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TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN GREEK TRAGEDY'S MYTHOLOGICAL EXEMPLA *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2015

Ariadne Konstantinou
Ariadne Konstantinou*
Affiliation:
Bar Ilan University
*
ariadni.konstantinou@biu.ac.ilariadne_kon@yahoo.com
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Novelties introduced into traditional myths are an essential characteristic of Greek tragedy. Each and every play demonstrates, in different ways, how tragedians were versatile and innovative in handling mythic material. Modern prefaces to individual tragedies often discuss the possible innovations in the dramatization of a myth compared to previous or subsequent versions. Innovations advanced in a play sometimes became so familiar that they came to be regarded as ‘standard’. Such examples include the condemnation and death of the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone and, in all likelihood, Medea's filicide in Euripides’ Medea.

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Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , December 2015 , pp. 476 - 488
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

οὕτως δὴ ἐκ(α)ινοποίησε τ(ὰς) ἱστορ(ί)ας …
Stesichorus, fr. 193.16–17 PMGF

One can innovate by telling a new tale in an old way, or an old tale in a new one. Something new may even be said by simply repeating something that has already been said.Footnote 1

Novelties introduced into traditional myths are an essential characteristic of Greek tragedy.Footnote 2 Each and every play demonstrates, in different ways, how tragedians were versatile and innovative in handling mythic material. Modern prefaces to individual tragedies often discuss the possible innovations in the dramatization of a myth compared to previous or subsequent versions. Innovations advanced in a play sometimes became so familiar that they came to be regarded as ‘standard’. Such examples include the condemnation and death of the protagonist in Sophocles’ Antigone and, in all likelihood, Medea's filicide in Euripides’ Medea.Footnote 3

In addition to its use in plots, mythological material is also richly employed in choral parts and in so-called mythological exempla. The latter are examples from the realm of myth, introduced by way of comparison, often for exhortation or consolation.Footnote 4 Despite the fact that mythological exempla are brief and sometimes bafflingly oblique, they provide a wealth of information on otherwise poorly attested myths from the classical period. They also offer a unique glimpse into the web of associations between the dramatized myth of a tragedy and the myth of the comparison, and thus communicate a different level of mythography. In this fashion, mythological exempla form a coherent corpus within the literary genre of tragedy and illuminate how tragedians appropriate earlier mythical tradition in their brief retellings that focus on a specific point of comparison. A study assessing the extent of possible innovation that such a corpus may contain has not been undertaken and forms the subject of this article.Footnote 5 In a case-by-case analysis of four particular passages, I show how tragedians were innovative in their treatment of mythological details. Myths were constantly modified in the process of being retold, in part because of the lack of sacred narratives and canonical texts in Greek culture.Footnote 6

TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN MYTH: EPIC, LYRIC AND TRAGIC POETRY

Before I proceed to consider the evidence for innovation in some of tragedy's mythological exempla, it is useful to review briefly how this topic has been addressed in two other relevant fields: first, innovation in epic and lyric mythological exempla, and, second, innovation in tragedy, particularly in Euripidean aetiologies. On the whole, my discussion of tragic exempla builds on, as well as lends support to, those scholars who point to innovation in the mythic narratives of these genres as well.

Regarding Homeric mythological exempla, the two scholars most often referred to as advocates of innovation and tradition respectively are Malcolm Willcock and Gregory Nagy. Willcock's discussion of the exemplum of Niobe in the Iliad is indicative of his overall approach.Footnote 7 Achilles narrates the example of Niobe, who ate even after her twelve children were killed, in order to persuade Priam to overcome his own grief for the loss of his son and eat as well. The detail of this story and others, Willcock convincingly argues, is invented ad hoc to provide a parallel for exhortation or consolation. According to his analysis, ‘the parallelism between the mythological story and the immediate situation often appears to be the creation of the poet’.Footnote 8 Nagy, drawing on social anthropology and speech act theory, takes a rather different stance on the matter.Footnote 9 He argues against the view that there is ad hoc personal invention of myth in Homeric poetry and interprets the concepts of ‘myth’, ‘tradition’ and ‘creativity’ in a far more inclusive way, thus allowing for the possibility that individual articulations of a myth, however unique they may be, still form an integral part of the creative mythological tradition to which they belong. Ruth Scodel advocates a middle stance on the debate.Footnote 10 She understands ‘invented’ paradigmatic narratives in Homer as ‘contextually bound’, and regards the adaptation of stories in particular contexts as traditional practice. As will become evident in what follows, I also argue that, while the details of a tragic exemplum may be introduced for an ad hoc analogy, its exemplarity is still presented in a traditional manner.

The question of tradition or innovation vis-à-vis mythical paradigms has also been addressed by scholars working on lyric poetry. Pindar's first Olympian ode, with its different versions of the myth of Pelops and Tantalus, holds pride of place in the debate.Footnote 11 While Adolf Köhnken argues that Pindar is innovative in his use of the myth, primarily for the purpose of poetic composition (and does not find a religious motivation for it), Nagy lays emphasis instead on the traditional elements in each of the two versions narrated by Pindar.Footnote 12 In a recent discussion on the topic, Ian Rutherford has argued that innovation in the myth of Pelops is more plausible.Footnote 13 In his view, the question we should be asking is not whether Pindar innovates but rather ‘how much innovation is there?’ and ‘why does Pindar innovate?’.

In the realm of tragedy, many contributions have tackled the topic of innovation on the level of tragic plot, and this need not be re-examined here. The recent debate on innovation in Euripides’ aetiological myths is particularly relevant to my discussion, since it pertains to the same corpus and, as in mythological exempla, some of the passages are rather brief. Scott Scullion has made a convincing case for innovation in Euripidean aetiologies.Footnote 14 Such innovation is, in his view, indicative of a variety and a ‘relative lack of constraint’ in paganism, as compared to monotheistic traditions:

[T]he assumption that the tragedians never invent cults is founded on a failure to reckon fully with the essential variousness of pagan religion, as well as on the preconception that imaginative literary work is necessarily subordinate to religious, political or other authoritative ideologies.Footnote 15

However, Richard Seaford has recently argued against Scullion's analysis and speaks of different underlying preconceptions.Footnote 16 With Euripides as our earliest source for an aition, Scullion is open to considering the aition as a ‘reflex’ of the themes of the play, and hence as a literary innovation that serves thematic purposes, while Seaford is, on the whole, doubtful about such an approach.

Once we turn to innovation in the microcosm of tragedy's mythological exempla, it soon becomes obvious that the topic is frequently addressed only in the context of individual passages. The common opinion, especially among commentators (some of whom shall be quoted below), is that there can be no innovation in an exemplum, because the poet was hardly likely to introduce changes in a brief reference made only in passing. A notable exception to this assumption is Alan Sommerstein, who argues that tragedians did innovate in ‘secondary mythical allusions’, just as they did in the scale of the plot.Footnote 17 However, he too thinks that innovation is contingent on the length of the allusion. The overarching reluctance to identify innovation in tragedy's mythological exempla owing to their brevity should, in my opinion, be demonstrated rather than asserted.

My ensuing discussion of four mythological exempla aims to show that innovative elements are also detectable in the details of brief analogies. We can also see this open-ended use of mythological material in passages that debate the appropriation of the mythic past. Different characters employ—or, rather, manipulate in a rhetorical manner—mythological material in different ways in order to make a point. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon (1140–9), after the Chorus compares Cassandra's lamentation to that of the nightingale, Cassandra takes up the comparison and claims that her own fate is even worse, thus indicating that the comparison is partially inadequate. Her progression of thought is that, while the transformation of Aëdon put an end to her misery, her own gloomy destiny still lies ahead of her.Footnote 18 Likewise, in Antigone's appropriation of the myth of Niobe (Soph. Ant. 823–38), the Chorus reacts to Antigone's analogy and suggests its limitation. In both passages the deliberation on the analogy does not detract from the exemplarity of the narrated myth, nor, I argue, is it in itself indicative of innovation. It is the suitability and interpretation of the analogy that is questioned rather than its narrative quality or the mythological information it conveys. Yet such disputes on mythic analogies also remind us that the details of stories can be adopted, adapted and adjusted by different characters to make a point.

Before I proceed to discuss particular exempla, a note on terminology is in order. In existing literature on the topic, the terms invention, innovation and creativity are rarely defined.Footnote 19 Nagy has even suggested that part of the problem ‘lies in the instability of our own concept of myth’ and, accordingly, ‘invention’ in myth.Footnote 20 In one sense, ‘invention’ can be assumed to take place ex nihilo; ‘innovation’ may take place against the background of an existing mythical tradition, while ‘creativity’ may highlight the individuality of an imaginative poet.Footnote 21 In this paper, I refrain from using the term ‘invention’, since I assume an encompassing mythical tradition on the basis of which dramatists creatively shape their material in a process of innovation within a traditional framework. I understand this process to be open-ended and mutable, much more so than in monotheistic traditions, where narratives may be creative within an established canon of sacred texts. This open-endedness of Greek myth enables me to speak of innovation introduced for the sake of comparison in the retellings of myths. Scullion's description of Euripidean aitia is equally applicable, I suggest, to the mythological exempla of tragedy—‘a fair amount of tradition underpinning a great deal of innovation’.Footnote 22

In what follows, I consider the evidence for innovative elements in the embedded narrations of four mythological exempla in tragedy, and argue that certain mythological details are created ad hoc.Footnote 23 My choice of the first two Euripidean exempla (from Bacchae and Medea) derives from the general reluctance of some commentators to identify innovation in these passages; their arguments against innovation are quite consistently, though apparently independently, related to the brevity of the exemplum. Likewise, the third exemplum, from Aeschylus' Suppliants, is frequently regarded as ‘traditional’. A tentative argument for innovation in a detail that features in the triple exemplum from Sophocles' Antigone concludes my discussion. In addition, the passages are discussed with descending order of certainty and I deliberately do not follow the usual (chronological and developmental) sequence of tragedians. While it is true that we have many more mythological exempla in the Euripidean corpus (partly because there are many more preserved tragedies) and that Euripides introduces exempla in dialogic parts far more than Sophocles did (his exempla are mainly in choral parts),Footnote 24 I wish to stress those aspects shared by the three tragedians in their innovative use of the mythological tradition, rather than discuss the diachronic development in the use of mythological exempla within the genre.Footnote 25

THE REASON FOR ACTAEON’S DEATH IN EURIPIDES' BACCHAE

It appears that tragedians sometimes use exempla which are chronologically appropriate in order to maintain some sense of relative mythical chronology. In Prometheus Bound, the plot unfolds in a primordial past, when Zeus has just assumed power and the Olympian gods are still young, at least compared to the older generation of Titans. Accordingly, the mention of Atlas, the brother of Prometheus, in the two mythological exempla of the play indicates an awareness of the primordial time of the dramatized plot.Footnote 26

In addition to relative mythical chronology, other affinities are also at play between embedding and embedded myth, which may, at times, also be indicative of innovation in the details of the exemplum. Euripides' Bacchae contains only one mythological exemplum, which compares Pentheus to his cousin Actaeon (337–40).Footnote 27 In advising Pentheus to accept and honour Dionysus as a god, Cadmus warns him that, if he refuses, he might face Actaeon's very fate:

ὁρᾶις τὸν Ἀκταίωνος ἄθλιον μόρον,
ὃν ὠμόσιτοι σκύλακες ἃς ἐθρέψατο
διεσπάσαντο, κρείσσον’ ἐν κυναγίαις
Ἀρτέμιδος εἶναι κομπάσαντ’ ἐν ὀργάσιν.Footnote 28

You see the miserable fate of Actaeon, whom raw-eating dogs that he had raised tore apart, after he boasted in the mountain-glades that he was better in the hunt than Artemis.Footnote 29

The reference to Actaeon here and elsewhere in the play foreshadows the death of Pentheus, who will shortly be torn to pieces by Agave, the mother who raised him, just as Actaeon was torn to pieces by the dogs he had raised. Two details are particularly striking in their resemblance to the plot's myth. First, the dogs of Actaeon are ὠμόσιτοι, which evokes the ὠμοφαγία, the eating of raw flesh in maenadism, and the adjective resonates with ὠμοφάγον (line 139). Second, the word ὀργάδες is probably used here and elsewhere in the play to resonate with the ὄργια of the Maenads.Footnote 30

The reason for Actaeon's death in the passage is that he boasted about outdoing Artemis at the mountain hunt. Apparently, this explanation has no parallel from the period.Footnote 31 In earlier sources, the common motivation for his punishment is that he wished to take Semele as his wife.Footnote 32 Elsewhere, but—as it appears—not prior to Callimachus, Actaeon's death is a punishment for having watched Artemis bathing.Footnote 33 Euripides may have introduced this new detail in his exemplum with regard to the older (or, for that matter, later) tradition. While Jeanne Roux excludes the possibility of innovation in the exemplum on account of its brevity,Footnote 34 I suggest that the audience need not have been concerned with the precise details. Indeed, the reason for Actaeon's death is presented in an overall traditional style, as if it were a story of old, and is made to appear familiar, while its brevity might, in fact, even favour innovation, since the audience might find such a briefly mentioned novelty interesting and inoffensive. Ad hoc innovation for the story around Actaeon's death becomes all the more probable if we take into account the leitmotif of hunting found in the play. Agave is certain that, in killing Pentheus, she has hunted down a lion's cub.Footnote 35 Hence, the mention of Actaeon's hunt becomes an additional point of analogy between the plot's myth and the embedded exemplum. Lastly, the reference to Actaeon's boast might also act as a foreshadowing of Agave's ill-fated boast.Footnote 36 The interplay between the dramatized myth and the myth of the exemplum, as well as the absence of contemporaneous parallels for this detail lead me to suggest innovation on the part of Euripides in the reason given for Actaeon's death.

THE DEATH OF INO’S CHILDREN IN EURIPIDES' MEDEA

The date of the Bacchae at the turn of the fifth century b.c.e. should not imply that innovation in a mythological exemplum is a late Euripidean experiment. In fact, such innovation is equally traceable in his Medea of 431 b.c.e. The famous exemplum from this play (1282–92) is sung by the Chorus at a most critical point, against the cries of Medea's children off-stage, immediately after the Chorus realizes the atrocious act it has just witnessed:

μίαν δὴ κλύω μίαν τῶν πάρος
γυναῖκ’ ἐν φίλοις χέρα βαλεῖν τέκνοις,
Ἰνὼ μανεῖσαν ἐκ θεῶν, ὅθ’ ἡ Διὸς
δάμαρ νιν ἐξέπεμπε δωμάτων ἄλαις·  1285
πίτνει δ' ἁ τάλαιν’ ἐς ἅλμαν φόνωι
τέκνων δυσσεβεῖ,
ἀκτῆς ὑπερτείνασα ποντίας πόδα,
δυοῖν τε παίδοιν ξυνθανοῦσ’ ἀπόλλυται.Footnote 37

I have heard of one woman, only one of those before, who put her hand to her own children: Ino, driven mad by the gods, when the wife of Zeus sent her out from her home in wandering. The wretched one fell to the sea, impiously murdering her children. Stretching her foot over the sea's edge, she perished dying together with her two children.

While in other versions of the myth Ino usually kills one son and her husband Athamas kills the other,Footnote 38 Euripides, according to Page in his commentary of Medea, ‘appears to follow a version of the story in which Ino killed her two sons and then leapt into the sea’.Footnote 39 Page assumes that Euripides uses a version of the myth that was familiar to the audience but not extant today. He contends that ‘the poet cannot have introduced even so slight an innovation in a passing reference intended as a parallel’.Footnote 40

However, subsequent scholars, especially Rick M. Newton, have explored the likelihood of novelty in this passage.Footnote 41 The reference to one or two children might seem a minor detail. Still, it provides an opportunity to consider how innovative elements might be embedded in mythological exempla. In mentioning the death of Ino's two children, δυοῖν τε παίδοιν ξυνθανοῦσ’ ἀπόλλυται, Euripides does not need to ‘follow’ any known version, nor does his audience need to be acquainted with the minutiae of the embedded myth. For the overall analogy to be successful, the dramatist presents it as a traditional story belonging to the past (τῶν πάρος); in this sense, some elements of Ino's story must have been familiar to the audience. At the same time, the analogy is adjusted to match its rhetorical context to this intense moment in the play. Newton also suggests that innovation in this detail becomes more likely when considered alongside the possibility that Euripides was the first to present Medea as the deliberate murderess of her sons in the play.Footnote 42 Furthermore, it is possible that once the audience has realized that Medea has two children in this play, the analogy with Ino's two children becomes more evident.Footnote 43

An additional detail obscures the identification of innovation in this passage, the claim of the Chorus that Ino is the only known filicide prior to Medea. There are several other stories that could be adduced here as parallels, such as the myths of Agave, Althaea or, even more appropriately, Procne. The possibility of Euripides' suppression of other stories—especially that of Procne—is important for the dating of Sophocles' lost Tereus. Jenny March, for instance, takes the Chorus' claim at face value and suggests that Euripides is unaware of Procne's intentional murder because it was first introduced in Sophocles' Tereus, thus dating this lost play after Euripides' Medea of 431 b.c.e.Footnote 44

While Euripides might well have suppressed supplementary mythological material, this does not mean that he necessarily innovates at this point; he is simply making a choice in fashioning the Chorus' argument—a ‘rhetorical exaggeration’ in Mastronarde's terms.Footnote 45 None the less, scholars expect to find a series of paradigms in the choral passage and not just the single case of Ino. As Newton aptly puts it, ‘the poet does not, as we normally expect, cushion the shock with a catalogue of well-known mythological paradigms’.Footnote 46 This expectation is based on the longer mythological exempla found in Aeschylus' Choephori (602–37) and Sophocles' Antigone (944–87), where the situation on stage is compared to three different stories. However, the ‘cushion’ of repetition is not the only technique dramatists may employ. A different rhetorical strategy, which, in my view, is the strategy adopted here, is to claim that the situation is almost without mythical precedent. Such rhetorical exaggeration is found also in a commonly athetized passage from Prometheus Bound (425–9), in which the Chorus claims to know only one Titan before Prometheus who was subdued, and that was Atlas. Another alternative is to argue that ‘x and y also killed their children, but nothing compares to what has just happened’.Footnote 47 Taking these rhetorical strategies into consideration, the possibility that Euripides was completely unaware of other mythological parallels becomes less likely and misses the point of the analogy. What is important at this crucial point in the play is not the accuracy or the veracity of the mythological information on Ino; rather, the uniqueness and atrocity of Medea's act is brought into focus through the rhetoric of the single exemplum—a focus that makes absolute sense as we hear the screams of children being murdered by their own mother.

This passage reveals a creative process of innovation in the handling of details in mythological exempla. Such a protean use of Greek myth defies, in a sense, the very concept (or presupposition) of a single canonical or authoritative mythological narrative, which poets had to ‘follow’, even in the microcosm of brief mythological exempla.

TEREUS THE HAWK IN AESCHYLUS' SUPPLIANTS

The most common mythological exemplum in the preserved tragedies is that of Aëdon, the nightingale, whether this is a proper noun or a name.Footnote 48 Aëdon mourning for her son is mentioned in the Odyssey (19.518–23), and this image becomes, so to speak, paradigmatic of women's mourning, as proposed in the sensitive reading of Nicole Loraux.Footnote 49 In Sophocles' lost Tereus and in later narrations her name is often Procne.Footnote 50 While Procne, Philomela and Tereus are known to undergo a transformation into birds—a nightingale, a swallow and a hoopoe—the early tradition regarding the metamorphoses remains rather vague.Footnote 51

I focus here on an exemplum from Aeschylus' Suppliants (58–76), in which the Chorus of Danaids compares their lament to that of the nightingale bemoaning her son's death.Footnote 52 The passage provides an opportunity to discuss the connection that a mythological exemplum has with the play's literary imagery. Furthermore, because of the relatively early (though still contested) date of the play,Footnote 53 innovation in the details of an exemplum does not feature as a particularly late or uniquely Euripidean phenomenon; rather, it is an existing option that Aeschylus already utilizes early on.

εἰ δὲ κυρεῖ τις πέλας οἰωνοπόλων
ἔγγαιος οἶκτον ἀίων,
δοξάσει τιν’ ἀκούειν ὄπα τᾶς Τηρεΐας  60
μήτιδας οἰκτρᾶς ἀλόχου,
κιρκηλάτου γ’ ἀηδόνος,
ἅτ’ ἀπὸ χλωρῶν ποταμῶν εἰργόμενα
πενθεῖ μὲν οἶκτον ἠθέων,
ξυντίθησι δὲ παιδὸς μόρον, ὡς αὐτοφόνως  65
ὤλετο πρὸς χειρὸς ἕθεν
δυσμάτορος κότου τυχών.
If there happens to be any native nearby
skilled in augury who hears my lament,
he will think he is hearing a voice like that
of Tereus' wife, whose cunning schemes brought her misery,
the nightingale whom the hawk pursues,
who, shut off from her green river-banks,
utters a grieving lament for her familiar haunts
and sings the story of her son's death, how he perished
by her own kindred hand,
experiencing her unmotherly anger.Footnote 54

My interest lies in the unique image of Tereus, metamorphosed into a hawk, here in pursuit of the nightingale, κιρκηλάτου γ’ ἀηδόνος. Other than in the above passage, the transformation of Tereus into a hawk is attested only in Hyginus and in other late sources, which might well have drawn directly or indirectly on this passage.Footnote 55 Indeed, the standard view among scholars is that Tereus' metamorphosis into a hoopoe was an innovation first introduced by Sophocles in the lost Tereus, which was, in turn, taken up in the creation of the comic version of Tereus in Aristophanes' Birds of 414 b.c.e. Footnote 56

I suggest that we could interpret the image of Tereus the hawk in this Aeschylean exemplum as an ad hoc poetic innovation, better understood in the context of other bird images in the play, rather than read it as an early or traditional mythological variant. Thus, in addition to Euripides, Aeschylus too appears to be creative in the handling of details within the microcosm of mythological exempla. Such innovation would also present the mythological detail of Tereus' transformation in the passage in a different light.

The image of the hawk in pursuit of other birds is not a new literary image. Hesiod's Works and Days (203–12) also features a famous fable of a hawk pursuing a nightingale, and this passage is often adduced as a parallel to Aeschylus' exemplum. In addition to Hesiod, the image of the hawk pursuing its victims features in several similes in the Iliad. In his pursuit of Hector, for example, Achilles is compared to a hawk hunting a dove.Footnote 57 These important passages from Hesiod and the Iliad have led scholars to assume that Aeschylus' reference to the hawk might represent an earlier form of the story.

However, additional parallels within the Suppliants suggest that the image of the hawk in pursuit of the nightingale also forms part of the play's larger network of avian images, becoming, in fact, one of its dominant images.Footnote 58 In other words, imagery employed in the central myth of the tragedy is relevant for contextualizing the reference to the hawk in the embedded myth. Just over two hundred lines after this exemplum, Danaus returns to hawk (and dove) imagery, when he urges his daughters to sit by the altar. In this simile, the Danaids are compared to a flock of birds in fearful flight from hawks, the Aegyptiads.Footnote 59 Such avian images are important for the (self-)characterization of the Danaids as victims.Footnote 60 Perhaps the bird imagery in the exemplum should also be read as part of the Danaids' manipulative tactics to present themselves as powerless prey, fleeing from the hawk-like rapacious Aegyptiads.Footnote 61 And while the Danaids compare their lament to that of the nightingale so as to present themselves as victims of male violence in alien surroundings, one cannot fail to notice that, by referring to kindred murder, the exemplum also invites a subtle comparison between the death of Itys and the murder of the Aegyptiads that the Danaids will eventually commit.Footnote 62

The detail of this mythological exemplum from the Suppliants presents an elaborate combination of a literary theme set in a mythical background. We have, on the one hand, the imagery of the hawk in pursuit of its victims, as we know it from hexameter poetry. In this respect, the Hesiodic and Iliadic parallels are important ones. On the other hand, the hawk metamorphosis must also be assessed in light of the play's avian imagery and its role for the characterization of the Danaids as victims in the play. However, this double perspective has been accorded little or no significance. As in the exemplum from Medea, an important question related to this passage is the contribution it makes to the reconstruction of Sophocles' lost Tereus. The frequent assumption is that, since Aeschylus' passage is chronologically prior to any of the proposed dates for the Tereus, it presents a more ‘traditional’ or ‘original’ version of the myth, in which Tereus is transformed into a hawk. In fact, the transformation of Tereus into a hoopoe is regularly considered to be one of Sophocles' innovations to the myth, first introduced in his Tereus.Footnote 63 From the reworking of Tereus' character in Aristophanes' Birds there is no doubt that Sophocles' Tereus was a genuinely memorable performance in matters of staging. Yet this does not mean that Aeschylus might not have innovated with regard to the hawk metamorphosis in the Suppliants. It is plausible, instead, that Tereus' metamorphosis into a hoopoe might have been mentioned elsewhere in Aeschylus. I am thinking in particular of fr. **581, today commonly assigned to Sophocles' Tereus, and its specific reference to the hoopoe that alternates into a hawk according to season. No less an authority than Aristotle—who quotes the fragment in the first place—ascribes it to Aeschylus, without being in the least aware of any inconsistency that such an assignment may entail.Footnote 64 If an Aeschylean attribution is indeed likely, this would strengthen my suggestion that the reference to Tereus the hawk is not traditional, even if it is chronologically earlier. Instead, it may have been created ad hoc and first introduced in this exemplum as part of the play's bird imagery, especially since there are no independent parallel texts that attest to this transformation.

THE BLINDING OF THE PHINEIDS IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE

The last passage in which I consider the evidence for innovation is the fourth stasimon of Sophocles' Antigone (944–87), in which the Chorus compares Antigone's imprisonment to those of Danae, Lycurgus (the king of the Edonians) and Cleopatra (daughter of Boreas and Oreithyia, and wife of Phineus). Several scholars have studied the allusive lyric style of the ode, which comprises one of the most renowned mythological exempla in tragedy.Footnote 65 My own focus is on a particular detail from the third exemplum (966–87), specifically the question of who blinds the sons of Phineus and Cleopatra. While we know that both Aeschylus and Sophocles had handled this myth in tragedies now lost, it is impossible to determine their plots with any certainty.Footnote 66 In addition, the stasimon as a whole and especially the third exemplum leave ample room for questions.Footnote 67 Accordingly, my discussion on innovation in the detail of this myth must remain, to a large extent, speculative.

In the ode, the blinding of the Phineids is inflicted by Phineus' wife, ἐξ ἀγρίας δάμαρτος (973). Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood questions the traditional view that identifies this reference with Phineus' second wife and the Phineids' step-mother.Footnote 68 Instead, she proposes that the ‘wild wife’ might well be their mother Cleopatra. There is a certain fluidity between versions regarding the agent who blinds the children, as can be seen from the scholiast's three alternative narratives: it is either the second wife (whose name varies), Phineus himself or Cleopatra.Footnote 69 In one of the two lost Phineus plays by Sophocles, Phineus was the one who inflicted the wound on his children, at the instigation of his second wife.Footnote 70 While it is impossible to ascertain whether Antigone was performed before or after this Phineus,Footnote 71 it appears that Sophocles was at liberty to modify the agent responsible for the blinding of the children. In other words, there was no particular or canonical version of the myth he would have been obliged to ‘follow’, in relation either to the plot of the lost play or to the extant exemplum.Footnote 72 This allows for the possibility that assigning the blinding to the ‘wild wife’—irrespective of whether this is the first or the second wife—is an innovation introduced specifically in this elusive stanza. Still, it is not clear why Phineus is not depicted as the one who blinds his children. Perhaps it has to do with the preference for a female figure to match Antigone (although we do have the preceding exemplum of Lycurgus in the ode); perhaps a male causing the blinding would have been perceived as too close a parallel to the blinding of Oedipus or Phineus and was, therefore, avoided. Unfortunately, textual corruption and lack of textual parallels from the same period make it difficult to interpret this exemplum with confidence or to explain Sophocles' rationale in fashioning this innovative detail.

***

This paper has argued that some mythological exempla in tragedy show signs of innovation on the level of details. While there is no doubt that tragedians innovated in shaping the tragic plot, scholars have tended to assume that innovation in brief mythological exempla is unlikely. This assumption is unwarranted, because mythic narratives in general tend to present variations on a traditional theme, and consequently innovation can be found even in a brief allusive narrative. While not every mythological exemplum in tragedy need be innovative, innovation on the level of details was a possibility that all three tragedians explored when shaping the microcosm of comparisons that drew on the realm of myth. Recognizing this fact helps us appreciate the full poetic and dramatic potential of mythological exempla in Greek tragedy.

Footnotes

*

Research for this article was conducted in 2012–13, while I held a Halbert Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. I am grateful to Victoria Wohl, my host from the department of Classics, for offering invaluable feedback at different stages of this project and for welcoming me to a vibrant community of Classicists. The Munk School of Global Affairs provided a friendly and stimulating work environment. Thanks are also due to CQ's two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their help in improving the final version.

References

1 A. D'Angour, The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience (Cambridge, 2011), 210.

2 On myth and tragedy see, among others, P. Burian, ‘Myth into muthos: the shaping of tragic plot’, in P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1997), 178–208; M.J. Anderson, ‘Myth’, in J. Gregory (ed.), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Malden, MA, 2005), 121–35; A.H. Sommerstein, ‘Tragedy and myth’, in R. Bushnell (ed.), A Companion to Tragedy (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2005), 163–80; R. Buxton, ‘Tragedy and Greek myth’, in R.D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (Cambridge, 2007), 166–89; and J. Alaux, ‘Acting myth: Athenian drama’, in K. Dowden and N. Livingstone (edd.), A Companion to Greek Mythology (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2011), 141–56.

3 On innovations to the myth in Sophocles' Antigone see M. Griffith, Sophocles Antigone (Cambridge, 1999), 4–12; on Euripides' Medea see D.J. Mastronarde, Euripides Medea (Cambridge, 2002), 44–57 and Sommerstein (n. 2), 168. On innovations in the Oresteia, see D. Raeburn and O. Thomas, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students (Oxford, 2011), xxii–xxx, A.F. Garvie, Aeschylus: Choephori (Oxford, 1986), ix–xxvi and A.H. Sommerstein, Aeschylus Eumenides (Cambridge, 1989), 1–6.

4 Willcock, M.M., ‘Mythological paradeigma in the Iliad ’, CQ 14 (1964), 141–54, at 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar defines mythological exempla in the Iliad ‘as a myth introduced for exhortation or consolation. “You must do this, because X, who was in more or less the same situation as you, and a more significant person, did it”’. I would add to this definition that in tragedy, and especially in Euripides, the exemplum acquires authority and exemplary status also by right of its antiquity, by belonging to a different stratum in relation to the dramatized mythic present, as in Eur. Hipp. 451–2 (γραφάς … τῶν παλαιτέρων). The transmission of mythological material in exempla is often reported to have been oral, as in Eur. HF 1315, Hyps. 752g.18–19 Kannicht, as well as Soph. Phil. 676–85 (at 676–7 and 681) and Ant. 823–38 (at 823 and 829). Cf. [Aesch.] PV 425–9 (at 427) and Eur. Bacch. 337–40 (at 337).

5 On mythological exempla in general, see the important classificatory work of R. Öhler, ‘Mythologische Exempla in der älteren griechischen Dichtung’ (Diss., Basel, 1925) and Canter, H.V., ‘The mythological paradigm in Greek and Latin poetry’, AJPh 54 (1933), 201–24Google Scholar. N. Zagagi, Tradition and Originality in Plautus: Studies in the Amatory Motifs in Plautine Comedy (Göttingen, 1980), 32–43 discusses some of Greek tragedy's mythological exempla, though her interest lies in detecting hyperbolical comparisons that can be adduced as precedents to hyperboles in Plautine comedy. Additional passages are discussed in M. Davies, ‘Sophocles' Antigone 823ff. as a specimen of “mythological hyperbole”’, Hermes 113 (1985), 247–9Google Scholar; T.C.W. Stinton, ‘The scope and limits of allusion in Greek tragedy’, in M. Cropp, E. Fantham and S.E. Scully (edd.), Greek Tragedy and its Legacy: Essays Presented to D.J. Conacher (Calgary, 1986), 67–97; and Davies, M., ‘The stasimon of Sophocles' Philoctetes and the limits of mythological allusion’, SIFC 19 (2001), 53–8Google Scholar. On consolatory aspects of tragedy's mythological exempla see Pattoni, M.P., ‘L'exemplum mitico consolatorio: variazioni di un topos nella tragedia greca’, SCO 38 (1988), 229–62Google Scholar, as well as Nicolai, R., ‘L'emozione che insegna: parola persuasiva e paradigmi mitici in tragedia’, Sandalion 26–8 (2003–5), 61–103 Google Scholar; also, R. Nicolai, ‘Mythical paradigms in Euripides: the crisis of myth’, in A. Markantonatos and B. Zimmermann (edd.), Crisis on Stage: Tragedy and Comedy in Late Fifth-Century Athens (Berlin and Boston, 2011), 103–20 and R. Nicolai, ‘La crisi del paradigma: funzioni degli exempla mitici nei cori di Sofocle’, in A. Rodighiero and P. Scattolin (edd.), ‘…un enorme individuo, dotato di polmoni soprannaturali’: Funzioni, interpretazioni e rinascite del coro drammatico greco (Verona, 2011), 1–36.

6 With a qualification regarding the Homeric corpus, on which see M. Finkelberg, ‘Homer as a foundation text’, in M. Finkelberg and G.G. Stroumsa (edd.), Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (Leiden, 2003), 75–96.

7 In Willcock (n. 4) and Willcock, M.M., ‘Ad hoc invention in the Iliad ’, HSPh 81 (1977), 41–53 Google Scholar. On the exemplum of Niobe see Il. 24.602–17.

8 Willcock (n. 4), 147. Ingalls, W.B., ‘Linguistic and formular innovation in the mythological digressions in the Iliad ’, Phoenix 36 (1982), 201–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides linguistic support for Willcock's thesis, by showing that, when innovating in mythological content, the poet also uses relatively newer and less traditional language. Braswell, B.K., ‘Mythological innovation in the Iliad ’, CQ 21 (1971), 16–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues for mythological innovation in additional passages that are not exempla.

9 G. Nagy, ‘Mythological exemplum in Homer’, in R. Hexter and D. Selden (edd.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York and London, 1992), 311–31.

10 R. Scodel, Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience (Ann Arbor, 2002), at 1–41, especially 24–32.

11 In addition to Pindar, see Stesichorus, fr. 913 PMGF (for innovations in the myth of Helen in his palinode) and Bacchylides 5 (on Heracles and Meleager). On mythological exempla in Sappho, see L. Edmunds, ‘Tithonus in the “New Sappho” and the narrated mythical exemplum in Archaic Greek poetry’, in E. Greene and M.B. Skinner (edd.), The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues (Washington, DC, 2009), 58–70. For mythological innovations in Corinna's poetry, see Collins, D., ‘Corinna and mythological innovation’, CQ 56 (2006), 19–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Köhnken, A., ‘Pindar as innovator: Poseidon Hippios and the relevance of the Pelops story in Olympian 1’, CQ 24 (1974), 199–206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Nagy, G., ‘Pindar's Olympian 1 and the aetiology of the Olympic Games’, TAPhA 116 (1986), 71–88 Google Scholar.

13 I. Rutherford, ‘Singing myth: Pindar’, in K. Dowden and N. Livingstone (edd.), A Companion to Greek Mythology (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2011), 109–23, quotations from 115.

14 Scullion, S., ‘Tradition and invention in Euripidean aitiology’, ICS 24/25 (1999/2000), 217–33Google Scholar.

15 Scullion (n. 14), 218.

16 R. Seaford, ‘Aitiologies of cult in Euripides: a response to Scott Scullion’, in J.R.C. Cousland and J.R. Hume (edd.), The Play of Texts and Fragments: Essays in Honour of Martin Cropp (Leiden, 2009), 221–34.

17 See Sommerstein (n. 2).

18 For a similar argument, see the mythological exemplum of Callisto and the daughter of Merops in Eur. Hel. 375–85, with discussion of the lioness imagery in this passage in Konstantinou, A., ‘The lioness imagery in Greek tragedy’, QUCC 101 (2012), 125–41Google Scholar.

19 Scullion (n. 14), 221 speaks of ‘not just innovation but invention’, by which I understand a climactic difference, on which he unfortunately does not expand.

20 Nagy (n. 9), 312.

21 On the notion of novelty and problems in its definition see D'Angour (n. 1), especially at 64–84 on νέος and καινός.

22 Scullion (n. 14), 230.

23 The term ‘embedded’ is borrowed from narratology, where it is employed to describe narrative levels constructed in the manner of the ‘Chinese box’ or ‘Russian dolls’, on which see W. Nelles, ‘Stories within stories: narrative levels and embedded narrative’, in B. Richardson (ed.), Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frame (Columbus, 2002), 339–53. On whether narratology is a constructive lens for the analysis of Greek tragedy, see J. Gould, “‘… And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings”: Greek tragic drama as narrative’, in id., Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2001), 319–34 and F. Dunn, ‘Sophocles and the narratology of drama’, in J. Grethlein and A. Rengakos (edd.), Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature (Berlin and New York, 2009), 337–55.

24 See especially Nicolai (n. 5 [2011]), ‘La crisi del paradigma’.

25 On a comparison of mythological exempla in Sophocles and Euripides, see Nicolai (n. 5 [2011]), ‘Mythical paradigms’, 103–4, with a useful list of Euripidean exempla at 117 n. 30, as well as Nicolai (n. 5 [2011]), ‘La crisi del paradigma’, especially 33.

26 PV 345–50 and 425–9 (with cruces in the OCT edition of Page).

27 He is also mentioned at Bacch. 230, 1291 and 1227.

28 Ed. J. Diggle, OCT.

29 Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.

30 On both points see R. Seaford, Euripides: Bacchae (Warminster, 1996), at 179.

31 Though it does reappear in Diod. Sic. 4.81.4–5.

32 See Stesich. fr. 236 Page (from Paus. 9.2.3); Hes. fr. 217A M-W; Acus. FGrHist 2 F33 (from Apollod. Bibl. 3.4.4); and the discussion in Schlam, C.C., ‘Diana and Actaeon: metamorphoses of a myth’, ClAnt 3 (1984), 82–110 Google Scholar, at 83–7.

33 Callim. Hymn 5.107–18. See also Ov. Met. 3.138–252, and a discussion of further textual and visual parallels in Schlam (n. 32), 95–105.

34 J. Roux, Euripides: Les Bacchantes (Paris, 1972), 361, ‘de tous les texts anciens, ce vers est le seul qui nous ait transmis cette version de la légende. Elle devait cependant être familière aux spectateurs, si l'on en juge par la brièveté de l'allusion’. She goes on to speculate that Aeschylus might have developed a similar narrative in the Toxotides. See also Schlam (n. 32), 86–7.

35 See especially Bacch. 1168–300, a passage rich in hunting vocabulary, and the discussion on the metaphor of the hunt in the play in C. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae: Expanded Edition (Princeton, 1997), 31–6.

36 Bacch. 1233 (μέγιστον κομπάσαι πάρεστί σοι).

37 Ed. J. Diggle, OCT.

38 As in Hyg. Fab. 2 and 4. This is also what the scholiast on Med. 1284 tries to convey: οἱ μὲν οὖν ἱστοροῦσι … Εὐριπίδης δέ φησιν …, ‘Some narrate … but Euripides says …’. See also Newton, R.M., ‘Ino in Euripides' Medea ’, AJPh 106 (1985), 496–502 Google Scholar, at 500–1.

39 D.L. Page, Euripides: Medea (Oxford, 1938), at 172 on Eur. Med. 1284, emphasis added. Compare Mastronarde (n. 3), 371: ‘Euripides seems to allude here to a version in which Ino, in madness …, kills both her children, but then leaps into the sea (or kills them by taking them with her in her leap)’ (emphasis added).

40 Page (n. 39), 172 on Med. 1284.

41 Newton (n. 38); see also T. Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore and London, 1993), 177.

42 Newton (n. 38). While I agree with this point, Mastronarde (n. 3), 371 on 1284 rightly notes that the audience must have accepted that Ino's murder of both of her children was due to poetic licence and not, as Newton believes, because the Chorus cited an ‘event which never occurred’.

43 For variety regarding the number and names of Medea's children in other versions, see Mastronarde (n. 3), 49–50.

44 J. March, ‘Vases and tragic drama: Euripides' Medea and Sophocles' lost Tereus’, in N.K. Rutter and B.A. Sparkes (edd.), Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 2000), 119–39. For scepticism regarding this dating, see A.H. Sommerstein, D. Fitzpatrick and T. Talboy (edd.), Sophocles: Selected Fragmentary Plays (Oxford, 2006), 1.159.

45 Mastronarde (n. 3), 370.

46 Newton (n. 38), 501. See also March (n. 44), 120.

47 Such line of argument is adopted in Eur. HF 1016–27, where the Chorus refers to the murders by the Danaids and by Procne but admits that these exempla fall short in providing a suitable analogy to Heracles' murder of his three sons. In Soph. Phil. 676–85, the Chorus compares the suffering of Philoctetes to that of Ixion, only to find the comparison inadequate.

48 See Aesch. Supp. 57–67, Ag. 1140–9; Soph. Aj. 624–34, Trach. 103–11, 962–3, El. 103–9, 145–52, 1074–81; Eur. IT 1089–105, Hel. 1107–21, Phoen. 1509–18.

49 N. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (with the Essay “Of Amnesty and its Opposite”) (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 57–65.

50 For a reconstruction of the play see Fitzpatrick, D., ‘Sophocles’ Tereus ’, CQ 51 (2001), 90–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 On the metamorphosis theme in this myth see P.M.C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford, 1990), 99–107 and 248–9.

52 H. Friis Johansen and E.W. Whittle, Aeschylus: The Suppliants (Copenhagen, 1980) print Metis as the name for Tereus' wife, on which see the criticism of Verdenius, W.J., ‘Notes on the Parodos of Aeschylus' Suppliants ’, Mnemosyne 38 (1985), 281–306 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 294 and Griffith, M., ‘A new edition of Aeschylus' Suppliants ’, Phoenix 40 (1986), 323–40, at 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 On the date of the Suppliants see A.F. Garvie, Aeschylus' Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge, 1969), 1–28, the earlier dating proposed in Scullion, S., ‘Tragic dates’, CQ 52 (2002), 81–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the ‘Preface to the second edition’ of Garvie's book (Bristol, 2006).

54 Text and trans. A.H. Sommerstein, LCL.

55 Hyg. Fab. 45 and Friis Johansen and Whittle (n. 52), 53. For a more detailed list of late sources, see Whittle, E.W., ‘Two notes on Aeschylus’ Supplices ’, CQ 14 (1964), 24–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 27 n. 9, where the silence of interim sources regarding Tereus' metamorphosis into a hawk is cited as a parallel to the absence of interim sources that refer to Io as ‘flower-browsing’ in Aesch. Supp. 43, mentioned again only in much later sources (such as Etym. Magn. 389.2 s.v. Εὔβοια).

56 On the metamorphosis of Tereus in Sophocles and Aristophanes see N. Dunbar, Aristophanes Birds (Oxford, 1995), 139–41 (on Av. 15) and 164–5 (on Av. 101).

57 Il. 22.139–42 and cf. Il. 16.582–3, 17.755–7 and 21.493–6.

58 See other bird images in 30, 223–5, 510–11 and 751, with a discussion of avian imagery in the play in R.D. Murray, The Motif of Io in Aeschylus’ Suppliants (Princeton, 1958), 44–5; D.J. Conacher, Aeschylus: The Earlier Plays and Related Studies (Toronto, 1996), 83 and 132–40, especially at 134–5 and T. Papadopoulou, Aeschylus: Suppliants (London, 2011), 61. Also, Friis Johansen and Whittle (n. 52), 179 on Supp. 224, the ‘bird-imagery hinted by 30 ἐσμόν and developed in the motif of the hawk-chased nightingale (60ff.) has been refashioned’.

59 Supp. 223–5: ἐν ἁγνῶι δ’ ἑσμὸς ὣς πελειάδων | ἵζεσθε κίρκων τῶν ὁμοπτέρων φόβωι, | ἐχθρῶν ὁμαίμων καὶ μιαινόντων γένος, ‘sit in this holy place like a flock of doves in fearful flight from hawks, their fellow-birds, hostile kindred who defile their race’ (trans. A.H. Sommerstein, LCL).

60 Avian imagery is also used to describe the pursuit of the Danaids by their cousins in PV 853–9.

61 On the Danaids' manipulative tactics, see Griffith (n. 52), 325–6 and Papadopoulou (n. 58), 39–43.

62 Euripides takes up the parallelism in HF 1016–27, where the murders that Procne and the Danaids committed are compared in an exemplum to Heracles' murder of his sons in the play. See also Eur. Hec. 885–7, where Hecuba, in commenting on the capacity of women to be murderers, mentions the Danaids and the Lemnian women.

63 See, for example, Griffith, R.D., ‘The hoopoe's name (a note on Birds 48)’, QUCC 26 (1987), 59–63 Google Scholar; Dobrov, G., ‘The tragic and the comic Tereus’, AJPh 114 (1993), 189–234 Google Scholar, at 211–13 and 218–21; March (n. 44); Sommerstein et al. (n. 44), 1.142–9, especially at 145; and C. Hahnemann, ‘Sophoclean fragments’, in K. Ormand (ed.), A Companion to Sophocles (Malden, MA, 2012), 169–84, at 175.

64 Arist. Hist. an. 633a18–27. Pliny (HN 10.86) also assigns the information to Aeschylus. See TrGF 4.**581 Radt (note) for the assignment of this passage to Sophocles, first proposed by Welcker. The note discusses other possible ascriptions, including the defence of the Aeschylean ascription by Cazzaniga and Mette. See also the more recent discussion in Sommerstein et al. (n. 44), 1.189–91.

65 On the ode see, among others, R. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles' Tragedies (Oxford, 1980), 126–32; R.P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), 98–109; Sourvinou-Inwood, C., ‘The fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone ’, BICS 36 (1989), 11–65 Google Scholar; and M.R. Kitzinger, The Choruses of Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes: A Dance of Words (Leiden, 2008), 57–61. This series of mythological exempla is quite unprecedented in the remaining corpus of Sophocles, which contains only a few mythological exempla, on which see Nicolai (n. 5 [2011]) ‘La crisi del paradigma’.

66 Aeschylus' Phineus was the first play in the trilogy that also included the Persae. On the Sophoclean fragments of Phineus A and B and the Tympanistai see TrGF 4.704–17a Radt and TrGF 4.636–45 Radt with a discussion in A.C. Pearson, The Fragments of Sophocles (Amsterdam, 1963), 311–22.

67 Griffith (n. 3), 291–2 and Kitzinger (n. 65), 59–60.

68 Sourvinou-Inwood (n. 65).

69 Scholion on Ant. 981. On Phineus' blinding of his children see also Apollod. Bibl. 3.15.3 (a named source in the Antigone scholion) and Hyg. Fab. 19. On the blinding of Phineus himself see Hes. fr. 254 M-W (= Scholion on Ap. Rhod. Argon. 2.178), Apollod. Bibl. 1.9.21, scholion on Od. 12.69 and Hyg. Fab. 19, as well as a discussion of the myth in R. Buxton, Myths and Tragedies in their Ancient Greek Contexts (Oxford, 2013), 184–6.

70 See frr. 704 and 705.

71 Burton (n. 65), 128: ‘Whether this ode is a résumé of tragedies already produced or a forecast of future productions, there is no evidence to show’.

72 Contrary, that is, to the assertion of Winnington-Ingram (n. 65), 105 that ‘Sophocles expected his audience to recognize one version in particular, probably from a play, and very likely from a play of his own’.