Birds, stars, and mousikē: visions of escape in Euripidean choral odes
Journal Article
Overview
abstract
ABSTRACT; In this essay, I discuss, as a group, moments when a Euripidean female chorus express a wish for winged travel elsewhere—the second stasimon of Iphigenia among the Taurians (1089–1152),the third stasimon of Helen (1451–1511), the second stasimon of Hippolytus (732–75), and the first stasimon of Bacchae (370–431). These choral passages offer lengthy and elaborate escape prayers that embellish the conventional wish to take wing or disappear, focusing on the idea of wings and travel as opposed to the idea of disappearing, and offering a bird’s-eye view of imagined expanses of land and sea. In Euripides’ plays, as I argue, female choruses who wish for release from their impossible circumstances offer surprisingly similar visions of escape. Again and again, they wish to return home (to an actual home or to a notional homeland) and they yearn for winged travel to places characterized by bands of maidens and female mousikê (song, dance, and music).
