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.

摘要

本文探讨了一系列古希腊花瓶图像与Sappho和Stesichorus的精选诗之间的关系。它认为，与早期和现代视觉作品一起阅读歌词作品，可以阐明有关诗歌的结构，内容，敏感性和连贯性的悬而未决的问题，并有助于解决围绕表演背景和作曲家为其设计歌曲的听众所产生的困惑。提供Sappho的fr的近距离读数后。16和Stesichorus的Geryoneis结合七世纪和六世纪的花瓶，并展示了花盆和诗歌的设计，关怀和环境之间的重叠，在第三部分和最后一部分中，本文变成了Sophocles的Trachiniae中的合唱歌曲，合唱团成员将自己标识为agôn的观众在Heracles和Achelous之间。通过将段落和花瓶图片类似地处理合唱，作为观看者在英雄和怪物之间进行的挣扎的观看者，我主张绘画和文字曲目之间的进一步契合：在我的实践中，我将“合唱观众”定为风格，准视觉形式的观看，可以观看超出即时可感知范围的事物，我建议在视觉和文字叙述中，合唱歌曲和舞蹈都将自己呈现为一种媒介，观众可以通过该媒介接触个人和这些事件在空间，时间和/或本体论顺序上遥不可及，而合唱团则是演出和现场演出之间的管道，而歌曲中的情节属于这些领域。