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.
Continue reading “In Defense of Hegelochos”