Figuring choral lyric: Sappho, Stesichorus and the spectacular chorus in archaic Greek texts and images

Abstract

This article explores relations between a series of archaic Greek vase images and select poems by Sappho and Stesichorus. It argues that reading the lyric works alongside both earlier and contemporary visual accounts can elucidate outstanding questions concerning the poems’ structure, contents, sensibility, and coherence, and help resolve the puzzles surrounding the performance context and audiences for whom the composers designed their songs. After supplying close readings of Sappho’s fr. 16 and Stesichorus’s Geryoneis in conjunction with seventh- and sixth-century vases and demonstrating the overlaps between the pots’ and poems’ designs, concerns, and milieux, the article turns, in its third and final section, to a choral song in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, where the chorus-members identify themselves as spectators to an agôn between Heracles and Achelous. By treating the passage together with vase images that similarly position choruses as viewers of an ongoing struggle between a hero and monster, I argue for a further alignment between the painted and textual repertoires: in a practice that I style ‘choral spectatorship’, a heightened, quasi-visionary form of seeing that permits the viewing of what lies beyond the immediately perceptible, I propose that in both the visual and textual accounts, choral song-and-dance presents itself as the medium through which audiences might gain access to individuals and events remote in space, time, and/or ontological order, with the chorus serving as a conduit between those present at the performance and the realms to which the episodes evoked in their songs belong.