Euripides' Antiope and the Theban Trilogy by Julianna K. Will a Thesis
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Euripides’ Antiope and the Theban Trilogy by Julianna K. Will A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Classics in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada April, 2015 Copyright © Julianna K. Will, 2015 Abstract This thesis is a discussion, reconstruction, and analysis of Euripides’ lost Antiope. Based on metrical studies which suggest a date much earlier than its usual date of 410 or 408 B.C., I specifically focus on the possibility that Antiope might be part of a larger Theban trilogy, produced together with Suppliant Women and one other play. I begin with a thorough look at the mythological material existing before Euripides’ version of the story, as well as the tragedy’s effect on later versions. From there I provide a translation of the existing fragments arranged in the order I believe they were written for the tragedy, and a reconstruction with discussion. The latter half of the thesis I devote to reading Antiope as part of a trilogy. I compare the similarities between the proposed Theban trilogy with the more firmly established Trojan trilogy, and I provide a discussion on Antiope and Suppliant Women, commenting on how reading the two plays together can drastically change an analysis of either. I conclude that even if Euripides did not have “trilogy” in mind when he wrote Antiope and Suppliant Women, the connection between the two tragedies is both too important and too subtle for them to have been produced in separate years and still have been appreciated by an ancient audience. ii Acknowledgements I would very much like to express my thanks to my two supervisors, Dr. R.D. Griffith and Dr. Ian Storey. I am very grateful to have had the chance to work with both, and am especially thankful to Dr. Storey for eschewing his retirement in order to continue to work with me on this project, which we started almost four years ago in the final year of my B.A. in a private reading course on Euripidean fragments. Dr. Griffith’s perspective provided me with several new avenues to take the thesis, and I will be eternally grateful to him for tirelessly correcting all of my split infinitives. I also want to thank my friends and family for putting up with me, in general really, but especially for the past few months, my oma who has always been such a huge influence in my life, and, of course, my cat, Breakfast, who keeps me sane. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: The Myth 4 Chapter 3: Antiope 25 Chapter 4: The Reconstruction 46 i) The Fragments 46 ii) The Setting 48 iii) The Prologue 51 iv) Parados 54 v) Episode 1 56 vi) Stasimon 1 60 vii) Episodes 2-3/4 60 viii) Stasimon (?), Episode 4/5, Exodos 63 Chapter 5: Studying Antiope as Part of a Trilogy 69 i) Themes in Antiope 74 ii) Parents 75 iii) Brothers and Mothers 81 Chapter 6: Antiope and Suppliant Women 96 i) Eleutherae and Dionysus 96 ii) Theseus vs. Heracles, Amphion and Zethus vs. Castor and Pollux 100 iv iii) Γένος and Ξένοι 103 iv) The Agon 106 v) Adrastus’ Funeral Oration 117 Chapter 7: Conclusion 120 Map 1 123 Map 2 124 Genealogy Table 125 Bibliography 126 v Chapter 1: Introduction Based on the scholion to Aristophanes’ Frogs 53, διὰ τί δὲ ἄλλο τι τῶν πρὸ ὄλιγου διδαχθέντων καὶ καλῶν, Ὑψιπύλης, Φοινισσῶν, Ἀντιόπης;1 the lost play Antiope by Euripides was until recently believed to have been produced either in 410 or 408 B.C. together with Hypsipyle and Phoenician Women. This date does not conform to metrical patterns in Euripides’ extant works, as the resolution rate2 in the remaining fragments seems too low to have been written so late in his career. Resolutions in Euripidean tragedies have long been established as one of the more reliable methods of dating Euripides’ extant plays, using the plays whose dates are surely established by their hypotheses or by the remains of their didascalic lists as a basis. Using the frequency of resolutions to date the fragmentary plays is still an uncertain business, especially as only three of them have as much as a tenth remaining.3 Antiope, however, provides us with the largest amount of remaining text for any of the lost plays, and the low resolution rate is quite pronounced.4 Zieliński’s huge study of Euripidean metre in 1925 recognized this inconsistency, and he felt that it was a problem needing to be addressed. His solution was to postulate that Euripides wrote Antiope earlier in his career, but produced it later in 410- 1 “Why did he not mention one of the good plays produced just before [Frogs in 405], Hypsipyle, Phoenician Women, Antiope?” 2 Resolution occurs in iambic trimeter when the usual formula of long/short, long, short, long syllables is “resolved” by adding a dactyl, an anapaest, or a tribrach. The early plays of Euripides have a very low resolution rate. Alcestes, for example, written in 438 B.C. has a resolution rate of 6%, while Iphigenia at Aulis, written in 407 B.C., has one of 44%. See Storey 2014, 136-8. 3 Cropp-Fick 1985, 1. 4 Cropp-Fick 1985, 23: Antiope: 50% RLI (Relative Likelihood Interval) 2.49-3.84, 10% RLI 2.05-4.50; compare to Hypsipyle 50% RLI 5.91-7.74, 10% RLI 5.24-8.59 and Phoenician Women 50% RLI 6.55-7.39, 10% 6.22-7.75. 1 408 B.C.5 Webster, like Zieliński, chose to give the scholion the benefit of the doubt, assuming in his reconstruction that Antiope was produced alongside Hypsipyle and Phoenician Women. The more recent metrical study by Cropp and Fick have again, however, called the scholion’s testimony into question, saying that the “problem is real and cannot be ignored.”6 They conclude that the metrical statistics from the remaining fragments are either unrepresentative of the whole play, or the scholion’s “Antiope” is corrupt for “Antigone”.7 The former option is extremely unlikely when we take Antiope fr. 2238 into consideration, which accounts for nearly half of the remaining lines, containing 106 preserved trimetres from the end of the play, with a resolution-rate of 3.67 per cent.9 The existence of this fragment makes the former option unlikely, as it is difficult to assume that such an extended portion of the play is completely unrepresentative of the whole. If we allow for the latter possibility, however, the identity of the other two plays produced with Antiope becomes uncertain. In an unpublished paper titled “Euripides’ ‘Trilogy’ of 422 B.C.” Ian Storey suggests that Antiope was produced alongside the lost Erechtheus and the extant Suppliant Women around 422 B.C.10 In this paper, Storey outlined the major areas where 5 Zieliński 1925, 219-221. 6 Cropp-Fick 1985, 75-76. Huys agrees with Cropp-Fick, see Huys 1995, 73-74. 7 Collard 2004, 269. See Cropp-Fick 1985, 75. Antigone does not have an established date, but Collard and Cropp point out that the metrical criteria for the tragedy indicate that the play was produced anywhere from 420 to 406 B.C. (2008, 159). It is possible, therefore, that Antigone was produced alongside Phoenician Women and Hypsipyle, especially given the prominence of Antigone in two of the plays. 8 I have preserved Kannicht, 2004 for all the fragments. 9 Cropp-Fick 1985, 75. 10 Storey points out that Suppliant Women is the most difficult to date of the extant plays, and could have been produced any time between 424-416 B.C. Like Antiope, the metre 2 the three plays relate to one another, especially making note of similar terminology in the fragmentary plays’ text and their notable counterparts in Suppliant Women. I, myself, having been fortunate enough to work with Storey on this theory, would like to devote the following to a discussion of Antiope itself, the Euripidean “trilogy”, and a comparison of the Antiope to Suppliant Women. I shall begin with an analysis and reconstruction of the lost Antiope. From there I shall discuss the idea of trilogy and its three distinct forms used by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Next, I shall provide a comparison between Euripides’ more firmly established “Trojan Trilogy” and the proposed Theban one, concentrating largely on story arc and similar themes. Having established this precedence for trilogy, I shall then move on to Suppliant Women and Antiope. The many instances in which the fragments of the lost play touch on Suppliant Women not only make the two plays likely to have been performed together, but may also change our literary analysis of both. I am conscious of the fact that I have left both the second play in the trilogy and the satyr play out of this paper. Storey has argued for Erectheus as the second play, and Autolycus as the satyr play.11 Further investigation into these two plays would, no doubt, provide an excellent avenue for further study on this topic. For the purposes of this paper, however, I have decided to focus entirely on Antiope. suggests a date on the earlier side of this timeline. Storey chooses 422 B.C., allowing it to be influenced by Delion as well as a recent performance of Aeschylus’ Men of Eleusis (2009, 2-3). 11 Storey 2008, 4,7. 3 Chapter 2: The Myth In Euripides’ version of Antiope’s story, she is the daughter of Nycteus and is raped by Zeus, resulting in her becoming pregnant with the twin boys Amphion and Zethus.