Margaret Foster (University of Michgian)
In this paper, I deploy the riddle of the Sphinx to illuminate the divergent spatial programs of fifth-century lyric and tragedy. This case study stems from a book project that investigates the ways in which ancient Greek lyric poetry and tragedy speak to each other within a dynamic and evolving generic economy of fifth-century choral song. The book tracks lyric poetry’s varied but targeted responses to Athenian tragedy’s imperial ideology: fifth-century lyric poems resist, facilitate, and grapple with the ideological strategies of tragedy. For this paper, I enlist Sara Ahmed’s work on spatial disorientation (Ahmed 2006; see also Dufallo 2021). Ahmed’s approach offers a means of thinking about both the extent to which tragedy “disorients” or even derails lyric’s greater rootedness in epichoric spaces as well as how epinikion can characterize tragedy in spatial terms as a kind of going-off-course (cf. Kurke 2013).
The paper falls into two parts. Part I focuses on the evocation of the riddle in the parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. I argue that Aeschylus’ presentation of the riddle, even as it emphasizes the riddle’s correct answer of human adaptability over time, simultaneously eschews the “loop of nostos,” the cultural imperative to travel out from home and back again (for this phrase and its significance, see Kurke 1991). As a result, Aeschylus’ evocation of the riddle becomes a kind of disavowal of nostos itself and, accordingly, an image of spatial dislocation. We can detect this same disavowal in other tragic representations of the Sphinx’s riddle. What is more, since the riddle of the Sphinx, like the Erinyes and the crossroads, operates as a paradigm for the genre of tragedy (Kurke 2013), we can understand its emphasis on spatial dislocation as symptomatic of the uprootedness of the genre as a whole.
In Part II, I turn to Pindar’s Pythian 8. I argue that Pindar conjures key images from the Oedipus myth, above all the paradigmatic image of the riddle of the Sphinx, in order to rehabilitate them within his own epinikian ideology. In Pythian 8’s concluding epode, Pindar’s programmatic statement about the human condition evokes the riddle even as it rejects tragedy’s own formulation of human adaptability. In contrast to tragedy, Pindar links the human capacity for change to spatial mobility and, more importantly, to nostos. This case study highlights how lyric poetry sets itself up as a precise response to Athenian tragedy. My project serves as a counterbalance to recent important scholarship, including Anna Uhlig’s 2019 monograph on the shared performative qualities of Pindaric and Aeschylean poetics as well as several projects that have focused on tragedy as an Athenian export across the Greek world but have largely ignored how lyric poetry responds to this phenomenon (see, e.g., Bosher 2012, 2021; Csapo, Goette, Green, and Wilson 2014; Stewart 2017).