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9. Rhetoric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2019

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Extract

The first twelve lines of this text were ascribed to Sophocles’ Tereus by the fifth-century ad anthologist Stobaeus, whose works, unlike Sophocles’ play, did survive antiquity; they appear in Radt's edition of the fragments as fr. 583. Scholars have long supposed, rightly, that they were delivered by Procne, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, and wife of Tereus, king of Thrace. After living with her husband for a while she grew lonely, and asked him to fetch her sister Philomela from Athens. Tereus did so, but on the return journey he raped her, cutting out her tongue to prevent her accusing him. She was, however, able to communicate to her sister what had happened by weaving the story into a tapestry; together, the sisters conspired to kill Tereus’ child by Procne, Itys, and served the poor boy's flesh as a meal to his unsuspecting father. Once he discovered the truth he pursued them, and the gods turned all three into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow. Procne in her new form became a byword for misery: the nightingale's call was thought to symbolize her perpetual lamentation for her own child, whom she had killed in pursuit of a terrible revenge.

Type
II Interpretation
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 Finglass 2007d on El. 107.

2 For a discussion of the fragment, together with the other evidence for the play then known, see Coo 2013b.

3 Finglass 2016c, 2017g, 2019; Slattery 2016.

4 Mossman 2001, 2005, 2012; Lewis 2015. Also McClure 1999; Foley 2001; Chong-Gossard 2008; Van Emde Boas 2017; Finglass and Coo 2019a.

5 Hom. Od. 4.566–8, 6.43–5.

6 Finglass 2016c: 76–7, 2019.

7 Buxton 1982.

8 Finglass 2009b: 92–5, 2011b on 485–524, 2020.