Night and Sun in the first ode: Women of Trachis

He to whom flickering Night, despoiled of shining armor 

gives birth and lays down to sleep ablaze, 

Sun, Sun, I ask 

that you proclaim this,

where is Alcmena's son, 

where dwells her child? O radiant fiery flash, 

is he in the hollow seas, or does he wander the twin continents? 

Speak, O strongest eye!

ὃν αἰόλα νὺξ ἐναριζομένα 

95

τίκτει κατευνάζει τε, φλογιζόμενον 

Ἅλιον Ἅλιον αἰτῶ 

τοῦτο καρῦξαι, τὸν Ἀλκμήνας πόθι μοι πόθι παῖς 

ναίει ποτ᾽, ὦ λαμπρᾷ στεροπᾷ φλεγέθων, 

100

ἢ ποντίας αὐλῶνος ἢ δισσαῖσιν ἀπείροις κλιθείς, 

εἴπ᾽, ὦ κρατιστεύων κατ᾽ ὄμμα. 

The chorus of Women of Trachis begins its first ode at a very high pitch. The compressed scene of the first two lines: Night, stripped of her starry armor like a slain Homeric hero, gives birth to the sun, whose plundering blaze is extinguished within her deep folds. It's the agon of light on Earth. To hear that Night is stripped like the corpse of a Homeric warrior should cause wonder. Who, what, is this mother who births the warrior that despoils her arms, and tucks him in?  

Mothers so despoiled by their children might not be content. Is Night angry with the plunderer? She tucks him in every evening - a mild ministry of love? Or a reassertion of her ineluctable primacy, her beforeness, that no entity, however hot and bright, can displace. Certainly Heracles, whose whereabouts the sun is begged to publicly proclaim after the manner of a herald, has encountered his share of potent angry goddesses. The anger started before he was born, and ended only with his conflagration. Hera's fury.

Enfolding mother and solar son, each taking the other down just when that other appears invincible. The virginal maidens of Trachis might be singing the ode, but its burden is Sophoclean. In this cosmic context, nothing, not even motherhood, is sacred. In the unceasing sacrifice, a making sacred might not be unimaginable -- but it's probably not going to be demonstrable. Yet even Zeus fears to anger Night.

The sons of Phineus, Fate and blinding in Antigone

The last two strophes of the fifth ode of Antigone enrich the theme that Fate cannot be dodged, outwitted, or subjected to our will.

From Danae's permeable prison in Argos, to Lycurgus's hopeless repression of Bacchus in Thrace -- both touched on here -- the fifth ode moves to Salmydessus and the tale of the sons of Phineus.

It's a tale of a very bad stepmother -- Idaea, or Eidothea, the second wife of Phineus. This king first married Cleopatra, the daughter of Boreas and Orytheia. The choral ode reminds us that Cleopatra was not only high-born, but that through her mother she traced her lineage to Erechtheus -- the first Athenian culture hero and sacred offspring of an averted rape of Athena by Hephaestus. (More on Erechtheus here.)

The ode, then, concerns a king who was married to a woman descended from the founding hero of Athens and from the North Wind, who bore him two sons. But he put Cleopatra away and married Idaea/Eidothea, the stepmother described in the ode using her shuttle to crush the eyes of the sons of Cleopatra and Phineus.

παρὰ δὲ κυανεᾶν πελάγει διδύμας ἁλὸς 
ἀκταὶ Βοσπόριαι ἥδ᾽ ὁ Θρῃκῶν ἄξενος 
970Σαλμυδησσός, ἵν᾽ ἀγχίπτολις Ἄρης 
δισσοῖσι Φινείδαις 
εἶδεν ἀρατὸν ἕλκος 
τυφλωθὲν ἐξ ἀγρίας δάμαρτος 
ἀλαὸν ἀλαστόροισιν ὀμμάτων κύκλοις 
975ἀραχθέντων, ὑφ᾽ αἱματηραῖς 
χείρεσσι καὶ κερκίδων ἀκμαῖσιν.

And by the waters of the Dark Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city Salmydessus, [970] where Ares, neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance [975] for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands and with her shuttle for a dagger.

κατὰ δὲ τακόμενοι μέλεοι μελέαν πάθαν 
980κλαῖον, ματρὸς ἔχοντες ἀνύμφευτον γονάν: 
ἁ δὲ σπέρμα μὲν ἀρχαιογόνων 
ἄντασ᾽ Ἐρεχθειδᾶν, 
τηλεπόροις δ᾽ ἐν ἄντροις 
τράφη θυέλλαισιν ἐν πατρῴαις 
985Βορεὰς ἅμιππος ὀρθόποδος ὑπὲρ πάγου 
θεῶν παῖς. ἀλλὰ κἀπ᾽ ἐκείνᾳ 
Μοῖραι μακραίωνες ἔσχον, ὦ παῖ.

Wasting away in their misery, they bewailed their miserable suffering [980] and their birth from their mother stripped of her marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her father's gusts. She was the child of Boreas, running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.

Phineus is variously said to be the son of Agenor or of Phoenix - either way, he's a close relation, possibly a brother, of Cadmus. In a sense, he's a variant of Cadmus -- both were sent to find their sister Europa. Both failed. Cadmus via an oracle ends up founding Thebes, marrying Harmonia, and siring a line that leads to Dionysus, Amphion and Oedipus. Phineus chooses a woman who destroys his family, and according to some versions of his story, causes him to be cursed with blindness for blinding his sons. He also is said to have became endowed with prophecy.

Phineus cancels an alliance with the human cult hero of Athens for a marriage with a woman so violent (ἀγρίας δάμαρτος = savage spouse) as to personally mutilate children.

At this point we can at least see how this background creates a link to the earlier ode that begins:

εὐδαίμονες οἷσι κακῶν ἄγευστος αἰών. 
οἷς γὰρ ἂν σεισθῇ θεόθεν δόμος, ἄτας 
585οὐδὲν ἐλλείπει γενεᾶς ἐπὶ πλῆθος ἕρπον: 
ὅμοιον ὥστε ποντίαις οἶδμα δυσπνόοις ὅταν 
Θρῄσσαισιν ἔρεβος ὕφαλον ἐπιδράμῃ πνοαῖς, 
590κυλίνδει βυσσόθεν κελαινὰν θῖνα καὶ 
δυσάνεμοι, στόνῳ βρέμουσι δ᾽ ἀντιπλῆγες ἀκταί.

[583] Blest are those whose days have not tasted of evil. For when a house has once been shaken by the gods, [585] no form of ruin is lacking, but it spreads over the bulk of the race, just as, when the surge is driven over the darkness of the deep by the fierce breath of Thracian sea-winds, [590] it rolls up the black sand from the depths, and the wind-beaten headlands that front the blows of the storm give out a mournful roar.

Phineus's house has been shaken - the sea winds of Thrace, roiling the ocean, are a fit image of his kingdom overturned by his love of Idaea. We are reminded that Cleopatra was the daughter of the North Wind. 

This relevance of one ode to another leads us to consider that the odes of Antigone might be read as a closely composed group of mutually allusive texts -- a subject for a book-length study. Having no time for that just now, let's just look briefly at two passages that bring the tale of Phineus into line with salient lines of earlier odes:

The first evokes how a house can violently lose light -- a blinding:

(599) For now that dazzling light (φάος) that had been spread over the last roots of the house of Oedipus in its turn is cut down by the blood-stained dust of the gods infernal and mindlessness in speech and frenzy.

The second, from the ode addressing Eros, speaks in a strangely detailed manner to the errant love of Phineus:

. . . you (i.e., Eros) roam over the sea and among the homes of men in the wilds. Neither can any immortal escape you, [790] nor any man whose life lasts for a day. He who has known you is driven to madness.

φοιτᾷς δ᾽ ὑπερπόντιος ἔν τ᾽ ἀγρονόμοις αὐλαῖς: 
καί σ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἀθανάτων φύξιμος οὐδεὶς 
790οὔθ᾽ ἁμερίων σέ γ᾽ ἀνθρώπων. ὁ δ᾽ ἔχων μέμηνεν.

If nothing else, the tale of Phineus is an apt illustration of one who has been "driven to madness" by love. In the ode we have been reading, his tale follows those of Acrisius and Lycurgus -- two other kings who strove to outwit destiny, to subject Fate to their will.

It is this that the last strophe addresses. Though the entitled sons of Cleopatra had every reason to "look forward to" a distinguished life as royal princes, as well as scions of Boreas, they languish in a prison, where they see only darkness. The future we have the temerity to anticipate exists for us as a mode of unauthorized prophecy -- it can prove false, as it did for these children, as well as for Cleopatra.

If any one could have outrun fate, or dodged the Symplegades, it would have been Cleopatra:

She was the child of Boreas, running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods.

But no:

Yet she, too, was assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.

In fact, the ode tells us, we are, and can only be, blind to the future. Anticipation is illusion. No matter how much cause we might have to foresee great things (or terrible things) for ourselves, what comes is not what we prophesy to ourselves, but what Fate holds in store. As Oedipus came to see, the Fate he dreaded was what he, the unriddler, saw too late. We are always too late to control what is to come.

By coincidence, or Fate, the next voice we hear is that of Teiresias, who knows what we can and cannot see, or foresee.

Danae, Lycurgus, Phineus: Myths of the 4th stasimon of Antigone

Danae, reclining on a couch and grasping her hair ribbons, is impregnated by the god Zeus in the form of a golden shower.

Lycurgus of Thrace

On this vase, Lycurgus, armed with a sword, has slain Dionysos' companion, Ambrosia. Dionysos summons an Erinys to drive the King of Thrace to madness. The Erinys is depicted as a winged huntress, whose arms and hair are draped with poisonous serpents.

On the famous Lycurgus Cup, the King is tangled in vines as a Satyr, Pan, a panther, and Bacchus all avenge Ambrosia. Photos of the scenes on the cup, which turns blood red when backlit, can be seen here.

Lycurgus's story has several variants, but each has him driven mad by Dionysus.

Lycurgus Cup

The last two strophes of the ode contain a series of allusions to the story of Phineus, a king who was blinded because he shared his prophetic knowledge with the Argonauts, but whose sons by Cleopatra were also blinded because Phineus believed their stepmother, Idaea's lie. The Phineus story has many variations (see Sophocles frag. 704).

Phineus and the Harpies

Eerie confusion in the chorus

Forgive this long, pedestrian entry.

The choral ode at the end of Hippolytus scene 5 has a lot of work to do. At the very least, it purports to bring us the civic response to the banishment of Hippolytus by his father, Theseus. The reaction can be construed as dual -- male companions singing strophes, female attendants of the dead queen singing the antistrophes.

But the ode, with lyric timelessness, also serves to mark a sense of time passing, and prepares us for the scene of high action that is about to come, the tale of the messenger. This dramatic anticipation seems in part the burden of the third and fourth strophes. If we try to chart the "logic" of the ode, it might go something like this:

If the first strophe raised the "thesis" of whether ordered powers exist in the world or whether all is randomness void of divine intention, the antistrophe then offers, as "antithesis," some practical sense of how to "survive" in the absence of meaning.

If we are now expecting synthesis, it does not appear to arrive. The third stanza, sung by Hippolytus's friends, reaches not some happy fusion of existential angst and "go along to get along," but something more on the order of darkness at noon:

οὐκέτι γὰρ καθαρὰν φρέν᾽ ἔχω 

no longer am I clear . . . 

καθαρὰν: spotless, clear, untroubled, clean, free of debts, pure
φρέν᾽: seat of the passions; heart; mind.

The loss of clarity is linked to the banishment of the φανερώτατον ἀστέρ᾽ -- the most visible star -- of "Hellenic Athens." Given that the central ode had linked the story of Hippolytus with that of Phaethon and Helios (and the amber-weeping Heliades), then this "star" carries the force of the sun for the friends and attendants of Hippolytus, a palpable loss of clarity indeed.

 Within that darkness, bewilderment, loss of bearings, the chorus twice repeats εἴδομεν -- "I see":

εἴδομεν εἴδομεν ἐκ πατρὸς ὀργᾶς1125 

ἄλλαν ἐπ᾽ αἶαν ἱέμενον 

I see, I see out of his father's wrath
towards another land he hastens.

But, instead of a vision of that other land, the chorus turns back to address the old land from which Hippolytus is being expelled. The address -- an apostrophe -- breaks from narrating what the chorus "sees" to addressing what is lost -- the sands (not just beach, but sands of the city's shore) and mountain haunts in which the brightest star hunted, raced, exhibited his excellence and devotion to Artemis:

ὦ ψάμαθοι πολιήτιδος ἀκτᾶς,ὦ δρυμὸς ὄρεος, ὅθι κυνῶνὠκυπόδων μέτα θῆρας ἔναιρεν1130 

Δίκτυνναν ἀμφὶ σεμνάν. 

O sands of our city's shore, o mountain thickets where with his swift hounds he slew the wild beasts [1130] in company with holy Dictynna!

Dictynna

The name "Dictynna" evokes a tale from Crete that involves eros (Minos's) and flight that we can only point to en passant.

Here the mention of sands and shore anticipates the next scene with Hippolytus on the sandy shore. But the mountain thickets also echo the wild words of Phaedra in her first scene, when she enters, raving, disheveled,

Phaedra sung [215] Take me to the mountain: I mean to go to the wood, to the pine-wood, where hounds that kill wild beasts tread, running close after the dappled deer! By the gods, how I want to shout to the hounds [220] and to let fly past my golden hair a javelin of Thessaly, to hold in my hand the sharp-pointed weapon!

The chorus asks (141) whether she is possessed by the frenzy (ἔνθεος)  of Pan - ἔνθεος: god within - enthusiasm. To be en-theosed is not a state of mind one associates with sophrosyne.

In the next strophe, the chorus (presumably of women) addresses the absent Hippolytus, and echoes of Phaedra become more pronounced. As Hippolytus steps into his chariot to begin his fatal journey, the chorus evokes his horse-handling prowess:

Chorus
No more shall you mount behind a pair of Enetic horses and take the Limnaean race-course with the feet of your trained steeds. [1135]

οὐκέτι συζυγίαν πώλων Ἐνετᾶν ἐπιβάσῃτὸν ἀμφὶ Λίμνας τρόχον κατέχων ποδὶ γυμνάδος ἵππου:

In Phaedra's first entrance, her mind has lost its self-mastery, and she raves of taming "Enetic horses":

Phaedra
Mistress of the Limnaean Salt Lake, Artemis, mistress of the coursing-ground for horses, [230] oh that I might find myself on your ground taming Enetic horses! 

δέσποιν᾽ ἁλίας Ἄρτεμι Λίμνας καὶ γυμνασίων τῶν ἱπποκρότων,230εἴθε γενοίμαν ἐν σοῖς δαπέδοις,πώλους Ἐνέτας δαμαλιζομένα.

The love-struck queen's erotic fantasy (of Artemis!) interweaves with the choral vision of the chaste pursuits of Hippolytus, producing a chiastic (ABBA) pattern:

Enter Phaedra : Horse taming :: Horsemanship of Hippolytus : Exit Hippolytus.

The loss of pure clarity of the choral singers brings a confusion of Phaedra and Hippolytus, or an interfusion of the two characters -- "alike" in both being victims of Aphrodite's anger. There is a sense of duality, of two who are in some sense, through a "twist" of fate, as one.

The epode brings the chorus from reflection to action -- to what it will do:

Χορός
ἐγὼ δὲ σᾷ δυστυχίᾳ
δάκρυσι διοίσω πότμον
ἄποτμον: ὦ τάλαινα μᾶ-
1145τερ, ἔτεκες ἀνόνατα: φεῦ:
μανίω θεοῖσιν.
ἰὼ ἰώ:
συζύγιαι Χάριτες, τί τὸν τάλαν᾽ ἐκ πατρίας γᾶς
οὐδὲν ἄτας αἴτιον
1150πέμπετε τῶνδ᾽ ἀπ᾽ οἴκων;

Chorus
But I for my part will spread abroad your unhappy fate with tears at your misfortune. O unhappy mother, [1145] it was to no purpose that you bore him. Oh, I am angry with the gods! Ye Graces that dance your round, why do you not accompany this man from this house? He has been ruined by his father's wrath [1150] but is guiltless of no mad deed.

No comforting sense of closure here, only a sense of injustice that extends from the king to the Graces (how ungraceful of them!) and the gods.

A few notes, briefly, as this is already too long:

1. "Enetic" horses relates to the Veneti, early settlers of the region around Venice, Italy. Legend had it they were remnants from Troy (like Aeneas). Later on, these tribes chose to side with the Romans, but in the 5th century they were a people known for their fast horses and amber.

2. Let's remember, Hippolytus is the great-great-grandson of Pelops (father of Pittheus), the horseman who claimed Hippodamia -- by bribing her brutal father Oenomaus's charioteer to replace a metal axle with one of wax, leading to the king's death.  Some say this occurred near where Hippolytus has his mutilating collision in his chariot. The lethal trickery of Pelops -- a favorite of Poseidon -- lies behind this tale of Thesesus and Hippolytus

3. The mad words of Phaedra curiously echo "Hippodamia," which means "horse-tamer":

ἱπποκρότων,230εἴθε γενοίμαν ἐν σοῖς δαπέδοις,πώλους Ἐνέτας δαμαλιζομένα.

The technical term for a linguistic phenomenon in which the beginning and ending of a word is split by other inserted words is tmesis, from the Greek word for "cut". Tmesis occurs several times in the play. Note the eerie effect: uncanny echoes of the past bleed through the words the confused chorus sings just before the play turns to the wondrous death of Hippolytus.