Andromache’s Elegiac Lament: Euripides marathon continues!

Andromache’s Elegiac Lament 103-116 to Parados 117-146

After the servant leaves on her dangerous mission, Andromache is alone and sings her lament to end the prologue and signal the Parados, the entrance of the chorus of local women. Andromache is not content to mourn the fall of Troy and the slaughter of her family, but goes further back to the causes of the war, to Paris and Helen, thereby illustrating a tendency on the part of Euripides' characters and choruses to sound at times like rhapsodists ( performers of epic poetry like the Cycle and Homer).  

In this play there is a consistent preoccupation with causes. Andromache here suggests that the war was prompted by the rape of Helen: three other theories will be presented before the end of the play, two by the chorus and the third by Peleus. One cannot assume that Euripides intended these as purely ornamental digressions. Their primary purpose remains for the present unrevealed, but the immediate effect of Andromache's reflections on the war is to push the beginning of the tragedy further back in time. In review of the prologue, one should note that it ends as it begins, that is, with a statement of Andromache's misfortunes and plight. Yet enough intrusions have separated these two monologues to discourage one from interpreting the entire scene as simply an extended threnos. A second (minor servant) character is introduced, and the plot is actually furthered, if slightly, before Andromache turns to her lamentations.

Andromache’s monodic lament in Andromache recalls her laments in the Iliad, and creates a point of continuity between the Homeric Andromache and the Euripidean Andromache. Andromache herself says in the proem that she is always lamenting (ἡμεῖς δ’ οἷσπερ ἐγκείμεσθ’ ἀεὶ/θρήνοισι καὶ γόοισι καὶ δακρύμασιν/πρὸς αἰθέρ’ ἐκτενοῦμεν· 91-93), a state of affairs which fittingly expands upon Hector’s prediction of her future from Iliad Book 6.39 The lament itself recalls the cause of the Trojan War, the death of Hector, and Andromache’s captivity. The death of Hector and Andromache’s captivity were recounted in the prologue by Andromache herself (8-15). In this song, she explicitly names the culprit: the marriage of Paris: Ἰλίωι αἰπεινᾶι Πάρις οὐ γάμον ἀλλά τιν’ ἄταν/ἀγάγετ’ εὐναίαν ἐς θαλάμους Ἑλέναν (103-104). This is the first of several references to Paris and Helen and the cause of the Trojan War in Andromache. It is fitting that Andromache be the first character to recall the ruin that disastrous union caused: as the sympathetic character of the play, it is her suffering, and the causes of her suffering, which captivate audience and reader.

Andromache also makes use of several typical features of tragic laments. She makes explicit reference to the tears she shed upon being led away as a slave (πολλὰ δὲ δάκρυά μοι, 111) and uses a simile to describe in detail the depth of her sorrow while she clutches the statue of the goddess as suppliant (τάκομαι ὡς πετρίνα πιδακόεσσα λιβάς, 116). She also apostrophizes herself as “wretched me!” (ὤμοι ἐγὼ μελέα, 113), a feature used often by women in laments.The tone of the lament extends the sense of passivity Andromache cultivated in her prologue. She is careful to say that none of the events were of her making; she suffers through the insensitivity and cruelty of others.

“That no man is to be accounted happy until after his last day on earth” is a commonplace of tragedy and Andromache's lament end with it. This bit of truth might at first seem out of place here. It is usually spoken in reproachful warning to one who thinks himself blest by fortune (e.g. Solon to Croesus in Herodotus' account), or by a speaker with unwitting tragic irony (e.g. by the pompous Agamemnon in the Aeschylus play). So is the present use of it partially ironical, but the speaker is both the wit and the victim.  Andromache, who can by no means be called happy in advance of her death and whose last day may well be the most wretched of many, includes the proverb among her preliminary observations as a grim bit of understatement. But the subtlety transcends mere irony, for Andromache stands now in full realization of the truth of this axiom which throughout her life, up to the attack on Troy, had no practical meaning. She once was happy but now is not. Who can say whether she ever will be again?

The Andromache includes the only passage of elegiac couplets in extant Greek tragedy. Elegiac meter was originally associated with mournful songs accompanied by the aulos (double reed wind instrument); its use was later extended to epigrams and love poems. An elegiac couplet consists of a line of dactylic hexameter ( the meter of all Epic)  followed by a shorter line traditionally called a “pentameter.” The dactylic hexameter contains six feet; each foot is either a dactyl (LONG-short-short ) or a spondee (LONG-LONG). The sixth foot is always a spondee, and the fifth is usually a dactyl, so most lines end with the rhythm LONG-short-short LONG-LONG: “Shave and a Haircut.”(No “two bits!”)

The alternating pentameter line is not really five dactylic feet; rather it is  2.5 + 2.5 feet. The pattern: LONG-short-short-LONG-short-short-LONG: “Lions and Tigers and Bears!”( No “Oh my!”) Two dactyls plus a long syllable is called a “hemiepes” (half-foot). Two hemiepes with a word boundary between them, make up the so-called pentameter line. In the first hemipies, a long syllable can be substituted for two shorts.

The elegy of Andromache in the Andromache of Euripides actually shows the evolutionary relationship between lament and elegy. We see it in the simple fact that this elegy is complete as an elegy, but it is incomplete as a lament. The elegiac singing of Andromache is not a complete performance of lamentation. It is only part of a performance, as we see from what happens after Andromache finishes her song of lament. This lament, which is a monody sung by the tragic actor representing Andromache, leads into an antiphonal lament, sung and danced by the chorus of tragedy. At line 117, the hexameter of what was expected to be the next elegiac couplet is picked up as the first line of a choral song—a song that is meant to be sung and danced by the chorus. This choral song is decidedly not elegiac in form. From line 117 onward, there are no more elegiac couplets to be heard since the hexameter at this line will not be followed by a pentameter.

So, the elegy of Andromache, as a monody, is only a part of the lament here, since the choral song of the women of Phthia continues where Andromache left off. From the plot of the tragedy, we can see how the continuation comes about. An ensemble of local women from Phthia has just arrived at the scene of action, finding there a foreign woman from Troy, Andromache. She is in a state of abject isolation, lamenting her misfortunes as she sings her monody of sorrow.

The local women react to the sorrow by singing and dancing an antiphonal lament in response to the monodic lament sung by Andromache. This sharing of sorrow between the two sides, by way of the monody sung by Andromache on one side and the choral song sung and danced by the local women on the other side, leads to a communalization of emotions, in all their diversities. By way of this communalization, the local women from Phthia have in effect accepted the foreign woman from Troy as their lead singer. For the male chorus who represents this ensemble of women, the actor and virtuoso singer who represents Andromache in singing her lament is in fact the lead singer, since the monody he sings leads into the singing and dancing of the chorus. By contrast with epic, which shows a distinction between thrēnos and góos as genres, we see no such distinction in the monody of Andromache as represented in the Andromache of Euripides. Both words thrēnos and góos refer in this monody to laments performed by women In short, the references to female lament in tragedy are in reality references to female lament only as represented by male lament. Such a representation of female lament by tragedy can be considered an act of male appropriation, which Nagy calls a masculinization of women’s lament.” With its power of direct representation, which is called mimēsis in Greek, tragedy is not only more realistic than epic in the ways it shows lament in action. It is also more deceptive since this realism makes it all the more difficult to distinguish between genres of male and female lament embedded within tragedy as a genre of all-male performance. The masculinization of women’s lament in tragedy is so realistic that it becomes barely noticeable. That is what makes tragedy in Athenian State Theater seem so threatening in Plato’s Republic (III 395d–e).The perceived threat is that men who represent the laments of women in tragedy will start to talk and think and even feel like women, not like the men they really are. In the masculinization of women’s lament, from Plato’s point of view, the danger is that men’s lament can in turn be feminized.

In brief, then, the elegy of Andromache composed by Euripides for his Andromache is exceptional in ancient Greek literature because its form represents three different but related genres: (1) lament as performed by women, (2) elegy as performed by men, and (3) threnodic elegy as performed by men who are professional singers. The representation of all three of these genres must have seemed most realistic to the audiences of Euripides, since he is ridiculed in the Frogs of Aristophanes (1301–1303) for heavy-handedly inserting what is called the thrēnos into his tragedies.

    The differences we see in these three genres stem from a basic tendency in the evolution of poetic forms in the prehistory of Greek literature. That tendency can be described as an ongoing differentiation of specialized forms of solo performance evolving out of unspecialized forms of group performance. What results is the emergence of specialized forms that exist only in solo performance, cut off from the corresponding unspecialized forms that continue to exist in group performance. To put it in terms of attested forms of performance in the fifth century BCE, a period of time that coincides with the classical phase of ancient Greek literature, solo performance becomes monodic while group performance remains choral (Nagy 1990a:85, 340–341). Almost all of the poetry we find surviving from the literature of this period has been composed exclusively either for monodic or for choral performance. An exception is tragedy, along with other dramatic forms as attested primarily in the context of Athenian State Theater in the fifth century. Within the framework of tragedy and other drama, the monodic and the choral dimensions of performance are still connected, as in the elegy of the Andromache of Euripides.