NOTES

Many thanks to Martin Cropp, Paula Debnar, and Donald Mastronarde for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

1  For the parodies see Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 18-19. The visual evidence for the play’s popularity is more difficult to assess, since vase-paintings referring to the Telephus myth do not necessarily allude to tragic versions of that myth (see Small, chapter 7 in this volume).

2 The ten tragedies are Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women, Orestes, Phoenician Women, Bacchae, and the spurious Rhesus, which is discussed by Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume.

3  Thus Aristotle recounts what Euripides said to Hygiaenon, who ‘‘accused him of impiety because of his line advocating perjury, ‘My tongue swore, but my mind was unsworn.’ Euripides replied that [Hygiaenon] did wrong to bring into the law courts trials from the Dionysiac contest’’ (Rhetoric 1416a29).

4  They are: Alcestis (438), Medea (431), Hippolytus (428), Trojan Women (415), Helen (412), Phoenician Women (409), Orestes (408), Bacchae (ca. 407; produced posthumously), and Iphigenia at Aulis (ca. 407; produced posthumously).

5  This notion can perhaps be illustrated by an analogy from opera. Few, I think, would deny that Don Giovanni is the darkest opera Mozart ever wrote, or would describe it as a work that signals the exhaustion of the operatic genre. Yet in the finale of Act II Mozart sees fit to indulge in a sly in-joke at the expense of himself as well as his contemporaries. Don Giovanni has invited the marble statue of the Commandante to dinner, and as he begins his meal the musicians strike up three tunes. First Mozart quotes passages from two minor composers of his own time, and then he quotes from his own Marriage of Figaro, at which point Leporello comments, ‘‘That’s a tune I’ve heard once too often!’’ Anyone who caught the joke must have cherished it as a pungent counterpoint to the tragic denouement. I thank Professor Peter Bloom of the Smith College Music Department for drawing this example to my attention.