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 mythi- cal 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 hero- ines, 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 charac- ters 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 occa- sions. I owe a further debt to Deborah Steiner for generously sharing her unpublished work on chorality in Greek culture.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.com09/29/2021 07:26:13AM 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 occa- sions 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.com09/29/2021 07:26:13AM 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 nar- rative; 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.com09/29/2021 07:26:13AM 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 perfor- mance.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 pro- totype 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.