From curculio@glasscity.net Sun Mar 4 11:32:18 2001 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id LAA132312 for ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 11:32:17 -0800 Received: from mailcore4.oh.voyager.net (mailcore4.oh.voyager.net [207.90.100.18]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA19855 for ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 11:32:17 -0800 Received: from t9q0o0 (d20.as0.bwlg.oh.voyager.net [208.13.20.85]) by mailcore4.oh.voyager.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id OAA11659 for ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 14:32:15 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <006a01c0a4e3$097703a0$55140dd0@t9q0o0> From: "Michael Hendry" To: References: Subject: Re: chorus of E. Supp. Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 14:40:57 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Anne Mahoney asks: > Maybe I'm over-analyzing here, and maybe there's a standard answer to this > question that I've just missed. In Euripides's Suppliant Women, the > chorus are the mothers of the Seven Against Thebes. It seems to me there > should be *six* mothers -- one each, leaving out Jocasta. Who, then, are > the other six members of the ordinary tragic chorus? (or, worse, the > other nine, if E. had a chorus of 15 here) > I think we are not supposed to take the numbers too literally. People used to think that Aeschylus' *Suppliants* and the other plays of the trilogy must have had choruses of 50 to represent the 50 daughters of Danaus and their 50 cousins who wanted to marry them, and I think 50 handmaids, too, with supposedly as many as 153 people milling around on the stage at one point. Modern scholars (Taplin? West? Pickard-Cambridge?) argue that the chorus was the usual 12 or 15 -- whichever was standard at that time, I never can remember -- and that we are supposed to just assume that they "stand for" groups of 50. Whoever said this specifically referred to the case of Euripides' *Suppliants* and said that it would be absurd to supposed that the chorus there had only 7 (or 6?) members. It sounded convincing to me when I read it. In other words, the 12 (or 15) represent a generic sort of multiplicity rather than a specific number of individuals. Also, if the jury in the *Eumenides* is 12, I think it's because there were 12 in the chorus that year, and has nothing to do with the modern 12-person jury. I suppose even in Aeschylus' time the Athenian jury was 101, 201, 501, or 1001? If so, why an even number in the play? Hmmmm . . . . this is getting complicated. A related phenomenon: in the *Prometheus Bound*, are we supposed to think "Prometheus was married to one of the Oceanids -- is she the third one in the back row or what?". The author of the play gives no clear hint that Mrs. P. is present, and therefore we should presume either (a) that she is not, or (b) that it hardly matters one way or the other, or he would have let us know. The chorus is just a bunch of generic Oceanids, not wearing nametags, and we are not entitled to try to pin them down more specifically. Michael Hendry Department of Romance Languages 203 Shatzel Hall Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0230 Telephone: (419) 372-2667 Fax: (419) 372-7332 E-mail: curculio@glasscity.net Web-page: http://www.curculio.org .