What melos for Troy? Blending of lyric genres in the first stasimon of Euripides' Trojan Women

The focus of this paper is on three different aspects of the first stasimon of Trojan Women. While the aspects in question could be (and have been) considered to figure among Euripides’ ‘New Musical’ features, they have seldom been regarded as distinctive traits of generic interaction between tragedy and lyric poetry, nor have they been treated consistently within the poetics of a single play. The first aspect deals with the ‘dithyrambic’ character of the ode in terms of its structural and stylistic features. The second aspect encompasses a trait of late Euripidean poetics that is prominent in Trojan Women: the sustained strategy of musical imagery and the mechanism of choreia, with the implications these might have had in performance. The third aspect regards a further pervasive thematic motif in Trojan Women that surfaces in the opening of the stasimon and characterizes the song as a blending of genre: the theme of ritual lament and threnodic music as the only available for both the Chorus and the characters to express the loss of their city, culture and mousikē.The paper appears in Rosa Andújar, Thomas R. P. Coward, Theodora A. Hadjimichael (Eds.), Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy (pp. 239–264). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter