Stesichorus on stage

The influence of Stesichorus on Greek tragedy is generally accepted. 1 Indeed, scholars have gone as far as to call the poems ‘tragedies in embryo’, 2 or to describe Stesichorean characterisation as ‘a prototype of the tragic principal’. 3 Yet most discussions of the relationship between Stesichorus and tragedy suggest little detailed engagement between the texts. Rather, the focus is confined either to the broad shaping of the plot (for example, mythological innovations such as Helen’s absence from Troy), or stylistic devices such as tragic irony, the significance of speeches, or the preponderance of female characters. 4 To some extent this is an inevitable consequence of the randomness of selection. Even where Stesichorus’ choice of myth overlaps with a tragic version, if only a few lines of the Stesichorean poem survive, we are lucky if there is any visible connection between the texts. In the case of the Palinode, for example, our knowledge of the plot enables us to see links with Euripides’ Helen, but too little remains to allow us to comment on anything other than the general handling of the myth. 5 Is it then impossible to identify Stesichorean traces in our close reading of tragedy? This article will argue that it is not, and that a close analysis can shed light on how the tragedians allude to the details of his poetry. Tragedy’s metrical and thematic flexibility and its tendency towards mimesis make it adept at incorporating other poetic forms. In the main, interactions between lyric and tragedy tend to take the form of allusions to the tropes of lyric genres rather than intertexts with specific pieces. 6 Tragedy is aimed at a mass audience and to be successful, tragedians must take account of differing levels of knowledge. The use of (say) a paian-tag is likely to be more accessible than an allusion to a particular Pindaric Paian, since many audience members may not know particular texts, but still have a feeling for what certain genres tend to sound like. While some lyric forms were still performed in Athens, an individual would only know canonical works if they had formed part of his education (reinforced through institutions such as the symposium, which would encourage him to memorise and re-perform famous pieces). Moreover, tragedy (unlike comedy, which can explicitly alert the audience to intertextuality) is confined to its mythological setting, and allusions must be intelligible on their own merits. We find relatively few references to lyric poets compared to allusions to Homer, whose status as the ‘core curriculum’ in a literary education would have made him more widely accessible than other poets. Yet although tragedy prefers the generic to the specific, we nevertheless find intertextuality with lyric poetry. An example is the evocation of Pindar’s ninth Paian in the parodos of Sophocles’ Antigone, where the opening words ἀκτὶς ἀελίου are the same. It seems likely that only a limited section of Sophocles’ audience would have recognised the