Chapter 7 Narrating Neoptolemus: Dance and Death in Euripides’ Andromache
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Abstract
In Euripides’ Andromache, a lively messenger’s speech describes the violent death of Neoptolemus at Delphi, making extensive use of the language and imagery of dance and performance. Rather than “dancing a story,” Euripides’ messenger thus encourages his audience to imagine the story itself as a dance, animating the relatively static form of his speech with vivid and metatheatrical allusions to movement and gesture. Focusing on this passage (Eur. Andr. 1085–1165), my chapter will explore how and why dance and movement become implicated in the formation of a spoken narrative. We will see that the descriptions of movement in the speech not only enliven the story itself, but also invite the audience into a more intimate, and ultimately unsettling, relationship with Neoptolemus and his death. I will argue that the messenger’s speech, through its imaginative narration of dance, aims at the kind of affective engagement with the audience that has more often been associated with choral lyric in Greek tragedy.