The Night Troy Burned: Euripides’ Choral Synesthesia
First Stasimon 511-567
I have transliterated all the Greek words so you can try your tongue at pronouncing them!
As eyewitnesses, the Chorus sings and dances describing the
night Troy fell with sensuous, evocative language. Scenes of false jubilation
contrast with the devastation caused by the secret vanguard inside the great
wooden horse. The sight of the
gold-decked horse is encapsulated in the single and unique compound chruseophalaron,
lit. “with golden cheek pieces of the
horse’s head harness.”; in the sinister ship’s hull used to compare the shape
and color of the horse; in the bright torch flares glowing in the dark,
expressed in the oxymoron malainan aiglan “black gleam” and in the “terrified
hands” of children, cheiros eptoemenos, clutching at their mothers’
dress. Sound is evoked in the description of pipes playing (544) thudding feet
( 546) and song (547) as well as in the bold image at 555-6 “a bloody shout
possessed the city.” Texture is stressed in a number of epithets suggesting the
material composition of things- “the mountain pinewood” (533), the “polished
ambush” (544), the circling ropes of spun flax” (538) and the stone temple
floor (540). The senses blend and
overlap: the sound of thudding feet and singing cuts through the darkness with
intermittent gleams of torchlight, so
that sound and darkness and light become indistinguishable. Thus, a shout is
described with a word that also connotes the redness of blood, phoinia
(555), and an abstract word “ambush” (534) is given a tangible, textural
adjective to suggest the polished wood in which it is hidden.
The Greeks’
brutal decapitation of the Trojan men is evoked in two words, karatomos
eremia “headless desolation”, while the Trojan women, taken as so much loot
to breed sons to Greek men are called neanidon stephanon…..Helladi
kourotrophon, a phrase so condensed it is almost untranslatable without
using more words, “ a crowning-prize-of-young-women to-breed-sons-for-Greece.”
Next: Andromache enters with her baby on board chariot.
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