Epinician and tragic worlds: the case of Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Abstract

Classical scholarship tends to place lyric poetry and tragedy in different categories, and to overlook the close relationship between the two.At first glance, this is hardly surprising.Tragedy is a product of the fifth century and resolutely Athenian, whereas lyric ranges widely in time, place and context. 1 Tragedy focuses on the darker aspects of human experience and teaches via negative exempla whereas lyric tends to provide a more positive view of the world and of its mythological heritage.The clearest point of interchange between the two genres is through the tragic chorus, who simultaneously represent a group of characters in the play and a chorus which sings in lyric verse.However, scholarship on the chorus has traditionally focussed on its dramatic and mimetic function, whilst analysis of the odes tends to concentrate on their relationship to the wider themes of the play. 2Thus, whilst classicists generally agree that tragic and lyric choruses are related, the implications of this observation are rarely noted.This paper aims to break down the separation between the two genres, and to investigate the continuities between tragic song and its ritual cousins.In doing so, I will focus on one particular interface: that between tragedy and epinician poetry, and will explore it by means of a case-study: Sophocles' Trachiniae.Lyric poetry is part of tragedy's heritage, but the significance of choral performance in Greek society goes beyond this, and choruses formed a significant part of cultural life and civic education in the fifth century as well as the archaic period. 3 As such, * I use Lloyd-Jones and Wilson's OCT for the text of Sophocles; the Teubners Snell-Maehler for that of Pindar and Bacchylides.All translations are my own. 1 Rhodes 2003 and Carter 2004 play down the importance of Athens and stress the generalisable nature of tragic morality and the presence of an international audience.However, the fact remains that tragedy evolved in Athens and remained an Athenian genre throughout the fifth century: out of the 49 fifthcentury tragedians listed in TrGF I, 42 are Athenian; moreover, surviving tragedy presents Athens differently to other poleis. 2Scholarship on the tragic chorus tends to focus on the chorus' role within the play and relationship to the audience -is it 'ideal spectator'; 'voice of the polis'; 'voice of the marginalised group'?: see e.g.

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