Plato is responsible for a complex and aggressive critique of the decadence of mousike (song) and choreia (dance): he accuses some composers of being ‘‘instigators of unmusical law-breaking’’ who, ‘‘though by nature skilled at composition, were ignorant of what is right and lawful in music. In a Bacchic frenzy, and enthralled beyond what is right by pleasure, they mixed lamentations with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs’’ (Laws 700d, trans. Barker 1984-89, 1: 156-57). This comment is generally associated with the bad practice of the New Music of the late fifth century; the late plays of Euripides are often considered to exemplify this trend. The kommos of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, however, starts as an invocation of the dead (315-71); it turns into a prayer to Zeus (380, 394-409); it continues into a reperformance of the orientalizing lament, through the evocation of a repressed threnos and of a prevented funeral (423-34); and it ends with a prayer to the gods (462). In Sophocles, the female chorus of Women of Trachis mixes the male paean (210) and the dithyramb (219) in the same song (205-24: Rutherford 1994-95, 120). The paradoxical ‘‘paean of the dead’’ (that is, lament) already appears in Aeschylus (Libation Bearers 151; see Agamemnon 645; Euripides, Helen 177; Kappel 1992, 48; Rutherford 2001, 118-20). In short, the different genres of archaic lyric are mixed in the lyric sections of tragedy from Aeschylus onward, and in fact Plato argued that the hybridizing of Greek lyric genres started after the Persian Wars, in connection with democratic reforms in Athens (699d; Harvey 1955, 165).
Some of the most rigorous examples of generic consistency occur in late Euripides. In Jon, the protagonist sings a paean for Apollo (112-43), and he does not stray from the theme of praising Apollo, the laurel, and the service to his temple; even the meter
Used in the refrain to Paean (the molossus:---) recalls archaic invocations to the gods
(West 1982, 55; Rutherford 2001, 111-12). The twist lies in the everyday nature of the occasion, the very fault that Aristophanes criticized in Frogs 1343-63: as he sings, Ion describes his task of sweeping the floor of Apollo’s temple. The parodos of Bacchae is a transposition to the stage of a cult song, the arrival of a chorus celebrating
Dionysus: ‘‘The Chorus themselves emphasize the point: they use a formula which must be designed to give the illusion of a religious procession (68-70), and announce that they are about to sing ‘the traditional things in honour of Dionysus’ (71). The hymn is written mainly in a traditional cult meter [ . . . ]; it introduces ritual cries’’ (Dodds 1960, 71-72). The meter is ionics a minore (general metrical pattern: UU--) . This meter is used elsewhere in orientalizing (Aeschylus, Persians 65-114) and Dionysiac (Aristophanes, Frogs 323-53; Dale 1968, 124-28; West 1982, 124) contexts.
Another instance of Euripidean generic consistency occurs in some late stasima, which contain little else but narrative of mythical events (Panagl 1971). These stasima have been considered a transposition for the tragic stage of a type of fifth-century dithyramb, which included long mythic sections (Plato, Republic 394c; Harvey 1955, 173; Barker 1984-89, 1: 215 n. 76). In the second stasimon of Helen the chorus narrates the story of Demeter, identified with the Mother of the Gods, and of her daughter Persephone (1301-68). The ode ends by stressing the links between the cult of the Mother of the Gods and the cult of Dionysus (a possible allusion to the dithyrambic genre), and criticizing Helen for not having given enough attention to the Mother of the Gods. The thematic connections with the action of the play are left implicit. The false news of the death of Menelaus has just been announced. The life that awaits mortals after their descent to Hades is the theme of the stasimon, a theme linked to the immortality promised in the mystery cults of the Mother of the Gods and of Dionysus. This and other similar narrative stasima have often been compared to the embolima mentioned by Aristotle, but even if the links are not made explicit, the songs have a clear connection with the plot, and present some of the finest examples of tragic lyric narrative.
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often took care to provide explicit links between the mythic narrative in stasima and the action on stage. These passages have been grouped into a category with a special name: the stasima that feature a ‘‘mythological example’’ (for example, Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 602-38; Sophocles, Antigone 944-87; Euripides, Medea 1282-92; see list and discussion in Oehler 1925). ‘‘Mythological examples’’ are shorter than ‘‘dithyrambic’’ narratives, and have more explicit connections with the plot. A tradition of criticism that placed aesthetic value on explicit coherence and dramatic effectiveness gave bad marks to the ‘‘dithyrambic’’ evolution of the late Euripides. Although the lyric forms of tragedy do not follow a linear pattern of change, it is true that the late plays of Euripides display an array of lyric forms, both mimetic and narrative, choral and epirrhematic, dialogic and monodic, that has no equal in Aeschylus and Sophocles. The protean quality of Euripides’ song-writing skills yields such diverse results as the loosely connected second stasimon of Helen and the imitation of cultic song performance of Bacchae.
In discussing the lyric sections of tragedy, many critics have adopted Platonic, Aristotelian, or Romantic assumptions, often all at the same time. We might now be tempted to revise them all. It would be easy to read generic inconsistency as a bold literary revolution, anticipating the Hellenistic ‘‘crossing of genres’’; to praise dithy-rambic stasima because they open up meaning and break away from the constraints of dramatic context; to recognize in choral passages not the voice of the ‘‘author’’ or that of an ‘‘ideal spectator’’ but the marginalized speech of slaves and women. Such revisions do not yield a completely satisfactory critical formula, precisely because no such formula exists. In fact, tragic choruses adopt the authority of public genres even when their members are foreigners or slaves and insist on giving us authoritative (if not authorial) views about good and evil. They may even question the appropriateness of their own choreia (Sophocles, Oedipus the King 895-99; Henrichs 1994-95, 65-73). Actors’ songs are split equally between spontaneous expression of emotion and self-conscious generic experimentation. Lyric structures give form to contact and conflict; in interpreting them we must learn to recognize the literary choices made by the authors (song versus recitative, paean versus lament, spontaneity versus convention, lyric dialogue versus epirrhema), and the gender roles, social implications, and metaliterary allusions that these choices presuppose or challenge.
World History
