Competing Generic Narratives in Aeschylus’ Oresteia

Abstract

Ever since Hellenistic scholars and librarians began to sub-divide some collections by genre, it has been a convenient filter through which to view ancient literature. Yet as scholars have increasingly come to recognise, generic boundaries are porous, and Greek writers from the archaic period onwards include material that evokes different literary forms. In this context, the relationship between Greek tragedy and earlier choral poetry is particularly rich, because tragedy is itself a choral genre, and a mimetic one. When a tragic chorus evokes (say) a paeanic or hymenaeal chorus, the choreuts do not merely allude to, but actually perform the other genre. The tragic chorus in some sense really do become the ritual chorus performing the song, and the audience sees a paian or hymenaios being enacted before their eyes. Thus lyric representations in tragedy are immediate and visceral, in a way that is quite different from literary intertexts such as allusions to famous scenes from Homer. Moreover, allusions to lyric song are more than literary guessing-games for the educated elite, since these forms of poetry are associated with particular events or stages in the life of a community or an individual. In its original performance context, choral lyric can operate as a vehicle for expressing social norms, and exploring how one should react to a significant event, whether sickness, a military victory, a wedding, or the worship of a god. Hence when a piece of ritual lyric is transferred into tragedy, it brings with it a set of shared associations and values rooted in the world beyond the play, and the tragedians can use these generic triggers to explore or test these conventional beliefs, or to show how they map onto (or fail to be compatible with) the world of the play. 1 My previous work on this topic focuses on plays which allude to a single dominant lyric genre, whose performance context relates to the preoccupations of the tragedy itself: for example, hymenaios in plays that focus on dysfunctional relationships between the sexes; paian in plays that focus on man's relationship with the divine. In these cases, the choral odes tend to show intricate, dense, and sophisticated allusion to the tropes of the chosen lyric genre. This article, however, will approach the topic from a different angle, by looking at how tragedy can incorporate multiple lyric genres simultaneously. As we shall see, generic interaction can be used to create a narrative arc, which runs subtly throughout the play rather than being concentrated in particular odes, and can guide the audience's interpretation of the broader action. Rather than detailed allusion or intertextuality, we find something more like Wagnerian leitmotifs: small-scale references which may not seem noteworthy when taken in isolation, but which over the course of a play build up a pattern of association. Since genres carry different sets of connotations, the poet can create conflicting arcs, and bring them into tension to explore different possible outcomes, or competing motivatio...