Bacchylides Playing Tragic

Abstract

This paper focuses on features in Bacchylides’ poetry that have been mainly associated with the tragic genre: human error, the ignorance of tragic characters, the audience’s privileged knowledge at a tragic and lyric performance and its activation, tragic irony, and the audience’s participation in the completion of mythological narratives. As evidence of Bacchylides’ tragic aura I analyse the figures of Deianeira and Heracles in Odes 5 and 16 in connection with the story in Sophocles’ Trachiniae; the resemblance of the structure of Ode 18 with encounters with the tragic chorus and how it creates internal and external audiences; questions of closures and narratives endings.