Penelope As Atragic Heroine

Penelope as a Tragic Heroine Choral Dynamics in Homeric Epic

Sheila Murnaghan University of Pennsylvania [email protected]

Abstract

Attention to the ways in which Homeric epic is shaped by its engagement with choral lyric reveals continuities between epic and tragedy that go beyond tragedy’s mythical subject matter and the characteristics of tragic dialogue: both poetic forms rework the circumstances of choral performance into fictional events. This point can be illus- trated through the figure of Penelope in the Odyssey who, like many tragic heroines, is in effect a displaced chorus leader. Penelope’s situation and her relations with her serving women, especially with the twelve disloyal maids whose punishment takes the form of a distorted choral dance, anticipate the circumstances of the tragic stage, in which individual characters act and suffer in the constant presence of choral groups.

Keywords chorality – nightingale – Penelope – Nausicaa – maidservants

A defining feature of classical Athenian tragedy is its combination of actors and choruses,* a distinctive configuration of individual and collective characters who together enact episodes from the mythical tradition.1While actors and

* Versions of this article were delivered at the Epichoreia workshop at New York University in January 2012 and at the University of Pennsylvania Classical Studies colloquium in September 2012. I am grateful to members of both audiences, especially Helene Foley, Barbara Kowalzig, Timothy Power, Deborah Steiner, and Ralph Rosen, for their helpful responses on those occasions. I owe a further debt to Deborah Steiner for generously sharing her unpublished work on chorality in Greek culture. Thanks also to Alex Purves and Timothy Power for reading and commenting on an earlier draft and to the editors of YAGE for their patience and encourage- ment. 1 Acting together is suggested by the term Aristotle uses to describe the relationship of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24688487_00201006Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access 166 murnaghan choruses differ in their language, meters, performance styles, and roles in the tragic plot, their association with each other is fundamental to tragic form. If Aristotle is to be believed, tragedy took shape through a restructuring of the chorus, in which the leaders of the chorus were more sharply differentiated and became the actors (Poetics 4.1449a9–19). As the storytellers of nondramatic lyric took on a new function as direct imitators of the action, the chorus’s inher- ent dynamic of leaders and led was redeployed in performances of fictional events conceived in terms of individuals and groups. A growing body of scholarship on the tragic chorus has shown that the occasions of choral performance remain a significant factor beneath the surface of the tragic plot: choruses oscillate between their fictional roles and their identity as performers, breaking into explicit song and dance or associating themselves with imagined choral performances at other times and places. But these two aspects of the chorus are also in tension because tragedy’s painful, disruptive, transgressive events are antithetical to the festive conditions with which nondramatic choruses are associated; as a result, the tragic chorus typ- ically performs as a chorus only when it optimistically misunderstands what is happening. Except in circumstances that call for lamentation, overt fulfill- ment of the chorus’s musical identity is foreclosed by its involvement in the tragic plot, displaced onto memories of a lost past or wishes for an uncer- tain future.2 And even lamentation, when properly and formally rehearsed, expresses solidarity among its participants and points ahead to consolation and renewed pleasure in ways that counter the troubled circumstances of the tragic plot.3 While actors and choruses are equally definitive of tragedy, tragedy’s debt to Homer is generally recognized only in relation to the actors. The Homeric epics are widely acknowledged as important sources of tragic plots, in which the actors play the leading roles and find themselves in situations enough like those of epic characters that the epics are often characterized as already tragic in spirit. The copious direct speech reported by Homer is regularly cited as a

chorus to the actors, realized ideally by Sophocles: συναγωνίζεσθαι (Poetics 18.1456a26– 27). 2 On the self-referentiality of the tragic chorus, see the groundbreaking work of Henrichs (1995, 1996); on the tension between tragic action and choral festivity, see Murnaghan 2011. 3 Many tragedies involve distorted forms of lamentation, whether excessively prolonged as in Sophocles’s Electra, or cut short by dispersal of the participants as in Euripides’s Trojan Women, or precluded by a lack of harmony between the principal mourner and the chorus as in Sophocles’s Antigone. On tragedy’s characterization of lament as “negated music,” see Segal 1993.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access penelope as a tragic heroine 167 significant precursor of the spoken dialogue of tragic actors. But the chorus is generally not considered to be part of tragedy’s epic inheritance. According to John Gould, “The chorus is clearly an expressive medium which has no direct analogue in the Homeric poems, and whose origins lie in quite other areas of Greek literary tradition” (1983: 43).4 Gould is cited approvingly in a recent article by Irene de Jong (2016), who stresses the influence of Homeric epic on tragic form, but locates that influence almost exclusively in types of speech and behavior presented by actors: the deliberative monologue, the messenger’s speech, the scene-setting prologue, the appearance of a deus ex machina, and the presence of silent characters; she finds only an embryonic form of tragic choral speech in the “tis-speeches,” in which the poet reports on what people are saying or might say in general.5 It is certainly true that the meters and performance modes that distinguish the tragic chorus as an “expressive medium” do not derive from hexameter narrative; on the contrary, the hexameter itself is believed to have developed from lyric meters (Nagy 1974). But the presence of collective groups who are signif- icantly related to important individuals is a pervasive feature of the Homeric world. The major heroes of both Homeric epics are accompanied by groups of largely anonymous followers, such as Achilles’s Myrmidons or Hector’s Tro- jans or Odysseus’s companions. The sometimes difficult relationship between these leaders and their men is matter of concern in the epics (Haubold 2000), and it is recapitulated in the minority of extant tragedies that have choruses who represent men of military age, such as the choruses of Sophocles’s two most Homeric plays, the Salaminian sailors of Ajax and Neoptolemus’s crew in Philoctetes. Not only does the world portrayed by Homer anticipate in this way the demographics of the tragic stage but some events in the epics resemble the plots of tragedies in being fictionalized reworkings of the occasions of choral performance. Greek choral lyric clearly predates the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the lyric heritage of epic is evident not only in the hexameter itself but also in numerous overt references to choral song and dance, from the paean performed by the Achaeans when they return Chryseis to her father (Il. 1.472– 474) to the cluster of performances (including an epithalamium, a harvest

4 Gould does find a kind of analogue to the tragic chorus’s presentation of a perspective that ironizes the experiences of the characters in such Homeric passages as the shield of Achilles. 5 On the influence of Homeric narrative technique on tragedy, see also Herington 1985: 133– 144.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access 168 murnaghan song, and the dance of young men and women on Daedalus’s Cretan dance floor) depicted on the Shield of Achilles to the false wedding celebration of Odysseus’s loyal followers during the night of his reunion with Penelope (Od. 23.133–152).6 One Homeric episode in particular, the scene in which Nausicaa plays ball with her handmaidens in Odyssey 6, is patently modeled on a choral performance.7There is in general a close affinity between group play and dancing, and here the poet actually uses a word for dancing, μολπή, to describe the girls’ game before going on to compare Nausicaa, in her role as their leader, to Artemis (Od. 6.101–109):

τῇσι δὲ Ναυσικάα λευκώλενος ἤρχετο μολπῆς. οἵη δ’ Ἄρτεμις εἶσι κατ’ οὔρεα ἰοχέαιρα, ἢ κατὰ Τηΰγετον περιμήκετον ἢ Ἐρύμανθον, τερπομένη κάπροισι καὶ ὠκείῃς ἐλάφοισι· τῇ δέ θ’ ἅμα νύμφαι, κοῦραι Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο, ἀγρονόμοι παίζουσι· γέγηθε δέ τε φρένα Λητώ· πασάων δ’ ὑπὲρ ἥ γε κάρη ἔχει ἠδὲ μέτωπα, ῥεῖά τ’ ἀριγνώτη πέλεται, καλαὶ δέ τε πᾶσαι· ὣς ἥ γ’ ἀμφιπόλοισι μετέπρεπε παρθένος ἀδμής.

it was Nausikaa of the white arms who led off the dancing; and as Artemis, who showers arrows, moves on the mountains either along Taÿgetos or on high-towering Erymanthos, delighting in boars and deer in their running,

6 References to songs of all kinds in the Homeric epics are collected and discussed in Grandolini 1996; reflections of choral song throughout early hexameter poetry are surveyed in Richard- son 2011; for the less overt integration of lyric elements into Homeric similes, see Martin 1997. Carruesco has made the important and suggestive point that choral song provides a prototype for the epic singer’s performance as well as the events of his narrative, particularly in connection with the poet’s summoning up of catalogues (2010) and his construction of ordered patterns of human and divine interaction similar to the patterns found in Geometric art (2016). For the significant place of choruses, especially maiden choruses, in Geometric art, see Langdon 2008. 7 The prominent choral associations of this episode are well discussed by Lonsdale (1993: 206– 210), Ford (1992: 118–119), and Karanika (2014: 52–68). The choral character of Nausicaa’s companions was evidently realized in Sophocles’s lost play based on this episode, the Nausicaa or Plyntriai (The Women Washing Clothes). Cf. the chorus of Euripides’s Helen, who are washing clothes by a river when they hear Helen’s cry and come to her side (179–184).

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and along with her the nymphs, daughters of Zeus of the aegis, range in the wilds and play, and the heart of Leto is gladdened, for the head and brows of Artemis are above all the others, and she is easily marked among them, though all are lovely, so this one shone among her handmaidens, a virgin unwedded.8

Not only is Artemis herself regularly portrayed as a conspicuous member of a divine chorus (Homeric Hymns 3.197–199, 27.16–20), but the situation in which a leading girl’s special prominence is noted with satisfaction by her mother suggests choral performances, especially occasions like the partheneion, in which unmarried women display their readiness for marriage. Nausicaa’s identity as a leading dancer is made explicit by Odysseus when he praises her and spec- ulates that her parents and her brothers rejoice when they see her as τοιόνδε θάλος χορὸν εἰσοιχνεῦσαν, “such a shoot taking her place in the chorus of dancers” (Od. 6.157). The choral resonance of this episode is also reflected in Nausi- caa’s account to her father of why she needs to wash her brothers’ clothes: a suppressed reference to her hoped-for wedding is replaced by a more general observation that they need fresh clothes when they go “ἐς χορόν”(Od. 6.65). And the community in which Nausicaa is a leading figure is generally rich in such performances; the peace, prosperity, and timelessness of Phaeacian society is reflected in numerous games and musical occasions. As Andrew Ford observes, the episode of Nausicaa playing ball is “one of several displacements of eighth-century festival life to be found on this exotic island” (1992: 11). Another is the series of encounters between Odysseus and Demodocus in Odyssey 8, which represents a fictionalized version of a rhap- sodic competition, an event in which two singers try to outdo each other and in which one singer picks up where the other leaves off so that they pro- duce together an extensive, continuous narrative. A series of spontaneous interchanges and negotiations between Odysseus and Demodocus leads to a particular—and strikingly comprehensive—sequence of epic recitals, by both characters in turn. A musical event, in this case involving recitation rather than choral performance, has been converted into a plot sequence that con- tains an important narrative turning point, the moment when Alcinous finally asks Odysseus who he is and Odysseus reveals his identity before embark- ing on an extended account that fills in the story from the fall of Troy to his arrival at Calypso’s island. Sarah Olsen has suggested that a rather different

8 This and all subsequent translations from Homer are taken from the versions by Richmond Lattimore. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations are my own.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access 170 murnaghan performance that interrupts that sequence of recitations—the dance follow- ing Demodocus’s recitation of the tale of Ares and Aphrodite that features two solo performers (Od. 8.370–380)—also plays a significant role in the ongoing negotiation of Odysseus’s position in relation to his Phaeacian hosts (2017: 14– 19).9 Nausicaa is not the only female character in Homer who has been identified as a chorus leader. Another is Helen, who is widely associated with that role outside of epic, especially in Spartan myth and ritual (Calame 1997: 191–202), and who is generally portrayed in Homer as a poet-like figure (Clader 1976: 5–9; Elmer 2005). Richard Martin has shown that in many of her Homeric appear- ances Helen is identified specifically as a leader of laments (2008). She plays that role overtly at the end of the Iliad when she is the one of the women who leads off (ἐξῆρχε, 24.761) the Trojans’ laments for Hector, but she speaks the language of lament at other times as well, in her mournful interactions with Priam on the walls of Troy in Iliad 3 and in her prophetic, authoritative interactions with Telemachus in Odyssey 4 and 15. In a study of work songs in the Greek tradition, Andromache Karanika further shows that Helen’s role as leader of laments is complemented by her prominent role in carrying out and directing women’s domestic work, especially weaving and wool-working (2014: 25–41). When Helen makes her first appearance in the Odyssey, she positions herself to take up spinning in a sequence that evokes the formation of a chorus around its leader (4.120–136). As she emerges from her room, she is compared to Artemis; three serving women then come to her, each bringing an item that will further her spinning, and they form a collaborative group. As Karanika puts it, “it is almost like the preparation of a theatrical scene on stage” (2014: 31). Here too the con- stituents of poetic performance have been reconceived and naturalized so that they become features of a character’s behavior within a fictional plot. One rou- tine and unremarkable aspect of this scene-setting is the simple fact that Helen, like all respectable Homeric women, does not appear alone but is accompanied by other women: in this way, the conditions of the chorus converge with the social convention of the Homeric world. Finally, the group of Trojan elders towards whom Helen directs her threnodic speech in Iliad 3 can also be recognized as a displaced chorus: like a significant subset of tragic choruses they are old men suited to observe rather than participate in military action, and

9 For the broader argument that the entire Odyssey makes the banquet—the primary setting of songs such as those of Demodocus (and presumably of the Odyssey itself)—a central theme, with the result that “the poem comes to encompass its own setting” (xi), see Bakker 2013.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access penelope as a tragic heroine 171 they are compared to cicadas, the insects that appear repeatedly as figures for human singers throughout the Greek tradition (Il. 3.150–152).10 In his discussion of Helen as a chorus leader, Martin also invokes the episode recounted by Menelaus in Odyssey 4, in which Helen walks around the Tro- jan horse imitating the voices of all of the wives of the heroes hidden inside. There Helen becomes in effect a one-person embodiment of the chorus, at once the leader and the group; she dramatizes the close identification between the individual chorus leader and the collective chorus members, which is especially pronounced in lament, with its characteristic format of call and response. Accordingly, in the account of the funeral of Achilles in Odyssey 24, the poet oscillates between attributing the laments that were sung on that occasion to collective Mousai and a singular Mousa (Richardson 2011: 16). By imitating multiple voices, Helen also recalls one of the archetypal choral ensembles of early Greek poetry, the Delian maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, who imitate πάντῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων φωνάς, “the voices of all men” (162). The song of the Delian maidens represents a high point of human civilization, in which a human performance echoes the festivities of the gods on Olympus and both enacts and fosters a flourishing and harmonious society. But Helen’s ventriloquizing is a deadly perversion of a choral performance, designed to dis- tract each of the heroes from their collective purpose and to lead them to their deaths: the voice of the woman who would have lamented each hero if he were already dead is used instead for “a summons to death unless one resists it” (Mar- tin 2008: 126, emphasis in original). In this respect, as Martin observes, Helen resembles the Sirens, the mythical prototype for deceptively beautiful singing and an ensemble that similarly straddles the border between individual and collective song; in the Odyssey, the Sirens appear as a pair of individual singers (Od. 12.52, 167), but elsewhere they are presented as a chorus-like group of three or more and serve as a model or analogue for a number of human choruses, including the chorus that joins Helen in Euripides’s Helen (167–178) (Bowie 2011: 49–65; Peponi 2012: 76–80). The episode of Helen at the Trojan Horse resembles the scenarios of tragedy, in which choral song is relocated to suspenseful circumstances involving danger and destruction. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which the portrayal of Penelope in the Odyssey represents a similar but more extended reworking and distor- tion of a choral configuration in the context of a fictional plot. It has been long recognized that the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope is set against the

10 On the association of cicadas with poetry and song, see Davies and Kathirithamby 1986: 117–118; on old man choruses in tragedy, see Foley 2003: 27; Murnaghan 2013b.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access 172 murnaghan background of a festival. In his 1975 book, Archery at the Dark of the Moon, Nor- man Austin argues that the contest of the bow, which Penelope proposes and which gives Odysseus his chance to defeat the suitors, coincides with—and is assimilated to—a festival of Apollo at the new moon. Olga Levaniouk has ana- lyzed the conversation between Odysseus and Penelope the night before as an exchange of mythical allusions that prepare for that festival (2011). The references to this festival of Apollo are muted and largely implicit, but the narrative does also include an explicit pseudo-festival: the fake wedding celebration that is put on in the house of Odysseus to keep the news of the suitors’ slaughter from getting out; this is the public event that occurs while Odysseus and Pene- lope celebrate their reunion in private (Od. 23.141–147):

ὣς ἔφαθ’, οἱ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ μάλα μὲν κλύον ἠδ’ ἐπίθοντο πρῶτα μὲν οὖν λούσαντο καὶ ἀμφιέσαντο χιτῶνας, ὅπλισθεν δὲ γυναῖκες· ὁ δ’ εἵλετο θεῖος ἀοιδὸς φόρμιγγα γλαφυρήν, ἐν δέ σφισιν ἵμερον ὦρσε μολπῆς τε γλυκερῆς καὶ ἀμύμονος ὀρχηθμοῖο. τοῖσιν δὲ μέγα δῶμα περιστεναχίζετο ποσσὶν ἀνδρῶν παιζόντων καλλιζώνων τε γυναικῶν.

So he spoke and they listened well to him and obeyed him. First they went and washed, and put their tunics upon them, and the women arrayed themselves in their finery, while the inspired singer took his hollowed lyre and stirred up within them the impulse for the sweetness of song and the stately dancing. Now the great house resounded aloud to the thud of their footsteps, as the men celebrated there, and the fair-girdled women.

While Odysseus here steps momentarily into the role of a chorodidaskalos, someone who sets up choruses, Penelope is portrayed throughout in ways that indicate that she, like Nausicaa and Helen, is a displaced chorus leader. Like Helen, Penelope has often been identified as a poet figure. Her affinity to a poet is especially evident in her famous weaving and unweaving of a shroud for Laertes, which can be taken to represent plot-making, creativity, and self- determination and has led to her impressive afterlife as an artist in modern women’s poetry and in theories of women’s writing; her association with writing in particular has been furthered by the punning relationship in English between “textile” and “text.”11

11 On Penelope as a figure for women’s writing, see Murnaghan and Roberts 2002: 24–25; Clayton 2004.

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In the context of the Odyssey, Penelope resembles not a writing poet but an oral bard, and her poetic qualities are revealed in her speeches as well as her weaving.12 In her conversation with the disguised Odysseus in Odyssey 19, she notably compares herself to a singer who is also a figure for lamentation, the nightingale (Od. 19.512–524):13

αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ καὶ πένθος ἀμέτρητον πόρε δαίμων· ἤματα μὲν γὰρ τέρπομ’ ὀδυρομένη, γοόωσα, ἔς τ’ ἐμὰ ἔργ’ ὁρόωσα καὶ ἀμφιπόλων ἐνὶ οἴκῳ· αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν νὺξ ἔλθῃ, ἕλῃσί τε κοῖτος ἅπαντας, κεῖμαι ἐνὶ λέκτρῳ, πυκιναὶ δέ μοι ἀμφ’ ἀδινὸν κῆρ ὀξεῖαι μελεδῶνες ὀδυρομένην ἐρέθουσιν. ὡς δ’ ὅτε Πανδαρέου κούρη, χλωρηῒς ἀηδών, καλὸν ἀείδῃσιν ἔαρος νέον ἱσταμένοιο, δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι καθεζομένη πυκινοῖσιν, ἥ τε θαμὰ τρωπῶσα χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, παῖδ’ ὀλοφυρομένη Ἴτυλον φίλον, ὅν ποτε χαλκῷ κτεῖνε δι’ ἀφραδίας, κοῦρον Ζήθοιο ἄνακτος, ὣς καὶ ἐμοὶ δίχα θυμὸς ὀρώρεται ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα …

521 πολυηχέα MSS πολυδευκέα testimonia (Aelian NA 5.38: ἤδη μέντοι τινὲς καὶ πολυδευκέα φωνὴν γράφουσι τὴν ποικίλως μεμιμημένην)

The divinity gave me grief beyond measure. The daytimes I indulge in lamentation, mourning as I look to my own tasks and those of my maids in the palace. But after the night comes and sleep has taken all others, I lie on my bed, and the sharp anxieties swarming thick and fast on my beating heart torment my sorrowing self. As when Pandareos’ daughter, the greenwood nightingale,

12 Felson connects Penelope’s two spheres of poet-like behavior when she writes of “scenes … that reveal Penelope improvising, like a performing poet, as a weaver of her life-history” and adds, “She also uses poetic devices—simile, paronomasia, mythic exemplum—to make her points. In a sense, the interview in Book 19 is Penelope’s aristeia as a bardic figure” (1997: 25). 13 In addition, Penelope’s own name identifies her with a type of bird that is closely related to the nightingale and also to the halcyon, another bird with strong musical associations. See Levaniouk 2011: 287–318.

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perching in the deep of the forest foliage sings out her lovely song, when springtime has just begun; she, varying the manifold strains of her voice, pours out the melody, mourning Itylos, son of the lord Zethos, her own beloved child, whom she once killed with the bronze when the madness was on her; so my mind is divided and starts one way, then another.

The nightingale is a solitary figure, mourning alone because she is separated from her beloved son and alienated from her husband; in this she resembles the painfully isolated figures of tragedy.But the nightingale is also a chorusleader or a potential chorus leader, and that is reflected in Penelope’s designation of her song as πολυηχέα, a word which may be translated “much-resounding,” “much echoing,” or “many-toned,” and which suggests the multiplicity that is characteristic of a chorus. In a poem from the Palatine Anthology, πολυηχέα is actually used as an attribute of the tragic chorus: in a list of the arts owed to each of the Muses, Euterpe is said to have invented τραγικοῖο χοροῦ πολυηχέα φωνὴν, “the much-resounding voice of the tragic chorus” (Anth. Pal. 9.504.3). When in Aristophanes’s Birds the Hoopoe calls on the Nightingale to sing, he spells out how the echo generated by her solitary voice can lead to the creation of a chorus (215–222):

καθαρὰ χωρεῖ διὰ φυλλοκόμου μίλακος ἠχὼ πρὸς Διὸς ἕδρας, ἵν’ ὁ χρυσοκόμας Φοῖβος ἀκούων τοῖς σοῖς ἐλέγοις ἀντιψάλλων ἐλεφαντόδετον φόρμιγγα θεῶν ἵστησι χορούς· διὰ δ’ ἀθανάτων στομάτων χωρεῖ ξύμφωνος ὁμοῦ θεία μακάρων ὀλολυγή.

Pure, its echo proceeds through leafy greenbriar to the seat of Zeus, where golden-haired Phoebus hears it, and accompanying your sad songs with his ivory-inlaid lyre, establishes choruses among the gods. Through their immortal mouths, “ololuge,” the divine cry of the blessed ones, proceeds in perfect unison.

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Ford has instructively compared this passage to the parodos of Euripides’s Helen, where Helen, as a solitary mourner, issues a cry that summons a group of nearby women and turns them into a supportive, echoing chorus, who mitigate her suffering (2010: 291–294).14 In his discussion of the nightingale in De natura animalium, the second- century B.C.E. author Aelian reports on her characteristics as a singer (5.38):

Χάρμιδος ἀκούω τοῦ Μασσαλιώτου λέγοντος φιλόμουσον μὲν εἶναι τὴν ἀηδόνα, ἤδη δὲ καὶ φιλόδοξον. ἐν γοῦν ταῖς ἐρημίαις ὅταν ᾄδῃ πρὸς ἑαυτήν, ἁπλοῦν τὸ μέλος καὶ ἄνευ κατασκευῆς τὴν ὄρνιν ᾄδειν· ὅταν δὲ ἁλῷ καὶ τῶν ἀκουόντων μὴ διαμαρτάνῃ, ποικίλα τε ἀναμέλπειν καὶ τακερῶς ἑλίττειν τὸ μέλος.

I have heard from Charmis of Massalia that the nightingale is a lover of the Muses and also a lover of fame. When she is in unpeopled places and sings to herself, the song is simple and the bird sings without artifice. But when she has been captured and does not lack listeners, she sings variously and meltingly trills her song.

He then goes on to quote the Odyssey 19 passage and reports a variant reading for πολυηχέα: ἤδη μέντοι τινὲς καὶ πολυδευκέα φωνὴν γράφουσι τὴν ποικίλως μεμι- μημένην, ὡς τὴν ἀδευκέα τὴν μηδ’ ὅλως ἐς μίμησιν παρατραπεῖσαν (But some write poludeukea phonen, that is “imitating variously,” just as adeukea means “wholly unsuited for mimesis”). Arguing for poludeukea as an equally legitimate reading, Gregory Nagy interprets it as signifying continuity through repeated reperfor- mance, which he identifies as a definitive feature of traditional poetry (1996: 32–50). But the idea of “imitating variously” might also be understood in relation to the Delian maidens and their imitation of many voices, in which case poludeukea could be construed as suggesting the polyvocality of a chorus. Later that night, Penelope envisions herself not as the solitary Aedon but as part of the closely related collective of Aedon’s sisters, identified here simply as the “daughters of Pandarus”: she wishes that instead of having to marry one of the suitors she could be snatched away by a whirlwind as Pandarus’s daughters were when they were on the brink of marriage (Od. 20.56–82). In other mythic scenarios, notably that of Persephone, death is the trauma undergone by the individual marriageable woman who is separated out from her choral

14 On Helen as a chorus leader in Helen, see also Murnaghan 2013a. In Aeschylus’s Suppliants the chorus explicitly compares its own collective song with the voice of the nightingale (57–67).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access 176 murnaghan companions. For Penelope, however, death would be preferable to the singular, conspicuous position she currently occupies as the object of the suitors’ attention. Because her resistance to marriage places her in increasing danger of harmingTelemachusand so behaving like Aedon, whose story prefigures that of many unwillingly destructive tragic heroines, Penelope would prefer to merge into the group from which Aedon is distinguished.15 Penelope’s report on her actual circumstances makes it clear that she, like Aelian’s nightingale, undergoes variation depending on whether or not she is alone. Only at night does she experience agonizing solitary pain, like that of an isolated tragic character such as Helen in Euripides’s Helen before the arrival of the chorus. In the daytime, when she is together with her serving women as they work, she takes pleasure in mourning. Here Penelope, like Helen, com- bines the roles of leader of laments and supervisor of women’s work. Her relationship with her serving women is in general like that of a lamenting figure with an answering chorus, a relationship that she herself describes when recounting her dream (Od. 19.541–542):

αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ κλαῖον καὶ ἐκώκυον ἔν περ ὀνείρῳ, ἀμφὶ δ’ ἔμ’ ἠγερέθοντο ἐϋπλοκαμῖδες Ἀχαιαί, οἴκτρ’ ὀλοφυρομένην ὅ μοι αἰετὸς ἔκτανε χῆνας.

Then I began to weep—that was in my dream—and cried out aloud, and around me gathered the fair-haired Achaian women as I cried out sorrowing for my geese killed by the eagle.

In an earlier episode in book 4, just after the herald Medon has told her about Telemachus’s voyage, Penelope addresses her serving women in a way that not only presents her as a leader of laments but also anticipates a tragic heroine addressing a chorus of sympathetic supporters: she calls them philai and makes them the audience for an extensive review of her sorrows (Od. 4.715– 723):

15 On the relationship between Penelope’s evocation of Aedon and of her sisters, see Lev- aniouk 2008: 24; Lesser 2017. On standing out within the chorus and emerging from the chorus as models of female tragic experience, see Murnaghan 2013a: 161–163; on the tragic heroine’s emergence from a chorus specifically identified as a group of her sisters, see Mur- naghan 2006. Penelope herself is separated from her own sister, whose deceptive image Athena sends to Penelope when she is alone at night, in order to alleviate her suffering and stop her lamenting (Od. 4.795–841).

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ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας ἀπέβη κατὰ δῶμ’ Ὀδυσῆος. τὴν δ’ ἄχος ἀμφεχύθη θυμοφθόρον, οὐδ’ ἄρ’ ἔτ’ ἔτλη δίφρῳ ἐφέζεσθαι πολλῶν κατὰ οἶκον ἐόντων, ἀλλ’ ἄρ’ ἐπ’ οὐδοῦ ἷζε πολυκμήτου θαλάμοιο οἴκτρ’ ὀλοφυρομένη· περὶ δὲ δμῳαὶ μινύριζον πᾶσαι, ὅσαι κατὰ δώματ’ ἔσαν νέαι ἠδὲ παλαιαί. τῇς δ’ ἁδινὸν γοόωσα μετηύδα Πηνελόπεια· “κλῦτε, φίλαι· πέρι γάρ μοι Ὀλύμπιος ἄλγε’ ἔδωκεν ἐκ πασέων, ὅσσαι μοι ὁμοῦ τράφεν ἠδ’ ἐγένοντο …”

So speaking he went away back into the house of Odysseus, and a cloud of heart-wasting sorrow was on her, she had no strength left to sit down in a chair, though there were many there in the palace, but sat down on the floor of her own well-wrought bedchamber weeping pitifully, and about her her maids were wailing all, who were there in the house with her, both young and old ones. To them lamenting deeply Penelope spoke now: “Hear me, dear friends. The Olympian has given me sorrows beyond all others who were born and brought up together with me …”

But not all of Penelope’s serving women are sympathetic and supportive. Twelve of her handmaidens are notoriously disloyal, sleeping with the suitors and showing disrespect to Penelope herself and to her guest, the disguised Odysseus. These women constitute a kind of anti-chorus, or perverted version of a chorus, which signals a household characterized not by proper harmony but by enmity and mutual suspicion.16 In tragedy, which focuses on such households and other dysfunctional situations, there is often an element of hostility or a lack of harmony between choruses and protagonists. This is strikingly the case with some of the tragic choruses whose musical identity is most visible, such as the Erinyes of Aeschy- lus’s Eumenides and the Lydian bacchantes of Euripides’s Bacchae; but such estrangement also appears in more muted forms in situations involving choruses with more fully integrated identities within the plot, such as the Theban elders of Antigone, who are sympathetic to Antigone, but not unconditionally so, with the result that she feels they are mocking her as she goes off to her

16 For the chorus as an analogue to a properly functioning household (in which a chaste and respectable wife maintains perfect order as Penelope cannot), see Xenophon Oec. 7.3.

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πειρωμένῃ δὲ τῶνδε τῶν ἔργων ἐμοὶ σιγὴ παρ’ ὑμῶν, πρὸς θεῶν, ἔστω, φίλαι· ὡς εἰ τάδ’ ἡ τεκοῦσα πεύσεται, πικρὰν δοκῶ με πεῖραν τήνδε τολμήσειν ἔτι.

But when I attempt these acts, grant me, by the gods, your silence, friends. I think that if my mother learns of this, my daring attempt will end in bitterness.

Each of the Odyssey’s three accounts of Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of Laertes’s shroud includes the information that it was disloyalty among the maids that led to the exposure of the trick and so to the crisis in which Penelope now finds herself. The two versions given by various suitors attribute the disclo- sure to τις … γυναικῶν, “one of the women” (Od. 2.108, 24.144), while Penelope blames the women as a group: δμῳάς, κύνας οὐκ ἀλεγούσας, “my maidservants, those heartless dogs” (Od. 19.154). Here we see again the variation between single leader and collective group characteristic of choruses. This particular group does have its own clear leader in the figure of Melantho, the sharp-tongued maid who is paired with the leading suitor Eurymachus and engages in several abusive exchanges with Odysseus (Od. 18.320–336, 19.65–95).18 But Melantho is closely associated with the other maids, so that when Odysseus threatens to

17 Cf. Soph. Trach. 596–597; Eur. Hipp. 710–712, Med. 259–263, IT 1056–1064, Hel. 1387– 1388 (requests made by women); Aesch. Ch. 555–559, 581–582; Eur. Ion 666–667, IA 542 (requests made by men). 18 Further investigations along the lines of this article might profitably consider Odysseus’s adversarial relationships with various groups of male competitors who have similarly

Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 01:52:03PM via free access penelope as a tragic heroine 179 tell Telemachus to cut her to pieces, all of the women cower and tremble in fear (Od. 18.340–342). Not only does the betrayal of Penelope’s plot by one or more of the maids precipitate the crisis that leads to the bow contest, but their presence throughout the conversation between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus in book 19 imposes the conditions of constraint and necessary indirection that characterize that episode, and their presence is one of the strongest arguments for the claim that Penelope has already recognized Odysseus at that point but cannot show that she does.19 When the time comes for Telemachus’s revenge, his punishment is expressly directed to a group of twelve out of Penelope’s fifty maidservants—both num- bers with strong choral associations—who are identified as the disloyal ones by Eurycleia. He pointedly departs from Odysseus’s instructions to go after the women who make up this travesty of a chorus with swords (Od. 22.440–445) and imposes on them instead a travesty of choral performance (Od. 22.465– 473):

ὣς ἄρ’ ἔφη, καὶ πεῖσμα νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο κίονος ἐξάψας μεγάλης περίβαλλε θόλοιο, ὑψόσ’ ἐπεντανύσας, μή τις ποσὶν οὖδας ἵκοιτο. ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἢ κίχλαι τανυσίπτεροι ἠὲ πέλειαι ἕρκει ἐνιπλήξωσι, τό θ’ ἑστήκῃ ἐνὶ θάμνῳ, αὖλιν ἐσιέμεναι, στυγερὸς δ’ ὑπεδέξατο κοῖτος, ὣς αἵ γ’ ἑξείης κεφαλὰς ἔχον, ἀμφὶ δὲ πάσαις δειρῇσι βρόχοι ἦσαν, ὅπως οἴκτιστα θάνοιεν. ἤσπαιρον δὲ πόδεσσι μίνυνθά περ οὔ τι μάλα δήν.

So he spoke, and taking the cable of a dark-prowed ship, fastened it to the tall pillar, and fetched it about the round-house, stretching it up high, so that none could reach the ground with her feet, and like thrushes, who spread their wings, or pigeons, who have flown into a snare set up for them in a thicket, trying

named leaders: the young men of Scheria (Euryalus), his companions (Eurylochus), and the suitors (Eurymachus). 19 This point is stressed by Winkler: “Modern readings of Book 19 regularly ignore [the maids’] presence altogether and read the scene as a simple two-person transaction between Penelope and Odysseus. … I take Melantho and maids like her to be important actors, or presences, in this scene. They represent the fact that if any hint of collusion between Penelope and Odysseus were to be visible or audible, some observer (such as one of the maids) would use that to harm Penelope and destroy Odysseus” (1990: 148–149).

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to find a resting place, but the sleep given them was hateful; so their heads were all in a line, and each had her neck caught fast in a noose, so that their death would be most pitiful. They struggled with their feet for a little, not for very long.

This event in the Odyssey’s plot is a grisly version of a dance, in which a group of women is arranged in a pattern by a directing male, as were, for example, the choruses of young women whose performances were scripted and chore- ographed by Alcman.20 Telemachus and his helpers lead the women out of the house (ἐξαγαγόντες, 458) and he positions them in an orderly line (ἐξείης, 471); the final twitching of the women’s feet is clearly reminiscent of dancing, even if that dancing is cut short at the same time as their voices are silenced through strangulation.21 The comparison to birds makes one of the most fre- quent and pervasive models or metaphors for choral performance in the Greek tradition the basis of a Homeric simile. The many female choruses portrayed literally or metaphorically as birds include the Sirens, who are often depicted as half-women, half-birds but sometimes simply as birds. Mythic explanations of the Sirens’ avian identity include stories in which they are the companions of Persephone; in one version they are given wings so that they can search for their lost companion (Ovid Met. 5.552–563), but in another, recorded by Hygi- nus, their transformation into birds is Demeter’s punishment for their failure to protect Persephone (Fabulae 141). The figurative transformation that unfolds in the Odyssey passage can be seen as a similarly motivated punishment, as these women have failed to protect Penelope from the danger of being separated from her female companions and subjected to an unwanted marriage that she considers tantamount to death. This punishment happens only after the same women are forced to clean the hall, washing away the blood of the slaughtered suitors—a cruel variation on the washing that properly precedes a choral performance, as in the wedding celebration orchestrated by Odysseus (Od. 23.142) or in Nausicaa’s seaside laundry expedition, or the archetypal choral performance of Hesiod’s Muses (Theog. 5–6).

20 For fuller elaboration of the parallels between the maids’ punishment and Greek concep- tualizations of choral dance, see Steiner, forthcoming: chapter 3. 21 As Steiner points out, the fact that the maids’ feet are not allowed to touch the ground echoes the glorious elevation of two outstanding Phaeacian dancers, who play with a ball which they catch before their feet touch the ground (πάρος ποσὶν οὖδας ἱκέσθαι, Od. 8.370–376). The maids’ silenced feet can also be contrasted with the thudding feet of the deceptive revelers, which makes the house of Odysseus groan (περιστεναχίζετο, Od. 23.146) and catches the attention of people passing by outside.

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The πεῖσμα, the stretched-out cable or mooring line along which the women are hung, also resonates with Greek conceptions of dance formation, as can be seen in the opening lines of Pindar’s fragmentary second dithyramb (1–5):

Πρὶν μὲν ἕρπε σχοινοτένειά τ’ ἀοιδὰ διθυράμβων καὶ τὸ σὰν κίβδηλον ἀνθρώποισιν ἀπὸ στομάτων, διαπέπ[τ]α[νται...... ]....[ κλοισι νέαι …

In the past the song of dithyrambs came forth stretched like a measuring line and the san came falsely from the mouths of men, but new … have been thrown open … text and trans. Race

Pindar is commenting on the evolution of the dithyramb, which in earlier days was an ἀοιδὰ σχοινοτένεια—a song stretched out like the σχοῖνος or σχοινίον. This was a rope that could be used for various purposes—for example, as a fishing line or a mooring cable; in our other earliest attestations, which come from Herodotus, the σχοινίον is a line that is stretched out tautly for purposes of measurement or for marking a straight line (for example, when digging a canal)—that is to say, stretched out for purposes of straightness rather than of length (1.66, 1.189, 1.199, 7.23). Pindar’s use of σχοινοτένεια in Dithyramb 2 has sometimes been interpreted as meaning simply “long,” as in “long-winded,” but there is a growing tendency among scholars to see the term as referring to the positioning of the performers in a straight line. Some editors restore κλοισι in the final line as κύκλοισι, “circles,” which would refer to the definitive form assumed by the dithyramb in the Classical period, when the phrase κύκλιος χορός, “circular chorus,” became synonymous with dithyrambic performance; in that case, Pindar would be alluding here to the dithyramb’s acquisi- tion of its definitive circular form.22 Linear dancing, the earlier form evoked by Telemachus’s πεῖσμα, is mentioned by Homer in the choral scene that appears on the shield of Achilles, where the performers sometimes go in a circle and sometimes ἐπὶ στίχας, “in lines” (Il. 18.602); in a parthenaic context, Alcman described young girls dancing ἐν τάξει, “in order,” as ὁμόστοιχοι, “all in one row” (33 PMG).

22 For a thorough argument along these lines, see D’Angour 1997.

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Telemachus’s punishment of the disloyal maidservants exorcises the perverted chorality that has marked his troubled household in Odysseus’s absence. It paves the way for the restored version of properly festive choral performance that is established by Odysseus soon thereafter, in which Telemachus himself participates.That wedding dance is superficially false, a deceptive trick to cover up the death of the suitors and mislead the people of Ithaca, but it is also a true expression of the happy outcome of the plot, a fitting accompaniment to the remarriage that Odysseus and Penelope are experiencing while it takes place.23 The choral resonance of the maidservants’ punishment has until recently been invisible to classical scholarship. But it has already been recognized in reception, which sometimes arrives sooner at important insights than scholarship does, especially in connection with the marginal characters or suppressed concerns of the original texts. Two contemporary women writers who have entered imaginatively into the plight of Penelope’s scapegoated maidservants have made the connection in their poetry. One is Margaret Atwood, who takes up the cause of the maids in her formally hybrid Penelopiad, in which she gives the maids a lyric voice that complements and counters the prose voice of Pene- lope (who regrets the fate of the maids and blames herself for it but finally gives into compassion fatigue and becomes exasperated with them). Deftly revers- ing the Odyssey’s conversion of the maids’ dance into hanging by rope, Atwood gives them an insistently accusatory song with a title that identifies it as both a “chorus line” and a jump-roping song, evoking girls’ innocent forms of dance- like play, such as Nausicaa’s ball game (2005: 5–6):

The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Song

we are the maids the ones you killed the ones you failed

we danced in air our bare feet twitched it was not fair …

23 On the restoration of conventional festive chorality as the happy outcome of some tragic plots, see Murnaghan 2011.

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As the song continues and concludes, Atwood’s maids make a point that is suppressed in the Odyssey, namely that their punishment is a source of satisfaction to the male characters who are restoring the household just as the sight of young women dancing is a source of pleasure to male spectators:24

we scrubbed the blood of our dead paramours, from floors, from chairs

from stairs, from doors we knelt in water while you stared

at our bare feet it was not fair you licked our fear

it gave you pleasure you raised your hand you watched us fall

we danced on air the ones you failed the ones you killed

In Gail Holst-Warhaft’s “The Twelve Women,” Telemachus’s actions and Homer’s simile are interlaced with Telemachus’s thoughts: in his mind, the resemblance of the punishment to dancing becomes explicit and generates a memory that highlights the contrast between an innocent past and the deadly present (2007: 54–57, emphasis in original):

24 Odysseus’s pleasure in the dancing of the young Phaeacians is notably focused on their feet (Od. 8.265). Atwood’s granting of a voice to these maids can be compared to a pair of Hellenistic epigrams that do the same for another group of young women, the daughters of Lycambes (Dioscurides 17 GP = AP 7.351, Meleager (?) 132 GP = AP 7.352). The daughters of Lycambes are analogues to Penelope’s maids who appear in the context of a different poetic genre; they were reportedly caused to hang themselves by the iambic poet Archilochus because he impugned their virginity in his poetry. In these epigrams, they speak up to insist on their virginity and denounce the poet figure who is, in effect, their killer. See Rosen 2007: 472–475.

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But Telemachus thought the death too clean for the women and strung a ship’s hawser across the courtyard tightening it enough so no foot could touch the ground. And as when long-winged thrushes or doves come to roost in a clump of bushes and find instead a snare, the women’s necks were placed in nooses so their death would be most miserable. Their feet twitched for a while reminding him of how they’d seemed to tread the air dancing to the flute on summer nights.

If we had more than a single line of Aeschylus’s Penelope, which evidently included the conversation between Penelope and the disguised Odysseus that is narrated in Odyssey 19, we might be able to tell whether or not Aeschylus followed Homer in surrounding Penelope with a group of untrustworthy women like the ones whose presence contributes to that episode’s atmosphere of constraint and suspense; he may instead have provided her with a more sympathetic chorus that would have recalled the other thirty-eight serving women who remained loyal.25 It is a reasonable surmise that this lost play also included the slaughter of the suitors. If so, that event would almost certainly have taken place offstage. Strikingly, in a further and rather different anticipation of tragic form, the Odyssey already includes an account of the suitors’ death as an offstage event. The direct narration of the battle in the hall is followed by an account of how that news reached Penelope. Eurycleia comes to Penelope to tell her that Odysseus has returned; Penelope is happy but wary and questions her further (Od. 23.34–46):

καί μιν φωνήσασ’ ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα· “εἰ δ’ ἄγε δή μοι, μαῖα φίλη, νημερτὲς ἐνίσπες, εἰ ἐτεὸν δὴ οἶκον ἱκάνεται, ὡς ἀγορεύεις, ὅππως δὴ μνηστῆρσιν ἀναιδέσι χεῖρας ἐφῆκε μοῦνος ἐών, οἱ δ’ αἰὲν ἀολλέες ἔνδον ἔμιμνον.” τὴν δ’ αὖτε προσέειπε φίλη τροφὸς Εὐρύκλεια·

25 For other lost tragedies that appear to have been based on the Odyssey, see Wright 2016: 204.

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“οὐκ ἴδον, οὐ πυθόμην, ἀλλὰ στόνον οἶον ἄκουσα κτεινομένων· ἡμεῖς δὲ μυχῷ θαλάμων εὐπήκτων ἥμεθ’ ἀτυζόμεναι, σανίδες δ’ ἔχον εὖ ἀραρυῖαι, πρίν γ’ ὅτε δή με σὸς υἱὸς ἀπὸ μεγάροιο κάλεσσε Τηλέμαχος· τὸν γάρ ῥα πατὴρ προέηκε καλέσσαι. εὗρον ἔπειτ’ Ὀδυσῆα μετὰ κταμένοισι νέκυσσιν ἑσταόθ’·…”

and she spoke to her and addressed her in winged words: “Come, dear nurse, and give me a true account of the matter, whether he really has come back to his house, as you tell me, to lay his hands on the shameless suitors, though he was only one, and they were laying in wait in a body!” Then the beloved nurse Eurykleia said to her in answer: “I did not see, I was not told, but I heard the outcry of them being killed; we, hidden away in the strong-built storerooms, sat there terrified, and the closed doors held us prisoner, until from inside the great hall your son Telemachos summoned me, because his father told him to do it. There I found Odysseus standing among the dead men he had killed …”

Because a narrator can take his audience anywhere, this dialogue is set in the private space of Penelope’s bedroom, but Eurycleia’s response is comparable to the speeches of messengers who report on similarly violent events in the public spaces represented by the tragic stage. In the course of her speech, she shifts between first person singular and first person plural (41, 43), so that she also resembles a chorus as well as an individual actor. As she reports on events that she did not see because she was on the other side of a closed door, she prefigures many tragic choruses, who often appear onstage standing outside the door of the skene, perhaps hearing a cry, and wondering what is happening inside, but also a number of tragic messengers: for example, in two plays of Sophocles, Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, a messenger describes being one of a group of people standing outside an enclosed space—the tomb of Antigone or the bedroom of Oedipus and Jocasta—which is then opened up so that they can see what is inside (Ant. 1209–1225, OT 1251–1264). Eurycleia is summoned into the hall to witness a scene that is very like the indoor scenes that are made visible in tragedy through the operation of the ekkyklema: a tableau of a tri- umphant killer surrounded by victims, like Clytemnestra in Agamemnon or Ajax in Ajax.

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This brief exchange between Penelope and Eurycleia in the Odyssey seems to anticipate, within a narrative delivered by an omniscient narrator, ways of representing action that answer to the physical constraints of the theater, a performance venue that did not yet exist when the Odyssey was composed. That suggests that the spatial arrangement of the classical theater, with its prominent door leading to an unseen interior and its entrance routes for messengers, was itself shaped by the particular form of storytelling that went on there— a form rooted in nondramatic lyric. The lines of transmission from epic to tragedy are impossible to trace exactly and were undoubtedly multiple, involving both the recitation of hexameter epic and the narrative-heavy performed lyric of poets like Stesichorus. But the Odyssey’s presentation of Penelope both as the recipient of a report from elsewhere and as a heroine whose experiences are conditioned by the ever-presence of chorus-like collective characters is one sign (among many others that might be similarly explored) of the fundamental affinity that makes epic a precursor of tragedy not only in its content but in its form. Both are modes of storytelling in which the internal dynamics of choral performance have been reworked into fictional plots that unfold, often in disturbing ways, through interactions between individuals and groups.

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