Ichneutae (Walker 1919)/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE PLOT
Denique sit quidvis, simplex dumtaxat et unum. Horace.
The plot of the Ichneutae, so far as the play is extant, is simplex et unum. Apollo, having lost his oxen, arrives, in the course of searching for them, at Mt. Cyllene in Arcadia. Here he makes proclamation concerning his loss. In response Silenus and the Satyrs appear and undertake the quest of the oxen, it being agreed that their reward, if they succeed, shall consist of gold and of manumission from servitude. Apollo having departed, they speedily light on the tracks of the oxen. Silenus marshals the Satyrs for further search. Soon, however, a strange sound is heard, which terrifies the Satyrs, but not Silenus, who continues to incite them to activity. Almost immediately they halt in front of a dwelling, from which after a little delay the Nymph Cyllene appears. After upbraiding them for their noisy approach, she tells them, in reply to questions, that an infant son of Zeus by Maia, who is at present lying sick, is concealed within, a babe of abnormal growth, who has made a lyre out of a tortoise, which lyre it is that has produced the strange noise. She denies all knowledge of the oxen, but incidentally mentions that one of the appurtenances of the lyre (as far as I can judge from the defective text, the bag in which it is kept) is made of ox-hide. The circumstance excites the suspicion of the Satyrs, but Cyllene persists in her denials, maintaining that it is a blasphemous absurdity to bring a charge of theft against the child. Ultimately the Satyrs espy some ox-dung and insist, with a threat of personal violence, that Cyllene should produce the oxen. At this point the continuous text of the papyrus breaks off. From fragmentary remains however it is clear that the oxen are found and that Apollo returns to the stage. From other fragmentary remains, much more difficult to deal with, it would appear, if the treatment adopted by me is right, that the Satyrs are subsequently stricken with madness by Pan for having violated his sanctuary in or adjacent to the dwelling of Cyllene, and that Apollo takes steps to heal them. For the rest of the probable action see my text and notes, and also Chapter II.
The above plot is manifestly based on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Hymn III.). Sophocles however departs from his original in five respects.
First, he introduces Silenus and the Satyrs. This is, so to speak, a merely conventional departure. Silenus and the Satyrs (or occasionally, it would seem, some similar characters) had to be introduced whenever any story was dressed up as a Satyric play. In just the same way Euripides imports them into the story of the Cyclops.
Secondly, as a result of introducing Silenus and the Satyrs, Sophocles attributes the discovery of the oxen to their activities, not, as the Hymn, to information given to Apollo by a countryman who had seen Hermes driving the cattle.
Thirdly, whereas the Homeric Hymn represents indeed Hermes as living on Mt. Cyllene, but speaks of the oxen as having been left by him at Pylos, Sophocles puts the oxen also on Mt. Cyllene. He clearly takes this course in order to observe the dramatic unity of place.
Fourthly, in the Hymn there is no sort of connexion, direct or indirect, between the theft of the oxen and the making of the lyre. Sophocles introduces a connexion by representing Hermes' use of ox-hide, taken from the stolen cattle, in or about the lyre as furnishing the Satyrs with the clue which led to their recovery. Dramatic unity of action demands a connexion.
Fifthly, Sophocles goes outside the borders of the story told in the Hymn by introducing the Nymph Cyllene instead of Maia. I think that this variation, like that of the omission of the informer, is due, though less obviously so, to the fact of the introduction of the Satyrs. In the first place it would hardly have been seemly to bring into contact with the Satyrs a female personage of the dignity of Maia; and in the second place, even if Maia had appeared, she could not well have descended to the falsehoods with which Cyllene delays the finding of the oxen, falsehoods absolutely essential to the dramatic protraction of the interval antecedent to discovery.
These five modifications are incidental to the dramatisation of the legend, and doubtless, unless indeed it had already been dramatised by someone else, were all effected by Sophocles himself. The introduction of the new character, Cyllene, seems at first sight somewhat bolder than the other changes. But there is ground for thinking that this introduction involves no substantial innovation. Though the Nymph in question does not figure in the Homeric Hymn, yet it is in no way inconsistent with the Hymn that she should at some period or other have acted as nurse to Hermes; and Philostephanus (as we learn from a scholium on Pindar, Ol. VI. l. 144) states ἐν τῷ περὶ Κυλλήνης (a book, I presume, about Mt. Cyllene) that Cyllene and Helice nursed Hermes. If Philostephanus had not added the name of Helice, I should have supposed that he was merely basing himself on this play. As it is, I am inclined to conjecture that some such expression as
Κυλλήνη θ᾽ Ἑλίκη τε θεοῦ τροφοὶ Ἑρμείαο
occurred in the Megalae Eoeae of Hesiod, where (see Antoninus Liberalis, ch. 23) the legend in question is dealt with. Indeed, seeing that Antoninus (l.c.), speaking of the episode of the informer, an integral part of the story as told in the Homeric Hymn, gives a list of authorities, and seeing that none of those authorities, except Hesiod, is of substantially earlier date than Philostephanus (circa 250 B.C.), it is natural to assume as probable that it is from Hesiod that Philostephanus derives his information.
In the Homeric Hymn, as it has come down to us, Hermes first kills the tortoise and makes the lyre, and afterwards steals the cattle. But Apollodorus (III. 10), while agreeing in the main with the now current Homeric account, transposes the order of events. Sophocles abstains altogether from fixing the order, though it is evident that the ox-hide bag (if it was a bag) must have been made after the theft of the cattle. A good deal of ink has been wasted on Apollodorus. I can hardly doubt but that he followed the Hymn in the form in which he had it. As we have it, it is an extraordinarily incoherent document, most curiously pieced together. Moreover the exordium and termination are preserved (forming Hymn XVIII.) in an alternative form (XVIII. ll. 1–9 = III. ll. 1–9: XVIII. ll. 10–11 = III. ll. 579–580), which exhibits a strange mixture of likeness and unlikeness to the vulgate. Also l. 51, which runs in our texts as
ἑππὰ δὲ συμφώνους ὀίων ἐτανύσσατο χορδάς,
is quoted by Antigonus of Carystus (Histor. Mirab. 7), who lived in the third century B.C., as
ἑπτὰ δὲ θηλυτέρων ὀίων ἐτανύσσατο χορδάς.
All this suggests that the text of the Hymn was singularly fluid in antiquity, so that Apollodorus may well have had before him an arrangement of the parts in a sequence different from that which we now possess. Also the reticence of Sophocles may conceivably indicate that in his days the right order was in dispute.
Of Sophocles' predecessors, Alcaeus, in a Hymn to Hermes, of which an irrelevant morsel (Alcaeus, Fr. 5) survives, mentioned the story (as we are informed by Pausanias, VII. 20); but his treatment of it must have been most summary. Among Sophocles' successors, Horace did the same (Carm. I. 10) in a hymn perhaps based on that of Alcaeus. In the Ichneutae however, as will be seen to follow as a side-conclusion from the arguments set forth in the next chapter, it is highly improbable that, had we the full text, we should find that
viduus pharetra
Risit Apollo.