The mangled second-century papyrus which preserves this passage from Sophocles’ Eurypylus is powerful testimony to an extraordinarily passionate scene. Before the passage above comes the opening of a messenger speech, little of which is preserved. It seems to describe the death of Eurypylus, who brought his soldiers to Troy to support Priam, but was slain by Achilles’ son Neoptolemus. Eurypylus’ father was Telephus (mentioned, by a virtually certain restoration, at line 26), king of the Mysians, who was wounded by Achilles’ spear when the Greeks mistakenly landed in his country on the way to Troy, and was later cured by the same weapon; his mother was Astyoche, Priam's sister. After the account of Eurypylus’ death follows an emotional exchange in song between two speakers; their names are not preserved, but paragraphoi indicate speaker change. One speaker suffers a particularly intense reaction to Eurypylus’ death, such as would suit only his mother, Astyoche. The other speaker comments on the character's grief, fulfilling the chorus's role. After this lyric exchange or kommos, Astyoche, now speaking, asks the Messenger about the treatment of her son's body and (another likely restoration) of a companion of his, perhaps Antenor's son Helicaon.Footnote ² The ‘impassioned rhetoric’ of the Messenger's reply is clear;Footnote ³ in particular, his account of the lamentation over Eurypylus’ corpse, especially Priam's, rises to the fraught occasion.

This myth is allusively recounted in the Odyssey, where Eurypylus, son of Telephus and the most handsome warrior after Memnon, is said to have been killed at Troy by Neoptolemus, ‘because of the gifts given to a woman’.Footnote ⁴ The duel also featured in the Little Iliad, and is depicted on a late sixth-century vase.Footnote ⁵ The fifth-century mythographer Acusilaus of Argos gives a fuller account, which seems to underlie that of the Odyssey: Astyoche was bribed by Priam through the gift of a golden vine to send her son into conflict.Footnote ⁶ A later source states that Astyoche needed to be bribed because Telephus, in return for being healed, had promised Achilles that neither he nor his offspring would take up arms against him.Footnote ⁷

The Sophoclean plot seems to have employed the same story as Acusilaus, given Astyoche's lament that she is being punished ‘justly’ (40), a view endorsed by the chorus (41, 46). The ‘justice’ in question involves her punishment for having sent her son to war (or permitted him to go) against her better judgement (perhaps because he was so young that his survival was seriously in doubt), or contrary to some prior agreement (as in the version recorded by the scholia to Juvenal), or in defiance of some prophecy that Eurypylus would die if he joined the conflict (as in the myth of Eriphyle, who was bribed by Adrastus with a golden necklace to send her husband Amphiaraus on the expedition against Thebes, even though she knew from Amphiaraus’ own prophecies that he would die as a result).Footnote ⁸ There must have been some good reason for Astyoche to ensure that her son did not go to Troy, a reason which she was prepared to overlook thanks to the bribe; the latter two scenarios, in which Astyoche's action is immoral rather than simply thoughtless, cohere better with the evidence. As a result, Eurypylus’ death is more than the random slaying of a brave warrior; it is a truly tragic tale in which Astyoche's own choices and moral failings lead to the destruction of her family.

The lyric exchange between Astyoche and the chorus recalls a distinctive passage in Aeschylus’ Persians, in which a Messenger arrives relatively early to announce the Persian army's annihilation, prompting a short dialogue between the main female character, the Persian Queen, who speaks, and the chorus, who sing (246–89); replying to the Queen's questions, the Messenger then narrates the calamity in detail. But the bisection of the Messenger's narrative in Eurypylus is more extraordinary. Here both interrupters, Astyoche and the chorus, sing at least part of their piece, ensuring a more powerful aural impact and more directly emotional tone; and the lengthy interruption takes place not merely after the initial announcement of the news, but some way through the narrative – indeed, immediately after it has reached the death of Eurypylus, intensifying an already painful moment.

It has been suggested that the scene in Eurypylus, like that of Persians, occurred at an early stage, and that, as in Sophocles’ Ajax, some problem with the burial of Eurypylus allowed the continuation of forward momentum even after the title character's death.Footnote ⁹ More recently, however, help in placing this narrative has come from an unlikely source. Analysis of the pattern of wormhole distribution can allow us to determine the rough position of a substantial papyrus fragment from a roll: for as the worms burrow their way in, the holes that they leave recur at quite a gap at the start of the text, but towards its end, at the centre of the roll where the text is most tightly wrapped, there will be a relatively small distance between the holes. So through a paradox of which Sophocles himself would have been proud, the decay of the object has ensured the preservation of key details about its original state. Painstaking calculations have allowed Giulio Iovine to conclude that the fragment above ‘was very close to the end of the roll (only a few columns may have followed), and that the facts it recounts might have constituted the final episode of the tragedy’.Footnote ¹⁰ In other words, the Messenger's plangent words come not in the middle but at the end of the play, as a climax. And since Eurypylus may have been the concluding play in a connected Sophoclean trilogy on the Telephus myth (p. 4 above), this speech might even have formed the culmination of a connected series of dramas, with all kinds of poetic associations that cannot now be traced.

This new discovery aligns the play not so much with Aeschylus’ Persians, but with Sophocles’ Antigone, which also concludes with a central character, in that case Creon, learning via a messenger that his son Haemon has died as a result of Creon's own foolishness. Creon is at least permitted to hold his son's body, coming on as he does with Haemon's corpse in his arms; whether the dead Eurypylus is returned to Astyoche at the end of this drama remains unknown.Footnote ¹¹ There is certainly an emphasis on Eurypylus’ relationship with his parents. The fragmentary opening above, with the phrases ‘twofold’ and ‘of his father’ (31–2), will refer to how Eurypylus was slain by the same spear which had wounded his father (a weapon already mentioned by the Messenger, with likely or possible references at lines 11, 19, 20, 25, 29); Astyoche then speaks of herself as a ‘third (sc. victim of the same weapon)’ (34). The contrast between the father's fate, in which the wound was temporary and later cured, and the son's, which was all too permanent, is poignant, as is the idea that the same weapon has a third victim whom it never even touched, the wife and mother of the father and son. Yet Astyoche is not simply a victim – she herself in effect gave the spear its second opportunity to strike.

A parent causing the death of a child, with whatever degree of moral culpability, recurs in other tragedies; Euripides’ Ino is perhaps the most striking instance, with fully six children falling through parental action (p. 33 above). Sophocles individualizes the theme through the unusual splitting up of the Messenger's narrative by the sung responses of mother and chorus, and via the particular content of the second half of the speech, which emphasizes Priam's reaction to his nephew's death.Footnote ¹² Repeatedly he is described as if he were Eurypylus’ true father (71, 74–5), an ironic designation given his complicity in his death. That complicity seems to be the subject of another fragment, from after the passage above, in which Astyoche refers to Priam (perhaps cursing him?) and sings of him ‘persuading’ her ‘to commit a senseless act’.Footnote ¹³ Yet Priam's intense sorrow will have mitigated any negative audience reaction; moreover, in persuading Astyoche to allow Eurypylus to come to Troy, he was seeking no personal gain, but the safety of his people. Astyoche, by contrast, commits a far worse offence: accepting a bribe to send her son to a fatal conflict. Priam's fatherly emotion thus primarily contrasts with Astyoche's fatal lack of maternal care – her current emotion, striking though it is, comes too late. The Messenger's speech, while stimulating feelings in its own right, thus allows the audience to explore one of the play's key themes by comparing the presentation of Priam within the narrative with the woman who forms the narrative's primary audience. The recent discovery that the speech came at the end suggests that this culminating narrative and the reaction to it will have been of decisive importance for the audience's reaction to Eurypylus’ mother, and thus to the play as a whole.

Our rare good fortune in being able to perceive Sophocles’ innovative handling of the Eurypylus messenger speech is counterpoised by the crushing loss of the enormous majority of these Sophoclean narratives. The number has recently been augmented by the new Tereus fragment, which reveals that a speech by the title character's wife, Procne, about the sorrows of marriage, part of which was already known from a quotation fragment, is followed by the entrance of a shepherd, who after a brief portion of stichomythia begins (in lieu of a messenger) to deliver a narrative; that narrative will probably cause Procne great grief, and put into a new, appalling context the general remarks about marriage which she had only just been uttering (pp. 73–7 below). Again, it is not just the narrative itself but its place and purpose which distinguish Sophocles’ handling of the form, here casting an altogether different light on remarks made by the main character before the messenger had come on stage.

The topic of messenger speeches in Sophocles may not have attracted its own monograph, as Euripidean messenger speeches have in the form of Irene de Jong's Narrative in Drama. The Art of the Euripidean Messenger-Speech (1991), but they have nevertheless received scholarly interest, sometimes in the context of monographs devoted to such speeches in tragedy as a whole.Footnote ¹⁴ De Jong herself has produced several papers on Sophoclean narrative, as has Christina Kraus on storytelling in Trachiniae;Footnote ¹⁵ the application by De Jong and others of narratological analysis to the plays of Sophocles has been well documented by Andreas Markantonatos, who himself has produced an account of Oedipus at Colonus that focuses on the role of narrative, particular on how Oedipus exerts control over events by means of his retelling of events from the past.Footnote ¹⁶

Most messengers are not attempting to control events with their narratives; nameless figures of no interest in themselves, they aim to give an account of what they have experienced, delineating the extent of their familiarity with events to ensure as accurate and objective a report as possible. An exception is the Paedagogus’ narrative of the death of Orestes in Electra, perhaps the best-known and most striking messenger speech in Sophocles.Footnote ¹⁷ Although the Paedagogus is not named, we have met him before, in the play's prologue, where he urges Orestes to begin his plan of vengeance. Orestes tells him to announce to the royal household Orestes’ death in a chariot race at the Pythian games (47–50); the Paedagogus turns a four-line instruction into a speech of over eighty (680–763), whose vivid description of the contest (the most detailed such account which has survived from antiquity, and thus of historical as well as literary significance) is all the more powerful because the audience knows that it is founded on a lie. Just as significant as the narrative itself, in which Orestes seems certain of victory before dashing his chariot against the turning-post (pp. 71–2 below), is the reaction which the Paedagogus’ initial announcement provokes in the women who hear it:

The narrative that follows is contextualized by that fallout – the audience react not just in their own right (a necessarily complex reaction, given that they know that the narrative is fictional within the already fictional world of a play, and thus requiring a double suspension of disbelief), but are invited to imagine the effect which the Paedagogus’ words have on Electra, who has been destroyed by the news, and on Clytemnestra, eager as she is to hear the message in full. Her words to Electra ‘You deal with your own business’, as if the death of her brother had nothing to do with her, are a candidate for the play's most heart-wrenching phrase. We can only imagine how the interaction was physically performed (did Electra collapse? Was Clytemnestra's triumph visible in her posture?) as the Paedagogus told his tale.

Sophoclean narratives can also be conveyed via dialogue, through stichomythia, or even in lyric. The narratives told by the chorus in the fourth stasimon of Antigone, for example, formally intended to console Antigone as she goes to her death by citing mythological examples of suffering, have an importance beyond that purpose: they evoke themes from the play as a whole, with significance for Creon as much as for Antigone, especially in view of the disaster about to enfold him.Footnote ¹⁸ Such narratives can embrace not just the mythological past but the immediate future, as in the chorus's description in Ajax of the likely behaviour of Ajax's mother once she hears of his death:

The chorus's picture of Ajax's mother stirs the audience thanks to its detail, specifying as they do the type of lamentation which she will utter and rejecting alternative possibilities as insufficient for the tragic occasion. The lavish scene-painting suits the plangent world of lyric; when Ajax himself describes the same woman's reaction to the same event, even beginning with the same particle combination, his words are briefer:

Ajax's stark expression might scarcely qualify as a narrative at all; but the picture that he draws is no less powerful than the chorus's, thanks to the archaic simplicity and brevity of the phrasing. It would not be in keeping with Ajax's character to describe the lamentation in detail; but it is entirely like him to show such imaginative sympathy, even now, as he appreciates the sorrow which his action will cause a woman far away whom he will never see again. Sophocles’ returning to the same topic in such different ways across a brief expanse of the drama not only lends unity to the play, but demonstrates his extraordinary versatility, sophistication, and restraint as a teller of narratives.Footnote ¹⁹