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Sappho F 44 Voigt and Euripides' Troades

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Sappho F 44 Voigt and Euripides' Troades Mnemosyne 71 (2018) 920-937 brill.com/mnem Sappho F 44 Voigt and Euripides’ Troades Lucía P. Romero Mariscal University of Almería—Cysoc [email protected] Received February 2017 | Accepted July 2017 Abstract In this paper a new interpretation of the first stasimon of Euripides’ Troades is pro- posed, based on a plausible relationship with Sappho’s F 44 Voigt. Sappho’s version of the wedding of Hektor and Andromache seems to be poetically evoked by the women of the chorus right before Andromache’s arrival on stage in the second episode of the play. The lyric, recalling the welcoming of the Trojan Horse to the town and the ensu- ing communal revelry, conjures up the civic celebrations at the nuptial procession and reception of the happy couple. The striking contrast between the lyric past and the tragic present casts an even more somber light not only on the widow of Hektor but also on the Trojan women themselves who form the chorus of the play. Keywords Sappho – Euripides – Troades – Andromache – First Stasimon 1 Introduction Euripides’ Troades deals with the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, drawing particular attention to the vanquished female survivors rather than to the male Greek victors. Due to the recent capture of the city by the Achaeans, the Trojan women find themselves in a sort of transitional state: strictly speak- ing, they are not yet slaves, but prisoners of war held captive, awaiting a deci- sion about their fate.1 As such, the women of the chorus fear for their lives 1 As Gregory 1991, 155 points out, “they are not entitled to even the minimal protection that slaves could expect from their masters”. See also Croally 1994, 85. In this regard, the chorus © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi:10.1163/1568525X-12342423Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:21:53AM via free access Sappho F 44 Voigt and Troades 921 (E. Tr. 178-179), although they equally dread the alternative to death—slavery.2 Moreover, the specific kind of slavery these women actually fear in the first place is sexual, meaning that the impending doom looming large over these frightened war captives is death or sexual submission (E. Tr. 180-181).3 As Craik 1990, 30 aptly put it, “Troades is about sex and war: great and perennial, per- haps the greatest and most perennial of all, literary themes.” Not only the chorus but also the main characters of the play are all women of Troy and hence prisoners of war. Hekabe, the former queen of the city, is always present on stage, which turns her into the linchpin of the drama as well as the virtual leader of the chorus.4 Furthermore, throughout the different episodes of the tragedy she encounters other formidable female characters to whom she is closely related in one way or another. Together with Hekabe and the chorus, all these singular women—Kassandra, Andromache and Helen— are also faced with the gendered predicament that afflicts female war captives (i.e. the explicit menace of death or sexual submission to a male master).5 Although Kassandra, Andromache and Helen have been handpicked and not of Euripides’ Troades is unique in the extant corpus of Athenian tragedy, except, perhaps, for Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus and Sophocles’ The Captive Women. The chorus of Euripides’ Troades actually suffers what the chorus of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes 321-368 fears so much. Not even the chorus of Euripides’ Hecuba equals the acute sense of shock and uncer- tainty that afflicts the chorus of Troades, due to the fact that in the former play some time has already passed from the sacking of the city to the enforced delay that prevents the Greeks from resuming their nostos from the shores of Thrace. 2 According to Suter 2003, 19, “in lamenting their passage to their life of slavery, the women are, unbeknownst to themselves, lamenting their own deaths also. For they, although innocent, will die with the guilty Greeks in Athena’s storm.” However, as Rodighiero 2015, 250-251 no- ticed, none of the characters of the play will actually be drowned in Athena’s and Poseidon’s storm. The prologue of this play seems to act as a threshold through which the current situ- ation of the Trojan women is laid bare to the audience, i.e. their immediate state as war cap- tives. For the ambiguous interpretation of the role of the gods not only in the prologue but also throughout the storyline of the play, see also Goff 2009, 37-39 and 42. 3 Regarding female war captives, see Scodel 1998, 140, who insists on the fact that “the accep- tance of the sexual relationship is part of the general acceptance of slavery”. 4 See, amongst others, Goff 2009, 43. For the text of Euripides’ Troades I will follow Diggle’s OCT. 5 According to Craik 1990, 5-6, Hekabe’s words in lines 112-118 could be metaphorically under- stood as if not even old Hekabe is spared the sexual trauma which affects all vanquished women. See also Scodel 1998, 145, who also insists on the fact that in Troades “rape is an important theme from the beginning”. Mnemosyne 71 (2018) 920-937 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 02:21:53AM via free access 922 Mariscal simply allotted, as is the case for Hekabe and the chorus,6 the plight of these women, especially Andromache, is almost identical to that of the chorus, and the Trojan women explicitly liken their situation to hers (E. Tr. 684-685). As the faithful widow of Hektor and loving mother of Astyanax, Andromache adds qualitatively to the pathos of the play, which will eventu- ally reach its climax in the scene of the dead child lying on the shield of his father. In sharp contrast with the unintelligible Kassandra and the sophistic Helen, Andromache—the model wife—provides a moving example of tragic peripeteia, being the epitome of heartbreaking misfortune and failed virtue.7 Curiously enough, she is not even mentioned by Poseidon in the prologue of the play and very little is said about her in the beginning of the first episode, as if, as Meridor 1989, 20-21, 28-31 plausibly contended, the poet wanted to pre- vent the audience from anticipating anything regarding her sorrowful fate and, most of all, that of her child. Therefore, her first and only appearance on stage is both theatrically impressive and dramatically moving, since the playwright seems to have carefully prepared it within the gradual unfolding of the plot. The so-called ‘Andromache scene’ takes place after the ‘Kassandra scene’ in the first episode of the play. More precisely, it starts right after the first sta- simon. Prior to this, a baffling celebratory hymn with perverted hymenaeal features is strikingly deployed by the enthusiastic prophetess in her first monody.8 Kassandra’s mother, who had refused to join in with the attempted choral celebration that her daughter had so unfathomably initiated, was dev- astated after the departure of the insane ‘bride’ (E. Tr. 500-510). It was at that very moment when the chorus sang the first stasimon of the drama (E. Tr. 511- 567). Hekabe had previously told the women of the chorus to respond with laments to Kassandra’s hymenaeal exhortations, since mourning was actually more fitting to the situation in which all of them, not only Kassandra, were immersed (E. Tr. 351-352).9 Therefore, in the first stasimon the chorus resumes 6 The chorus is actually divided into two semichoruses and would perhaps impersonate both adult women as well as young girls or parthenoi. See Parmentier 2001, 34-35 n. 3, Lee 2001, 90-91, and Goff 2009, 45. That not only the women of the chorus but also Hekabe have been allotted is clear from E. Tr. 243, 277, 282, 289-291 and 1270-1271. See, also, Hose 1991, 288-290. 7 See Meridor 1989, 35, Croally 1994, 90, 92, and Rodighiero 2016, 193. 8 For Kassandra’s monody and the language of hymenaios, see, amongst others, Barlow 1986, 173-174; Papadopoulou 2000, 520-523; Battezzato 2005, 77-79; Cerbo 2009, 87 n. 1 and 96; Lee 2001, 125-129, and Swift 2010, 254-255, as well as 400. 9 However, that Kassandra’s perverted hymenaeal monody bears some funereal features has been highlighted by Suter 2003, 8-9, for whom “the conception of marriage as a kind of death is common in Greek literature and ritual; here the two are presented as inextricably combined”. MnemosyneDownloaded from71 (2018) Brill.com09/27/2021 920-937 02:21:53AM via free access Sappho F 44 Voigt and Troades 923 the lamenting with a new song, a dirge, which ironically is also brimming with stark references to premature celebrations with joyful music as well as choral singing and dancing. I submit that the first stasimon of Euripides’ Troades functions as a hinge between the ‘Kassandra scene’ and the ‘Andromache scene.’10 It appears to me that, throughout this stasimon, the poet is deliberately preparing the audi- ence for the spectacular entrance of Andromache and he manages to do so by means of recurrent allusions not only to epic but also to lyric and, more specifically, Sapphic poetry.11 Furthermore, I am inclined to propose that the playwright builds on Sappho’s F 44 Voigt in order to introduce the second epi- sode of the tragedy and to draw an even more poignant contrast between the happy Andromache who once came to Troy as the gorgeous bride of Hektor and the miserable Andromache who will now leave Troy as the pitiful bed slave of Neoptolemos.12 As such, the imagery depicted in F 44 Voigt by Sappho is pervasive in the first stasimon of Euripides’ Troades and, in my view, the sub- tle but recognizable interplay between Sappho’s song and Euripides’ tragedy aims to highlight the situational contrast between the glorious past and the 10 I adhere to the recent scholarly interpretations that reject the view of this peculiar sta- simon as an embolimon.
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