With apologies to Jane and Gordon for not posting in awhile…I didn’t realise I had a fan base!
Actual ‘work’ work (in the sense of research) has been on and off of late. I got a good chunk done of one paper over Christmas and some of another during the Easter break, but since then it has been non-stop marking and job applications – I hope to sneak some work in tomorrow, before the next set of exam papers come in, on the article that demands my attention most.
This discussion returns to my thesis topic of wedding songs, and looks at the 3rd Stasimon (choral ode) of Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis. This song describes the marriage of mythical hero/goddess couple, Peleus and Thetis (parents of Achilles) at a moment in the play between Achilles’ decision to marry Iphigenia and save her from sacrifice, and Iphigenia’s realisation that her father Agamemnon really would rather cut her throat in exchange for fair sailing to Troy.
The epithalamial resonances in this ode are in no doubt, but my question is – how do they function here? Critics most often note the contrast between the ‘idealisation’ of the ode and the brutality of the rest of the play. My argument is that the ode isn’t that idealistic – it makes full use of the ironic/foreboding element present in the Greek wedding song to in fact tie the mythical past even more closely to the violent present.
There are linguistic and thematic parallels with Sappho’s wedding narrative of Hector and Andromache (fr. 44), but the Sapphic song can be seen to refer poignantly to the Iliad - in Hector’s death (explicitly connected with his wedding by Homer) and the recovery of his body. So the ‘idealism’ lent by the Sapphic intertext is undermined by that very intertext. Euripides, I argue, employs his own set of Homeric allusions – the foreshadowing of Thetis’ gift of arms to her son at the end of the antistrophe refers directly to that scene in Iliad 18. Even the language is the same.
The scene in the Iliad means that Achilles will re-enter the battle, kill Hector, and die trying to enter Troy. By referring to it here, Euripides predicts the hero’s glory and tragedy – a fate that will itself doom Iphigenia to death. Moreover, if the Euripidean song about Thetis’ wedding refers to Iliad 18, it is probably also meant to recall Thetis’ 1st-person narrative of that marriage in that book – not a joyous occasion blessed by the gods, but a humiliating rape inflicted upon her by those same gods.
There is certainly an ironic contrast present in this ode, but I would stress the ‘ironic’ aspect of that contrast. The Homeric, and even Sapphic, allusions undermine any picture of idealisation the ode presents us with at first glance. By using a polyvalent genre such as the epithalamium, whose double-meanings are culturally ingrained, Euripides produces a song with violent undertones that cannot be divorced from the action of his drama. It ensures Iphigenia will go to her death – a death whose glory is undermined by the rhetoric of the play and questioned by scholars. and if we question the glory of her death, must we also question that of Achilles, which is inextricably linked with it?
Tags: epithalamium, Euripides, gender, Greek literature, hymenaios, interpretation, Iphigenia, research, telos, wedding song
