In Defense of Hegelochos

The Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) is known for adapting traditional myths in highly innovative and sometimes controversial ways. In spring 408 BCE, his perhaps most iconoclastic tragedy Orestes premiered at the City Dionysia in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the Athenian akropolis. The play addresses the same myth as Aischylos’s earlier tragedy Eumenides, but radically alters the plot. In Aischylos’s play, the character Orestes stands trial before a jury of Athenians and is acquitted of the crime of murdering his own mother. In Euripides’s adaptation, by contrast, Orestes (along with his accomplices Pylades and Elektra) are convicted and sentenced to death in Argos and attempt to escape through murder and hostage-taking.

The play’s radically revisionist treatment of a classic myth, however, is not the only reason why its first performance is famous. Several ancient scholarly commentaries, known as scholia, attest that, in the first performance of the play, Orestes was portrayed by an actor named Hegelochos, who messed up one of his lines and won eternal ridicule. In this post, however, I will argue that Hegelochos may not be entirely (or perhaps at all) to blame for the infamous slip-up, which may owe just as much or more to the audience’s mishearing.

Hegelochos’s mistake

Unlike English and Modern Greek, which both have stress accents, Ancient Greek had pitch accents similar to modern Japanese, Norwegian, Turkish, or Basque. This means that every word had a specified change in pitch on a certain syllable. In Ancient Greek, there were three different kinds of pitch accent; the acute accent (´) indicated a rise in pitch, the grave accent (`) indicated a fall in pitch, and the circumflex accent (ˆ) indicated a rise followed by a fall in pitch on the same long syllable. These accents were lexically significant, meaning that using a different accent could potentially change the meaning of a word, even if it was pronounced exactly the same otherwise.

In line 279 of Euripides’s play, the character Orestes, upon recovering from an episode of madness, is supposed to say “ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλήν᾽ ὁρῶ,” which means “For, out from the waves, I again see a calm.” The mood of the line is meant to be optimistic, conveying that the madness has subsided and that Orestes is feeling better.

An ancient scholion on this line, however, records that Hegelochos accidentally dropped his pitch too early while pronouncing the final syllable of the word γαλήν᾽ (galḗn᾽), meaning “calm,” most likely due to him rushing the line or running out of breath. This made the accent sound like a circumflex instead of an acute. It just so happens that the word γαλῆν (galên), which is pronounced exactly the same as γαλήν᾽ except for the fact that it has a circumflex instead of an acute accent, is also a word in Ancient Greek, which means “weasel.” Thus, instead of hearing “For, out from the waves, I again see a calm,” the audience heard “For, out from the waves, I again see a weasel.”

To make matters even worse, the ancient Greeks regarded seeing a weasel as an ill omen. Writing around a century after Euripides’s Orestes was first performed, the Greek philosopher Theophrastos of Eresos (lived c. 371 – c. 287 BCE) records in his Characters 17 that, if a superstitious man sees a weasel cross his path, he will not continue on his way until someone else goes first, thereby taking the weasel’s bad luck in his place. Hegelochos’s mention of such an ill-omened animal therefore changed the mood of the line to mean the opposite of what Euripides intended.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing a least weasel, a weasel species common in Europe

Reception of Hegelochos’s mistake

The main reason why we know about Hegelochos’s pronunciation mistake is because comic playwrights of the era relentlessly made fun of it for years afterward. For instance, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) has a scene in his comedy Frogs, which was first performed at the Lenaia in 405 BCE, three years after the Orestes premiered, in which two characters, the god Dionysos and his slave Xanthias, encounter the empousa, a terrifying, shape-shifting bogey. When the empousa disappears, the following exchange occurs between the two characters (ll. 303–305):

Ξανθίας: δεῦρο δεῦρ᾽ ὦ δέσποτα.

Διόνυσος: τί δ᾽ ἔστι;

Ξανθίας: θάρρει: πάντ᾽ ἀγαθὰ πεπράγαμεν,
ἔξεστί θ᾽ ὥσπερ Ἡγέλοχος ἡμῖν λέγειν,
‘ἐκ κυμάτων γὰρ αὖθις αὖ γαλῆν ὁρῶ.’
ἥμπουσα φρούδη.

This means:

Xanthias: Come here, here, O master.

Dionysos: What do you mean?

Xanthias: Have courage! We’ve passed all good things.
And now it is permitted for us to say just like Hegelochos:
‘For, out from the waves, I again see a weasel!’
The empousa is gone!

Another Athenian comic poet named Strattis also lampooned Hegelochos in his lost comedy Anthroporestes, of which the following fragment survives (Strattis fr. 1 K–A [Kock]):

“καὶ τῶν μὲν ἄλλων οὐκ ἐμέλησέ μοι μελῶν,
Εὐριπίδου δὲ δρᾶμα δεξιώτατον
διέκναισ’ Ὀρέστην, Ἡγέλοχον τὸν Κυντάρου
μισθωσάμενος τὰ πρῶτα τῶν ἐπῶν λέγειν.”

This means:

“And I don’t care about the other songs,
but he ruined a very fine drama of Euripides,
Orestes, by hiring Hegelochos son of Kyntaros
to speak the first actor’s verses.”

Even today, over 2,400 years later, people are still retelling and adapting the story of Hegelochos’s mistake. Notably, in 2021, the singer-songwriter itskeyes posted a video of a song on TikTok titled “Every Actor’s Nightmare or A Prayer for Hegelochus,” which narrates the whole story through a song. The video has since gone semi-viral to the point where it was shared on other platforms and even I heard it, despite the fact that I am not on TikTok. (Since TikTok may be getting banned, here is a link to a version of the video on YouTube.)

I cannot commend the song highly enough; it is astonishingly catchy for a song about a 2,400-year-old pronunciation mistake involving arcane Ancient Greek pitch accents. Itskeyes also impressively includes factually correct details about the date, title, and author of the play and even manages to pronounce Hegelochos’s name correctly (with a hard g and ch as k as in chaos), despite, as far as I’m aware, having no background in classics.

ABOVE: Screenshot of itskeyes’s TikTok video about Hegelochos

In defense of Hegelochos

All this being said, even if we take the least charitable interpretation of the circumstances for Hegelochos, it is hard to blame him too harshly for his alleged error. The pronunciation difference between γαλήν᾽ and γαλῆν is extremely slight. Most modern English speakers who are not accustomed to tonal accents would not even be able to hear the difference between the two words when they are pronounced correctly out loud.

Furthermore, Hegelochos originally performed this line in the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus, which is a very large outdoor theater. Even though Greek theatres have famously good acoustics, even if Hegelochos pronounced his lines exactly correctly, audience members sitting in the back of the theater could still have very easily misheard the word γαλήν᾽ as γαλῆν.

Ultimately, though, in one respect, Hegelochos may have gotten the last laugh. Unless I am mistaken, he is the only actor who performed the primary role in the original performance of a surviving Greek tragedy whose name and role in a specific play are still known today and he owes this remembrance entirely to the fact that the comic playwrights made fun of him so relentlessly.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the Theater of Dionysos Eleuthereus on the south slope of the akropolis as it appears today. In the fifth century BCE, the theater would have had wooden benches; the stone benches seen today were added later in the fourth century BCE. In antiquity, the seats also went up much higher than they do today.