152–63 lectio dubia 154 ῥεῦμα Weil: ἔρυμα Μ κεδνῶν κακῶν τ᾽ Schütz: κακῶν κεδνῶν τ᾽ Μ; locum interpr. Dodds CQ 3 (1953), 13–15 155 ἄγος ΜΣ: ἄλγος Μ; ἄγος χοᾶν ad ῥεῦμα (= ῥεῦμα χοᾶν) adpositum est 157 μου Blaydes σέβας κλύ᾽ Bamberger: κλύε σέβας Μ 160 ἴτω Bothe: ἰὼ Μ 161 seq. Σκυθιτά, supra ιτ scr. ης, Μ; Σκύθης an Σκυθικά incertum; fort. Σκυθικά τ᾽ ἐν χεροῖν | ἐναργῶς (Bothe) βέλη κτλ., del. παλίντονα tamquam e schol. ad Σκυθικά illatum 163 ξίφη Pauw ex ΜΣ: βέλη Μ
Electra: But it is right for you to crown these [libations] with wailing, singing forth a paean of the dead man.
Chorus: Send forth a resounding tear, lost for our lost lord, into this stream that would turn back both good and evil, the prayed-for pollution of these poured-out libations. Hear me, majesty, hear me, oh lord, from your dimmed sense! OTOTOTOTOTOTOI! May some spear-strong man come! some redeemer of our house, brandishing in his hands the back-bending Scythian arrows, ready for work, an Ares plying the forged sword in close combat!Footnote 1
There has been little consensus on either the text or the meaning of Cho. 152–63.Footnote 2 Page prefaces his apparatus criticus on this passage by remarking on the manuscript's lectio dubia, and the textual issues associated with this short song were equally apparent in antiquity.Footnote 3 What is clear from this passage, however, is the ‘striking oxymoron’ that it offers of a paean sung in mourning.Footnote 4 Paeans—whether martial, sympotic or medicinal—were songs most associated with Apollo and the Olympian sphere, and a chthonic paean such as Electra requests, a παιᾶνα τοῦ θανόντος (151), would represent an abnormal employment of the genre, to say the least.Footnote 5 However, the choral song at Cho. 152–63 accentuates the dissonance inherent in the passage's frame to present a troubling version of the paean by engaging with, and distorting some of, the genre's formal features, most importantly its characteristic refrain, ἰὴ παιάν, here transformed into a command to weep, ἵετε δάκρυ (152).
Rutherford characterizes this song as a paean owing to its frame and content, but argues that ‘there are no generic allusions’ to the formal paean within this short choral passage.Footnote 6 It is true that there is no sustained paeanic refrain here, nor even a clear paean-cry, but there is, I suggest, a sublimated reference to an altered version of these ritual cries in the chorus’ initial self-address to weep, ἵετε δάκρυ καναχὲς ὀλόμενον (152).Footnote 7 There is admittedly only mild aural correspondence between the chorus’ command ἵετε and the typical ritual cry ἰή, but the connection becomes more apparent when viewed in association with other related extensions and etymologies of the paean-cry. Pindar's Paean 6 for the Delphians, for example, offers the most notable parallel for this passage in its vigorous paeanic epiphthegma following the death of Neoptolemus at the close of the second triad (Pind. Pae. 6.121–2):
The presence in this paean-cry of the otherwise unexampled form ἰῆτε may lend some clarity to the chorus’ verb ἵετε at Cho. 152. Explanations for Pindar's form of the paean-cry here are numerous,Footnote 9 but the most compelling, offered by Wilamowitz and accepted by Rutherford, interprets it as an uncommon form of ἵημι in either the second-person plural imperative, ἵετε, or in the optative, ἱεῖτε.Footnote 10 Although the verb here has the meaning of ‘to utter’,Footnote 11 Wilamowitz argues that its use recalls the original paean-cry associated with Apollo's killing of the Python at Delphi, perhaps most clearly represented by Callimachus’ Hymn 1.103: ἱὴ ἱὴ παιῆον, ἵει βέλος, ‘Iē Iē Paian! Shoot the shaft!’Footnote 12 The association between ἵημι, shooting, and the paean-cry appears in other Hellenistic works and may indicate the earlier circulation of such a traditional etymology during the fifth century.Footnote 13
It is against this backdrop that the paeanic features of Cho. 152 begin to come into clearer focus. The passage's frame provides the song with a clear yet unusual hymnic colouring, and the paronomasia and possible common etymology between cries such as Pindar's ἰῆτε and Aeschylus’ ἵετε confirm such a character. Aeschylus’ ἵετε, however, involves levels of reference beyond the paean-cry in a cult-song such as Paean 6, as perhaps should be expected of a ‘hymn’ to Apollo incongruously embedded within a Dionysian mimetic performance. For instance, like the genuinely hymnic example from Pindar, the chorus’ ἵετε can act as the impulsive, ecstatic cry to the god familiar from the paean and from interjections such as the Bacchic εὐοῖ. Aeschylus’ verb, however, is marked both by its change in metrical quantity from the more traditional refrain and by its grammatical responsibilities as the main verb in its clause. Whereas the Pindaric ἰῆτε, although itself allusive, functions primarily as the religious cry, Aeschylus’ ἵετε can merely nod at such a function before becoming instead a command to weep, a fundamentally ironic appropriation of an already corrupted refrain more typically associated with joy or expectation.Footnote 14
Aeschylus accentuates this characterization in his description of the chorus’ weeping, καναχὲς ὀλόμενον, ‘crashing, lost’, that subtly underlines both the musical nature of the δάκρυ, ‘tear’, and its ensured futility as an offering. καναχές, for instance, is a hapax legomenon, related to terms often used to describe water, but glossed by the scholiast here as ἠχητικόν, ‘resounding’, a descriptor more easily associated with sound or song than with a teardrop.Footnote 15 ὀλόμενον, on the other hand, gains special resonance from the polyptotonic refrain created by its following line, ὀλομένωι δεσπόται: even the tear is ‘lost’ and shed for a ‘lost lord’.Footnote 16 The twisted paean that the chorus sings is instead a resounding lament, and one that, rather than addressing itself to the Olympian gods, is immediately poured out and lost in the streams of chthonic offerings, γαπότους χοάς (Aesch. Cho. 164).
A cry such as Pindar's ἰῆτε can triumphantly recall Apollo's victory over the Python in a hymn performed at Delphi, but Aeschylus’ ἵετε here regards Delphi in a more ambiguous fashion. The chorus’ paeanic reference requests violence, and, although the characters cannot yet appreciate the fact, Orestes will come from Delphi bearing death ordained by Apollo, but conveying also in that violence the matricidal destruction of his family and the seeds of his own madness that, short of the Eumenides’ divine intervention, would be certain to continue the cycle of violence. The ἀναλυτήρ that the chorus requests in line 162 is not an Apollo but an Ares, and he wields Scythian arrows, Σκυθιτὰ … βέλη, a possible reference to Apollo's residence among the Hyperboreans and his absence from Delphi.Footnote 17 The chorus’ quasi-refrain ἵετε deforms the traditional paean-cry's generically appropriate prayer for salvation into a foreshadowing request for further Delphic violence,Footnote 18 and although the song may still attempt to engage with the Olympian sphere, it cannot avoid anticipating the bloodshed of the chthonic world of vengeance to which it is ultimately addressed.
As the song continues, further hymnic features appear, such as the kletic markers κλύε δέ μοι … κλύ’ at line 157, before the chorus veers into the unrestrained and uncontrolled lament of the θρῆνος-like cry ὀτοτοτοτοτοτοῖ of line 159.Footnote 19 The well-ordered male paean has transformed into a frenzied female lament familiar from Cassandra's raving in Agamemnon and later in the play from Aegisthus’ death-cries at Cho. 869.Footnote 20 It is possible, however, that Aeschylus reasserts the song's paeanic character in the chorus’ next word. Page prints ἴτω, ‘let him come’, but West preserves the reading of MS M, ἰώ, a common word for lament in Aeschylus and elsewhere, but a word also associated with the paean-cry.Footnote 21 For instance, at Soph. Trach. 221, in a classic instance of a disordered tragic paean, the chorus exclaims ἰὼ ἰὼ Παιάν, a phrase paralleled by Lamachus at Ar. Ach. 1212, ἰὼ ἰὼ Παιὰν Παιάν.Footnote 22 Especially when read in conjunction with the following prayer for the ἀναλυτήρ to come and restore the house, the reading of M, ἰώ, takes on a further paeanic character that complements the passage's opening word.
The compounded ironies of a chthonic παιᾶνα τοῦ θανόντος in the Dionysian setting of tragedy are numerous. The song's brisk iambic-dochmiac metre would be more at home in lament and would have been noticeably different from the calm and ordered music typical of cult paeans, while the chorus-members themselves were inappropriate paean-singers.Footnote 23 Such structural anomalies occur in many other tragic paeans, but Aeschylus offers a particularly distorted example in this song in the deformation of the formal feature of the genre: the paeanic refrain. That such distortion accompanies the play's central ritual act—the pouring of libations and the placing of the vessels on Agamemnon's tomb—only amplifies this discordant note within a trilogy elsewhere concerned with the theme of corrupted sacrifice.Footnote 24 The shade of Agamemnon has received its offerings for appeasement and the paean that the chorus sings still asks for salvation, but is accompanied by a tearful rather than joyful cry.Footnote 25
