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HOMERIC HEROES AND NORMS OF CONDUCT

Apolline force. Cassandra’s presence in the Agamemnon, rightly discussed as the most protracted silence on classical stage, is framed by the Watchman’s words that choose to leave certain things unsaid, associating silence with powerlessness. This essay redirects our attention from Cassandra’s status (virgin, concubine etc.) and puts forth a new reading focusing on her silences and enigmatic cries. It is the staged silence that makes her later lyric utterance a forceful and disquieting voicing. This dramatic technique also implicates Apollo as the god of prophecy and song. The same connection is convincingly argued for Creusa. Although Creusa, unlike Cassandra, speaks as soon as she enters the stage, her past trauma is disclosed and her silence ruptured in her lyric monody, in a play that constantly uses language of concealment, secrecy and coercion. Creusa swerves into lyric anapaests. This fascinating reading highlights the captive girl and the royal wife as two figures whose lyric utterance both ‘outstrips the comprehension of their male interlocutors’ (p. 237) and points to female trauma, with both figures being Apollo’s victims. K. Synodinou, through the perspective of epic female silences, moves to tragedy and how tragedy moves beyond the assumption of female submissiveness, focusing on Clytemnestra. This essay brings together the Aeschylean Clytemnestra from Agamemnon and the Euripidean one from Iphigenia in Aulis and traces the evolution of a character as she is transformed into a revolutionary figure who defies her husband. The final essay by R. Seaford revisits the silences of Achilles and Niobe in the Aeschylean lost dramas, returns to Cassandra in Agamemnon and explores how Aeschylus innovated by introducing long silences, something not present in the earlier epic tradition. This essay subtly brings attention to the hymenaeal context by analysing Niobe’s ‘veiled silence’ as also Cassandra’s bridal silence. This essay aptly points out associations between isolation and silence in tragedy, as the silence of the mourner or the bride, which are evoked further, are ritualised silences, being merged with the silence of isolation. This is a volume rich in detail, offering nuanced close readings that considerably change earlier views of how silence is present in ancient literature, making a compelling case that silence operates as an important agent in performative texts and beyond.