Language and Meter

The first four stasima of Euripides' Medea begin with dactylo-epitrite stanzas. Recent commentaries emphasize the dactylic portions of these and note their epic associations, positing “a slow and dignified movement” in contrast to the Aeolic stanzas that follow (Mastronarde 2002: 240; similarly Mossman 2011: 257). While the dactylic sections do recall epic, they are not the entire meter, and this paper studies the alternation of rhythms in these odes. By divorcing the rhythm of these stanzas from linguistic “frames” (cf.