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Appendix C Lyrics in Hekabe The lyrics in Hekabe are not closely related to the events on stage. After the emotional scene in which Polyxene is led off to her death, Hekabe collapses in despair and lays a curse on Helene for the misery she brought Troy; but the chorus has no direct comment on what they have witnessed. (See C. Milller [1933, 21-24]). Instead they sing a song of escape, imagining their sea voyage to a future life of servitude in Hellas. The scene in which Polyxene's death is narrated is followed by a brief song about Alexandros and Helene, the judgment of Paris, and the sorrow of Trojan and Greek women at the war. After the discovery of Polydoros' corpse their song returns to this theme in a more ambitious structure. The thematic similarity of the three odes is striking: all contain references to sea voyages, all refer to the misery of women in war, and all center upon the experience of the chorus without ever making any direct return to the signal and obvious miseries of Hekabe, which are being enacted on stage (on the interrelation, see Hofmann [1916,71ff.]). These songs also have in common a remote and fantasied quality that could not contrast more severely with the lurid atmosphere, grotesque style, and hurried pace of the play that they adorn. The first chorus derives its theme from Polyxene's denunciation of slavery in the preceding scene; but the treatment in lyric is completely inverted. Polyxene pictures the life of a slave in accurate and even anachronistic colors: she thinks she may be forced to prepare food, sweep the house, work at the loom, and share the bed of a 330 Lyrics in Hekabe 331 slave (362 - 66)-whereas in epic the Trojan princesses had a more elevated role as concubines of the Greek heroes. The chorus, by contrast, imagine themselves taking part in several picturesque and famous Hellenic religious ceremonies, in a prettified travelogue of slavery. The chorus' fantasy of their future is more than idealized; it is full of blatant errors. Rosivach (1975, 354-57) has shown that they seem to imagine a virginal service to Artemis and Athena, although they themselves are matrons and the sexual slaves of Greek victors. In addition to this, the chorus imagine themselves as participating in religious ceremonies, such as weaving the robe for Athena at the Panathenaia, that were certainly closed to slaves and noncitizens . The response of the audience to this sort of lyric will not be one of rejection (a la Verrall) but one of (repressed) confusion: lyric, especially escapist lyric of this sort, is meant to present us with a glorified or beautified reality. But it is nowhere laid down how far this glorification can go; and in this case the inaccuracy of the chorus' expectations is extreme. While Polyxene sees death as the only escape from reality, the chorus simply transform reality into an altered, more picturesque version. Clearly, after having begun their lyric with a parodos that was not really a lyric interlude at all, the chorus are turning abruptly away from the mimesis of reality in the stage events. The second ode is marginally more closely tied to stage action. Hekabe ends the scene (62o£f.) with an address to the house of Priamos and its lost glory, and the chorus also sing of Troy's destruction. But their theme is generalized and, like the first ode, this song centers on the chorus rather than on the actors. (Note the repeated "for me, for me pain was fated" in the opening lines [629-30].) The role of Alexandros and Helene is emphasized, as well as the beauty of the latter and the contest between the three goddesses. The epode, again lightly paralleling the previous scene, refers to the sorrow of Greek women, mentioning a "Spartan girl" as well as an old mother, the Greek counterparts of Polyxene and Hekabe, who have been so sharply juxtaposed in the previous scene. The sympathetic reference to Greece, like the fantasy of inclusion in Greek society in the first stasimon, parallels the sentimental identification between Greek and Trojan in Polyxene's death. The theme of female beauty plays fitfully over the ode, without acquiring any central focus; and this theme also recalls the spectacular description of Polyxene's lovely body in the previous scene. The last stasimon pulls together, concentrates, and expands the themes of the other two. It is a full-scale...

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