Cosmetic Accessories: Ways to Read the Trilogies of Euripides

Whitney dressing me up in the downstairs bathroom at some point in the late ’90s (or, Bacchae 934)

Introduction — Retu(r)ning from Intermission

That was a much longer intermission than I intended. Act II of Corona Borealis is about to begin, but there needs to be a little interlude music to allow the audience the chance to settle back in and immerse themselves before the curtain is pulled back. This piece acts as such.

During the pause I spent a great deal of time pondering a single question: how do I read Greek tragedy? I kept saying things about various plays that would make other tragedy scholars cock their heads and I wondered if perhaps I was just reading the genre incorrectly. Which wouldn’t be too surprising–my reading is informed by my artistry which can be boiled down to all the areas of learning that I favored in childhood: word-play, arithmetic, musicality, and religious belief.

However, those four areas are also necessary for the creation of an Attic drama, and so over time I developed a process of reading the plays that looked at them in these four areas, from which I synthesize a single interpretation:

Word Root Networks — I catalog different roots and see how they develop throughout the play. I mark highly repetitive terms, root-developments across all parts of speech, and wordplay, making catalogs to chart how those language networks build different paths of meaning as the plot progresses. I pay particular attention to the first lines of each play to guide my interpretations.

Numerical Divisions — I look at a 2-actor cast in Aeschylus and a 3-actor cast in Sophocles and Euripides to determine how different characters are grouped together and relying on the textual constraints of which characters are on stage with one another throughout the plot to determine this. I also look at numerical lexicon throughout the text as well as seeing how different line divisions impact dramatic organization of the plot.

Sound-tracking — I analyze the meters of the play–the polymetric feet that divide the various songs from the trimeter dialogue and speeches. I also count all the songs and attempt to see how these different numerical forms fit together and have developed different methods of reading the soundtracks based on their arrangement: the alternating synchystic, the mirrored epicentric, and the poetically responsive antistrophic.

Theological Influence(r)s — I have always been fascinated by stories of the terrifying Greek gods and the ways in which people worship them. It’s why this genre has held my fascination for so long. Tracing the different divine influences over the plot–from the gods as characters, to their use as parable or instigator of an issue, to their representation within the music–adds further depth to understanding the stakes of the play.

Greek tragedy is a religious musical theater exploitation genre fest filled with existential exploration of belief systems–it’s everything I love in life. It is also a genre of fragments–each poet would submit a tetralogy (comprising a trilogy of tragedies and an accompanying satyr play) for ranking in the City Dionysia, and yet not a single tetralogy survives. The closest to completion is Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, from which only the satyr play Proteus is lost. Ranking second is Euripides’ posthumous trilogy containing the extant Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis, where the third tragedy Alcmaeon in Corinth is lost (there is no reporting on whether this trilogy was presented with a satyr play or not). In third place, an argument could be made for both the Trojan War tetralogy, from which Troades is extant and fragments exist from all the other plays (I count the Sisyphus fragment), or the trilogy that Phoenissae belongs to with the large fragmentary archives of both Antiope and Hypsipyle.

Yet, I kept getting pushback at conferences when I would discuss the trilogies and tetralogies of Euripides, because there seems to be a particularly Aeschylean bias towards what a trilogy can actually be. And while I have always been enchanted by the trilogies and tetralogies of Euripides with the glimmering poikilia of their dazzling forms, it seems that his penchant for variety had led scholars to interpret the plays of his trilogies and tetralogies as having nothing to do with one another, save for occasional thematic similarities. And that interpretation always felt off to me from the perspective of an artist–do you have any idea how difficult it is to compose four completely distinct plays that have nothing to do with one another year after year? From a creative perspective, the opposite would seem far more logical: that a trilogy/tetralogy form would enable you to present the same theme or lesson in three to four different ways.

However, I do recognize that I’m speaking to a field of scholars who might not be used to thinking as creatives. One of my professors, Jacques Bailly, suggested over a year ago that I just sit down and write a piece about what a non-plot contiguous trilogy could look like, because he said that it might not be obvious to folks who don’t think as “lyrically and narratively” as I do. After grumbling about it for two semesters, I realize that he’s right, so I’m finally doing it — let’s go over five trilogies/tetralogies of Euripides that all have at least one extant play, so that we might see how considering the surviving plays through the structures of their fragmented complete forms helps to illuminate further aesthetic conventions and tropes in the individual texts as well as the broader extant tragic archive.

I’m about to go over quite a lot of information very quickly–condensing these forms took quite a bit of wrangling–so if there are any parts that folks would like me to elaborate on, please do not hesitate to question them. I love feedback and am more than happy to go on deep-dives of any of these points that I’m bringing up.

The Kosmos of Euripides

I rather adore all the glittering colors in Greek tragedy. I’ve never been able to help it–if I see anything opalescent, iridescent, bioluminescent I am immediately drawn to it. I first began reading tragedy in earnest while taking the seminar “Tragic Bodies” under Nancy Worman at Columbia. It was the first time in my life that I’d lived so far from my family, and I wore quite a lot of gold glitter and brightly saturated colors to try and lift my spirits amongst the khakis of classicism. And there is so much iridescent variety–bound up in that lovely Greek word poikilia–to look at in the tragic genre, particularly in the realm of style and costume.

Greek tragedy is a genre of dressing up as different mythological characters and acting out their follies upon the stage. It is also a genre that is meant to instruct the general masses in different modes of living, as Aristophanes’ Aeschylus reports in the Frogs (1009–10). It does this through the staging of contemporary philosophical debates, political maneuvers, religious factions, and the innovations in poetic and musical genres–amongst a full spectrum of identities that a two or three actor cast is constantly alternating between.

In order to link costume and dress-up side of tragedy with the intellectual and educational side, I became very preoccupied with the styling of the head as a link between the two–particularly hair as a site of epistemological craft in terms of braiding, as well as braided garlands that signify both devotion to different divinities as well as poetic competition. I created a catalog of all of the hair and headwear-related terminology across the entire genre to determine not only how the different playwrights used hair in the language of their plays, but also how that terminology interacted with other language networks in the genre.

One word that occurred quite frequently, yet was not a term that is inherently hair-associated, is the word kosmos, meaning the make-up or order of a thing–from a person’s styled cosmetic, to the order of a cosmopolitan city, to the broader celestial cosmos. It is a word that shows up across every one of Euripides’ extant plays–save the Cyclops–and quite a few of his fragmentary plays as well. I find Euripides’ use of kosmos to be quite singular in that he clearly continues trends that were popular in Aeschylus and Sophocles, while also forming some of his own conventions with the term.

Like Aeschylus (Sup. 463), he also uses it with great economy around clothing, jewelry, and hair accessories, particularly vegetal and floral crowns used for religious signification and sympotic celebration. These uses of kosmos draw attention to the costuming of the characters and how that relates to their performance of the text. Like Sophocles (Ant. 396; El. 1401), he also uses it to describe the stylings of funeral practices, from the make-up of the tomb to the style of the mourners. Given that tragedy is a genre that frequently deals with the topic of mourning and stages its gestures, it is easy to trace through this motif how kosmos in the funerary sense can highlight an element of metatheatre in terms of the set pieces and costumes of lament.

In his own innovation, Euripides also seems to use kosmos in the sense of poetic composition, particularly in self-reference to his past plays as he develops a poetic canon of variation. Like in his Hippolytus, the titular character’s opening lines are:

σοὶ τόνδε πλεκτὸν στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου
λειμῶνος, ὦ δέσποινα, κοσμήσας φέρω

I bring you this braided crown from an uncut
meadow, my lady, that I’ve composed. (73–4)

The character is bringing the goddess Artemis a symbol of their shared chastity, but it bears a metapoetic edge considering it’s Euripides’ second treatment of the Hippolytus myth, as his first play was dubbed too unseemly and inappropriate. Hippolytus composes a crown of modesty as Euripides composes a more modest Hippolytus.

While it might seem a bit odd to a contemporary artist to have a playwright liken himself to something of a hairstylist, it didn’t seem at all out of place for Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 2nd century CE in his treatise on composition where he compares Plato to a hairdresser in the manner that he composes his dialogues:

ὁ δὲ Πλάτων τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ διαλόγους κτενίζων καὶ βοστρυχίζων καὶ πάντα τρόπον ἀναπλέκων οὐ διέλειπεν ὀγδοήκοντα γεγονὼς ἔτη· πᾶσι γὰρ δήπου τοῖς φιλολόγοις γνώριμα τὰ περὶ τῆς φιλοπονίας τἀνδρὸς ἱστορούμενα τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δὴ καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν δέλτον, ἣν τελευτήσαντος αὐτοῦ λέγουσιν εὑρεθῆναι ποικίλως μετακειμένην τὴν ἀρχὴν τῆς Πολιτείας ἔχουσαν τήνδε ῾Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ μετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρίστωνος.

…while Plato, combing and curling and re-braiding his dialogues in every way, never left them off, even at the age of eighty. Of course, every scholar is familiar with the stories told about his industry, especially the one about the writing-tablet which they say was found after his death, with the opening words of the Republic arranged in various orders: “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston.” (Comp. 25, trans. Loebs with a couple of my amendments)

Dionysius uses this metaphor to express Plato’s finickiness with achieving euphony and melodic flow in the form of his prose, which draws attention to the technical aspect of writing in terms of editing and rearrangement. A literary composition begins as a disordered mass of words and ideas that need to be put into proper order; hair–particularly curly/textured hair–begins as a chaotic mass that needs to be put into a cosmetic style. Both are attempting to achieve an idealized form with many edits, alterations, and reconfiguring to ensure that not a single strand is out of place.

Where tragedy diverges from prose is that it is a genre that inherently falls apart. So while Euripides has plenty of instances of hair coming together in his stagings, he also frequently depicts the same hair falling apart as the plot advances. Take for instance his Hermione from the Andromache, who enters from the skene talking about her ornate costume:

κόσμον μὲν ἀμφὶ κρατὶ χρυσέας χλιδῆς
στολμόν τε χρωτὸς τόνδε ποικίλων πέπλων

Ornament of delicate gold around my head
and neck, varicolored dress on my flesh… (147–8)

She claims that her outfit, given to her on account of her dowry rather than her husband’s allowance, is what enables her to speak freely (153: ἐλευθεροστομεῖν). However when her and her father’s plot to get rid of Andromache and her son fails, thus weakening her social position in the house, she re-enters to perform her monody while stripping out of her kosmos, beginning first with her hair:

σπάραγμα κόμας ὀνύχων τε
δάι᾿ ἀμύγματα θήσομαι.
[…]
ἔρρ᾿ αἰθέριον πλοκάμων ἐ-
μῶν ἄπο, λεπτόμιτον φάρος.

I tear my hair with nails
and make furrows in my cheeks
[…]
into the air from my braids
goes my gossamer veil (826–31)

There’s a great deal of plot that happens between Hermione’s two entrances, however her opening lines each time show the clear arc of a tragic character expressed through her hair–she enters the plot put-together, and as the story twists and turns, she finds herself torn apart. The irony lies in that the tragic kosmos–at least in terms of costume and hairstyling–is inherently a destruction of other forms of style-kosmos.

Tragedy’s beauty comes from its cosmetic rooted in the disordering of different systems of order. Euripidean trilogies/tetralogies must be understood in this light–they disorder the traditional order of plot-contiguous trilogies and present a cohesive form that is designed to break down, a collection of accessories that style a central lesson that is being taught. Composed for discourse, a kosmos designed for sparagmos.

Euripides also develops his cosmetic system across his lifetime, and so as I advance through each tetralogy and then trilogy, my reads similarly become more complex as there is more material and development of his style to work with. But before we begin, I would like to emphasize that the majority of research I did for this was just reading a lot of Loebs fragments–most of what I’m arguing for is just ways of reordering and reorganizing the information that we already have around these forms.

Apollo Behind the Skene (Alcmaeon in Psophis, Cretan Women, Telephus, Alcestis)

The earliest extant play of Euripides comes from a tetralogy that has some curious behind-the-scenes actions from the god Apollo. While only the “satyr” play of the trilogy survives, the Alcestis is a bizarre entry for a satyr play considering it goes against the main convention of that subgenre–there is no satyr chorus. Instead, the god Apollo opens the play explaining how he’s fixed the plot–that the humans think everything is a tragedy with the queen Alcestis sacrificing herself to extend the life of her husband Admetus, but in actuality they will have a happy ending because the god is going to send Heracles down to retrieve Alcestis from the Underworld and reunite her with the king.

Apollo shows up in the plays of the main trilogy as well: In Alcmaeon in Psophis, the titular character has to return to Psophis to retrieve the necklace of Harmonia, which has a lot of backstory–it was first given by Polyneices to Alcmaeon’s mother Eriphyle to persuade her husband Adrastus to join Polyneices in his expedition against Thebes, ultimately leading to his prophesied death. At the order of their father, Alcmaeon and his brother killed their mother and as a result, he brought pollution upon Psophis where he had gone for purification. After marrying the Psophian princess Arsinoe and giving her the necklace of Harmonia, he travels to Delphi to seek Apollo’s aid and there falls in love with the naiad Callirhoe after her father Achelous purified him.

At her request for the necklace, he returns to Psophis to retrieve it, fabricating the lie that he has to dedicate it to Apollo’s shrine in order to receive full purification. His plot falls to pieces and he is torn apart by Arsinoe’s brothers. Apollo’s actions influence the plot twice, first in sending Alcmaeon to Achelous which makes him unfaithful to Arsinoe, and then as being willing to be the excuse for his retrieving the necklace. So at two points, Apollo seems to help orchestrate Alcmaeon’s ruin.

The play where it is impossible to determine whether the god had an influence around the plot is the Cretan Women–too little survives with too much speculation–however what few key details we do have help to connect it with Alcmaeon and Telephus. The plot centers around the figure of Aerope, mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus, and wife of Pleisthenes in this play, rather than the more-traditional Atreus. Both Atreus and Thyestes do show up as characters, and there seems to be a central element of infidelity in the plot similar to Alcmaeon’s faithlessness in the prior play (and if the golden ram of the Argive kingship plays a role in this play, then there might be a similar parallel of having a divine object sparking contention that divides familial and marital relationships). The character Thyestes also shows up in rags, similar to both Alcmaeon (fr. 78a) in his play, as well as the infamous beggar outfit of Telephus in his own play. There is also mention of an extravagant feast (fr. 467–9) which may bring to mind the partying mood that the unaware Heracles brings to the house of Admetus in Alcestis.

In the Telephus, the titular character is a son of Heracles who seeks out the god Apollo for healing from his injury at Achilles’ spear. It takes place outside of the palace of Argos (which very may have been the setting for the prior play) and requires its titular character to initiate a process of healing with the weapon and man that injured him in the first place. While in the Alcmaeon the titular character attempts a deception around purification using Apollo’s religious site which ultimately leads to his own sparagmos, in the Telephus the titular character is in genuine need of healing and is able to affect this outcome by promising his own deceptive knowledge: helping the Trojans find the correct paths and routes to Troy, despite being married to Laodice, a daughter of Priam. With this deception, he completes the trilogy of deceptive spouses where there seems to be a strong undercurrent of Apollonian influence.

Following up this pattern, Alcestis perhaps makes sense sitting in the satyr play position: it bears Apollo in a position of needing to retrieve a charmed object (Alcestis, like the necklace and spear) and using deception to cheat Thanatos (in the form of Heracles, perhaps setting up why the god was so helpful to one of his sons in the prior play). Alcestis, in contrast to the spouses of the trilogy, is the best of wives and the tragic element is that the mortals have no knowledge of Apollo’s machinations and so they mourn.

This aesthetic of mourning is highlighted around the titular character with kosmos. It is used to describe Alcestis’ burial adornments from Admetus (149, 161), as well as a competing ornaments from her parents (613, 618, 631), to drive home the dramatic irony when Admetus says that Alcestis has the kosmos of a young woman and despairs at having to take her on, not recognizing his wife returned from the dead. This would suggest a strong connection between kosmos and costuming, and while the only other surviving kosm-root from the tetralogy comes from Agamemnon telling Menelaus to order his own city (fr. 723) in the Telephus, it is interesting that theatrical life of a costume from that very play gained such traction as to be parodied in Aristophanes’ Acharnians. It is also easy to imagine the kosmos of Alcmaeon was probably the necklace, and it is entirely believable that Achilles’ spear counts as a kosmos, considering Euripides references it as such in his posthumous Iphigenia in Aulis (931).

Lacking any of the tragedies from the central trilogy of the tetralogy it is hard to determine the exact nature of Apollo’s influence over the plot, but I have a few suggestions. He is a behind-the-scenes god in a metatheatrical sense, in that he is often put in opposition with Dionysus, the god of theater. However, they are complementary opposites–Dionysus takes over the prophetic seat at Delphi during the winter months, and they are both gods associated with musical performance genres. Perhaps with this tetralogy, Euripides stages Apollo as always having an influence over tragedy, almost akin to a stage manager, and so the Alcestis is what a satyr play would look like on an Apollonian stage, say if he took over the Dionysia in the same manner that Dionysus takes over his Delphic duties.

In his earliest work that survives to this day, Euripides stages the gods as critical agents of the plot. What’s interesting is the alternative nature of Apollo by the conventions of the genre–as an alternate of Dionysus, his presence invites one to think of both the opposite of tragedy, but also how it might be otherwise, the little variations that are created by emphasizing a spectrum. By casting the gods in symbolic production roles around the theater, Euripides opens the door to judge whether the stagings of the gods can compete with one another in the dramatic medium, not to mention which ones we might be more inclined to give our devotion to.

Many thanks to my old Columbia colleague Maria Combatti who recommended that I look at kosmos in Alcestis all the way back in November of 2018, and whose dissertation on somatic landscapes in Euripidean drama I have found incredibly instructive over the past few years. I must also thank my dear friend and UVM colleague Sunshine Alvarrez de Silva whose presentation on divine genre-play in the Alcestis, Bacchae, and Amphitruo at CANE this past March helped bring my attention back to this excellent play.

Collecting a Crop (Dictys, Medea, Philoctetes, Reapers)

The Medea belongs to a tetralogy that explores different aspects of gathering and harvesting. Medea harvests everything–she helps Jason gather the golden fleece, she promises Aegeus to help him create a crop of offspring, and she uses deadly kosmos from her own collection–a crown of braided gold and a gossamer dress smeared with poisons–to takes out her romantic rival as well as the king of Corinth. Where Euripides innovates a new ending–which has descended to the present day as the definitive canon of the myth–is in having her decide to kill her own children as a rational logic as opposed to the Corinthians killing them out of revenge. She reasons they will die more kindly by her own hands rather than by theirs–and thus reaps a crop of her own offspring.

Dictys also bears a gatherer in its titular character, the “Net-Guy” fisherman foster father of Perseus who first gathered up the infant hero and his mother Danae in their maritime exile. When the king Polydectes makes moves to match with Danae, Perseus deceptively assures him that there isn’t any gift that he wouldn’t gather for Polydectes as a wedding present–he would even go so far as to retrieve the head of a gorgon. Polydectes takes the bait and sends Perseus on that mission, thinking that the attempt would cause him to perish, making it all the easier to claim Danae, but Perseus returns with the crop of Medusa’s snake-haired head to kill the unwanted suitor. Like the Medea, this play plots children killing for their mother, but Perseus is a conscious agent of his actions who designs his own scheme, whereas Medea’s children are ignorant of their mother’s scheme. The Dictys also has a fragment (fr. 346) meditating on the universality of parents loving their children, a sentiment that is tested to its limits by the Medea.

Philoctetes deals with gathering outside of the familial context and instead focuses on alliances–beginning with the local chorus of Lemnian shepherds herding their flocks (fr. 792a) who feel anxiety over ignoring Philoctetes during his exile. Philoctetes himself is marked by his wild style as he has no clothing except piecemeal animal hides (fr. 789d). He, like Medea, deals with betrayal due to being stranded in a strange land by former loved ones without resources or allies. And yet contrary to Medea, Philoctetes is at the receiving end of the plot’s deception by his loved ones as they need both him and his bow to reap a crop of the Trojans.

This read of gathering was inspired by the lost satyr play Reapers (Theristai) which was reported to have been lost in antiquity, at least by the 2nd century CE. While it is unknown what sort of crop was being harvested in Reapers, it is easy to see how Euripides gathers and sorts his own “crops” in a metapoetic sense of the composed structure of these various narratives, what bits and pieces may be changed and altered to show similar tropes developing differently through their respective myths. It also speaks of the greater structure of competition around the City Dionysia–different composers and performers of various art forms gathering and collecting together to present variations on well-established religious canon. In this way, we might think of the participants in the festival as different cosmetic accessories that order, disorder, and reorder themselves every year.

While the kosmos of Alcestis centered around the appropriate costuming to lament death, the kosmos of Medea are rare pieces of divine couture from the titular character’s collection that she is using to ensure death–the gossamer dress and crown of braided gold that she uses as bait to get Jason’s new bride to come into contact with deadly poisons. While most uses of kosmos in the Medea center around her deadly plot device (787, 951, 954, 972, 982, 1156), there is also one instance when the chorus concedes the aesthetic order of Jason’s speech that he made against Medea (576), despite the fact that they disagree with him leaving his wife. This draws a line between the kosmos of Jason’s speeches and the kosmos Medea’s actions, accomplished through the props of her cosmetic accessories.

It is also noteworthy that in Jason’s speech, he blames Aphrodite as the one responsible for his success (527) and Eros as the impetus for Medea’s mindset of betrayal (530). This both sets up the second stasimon as a hymn concerned with modesty and self-restraint towards Aphrodite and Eros (627–62) as well as links to the Dictys, which discusses similar issues around the erotic gods (fr. 331, 340). Echoes of the Dictys also resonate in Medea’s third stasimon–as the Corinthian chorus sings of Athens as an idealized elsewhere for Medea to escape to (if only she refrains from killing her children), they claim that the Athenian people are:

φερβόμενοι
κλεινοτάταν σοφίαν
αἰεὶ διὰ λαμπροτάτου
βαίνοντες ἁβρῶς αἰθέρος

dining on
most-famous wisdom
always through the brightest
air luxuriantly stepping (Med. 826–30)

The reference to the Athenians stepping through the bright air would recall Perseus doing likewise with his winged sandals elsewhere in the trilogy. In this first antistrophic pairing, the word “always” (αἰεὶ — 828/840) retains its spot in both the strophe and antistrophe, the repetition suggesting a strong responsion between the set of lyrics. Here they center Aphrodite in a moderate depiction and link her with the personification of Wisdom:

αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἐπιβαλλομέναν
χαίταισιν εὐώδη ῥοδέων πλόκον ἀνθέων
τᾷ Σοφίᾳ παρέδρους πέμπειν Ἔρωτας

always tossing up
her hair in a sweet-smelling braid[ed crown] of rosebuds
to sit beside Wisdoms she sends Desires (840–4)

This pairing with its idealized aesthetics helps to foreshadow the horror of Medea’s actions in the messenger’s speech–the Corinthian princess’ death is triggered by her acceptance of Medea’s high fashion and her eagerness to dress herself up in them. It begins with her looking in the mirror and arranging her hair to perfect her image:

λαμπρῷ κατόπτρῳ σχηματίζεται κόμην,
ἄψυχον εἰκὼ προσγελῶσα σώματος.

in a bright mirror she formed her hair
smiling at the image of her lifeless body. (1161–2)

The arrangement of her hair with metatheatrical language helps draw attention to the connection of hair and mirrors that is presented in the Dictys with Perseus using the mirror to avoid the direct stare of Medusa (who is most notably signified by her hair) in order to kill her–it is not difficult to imagine that Med. 1162 could have been a repeated line in the Dictys messenger speech, but referring to Medusa’s demise instead.

It also draws the link between the Corinthian princess and the idealized aesthetics of the third stasimon–she has a braided crown similar to Aphrodite and she steps luxuriantly around the room in her kosmos (1164) like the Athenians. However the poison disrupts the prior aesthetics and twists them into horror–in lieu of Aphrodite sending sweet breezes, the princess spouts a deep wail (1184); instead of tossing her hair in a sweet-smelling rosebud crown, she tries to toss her golden one off to prevent the odors of burnt hair and melting flesh (1190–1203).

This prefacing of hair horror in the messenger by hair cosmetics in an earlier choral ode seems to be a motif that Euripides gets some mileage out of, because he uses a similar scheme several years later in his Hecuba with the chorus singing about hair aesthetics before they enact a horrific response in the messenger speech. In their third stasimon (the same choral ode as in the Medea), the chorus of enslaved Trojan women sing about the final night of the war, in their last moment of celebration before the Achaean ambush triggered the city’s fall:

ἐγὼ δὲ πλόκαμον ἀναδέτοις
μίτραισιν ἐρρυθμιζόμαν
χρυσέων ἐνόπτρων
λεύσσουσ᾿ ἀτέρμονας εἰς αὐγάς,
ἐπιδέμνιος ὡς πέσοιμ᾿ ἐς εὐνάν.

I was rhythming
my braids in a head-binding mitra,
at the golden mirror
gazing into its limitless depth
as I prepared for bed. (923–6)

The chorus uses odd language for hairstyling that would be far more in place with musical composition as they discuss looking into a mirror in an aestheticized scene of seduction. After the titular character decides to get revenge for all the suffering and loss that she’s endured, Hecuba engages in a subtle seduction of the Thracian king Polymestor in order to lure him into the women’s tent to kill his sons in exchange for him killing her own. Following this action, Polymestor comes out, blinded, and gives his own messenger speech, reporting the violence that the women did to him:

εἰ μὲν πρόσωπον ἐξανισταίην ἐμὸν
κόμης κατεῖχον,
[…]
ἐμῶν γὰρ ὀμμάτων
πόρπας λαβοῦσαι τὰς ταλαιπώρους κόρας
κεντοῦσιν αἱμάσσουσιν·

if I tried to move my face,
they grabbed my hair.
[…]
for my eyes
they seized brooch pins–the wretched pupils
they punctured, making them run with blood. (1165–71)

The chorus sang about putting their own hair into a specific rhythm/order while gazing into a mirror, thinking that they were in for a night of seduction when they were really in for a night of horror. They stage a similar scene for Polymestor to experience: he thinks that Hecuba is leading him to treasure but instead he has his hair set in a certain manner to keep his gaze fixed so that the chorus can stab out his eyes.

I bring up the Hecuba not to illustrate that Euripides uses similar scenes over (as that is fairly standard in a competitive genre), but to show why it would make sense to reuse a plot device from a Medea treatment for a Hecuba treatment. Both plays concern foreign women who are at the whims of a society that is hostile towards them with an empathetic female chorus, both plays have the heroines decide to stage their own revenge. The key difference comes around the death of their children–Hecuba’s have all been forcibly taken from her which triggers her impetus for revenge whereas Medea impetus for revenge triggers the death of her children.

The repetition of using hair aesthetics in the third stasimon to set up hair horror in the messenger from the Medea to the Hecuba can perhaps shed some further light on how the Dictys may have been structured–it is almost certain that Medusa’s death would be a messenger speech in the play, so perhaps it had aesthetic lyrics around snakes and hair in its third stasimon. And yes, I know that’s a lot of evidence to amass only to suggest the potential lyrical content of one choral ode from one lost play–but this is why I like studying the cosmetics of Euripides.

There’s so much potential to reveal by playing around with all the glittering pieces.

My thanks goes to my colleague Anna Conser, whose dissertation on the musical design of Greek tragedy has deeply informed and instructed my own. Most importantly, however, it goes to my sister, Whitney Stovall, who played Medea in Anna’s production. While I sat watching her design her hair for the role in a mirror, reminiscing about all the times she used to design my own hair growing up, it gave me the idea to start paying more attention to how hair and mirrors connect in Greek tragedy.

Trojan Melo(drama)s — (Alexandros, Palamedes, Troades, Sisyphus)

This tetralogy is one of the only plot-related trilogies of Euripides that we know about. Just by chance, I’ve had the utter delight of spending this summer in tragic competition with the lovely and illustrious Luke Soucy. We entered into an agreement to spend the summer writing translations of Troades–he would do Seneca’s closet drama with supplemental material from Latin epic, and I would do Euripides’ original set among all of the fragments of its tetralogy.

So I actually have quite a bit to say about this one.

For starters, Euripides’ trilogy is not a continuous narrative following one character or set of characters, but instead a “before-middle-after” presentation of the Trojan War. The first play deals with the Trojan royals, the second with the Achaean soldiers, and then the third with both.

The satyr play deals with Sisyphus, who is linked to the broader narrative by being an ancestor of Odysseus in dramatic convention (who was both a character in the Palamedes, as well as mentioned to be the inevitable fate of Hecuba in Troades).

I’ve been translating Troades in the context of its divine prologue: the goddess Athena asks Poseidon to join her in collaboration to put aside their past strife, meaning not only their being on opposite sides of the war, but also the enmity born from their past competition over Athens–when Athena’s olive tree won out over Poseidon’s salt spring. Part of Athena’s civic victory was the Athenians wearing crowns in her honor–however, due to the Achaeans violating her temple, she offers to stage a reversal of their ancient Athenian competition: Poseidon using his salt water to conquer the “victory crown” of Trojan women that the army is bringing home to ensure that everyone dies at sea. The chorus refers to themselves as a crown of young women in their first stasimon:

νεανίδων στέφανον ἔφερεν
Ἑλλάδι κουροτρόφον,
Φρυγῶν πατρίδι πένθη.

a crown of young women brought
for Hellas: nursemaids of the youth
for the fatherland of Phrgians: grief (565–7)

As well as emphasizing the olive crowns that rest upon the gleaming heads of the Athenians in their second stasimon as they wonder who they are going to be portioned off to:

ἵν᾽ ἐλαίας
πρῶτον ἔδειξε κλάδον γλαυκᾶς Ἀθάνα,
οὐράνιον στέφανον λιπαραῖσί τε κόσμον Ἀθήναις,

Where the olive’s
sea-green sprig Athena first presented,
heavenly crown and ornament for glistening Athens, (801–3)

This is a play where the 3-actor cast is incredibly useful towards looking at dynamics in both the play as well as how a 3-actor cast could potentially spread across a trilogy. In the prologue, the three actors are presented–one plays Poseidon, the next Athena, the last Hecuba. The actor who stays in a single role the entire play, based on the constraints of the text around sharing the stage with scene partners, is Hecuba’s actor. That means, between Poseidon’s actor and Athena’s actor, the rest of the characters have to be played by one of the two, and based on which characters are speaking when, there is a clear delineation by gender–one actor would play Talthybius and Menelaus, the other would play Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen.

Sequence of characters sharing scenes (sans chorus):

Poseidon & Athena
Hecuba
Hecuba & Talthybius & Cassandra
Hecuba & Talthybius & Andromache
Hecuba & Menelaus & Helen
Hecuba & Talthybius

While it would be simple to pair the characters with the divinities of the same gender, following the prologue it makes more sense that they are divided by allegiance–Poseidon’s actor plays Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen while Athena’s portrays the Greek men. This follows the point of Athena requesting Poseidon’s powers to unfold their plot, allowing him to take center stage to achieve their joint victory whereas she plays a more ancillary role. I’ve been translating the play based upon this read: Poseidon and Athena are staging this drama, constantly alternating their respective Trojan and Greek roles to affect their desired outcome and torment their third actor’s character along with the chorus in the process. As Hecuba says in her fourth line:

μεταβαλλομένου δαίμονος ἄνσχου

endure the alternating deity (101)

In the opening lines of the play, Poseidon mentions that he has just come from the depths where the Nereids dance, which further encourages his linking with the other female characters of the play, and also could potentially shed light on some of the other castings in the two earlier plays. The Palamedes apparently ended with the titular character being saved by the Nereids at the end of his play, which could indicate that Poseidon’s actor in Troades was the lead titular actor in Palamedes. It would be very attractive then to suggest that Athena’s actor played Alexandros (and no, the alliteration does not escape me, I believe that if this theory is indeed the case, Euripides was probably trying to make it as obvious as possible), which would mean that in a 3-actor casting across a trilogy, a playwright might break it up so that each of the actors could be a lead for each of the plays. It would therefore make sense that Hecuba’s actor also played her character in Alexandros, where her role is not the lead. Hecuba and Cassandra also have a scene in the play which would mean (if Athena’s actor was indeed playing Alexandros as the lead) that Poseidon’s actor would play Cassandra in Alexandros as well.

This even balance of all the actors helps to emphasize the ever-changing yet repetitive nature of fate and tragedy, which is highlighted in the arc of the tetralogy. The Alexandros deals with an athletic competition where the Trojan royals are bristling at a mere slave winning the victory crown (fr. 61d), not recognizing the titular character as a part of their own family. This victory crown is reversed by the events of Troades, where all victories are brought to nothing, and all the Trojan royals either die or become enslaved. Centered between the two is the Palamedes, a cautionary tale about being betrayed by allies with the very things that you taught them–Odysseus and Diomedes frame Palamedes with a false note from Priam when he was the one who taught them how to write in the first place. These alterations of fate are punctuated by the satyr play Sisiphys, of which nothing is known about save for a potentially misattributed fragment that outlines the rationale of men inventing the gods so that they could be held accountable for doing terrible things. The only sure thing we can know about the play was that it concerned Sisiphys, the tormented figure in Tartarus cursed to endless repetitive labor.

Now–these are pretty bleak elements and themes in an already bleak genre, so some historical context might be helpful. This tetralogy was written in the wake of the Melian Massacre, when Athens killed all of the men of the island of Melos and enslaved all of the women and children, and it was staged in 415 BCE just before the start of the infamous Sicilian Expedition, generally seen as the main turning point of the Peloponnesian War when Athens lost most of their navy due to terrible decision-making and planning. This tetralogy was composed at the pinnacle of Athenian imperial exploitation right before their fall, at a time when Athens staged an utterly senseless and hypocritical butchering. Not even the staunch Thucydides could help himself from dipping into the tragic genre as he was recording the Peloponnesian War for this episode. There is no rational way to convey what happened.

Drama, however, can offer other avenues for reverberating and echoing the horrors of imperial greed. There is a fascinating repetition of μέλεος (wretched) and μέλος (song) throughout the text that does not feel accidental–and I’ve endeavored to bring it through my translation with overuse of “melancholy” and “melodies”. And yes, I hear the philological chorus: “But Vanessa! Melos is spelled with an eta, not an epsilon because it derives from the word for melon rather than the word for melody!” And my counter to that is, a very careful artist who is hyper-aware and responsive to backlash (if his extant second Hippolytus play is any indication) might be particularly mindful in how they might suggest that what their city did was deeply fucked up.

Careful artists can also explicitly spell it out exactly once, if they know how to utilize mythological precedent and Greek grammar to their advantage. Right after Cassandra’s monody where she sings a wedding hymn for her upcoming blasphemous nuptials to Agamemnon, Hecuba tells all the Trojan women to exchange their marital melodies for tears:

ἐσφέρετε πεύκας δάκρυά τ’ ἀνταλλάσσετε
τοῖς τῆσδε μέλεσι, Τρωιάδες, γαμηλίοις.

Bring in the torches, exchange tears
for the songs, Trojan women, for the nuptials. (351–2)

Lines like these are why I’ll never stop reading this genre. Because γα-μηλίοις to an Athenian audience in 415 BCE would sound like “for the Melian lands” or “for the Melians”, as μηλίοις literally means “for the Melians”. Euripides is able to skirt potential backlash because he uses wordplay to achieve this while situating it around Cassandra’s nuptials, a popular mythological subject for dramatic treatments. After so many repetitions of μέλ-, to have a sudden μηλ- that is an explicit pun before going back to only μέλ- echoes for the rest of the play is a staggering move, particularly in its placement next a vocative title-drop of the play. This wordplay draws attention to the letters eta and epsilon and how Euripides is utilizing them to his advantage in terms of skating by censorship–a grammatical lesson surely supported in spirit by the prior Palamedes play.

Troades is a requiem for Melos where Euripides reverses the religious bedrock of Athenian identity. Their patron goddess supported the Greeks until they violated her customs and she staged their ruin. Staging such a ruin of the Greeks–the salt wave conquering the victory crown–in front of an Athenian audience acts as a symbolic reversal of the contest that gave her the honor of being their patron in the first place, meaning that the goddess is taking herself out of the picture, placing Athenian identity in crisis. She (through Euripides) would rather they all be under the domain of Poseidon.

And while Troades is third within the trilogy that Euripides’ composed for the Dionysia that year, it is the second tragedy within a trilogy of tragedies at the turning point of the Peloponnesian War–the first being the Melian Massacre, the third being the Sicilian Expedition where Athens lost most of its navy, marking their inevitable defeat within the war. The fact that this play was staged between the two is staggering–Euripides echoed Melos throughout his play, and just by chance history responded in kind with Athena’s staging of maritime disaster.

Speaking as a writer and composer…I think that this tetralogy is truly one of the most impressive pieces of poetry that has survived from antiquity, even in its fragmentary form. I do not know how to make sensible art in the face of utter slaughter, let alone art that can so effectively take a swipe at the religious bedrock of your society’s imperial ideology. Euripides gives me something to meditate on for survival strategies as my own empire continuously necessitates and justifies child sacrifice. I’ve seen more pictures and videos and chunks of dead children in the past nine months than I’ve seen in the rest of my life combined, a school year’s length of non-stop horror. I do not know beyond boycotting corporations how I can help the children of Palestine, of the Congo, of Sudan–but they are who I think of, who I cry over when I catalog the use of kosmos representing the funeral attire of Astyanax that the Trojan women attempt to cobble together for his corpse.

My attentions towards this play are deeply influenced by my dear friend Emma Ianni, who’s de-lightful dissertation “When Language Fails: Tragedy and Thucydides” was just released in the academic commons last month–everyone go read. I must also thank Paul Eberwine, who has continuously proven to be an excellent debate partner around the divine dynamics at work in this play, and of course Luke Soucy, for his willingness to be in theatrical competitive collaboration with me, and for asking excellent questions that helped me develop these points.

From Lyre to Aulos (Antiope, Hypsipyle, Phoenissae)

Alright, that last one got heavy so let’s talk about music for a little bit.

These last two trilogies are a little easier to wrangle than the previous tetralogies mostly because there isn’t evidence of their satyr plays, so I can’t really take them into account. This is also the one trilogy where scholars have noticed a unifying thematic similarity–Froma Zeitlin has acknowledged that each play of the trilogy deals with brothers and their mother. Around this central theme, however, is a fascinating staging of a popular 5th century debate between masculine identities: the soldier of action/labor vs the musician of discourse/contemplation. This debate plays out through the structure of the trilogy by pairing a similar binary opposition between the musical designs of the Antiope and Phoenissae: the former has a musical design that represents a lyre, whereas the latter has a musical design that represents an aulos. The structure of this trilogy shows that binary oppositions are always on a spectrum that change and intermix based on the nature of tragic form.

That’s a lot of moving pieces, so let’s start with the familial relationships: each play in the trilogy has a pair of brothers who are in some form of conflict or contest relating to their mother–the Antiope has Amphion and Zethus who represent the musician/soldier binary, and a good deal of their play seems to be in debating the nuances of those archetypes. However, their opposed dispositions do not stop them from uniting in collaboration to save their mother: they kill the cruel Theban queen Dirce by tying her hair to a bull and take over the throne, causing Amphion to build the walls and seven gates of Thebes with his lyre.

The Hypsipyle has the brothers Euneus and Thoas, however they are not the ones who save Hypsipyle, it is in fact the army of the Seven marching to Thebes–in aiding them in finding water, she leaves behind her infant charge who is killed by a snake. The Seven intervene on the queen Eurydice taking revenge upon her, and it is agreed that funeral games will be held in honor of the infant Opheltes. Euneus and Thoas end up taking part in the athletic competition, which leads to a recognition with their mother (it is unclear from the surviving evidence how exactly this played out). This reunion of mother and sons amid athletic competition was supposed to be the aetiological explanation for the establishment of the Nemean Games, one of the four main athletic tournaments in ancient Greece.

Finally the Phoenissae stages the infamous sons of Oedipus and Jocasta, Eteocles and Polyneices, in their conflict at the gates of Thebes. Unlike the prior two plays named for the mothers, Phoenissae (named for the chorus) has the brothers and mother perish due to the conflict, rather than the brothers overcoming some conflict to ultimately save their mother. The fragmentary plays both had scenes of beneficial recognition with the mother character, which may explain the placement of Phoenissae as the final tragic ending to this trilogy: there is perhaps too much recognition at play with all the sons of Jocasta–I mean, one of them blinded himself over it.

The plays also seem to be set in chronological order–the Antiope ends with the gates of Thebes being built, the Hypsipyle begins with the titular character encountering the Argive army on their way to Thebes, and the Phoenissae starts with the gates being attacked by the army. Placing the plays in this order also highlights how the archetypical debate first presented in the Antiope–of the working/fighting man of action juxtaposed with the musical/poetic man of intellectualism–develops across the entire trilogy, not just in the first play.

In the Antiope, the archetypes fall to Zethus and Amphion, respectively, yet the two are able to set aside their agonistic differences to accomplish the same goal. In the end, it is Amphion whose position is solidified by his skill in crafting the fortifications of the city (showing that music can have a place in defending against warfare). Music, therefore, wins out in the Antiope. The exact opposite is true in Phoenissae–war has won out instead, locking the brothers in conflict where neither of them is particularly interested in music. Between the two is the Hypsipyle, which centers athletic competition as the central contest of the brothers to split the difference between music and warfare: like music it is frequently set in a competition of aesthetic ability, and there are usually time limits/spatial constraints that need to be accounted for; like warfare there is continuous physical activity and exertion, often the need to strategize against one’s opponents in the moment to ensure survival in the conflict, but most importantly–there is the need to get in extremely close proximity with one’s opponent, which is not the case for music.

The arc of music to warfare across the trilogy is represented in development of the kosm-roots through the three plays. In the Antiope, kosmos is linked to the realms of discourse and music, first in a fragment of a speech that relates kosmos to silence that a man should bear like a crown as opposed to nitpicking chatter:

κόσμος δὲ σιγή, στέφανος ἀνδρὸς οὐ κακοῦ·

silence is an ornament, a crown for a man without vice (fr. 219)

The statement is perhaps a derisive comeback from Zethus, telling Amphion to shut up and using ornament and style as justification, which would suggest that Amphion would be persuaded by such an adorning argument, particularly in light of Zethus also grumbling at Amphion’s “feminimitating” ways as a deviation from his true nature (fr. 185). Nature more broadly is expressed by kosmos in a fragment of choral lyric that is frequently attributed to this play:

ἀλλ᾿ ἀθανάτου καθορῶν φύσεως
κόσμον ἀγήρων, πῇ τε συνέστη
καὶ ὅθεν καὶ ὅπως.

but looking upon deathless nature’s
unaging cosmetic, its matter of coming together
and when and how. (fr. 910)

Nature is inherently related to music in the Antiope as Amphion is reported to have entered singing an ode to Aether and Gaia (fr. 182a), and his musical affinity with nature is what enables him to harmonize the stones into forming a wall in a similar numerical form to his lyre. Therefore the two reported kosm-roots from the play are aligned with discourse and musicality represented by the character who plays the lyre.

While it is impossible to determine exactly how the debate between masculine archetypes may have been staged in the Hypsipyle, there are some useful clues in tracing the kosm-roots. The use of said roots are directly tied to the rearing and education of men. First Adrastus uses it to speak of his own discerning eye, good composure, and careful consideration in order to convince Eurydice to unveil her face to him:

κοσμεῖν τ᾿ ἐμαυτὸν καὶ τὰ διαφέρονθ᾿ ὁρᾶν.

[I’ve been raised] to compose myself and behold what matters. (fr. 757.78)

Next, Euneus tells his (unknowing) mother how he and his brother were raised by Orpheus in Thrace, which again juxtaposes the musical man with the fighting man in terms of their education, but this time the kosm-root has been aligned with the warfare side of the debate:

μοῦσάν με κιθάρας Ἀσιάδος διδάσκεται,
τοῦτ[ο]ν δ᾿ ἐς Ἄρεως ὅπλ᾿ ἐκόσμησεν μάχης.

He instructed me in the music of the Asian kithara
and styled my brother in Ares’ arms for battle. (fr. 759a.101–2)

This juxtaposition of warfare and music is also highlighted in the fragmentary parodos, where the chorus sings of the army coming against the walls of Amphion which directly links central themes from the Antiope to the Phoenissae, showing that Euripides is creating an intentional arc through these plays:

ἀσ[τ]ράπτει χαλκέο[ι]σιν ὅπλο[ις
Ἀργείων π[ε]δίον πᾶ[ν·
ἐπὶ τὸ τᾶ[ς] κιθάρας ἔρυμα
τᾶς Ἀμφιονίας ἔργον

the whole landscape flashes
with the bronze armor of the Argives
against the stronghold
work of Amphion’s kithara (fr. 752f.30–3)

Finally, by the Phoenissae, all of the kosm-roots are associated with warfare. First the chorus sings of the Theban army “dressing up in bronze” (797b: χαλκῷ κοσμήσας) and Creon mentions Eteocles similarly “styled in armor” (861: κοσμηθεὶς ὅπλοις). The first messenger notes that the brothers are “adorned by their friends” in armor (1244: φίλοι δ᾿ ἐκόσμουν) as they prepare for single combat with one another, and the second messenger begins the narrative of the deaths with the brothers made up in their bronze armor (1359: ἐπεὶ δὲ χαλκέοις σῶμ᾿ ἐκοσμήσανθ᾿ ὅπλοις).

Across the three plays, kosm-roots (even in fragmentary form) show an arc of the debate between these key masculine archetypes: music wins out in Antiope, war wins out in Phoenissae, and the Hypsipyle oscillates between the two. It is not only male characters, however, who help to develop these ideas through the narrative. For example, in the Antiope, Zethus argues against Amphion’s newfound musicality and attempts to urge him back towards the “good-music” of physical labor:

ἀλλ᾿ ἐμοὶ πιθοῦ·
παῦσαι ματᾴζων καὶ πόνων εὐμουσίαν
ἄσκει· τοιαῦτ᾿ ἄειδε καὶ δόξεις φρονεῖν,
σκάπτων, ἀρῶν γῆν, ποιμνίοις ἐπιστατῶν,
ἄλλοις τὰ κομψὰ ταῦτ᾿ ἀφεὶς σοφίσματα,
ἐξ ὧν κενοῖσιν ἐγκατοικήσεις δόμοις.

But let me persuade.
Cease this idle folly, and practise the fine music
of toil–sing of such and seem sensible:
digging, plowing the land, watching over flocks,
leaving to others these little sophistications
which will have you making a home in poverty. (fr. 188)

Zethus maintains a distinct separation around masculine activities–that they should be full of action and outdoors as opposed to indoor artistry and intellectual contemplation. By the end of the play, what Zethus has derided as purely indoor activity has a useful outdoor function in the creation of the Theban walls, highlighting the fact that Amphion has been so aligned with broader nature the entire play, inherently problematizing the binaries that Zethus was attempting to establish. The Hypsipyle further problematizes any binary structures in masculine activities by exploring the same activities in another gender. Whereas Amphion sang part of the parodos in his play, Hypsipyle sings the beginning of the parodos as a lullaby to her infant charge as an expression of her work:

οὐ τάδε πήνας, οὐ τάδε κερκίδος
ἱστοτόνου παραμύθια Λήμνια
Μοῦσα θέλει με κρέκειν, ὅτι δ᾿ εἰς ὕπνον
ἢ χάριν ἢ θεραπεύματα πρόσφορα
π]αιδὶ πρέπει νεαρῷ
τάδε μελῳδὸς αὐδῶ.

not for the threads nor the shuttle
stretching-webs no Lemnian work-songs
does the Muse wish me to weave, but the sort to lull
or to charm or attend to his needs —
what befits a young boy
such I melodically sing. (fr. 752f.9–14)

She sings of the indoor songs that she used to aid her work of weaving back on her home island of Lemnos which have been replaced by her current musicality to accompany her indoor work of singing a lullaby for her charge–her work-music has gone from relieving her own labor to being catered to what is appropriate for the rearing of a young man. This shift in adding feminine expressions of musicality in the second play of the trilogy becomes critical for setting up the musical design of the third play, showing how musical genres associated with femininity are recontextualized for the education of young men and the production of musical dramas.

Phoenissae is a fascinating play in that it breaks from musical tradition when it comes to Theban War plays, across all of the playwrights–it’s the first extant play in that sub-genre that does not have a seven-song soundtrack. Aeschylus’ Seven, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Euripides’ earlier Suppliants all feature seven distinct musical scenes which aesthetically emphasizes heptatonic resonances surrounding the myth: the seven gates of Thebes constructed by a seven-stringed lyre under attack by seven captains and defended by seven captains. In this way, the soundtracks of Theban War plays frequently represent both the gates of Thebes as well as the seven strings of the lyre.

For this reason, I’ve often thought of the Theban War plays as “the lyre of Thebes being thrown out of tune”, considering that the lyre was associated with the god Apollo and the more celebratory and positive aspects of musical performance, juxtaposed with the aulos, which was more associated with dithyrambs, threnody, and the more negative emotions of musical performance. This instrumental binary is often utilized in tragic lyric, particularly with the chorus or a singing character referring to them going into a form of lamenting song “not fit for a lyre”, a motif that Euripides utilizes in several of his plays (Alc. 447, IT 146, Hel. 185), including the Phoenissae when the chorus is singing of the attack of the Sphinx, in the horror of her snatching up youths around the river Dirce:

ἄλυρον ἀμφὶ μοῦσαν

around the lyreless music (1028)

However, there is also mythological precedent for the lyre being associated with lament and the blurring of genres due to the figure of Orpheus–the most famous lyre concert in all of mythological history was in the underworld as a plea to bring his love back to life. Therefore it makes sense that the Hypsipyle features Orpheus as the foster father who blurs the lines between musicality and warfare, instruction and cosmetic with his young charges, especially in his musical performances being associated with lament and the ability to control nature.

The Phoenissae departs from its trilogy structure by turning away from the lyre, as well as breaking with Theban War play tradition by introducing a ten-song soundtrack. Originally, I thought perhaps it was because Euripides was attempting to emulate a ten-string lyre–and perhaps adding some insight into instrumental innovations during the birth of new musical genres at the end of the fifth century, but I realized that it wasn’t only in the number of songs that the play seemed to differ musically from previous tradition. The other Theban War plays tended to favor choruses who were aligned with one side or another–Aeschylus has the chorus of young Theban women, Sophocles has the chorus of old Theban men, and Euripides’ Suppliant chorus are of the elder Argive mothers attempting to retrieve their sons’ bodies. The chorus of Phoenissae, by contrast, is there entirely by accident: they are a group of Phoenician women on their way to Delphi who are waylaid in Thebes by the attack of the Seven, and they sing of both the battle strife and the divide amongst the house of Oedipus as its two sons wage war upon each other.

Now despite having a different number of songs, the musical design of the Phoenissae is still what I would term an epicentric soundtrack–epicentricity was coined by John Franklin to discuss the principal rule of the lyre in that it always tunes to the center string. At my SCS panel this past January, I discussed the different forms of soundtrack arrangement in tragedy and noted how the epicentric soundtrack tends to have a central middle song (or songs, if it has an even number) that creates the central turn of the play’s plot from which the rest of the songs all mirror out.

I first noticed this pattern with the other Theban War plays–since they were emulating the structure of a lyre, I looked at the middle song/musical scene of every soundtrack to read it as the central guiding principle of each play. Aeschylus’ Seven has the choral responses to the enemy’s shields as its center song, directly leading to Eteocles becoming involved in the action–so an epicentric read of that soundtrack strongly emphasizes Zeitlin’s infamous read of those semiotic shields. Sophocles’ Antigone has her showstopping kommos with the chorus as the center song, after which all the empathies of the chorus and eventually Creon begin to bend (or tune) towards her position. Euripides’ Suppliants has the maternal chorus and Adrastus singing in lamentation for the returned dead soldiers’ bodies, which is directly followed by Theseus encouraging Adrastus away from the feminine musical performance of lament to the masculine performance of funeral oration.

The Phoenissae still has a mirrored soundtrack, despite having an even number of songs:

The ten songs of Phoenissae arranged in an order mirrored from the center

The center of the play, arranged by the musical design, is the scene where Tiresias informs Creon that the only way to save Thebes is to sacrifice Creon’s son Menoeceus, after which Menoeceus goes off to sacrifice himself, triggering the beginning of the end of the conflict. The choral odes surrounding it, the second and third stasimon, have language exploring both musicality and notions of doubling. In the second stasimon, the Phoenician chorus sings of the walls of Thebes “built by the lyre of Amphion” (824) next to the “two-flowing streams” (825) of the Dirce and Ismenus rivers. The rivers, I argue, represent the double-pipes of the aulos with their twain flow. This is then supported by the third stasimon which not only has the previously quoted “lyreless music”, but also has a very notable presence of repeated (or doubled) words:

1019: ἔβας ἔβας
1022: πολύφθορος πολύστονος
1030: ἔφερες ἔφερες
1031: φόνια· φόνιος
1033–4: ἰάλεμοι δὲ ματέρων/ἰάλεμοι δὲ παρθένω
1036: ἰηιήιον βοάν/ἰηιήιον μέλος;
1037: ἄλλος ἄλλοτ᾿
1047: γάμους δυσγάμους
1054: ἀγάμεθ᾿ ἀγάμεθ᾿
1060–1: γενοίμεθ᾿ ὧδε ματέρες/γενοίμεθ᾿ εὔτεκνοι

This pattern of repetition, at the center of the musical design with a song that puts forth the binary between the lyre and the aulos in the Theban landscape, signals that the soundtrack has leaned away from the lyre and towards the double pipes. And it’s not only in the two central choral odes that helps to express this shift, but actually in the close proximity of the four central choral odes based on tragic convention: Helene Foley has remarked that there is no other place in extant tragedy where four choral odes happen in such concentrated succession of one another, especially within the middle of a play, which is the key to understanding its bizarre soundtrack shape.

I argue that the mirrored ten-song soundtrack with the close contraction of its central odes is actually supposed to represent the shape of an aulos, which had its two narrower ends pulled together in a mouthpiece for performance, from which the two pipes splay out (as I’ve attempted to show in the layout of the musical design above). This makes the mouthpiece center of its epicentric arrangement tied directly to the chorus, whereas the ends of the pipe are mostly represented by Jocasta and her incestuous offspring — its first and final songs are both lyrical scenes with Antigone going back and forth with another character, not dissimilar to the dueting tones of the aulos (and potentially the same actor playing both the Servant and Oedipus).

The dual tones of the aulos, as opposed to the seven tones of the lyre, help to emphasize the sliding spectrums of duality and binary that are presented not only in this play, but across its trilogy. In Phoenissae, there are the dual brothers, the duality of identity afforded Jocasta’s offspring due to incest, the two eyes that see no more due to that incest, the duel ending in dual death (I couldn’t finish this section without making this pun at least once), as well as the divide created between the chorus and those at war, considering this is the one choral identity that does not have an inherent stake in either side of the conflict.

Across the trilogy, it echoes the duality of the brothers in each play, as well as the binary between musicality and warfare, which is finally united by an instrument associated with negative emotions. There is only one other Theban War play that survives and it seems to confirm that Phoenissae deeply impacted the conventional seven-song soundtrack trope: Oedipus at Colonus has a nine-song soundtrack and it’s the only musical design that seems to have a catalectic soundtrack, ie the order and pattern of the songs would suggest that it was set up for the audience to expect a tenth song that Oedipus takes part in singing it, which would strongly suggest a musical homage being paid to Phoenissae.

While there is no direct evidence outside of plot structure to support this, I suggest that the Antiope had a seven-song soundtrack to help emphasize Amphion building the seven-walls of Thebes with his seven-stringed lyre. This trilogy would then be bookended by plays with musical designs that represent different instruments, going from the lyre of Antiope to the aulos of Phoenissae. This opposition of instruments is coordinated with the trope of the fighting man of action vs the musical man of contemplation. In the Antiope, the brother Amphion’s attitudes prevail in the play and music holds everything together–his lyre becomes the foundation for the city’s fortification. By the Phoenissae, fighting is the primary concern of the fraternal duo, the lyre-built walls are falling apart from strife, and thus a new form of music is demanded in the aulos.

It is through studying the structure of this trilogy that some of Euripides’ cosmetic composition style is best illustrated–the components he uses are not out of the ordinary: popular late 5th century archetypes of masculinity, playing around with the dynamics of binary opposition, and highly conventional tropes around musical genres and instruments. It is how he arranges them which makes his artistry so fascinating and unique, and perhaps has partly led to his work surviving the most of all his dramatic contemporaries, particularly as it became a part of school curriculum in antiquity. There is much to teach from this play and its fragmentary trilogy-mates, and I hope I’ve done a bit to help illuminate new pathways forward for instruction.

There are many to thank when it comes to this section. First and foremost, Rosa Andújar’s excellent chapter on the Phoenissae — where she reads it as a horror soundtrack engaging in queer temporalities — has been wildly influential on my own read of the play, as well as my students’ reflections on her chapter in the “Ancient Tragedy/Modern Horror” course that I taught last semester. I must also thank John Franklin, not only for coining the term “epicentric”, but especially for giving me multiple resources when I was on my ten-string lyre goose chase and for inviting Sarah Olsen to come give a talk at UVM in 2023 on the monodies of this play, which was the first time I realized that it too had a mirrored epicentric soundtrack. In addition, shout out to Ella Hasselwerdt who asked me about soundtracks that are difficult to wrangle during my SCS panel and to the contemporary aulete Rachel Fickes for answering some of my practical performance questions during the CAMP production of Lysistrata at the joint meeting last January.

The Stages of Belief (Bacchae, Alcmaeon in Corinth, Iphigenia in Aulis)

This is my favorite trilogy in all of tragedy. I have presented on it non-stop for the past few years, and I could probably write a book on it at this point. Because this is the trilogy that I have the most to say about, I’m just going to try and focus on one part (and I should probably start uploading all my old conference papers here on Corona Borealis now that I actually have time to sit down and edit them). I believe, in the fullest sense of that word, that this trilogy stages the disintegration of theistic belief over the course of its three plays, in a very similar fashion to how the previously discussed trilogy developed binary spectrums across its three plays.

Bacchae is widely considered one of Euripides’ most religious plays, contributing to a belief that he turned back towards the gods at the end of his life. The god of the theater himself stage-manages the plot from his opening lines to orchestrate his own mortal royal family being ripped apart on account of his mother. The chorus of bacchants from Sardis are entirely devoted to his cause as they sing of the associated gods in his retinue (as well as briefly citing the influence of Aphrodite in the first stasimon) giving an overview of the main gods that Euripides would utilize in musical Dionysian performance. The chorus’ emotions and allegiances remain in Dionysian revelry throughout the entire play instead of empathizing with the mortals grieving. Bacchae is infused with a religious ecstasy that is fresh and vital.

Alcmaeon in Corinth also begins with a divine prologue, this time of Apollo explaining the lineage of Alcmaeon as having descended from Mantis (fr. 73a), a woman whom Apollo had failed in seducing, and who was the daughter of Tiresias (which, Tiresias was almost definitely played by Dionysus’ actor in the prior play, as the two characters share scenes with Cadmus and Pentheus, but not each other). The chorus of Corinthian women potentially also sing of Aphrodite in their first stasimon, as the goddess is mentioned in the first stasima of the other two plays. This play reportedly had reconciliation as opposed to sparagmos for the parent-child relationship: Alcmaeon recognizes his enslaved daughter Tisiphone and they are able to be reunited, whereas Agave’s recognition of Pentheus comes after she only has his head left.

Iphigenia in Aulis, in contrast, is what I consider to be Euripides’ least religious play. While I hesitate calling it outright a-theistic (mostly because contemporary atheists tend to have a lot of feelings when I do that), I definitely consider it entirely anti-theistic in every sense of that conjunction — both against the gods as well as offering something up in their place. The play centers around two goddesses, Aphrodite and Artemis. The latter is the impetus for the chorus of Chalcian newlyweds — they’ve heard about the judgment of Paris from their husbands and have come to gawk at the hunky Achaean soldiers–and the former is the orchestrator of the plot, as she has demanded Iphigenia’s sacrifice (with no reason given in this text), which has led Agamemnon to engage in a deceptive plot against his daughter involving a fake marriage.

The two surviving plays create a binary between the agents that are staging deception–the Bacchae depicts a god’s plotting whereas Iphigenia depicts the conflicting plots of mortals. The former presents the tragic deception as something new that the god Dionysus is creating to achieve his divine ends (arguably the birth of tragedy, if you’ll excuse the Nietzsche). The latter presents the tragic deception as repetitive, dealing with conflicting motivations, and frequently self-referential: Euripides cites quite a lot of his own past tropes within this play.

The metatheatrical divine/mortal binary of staging is apparent through the kosm-roots of the plays. In the Bacchae, the kosm-roots are all centered around Dionysus’ influence over the citizens of Thebes, but especially in how he’s staging his family members to be representatives of the tragic form. First the messenger speaks of the “fine order” (693: εὐκοσμίας) of the three choruses attached to each of Dionysus’ aunts as they all rise in coordination on Mt. Cithaeron (which would mimic the three choruses of a tragic trilogy, begging the question–are the main chorus of Sardian bacchants supposed to represent the satyr play?).

After Pentheus reveals that he is amenable to dressing up as a woman and agrees to Dionysus magically making his hair grow long, he asks what the second “form of his costume” will be (832: σχῆμα τοῦ κόσμου). After he hurries inside to change, Dionysus gloats that his costume is actually his adornments to go down to the underworld in (857: κόσμον). And when Pentheus returns in his style with his hair slightly askew because he was dancing and shaking his head around indoors, he tells Dionysus to style the lock back into place (934: σὺ κόσμει), because he’s devoted to his attentions. The kosm-roots in the Bacchae illustrate the moving pieces of Dionysus’ design before they all come crashing together in bloody sparagmos as a pure expression of Dionysian victory. A kosmos designed for sparagmos.

While there is no attributed fragment to Alcmaeon in Corinth that has a kosm-root, there is an unattributed Alcmaeon fragment (ie, it’s unknown whether it belongs to the Psophis play or the Corinth play) that does mention kosmos. And while I’ve hopefully illustrated thoroughly by now that this is a common word that Euripides deploys to help give form to his artistry, I claim that it should be attributed to this posthumous trilogy of Euripides, a wary warning situated between two plays that are opposing in their relationship to the cosmetic gods:

βροτοῖς τὰ μείζω τῶν μέσων τίκτει νόσους·
θεῶν δὲ θνητοὺς κόσμον οὐ πρέπει φέρειν.

For humans, what exceeds the middle breeds disorders:
Mortals ought not bear the cosmetic of the gods. (fr. 79)

In Iphigenia in Aulis, the kosm-roots show a greater variety–perhaps in reflecting how mortals use tragedy to more diverse ends than the gods do. First, after Agamemnon has failed to retract his past deception (in the form of a lie written on a tablet, which could be seen as a metatheatrical composition prop), he gripes at the coming conflict by questioning the “disorder of speeches” outside his tent (317: λόγων ἀκοσμία). In hearing of these layered deceptions, the chorus sings an ode to Aphrodisian modesty where they locate virtue in different gendered realms–for women in Cyprian secrecy and for men it is when a city is in good order (the latter of which is ironic in the context of its trilogy given that the Bacchae is all about Pentheus losing control of his city):

μέγα τι θηρεύειν ἀρετάν,
γυναιξὶ μὲν κατὰ †Κύπριν
κρυπτάν†, ἐν ἀνδράσι δ᾿ αὖ
κόσμος ἐνὼν ὁ μυριοπληθὴς
μείζω πόλιν αὔξει.

A great thing to hunt virtue:
for women it is down in †Cypris’
cleft†, in men it is when
good-order flowing infinitely
increases greatness in a city. (568–72)

In their second stasimon, the chorus also sings of Cassandra performing her prophecies in Troy, shaking her hair not-dissimilarly to the divine hairography of Pentheus when she is under the god’s influence, though this time it’s Apollo who is positioned as the hairstylist:

τὰν Κασσάνδραν ἵν᾿ ἀκούω
ῥίπτειν ξανθοὺς πλοκάμους
χλωροκόμῳ στεφάνῳ δάφνας
κοσμηθεῖσαν, ὅταν θεοῦ
μαντόσυνοι πνεύσωσ᾿ ἀνάγκαι.

There I hear Cassandra
whips her amber braids
in a greenleaved crown of laurel
styled, whenever the god’s
mantic influences are exhaled. (757–61)

The final kosm-root is potentially spurious, but still worth noting–Achilles is talking about the future bloodshed for Ares that he will adorn his spear with (931: κοσμήσω δορί). Now, the first instance of ἀκοσμία is interesting because that’s the only time that word specifically shows up in all of extant and fragmentary Euripides (and it is not a popular form of a kosm-root in tragedy, it almost exclusively is used in Aeschylus’ Persians and Sophocles’ Antigone), which makes it something of an outlier in this group, because the other instances seem to be direct references to past plays of Euripides. The strophe and antistrophe in the first stasimon carry forward lessons first developed in the two odes of Eros and Aphrodite from his 1st-prize-winning Hippolytus, and the entire second stasimon references quite a bit of the subject matter from Troades, and even has the chorus ventriloquize the Trojan women’s future (from their perspective in the mythological chronology) horror at being dragged away by their hair from their fatherland. And finally, Achilles’ reference to his spear seems to be a direct nod back to Euripides’ ever-popular Telephus.

So, to sum up–in his final trilogy, Euripides has the kosm-roots in the Bacchae reflect the singular staging of Dionysus achieving his victory through his family’s sparagmos, and the kosm-roots in Iphigenia represent the variety of reasons a mortal could compose tragedy (political identity, divine ecstasy, bloody penetration), punctuated by references to Euripides’ body of work. Between the two sits the anxiety around the spectrum of divine and mortal composition in Corinth–the former play presents the heady divine excitement of creating a new form of media, the latter presents mortals scrambling to undo their deceitful plot-twists.

The anti-theism is best understood through the choruses of the two extant plays. In the Bacchae, the Sardian chorus is utterly devoted to Dionysus–the only time they question his influence is in their second stasimon, after their leader (Dionysus in disguise) has been taken off to be imprisoned. Their momentary doubts about the god’s presence are immediately squashed by Dionysus’ voice interrupting their song to assure them that all was still under his control. From that point onward, the chorus stays aligned with his divine influence.

The chorus in Aulis, by contrast, shifts allegiances all over the place. They first enter aligned with the goddess Aphrodite: singing a catalog of all the Achaean soldiers who they’re eyeing while sharing what their husbands told them around the beauty contest of the goddesses. They even go so far as to judge which of the soldiers is the most beautiful, musically staging their own beauty contest to match. Following Agamemnon informing them of the plot and swearing them to silence, they shift stances and sing an ode to Aphrodisian modesty, pulling back on their prior excessive desire (and potential for infidelity), reminiscing instead about the variable nature of mortals (558) and the importance of education towards good discernment (565). They end on a note of anxiety for the desire of Paris and Helen that will bring strife to Troy.

After Iphigenia and Clytemnestra arrive and Agamemnon digs his heals further into his plot, the chorus sings their second stasimon around the Achaean soldiers — this time, instead of focussing on their own past sexual desire, they predict the future sexual violence that the army will bring upon the women of Troy. They no longer sing of Aphrodite, but mention Apollo (who performed the prologue of the prior play) in his connection with Cassandra. At the end of the song, they question whether Helen was really begat by Leda and Zeus as a swan, or if that was just a false tale on tablets descended from the Pierian Muses. In singing about Cassandra and her prophetic powers, they are able to mimic those abilities when they ventriloquize the Trojan women’s future cries.

In their third stasimon, following the plot of the false marriage being revealed to all, they sing a song that shifts genres concerning Achilles and Iphigenia–the strophe and antistrophe of the song deals with the mythological past lineage that Achilles comes from in the form of a wedding hymn for his parents, whereas the final epode concerns the horrifying immediate future that Iphigenia is about to face as a sacrifice to Artemis. Considering that all the characters had been brought together on account of lies upon a tablet, the third stasimon similarly acts as a false promise, a sort of bait-and-switch.

The third stasimon also carries forward the theme of Apollonian prophecy that the chorus utilizes. In the antistrophe, they sing of Chiron’s prophecy that he gave Thetis and Peleus concerning the future glory that Achilles would win at Troy, before they sing about Iphigenia’s more immediate future in the epode. Chiron’s prophecy places Achilles in a lineage of divine instruction–Chiron learned the mantic art from Apollo (1064) and in turn will become Achilles’ instructor. Iphigenia’s fate, on the other hand, the chorus recoils against, comparing her to a wild animal about to be slaughtered, insisting that she wasn’t raised in a herd like cattle, but instead reared by her mother to be a bride (1086–8) . The chorus juxtaposes the divine privilege that Achilles enjoys as the son of a goddess in his upbringing with the sudden harsh reality that Iphigenia faces due to her mortal circumstances.

In the final lines of this choral ode, the chorus seems to reference the fragment that is most contentiously associated with the Sisyphus, the longest tragic fragment that seems to discuss any sort of atheistic subject matter in its rationalization of the gods. At the end of the quoted fragment, it is revealed that the impetus for creating the gods are rooted in the nom-roots in this passage, from lawless behavior that needs to be regulated, laws/customs being the method of regulation, and belief being the verbal action to ensure that everyone within a society performs in a certain way:

τοίους πέριξ ἔστησεν ἀνθρώποις φόβους,
δι᾿ οὓς καλῶς τε τῷ λόγῳ κατῴκισεν
τὸν δαίμον᾿ οὗτος ἐν πρέποντι χωρίῳ,
τὴν ἀνομίαν τε τοῖς νόμοις κατέσβεσεν
<…>
οὕτω δὲ πρῶτον οἴομαι πεῖσαί τινα
θνητοὺς νομίζειν δαιμόνων εἶναι γένος.

Such were the fears he established all about for humans,
and thanks to these fears he beautifully set a home
by his speaking for divine power in a fitting place,
and quenched lawlessness with the laws.
<…>
In such a way, I think, someone first persuaded
mortal men there is a race of divinities to believe in. (37–42)

As I said earlier, I do not read Iphigenia in Aulis as an atheistic play, but rather an anti-theistic one: it does not directly deny the existence of the gods, but it holds and incredibly unfavorable view towards them and does offer an interesting development around the wordplay of nom-roots:

Ἀνομία δὲ νόμων κρατεῖ,
καὶ μὴ κοινὸς ἀγὼν βροτοῖς
μή τις θεῶν φθόνος ἔλθῃ;

Lawlessness rules over the laws
and mortals can no longer make common contest
to keep the jealousy of the gods from reaching them. (1095–7)

Instead of outright denying the gods, the chorus instead presents a bleak theistic landscape where mortals are constantly at the petty whims of their divine rulers. If this is supposed to be a direct reference to the Sisyphus, then perhaps this is the mortal rationality of what happens when you create a belief system to keep society in check–sometimes the belief system takes on a mind of its own and reverses all the intentions that you initially had for it.

It is unsurprising that following this statement, the chorus stops singing entirely. Iphigenia has to sing two more monodies, and it isn’t until all the adults in the plot have utterly failed her and she’s engaging in self-deception to try and make her parents’ marriage okay, to allow her death to have no impact on it (which, we all know from mythological and theatrical precedent, can never be true, there is no interpretation where Clytemnestra is okay with what Agamemnon does to their child), it isn’t until she’s literally singing herself to her own sacrifice that the chorus comes back to the soundtrack to support her in her final exodus.

The anti-theistic stance that this chorus takes is most blatant when they are acting as Iphigenia’s back-up. When Iphigenia calls the chorus, she asks them to:

συνεπαείδετ᾽ Ἄρτεμιν
Χαλκίδος ἀντίπορον,

together celebrate Artemis
opposite of Chalcis (1492–3)

Her musicality is firmly rooted towards Artemis, however her lyrics suggest that perhaps she is aware that the choral allegiances to the gods have shifted. The word for “opposite” (ἀντίπορον) can mean both “on the opposite coast of” and “opposite in the ways of”, depending on how you want to translate πόρος, which has a range of meanings from a ferry, to a narrow body of water, to any means of accomplishing a thing (when paired with the genitive, as it is here). If it holds the former meaning, Iphigenia is referring to a temple of Artemis that stands on the opposite coast from Chalcis; if it holds the latter, Iphigenia is acknowledging the disdain towards divine pettiness that the chorus ended their third stasimon with, specifically the jealousy of Artemis for undercutting Aphrodisian victory and excess (in the form of choral lust and the prior beauty contest) in order to demand her own sacrifice.

And what does the chorus do in response? They sing about Iphigenia for eleven lines straight. And then, when they finally acquiesce to her request and sing about Artemis, they very shadily slip into the subjunctive:

ἀλλὰ τὰν Διὸς κόραν
κλῄσωμεν Ἄρτεμιν,
θεῶν ἄνασσαν, ὡς ἐπ᾽ εὐτυχεῖ πότμῳ.

But for Zeus’ girl
let us praise Artemis
queen of the gods, as if upon some blessed fate. (1521–3)

It is within this mood that I feel the anti-theistic nature makes itself so apparent–the chorus only comes back to the soundtrack because Iphigenia needs backup, she asks them to praise Artemis, and they can’t even do so indicatively. Their motives are with the mortals who need help with their performances, not on account of divine worship: their final eight lines of the song are asking the goddess to give the mortals eternal glory. Iphigenia calls for a paean, and this chorus barely scrapes the minimum requirements. Their first two songs were aligned with Aphrodite, their next two with Apollo, and after Iphigenia sings the final two songs of the soundtrack, they join her in order to emphasize the glory that she will achieve in the future as a mortal. They’ve put mortal empathy in the place of religious devotion; hence, I consider Iphigenia in Aulis to be Euripides’ most anti-theistic play.

Setting this play after the Bacchae, which has a chorus so thoroughly saturated with Dionysus — how would that have impacted the audience of 405 BCE concerning their own relationship to the gods, to the genre, to the poet who couldn’t live long enough to stage his final trilogy? With one play endlessly affirming its love for the god of theater, while another shows the theatrical form falling apart as it becomes more disillusioned with the gods? These are questions I don’t have academic answers to, but are ones that drive me to endlessly try and understand this strange form of media that has survived to this day. There could be some hints though, if I am allowed to attempt to place another one of the unattributed Alcmaeon fragments in Corinth. There are three lines preserved about women who practice the craft of divination:

γυναῖκες, ὁρμήθητε μηδ᾿ ἀθυμία
σχέθῃ τις ὑμᾶς· ταῦτα γὰρ σκεθρῶς ὁρᾶν
ἡμᾶς ἀνάγκη τοὺς νομίζοντας τέχνην.

Women, go and don’t let faintheartedness
hold you! For seeing such things clearly
is necessary for those of us who practice this craft. (fr. 87)

This would align with the Corinthian play considering it’s kicked off by Apollo speaking of Mantis (“Seer-Gal”) as well as the prophetic developments around Apollo in the two central choral odes of Iphigenia in Aulis, but I’m more interested in the message that the lines are speaking about concerning divine craft. Prophecy is not dissimilar to tragic composition–they are both attempting to reveal the truth through divine influence to wildly diverging audience responses. The emphasis on seeing things clearly is an important lesson in a genre attempting to instruct its audience in the arts of discernment and deception. The chorus in Aulis echoes similar sentiments as they reflect on the notion of what is right amidst the changing nature of mortals:

διάφοροι δὲ φύσεις βροτῶν,
διάφοροι δὲ τρόποι: τὸ δ᾽ ὀρ-
θῶς ἐσθλὸν σαφὲς αἰεί:
τροφαί θ᾽ αἱ παιδευόμεναι
μέγα φέρουσ᾽ ἐς τὰν ἀρετάν:
τό τε γὰρ αἰδεῖσθαι σοφία,
τάν τ᾽ ἐξαλλάσσουσαν ἔχει
χάριν ὑπὸ γνώμας ἐσορᾶν
τὸ δέον, ἔνθα δόξα φέρει
κλέος ἀγήρατον βιοτᾷ.

Varying are the natures of mortals
varying are their tropes: but the truly
good are forever apparent:
the nourishment of education
greatly bends towards virtue:
for to be ashamed is wisdom,
and it has the unconventional
charm of seeing through consideration
what is needed, therein reputation brings
glory unaging for life. (558–67)

The lesson I take from our second most complete trilogy that survives from antiquity is perhaps one a bit too simple and obvious: change is our only constant. Belief is a process of minds changing time and again based upon our network of interpersonal relationships and cultural identities. Few artists exemplify this better for me than Euripides, not only in his wildly divergent relationships to various gods, but in the way that he teases out and negotiates the changing strategies around human survival. I greatly admire his work because it has survived so much, and for such absurd reasons. I actually quite like that this trilogy is our second most complete solely because there are two different manuscript traditions with Euripides which preserved them for entirely arbitrary reasons: Bacchae became a school text in antiquity with multiple manuscripts to draw from; Iphigenia is a part of the chunk of the alphabetic anthology that most of the eta and iota plays belong to, each surviving in only a single manuscript. It is purely by chance that this is the second most complete tragedy that we have, but I find that to be the best reason to give it such attention as we attempt to help one another survive whatever might be thrown at us in the future.

We are but children of chance, are we not?

I must thank Josh Billings for his patience in entertaining my increasingly hair-brained interpretations of this trilogy, as well as his book The Philosophical Stage which has provided incredibly useful models for dealing with tragic catalogs, prologues, and dialogues as modes of instruction. His analysis of soph-roots in the Bacchae and how that network operates in light of the rest of the soph-roots in Euripides inspired my approach to catalog all of the kosm-roots in this trilogy for similar purposes.

I would like to end on a bit of a personal note, because I’ve done quite a lot of reflecting since I turned 30 about why I still hang around classicists. I’m done with my second masters and I have no intention of pursuing any more graduate studies. I also have no interest in engaging in many of the broader theoretical aesthetic debates around tragedy that I first trained under. I just like reading these plays, latching onto glitzy-glamorous vocabulary, counting different numerical forms, trying to fiddle with the music, and organizing their divine cosmetics — all because doing these practices with ancient plays helps my own art, and the two have quite an entangled relationship now.

These methods are not of a traditional sophistication, or in the proper academic schools of thought around how one is supposed to read tragedy: they are merely the first epistemology that I learned as a young chorus member. I grew up in a sibling quartet that was headed by our dazzling chorus leader, my sister Whitney, my first Muse. Her endless lists, organizational systems, how she taught me to create synchronous balance within a space, the dress-up costumes she would make for all of us, her passions for orchestra and drama club — I have always followed my big sister’s example, and my methods of engaging with media forms are no different.

It is perhaps a bit fanciful to say that I like to read Greek tragedy in the same manner that my sister and I would sort through our mom’s and aunties’ jewelry boxes to divide all the glittering treasure into different aesthetics, or that I observe the playwrights’ kinky plot-twisting in the same manner that I used to watch Whitney braid my hair in a mirror. I have always been a girl of whimsy. But the more I reread all of Attic drama, the more that I realize how much the characters in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were just as preoccupied with their head’s external arrangement in the form of cosmetics as they were with its internal arrangement in terms of educational, political, and philosophical debates. So, perhaps it just takes a whimsical artist to recognize the eccentric cosmetics making up this ancient genre.

More of that to come in time. Like I said, this is just the retu(r)ning from intermission. Act II is about to begin.

Bac. 934: “There, you compose me, for I’m utterly devoted to you.”