The friendly expatriate ladies of the chorus in Helen enter having heard loud lamentation issuing from the palace, while engaged, like the Φλα of the chorus in Hippolytus 125ff., in spreading laundered crimson textiles to dry in the sun. The central theme of ‘hearing cries’, with the verb κλυον and nouns of utterance, is reminiscent also of Medea 131ff., where the opening words of the Parodos κλυον Φωνν, κλυον δ βον… allude to Medea's loud utterances сωθεν in 96ff. and 111ff. (...) : here, as there, the Parodos exploits the familiar motif of βοηδρομα. (shrink)

So Pearson. The strange series of hypodochmiacs here and atO.T.1207 ff., with brevis in longo without pause atAj.421 andO.T.1208, seems metrically self-contained, despite their syntactical interdependence (esp.Aj.421–2οὐκέτ' ἄνδρα μὴ | τόνδ' ἴδητ', so that the word-overlap ofοἷονinto iambics in Pearson's text is unlikely.ἑξερῶ μέγαshould therefore be writtenplena scriptura. Thenοἷον οὔτιν' ἁ Τροί|α στρατοῦ…is possible, but the ithyphallic with word-overlap, sometimes found in the syncopated iambics of Aeschylus, is foreign to Sophocles. Divideἐξερῶ μέγα, | οἷον οὔτινα | Τροία…Thenϕίλοι τοῖσδ' ὁμοῦ = (...) οἷον οὔτινα, i.e.δ= hyp., which is not certainly found, and the antistrophe has two syllables extra. (shrink)