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VI. The Chorus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

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Extract

Though lacking the pre-eminence which it apparently had earlier in the development of tragic drama, the chorus remained a central element in the plays of Sophocles. We find in his works, as in those of Aeschylus and Euripides, that counterpoint between heroes and chorus which is a major aspect of the doubleness of Greek tragedy. The fates of Oedipus, Ajax, Heracles, and the rest are not private or claustrophobic (contrast Seneca); on the contrary, they are played out in public, before groups of ordinary people. These groups, again as in the other tragedians, are socially or politically marginal: women (Elec., Trach.), old men (Ant., Oed. Col., Oed. Tyr.), subordinates (Ajax, Phil.). The identity of the groups, far from being a matter of indifference, may materially affect the way in which the plot of the drama is inflected. We know from Dio Chrysostom (Or. 52.15) that, whereas Sophocles’ chorus comprised sailors who had come along with Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Aeschylus and Euripides brought on a chorus of inhabitants of Lemnos. It can hardly be doubted that in choosing as he did Sophocles intended to emphasize Philoctetes’ utter isolation.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 16: Sophocles , 1984 , pp. 22 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes

1. ‘Apparently’: because the early history of tragedy, hazy at the best of times, became hazier still with the downward revision of the dating of Aeschylus’ Suppliants (cf. ch. II n. 16 above). (A sensible discussion of the origins of tragedy is now available in the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1 (Greek), 258ff.) ‘Pre-Suppliants’ but still essential as a study of the development of the chorus is Kranz, W., Stasimon (Berlin, 1933)Google Scholar; also useful, on this as on other matters relating to the chorus, is Pickard-Cambridge (1968), ch. 5.

2. Cf.Kirkwood, G. M., ‘The dramatic role of the chorus in Sophocles’, Phoenix 8 (1954), 1–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Cf. ch. V n. 25 above.

4. See Schmidt, J.-U., Sophokles: Philoktet. Eine Struckturanalyse (Heidelberg, 1973), pp. 57-8Google Scholar.

5. On the tricky matter of the ‘limitations’ of the chorus see H. Lloyd-Jones’ review of G. Müller’s commentary on Ant., CR 19 (1969), 25 Google Scholar. There has been a good deal of controversy, in relation to Ant., about how far the chorus’ views are ‘in character’ and how far they go beyond it: Cf.Müller, G., ‘Überlegungen zum Chor der Antigone’, Hermes 89 (1961), 398–422 Google Scholar; Alexanderson, B., ‘Die Stellung des Chors in der Antigone’, Eranos 64 (1966), 85–105 Google Scholar; Easterling, P. E., ‘The second stasimon of Antigone ’, in Dionysiaca, ed. Dawe, R. D., Diggle, J. and Easterling, P. E. (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 141-58Google Scholar.

6. On this convention of even-handedness see Burton (1980), p. 35.

7. Sophocles’ liking for a choral diminuendo at the end of a play is discussed by Hester, D. A., ‘Very much the safest plan, or last words in Sophocles’, Antichthon 7 (1973), 8–13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Reinhardt (1979), p. 82.

9. See Burton (1980), p. 135.

10. See Burton (1980), p. 269.

11. For help with the details of tragic metre one may with profit turn to Dale, A. M., The Lyric Metres of Greek Drama2 (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar and West, M. L., Greek Metre (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.