Chapter Three focuses on Euripides’ Ion, wherein we find important depictions of both male and female solo dancing. I begin this chapter with a discussion of male dancing in late Archaic and Classical Greek thought, exploring how male choral leadership, especially as embodied by the god Apollo and the hero Theseus, offers a positive model for the male dancer as an authoritative but collaborative figure within his community. I then observe how Ion’s opening monody vacillates between images of male choral leadership and less lofty images of solo work song/dance, calling attention to the ambivalence of the titular character’s social status. I further demonstrate that a similar ambivalence surrounds Ion’s mother Creusa, who performs a monody of her own that draws upon the imagery of female chorality and choral leadership. Yet while Ion’s monody prefigures his transformation from Delphic servant to Athenian royalty, Creusa’s song reframes the assault that resulted in Ion’s birth as a more normative form of maidenly transition. In both cases, I suggest, Euripides uses dance to situate Ion and Creusa within their final roles while also highlighting the contradictions and conflicts that swirl around them.

The Iliad and Odyssey from their earliest stages coexisted with smaller performative genres, many involving music (hymns to humans or gods; tunes to accompany work) or music and dance together, as well as paraliterary “genres of speaking” that had neither musical accompaniment nor strict formal rules. A survey of Homeric allusions to, and embedding of, performance events finds them to be further marked by distantiation and imaginative stylization, thus complicating any mining of epic as an historical source for early song-making traditions.