Euripides

Nineteen plays survive under Euripides’ name, eighteen tragedies and the satyr-play Cyclops.^[1] The Greek text on this site is Gilbert Murray’s Oxford edition (Euripidis Fabulae) in the Perseus Digital Library. Gregory counts nine plays datable from external evidence;^[2] the Cambridge Companion’s chronology dates more, several with a query.

(Chronology = Easterling 1997; Gregory = Gregory 2005.) Gregory’s nine securely datable plays are Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Trojan Women, Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes, Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis. She gives the Phoenician Women as 409 without a query. She gives the two posthumous plays as “ca. 407”, where the chronology has “after 406”.^[2] The Ion is not dated in either list.

Dating by metre. For the rest, the trimeter is the clock. After the Hippolytus (428) resolution becomes steadily more frequent. By the Orestes (408) some 35% of trimeters show it. So it offers a useful way of dating plays for which there is no direct evidence.^[3] The undated plays are placed by it against the dated ones (Gregory, citing the table of Cropp and Fick 1985).^[4]

The method goes back to Zielinski (1925). He divided the plays into four periods by the growing share of resolved long elements in the spoken trimeter.^[5]

The figures differ. Halleran, citing the same table, gives the rise as from about 7% in the early plays to over 40% in the later ones.^[6] West’s figure for the Orestes is 35%. West also speaks of a “transitional period” (Hecuba, Troades, IT, Ion) in which lyric anapaests are most used.^[7] The plays after Andromache have astrophic dochmiacs.^[8] Dactylo-epitrite is rare after 415.^[9]

Groupings. The plays of 415 seem to have formed a connected set on the Trojan War, reminiscent of an Aeschylean trilogy.^[10] The Alcestis of 438 combines tragic and satyric elements. Heracles plays his satyr-play role of the strongman who overpowers the ogre.^[11]

Doubtful pieces. Authorship of the Rhesus is disputed. Easterling thinks it probably a fourth-century play. Cropp takes it to be (probably) a fourth-century play that replaced Euripides’ own Rhesus in the corpus. Burnett argued that Euripides wrote it young and made it perverse on purpose. Liapis argued that it was composed for a Macedonian production under Philip II.^[12] West names it separately from the plays of Euripides.^[9]

Finglass leaves the Rhesus out of his count as wrongly attributed. On that count eighteen of about ninety plays survive, about a fifth of the whole.^[13] Most scholars now think the transmitted Rhesus spurious, though Euripides did write a play of that name.^[14]

The transmitted ending of Iphigenia at Aulis (1578–1629) is in West’s view a wretched makeshift. Its author admitted features of the comic trimeter.^[15] Both the Iphigenia at Aulis and the Phoenician Women are heavily interpolated.^[16]

The lost plays. Papyri and ancient information give substantial insight into several lost plays. These are the Telephus (438), Phaethon and Erechtheus (around 420), Alexandros (415), Hypsipyle and Antiope, and the late Captive Melanippe. Papyri also supply scenes from Cretans (430s?) and Cresphontes (mid-420s).^[17] The Archelaus, for the Macedonian king, was supposedly produced shortly before his death.^[18]

What follows traces Euripides’ text through antiquity. The selection of plays, the Byzantine manuscripts and the modern editions are on the Manuscripts tab. The general story is on How the texts reached us.

The most performed tragedian. From 386 one “old” tragedy was revived each year at the City Dionysia. The provision was used mostly for Euripides. One of his Iphigenia plays was put on in 341, and the Orestes in 340 and again in the third century.^[1] An inscription records the festivals of 341–339. It shows Euripides chosen for the revival in each year, by the actor Neoptolemus in 341 and 340.^[2] His songs travelled too. Athenians captured in Sicily are supposed to have saved their lives by singing them.^[3] Lucian tells of a craze for them centuries later.^[4]

Actors’ lines. Popularity had a cost. Euripides was the most popular of the dramatists. So the Alexandrian critics found more lines altered or added by actors in his plays than anywhere else.^[5] The scholia are the ancient notes copied in the margins of the manuscripts. They blame actors for Medea 85–88, and for Orestes 1366–1368. These lines are said to have been composed so that the actor playing the Phrygian need not jump from the roof.^[5]

Lines added to a text by a later hand are called interpolations. Several kinds are recognised. Some are lines repeated from elsewhere in the play (Medea 1324 at 468) or from another play (Phoenician Women 972 at Helen 780). Some are additions for pathos (Medea 1233–1235). Some are whole passages that fit another poet’s plot (Phoenician Women 1625–1757, after Sophocles). And some are political reflections (Orestes 907–913).^[6]

An official copy. About 330 the orator Lycurgus had an official copy of the three tragedians made. Actors were not to depart from it. His one surviving speech quotes fifty-five lines of Euripides’ Erechtheus.^[7] Whether musical notation survived in such copies and reached Alexandria is disputed. Fleming and Kopff argue that musical and metrical knowledge was handed down; Parker and Prauscello, that it was lost.^[8] Wilson thinks it “may well be” that it was transmitted with the texts.^[9]

Alexandria. Aristophanes of Byzantium devoted himself to tragedy, and material from him reaches us in the scholia to Euripides. A hypothesis is a short introduction to a play. The scholarly hypotheses prefixed to some plays give the date, the other plays of the year and the prize, and they go back to him. He also discussed variant readings at Orestes 713, 1038 and 1287.^[10]

The notes at the end of the Medea and Orestes name Dionysius and Didymus as the immediate sources of the scholia.^[11] An inscription advertises volumes of Euripides. It shows that plays were sometimes sold in rough alphabetical order, five or six to a roll, perhaps following an Alexandrian edition.^[11]

Ancient copies. Euripides is unusually well represented by ancient books. A fragment of the Cretans is an early example of a parchment book (P.Berol. 13217). The Hypsipyle is written on the back of a roll, across the fibres, when material was short (P.Oxy. 852).^[12] Fragments of the Phaethon and Melanippe Desmotis from the fifth century AD show that plays outside the school selection were still read.^[13]

Colometry is the division of lyric into its metrical units, or cola, set out line by line. Lyric was written as prose until the colometrized editions associated with Aristophanes of Byzantium.^[14]

After about 200 BC the papyri and the medieval manuscripts divide tragic lyric into cola in much the same way. That uniformity seems to come from Alexandrian editing, and the name attached to it is Aristophanes of Byzantium’s.^[15] The short cola helped readers to recognise familiar rhythms inside longer periods. The layout also used indentation. Trimeters stood at the normal margin, longer lines such as trochaic tetrameters stood out to the left, and lyric cola were set in to the right. Accents and breathings, also credited to Aristophanes, were used far less in drama than in Homer.^[15]

Finglass urges caution. There is no hard evidence that Aristophanes edited all of Euripides, and confident claims about his editorial work in tragedy should be treated sceptically.^[16]

A papyrus of Orestes 338–345 has musical notation. It is the oldest substantial stretch of written melody on papyrus, and it may preserve Euripides’ own melody. Points over some syllables apparently mark a rising beat (arsis) on the first and third elements of the dochmiac.^[17] The papyrus dates from no earlier than about 280 BC. It writes the monosyllable ἐν (en), “in”, as e-en, sung to two notes.^[3]

School author. In the schools of the Hellenistic kingdoms Euripides was among the most read authors, with Homer, Hesiod, Menander and Pindar.^[18] His corpus, like others, came to include inauthentic material.^[19]

This tells how the plays came through late antiquity and Byzantium to the printed page. The general history is on How the texts reached us.

Two routes. From about AD 250 quotation narrows to ten plays of Euripides. Nine of them carry ancient scholia, the notes of ancient commentators: Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenician Women, Hippolytus, Medea, Alcestis, Andromache, Rhesus and Trojan Women. The tenth is the Bacchae.^[1]

By a happy accident nine more survived from the end of antiquity. Their titles begin with epsilon, eta, iota and kappa: Helen, Electra, Heracles, Children of Heracles, Suppliants, Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Iphigenia at Aulis and Cyclops. They have no scholia. They are thought to be the remnant of an Alexandrian edition arranged in rough alphabetical order. These “alphabetic” plays survive only in one fourteenth-century manuscript in Florence. The Bacchae survives only in it and a copy of it.^[1]

The two groups had different fates. The “selected” plays are found in many manuscripts, and the triad far more often than the rest. The alphabetic plays were one volume of an alphabetical complete edition, and they survive in a single manuscript and its copies.^[2] The Bacchae belongs to the selection even though only two manuscripts preserve it.^[3] Both of them date from the early fourteenth century. One breaks off at line 755, and the text has a large gap in the final scenes.^[4]

Finglass thinks a single “selector” choosing plays for schools unlikely. The selection, in his view, happened gradually and naturally.^[5]

The find was made by Demetrius Triclinius at Thessalonica. He had copies made by his pupils or in a local scriptorium, with many alterations in his own hand. These copies are our only source for the alphabetic plays. So for about half of Euripides’ surviving work we depend largely on Triclinius.^[6]

Triclinius and responsion. Triclinius had studied Hephaestion’s metrical handbook. He knew that the lyrics of tragedy should respond exactly: the antistrophe should repeat the metre of the strophe. In his autograph Euripides (Laur. 32.2) he enforced this with “Procrustean violence”.^[7] At Electra 435–437 he used responsion, and the parody of the passage in Aristophanes’ Frogs (1314 ff.). With them he made one good correction, then a bad one.^[8]

Triclinius rediscovered strophic responsion in tragic lyric and used it to emend the text. Modern scholarship on Euripides begins with him.^[9]

The school plays. The manuscripts of the plays read in Byzantine schools cannot be sorted into clean families. Readers compared copies and entered variants, so the tradition is “contaminated”.^[10] In the thirteenth century the syllabus narrowed to a “triad”. For Euripides this was the Hecuba, Orestes and Phoenician Women, copied in hundreds.^[11]

Byzantine appreciation was “superficial in the extreme”. Michael Psellus seriously compared Euripides’ iambics with those of the seventh-century George of Pisidia.^[12] A palimpsest is a manuscript whose first text was scraped off and written over. One in Jerusalem preserves parts of several plays copied in the eleventh century, without improving the text much.^[13]

Print. The first printed edition of the extant plays was the Aldine of 1503. It overlooked the Electra, which Petrus Victorius first printed in 1545.^[14]

Four plays had already been printed, in Janus Lascaris’ edition (Florence, 1494): Alcestis, Andromache, Hippolytus and Medea. The sources differ on the first Electra: Finglass dates it to 1546. Willem Canter’s edition of 1571 was the first to print the lyrics in responding verse.^[15]

Modern editions. The standard text is James Diggle’s Oxford edition in three volumes. The sources differ on its dates: 1982–1994 in the Cambridge Companion, 1984–1994 in Gregory.^[16] Kovacs’s bilingual Loeb (1994–2004) is attentive to Diggle’s text but independent of it.^[17]

The fragments are in Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1971–2004). It has replaced Nauck’s edition of 1889.^[18] In 1997 Kannicht’s Euripides volume was still forthcoming.^[19] Zuntz (1965) settled the relation of two key manuscripts. He showed that a supposed punctuation mark was a piece of straw.^[20]

This site quotes Gilbert Murray’s text, which Perseus makes openly available. Editors differ at Bacchae 199–203. Murray printed the transmitted text, Diggle brackets the lines, and Kovacs proposes a lost line instead.^[21]

Metre as evidence. Editors test the text against the regularities of tragic metre. At Iphigenia at Aulis 1578–1614 Porson’s Law and other rules are broken again and again, and editors diagnose a later hand. In Ion 1 they emend to restore the rule.^[22]

At Helen 174 ~ 186 a syncopated metron answers a full one. A syncopated metron has lost one of its short or anceps elements. The text has been doubted, and many scholars reject the few parallels in Euripides and Aeschylus.^[23] In Orestes 140–152 line 145 responds with 157. This shows that a doubtful sequence there is a baccheus.^[24] An elision at Troades 129 is queried as “corrupt?”.^[25] At Andromache 1035 ~ 1045 West suspects the text.^[26]

The trimeter and its chronology

The Nurse’s prologue to the Medea shows the early Euripidean trimeter, still close to Aeschylus and Sophocles:

Every line has the penthemimeral caesura, a word-end after the fifth element. A resolution is a long element replaced by two shorts. There is one, in line 2: κυ-α- of κυανέας, in the third princeps (the third long of the line). It falls within a word of three or more syllables, as resolutions usually do.^[1] Line 3 ends with brevis in longo (-τε): a short syllable stands in the final long position.

That restraint does not last. In Aeschylus and Sophocles there is on average at most one resolved line in ten. In Euripides resolution grows steadily more frequent after the Hippolytus (428 BC). By the Orestes of 408 about 35% of the trimeters have it, some of them two or three times over, as Or. 643:^[2]

The two syllables of a resolution normally belong to one word. Where they are split, the first word is a monosyllable, or at most a disyllable closely linked to the next, as Or. 2:^[1]

A prepositive is a short word, such as an article or preposition, that leans on the word after it. Euripides lets a prepositive supply the first syllable or two of an anapaestic foot. In tragedy this licence is otherwise confined to proper names.^[3] Porson’s Law holds: when the ninth element, the last anceps, is long, no word may end after it. Andr. 230, where γάρ (gar) adheres to the preceding word, is tolerated:^[4]

Trochaic tetrameters return in his later plays.^[5] Havet’s Law governs the line-opening, and it has three seeming exceptions in Euripides. A double short in the first three metra is admitted in tragedy only for a name, as IA 882:^[6]

A wider range of words. As resolution increases, the trimeters also admit differently shaped words and show increasing rhythmic variety.^[7] The increase let a larger vocabulary into the line, and made the speech sound more natural.^[8]

Stichomythia is line-by-line dialogue, and it is a Euripidean favourite. His later plays have scenes of more than a hundred consecutive lines of it (Ion 262–368). The Ion also has a very extended run of lines split between speakers (530–562).^[9]

Speech, recitative and song

The three modes of delivery could alternate within a single scene. Recitative is chanted verse, between speech and full song. The opening of the Medea shows how the metres and dialect forms differentiate the action:^[10]

All of Medea’s utterances up to 213 are sung. The Nurse only speaks and chants, which marks her subordinate role. But her chants are in the same metre as Medea’s songs.^[11] Whether the Nurse’s lines are wholly recitative depends on the edition. Easterling follows Diggle’s text, which gives her non-lyric dialect throughout. Some manuscripts imply a mixture of recitative and lyric.^[12]

The lyric cola of Euripides are described below. How much of each play is sung, and by whom, is on the Chorus and Actors’ song tabs.

Dochmiacs. The dochmiac is the metre of excited song in tragedy. In dochmiac contexts Euripides also uses an anapaestic metron or dimeter + iambic colon. After Andromache his dochmiacs are mostly astrophic, that is, not set in strophes. Or. 140–152 is a worked example.^[1] Euripides’ characteristic sung exchanges are mostly astrophic and often in dochmiacs.^[2] Two short lines from that passage show the basic unit, the dochmius:

Astrophic song and the editor. From the plays after Andromache onwards, Euripides’ dochmiacs mostly stand outside strophes. They come in long arias and dialogues full of problems.^[3] There is then no antistrophe to check against. The practical method is to count off runs of short syllables in eights, and to look for coincidence of word-end and metron-end. If the sum fails, try an iambic dimeter, or cretic plus dochmius.^[4] The music leads to the same difficulty. With the New Music it can be hard, and sometimes impossible, to be sure what the cola are.^[5]

Lyric iambics. In the later plays, above all in solo arias, the iambic sequence is divided so that trochaic phrasing proliferates. A πνῖγος (pnigos, “choker”) is a long run of verse with no pause for breath. Hel. 167–178 runs lekythia and trochaic metra together into a true πνῖγος, with no pause possible. Yet “it has to end iambic”.^[6]

Aeolic strophes are typical above all of late Euripides. There their even, unchanging rhythm can be almost hypnotic. Phoen. 202–213 is glyconics and pherecrateans. Resolution is admitted most often before the choriamb. It yields shapes like ⏑ — ⏖ — ⏖ ⏑ ⏑ ⏖ at Ba. 427.^[7]

Lyric anapaests. Euripides uses them more than any other poet, above all in Hecuba, Troades, IT and Ion. Ion 154–169 is the specimen. It has catalectic dimeters of seven longs and no caesura.^[8]

Ionics are occasional elsewhere, but Euripides uses them most in the Bacchae. Their association with devotional cult, and perhaps a sense of the Asiatic, explains their prominence there.^[9] Ionics can suggest a menacing or exotic Asian rhythm, of the kind used in ecstatic worship, as at Ba. 64–72.^[10] The metre of the parodos is a traditional cult metre. It is used elsewhere in orientalizing and Dionysiac contexts.^[11] From the parodos:

The first colon is io∧ io. It has the short metron ⏑ ⏑ — (io∧), which is also found in Aeschylus.^[12] The close ⏑ ⏑ — ⏑ — ⏒ — is one of the recognised ionic strophe-endings.^[13] The scansion needs long ᾱ in ἅπας (70) and long ῡ in Διόνυσον (72).

In Phoen. and Ba. Euripides admits the resolutions ⏑ ⏑ ⏖ — and ⏑ ⏑ — ⏖. Late in the century a single short may replace the initial double short (Phoen. 1539 f.).^[12]

Dactyls and dactylo-epitrite. A dactyl resolved to four shorts may occur at Andr. 490.^[14] Dactylo-epitrite is rare after 415. It is seen in Med. 410–420, where colon-division coincides with word-division throughout:^[15]

In the Medea dactylo-epitrite runs through all four stasima, which Dale analyses in her Metrical Analyses.^[16] In the second stasimon (627–662) the first strophic pair is dactylo-epitrite and ends in an ithyphallic. The second pair is first choriambic, then iambo-anapaestic, then choriambic again.^[17] The fourth stasimon (976–1001) is dactylo-epitrite. Its closing cola are catalectic iambic trimeters, which Dale treats as virtually equivalent to an epitrite and an ithyphallic.^[18]

Old forms too. Euripides does not move only towards metrical freedom. Some songs use metres traditionally associated with cult songs. Two are Ion’s paean to Apollo (Ion 112–143) and the hymn to Dionysus that forms the parodos of the Bacchae.^[19] The refrain of Ion’s paean is a molossus, — — —. It is a metre that recalls archaic invocations of the gods:^[20]

Three things set the later Euripides apart. His songs stop responding, they mix their metres, and his spoken verse loosens. The sources connect the first two with the “new music” of the second half of the fifth century.^[1] They do not connect the third.

From strophe to aria. In a strophic song the antistrophe repeats the metre of the strophe; this repetition is called responsion. In fifth-century tragedy it is eventually given up for “metrically free (monostrophic) composition”. That is the form of the arias of late Euripidean tragedy. It is also the form of the lyrics of Timotheus of Miletus, the avant-garde musician of the late fifth century.^[2]

The same change looks different from the composer’s side. Without strophes, the words never had to be fitted to a melody fixed in advance. The tune could follow every shade of feeling in the words. In such conditions a change of metre came naturally.^[3] In astrophic song, song without strophes, the word accent had some effect on the melody.^[4]

Polymetry. Polymetry is the use of many metres in one song. The long astrophic monodies (solo songs) and lyric dialogues of the last plays of Euripides and Sophocles show more of it than anything else.^[3] The same polymetry was characteristic of the dithyrambic poets of the age. Timotheus’ Persae moves through iambic, choriambic, trochaic, cretic, dochmiac, dactylic, anapaestic and aeolic sequences before settling into aeolic.^[5] A Hellenistic papyrus aria, P.Dryton 50, is polymetric and has no strophes, in the manner of the late classical New Music. It is full of dochmiacs.^[6]

From the plays after Andromache, Euripides’ dochmiacs are “predominantly astrophic”.^[7] In the later arias, iambic sequences are cut into trochaic phrasing that overruns the trimeter. Helen 167–178 is a headlong example.^[8]

Melody over rhythm. The ancient testimonies show poets turning from display of rhythm to display of melody and harmony.^[2] Euripides gave the first syllable of εἱλίσσετε (heilissete), “twirl”, a prolonged setting, a departure from one note per syllable. Aristophanes parodied it repeatedly (Frogs 1314, 1348):

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Literary Composition 64) says that music and rhythm, unlike prose, alter the natural quantities of words. They fit the syllables to the time-values, rather than the reverse.^[2]

The singers of such passages, West supposes, had to manage changes of mode as well, a feature of the new music.^[9] Earlier lyric, by contrast, is said to have been simpler. It kept to one harmonia, or mode, and probably followed the natural pitches of the words.^[10]

The Orestes papyrus. The papyrus of Or. 338–345 is the earliest papyrus to preserve any length of notated music. It shows the influence of the New Musical style fashionable in Athens in the second half of the fifth century. Its melody conforms only moderately to the word accents, since it served strophe and antistrophe alike. It also shows word-painting. There is a falling cadence on the last syllables of κατολοφύρομαι (katolophyromai), “I bewail”. And there is a high note on ἀναβακχεύει (anabakcheuei), “stirs you to Bacchic frenzy”, reached by a melodic upward leap of a large interval, perhaps a fifth.^[10]

Resolution as a clock. In the spoken verse the change is the steady rise of resolution. After the Hippolytus (428 BC) it rises to some 35% of trimeters in the Orestes of 408. The rise lets plays without external evidence be dated.^[11] The sources do not link this to the music, and this site makes no such claim.

The Metres tabs describe Euripides’ cola, and the Style tab his late manner. His choruses are described below. Songs for actors are on the next tab.

How much the chorus sings. Choral lyric fills on average 15% of the lines of a Euripidean play. In Sophocles it fills 17%, and in Aeschylus 34–55%. Yet the odes still carry reflection and feeling.^[1] In the Medea the figure is 19%.^[2] In the later plays the proportion of song to speech changes little overall. Actors’ songs make up for the shrinking choral lyric (Battezzato, citing Csapo).^[2]

Aristotle judged that Sophocles treated the chorus as “one of the actors”, and that Euripides did so less successfully (Poetics 1456a25–27).^[3] Where their identity is certain, Euripides has fifteen male and twenty-six female choruses.^[4]

Aristotle also complains that in later poets the songs became embolima, interludes that belong no more to one play than to another.^[5] Calame argues the opposite for Euripides. In his view the chorus is woven into the drama and its music, and its songs are not mere interludes written under the influence of the New Music.^[6]

Entrances. The parodos is the chorus’s entrance-song. In eight of the plays it is a dialogue between the chorus and a character already on stage. In some plays the chorus shares the protagonist’s fate, as the enslaved women of the Hecuba and Trojan Women do.^[7] The Hecuba has the only extant parodos with no singing: the chorus enters in recitative anapaests.^[8]

Metre and mood. A stasimon is a choral song sung after the chorus has entered. The third stasimon of the Medea (824–865) opens with praise of Athens in dactylo-epitrite, the metre of victory odes. In the second strophic pair the chorus asks how Medea can kill her children. There shorter aeolic measures make “a choppier rhythm”.^[9] Many odes start far from the action and make the connection only in their second pair. The first and second stasima of the Medea do this.^[9]

Songs of ritual. Odes borrow ritual genres. The Children of Heracles has the wedding cry ὦ Ὑμέναιε (917). In the Hippolytus (553–554) a wedding blessing is turned into a cry over an ill-fated marriage.^[10] Later in the same play the chorus sings a hymn to Aphrodite and Eros (1268–1281). It is a single strophe in dochmiacs, the rhythm of strong emotion.^[11] The old men of the Heracles sing what looks like an epinician (348–450). The entrance-song of the Bacchae (64–169) is in effect a dithyramb on the tragic stage.^[12] It transposes a cult song in a traditional cult metre, ionics.^[13]

Euripides also reshapes the lament. In the Andromache Peleus starts it (1172–1196). In the Suppliant Women Adrastus leads the female chorus (798–814). Each ends in a subordinate position.^[14]

Choral narrative. In some plays the odes are linked by a single story told out of order. In the Hecuba and Trojan Women it is the fall of Troy; in the Phoenician Women, the story of Cadmus and Thebes.^[15]

Some odes are almost all mythical narrative. Since Kranz they have been called “dithyrambic”, and they are characteristic of the late style. They have been compared with what Aristotle calls embolima, “things thrown in”: songs that could be performed in different plays.^[16] But on close reading they are linked to the plot. The second stasimon of the Helen (1301–1368) and the third of Iphigenia among the Taurians are examples.^[17]

A song for a city. In the Trojan Women it is the chorus that brings Troy into the play. Its song of the Wooden Horse (511–576) begins, unusually, with an appeal to the Muse for a new kind of song: a dirge for a city.^[18]

Women’s songs imagined. Euripides’ female choruses sometimes imagine forms of women’s song that do not yet exist. The women of Corinth wish that Apollo had given them the lyre. Then they could answer the male poets’ tales of women’s faithlessness (Medea 414–428). The chorus of the Ion turns the “cacophonous muse” against men (1090–1098).^[19]

Songs for actors are the most conspicuous change in Euripides’ drama. The chorus is on the previous tab.

A rising share. Over his career the share of lyric sung by actors rises from 13.3% in plays before the mid-420s to 47.1% in his last plays (Swift, citing Csapo).^[1] The trend is reversed in the two plays produced after his death, the Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis. Euripides moved back and forth between new ways and old (Gregory, citing Csapo).^[2]

The first monodies. A monody is a self-contained song for a single actor. Aeschylus and Sophocles have none. The first lyric monodies come in the Hippolytus of 428. There Phaedra sings 669–679, the long-postponed antistrophe to a choral song (362–372). Hippolytus has a long astrophic passage (1347–1388).^[3] When an adult Greek man sings in Euripides, the song is brief, as at 1370–1388.^[4]

Other monodies are Andromache’s (Andr. 103–116), Cassandra’s (Tro. 308–341) and Creusa’s (Ion 859–922).^[3] Creusa’s is, in K. H. Lee’s view, the emotional and structural heart of the play.^[5]

Early in the same play Ion himself sings a monody (112–143). It is in aeolic rhythm built on the choriamb, with a paean refrain at 141–143.^[6]

Who sings. In Euripides, as in Aeschylus, song mostly belongs to characters who are not adult Greek men.^[4] Boys, young adults and old men often have lyric parts. Among them are the children of Alcestis and Andromache, Ion and Hippolytus, Peleus, and the Oedipus of the Phoenician Women. Slaves are not given lyric, with one exception: the Phrygian slave of the Orestes.^[7] Euripides may have been the first to give children singing parts.^[8] In the Trojan Women Hecuba speaks, chants or sings almost a quarter of the lines.^[9]

Forms. Euripides developed a mostly astrophic form in which an actor receives news and reacts in song, often in dochmiacs. Desperation is the usual reaction (Hec. 684–720, Tro. 239–291, Ion 763–799). In late plays the reaction may be joy, as in the recognition of Iphigenia among the Taurians (827–899) and Helen’s reunion with Menelaus (Hel. 627–697).^[10]

Monodies are often astrophic, and so freer still in metre. The blinded Polymestor’s lament in the Hecuba (1056–1106) uses six types of metre.^[4] The Phrygian slave’s song in the Orestes (1368–1502) takes the place of a messenger speech. It is in contorted Greek and a variety of metres.^[11] It is one of the pieces inspired by the new dithyramb.^[12]

Elegiacs in a tragedy. Andromache’s lament (Andr. 103–116) is in elegiac couplets. Euripides uses the word ἔλεγος (elegos) only of sad, mournful song.^[13] The earliest instance of that sense is Trojan Women 119, of 415 BC.^[14] The lament begins:

In the hexameter the final -ῳ of Ἰλίῳ is shortened before αἰπεινᾷ. This shortening of a long vowel or diphthong before a vowel is called correption.^[15] The masculine caesura falls after αἰπεινᾷ in the third foot.^[16] The metre requires long ᾱ in ἄταν.

In the pentameter the contraction stands in the first half, the only place where the pentameter admits it. The two halves are divided by the caesura that is invariable in this line.^[17] The last syllable before it, the -ᾱ- of εὐναίαν, must be long.

The New Music. The growth of solo song reflects the New Music of the later fifth century, with its virtuoso performers.^[18] Its influence is clear from the Trojan Women of 415 on. The leading actor-singers became international stars.^[19]

Euripides can be counted among the New Musicians. The Frogs mocks him for taking his songs from everywhere: “harlots’ ditties, drinking-songs … laments, dances” (1301–1303). The chorus of the Trojan Women calls its dirge “new” (καινῶν ὕμνων, kainōn hymnōn, 512). And his late tragedies show melisms, several notes on one syllable.^[20] Timotheus’ monodies in the Persians are like those of Euripides’ later tragedies.^[21]