The Pitch of Passion: Circumflex Accents and Emotional Characterization in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis

summary: This paper proposes that linguistic pitch accents facilitated the expression of emotion and character in ancient Greek texts written for performance. Following a short survey of ancient and modern theories for voice melody's expressive function, I assess the patterning of circumflex accents in Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis through a combination of large-scale computational text analysis and close reading of select passages. The rate of circumflex accents turns out to vary significantly between characters, suggesting that intonation patterns could facilitate the expression of the actor's assumed identity (e.g., gender, age). Examining individual lines and passages with high numbers of circumflex accents, I observe that such passages generally express emotional states that modern research associates with high pitch variability (e.g., "pleading," "astonished," "scornful," "admiring"). These findings suggest that the patterning of pitch accents is interpretively significant as evidence for the audible intonation contours that would frame a text's meaning in performance.