This note offers two related arguments. First, I supplement the existing scholarly consensus that the speaker of Sophocles’ Tereus fr. 588 RadtFootnote ¹ is Procne by suggesting that her addressee is a shepherd (henceforth ‘Shepherd’), whose existence was recently discovered and confirmed by a new papyrus for fr. 583.Footnote ² Second, I attempt to contextualize P.J. Finglass's placement of fr. 583 in the first episode of the playFootnote ³ and to respond to the ‘internment’ problem posited by David FitzpatrickFootnote ⁴ by suggesting that the play takes place on an anniversary or some sort of commemoration of Philomela's supposed death. This proposal justifies the doleful tenor of the fragment and its generalizing subject-matter, the lonely plight of married women torn from their natal families, and resolves the question of Procne's state of knowledge about her sister's fate; and it allows for the internment of Philomela to figure into the play's plot by making Philomela's ‘death’ an established event before the play begins, as Gregory Dobrov suggests.Footnote ⁵

The recent discovery of a continuation of fr. 583 has opened up new avenues of inquiry into the play's structure while confirming or invalidating previous scholarly conjecture. I reproduce here fr. 583 Radt followed by Slattery's reconstruction of the new lines, as compiled and enumerated by Finglass:Footnote ⁶

While fr. 583 was already arguably the best-known and most-analysed fragment from the play, owing to the sheer fact of its length and its sentiments which resonate with other Sophoclean and Euripidean (anti-?)heroines such as Deianira and Medea,Footnote ⁸ the wider context of the fragment that the papyrus provides has now allowed for the confirmation of a Shepherd character (19, 23, 27), who has come to deliver some kind of news to Procne and the Chorus. Finglass argues that the Shepherd does not immediately deliver the presumably bad news that he brings, based on the fact that he swears some kind of oath (ὅρκον, 23), perhaps aimed at confirming the veracity of what he has come to report. Similar dramatic messengers who swear an oath to tell the truth include Chrysothemis of Sophocles’ Electra (881–2), Lichas of Sophocles’ Trachiniae (398–9) and Creusa of Euripides’ Ion (1478–87, 1528–31). Such oaths are either sworn sua sponte by the speaker or compelled by an interlocutor in order to confirm the speaker's veracity; Finglass surmises that the former applies in the case of the Shepherd in the Tereus owing to the probable connecting particle γάρ (23), which implies that Procne has doubted that the Shepherd's report will be accurate, and a conception of shepherds as generally untrustworthy.Footnote ⁹

This connection between oath-taking and the truthfulness of a report invites a connection between this fragment and fr. 588, an iambic trimeter in which one character exhorts a male character to take courage and speak the truth: θάρσει· λέγων τἀληθὲς οὐ σφαλῇ ποτε, ‘Take courage! If you speak the truth, you will never come to harm’.Footnote ¹⁰ While scholars generally agree that the speaker of the fragment is Procne,Footnote ¹¹ I suggest that the addressee is the newly confirmed Shepherd, a proposal not possible before the discovery of the new papyrus. This fragment accords well with the expanded context of fr. 583; one may imagine that the Shepherd hesitates to reveal the knowledge that he comes to bring, as does, for example, the Shepherd in OT 1144–69, despite the fact that he has ostensibly sworn an oath as to its truthfulness, and so Procne exhorts him to trust in the truth and reveal what he knows.

If this Shepherd has come to report the discovery of Philomela or the enclosure in which she has been imprisoned,Footnote ¹² then it is difficult to imagine another context into which fr. 588 could fit, based on our knowledge of the general outline of the myth. The addressee must be male, as evidenced by the masculine participle (λέγων),Footnote ¹³ and the only male characters that we can be reasonably certain had a role in the play are Tereus and the Shepherd, as the Chorus, Finglass has shown, must be composed of women.Footnote ¹⁴ The child Itys would not have had any occasion to be encouraged to tell the truth, and the presence of characters in Sophocles’ play like Dryas or Lynceus of Hyginus’ version of the myth (Fab. 45) is unlikely.Footnote ¹⁵ The choices, then, are Tereus and the Shepherd. The possibilities for the circumstances under which Tereus would be encouraged to tell the truth seem tortuously contrived if, as I will suggest below, the ‘death’ of Philomela were already established before the play's beginning. Perhaps someone is flashing back to Tereus’ revelation of Philomela's death and presenting the scene through oratio recta.Footnote ¹⁶ It is much easier, however, to draw a direct line from the oath, ὅρκος, sworn by the Shepherd to the truth, τἀληθές, that the addressee of fr. 588 is encouraged to speak. While it is still possible for the exhortation to occur in the context of an anagnorisis scene,Footnote ¹⁷ the lexical connection between the oath and the truth increases the likelihood that frr. 588 and 583 occur in the same scene.

This interpretation depends on the fate of Philomela having already been communicated to Procne by the time she speaks the lines of fr. 583, a scenario that Finglass rejects.Footnote ¹⁸ In this assertion, Finglass agrees with Lyndsay Coo that the content of the fragment precludes any knowledge on Procne's part of the fate of Philomela, because a shift within the same speech from lamenting the loss of Philomela to generalizations about the plight of married women would be too precipitous.Footnote ¹⁹ However, if the ‘death’ of Philomela were an event that occurred long before the play's beginning, perhaps a year prior, as Ovid depicts in his account (Met. 6.571),Footnote ²⁰ a speech that begins in a lament for Philomela could reasonably progress to an expression of feelings of loneliness that have been compounded by the long period of her separation from her home and her sister (χωρίς, 1). Previous scholarship has suggested three contexts for Procne speaking these lines: immediately after being informed that Philomela has died;Footnote ²¹ after discovering that Philomela has been raped and mutilated;Footnote ²² or before she knows that anything has happened, as she waits for Tereus to bring Philomela to Thrace from Athens.Footnote ²³ Although we cannot know for sure which option is correct, I suggest that the first, Dobrov's theory, should not be rejected, but perhaps be simply modified to allow for a longer period of time between Procne being informed about Philomela's ‘death’ and Procne speaking the words of fr. 583.

This time-frame allows for the possibility of the ‘internment’ of Philomela, her long imprisonment away from Procne, as a feature of the plot. Fitzpatrick rejects the internment and Dobrov's theory that Tereus’ return to Thrace (and the revelation of Philomela's ‘death’) was established before the beginning of the play, because ‘it loses the effect of having Tereus return home from Athens to disaster’.Footnote ²⁴ Such an effect, however, relies on the unsubstantiated theory that the Tereus was a nostos play like the Trachiniae or Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Footnote ²⁵ Such a preconception precludes perfectly viable plot-lines or events, including the event proposed in this note: that Procne progresses from grieving the loss of her sister towards lamenting the conditions of marriage that keep her separated from her natal family, before the news of what has truly happened to her sister reaches her by means of the Shepherd.

These two suggestions, that the addressee of fr. 588 is the Shepherd and that fr. 583 forms part of a lament for Philomela whose death has been an established event for some time, enrich our understanding of the Sophoclean corpus and the Greek tragic corpus overall; they also invite new, attractive parallels between the Tereus and other tragedies and, more specifically, Procne and other female tragic characters than previously identified. For example, the use of a shepherd figure as a deliverer of news puts the Tereus in extensive company, including Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Aeschylus’ fragmentary Glaucus Pontius and Euripides’ Iphigenia Taurica. Footnote ²⁶ Further, a lament for the long-dead finds a parallel in Sophocles’ Electra, in which Electra's grief is cast by the Chorus as long-standing (πάλαι, 124); indeed, the connection between the figures of Electra and Procne is reinforced by Electra's explicit mention of the Procne myth and her similarity to the grieving mother (145–9).