Sophocles, fr. 316 comprises matching entries in Photius, Lex. p. 489 Porson and the Suda ρ166, which are thought to derive from Pausanias the Atticist's dictionary.Footnote 1 Erbse presents the following text (ρ5):Footnote 2
ῥικνοῦσθαι: τὸ διέλκεσθαι καὶ παντοδαπῶς διαστρέφεσθαι κατ' εἶδος. λέγεται δὲ καὶ τὸ καμπύλον γίγνεσθαι ἀσχημόνως καὶ κατὰ συνουσίαν καὶ ὄρχησιν, κάμπτοντα τὴν ὀσφῦν. Σοφοκλῆς Ἰχνευταῖς.
“ῥικνοῦσθαι”: being twisted and variously skewed in appearance; it is also used for lewdly making oneself curved, during sex or dancing, by curling the lower spine (Sophocles in the Ichneutai).
How the verb fitted in to the Ichneutai has gone unanswered. Radt ad loc. merely comments ‘vix ad F 314.302 referendum’.Footnote 3 I agree: the lexicographers cannot be trying to gloss that description, also from Ichneutai, of the tortoise from which Hermes has fashioned a lyre:
It is short, pot-shaped and shrivelled up with a spotted skin.
Nevertheless, when the tragedians use a rare stem twice in the same play, the recurrence often forms an intratext to which one can attach some interpretative weight. Can one conjecture a significance-bearing reason why Sophocles might have used the extremely rare ῥικνόομαι and καταρρικνόομαι in very different senses within the same play?Footnote 4
I believe we can. The key is the remarkable ‘coincidence’ that the Homeric Hymn to Hermes – a text with much the same plot as Ichneutai and widely regarded as a source for Sophocles – also employs a phrase for ‘to sway the lower spine sexily’.Footnote 5
As Hermes first leaves his cave the narrator, giving Hermes' focalization, describes a tortoise σαῦλα ποσὶν βαίνουσα (28). Aristophanes' use of σαυλοπρωκτιάω (Vesp. 1171–3) and διασαυλόομαι (PCG fr. 635) shows what motion is intended – swaying the bottom from side to side, as tortoises indeed do as they walk. This swaying can imply vanity (as in e.g. Semonides, IEG 2 fr. 18 and the Aristophanes passages), but also sensuality. The satyrs, according to Euripides, Cyclops 39–40, once approached Althaea's house drunk, σαυλούμενοι, and prepared to serenade her with a barbitos. Anacreon used the word similarly, according to Clement of Alexandria (Paed. 3.11.69):
αἱ δὲ γυναικεῖοι κινήσεις καὶ θρύψεις καὶ χλιδαὶ κολουστέαι παντελῶς· τὸ γὰρ ἁβροδίαιτον τῆς περὶ τὸν περίπατον κινήσεως καὶ τὸ “σαυλὰ βαίνειν”, ὥς φησιν Ἀνακρέων [PMG fr. 113], κομιδῆι ἑταιρικά, ὥς γέ μοι φαίνεται.
Feminine movements and airs and luxuries must be completely curtailed: for pampered practices in one's gait and “σαῦλα βαίνειν”, in Anacreon's words, are utterly meretricious, in my humble opinion.
That σαῦλα connotes sensuality in the Hymn to Hermes is confirmed just a few lines later, with Hermes' remarkable greeting (31):
Be kindly, you gorgeous-bodied girl, who stamps in the chorus, who is a companion of the feast.
The Hymn to Hermes poses us a puzzle: how can Hermes see a sexy strut in the lumbering gait of a tortoise? This is not the place to discuss how that puzzle is gradually resolved.Footnote 7 For our purposes, it is enough that the hymnist took an apparently unalluring specimen, and redescribed its walk in such terms.
Putting the lexicographers' entries together with σαῦλα βαίνειν in the Hymn to Hermes produces a plausible account of fr. 316 and its relationship to Ichn. 302. Ῥικνοῦσθαι could describe the ‘sexy dance’ of the tortoise – or, perhaps, of the satyrs imitating a tortoise as they come to terms with its delightful music in the latter portion of the play.Footnote 8 But the verb would also recall the preceding, accurate description of the tortoise as κατερρικνωμένος (‘shrivelled’). This leaves us with an interesting new case of how satyr-plays pick up on and rework themes from epic, visible most obviously in Euripides' use of Odyssey 9 in his Cyclops.Footnote 9 I submit that Sophocles not only took over the Hymn to Hermes' paradoxically sexy tortoise, but gave her a further ‘twist in the tail’, by encapsulating both sexiness and unsexiness intratextually into a single verb.
