Among the one-word fragments from unknown plays of Sophocles, fr. inc. 1111 R. (φίλανδρον) has been treated as one of the more straightforward. It derives from a passage in Hermogenes of Tarsos’ treatise Περὶ Ἰδεῶν (late second century c.e.),Footnote ¹ which includes the Sophoclean adjective, its referent and a brief gloss: … ὁ Σοφοκλῆς … φίλανδρόν που τὴν Ἀταλάντην εἶπε διὰ τὸ ἀσπάζεσθαι σὺν ἀνδράσιν εἶναι (‘… Sophocles called Atalante philandros somewhere because she enjoyed being with men’).Footnote ² Brunck assigned the fragment to Sophocles’ tragic Meleagros;Footnote ³ most subsequent editors have edited the fragment as sedis incertae while commenting favourably on Brunck's ascription.Footnote ⁴ This suggestion has also found support beyond Sophoclean scholarship,Footnote ⁵ and, to my knowledge, no alternative has been brought forward. While the ascription of the fragment to the Meleagros is prima facie not implausible, I shall argue that a thorough analysis of the difficult passage in Hermogenes calls for a revision of the current lexicographical accounts of the word φίλανδρος—as well as φιλανδρία—and suggests that fr. 1111 may in fact originate in a satyr-play.

In ch. 2.5 of Περὶ Ἰδεῶν, Hermogenes turns to the ἰδέα of δριμύτης (or τὸ ὀξέως λέγειν/ὀξύτης),Footnote ⁶ which is characterized by witticism and wordplay. At the beginning of the chapter, he discusses a type of δριμύτης which occurs when a word is used in a context that activates a meaning not present in everyday usage. Aware of the intricacies of his own taxonomy, Hermogenes offers a series of examples to clarify the workings of this type (Id. 2.5.4–6 [340–1]):Footnote ⁷

Wooten translates the passage as follows:Footnote ⁸

I shall first discuss the gloss on φιλανδρία, which immediately follows the example from Euripides, and explore the different interpretations it has received, before I turn to the rest of the passage.

Wooten's translation reflects two interpretative assumptions that are open to debate. First, Wooten takes the statement to gloss not only the passage from Euripides, to which the Greek ἡ λέξις αὕτη … ἡ τῆς φιλανδρίας clearly refers, but equally the preceding quotation from Sophocles; hence he introduces the plural (‘in these passages’) and adds a reference back to ‘the word “philanderer” [sc. φίλανδρος]’. Wooten's second assumption concerns the value of the word νῦν, which occurs in both sentences of Hermogenes’ gloss; like all other translators known to me, Wooten takes the first occurrence of νῦν to refer to the example(s) where the word φιλανδρία (and φίλανδρος) is said to acquire a meaning antithetical to that of common usage. In contrast, Wooten assumes that νῦν in the second sentence implies chronological differentiation and refers to the usage in Hermogenes’ own time as opposed to the time of the poetic utterance(s).

As I shall argue later, I sympathize with Wooten's first assumption and believe that there is good reason to apply Hermogenes’ explanation of φιλανδρία in the Andromache to φίλανδρος in Sophocles. Wooten's second assumption, however, does not stand up to scrutiny. To be sure, it has found support in Lempp's recent German translation,Footnote ⁹ and the same understanding of the Hermogenes passage has led to the LSJ entry φιλανδρία II.2 and to the corresponding entry in GI, both of which state that the word ‘in later Gr[eek]’ has the ‘bad sense love of the male sex’, citing Hermog. Id. 2.5 as sole evidence for this meaning.Footnote ¹⁰ But why would νῦν have quite different senses in consecutive sentences? It is much more plausible that this second instance of νῦν (δήπου),Footnote ¹¹ too, refers to the passage from Euripides; in this case, the sentence would simply translate ‘for surely here it means licentiousness and adultery’.Footnote ¹²

Furthermore, there is simply no evidence to corroborate the implication of Wooten's and Lempp's translations that—to use LSJ's wording—‘in later Greek’ φιλανδρία has ‘a bad sense’. In fact, there is ample testimony to the contrary: uses of φιλανδρία in Hermogenes’ time abound,Footnote ¹³ not least in inscriptions and particularly in epitaphs,Footnote ¹⁴ and the word regularly has the sense ‘love of the husband’, often forming a hendiadys with σωφροσύνη uel sim. A similar picture emerges from a survey of the adjective φίλανδρος—which, again, has a strong epigraphical record.Footnote ¹⁵

Lastly, and most importantly, the entire passage in Hermogenes is concerned not with chronological differentiation (Hermogenes’ own time vs the fifth century b.c.) but with the distinction between the common usage of a word and its ‘pointed’ use in literary texts. According to Hermogenes’ definition, δριμύτης implies a friction or a clash between the meaning of a word in common usage and another semantic value which it acquires when in a certain context (for example a literalized understanding), resulting in what we might call ‘ambiguity’ or ‘double entendre’. The sentence immediately following the example from Euripides, then, contrasts the ‘piercing’ use in the poetic passage (νῦν) with common usage (ᾗπερ ἡμεῖς εἰώθαμεν χρῆσθαι),Footnote ¹⁶ and τὴν γὰρ ἀκολασίαν βούλεται νῦν δήπου σημαίνειν καὶ τὸ μοιχεύεσθαι glosses the poetic deviation from common usage, not the common usage itself (let alone specifically that of Hermogenes’ time); the common usage is less in need of an explication than the non-common one, which would otherwise remain unexplained. Accordingly, utterances such as ἐπ’ ἄλλου γὰρ τάττειν εἰώθαμεν τὴν φιλανθρωπίαν in Id. 2.5.4 on Xenophon or ἡμῶν πάλιν ἐπ’ ἄλλου πράγματος ταττόντων τοὔνομα τοῦτο in the section on Soph. fr. 1111 R. (2.5.5) refer to the common usage of the respective words, not to a historically specific usage or to a diachronic development.

To be sure, Hermogenes’ critical idiom is itself not free of ambiguities. Thus, his discussion of the Xenophon passage—Hermogenes’ first example—not only outlines the fundamental idea of δριμύτης but also illustrates the grammarian's difficulties in adequately describing the phenomenon. According to Hermogenes’ paraphrase, in a passage of his Kynēgetikos Xenophon discusses hunting dogs that prematurely give up the chase in order to return to their masters, and explains this inter alia by the dogs’ φιλανθρωπία. In Hermogenes’ understanding, it is the choice of φιλανθρωπία that results in δριμύτης: Xenophon's text draws on a literal etymological meaning of the word (φιλανθρωπία < φιλεῖν + ἄνθρωπος)—‘their good relationship to man and their pleasure in being around men’ (τὴν γὰρ πρὸς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους συνήθειαν καὶ τὸ συνεῖναι ἀνθρώποις ἀσπάζεσθαι)—which differs from the word's common meaning ‘pity and compassion’ (ἐλεεῖν καὶ οἰκτείρειν) (2.5.4).

While Hermogenes’ comments on the two meanings are straightforward, his respective qualifications are not. Both the common usage of φιλανθρωπία and its etymological ‘re-semanticization’ in Xenophon are said to be ‘proper’ (κυρίως) applications of the word. Indeed, Hermogenes’ use of his own critical idiom arguably enacts the effect of δριμύτης that it describes. While at first he distinguishes between the ‘word as signifier’ (cf. κυρίως σημαίνειν) and the ‘word in its relation to the signified’ (cf. κυρίως εἶναι ἐπὶ …), the categories ultimately converge. Thus Hermogenes starts with the observation that ‘the word properly signifies a thought of which it is not the proper expression’ (κυρίως μὲν οὖν ἔννοιαν σημαίνει λέξις οὐ κυρίως ἐκείνης οὖσα ἡ τοιαύτη), but then concludes that, ‘while it is not the proper expression of this matter (οὐ κυρίως μὲν ἐπὶ τούτου τοῦ πράγματος οὔσης τῆς λέξεως) […] the word somehow properly signifies this matter’ (κυρίως μέντοι πως σημαινούσης τὸ πρᾶγμα); he explains that, in fact, ‘the word might easily be seen as the more proper expression’ (καὶ γὰρ τάχα τούτου μᾶλλον ἂν εἴη κυριωτέρα ἡ λέξις) (2.5.4). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the ‘proper’ (κύριον) meaning of a word is not opposed to its figurative meaning, as we would expect, but to one that is ‘more proper’ (κυριώτερον). Ultimately, the equivocation of two semantic aspects of κύριον (‘proper = common / habitualized’ and ‘proper = the etymon of the word’) defamiliarizes the word and gives us pause.Footnote ¹⁷

If we turn to the original passage in Xenophon, it turns out that Hermogenes’ ‘common meaning’ of φιλανθρωπία—or rather τὸ φιλάνθρωπον, as Xenophon actually calls it—as ‘pity’ is not completely absent; rather, the word is used in a context that plays on its semantic value (Cyn. 3.9): πολλαὶ [sc. κύνες] δὲ τὰ διώγματα ἀφιεῖσαι ἐπανέρχονται διὰ τὸ μισόθηρον, πολλαὶ δὲ διὰ τὸ φιλάνθρωπον (‘Many of them [sc. the dogs] abandon the chase and return because of τὸ μισόθηρον but many also because of τὸ φιλάνθρωπον’). In their juxtaposition, Xenophon's alternative tags τὸ μισόθηρον and τὸ φιλάνθρωπον appear fundamentally ambiguous: depending on the understanding of one term the meaning of the other will shift. If μισόθηρον means that the dogs ‘hate the hunt (θήρα)’,Footnote ¹⁸ is it because they take issue with the brutality of it and thus show themselves ‘compassionate’ (φιλάνθρωπον) after all?Footnote ¹⁹ Or do they ‘hate the wild animals (θήρ)’Footnote ²⁰ and thus refuse to spend time among them rather than with the ‘humans whom they love’? But then, should not ‘hate of the wild animals’ make them ideal hunting dogs, while their ‘love of men’ should make them obey their master rather than abandon their task? Xenophon's μισόθηρον and φιλάνθρωπον shift ambiguously between alternative meanings and cannot be easily reduced to either one of them.

This analysis of the ambiguity in Xenophon tallies well with Hermogenes’ idea of the context-dependency of δριμύτης that he lays out at the beginning of his discussion: ‘The diction of δριμύτης … is not such [sc. δριμύς] in and of itself, but if it signifies a specific meaning which is not the proper expression, or, if it follows directly upon certain other words, it becomes, somewhat in the manner of a witticism (κατά τινα οἱονεὶ χαριεντισμόν), δριμύς or brings about δριμύτης.’Footnote ²¹ Hermogenes’ invocation of χαριεντισμός is important: as Hagedorn has convincingly argued, the concept of δριμύτης is rooted in peripatetic discussions of humour and witticism and finds, inter alia, a close parallel in Cicero's chapters on humour in De oratore Book 2, most notably his conception of ambiguum (De or. 2.254):Footnote ²²

Not unlike Cicero, Hermogenes concludes his discussion of δριμύτης with the warning that overindulgence may harm an orator's discourse as it is the preserve of the jester.Footnote ²³ δριμύτης, then, is conceptualized as a trope that, if inappropriately employed, lapses into the purely γελοῖον: this form of δριμύτης does not foreground one meaning of a word at the expense of another but, not unlike puns and other such witticisms, brings different meanings into play.

I would thus argue that Hermogenes adduces the quotation from Euripides’ Andromache because it entails a tension between two meanings in the word φιλανδρία: the ‘(licentious) love of men’, which Hermogenes expressly glosses as ἀκολασία and τὸ μοιχεύεσθαι, and the ‘(rightful) love of (one) man, that is, the husband’, which Hermogenes implies by appealing to common usage (ᾗπερ ἡμεῖς εἰώθαμεν χρῆσθαι). Once more, it is the specific context that activates both meanings and keeps them in balance: the lines are from Andromache's reply to her rival Hermione who has just accused her of bringing (barbarian) polygamy into Neoptolemus’ home.Footnote ²⁴ Andromache counters with her own definition of spousal ἀρετή (which consists in submission to the husband and indulgence of his infidelities, 222–8) and interprets Hermione's insistence on the exclusivity of Neoptolemus’ and her marriage as a symptom of sexual insatiability (ἀπληστία λέχους, 218)Footnote ²⁵ and ridiculous jealousy (cf. 227). In a reductio ad absurdum at the climax of her speech, Andromache's use of φιλανδρία draws on both meanings of the word, as she maliciously frames Hermione's ‘love of her husband’ in terms of her mother Helen's notorious ‘love of men’.Footnote ²⁶

Indeed, the words φίλανδρος and φιλανδρία lend themselves particularly well to such an ambiguous use. First, the word component -ανδρος has, just as ἀνήρ from which it derives, both a general and a specific meaning—‘man’ and ‘husband’ respectively—Footnote ²⁷ and, second, it can refer to either a single man or a plurality of men.Footnote ²⁸ A case in point is Aristophanes’ semiserious speech in Plato's Symposium, which contains the possibly best-known instance of φίλανδρος in Greek literature: the women who originally belonged to a man-woman creature (ἀνδρόγυνον, 191d) are said to be φίλανδροί τε καὶ μοιχεύτριαι (191e)—just as their male counterparts are φιλογύναικες and μοιχοί (191d). In its juxtaposition with μοιχεύτριαι, the word has regularly been understood as heavily sexualized: not just as ‘heterosexual’ but rather as ‘lewd’ (LSJ), ‘mannsüchtig’ (Benseler / Kaegi), ‘passionné pour les hommes’ (Bailly), etc. But again this attempt at clarifying the semantic nuance here may underplay the ambiguity inherent in the word. Arguably, it is precisely the elusive nature of the juxtaposition that foregrounds this. Do the words φίλανδροί τε καὶ μοιχεύτριαι form a pleonastic hendiadys (for example ‘man-crazy and nymphomaniac’)? Do they express two incompatible ideas (‘devoted to their husbands and home-wreckers’)? Or does the juxtaposition with μοιχεύτριαι sexualize the discourse on marriage inherent in φίλανδροι (‘sex-crazed in marriage and beyond’)?

It is a natural assumption that Hermogenes adduces the quotation from Sophocles to illustrate a similar moment of double entendre. Indeed, the close association with the Andromache passage, which immediately follows in Hermogenes, suggests that its use of φίλανδρος similarly entails a play on marital faithfulness as opposed to sexual licence. Yet, not a single interpreter of the passage has followed this suggestion; rather, it has been claimed that φίλανδρος in Sophocles had an altogether different force. Thus LSJ quotes the fragment as evidence for the special meaning ‘loving masculine habits’; in other words, the presence of men—both the legitimate husband and the throng of lovers—has been exorcised and given way to the abstract characteristic of ‘manliness’.Footnote ²⁹

The misunderstanding of scholars who took Hermogenes to claim that φιλανδρία had only assumed a ‘bad sense’ in his own time (and, conversely, understood his examples from the tragedians as illustrating a ‘good sense’) has contributed to the unanimity of interpreters and lexicographers in assigning an unambiguously unsexy meaning to the Sophoclean φίλανδρος. Far more important, however, is the fact that the reconstruction of the Sophoclean word as ‘loving masculine habits’ is conditioned by the mythographical tradition on Atalante, who famously repudiated all male advances until she was tricked and forced into marriage.Footnote ³⁰ In LSJ, this observance of mythographical orthodoxy is clearly marked: the tag ‘of Atalante’ accompanies the paraphrase ‘loving masculine habits’, as if this was all that was needed to support the special meaning (tellingly, the meaning is discussed in a different subsection from that on φίλανδρος used ‘of women’).

In addition to the elusive Sophoclean fragment, LSJ and GI give a passage in Plutarch's Life of Theseus (26.2) as a parallel for this special use of the word; here it relates to the Amazons for whom ‘love of men’ would seem similarly out of character. As is well known, they typically appear as ‘man-haters’ and ‘man-slayers’.Footnote ³¹ The parallel is well worth considering: not only are Atalante and the Amazons, at least in the more recent imagination, frequently associated,Footnote ³² but it also turns out that the Amazons are repeatedly characterized as φίλανδροι. Again, LSJ's gloss of this use as ‘loving masculine habits’ appears as an attempt at accommodating the ‘hatred of men’ dominant in myths of the Amazons. However, a rather more sexualized understanding is never far away.

In the Plutarch passage, which claims to draw on Bion of Prokonnesos (FGrHist 332 F 2), the Amazons’ φιλανδρία is adduced as an explanation as to why the Amazons welcomed Theseus in their land (26.2):

That it was their ‘sexual curiosity’ rather than their ‘manly habits’ that led them to prepare a warm welcome for the hero seems a natural conclusion. Indeed, Theseus’ stratagem may have been that he ‘led Antiope on’, before he asserted his own lust at the expense of hers. Even more explicit is the sexual subtext in a passage that Tzetzes attributes to Hellanicus of Lesbos (BNJ 323a fr. 17c = 167c Fowler), where the army of the Amazons is characterized as θῆλυς φίλανδρος ἀρρενοβρεφοκτόνος (‘womanfolk, man-lovers, killers of male offspring’).Footnote ³³ The sequence of the three attributes captures the discourse on the Amazons’ sexuality in extreme density:Footnote ³⁴ an all-female people (θῆλυς), they seek sexual encounters with men (φίλανδρος), but kill all male offspring (ἀρρενοβρεφοκτόνος), thereby ensuring both their status of an all-female people and its preservation. In any case, the fact that φίλανδρος here is immediately followed by a word that implies childbirth strongly suggests that there is more at stake than the Amazons’ ‘love of masculine habits’. References to the Amazons’ sexuality often play on the idea of indiscriminate promiscuity, which, as we have seen, is inherent in the word φίλανδρος. A striking example of this occurs in Seneca's Phaedra, when Theseus, convinced that Hippolytus has violated Phaedra, explains the contrast between Hippolytus’ ostentatious chastity and predatory sexuality as a trait inherited from his Amazon mother (Sen. Phaedr. 909–11):

The Amazons remain chaste for a long time, but then ‘prostitute’ themselves with entire ‘peoples’.Footnote ³⁵ If, then, the use of φίλανδρος for the Amazons turns out to be rather more ambiguous than most lexicographers would have us believe, there is all the more reason to rethink the word's semantic value(s) in Soph. fr. 1111 R.: after all, it features in a passage concerned with ambiguity.

In Hermogenes, the Sophoclean example is bookended by its discussions of φιλανθρωπία in Xenophon and φιλανδρία in Euripides, and it seems that the juxtaposition of the three examples is not coincidental. Hermogenes claims that Sophocles called Atalante philandros διὰ τὸ ἀσπάζεσθαι σὺν ἀνδράσιν εἶναι—a gloss open to rather different interpretations as it is simply not clear what kind of cohabitation is envisaged.Footnote ³⁶ On the one hand, Hermogenes’ comment looks forward to his discussion of the sexual subtext in Euripides’ Andromache which he introduces as being an example ‘of the same kind’ (καὶ τὸ παρὰ τῷ Εὐριπίδῃ δὲ τοιοῦτόν ἐστι, 2.5.6). On the other, it looks back to Hermogenes’ gloss of φιλανθρωπία in Xenophon, which it echoes (cf. τὸ συνεῖναι ἀνθρώποις ἀσπάζεσθαι [2.5.4] and τὸ ἀσπάζεσθαι σὺν ἀνδράσιν εἶναι [2.5.5]).

Most discussions of the Sophoclean fragment foreground the context of hunting, while the context of marriage and sexuality is neglected. In attributing the fragment to Sophocles’ Meleagros, it is suggested that the play focussed, at least in part, on the hunt for the Calydonian boar, during which Meleager and Atalante met, according to various sources. Such a reconstruction of the play, however, rests on tenuous evidence: the boar is only mentioned in fr. *401,Footnote ³⁷ whose attribution to the Meleagros is a mere conjecture, and there is no indication that Atalante figured in the play (indeed, Atalante's role in the Calydonian boar hunt is not securely attested before Euripides).Footnote ³⁸ To be sure, there is no reason why Atalante should not have figured in a play on the Calydonian hunt (or on another hunt, for that matter). But it is difficult to imagine that this interpretation of the fragment would have proved so successful over the years if it were not for its co-presence with Xenophon's Kynēgetikos in Hermogenes. A case in point is Radt's edition of fr. 1111 which reproduces Hermog. Id. 2.5.4–5 (340–1) from ὁ Ξενοφῶν … to … τὸ τῆς φιλανθρωπίας. The continuation of the passage with the example of φιλανδρία in Euripides is omitted. Although Radt does not explicitly endorse the attribution of fr. 1111 to Meleagros, his decision as to what constitutes the relevant context of the fragment strongly favours it.

Even if the fragment had formed part of a hunting scene, this would not give us any clear indication of the semantic value of φίλανδρος as ‘loving masculine habits’ rather than ‘loving a man (or men)’: as various retellings of Atalante's story show, eroticism is never far, even when she is depicted as huntress—indeed, her myth dramatizes the curse of the virginal but all too attractive huntress who eventually succumbs to a man.Footnote ³⁹

In any case, there is every reason to consider the entire context of the fragment in Hermogenes. The juxtaposition of examples in the passage suggests that the meaning of Sophocles’ φίλανδρος lies somewhere between the ‘company of men’ on a hunt and a form of ‘sexual congress with a man’, if not—like the Andromache quip with which it is more closely associated—between legitimate monogamous sexuality and licentious promiscuity.

Some of these ambiguous resonances of Atalante φίλανδρος in Hermogenes might be said to be prefigured in Xenophon's Kynēgetikos itself. At the end of the work, indeed in its last sentence, Xenophon (who claims that the hunt makes for ‘better men’) offers a post scriptum in the service of gender equality and includes women in the ‘optimizing discourse’ of his work (13.18):

Together with Procris, Atalante is the only mortal huntress to appear in the Kynēgetikos. As Phillips and Willcock have observed, Xenophon thus ‘elegantly concludes his work with a kind of ring composition and chiasmus’, as the mention of Prokris and Atalante in the final sentence looks back to the beginning of the treatise:Footnote ⁴⁰ in Cyn. 1.6, Cephalus—but not his wife, Procris—is mentioned,Footnote ⁴¹ while Atalante appears in 1.7. Strikingly, however, it is not in her capacity as a hunter that Atalante appears there but as the hard-to-get prize in the greatest marriage competition of her era. Xenophon's ‘elegant ring-composition’, then, leads from husband to wife in the case of Cephalus and Procris and from Atalante's marriage competition to her role as Artemisian huntress.

The story of the marriage competition for Atalante's hand (which in some sources is envisaged as a late consequence of her participation in the otherwise all-male hunting party at Calydon) should not be easily dismissed as the context for our fragmentum incertum. Atalante is variously remembered as the typical follower of Artemis, who prefers hunting and athletics to marriage, abhors men,Footnote ⁴² and submits all her (many) suitors to an extraordinary competition; she competes against each of them in a footrace and kills whomsoever she beats,Footnote ⁴³ until one of them tricks her and wins her hand. Like the Amazons, Atalanta is not interested in marriage, but, unlike the Amazons and rather like Artemis, she is not interested in sex either.Footnote ⁴⁴

Against the backdrop of Hermogenes’ discussion of ‘playful ambiguities’ it seems more than plausible that—just like φιλανθρωπία in Xenophon and φιλανδρία in Euripides—Sophocles’ φίλανδρος should not be reduced to any one meaning but rather be seen as playing on several. The attribute conflates the ideas of Atalante the manly and chaste huntress and the sexually desirable woman and, moreover, implies that Atalante is not only the object but also the subject of sexual desire. Such a use of φίλανδρος would find a congenial setting in a satyr-play. Not only are the genre's ever-lecherous chorus of Satyrs famous for their idiosyncratic understanding of ‘marital union’—one need only think of their quip on Helen as a ‘serial monogamist’ in Euripides’ Cyclops (181: πολλοῖς ἥδεται γαμουμένη)—but the ‘inversion of desire’ is their favourite trope in talking to the ladies: time and again, the Satyrs project their desire on to the women they encounter. Aeschylus’ Diktyoulkoi offers a particularly striking case of this when the Satyrs first open the wooden chest in which Danae and her baby had been thrown into the sea: instead of helping the young mother out, they muse on the desire that the woman must feel and on her wish to marry them all (in an emphatic plural).Footnote ⁴⁵ To be sure, a satyric Atalante is not attested for Sophocles. A possible context for φίλανδρος as satyric innuendo, however, may be found in the satyr-play represented by P.Oxy. 1083 fr. 1 (Soph. **fr. 1133 R.), which, as has been plausibly argued, is most likely Sophoclean.Footnote ⁴⁶ The twenty odd lines of the fragment are part of a marriage competition in which the Satyrs ask a father for the hand of his daughter: the father's name appears in the margin opposite line 19 as ]Ο̣ΙΝΕΥΣ—it is either Oineus, the father of Deianira, or, as Paul Maas suggested, Schoineus, the father of Atalante.Footnote ⁴⁷ The chorus of Satyrs is more than eager to enter into wedlock: ν̣υμφίοι μὲν ἥ[κομε]ν (6)—‘we come as the bridegrooms’, says any one of them in a play on the chorus’ elusive plurale tantum identity which always shifts between individual and collective. Where, if not here, could the play on ‘love of man’ and ‘love of men’ reveal its true δριμύτης?Footnote ⁴⁸