Apollo in Ivy: The Tragic Paean IAN RUTHERFORD A -?1.THENIAN tragedy was influenced heavily by the traditions of choral lyric poetry as well as by its own contemporary environment of song-dance performance.1 The extent to which we can chart this influence is limited by our comparatively poor state of knowledge about choral lyric outside of drama. One thing we do know, however, is that extra-dramatic choral lyric was catego rized by genres, chief among them the paean, the dithyramb, the threnos, the hyporchema, the partheneion, and the prosodion. Choral odes in tragedy sometimes resemble these genres, but the relationship is rarely exact?more often than not, tragedy distorts and subverts the conventions of choral lyric for literary effect. Apollo's genre, the paean, is a favorite of the tragedians, and it is possible to document its exploitation in tragedy in considerable detail. I will begin by giving a short sketch of the genre itself (I), and follow that with discussions of two further introductory issues: the implications of confrontation between Apolline song and Dionysiac environment (II); and methodological issues relat ing to the generic characterization of choral odes (III). Then I move on to a number of more specific questions: the relationship between the paean and themes relating to death (IV); the use of the paean to highlight patterns of disappointed expectations (V); its use as an instrument of deception (VI); and issues relating to com munity and isolation (VII). What I hope to show is that it is pre cisely the difference between the ethos of the paean and that of tragedy which lends richness and depth to the former's appropria tion by the latter. I. The Morphology of the Genre The paean was one of the most widely used genres of lyric poetry in the song-dance culture of archaic and classical Greece.2 The great age for composing paeans was the late archaic period. This content downloaded from 129.67.173.78 on Fri, 13 May 2016 19:52:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms