In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” two men stand by the sea and listen to a woman sing. Through her song the woman becomes the maker of her own world. She binds the disparate elements of emotion and sensation together in a formal composition. This anonymous, unaccompanied singer shapes, orders, enlarges, and even creates experience not only for herself but also for those who hear her.

Why does the individual voice raised in song move us so powerfully? To explain why song functions as it does is necessarily speculative. For the purposes of this project, the question may be considered from both linguistic and aesthetic perspectives. As an adaptive strategy for communication, song is a concentration of those elements of human speech that are heightened when emotion itself is high: variations in pitch and volume, rhythmical emphasis, and the repetition of sounds and syntactical units. From the standpoint of aesthetics, song draws upon a set of conventions and variations. Every song arises within a particular tradition and is heard by its audience based on prior encounters and expectations. This inevitably conditioned reception is notably prominent in the case of Greek tragedy, a stylized genre built up of a set of recognizable conventions, performed before an audience highly attuned to these conventions.

This book reveals Euripides’ groundbreaking use of monody, or solo actor’s song, in his late plays: in his hands, it is shaped into a potent and flexible instrument for establishing new narrative and thematic structures. At the same time, Euripides uses solo song to explore the realm of the interior and the personal in an expanded expressive range. Contributing to the current scholarly debate on music, emotion, and characterization in Greek tragedy, I examine the role of monody in the musical design of four plays of Euripides, all produced in the last decade of his career, between 415 BCE and his death in 406 BCE: Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. These plays are marked by the increased presence of solo actor’s song in proportion to choral song. The lyric voice of the individual takes on an unprecedented prominence with far-reaching implications for the structure and impact of each play. The monodies of Euripides are a true dramatic innovation: in addition to creating an effect of heightened emotion, monody is used to develop character and shape plot. These singing actors become the “artificers,” to borrow Wallace Stevens’ word, of the world in which they sing.

In Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes, Euripides experiments against the backdrop of monody’s traditional connection with lament. In contrast to the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, where solo actor’s song is predominantly connected with grief and pain, in these four plays monody conveys varied moods and states of mind. Although resonances of lament may still be present, monody in the late plays of Euripides can also express joy, hope, anxiety, bewilderment, accusation, and deliberation. Often, and simultaneously, it moves forward narrative exposition. As the scope of monody grows, its forms and dramatic functions change: passages of actor’s lyric become longer, more metrically complex, more detached from the other characters onstage, and more intensely focused on the internal, emotional experience of the singer. In the four plays under discussion, we see a steadily increasing refinement and expansion of monody as a form, a development that rests upon changes in the style and function of contemporary music in the late fifth century.

My argument stands at the crossroads of two paths of inquiry: the study of dramatic form, on the one hand, and, on the other, the synthesis of affect, emotion, and character. These terms require some clarification. In modern literary criticism of Greek drama, “form” is employed in a number of different ways: to refer to the structural units of a play (e.g., ode or episode), or to the typical elements that recur from play to play (e.g., the agōn), or more broadly to the overall construction of the dramatic plot in a sequence of scenes.Footnote ¹ Recent scholarship has emphasized the relationship between aesthetic form and politics and the cross-fertilization between the artistic structures of Greek tragedy and historical reality.Footnote ² Victoria Wohl, in particular, has explored the ways in which the formal structures of Euripides’ plays exert a “psychagogic force” on the audience, prompting emotional engagement with the dilemmas and contradictions of life in the democratic polis.Footnote ³ In all of these senses, Euripides has a highly developed and sophisticated sense of form. Although I will at times discuss the political and social context of Athens in the late fifth century, in this book I will principally be concerned with form as it functions within the plays themselves, focusing on the typical elements, such as the agōn, iambic rhesis, stichomythic exchange, messenger speech, and monody, which appear in combinations and re-combinations from play to play. By 415 BCE, these formal features of tragedy had become highly conventionalized and determined a set of expectations in the contemporary audience. As I hope to show, monody in the late plays of Euripides is always placed in self-conscious relation to these other formal elements of Attic tragedy.

Turning to the second set of terms, I argue that monody in the late plays of Euripides does represent a qualitative shift in concepts of individual emotion, sensation, causation, and subjectivity in tragedy, a new set of representations of what we might tentatively call “character.” This is an especially fraught term in critical discourse. The ancient Greeks referred to the dramatis personae of a play as prosopa (πρόσωπα, “masks”), emphasizing outward appearance and presentation rather than an inner stamp. In recent work on characterization in Greek tragedy, scholars have discussed the difficulty of defining or evaluating character and the artificiality of divorcing it from other aspects of a literary work.Footnote ⁴ Figures in Greek tragedy are idealized and fictionalized constructs, distinct from “real-life” people; the vision of the playwright is at all times shaped by social, cultural, and literary conventions.

In what follows, I adopt the inclusive definition of characterization put forward by Koen de Temmerman and Evert van Emde Boas, which includes the ascription not only of psychological and social traits but also outward appearance and physiology, habitual actions, circumstances, and relationships.Footnote ⁵ I do not intend the word “character” to convey the modern Western notion of a consistent, lifelong pattern of reactivity and of moral stature that above all constitutes the essence of a specific human being. Nonetheless, Euripides does seem particularly interested in exploring conflict within the dramatis personae of his plays, and in staging the conflicts, decisions, and reversals that take place in their interior worlds. Within this broader context, I propose that monody allows what is most distinctive about the singer at that moment to be brought out with particular strength and clarity of outline. Through solo song, Euripides reveals the inner state of the figure onstage and gives to it a place of central interest and importance.

Monody, like choral song and dance, takes Greek drama beyond storytelling and expands the art into a multimodal and multidimensional space. In the case of Euripides’ musical craft, we are fortunate to have the comprehensive study of Naomi Weiss, who examines the role of mousikē (music, song, and dance) and choreia (choral song and dance) in four plays from the last fifteen years of Euripides’ career: Electra, Trojan Women, Helen, and Iphigenia in Aulis.Footnote ⁶ Weiss demonstrates that Euripides combines contemporary musical innovations with the styles and motifs of traditional lyric poetry and contends that this mix of old and new is a central element of the poet’s experimentation with the language and performance of mousikē. I share Weiss’ interest in musical innovation in the late plays of Euripides and employ a similar methodology of close textual and metrical analysis. Yet there is almost no overlap in the material we consider or in the direction of our arguments. Weiss examines plays where most song is choral and discusses tragic choral poetry in reference to other, nondramatic genres. My own project, by contrast, focuses on plays where music is significantly the province of actors and puts monody in conversation with the other structural forms within Greek tragedy such as the agōn and the messenger speech.

Indeed, no single published work discusses monody in Euripides from a literary standpoint, although there do exist stimulating discussions of the monodies in individual plays. As in the case of formalism and characterization, this book draws together several strands of analysis. The philological tradition has produced important books about the metrical and structural elements of tragedy.Footnote ⁷ Other scholars have approached the role of lyric in drama from a variety of critical perspectives that consider its language and imagery, its links to established poetic and philosophical traditions, and its resonances with the political, social, and cultural developments of the Athenian polis; their writing on the songs of tragedy has focused on issues of gender, group identity, democracy, religion, and myth.Footnote ⁸ Finally, recent work on music has enhanced our understanding of the style and ideological implications of the “New Music” – the catchall term used by modern scholars to describe the changes in musical style, language, and performance in the fifth and fourth centuries – for which Euripides was both celebrated and criticized by his contemporaries.Footnote ⁹ Drawing on these quite different schools of criticism, what I offer here is an integrated study of the aesthetic qualities of monody: how actor’s song contributes to the unity of each play as a self-contained and self-referential dramatic work. Attention to such elements as prosody, meter, diction, syntax, setting, wordplay, imagery, and theme as well as to the more advanced techniques of irony, ambiguity, and internal tension can make available to us a richer set of readings – and of stagings – for a particular text. For a full appreciation of their complex role in Euripides’ dramatic art, monodies must be considered both as formal poetic compositions and as expressive vehicles for emotion and character.

Monody, by its synthesis of lyrical structure and emotional expression, brings together the formal and affective dimensions of tragedy. As Eugenie Brinkema has written, “The turning to affect in the humanities does not obliterate the problem of form and representation.”Footnote ¹⁰ Scholars have discussed the radical nature of Euripides’ formal experimentation; they have also remarked on the complexity of the figures, particularly female ones, in his plays.Footnote ¹¹ These are not separate assessments, but need to be taken together. As in all art, form and content shape each other. Euripides’ use of monody in his late plays provides a means to the creation of more complex characters; and his desire to dramatize the internal emotional states of these characters in turn drives him to expand the boundaries of monody as a dramatic form.

Monody and Dramatic Form

Every artistic tradition develops its own set patterns of repetition and variation and generates expectations built upon them. From cave-painting to the contemporary pop song, an art form is a specialized language with its own rules and regularities. A language depends for its intelligibility on its grammar – that is, on predictable morphology and on rules for the arrangement of units of signification. In particular, as Eduard Fraenkel writes in his commentary on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, “For Greek tragedy there exists also something like a grammar of dramatic technique.”Footnote ¹² Every Greek tragedy is constructed of discrete parts differentiated in form and style, which follow one another in a regular order. Innovation, modification, even subversion of these conventions are all possible; Greek tragedy was by its very nature a hybrid genre, which included and appropriated a wide variety of nondramatic subgenres from lyric poetry to forensic oratory and integrated them within a dramatic narrative.Footnote ¹³ But there is always a consciousness, shared between the artist and the audience, of the tragic theatrical tradition and its formal expectations.

The Greeks did not have a comprehensive general term for the different poetic forms of tragedy, which Aristotle in the Poetics names only as “parts” (τὰ μέρη).Footnote ¹⁴ In modern scholarship they are usually referred to by the German word Bauform (plural: Bauformen), a structural “building block”; the metaphor, drawn from architecture, imagines tragedy as a grand edifice built up of smaller units. The German philological tradition has generated valuable criticism of these Bauformen, with statistical detail and documentation. Much of this work is synthesized in the collection Die Bauformen der griechischen Tragödie, edited by W. Jens and published in 1971, which remains a valuable reference book.Footnote ¹⁵ The Bauformen recognized by Jens and his collaborators include the prologue, parodos, episode, choral ode, stichomythic exchange, messenger speech, agōn, rhesis, monody, supplication scene, and exodos.

This work is ongoing. Since the publication of Jens’ collection, many of these individual Bauformen have been the subject of articles and monographs, while additional type scenes in tragedy, such as the deus ex machina, have been identified and studied. For example, the messenger speech has proven particularly fruitful, inspiring three books in as many decades, by Irene de Jong, James Barrett, and Margaret Dickin, respectively.Footnote ¹⁶ The choral ode – obviously of great interest for our study of monody, as the dominant musical Bauform of tragedy – has also received extended treatment for all three tragedians.Footnote ¹⁷ Useful synthetic works include a chapter on tragedy as a genre by Donald Mastronarde as well as a monograph on tragic style by Richard Rutherford, who discusses the varied handling of spoken dialogue and lyric song alongside topics such as vocabulary, rhetoric, and imagery, with illustrations from a broad range of plays.Footnote ¹⁸

Nor is analysis of the formal structure of tragedy a phenomenon of modern times alone. The names of the different parts of tragedy seem to have been established already by the mid-fifth century. We can gather as much from the tragedies themselves, which sometimes explicitly display an awareness of their own preeminent patterns and governing rules. For instance, in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, produced in 458 BCE, the chorus of Furies introduce the scene of stichomythic dialogue about to commence, enjoining their opponent Orestes to “exchange line for line, in alternation” (ἔπος δ᾽ ἀμείβου πρὸς ἔπος ἐν μέρει, 585–586). In Euripides’ Medea, produced in 431 BCE, Medea refers to the agōn in process as a “conflict of words” (ἅμιλλαν λόγων, 546). Likewise, in Euripides’ Suppliant Women, produced in 423 BCE, at the beginning of the agōn scene Theseus accuses the Theban Herald of “contending in this contest” against him (ἐπεὶ δ᾽ ἀγῶνα καὶ σὺ τόνδ᾽ ἠγωνίσω, 427) and of entering into a “conflict of words” (ἅμιλλαν λόγων, 428).Footnote ¹⁹ And by the time of Plato a generation later, the phrase “a god from the machine” had become a proverb, reflecting the conventional scene that ends more than half of Euripides’ extant plays.Footnote ²⁰

But by far the most important evidence for the conventional building blocks of tragedy comes from Aristophanes, especially his comedy Frogs, produced in 405 BCE, one year after the death of Euripides. It was because of his deep appreciation for tragic poetry that Aristophanes could be so sharp and witty a satirist. In Frogs, the god Dionysus journeys to the Underworld to resurrect a tragic playwright and save the city of Athens. While in Hades, Dionysus agrees to judge a contest of poetic excellence between the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides. The play culminates in a long and brilliant showdown between the two dead playwrights, who vehemently disagree on issues of language, character, and theme as well as on more technical matters such as how to compose music for the stage.Footnote ²¹ First Euripides performs a parody of Aeschylus’ choral songs, lambasting their repetitive rhythms and ponderous language; then Aeschylus brings out the younger poet’s “Muse” and proceeds to mock his choral lyrics and then his monodies.Footnote ²² Comic exaggeration and distortion notwithstanding, this presentation of the rival tragedians must bear some relation to the experience of the audience. Aristophanes displays a sophisticated awareness of critical terminology: he differentiates between prologue (πρόλογος, 1119), rhesis (ῥῆσις, 151), and monody (μονῳδία, 944). In other passages, Aristophanes uses the names of specific poetic meters such as iambics, anapests, and tetrameter.Footnote ²³ We may conclude that at least some of Aristophanes’ original audience would have been familiar with the chief characteristics and even the names of the constituent parts of tragedy and would have been able to distinguish between them in performance. Greek drama aimed to please both hoi polloi and the cognoscenti.

To summarize the discussion thus far, the Greek tragedians were professional artists working in a highly regulated and conventional medium. Many aspects of each play were already set: the number and gender of actors, the use of masks, the series of entrances and exits, the portrayal of violence onstage, and the mythological stories from which the plot could be drawn. In addition, the audience would have come to the theater with expectations about the Bauformen from which the play was composed. They would have expected an alternation of spoken scenes and scenes set to music, with a singing and dancing chorus; in addition, a play might or might not include an agōn, a deliberative rhesis, a messenger speech, or a monody delivered by an actor. Within these constraints, poets could exercise tremendous creativity. In the late work of Euripides, one aspect of this creativity consisted of playing with the expectations of the audience by unexpected and unusual combinations of different Bauformen.

In the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Bauformen tend to follow one another in an ordered sequence without combination or overlap. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, for instance, produced in 458 BCE, the play moves relentlessly forward to its denouement: a watchman hints at the dark truths within the palace in a prologue rhesis, the chorus explore the mythological past of the house in their majestic parodos, a messenger delivers news of what has happened offstage, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon debate his decision to tread the crimson carpet in a taut, highly charged stichomythic exchange. Such a tightly organized structure, with a single rhythm of rise and fall, gives the impression of totality and unity. The late plays of Euripides are very different. They rarely proceed in a predictable linear fashion. Instead, these late plays spiral outward, following multiple plot threads and privileging the perspectives of multiple agents.

Here Donald Mastronarde’s distinction between “closed” and “open” forms in tragedy may be useful.Footnote ²⁴ A “closed” form depends on overt causal connections and focuses narrowly on a few main figures. In an “open” form, by contrast, some or all connections must be supplied by the audience of the play. The “open” form allows for the development of alternate structures of relatedness both formal and personal. As Mastronarde writes,

As Mastronarde emphasizes, “the open structure is not to be viewed as a failed effort at closed structure, but rather as a divergent choice that consciously plays against the world-view of closure and simple order.”Footnote ²⁶

Euripides is a master of the open form: his late plays demand interpretive effort from the audience. Like his predecessors, Euripides takes advantage of the all-encompassing capacity of tragedy to embrace, combine, and transform multiple genres and forms.Footnote ²⁷ Rather than employing each Bauform as an element standing distinct and separate from what precedes and follows, Euripides creates composite orders. This drive toward formal experimentation is especially apparent in Euripides’ novel use of monody in his late plays. In addition to strongly expressing a specific state of mind through song, a monody may simultaneously serve as part of an agōn, or as a deliberative rhesis, or as a messenger speech. In the plays I discuss, Euripides combines monody with other Bauformen to create hybrid structures, just as a collapsing telescope can be expanded or contracted, its parts nestled within each other. This is not a collapse into chaos, but a more concentrated order. One might also call the procedure Euripides employs in his monodies a liberation of form, as when the few simple shapes in a kaleidoscope are repositioned and reflected, such that while the individual elements are still recognizable, even disarmingly familiar at first glance, they transform into patterns wholly new.

The Emergence of Monody

The term “monody” in its etymological sense – “solo song,” from μόνος and ᾠδή – refers only to a mode of vocal delivery and is not restricted to tragedy. The word was occasionally used in this wider sense in antiquity. For instance, Plato, in a passage from the Laws, discusses the regulation of musical contests in the education of children; in this section he also examines μονῳδία and χωρωδία, “solo performance” and “choral performance,” without making any explicit connection to tragedy or even to theater.Footnote ²⁸ But monody became over the course of the fifth century BCE a specialized technical term for one of the constituent Bauformen of Greek tragedy, indicating an extended song delivered by an actor, as opposed to by a collective chorus.

Today solo song is ubiquitous in musical drama. Works of musical theater aimed at a wide audience – from opera to Broadway musicals to Disney movies – are based around the showstopping arias of individual singers.Footnote ²⁹ These solo songs are often the most popular and memorable parts of the dramas from which they are drawn. But this was not always the case. Greek tragedy emerged in the late sixth century; one of its sources was group songs associated with the dithyramb, a ritual musical celebration in honor of the god Dionysus.Footnote ³⁰ Choral lyric was thus central to early tragedy. Tragic songs were predominantly composed for performance by a group of twelve or perhaps fifteen adult male Athenian citizens who sang and danced in unison.Footnote ³¹ A chorus might rehearse for weeks or months before the premiere, but the individual members probably continued their other, usual trades during this period.Footnote ³² As we know from the surviving plays of Aeschylus, tragic odes from the early fifth century could be rich in imagery and dense with dramatic meaning, with metrical patterns of astonishing complexity; yet these songs were nevertheless constrained by the limits of amateur performance.Footnote ³³

Over the first half of the fifth century, tragedy developed its own particular musical conventions. Tragic choral odes, for example, came to be formed on the principle of strophic responsion, with each successive pair of stanzas introducing a new and distinct pattern. A strophic pair – a strophe and matching antistrophe – correspond in meter, music, and choreography. Strophic odes in tragedy thus have the structure AA BB CC, a structure distinct from lyric in other, nontheatrical genres of Greek poetry. The compositional technique of strophic responsion meant that tragedians could introduce tremendous metrical, musical, and choreographic variety into their compositions.Footnote ³⁴ Variation was possible not only from ode to ode over the course of a given tragedy but also within each individual ode as it moved from one strophic pair to the next. In order to compose music to fit the dramatic situation, tragedians could draw inspiration from the wide repertoire of existing styles and traditions of Greek poetry including prayers, laments, wedding songs, magic spells, lullabies, and hymns.Footnote ³⁵

By the middle of the fifth century, tragedy had outgrown its local origins.Footnote ³⁶ What had begun in Athens as a religious and civic ritual, integrating aspects of earlier epic and choral traditions became a unique art form with mass cultural appeal. The annual performance at the City Dionysia in Athens, which coincided with the beginning of the sailing season in the early spring, drew foreigners from across the Mediterranean world. Other powerful and wealthy cities soon built theaters of their own and commissioned poets, actors, and musicians to perform in them.Footnote ³⁷ Aeschylus died in Gela in 456 BCE, as a guest at the court of the local tyrant Hieron, still writing and producing plays.Footnote ³⁸ A generation later, Euripides and his fellow tragic poet Agathon both sojourned in Macedon at the invitation of King Archelaus.Footnote ³⁹ By the end of the fourth century, tragedy was performed in theaters, some of them seating more than 10,000 people, all over the Greek world, from southern Spain to Sicily to modern Afghanistan.Footnote ⁴⁰ This tremendous popularity was already well underway by the late fifth century.

Despite its status as religious ritual, tragedy had always been art for profit.Footnote ⁴¹ An increasingly sophisticated audience demanded novelty and skill in their entertainment, and the competitive nature of the festivals in Athens encouraged originality as well. Success was measured by the satisfaction of the spectators, who judged the performance. For the purposes of our interest in monody, the constant drive for innovation in tragedy manifested in two ways: the increasing prominence of music made by professional actors and aulos players rather than by the amateur citizen chorus, and the nature and sophistication of that music.

The late fifth century witnessed a tremendous increase in the extent and complexity of actors’ roles in tragedy.Footnote ⁴² In the 440s BCE a separate prize for best actor was instituted at the City Dionysia in Athens.Footnote ⁴³ Traditionally the art of acting, like that of dramatic composition, had been the province of well-connected, aristocratic families whose business was the theater. Aeschylus is said to have acted in his own tragedies, and his sons and nephews produced plays after his death. But by law actors at the City Dionysia and other dramatic festivals in Attica were not bound by the same restrictions of citizenship as choral performers. There arose a class of highly trained and highly paid professional actors from across the Mediterranean, who also specialized in the techniques of gestural, masked acting.Footnote ⁴⁴ We know of one, Hegelochus, who acted as the protagonist in the original production of Euripides’ Orestes in 408 BCE and whose unlucky mispronunciation of a key line cost him his career; he would have acted alongside a deuteragonist who played the demanding singing roles of Electra and the Phrygian.Footnote ⁴⁵ Evidence of these developments in the professionalization of tragic performance can be detected quite clearly in Euripides’ late plays, where many of his most striking, distinctive, and virtuosic musical passages take the form of monodies for the solo voice rather than choral songs.

The instrumental accompaniment for tragic songs changed as well. Archeologists and music historians have traced a progression during the later fifth century in the construction and capability of the aulos, the double-reed pipe used to accompany performances of Greek tragedy and comedy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Technical advancements at this time made it easier for an aulos player to use a variety of scales, styles, and modulations while playing. New modes, harmonies, and tunings were also introduced in tandem with developments in Greek musical theory. By the end of the fifth century, there was a high demand at dithyrambic and dramatic competitions for star aulos players who were both expert and distinctive in their musical style. Already by 430 BCE, these aulos players had a reputation as predominantly non-aristocratic and non-Athenian. One such was the famous musician Pronomos from Thebes, whose name and image grace a large, richly detailed vase, now in Naples, depicting the actors of a victorious tragedy.Footnote ⁴⁷

Euripides was a central and pioneering figure in the musical revolution that swept through Athens during the later fifth century. Modern scholars often use the label “New Music” for this movement, but the Greeks themselves referred to it as “theater music” since it found its fullest expression in the genres of dithyramb, tragedy, comedy, and satyr-drama, all musical forms associated with theatrical performance in honor of Dionysus.Footnote ⁴⁸ The chief characteristics of this new musical style in theater were multiplicity, complexity, ornamentation, and versatility. In the time of Aeschylus, the melody of a tragic song was expected to respect both metrical quantity and natural pitch accent.Footnote ⁴⁹ But starting around 430 BCE, the composers associated with the New Music, among them Cinesias, Melanippes, Phrynis, Philoxenus, Telestes, and Timotheus abandoned this older style in favor of greater expressivity and spectacular effects.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ancient sources depict these artists as having introduced a series of tonal, instrumental, and formal innovations in dithyrambs and nomes as well as in drama.Footnote ⁵¹ Star musicians dazzled audiences with performances not only on the aulos but also on the kithara, a type of concert lyre.Footnote ⁵² This expanded mimetic range was made possible by the professionalism and virtuosity of both composers and performers.

The New Musical revolution is one of the most widely discussed cultural events of antiquity. It sparked great controversy. Modern historians have examined comic parody, historical anecdotes, and musicological commentaries to reflect on the social and political dimensions of this change in musical style.Footnote ⁵³ Ancient critics connected the New Music with democratic mob culture and vulgar taste. Their accounts frequently employ metaphors of looseness, laxness, slackness, and softness, adding a moral dimension to their assault on the sound of the New Music. Others reviled it as barbarous, servile, anarchic, uncontrolled, and effeminate.Footnote ⁵⁴ Plato dismissed it as musical “theatrocracy.”Footnote ⁵⁵ But these dissenting voices were predominantly drawn from the conservative elite. New Music was popular music, and all the surviving evidence suggests that it was embraced with enthusiasm by the mass theatrical audiences of the time, no doubt in part because of its opposition to conservative and aristocratic values.

Sadly, almost all the dramatic music from this period has been lost. Two fragments on papyrus from the Hellenistic period, amounting to several bars of music, can tentatively be connected to the choral odes of Euripidean plays.Footnote ⁵⁶ These papyri show musically notated lyrics to choral passages from Iphigenia in Aulis and Orestes. The fragments are too short to give us much of an idea of overall musical composition, although they do indicate that the composer (perhaps Euripides, perhaps a later artist who restaged his plays) experimented with various metrical effects. There are no surviving musical fragments of Euripidean monody. But that is not to say we know nothing about the music of these compositions. The rhythms of the songs are reflected in the metrical patterns of the verses; some information about the musical system, including how the scales were conceived, survives in the works of Greek musical theorists; and musicologists can make inferences about the aulos based on fragments of ancient instruments, depictions on vases and wall paintings, literary descriptions, and cross-cultural comparisons. Most importantly, we have the words themselves from which much can be extrapolated about style and delivery. This evidence does not allow us to reconstruct the original musical performance of any tragedy but it does allow us to draw some tentative conclusions.

Even without musical notation, we can see that the influence of the New Music on the late plays of Euripides is showcased in his monodies, which demand and display the utmost skill of a professional singing actor and aulos player. In these compositions, Euripides often abandons the old rhythmic patterns of choral song with their more regular meters and strophic responsion in favor of free, nonstrophic stanzas of varying meters. He introduces bravura effects such as repeated single words and unusual metrical resolutions. He also employs melisma – the extension of a single verbal syllable over several different notes – as attested both by the parody of his lyrics in Aristophanes’ Frogs and by the few scraps of Euripidean text that preserve ancient musical notation, described earlier.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another characteristic of this period of musical innovation seems to have been experimentation with the mixing of genres. Although such generic hybridity was by no means confined to Euripides’ work or even to the theater in the late fifth century, Euripides in his late plays appropriates, transforms, and combines genres with particular self-consciousness and flair.Footnote ⁵⁸

Additional evidence for the growing popularity of tragic monody over the course of the fifth century comes from comedy.Footnote ⁵⁹ The first use of the term “monody” in extant Greek literature comes from the Horai of the comic poet Cratinus, dated to the mid-420s BCE.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two lines, transmitted as one fragment, twice mention monody: βούλει μονῳδήσωμεν αὐτοῖς ἕν γέ τι, “Do you want us to sing just one monody for them?” and οὐκ ἂν μονῳδήσειεν ἐκπεπληγμένος, “He could not sing a monody while struck out of his wits.” Because of the lack of surrounding context, it is not entirely clear where the joke lies; the word ἐκπεπληγμένος, “struck out of his wits,” could indicate suffering or, perhaps, extreme inebriation. In the plays of Aristophanes a generation later, the terms μονῳδία and μονῳδεῖν always refer unambiguously to tragedy.Footnote ⁶¹ As we have already seen, in Frogs monody is a central part of the competition between the ghosts of Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades; once he has mocked the choral odes of Euripides, Aeschylus parodies the style of his rival’s monodies, specifically designating them as such (τὸν τῶν μονῳδιῶν τρόπον).Footnote ⁶² These references in the comic dramatists constitute our only fifth-century instances of the term μονῳδία and its cognates. Although many monodies in tragedy are self-referential, the tragic poets do not use the words μονῳδία or μονῳδεῖν. Aristotle in the Poetics speaks only of monody to classify it under the heading of τὰ ἀπὸ τῆς σκηνῆς, “what comes from the stage,” which is contrasted with music from the chorus.Footnote ⁶³ Based on this evidence, it seems that μονῳδία and μονῳδεῖν emerged as technical terms for solo actor’s song in tragedy over the course of the late fifth century. This dating coincides with the period in which Euripides composed his most daring and inventive monodies.

For our purposes, monody will be defined as a passage of solo actor’s lyric of at least ten lines, which is either uninterrupted or only briefly interrupted by the chorus or by other actors.Footnote ⁶⁴ Monody stands in contrast to other musical arrangements in tragedy, where voices alternate more frequently and the individual sections by each participant are shorter. Such arrangements, which I generally refer to as a “lyric dialogue,” may take the form of an amoibaion (ἀμοιβαῖον), where one actor sings in alternation with another singing actor or the chorus, or an epirrhema (ἐπίρρημα), where an actor sings in alternation with a speaking actor or the chorus. The formal distinction in most cases corresponds to one of function: in a lyric dialogue, the focus is on communication, even if that communication is frustrated or incomplete, while in monody the emphasis is on the isolation and self-absorption of the singer. By these criteria, I have cataloged the passages of solo actor’s song in the complete extant plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in the Appendix.Footnote ⁶⁵ As can be seen at a glance, actor’s song occurs in nearly every play that has come down to us. In Aeschylus, each individual passage of actor’s song is brief; an actor rarely sings for more than five consecutive lines without interaction from another actor or the chorus. But in the works of Sophocles and even more so in those of Euripides, actor’s songs of ten lines or more – true monodies – take on a role of greater importance. Over time, these monodies increase in both length and frequency, especially after 415 BCE.

With this chart before us, we may pause to consider two suggestive accounts of monody: those of Eric Csapo and Edith Hall. Csapo’s article “Later Euripidean Music” synthesizes large amounts of data to demonstrate that over the course of his career Euripides shifted the musical burden of his plays from the chorus to the actors.Footnote ⁶⁶ In plays produced before the mid-420s BCE (Alcestis, Medea, Heracles, and Hippolytus), actors deliver on average 13.3 percent of all song; most music comes from the chorus. In the following decade (Andromache, Hecuba, Suppliant Women, Electra, and Heracles), the portion of song presented by actors is significantly higher than in the early plays, constituting on average 37 percent of song in each tragedy.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the late plays (Ion, Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, Phoenician Women, and Orestes), the actors deliver on average 47.1 percent of all song. Csapo’s research makes clear that the overall percentage of music to speech in each play remains relatively constant, and that the chorus continue to play a prominent part, especially in Euripides’ posthumous plays Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis. Nevertheless, over the forty years of Euripides’ career, the percentage of song delivered by actors as monody rises from about one eighth of the music in each play to almost half.

This quantitative increase, Csapo posits, responds to a desire on the part of playwrights, musicians, and actors to display a musical range and virtuosity beyond the reach of the amateur chorus and developed together with the increasing professionalization of actors and musicians in the fifth century. He suggests that the increased prominence of solo song in late Euripides is, in part, a function of the exigencies of dramatic competition. In the chapters that follow, I offer a complementary explanation: that the music of actor’s monody matched the sorts of plays that Euripides wanted to write. Monody in particular was uniquely suited to conveying emotion, especially the intense and highly volatile emotions of an individual in extreme circumstances.

Turning to Edith Hall, we find the argument that social distinctions within tragedy were reflected in different modes of musical expression.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Euripides, Hall proposes, monody is a marker of high social status, indeed almost always of royalty inherited by blood. When enslaved characters sing, it is usually the case that they are members of the aristocracy who have fallen upon hard times, as in the cases of Hecuba, Andromache, and Electra. Those born into slavery – with the exception of the Phrygian in Euripides’ Orestes – do not use lyric. But it is not all aristocrats who sing: Hall concludes that “singing in Euripides seems to be a female (and barbarian) prerogative,” and that, although some males in Euripides do sing, singers in Euripides are generally “the ‘others’ of the free Greek man in his prime.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet, looking at our chart of extant monodies, we notice that men do sing in a fair number of plays. Hall concedes that, among men, barbarians can sing (Polymestor in Hecuba, the Phrygian in Orestes); so may old men (Theseus in Hippolytus), immature young men (Ion in Ion), and men who have been driven to utter humiliation and agony (Philoctetes in Philoctetes, Heracles in Trachiniae). While Hall’s thesis seems broadly correct, then, these partial exceptions to her rule deserve further exploration: many of the monodies I consider challenge the expectation of a lament by a royal, barbarian woman and innovate against this expected backdrop.

Emotion, Subjectivity, and Song

The nature of the connection between music and the emotions is notoriously difficult to define. Some fundamental questions lie at the heart of most inquiries, ancient and modern. Most relevant to our investigation of monody, we might ask how solo song in drama functions as a means of self-expression, and how it creates a sense of subjectivity different from that created by speech. These questions are complicated by the fact that we have lost virtually all the music of fifth-century tragedy. In the parallel case of ancient dance, Sarah Olsen has proposed a methodology that foregrounds the tension between the embodied ephemerality of performance and the fixity of the written word.Footnote ⁷⁰ The idea that ancient music and dance are somehow “beyond words” makes them challenging subjects for scholarly interpretation. However, these challenges should not deter us completely.

Poetic representations of the emotional effects of music in ancient Greek literature are rich and varied.Footnote ⁷¹ In the Odyssey, we find examples of music making the listener feel melancholy, as when Penelope hears the song of the bard Phemius; or making the listener cry, as when Odysseus weeps at the performance of Demodocus at the Phaeacian court.Footnote ⁷² On the other hand, in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Muses remind us that music can make its hearers forget their ills and may bring them respite from worries.Footnote ⁷³ In Euripides’ Bacchae, the music of Dionysus is capable of inducing states of joy, ecstasy, and even madness.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Aristophanes’ Birds, the song of the nightingale enchants its hearers and pauses all strife.Footnote ⁷⁵ In ancient philosophy, too, music is assumed to work forcefully upon the emotions. Plato writes that music imposes order on the soul, and that training in certain kinds of rhythm and harmony produces men who are temperate, courageous, and good.Footnote ⁷⁶ Aristotle reasons that music can be used for amusement, entertainment, and education since “song is man’s sweetest joy.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet if music is consumed in inappropriate ways, both philosophers think it can throw the soul into disorder and even corrupt whole cities.Footnote ⁷⁸

Modern approaches lend support to these ancient ideas about the varied emotional power of music. The field of music psychology seeks to explain the connection between music and the emotions using the broader collection of approaches known as cognitive science. The cognitive science of music integrates ideas from philosophy, music theory, neuroscience, anthropology, ethology, and computer modeling to answer questions about music’s role in human lives. Research in these fields has established some basic facts about music.Footnote ⁷⁹ For instance, across the world, music occurs in contexts of ritual and play, and people experience music much more frequently in groups than they do alone. Many cultures recognize the capacity of music to induce particular states of mind, and it is often perceived as expressive in ways that go beyond language. Musicologist Ian Cross has described this quality as “floating intentionality” – the sense that music means something, but something that cannot be pinned down precisely.Footnote ⁸⁰ Cross hypothesizes that “floating intentionality” allows for large groups of people listening to music to experience the pleasure of a shared communicative experience even though the specific details of their understanding might differ profoundly. Indeed, the sense of being transported beyond oneself is a hallmark of musical listening around the world. This experience has variously been referred to in terms of a surplus of affect or a heightened state of arousal.

This heightened state of arousal seems to be particularly focused in the case of solo song. Solo song is what ethologists call a “super-normal stimulus.”Footnote ⁸¹ In social species, like humans, the expression of strong emotion in another member of the group is a signal of a situation that most likely calls for a response such as fight, flight, or nurturance. Emotions are coded into language first and foremost at the level of prosody.Footnote ⁸² When humans experience emotion in response to events of high importance in order to signal it to others we vary the speed, volume, and pitch of our voices. Song is an exaggeration and a formalization of such signaling. A single voice raised in song sends a cue that something vital is being communicated and concentrates the attention of the listeners on that individual.

Yet the issue is more complicated than this, for emotions are conditioned by the social world in which they operate, and classical views of the emotions differed from our own. The Greeks of Euripides’ age conceived of emotions not as spontaneous, irrational, or purely internal phenomena, as we tend to do today; rather, the ancient view of emotions included a necessary component of evaluation and reference to the outside world.Footnote ⁸³ Aristotle, in the second book of the Rhetoric (2.1, 137a20–23), defines emotion (πάθος) in terms of its effects on judgment:

Aristotle’s definition emphasizes the central role of cognition in emotion. For example, an emotion such as anger depends on the subject’s judgment of what counts as an offense, and what counts as an offense depends on the other parties involved and on prevailing cultural norms.

Aristotle, then, seems to have understood emotions as arising primarily in and from social interactions. This is a useful data point for any discussion of emotion in Greek tragedy, as on the stage figures are almost always presented in dynamic relationship to one another. Aristotle wrote several generations after Euripides; in the decades that separate the two authors, ways of depicting emotion in literature and drama had changed considerably, in no small measure due to the influence of Euripides and his fellow playwrights. In the chapters that follow, I will examine moments in Euripides’ plays when figures use song to reflect on their emotions: that is, on human relationships, and on the feelings and evaluative judgments that arise from them. For instance, in the tragedy Ion, the subject of Chapter 1, the Athenian queen Creusa contemplates breaking years of silence to accuse the god Apollo of once violating her. She sings, “My soul, how can I be silent?” (ὦ ψυχά, πῶς σιγάσω; 859). In this monody, Euripides explicitly dramatizes a conversation between a woman and her own emotion, drawing attention to the high stakes of this conversation by his marked use of solo song.

The contrast between speech and song is central to the expressive potential of tragedy. With the varieties of song, a greater range of attitudes becomes available to the personages of the drama: states of passionate intensity find their full voice. As Richard Rutherford has written: “Fundamental is the principle that sung verse gives more scope to emotion expressed through extravagant phrasing and wild exclamation: song is less controlled and rational than spoken verse. That is not to say that reason is alien to lyric, but it is conjoined with intensity of passion or at least powerful commitment.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Most likely there was always song, as well as dance, fully integrated into Greek theatrical performance; certainly it is present as far back as we can trace. There were clearly good reasons for dramatists to hold onto the tradition of song, and to develop it to their ends. Thus, if the monodies in Euripides’ late plays stand out in contrast to passages of actor’s lyric in earlier tragedy, it is not because the mode itself is new.Footnote ⁸⁵ Rather, as I hope to show, the poet has taken a familiar form, expanded its range, and turned it to new purpose.

Monody and Lamentation in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides before 415 BCE

Singing actors feature in almost all the tragedies that have come down to us from antiquity, but they are employed very differently, both in form and dramatic function. The greatest common thread before 415 BCE is the connection of actor’s song with lamentation. In the ancient literary critics, we find monody classified as a threnos (θρῆνος), an individual lament, and distinguished from a kommos (κομμός), a lament shared between an actor and the chorus.Footnote ⁸⁶ The relationship between lamentation in Greek tragedy and actual death rites in Attica in the fifthcentury BCE is neither straightforward nor entirely clear; nevertheless, drawing on evidence from archeology, vase paintings, and literature, we may sketch out some relevant features of contemporary funeral practice.Footnote ⁸⁷ Aristocratic funerals were grand public events. Despite periodic attempts to limit display through legislation, funerals were occasions for wealthy families to demonstrate their power and influence. Lamentation played a prominent role at every stage of the funeral: at the wake (πρόθεσις), during the procession when the body was carried by chariot to the gravesite (ἐκφορά), and at the gravesite itself. These lamentations often involved not only family members but also hired mourners, usually unrelated women over sixty years old, who were known for their skill in inducing grief.Footnote ⁸⁸ Lamentation in Greek culture was largely the province of women, especially the wives, mothers, and sisters of the deceased.Footnote ⁸⁹ Funerals thus provided a remarkable opportunity for female voices to be heard publicly in a culture that usually enjoined silence upon them. Although in tragedy a monody of lament may be sung by a male or female character, as we shall see, issues of gender are always in play.

An important commonality between early monody and lamentation is the use of song to underscore the connection between the individual actor and the collective chorus. An antiphonal or shared “call and response” structure is a standard feature of actual Greek laments, ancient and modern.Footnote ⁹⁰ Usual topoi include the expression of grief and loss, a contrast between past and present, praise for the dead, and anger and a desire for vengeance at those responsible for the death, as well as the desire of the mourner to die, and a description of the mourning rites offered for the deceased.Footnote ⁹¹ Certain stylistic features are also prominent: anaphora, anadiplosis, polyptoton, repetition, direct address to the dead, and inarticulate cries of grief. This musical heritage is strongly felt in early monody. Before 415 BCE, almost every composition for a singing actor in tragedy involves a musical part for the chorus as well, and much of the dramatic interest derives from their interplay.

Notably, there are no full-fledged monodies in the six certainly genuine and complete plays of Aeschylus – that is, there are no passages of actor’s lyric longer than ten lines that are not interrupted by the chorus or another actor.Footnote ⁹² In general, actor’s lyric is much less common than in the work of Sophocles and Euripides. Rather, the musical contribution of the chorus is central to the thematic and imagistic coherence of each drama: in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, for example, the chorus sing and dance for more than half of the play; in Agamemnon and Choephoroi for just under half.Footnote ⁹³ Prometheus Bound presents a more complicated case. The play contains two showstopping monodies: the lament of the Titan Prometheus and the maddened song of Io, the former lover of Zeus who is now pursued across the world by a stinging gadfly.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Sarah Olsen has explored, the monody of Io uses an extreme variety of music and meters to accentuate its central theme: Io’s failure to conform to a standard Greek model of maidenhood, with its rituals of orderly dance, song, and controlled sexual initiation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Io’s plight takes the form of a never-resting journey, captured by her agitated, erratic song and dance in the theater.Footnote ⁹⁶ Certainly, both Io’s monody and the lament of Prometheus are unlike anything in the other six plays attributed to Aeschylus and seem closer to the techniques of Sophocles and especially of Euripides. Unfortunately, both the authorship and date of Prometheus Bound are uncertain, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions from it about Aeschylean practice or even practice that necessarily influenced Euripides.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is likewise challenging to generalize from the evidence of Aeschylus’ fragmentary plays: it seems probable that the character of Orpheus sang in Bassarides, part of a lost Lycurgus trilogy, and several fragmentary lines of lyric hexameters have plausibly been attributed to the disguised goddess Hera in either Semele or Water Bearers.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet in these cases too, insofar as we can judge, passages of solo lyric seem to have been relatively brief and closely integrated with music from the chorus.

More about the origins of monody can be gleaned from Aeschylus’ other plays. Aeschylus composed three powerfully effective scenes where singing actors interact with a speaking or singing chorus: the lamentation of Xerxes in Persians, the Cassandra scene in Agamemnon, and the exchange of Orestes and Electra in Choephoroi.Footnote ⁹⁹ The highly emotional content of these scenes anticipates the subject matter of later monodies: Xerxes mourns his fall from glory; Cassandra communicates fantastic sights visible to no one else and predicts her own death; Orestes and Electra grieve for their dead father and make ready their plan for revenge. Yet Aeschylus’ lyric dialogues differ from later monody because of the integral and expansive role of the chorus, who in each case respond to the solo singer and shape the movement of the scene. The focus in these exchanges is on communication, or, in Cassandra’s case, on frustrated communication, rather than on the experience of the individual in isolation.

While Sophocles makes greater use of solo song in his plays than Aeschylus, actor’s lyric nevertheless remains tied to lamentation. No hero in the extant plays of Sophocles is restricted to purely iambic lines: Ajax, Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Electra, and Heracles all sing in lyric.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Fragmentary plays hint at even more singing roles; for instance, as a young man Sophocles himself was supposed to have sung and played the kithara onstage in the title role of his lost tragedy Thamyris, about the human poet who boasted he could defeat the Muses in song.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The ubiquity of such “singing heroes” in Sophocles’ plays has been explored by Sarah Nooter, who proposes that Sophocles has his central characters appropriate the language of lyric poetry in order to create an authoritative identity as poets and prophets, inspired by the gods.Footnote ¹⁰² Song confers power. Indeed, as Nooter states, “an ancient audience would recognize the hero in a Sophoclean play partly by his capacity to slide from spoken lines into song.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Drawing on the work of Bernard Knox, Nooter further suggests that the lyrics of the hero express a radical isolation from the other figures on the stage.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Yet there exists a tension between heroic isolation and the effect that the intransigence of the hero has on the community. Solo song in Sophocles is always embedded in a larger musical part that includes exchange with the chorus or with other actors, even if the soloist temporarily ignores them.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Even more than Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides seems to have been fascinated by the potential of monody from his earliest plays. Taken as a group, Euripides’ plays composed before 415 BCE bear out Edith Hall’s thesis that monody is primarily a mode of expression for royal women, and that the songs are strongly connected with lament.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These early monodies cluster in three main positions: before the parodos, in the first or second episode in pairing with another monody, or in the final scenes of the play.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Female singers outnumber male singers, and the positioning of monody seems to be affected by gender as well: women tend to sing earlier in the play, while men’s songs are reserved for the end. Monodies are usually sung in situations of loss and grief, as in Aeschylus and Sophocles, and frequently employ dochmiacs and anapests. There is movement over time toward greater length, more astrophic form, and more varied meter.

The evidence of lost and fragmentary plays from all stages of Euripides’ career corroborates these general trends. It is tantalizing to speculate, for instance, about the monody that began Andromeda, probably produced alongside Helen in 412 BCE; the heroine’s lament in lyric anapests, delivered by an actor chained to a rock and interacting with the echo of her own voice, presented such a striking and memorable musical scene that it formed the subject of an extended parody in Aristophanes’ comedy Thesmophoriazousai the following year.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Antiope, produced within a few years of Andromeda, also contained a monody early in the play, delivered by the musician Amphion and possibly dealing with the creation of the cosmos and the history of the lyre.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Fragments from Euripides’ Hypsipyle, performed around 410 BCE, preserve verses from a monody sung by Hypsipyle, once queen of Lemnos and now enslaved as a wet nurse to the infant Opheltes in Nemea; the extant lines suggest that the monody drew on various traditional forms of women’s song, including lullaby and weaving chant, as well as on lament.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Much exciting work remains to be done connecting the tragic fragments with larger trends in Euripides’ practice as a composer.

In order to compare the ways in which the individual tragedians compose lyric for solo voice, it may be helpful to consider specific examples. In the readings that follow, I draw attention to some relevant characteristics of three solo songs, one from Aeschylus, one from Sophocles, and one from an early play of Euripides, in such a way as to show both commonalities and changes in practice over time. These three songs will provide a backdrop against which we may more clearly discern the innovations of Euripides in his late plays.

(A) Our first example comes from the earliest extant tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians, produced in 472 BCE. The Persian king Xerxes, who dominates the last part of the play, does not utter a single line of spoken verse in iambic trimeter: his entire part is lyric.Footnote ¹¹¹ His long-delayed entry marks the dramatic climax to which the whole tragedy, with its anxious search for news of the battle of Salamis, has been leading.

Xerxes’ language characterizes him as barbaric, luxurious, effeminate, and above all defeated. His lyrics are marked by frequent cries of grief and distress, as he indulges in lamentation and self-pity. But he is not alone in his suffering, as a later monodist might be. After the opening in anapests – a meter generally associated with the entrance of a new character in tragedy – the king is joined by the chorus of Persian elders in a shared strophic composition.Footnote ¹¹² The scene includes seven strophic pairs in responsion as well as an epode. From line 1002 onward Xerxes and the chorus alternate individual lines, further binding together the king and his people. The immoderate grief of the Persians is thus contained in a tight, regular, and predictable musical form. This lyric exchange reinforces the condemnation of Xerxes’ decadent folly as expressed elsewhere in the play, but also unites the shattered kingdom in sorrow. Here is the anapestic opening, followed by the first strophe-antistrophe pair:

Several characteristic features of lament are immediately apparent. Both Xerxes and the chorus punctuate their lyrics with inarticulate, ritualized cries of grief (ἰώ, 908; ὀτοτοῖ, 919; αἰαῖ αἰαῖ, 928). Almost every line of the exchange includes explicit vocabulary of mourning and misfortune (δύστηνος, 909; τλήμων, 912; αἰάζει, 922; αἰακτός, 931; μέλεος, 932; θρηνητῆρος, 939). The chorus identify their outburst in the strophe as a “shout of lamentation” (πρόσφθογγόν … κακοφάτιδα βοάν, κακομέλετον ἰάν, 935–936), and Xerxes encourages them to continue with their discordant cry, “brimming with woes and tears” (ἵετ᾽ αἰανῆ [καὶ] πάνδυρτον δύσθροον αὐδάν, 941–942), to which they respond with another wail of grief (κλάγξω δ᾽ αὖ γόον ἀρίδακρυν, 946–947). The relationship between the monarch and his people is emphasized by his use of an imperative verb and their immediate response to his command (ἵετ᾽, 941). Later in the kommos, both parties use verbs that indicate that they are performing together the traditional, physical actions of lamentation, such as beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and rending their clothes (1046–1077).Footnote ¹¹³ The refrain “wail now in response to me” is repeated several times at the conclusion of the kommos as a demonstration of the unending antiphonal lament that will now occupy the Persians (βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά μοι, 1040, 1048, 1066). Each strophe is divided between Xerxes and the chorus, emphasizing the double tragedy of king and country.

Other features are typical of Aeschylus in his lyrics. The passage contains several unusual or compound adjectives (ἀτεκμαρτοτάτης, 910; τοξοδάμαντες, 926). Foreign loan-words and place-names lend an exotic flair (ἀγδαβάται, 924; Μαριανδυνοῦ, 937). Aeschylus’ famous use of abstruse and abstract language is immediately apparent. For instance, the downfall of Persia is couched in multivalent metaphors. The chorus lament for the noble army (στρατιᾶς ἀγαθῆς, 918) but also for the metonymical “high honor of Persian rule” (περσονόμου τιμῆς μεγάλης, 919). The soldiers who have died are bewailed not as individuals but as “the splendor” or “ordered beauty” of men (κόσμου τ᾽ ἀνδρῶν, 920). An important image throughout the play has been that of the Persian youth as the “flower” of the nation, a precious growth now “plucked” or “cut” in death (χώρας ἄνθος, 925). Continuing this image, the chorus imagine an unnamed, vengeful deity as having “plucked” or “cut down” this flowering crop of youths (δαίμων ἐπέκειρεν, 921).

As the earliest surviving example of actor’s song on the tragic stage, we may take this passage as a template for monody in subsequent decades, one that may be built upon and varied. The composition is explicitly one of mourning; it showcases elevated and abstract language, more similar to choral lyric than to iambic dialogue; and the antiphonal composition is carefully arranged to emphasize the bond between soloist and chorus.

(B) Our second example, from Sophocles’ Ajax, demonstrates the increased range and complexity of actor’s lyric a decade or two after Aeschylus’ death. The date of Ajax is uncertain, but it probably belongs to the middle period of Sophocles’ career, around the year 440 BCE.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The first episode of the play shows us the hero at his nadir of humiliation. After his mad slaughter of the herds, when he realizes what he has done, Ajax appears singing on the ekkyklema, the wheeled platform that displays the interior of his tent (348–429). Some passages of this kommos anticipate the monodies of Euripides’ early plays, for instance in their plangent grief and emphasis on Ajax’s desolate state. But the differences in approach and effect are significant. In a scene of eighty lines, Ajax sings three strophic pairs, while his spear-bride Tecmessa and the chorus of Salaminian sailors seek to restrain him in lines of spoken iambic trimeter.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The exchange involves attempts at argument and response: the chorus console Ajax, warn against an excess of grief, caution and comfort him; Tecmessa urges him to think of her and of his own former strength. Ajax, meanwhile, ignores them almost completely.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As William C. Scott writes, despite the interjections of Tecmessa and the chorus, Ajax “virtually sings one long lyric.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The variation in form – that is, sung lyrics for the hero versus spoken iambics for his wife and the chorus – emphasizes the lack of communication between the different parties.

The scene is dynamic rather than static: as the kommos progresses, the hero’s isolation becomes more extreme. In his opening lines, Ajax calls for death, curses his enemies, and laments his own fall from fortune. He never addresses his speech to any human being actually present, but his words and sentiments are comprehensible to them. Increasingly Ajax withdraws into himself, invoking absent or nonhuman witnesses: the hated Odysseus (379–381), his forefather Zeus (387), the Underworld (394–395), and the Trojan landscape (412–413). Yet there is something about his withdrawal that is not quite “into himself”; or we might say that he withdraws into a very public vision of himself. Ajax projects himself as the center of an increasingly expansive, supernatural world. The effect is to dramatize his self-inflicted, self-willed isolation from those who love him most and would try to help him.

Throughout the kommos, Ajax’s agitation is conveyed by apostrophe, impassioned repetition, and asyndeton. These poetic devices are brought to a climax in the final antistrophe:

The rhythm of the passage is almost entirely dochmiac, a tragic meter associated with excitement and emotional distress and particularly popular in later monodies.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The language is elevated, with resonances of epic and earlier tragedy. As Patrick Finglass comments, the range of vocabulary in this scene “simultaneously conveys the grandeur and bitterness of Ajax’s suffering.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Ajax sings not to his onstage audience but to the impersonal caves and coastline that have witnessed his greatness as a warrior and now witness his shame.

This passage of Sophocles is very unlike the example from Aeschylus. Compared to the lyrics of Xerxes in Aeschylus’ Persians, Ajax’s song is less closely linked to the surrounding action. The poet pauses the plot to explore Ajax’s reaction. The language, despite some unusual adjectives (e.g., ἁλίρροθοι, “surging”), is more condensed and clear, with shorter lines and stanzas, simpler syntax, and swifter transitions between ideas. Ajax’s kommos is similar to the antiphonal lament of Xerxes and the chorus in Persians in that it dramatizes grief following a loss of honor, but the focus is radically different: in Aeschylus the emphasis was on the vengeance meted out by an implacable deity against the Persian people as a group, while here it is on the suffering of the hero in isolation. Both songs touch on themes of loss, personal responsibility, and the individual’s relationship to the community, and both use the language of lamentation; but where Aeschylus’ handling is repeated and general, Sophocles hews closely to one person and his immediate, pressing situation. In this and other passages of actor’s lyric, Sophocles opens up new possibilities for characterization through the vivid portrayal of the turbulent inner state of an individual, a potentiality that will be developed further by Euripides.

(C) The two scenes we have analyzed thus far take us to the boundary of Edith Hall’s thesis that actor’s song in tragedy is the province of “royal women in extreme circumstances.” Xerxes and Ajax are royal and in extremis, but neither is female. It is arguable that in both cases grief and defeat have feminized these men, and that Xerxes is already less than a man because of his luxury and his foreignness. Nonetheless, for the full expression of unambiguously female grief in monody we must turn to the early plays of Euripides. Consequently, our third example comes from Euripides’ Hecuba, probably performed around 425 BCE.Footnote ¹²⁰ As we shall see, in this play Euripides exploits the connection of monody with lamentation to emphasize Hecuba’s apprehension, sorrow, and grief.

The prologue of the play is spoken by the ghost of Polydorus, the murdered son of Priam and Hecuba. After the ghost’s departure, Hecuba enters along with the other Trojan women who are awaiting enslavement and deportation to Greece. Her first words are in marching anapests, probably chanted, but she soon transitions to lyric anapests. The chorus inform Hecuba that as a final act of brutality before the departure of the ships, the Greeks plan to sacrifice her daughter Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. Hecuba’s response gives full range to her distress:

Hecuba’s monody contains many of the paradigmatic features of female lament in Greek culture.Footnote ¹²¹ The most marked is the insistent use of rhetorical questions that are posed and then either explicitly or implicitly rejected by the mourner. These questions are introduced by interrogative words, which cluster in remarkable concentration in this short section (τί, 154; ποίαν, 155; ποῖον, 155; τίς, 159; ποία, 159; ποία, 160; ποίαν, 162; ποῖ, 163; ποῦ, 163). Such repeated questions emphasize the mourner’s distress and confusion. Hecuba cannot comprehend what has happened to her and does not know how to proceed. In addition to the use of rhetorical questions, lamentation is signaled by the adjective “gone,” repeated in anaphora (φροῦδος, 160; φροῦδοι, 161). Finally, Hecuba expresses her longing for death by saying that life is no longer desirable for her (167–168). In this monody the plot comes entirely to a halt, while the emotions of Hecuba take center stage. In every sentence Hecuba focuses on herself, emphasized by the preponderance of first-person verbs (ἀπύσω, 154; ἀχώ, 155; στείχω, 163; σωθῶ, 164). When Hecuba mentions others, it is always in relation to herself: family, city, husband, and children have left her (159–161), no god will help or protect her (163–164), even the women of Troy who share her fate have destroyed her (165–167).

The language of the monody is highly charged throughout but straightforward in content and syntax. Euripides avoids the exotic adjectives of Aeschylus’ Persians as well as the specific details of individual experience that we observed in Sophocles’ Ajax. Rather, the power of the song comes primarily from sonic effects. The repetition and polyptoton of important words – ποίαν and ποῖον (155), δειλαία and δειλαίου (156), φροῦδος and φροῦδοι (160–161), ἀπωλέσατ’ and ὠλέσατ’ (167) – emphasize the obsessive nature of Hecuba’s thoughts and feelings. Euripides also juxtaposes words with similar sounds; for example, ἀπύσω and ἀχώ (154–155), στείχω and σωθῶ (163). Surely the virtuosic performance of the singer playing Hecuba and the piper accompanying the song were essential in creating a pathetic and stirring effect.

We have seen that both Aeschylus and Sophocles, albeit in different ways, exploit the interplay between the soloist and other characters onstage. So too Euripides. Although in this passage Euripides has Hecuba dwell obsessively on her own suffering, she is soon joined by another singer: when Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena emerges from the skene, her opening lyrics match Hecuba’s in a shared strophic composition (154–176 = 197–215).Footnote ¹²² The music of lamentation unites mother and daughter. Music also brings together the royal family and the women of the chorus. Over the course of the play, the suffering of Hecuba as an individual is balanced against the suffering of the Trojan women as a collective.Footnote ¹²³ Hecuba’s monody thus shows her as extraordinary in what she has suffered, but fundamentally connected to the other female characters in the play.

All three of the passages of actor’s lyric examined here have in common the expression of intense personal emotion, above all grief at loss and bereavement, anger, despair, and a desire for death. The connection between solo song and lamentation runs deep in Greek tragedy. All three tragedians draw heavily on the function of song in a largely oral culture to give ritualized expression to intense, conflicting emotions and to provide solace amid anxiety, loss, and confusion. As Charles Segal has shown, the traditional features of lamentation are both incorporated and transformed by tragedy. By absorbing inarticulate grief into formal lyric, as Segal writes, “the tragic poet is able to identify the emotional experience of suffering with the musical and rhythmic impulse of dance and song.”Footnote ¹²⁴

As we have seen, Xerxes in Persians is formally restricted to sung verse, a limitation unique in extant tragedy; his lyrics emphasize his grief and utter defeat; and through lamentation he is bound together with the community represented by the chorus of Persian elders. Compared to Xerxes, Sophocles’ Ajax displays a greater formal and emotive range, encompassing iambic dialogue and extended rhesis as well as song; song marks a moment of extreme distress, and emphasizes the isolation of the hero. Yet Sophocles resembles Aeschylus in that he embeds the actor’s lyric within a larger exchange with Tecmessa and the chorus. The singing actor is chiefly conceived of in terms of his membership of or isolation from a group. Likewise, in Euripides’ Hecuba, although Hecuba focuses almost exclusively on herself, she is later joined musically to both the chorus of Trojan women and to her daughter Polyxena. In all three cases, actor’s song engages with the language, themes, and meters of lamentation and employs an antiphonal musical structure shared between soloist and chorus drawn from actual Greek songs of mourning.

Monody in the Late Plays of Euripides

The practices of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and also of Euripides in his earlier works, are in contrast to the innovative approach to monody taken by Euripides in his late plays. In the plays produced after 415 BCE – in particular Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes – Euripides departs from the model of actor’s lyric established by his predecessors and followed in his own previous work. In these later compositions, solo song is not restricted to women, to royalty, or to situations that call for lamentation; nor is the soloist necessarily closely tied to the chorus. Instead, the monodies of these four plays constitute a departure from tradition, both formally and in the information they convey about the singer.

First, a word on production dates. As always with Greek tragedy, this issue presents some difficulty. Not all extant plays are dated, and not all dates are secure. Very many more plays were produced than are extant, written by the three canonical Athenian playwrights and by many others. Of the seventeen surviving plays of Euripides (not including the probably spurious fourth-century Rhesus or the satyr-play Cyclops), we have fairly secure production dates for nine plays, based on the information recorded in ancient hypotheses and scholia. The remaining plays can be dated relative to these on stylistic grounds. From the evidence of the securely dated plays, scholars have concluded that as time went on Euripides introduced various modifications, in particular increasing the frequency of resolution (i.e., the substitution of two short syllables for a long) in his lines of iambic trimeter and making greater use of passages in trochaic tetrameter.Footnote ¹²⁵ Although we cannot be sure in which year exactly a play was produced, the cumulative evidence allows us to divide Euripides’ theatrical career into stages – early, middle, and late – with some confidence. In the last decade of Euripides life, five extant plays have certain dates: Trojan Women was produced in 415 BCE and won second prize; Helen was produced in 412 BCE, along with the fragmentary Andromeda; Orestes was produced in 408 BCE; and in 405 BCE, after Euripides’ death, the poet’s son (or perhaps nephew) mounted the late poet’s three tragedies Iphigenia in Aulis, Bacchae, and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth. The other plays I discuss in this book – Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, and Phoenician Women – were produced sometime during this final decade, and probably in this order, although the exact chronology is not crucial for my argument.

In each of the four chapters that follow, I discuss the monody or monodies in one play, looking at choice of singer, positioning, meter, strophic form, language, and imagery; I also offer an interpretation that locates monody in the larger design of the drama. In these four plays, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy and builds upon it. Monody becomes a site of formal innovation and experimentation. At the same time, it facilitates the creation of an individual voice of broad expressive range, a voice both internally coherent and distinct from all others.

The first chapter presents Euripides’ use of monody to express a contest of ideas in Ion, produced around 414 BCE.Footnote ¹²⁶ In this play there is no formal agōn, where two figures set forth arguments in a direct struggle for dominance. Nevertheless, in Ion the central conflict of the play does receive its most explicit expression through the diametrical opposition of passionately held views. These views are expressed at length, but in song and separately, in the monodies of Ion and Creusa. In the prologue, the orphan Ion sings a paean to Apollo, the transcendent god at whose temple he serves. Through his monody the young man manifests his devotion to Apollo, his concern with purity and propriety, and his position as an orphan. The Athenian queen Creusa has had a much more direct and troubled experience of Apollo, repeatedly alluded to in the opening scenes. At the pivotal moment of the play, she delivers a musical accusation against the god who once violated her and, as she believes, left their infant son to die. Is Apollo benevolent and bright, or violent and uncaring? Because the god himself never appears onstage, the incompatible perspectives of Ion and Creusa demand interpretive reconciliation in the mind of the audience. In the two monodies, Euripides brings together the legalistic exposition typical of agonistic rhesis and the emotionality of lyric song.

The second chapter takes up the idea of monody as a vehicle for character. In Iphigenia among the Taurians, produced around 414–412 BCE, Euripides composes two monodies that highlight two critical stages of the heroine’s emotional journey from stasis to purposeful action.Footnote ¹²⁷ The virgin Iphigenia, rescued from her father Agamemnon’s attempt to sacrifice her and magically transported by the goddess Artemis to the distant realm of the Taurians, is held as a captive priestess, forced by the king to oversee human sacrifices. Her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades arrive by chance in the land of the Taurians; after recognizing each other by signs, Orestes and Iphigenia determine to escape. In her first monody, which opens the play, Iphigenia mourns the unfulfilled potential of her young life, where each status was canceled, each promised doing undone. This vivid portrait of Iphigenia’s inner state creates context for the scenes that follow, where she hides her true feelings and narrowly avoids sacrificing her own brother. Iphigenia’s second monody, delivered after the reunion scene with Orestes, marks a shift in her mind and a crisis in the plot. Here we see Euripides taking the traditional form and turning it to new and innovative purpose: monody becomes a site for deliberative thought and decisive action, acting as a rhesis wherein the heroine formulates a plan for the future. Iphigenia’s resolve is expressed not through a reasoned weighing of options in iambic trimeter but through song. The heroine’s second monody represents not only emotion but motion of the mind as well; a gathering for the leap forward and the leap itself. The two monodies in this play thus mark two points in the inflection of Iphigenia’s character, as she leaves behind her status as a passive victim and finds her purpose as the functional head of her family.

The third chapter explores Phoenician Women, produced around 410 BCE.Footnote ¹²⁸ In this play actor’s lyric takes on a role of unprecedented importance in the shaping of plot and in the development of character, counterposed to and to some extent replacing choral lyric. The Phoenician women who make up the chorus are outsiders to Thebes; by contrast, the three monodists stand at the very heart of the city, its inmost, incestuous natives. Antigone, Jocasta, and Oedipus – all singing characters – are inextricably bound up in the ruin of their house. Monody translates the dramatic movement of the play into something distinctively inward and personal: all action is concentrated into reaction. Framing the quarrel and combat of Polyneices and Eteocles, the four scenes of actor’s lyric in the play vividly portray the effect of the catastrophe on the individual members of the family. Three of these four lyric scenes feature Antigone; through song Euripides traces her progression from a sheltered maiden to a distraught mourner and finally to a mature woman who takes charge of her own and her father’s fate. As in the case of Iphigenia in Iphigenia among the Taurians, the multiple songs of this virginal heroine show a progression from powerlessness to agency. Euripides here experiments with monody not only as a structural device to shape plot and create meaning but also as a means for the development of a complex female figure through the presentation of her evolving emotional state.

In the fourth chapter I turn to Orestes, produced in 408 BCE, which stands as the culmination of a decade of experimentation with monody as a versatile dramatic form.Footnote ¹²⁹ At the climax of the play, the disappearance of Helen is reported not by a messenger in an iambic rhesis but by an anonymous, enslaved Phrygian in a virtuosic monody that is twice as long as all the combined songs of the chorus. The tonal and rhetorical ambiguities in the Phrygian’s song underscore the increasing fragmentation and chaos of the plot. This monody overturns the expectations of the audience through its combination of the traditionally antithetical genres of monody and messenger speech. The Phrygian is an unprecedented type of narrator in tragedy, offering instead of an objective reporting of events a “polyphonic” account that draws on a multiplicity of genres and styles.

In the last decade of his career, Euripides establishes monody as a dramatic form of considerable versatility and power. In examining these four plays, I hope to show some of the various potentials of this new Euripidean music as a major structural element in tragic drama, insofar as it can heighten emphasis, allow for the development of emotional states both subtle and extreme, reveal and deepen character, and mirror thematic movements. The poetry is charged with increased affect and expressivity; at the same time, it articulates a new self-consciousness about the reciprocal capacities of form and content to shape one another. The playwright repeatedly reconfigures the relationship between form and content, expanding the range of what can happen onstage, of what can be said and sung. Here we may discern the shift of sensibility in Euripides’ late work, which proceeds pari passu with an apparent loosening of structural demands, or what one with equal justice might recognize as an increase in degrees of freedom and a new conception of order: a liberation of form.