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Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Helen the Dionysian Necessity

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Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Helen the Dionysian Necessity Greek and Roman Musical Studies 6 (2018) 247-264 brill.com/grms Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Helen The Dionysian Necessity Barbara Castiglioni Università di Torino [email protected]/[email protected] Abstract The imagery of Dionysiac performance is characteristic of Euripides’ later choral odes and returns particularly in the Helen’s second stasimon, which foregrounds its own connections with the mimetic program of the New Music and its emphasis on the emancipation of feelings. This paper aims to show that Euripides’ deep interest in con- temporary musical innovations is connected to his interest in the irrational, which made him the most tragic of the poets. Focusing on the musical aspect of the Helen’s second stasimon, the paper will examine how Euripides conveys a sense of the irratio- nal through a new type of song, which liberates music’s power to excite and disorient through its colors, ornament and dizzying wildness. Just as the New Musicians pres- ent themselves as the preservers of cultic tradition, Euripides, far from suppressing Dionysus as Nietzsche claimed, deserves to rank as the most Dionysiac and the most religious of the three tragedians. Keywords Euripides – tragedy – New Music – Dionysus – religion – choral self-referentiality Introduction The choral odes of tragedy regularly involve the Chorus reflecting upon an ear- lier moment in the play or its related myths. In Euripides’ Helen, all three sta- sima are distanced from the action by their mood. The first choral ode follows © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22129758-12341322Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:16:51AM via free access 248 Castiglioni the successful persuasion of the prophetess, Theonoe, the working out of a good escape plan and high optimism on the part of Helen and Menelaus, but seems to ignore the progress of the play’s action and takes the audience back to the ruin caused by the Trojan war. In the third stasimon, instead of singing wedding songs for Helen and Theoclymenus, the Chorus look forward in time and envisage Helen and Menelaus’ joyful arrival back in Sparta.1 The second stasimon, however, goes even further. Helen has just agreed to marry the king of Egypt, pretending that Menelaus is dead. The Chorus then narrate the myth of Demeter’s search for her daughter and syncretize Demeter’s rites first with the rites of the Mother of the Gods and then with those of Dionysus. The allegedly excessive distance between the content of the Chorus’ song and the action of the play has led to strong scholarly con- demnation of the stasimon itself, generally considered the most irrelevant ode in Greek tragedy and influenced by the New Music’s irrelevance and empty aestheticism.2 These two complaints—that the ode is an irrelevant interlude and that it is ‘dithyrambic’—are connected, and need to be considered in more detail because they may compel us to reflect on the precise relationship of the stasimon to the action that surrounds it. In Poetics 1456a25-32, Aristotle deplores the practice, started by Agathon and common in the late fifth century, of writing ἐμβόλιμα, i.e. choral interludes that had nothing to do with the play.3 Even though Aristotle ascribes such sung interludes to “other poets” and not to Euripides, later critics have misinterpret- ed the passage, as if Aristotle’s remarks justified their own search for ἐμβόλιμα in Euripides, as Allan (2008, on Hel. 1301-68) has observed. Kranz’s influen- tial study of 1933, focused on narrative odes like the Helen’s second stasimon (“die ἱστορίαι”), greatly contributed to this charge, describing ten Euripidean late odes as “fully self-contained ballad-like narratives” and labelling them “dithyrambic”.4 The adjective ‘dithyrambic’, however, is useful only if it is un- derstood in terms of poetic diction, style and meter and if it is connected to its 1 Except where otherwise noted, I follow the text as printed in Diggle 1994. 2 Cf. Whitman 1974, 65. For an overview of earlier interpretations of the stasimon, cf. Allan 2008 on 1301-68. 3 ‘The chorus should be treated as one of the actors; it should be part of the whole and should participate [sc. in the action], not as in(?) Euripides but as in Sophocles. With the other poets, the songs are no more integral to the plot than to another tragedy—hence the prac- tice, started by Agathon, of singing interludes. And yet to sing interludes is quite as bad as transferring a whole speech or scene from one play to another’. 4 Cf. Kranz 1933, 252-60. On the origins of dithyramb, cf. D’Angour 1997. On dithyrambic po- lemics, cf. Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 59f.; Ieranò 1997, 206f.; Zimmermann 1992, 136f.; Csapo 1999/2000, 406-26; Lavecchia 2000, 30-7; Franklin 2013. Greek and Roman Musical DownloadedStudies from 6 (2018) Brill.com09/26/2021 247-264 01:16:51AM via free access Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in Euripides’ Helen 249 etymological sense, since it may indicate both the name of a Dionysiac choral performance and Dionysus himself (cf. e.g. Eur. Ba. 526).5 My concern here is to show that the Helen’s second stasimon must be con- sidered part of the Euripidean interest in religious phenomena and particularly in Dionysism, which is characteristic of his later plays (from 420 BC onwards). Euripides’ interest in Dionysism provides the major link between the poet and the New Musicians. In fact, far from embodying the final collapse of the reli- gious impulse, the New Music, which mainly affected the theatrical genres of dithyramb and drama, constitutes a revival of the Dionysian element at a time when it had come close to extinction.6 I intend to show that the Dionysiac context deeply influenced both the New Music and Euripides because it in- formed a qualitative change in music and brought about a new type of song, which liberated music’s power to heighten the emotional temperature of the plot. Since the New Musicians’ chief goal was to find a musical style that could speak the language of the passions, they constantly evoked Dionysiac music, cult and dance, which were especially suited to conveying emotion, and were associated with a freer and more dynamic musical style. 1 A Dionysiac Poetic Euripides’ multiple references to Dionysus, his formal innovations and his bold use of an astrophic and polymetric poetic style show that he was interested in this project of inventing a more emotive and dynamic musicality. In the Helen’s second stasimon, the second strophe and the second antistro- phe offer an etiology of ecstatic music and associate the rites of the Mother of the gods with those of Dionysus. Even though the Dionysiac context is clear- er in the second part of the ode, Euripides does not refrain from alluding to Dionysus in the first part. The Chorus begin by describing Demeter’s search for her abducted daughter, Persephone—the first sign that we are not dealing 5 Ἴθι, Διθύραμβ᾽, ἐμὰν ἄρ-/σενα τάνδε βᾶθι νηδύν / ἀναφαίνω σε τόδ᾽, ὦ Βάκ-/χιε, Θήβαις ὀνομάζειν, ‘Come dithyramb, enter here my male womb! I proclaim to Thebes that she should call you by this name’. As Battezzato (2013, 95) notes, in Ba. 526 διθύραμβος is attested as the name of the god for the first time. As the name of his song (μέλος), it is first attested in Archil. fr. 120 W.2; as an epithet of Dionysus, in Pratin. TrGF 4 F 3.15. 6 Cf. Csapo 1999-2000, 417. For a comprehensive treatment of the presence of Dionysus in Greek tragedy, with a particular emphasis on metatheatrical “Selbstreferentialität”, cf. Bierl 1991. Greek and Roman Musical Studies 6 (2018) 247-264Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:16:51AM via free access 250 Castiglioni with an embolimon.7 They refer to Demeter as ὀρεία μάτηρ θεῶν (‘the mountain mother of the gods’), a title which immediately emphasizes the identification of the Eleusinian goddess with the Mother of the Gods, a deity of Asian origin just like Dionysus.8 Although the association of Demeter and the Mother, as well as that between the Mother and Dionysus, is attested by several sources,9 this second stasimon is the earliest literary evidence for the blending of the two cults. The Mother’s frantic search is described by δρομάδι κώλῳ literally ‘on speeding foot’, but δρόμας is often associated in Euripides with possession and related phenomena, sometimes in specifically Dionysiac contexts (e.g. Eur. Hipp. 550f. δρομάδα ναΐδ᾽ ὅπως τε βάκχαν / σὺν αἵματι, Supp. 1000f. πρός σ᾽ ἔβαν 7 Helen has indeed been likened to Persephone earlier in the play. In the parodos (vv. 175-8), she hopes that her paean of grief will reach Persephone in the Underworld, and recalls that she was gathering flowers when abducted by Hermes (vv. 244-9; cf. H. Hom. Dem. 6-16). For the whole play, the underlying narrative of Persephone’s myth mirrors Helen’s hopes that she too may return to her family, winning release from another land of the dead (Egypt). For the identification of Helen with Persephone, linked to the parthenaic motive, cf. Zweig 1999, 165- 9, Foley 2001: 303-38, Swift 2010, 218-29. 8 The Mother of the gods, also known as Cybele, was the Greek counterpart of the Phrygian goddess Matar (on the Phrygian nomenclature of the goddess, see Brixie 1979; for Greek no- menclature, see Henrichs 1976). Her presence in the Greek world can be noted from the sixth century BC, as shrines and cult objects dedicated to her become frequent both in Greek cities on the West coast of Anatolia and on the Greek mainland.
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