In Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, produced around 414–412 BCE, the two monodies highlight two critical stages of the heroine’s emotional journey from stasis to purposeful action. In her first monody, Iphigenia mourns the unfulfilled potential of her young life, where each status was canceled, each promised doing undone. Iphigenia’s second monody, delivered after the reunion scene with Orestes, marks a shift in her mind and a crisis in the plot. Here monody becomes a site for thought and decisive action, acting as a deliberative rhesis wherein the heroine formulates a plan for the future. The two monodies in this play thus mark two points in the inflection of Iphigenia’s character as she leaves behind her status as a passive victim and finds her purpose as the functional head of her family.

Monody is an essential part of Euripides’ mature dramatic art. All the surviving examples of actor’s lyric by Aeschylus and Sophocles are songs of lamentation, where the use of solo song emphasizes the relationship between the isolated singer and the larger group. Reacting against this tradition, in his late plays Euripides reconfigures monody by blending it with the other traditional forms of Greek tragedy, such as the agon, rhesis, choral ode, and messenger speech. These reconfigurations, or “liberations,” are signaled so that attention is drawn in each case to the poet’s ingenuity. In addition to this formal innovation, Euripides uses monody as a vehicle to express emotion and develop character on the tragic stage.

In Euripides’ Ion, produced around 414 BCE, the central conflict of the play receives its most explicit expression through the diametrical opposition of passionately held views. These views are expressed at length, but in song and separately, in the monodies of Ion and Creusa. In his opening monody, Ion manifests his devotion to Apollo, his concern with purity and propriety, and his position as an orphan. At the pivotal moment of the play, the Athenian queen Creusa delivers a musical accusation against the god who once violated her and, as she believes, left their infant son to die. Is Apollo benevolent and bright, or violent and uncaring? In the two monodies, Euripides brings together the legalistic exposition typical of agonistic rhesis and the emotionality of lyric song.

The Introduction situates the monodies of Euripides’ late plays in the context of theatrical and musical innovation in Athens in the late fifth century. In plays produced after 415 BCE – in particular Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes – Euripides departs from the model of actor’s lyric established by Aeschylus and Sophocles and followed in his own previous work. Solo song is no longer restricted to women, to royalty, or to situations that call for lamentation; nor is the soloist necessarily closely tied to the chorus. In his late plays, Euripides successively redefines monody: each song takes over a traditional Bauform of tragedy and builds upon it. Monody becomes a site of formal innovation and experimentation. At the same time, solo song facilitates the creation of an individual voice of broad emotional and expressive range.