Paul Derouda wrote:C. S. Bartholomew wrote:I have been listening daily to lectures by Elizabeth Vandiver on Attic Tragedy and Greek Mythology. Vandiver explicitly addresses the question breaking down the barrier between the fictional scenario in the tragic drama and the scenario in the Athenian theater and contemporary culture. She more or less dogmatically asserts that Attic tragedians never crossed that barrier. For this reason I don't think χορὸς in this context refers to the χορὸς in the theater, but rather to a group of singers described in very unflattering terms that represent the Furies. I'm a perennial-first-year-student when it comes to classics so I could have misunderstood what Vandiver was saying.
Yes, probably the calling the Erinyes a chorus here is just metaphorical. But it is a bit funny, when you think that they will actually form the chorus in the last play of the trilogy. I don't think a crossing of the barrier you describe is intended here.
Incidentally, I've seen that barrier crossed several times in Aristophanes' comedies. (Can't give any examples right now). But that's another genre entirely.On the placement of Ἐρινύων at the end of a though unit larger than a sentence, it seems like postponing a key element in the semantic structure of a complex constituent is a pattern which reappears at different levels of the discourse structure. In other words, the head noun in a noun phrase can be postponed to the end of the phrase, a noun subject can be postponed to the end of sentence, a discourse critical noun can be postponed to the end of a paragraph. By discourse critical noun I mean a noun which is needed to disambiguate the whole paragraph. Ἐρινύων in this context is just such a noun. The phenomenon isn't limited to a noun/substantive but talking about verb placement is a whole different ball game.
I was thinking something along those lines, but couldn't have said it so well...
On Aristophanes' comedies I think Vandiver would totally agree with you. Aristophanes was playing games with the Tragedian tradition and flaunted the rules. I'm rather uncertain about how strict Euripides was about this. I seem to remember Vandiver's focus was on actors making direct reference to someone or something in the theater in a manner such that the fictional frame of reference was broken. I don't have the technical terminology to discuss this clearly.