THE CRY THAT SHAKES UP ALL THE WORLD: DISSENT IN GREEK WOMEN’S LAMENT (Essay for the OIKOS course Death in the Greek World) (original) (raw)
Queering the archive of Greek laments: over-identifying with dominant national narratives. (2019).
Journal of Greek Media & Culture
Lament in Greece has been historically linked to notions of cultural continuity and national belonging. As a literary genre or mode of performance, but also as a rhetorical trope, it has had a constitutive role in shaping national identity. Within this ideological context, Greek laments were strategically used by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century folklorists as survivals of an uninterrupted oral tradition, and hence as original proofs of continuity between modern Greeks and their supposed ancestors. Yet, the archives of oral poetry in general were extensively edited -but also partially constructed -by early folklorists in order to serve ideological purposes related to the construction of national identity, and to the promotion of the nation's image according to Western European notions of Hellenism. Furthermore, it was not unusual for these scholars to create themselves quasidemotic songs, in the manner and style of oral tradition. This was the case, for instance, of Georgios Tertsetis, whose quasi-demotic song 'The Fair Retribution' (H Δικαία Eκδίκησις) raises issues regarding desire between men, but also upon the impossibility of the subjects of such a desire to be mourned and lamented. Departing from an analysis of 'The Fair Retribution', and after offering a selective overview of the discourses of early folklorists regarding the use of Greek laments in the nationalist project, this article proceeds with a self-reflexive account of my lecture-performance Poustia kai Ololygmos: Selections from the Occult Songs of the Greek People. Enacting a pseudo-scientific persona, in this performance I announced the fictive discovery of an archive of Greek laments, which addresses issues of queer mourning and desire, while also bringing to the fore the absence of lament when it comes to queer subjectivities, in the past, but also in the present.
Queering the archive of Greek laments
Lament in Greece has been historically linked to notions of cultural continuity and national belonging. As a literary genre or mode of performance, but also as a rhetorical trope, it has had a constitutive role in shaping national identity. Within this ideological context, Greek laments were strategically used by nineteenth-and early twentieth-century folklorists as survivals of an uninterrupted oral tradition , and hence as original proofs of continuity between modern Greeks and their supposed ancestors. Yet, the archives of oral poetry in general were extensively edited-but also partially constructed-by early folklorists in order to serve ideological purposes related to the construction of national identity, and to the promotion of the nation's image according to Western European notions of Hellenism. Furthermore, it was not unusual for these scholars to create themselves quasi-demotic songs, in the manner and style of oral tradition. This was the case, for instance, of Georgios Tertsetis, whose quasi-demotic song 'The Fair Retribution' (H Δικαία Eκδίκησις) raises issues regarding desire between men, but also upon the impossibility of the subjects of such a desire to be mourned and lamented. Departing from an analysis of 'The Fair Retribution', and after offering a selective overview of the discourses of early folklorists regarding the use of Greek laments in the nationalist project, this article proceeds with a self-reflexive account of my lecture-performance Poustia kai Ololygmos: Selections from the Occult Songs of the Greek People. Enacting a pseudo-scientific persona, in this performance I announced the fictive discovery of an archive of Greek laments, which addresses issues of queer mourning and desire, while also bringing to the fore the absence of lament when it comes to queer subjectivities, in the past, but also in the present. KEYWORDS lament queer archive performance nationalism overidentification translation adaptation MARIOS CHATZIPROKOPIOU
Thrênoi to Moirológia: Female Voices of Solitude, Resistance, and Solidarity
Oral Tradition, 2008
Margaret Alexiou's The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition offered a diachronic, comprehensive study of Greek ritual lament that emphasized continuities between ancient and modern lament traditions while incorporating stylistic and thematic analyses of lament texts. In the past three decades, Alexiou's seminal work has been fundamental in shaping the field of lament studies; it has influenced scholars from such various academic fields as classics, comparative literature, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore to engage in explorations of mourning that take into account textual, performative, and cultural contexts. 1 The anthropologist Anna Caraveli-Chaves, whose fieldwork emphasizes cultural issues of gender and lament in rural Epiros and Crete, has identified the following salient elements of modern Greek women's lament: the role of the lamenter as mediator, or "bridge" between the worlds of the living and the dead; the aesthetics and function of ponos ("pain"); lament as vehicle for revenge; lament as an instrument for social criticism and protest; and finally the role of lament in establishing solidarity among the community of women mourners. 2 This essay explores the relationship between gender, lamentation, and death in the Greek tradition, making use of Alexiou's diachronic paradigm and by expanding upon Caraveli-Chaves' ideas regarding the social role of lament by examining and comparing ancient literary representations of women in mourning with authentic examples of women's lament practices based on ethnographic material from modern rural Greece. I shall focus specifically on the function of female lament as an expression of individual and collective pain (ponos; plural ponoi) and as a vehicle for uniting Greek women mourners through social bonding and solidarity in a community-what Caraveli-Chaves has termed a
2015
comprehensive study of Greek ritual lament that emphasized continuities between ancient and modern lament traditions while incorporating stylistic and thematic analyses of lament texts. In the past three decades, Alexiou’s seminal work has been fundamental in shaping the field of lament studies; it has influenced scholars from such various academic fields as classics, comparative literature, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore to engage in explorations of mourning that take into account textual, performative, and cultural contexts.1 The anthropologist Anna Caraveli-Chaves, whose fieldwork emphasizes cultural issues of gender and lament in rural Epiros and Crete, has identified the following salient elements of modern Greek women’s lament: the role of the lamenter as mediator, or “bridge ” between the worlds of the living and the dead; the aesthetics and function of ponos (“pain”); lament as vehicle for revenge; lament as an instrument for social criticism and protest; and fi...
"Female Lamentation in the Iliad"
Univ. of Chicago, MLA Thesis, 2006
By putting together two major sources of evidence, on the one hand, the unintended one (Homer's Iliad, a classic work of Greek literature), and on the other, the material one (the archaeological remains and art), this study shows that the Iliad, despite the war context behind the story and its main storyline, conveys the structure of the funerary ritual as practiced in ancient Greek society. This study contributes in this way to the partial reconstruction of the actual participation of women in an ancient ritual activity.
Noise, Music, Speech: The Representation of Lament in Greek Tragedy
American Journal of Philology, 2017
This paper examines how lament in Greek tragedy is conceptualized as both highly skillful song and inarticulate noise, and how the slippage between these two apparently contradictory characteristics could be exploited for dramatic effect. I demonstrate how the twofold nature of lament is bound up not just with its ritual practice (the combination of the góos wail and the more formal thrēnos) but with its association with birdsong and displays of extreme emotion by females and foreigners.
Musical Features of the Ritual Lament in Ancient Greece
This article considers one of the most ancient musical expressions of the Greeks: the lament. It was not only an ornamental element of various rituals but it was also a social reality. It hides specific meanings that need to be explained or, at the least, investigated. This article is far from being exhaustive but has the objective of explaining the importance of laments whilst underlining the difficulty of interpreting the literary and iconographic sources by using the Linos-song as a case study. Greek culture should not be analysed exclusively for its artistic, literary and philosophic contribution. Music has been considered marginal in comparison with these other aspects, but recent studies have shown how significant it was for the whole community. 1 Music represented more than an entertainment, especially in the archaic and classical periods. This article considers one of the musical expressions of the Greeks: the lament. 2 This choice comes initially from the fact that the lame...
Studia Philologica Valentina, 2023
Much of current scholarship aims at reconstructing ritual lamentation based on evidence from early Greek epic and lyric poetry and fifth-century tragedy. This paper, although it is an examination of a specific human emotion, elpis, within the corpus of early and classical Greek epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry that are thought to preserve the oral traditions of the genre, takes also into consideration the inscribed ancient Greek songs for the dead; that is archaic and classical epigrams and their later counterparts encountered, mainly, in the Greek Anthology. A study of elpis, a highly culturally dependent emotion, within these contexts will allow us to have a glimpse of the hermeneutic frames provided by each poetic genre, their performative contexts, and the expectation of the audiences, as well as of the general world-view that is shared by the poetic genres in question. In other words, a study of elpis in ancient Greek laments and songs for the dead will enable us to have a slightly clearer image of the evolution and the nature of this oral genre from archaic times until the Late Antiquity.
New Persephones: Death as Marriage in Ancient Greek Epitaphs for Women
In epitaphs like Phrasikleia’s, the juxtaposition of marriage and death and emphasis on death before marriage highlights what a girl did not achieve, marriage, and underscores the belief by her parents that this is what she should have achieved. These epitaphs exemplify the dominant social ideologies surrounding the expectations placed on girls in Greek society. Sadness is accentuated by the failed transition from girl to woman, the unfulfilled narrative. Grief, however, can prompt a different type of narrative thinking. Narrating grief, particularly the “event story of the loss itself” (Neimeyer 2004: 53-54), can instigate a process of consolation and acceptance that can “[reaffirm, repair, or replace] the basic plot and theme of the life story of the bereaved” (Neimeyer 2014: 489). That is, the narrative quest for sense-making after loss can help restore coherence and meaning back to “a life story altered by loss.” Though the experience of grief over death, particularly the death of a child, can be uniquely personal, myth nevertheless provides the mourner with certain sets of narrative coping templates. I argue that by referencing the myth of Persephone’s abduction and marriage in their daughters’ epitaphs, parents utilized a strategy of narrative sense-making as a means of consolation for the loss. This “sense-making” could work on three levels: 1) comprehension of the loss through identification of its cause, 2) assimilation of the loss into one’s world view, and 3) a positive reappraisal of the loss.
Women’s Choral Apotropaic Songs in Tragic Contexts of Domestic and Civic Disharmony
Maria G. Spathi, Maria Chidiroglou and Jenny Wallensten (eds.), Apotropaia and Phylakteria Confronting Evil in Ancient Greece, Archaeopress: Oxford., 2024
In ancient Greek culture, songs had many functions, including apotrope. In ancient Greece in times of crisis (domestic or civic), groups of women may have performed ritual prayers and generally ritual actions (involving words, gestures, movement) in order to help avert evil. The use of apotropaic prayers or wishes by female tragic choruses has not been unnoticed by modern scholars. Ancient Greek tragedy probably echoes these women’s practices. This paper suggests that the ritual performances of women reflected in ancient Greek tragedy may have been a choral performance, in other words, sung and danced prayers/religious discourse following the pattern of choral performances for other occasions and could well have approached the status of a recognizable lyric ‘genre.’
‘Most Musicall, Most Melancholy’: Avian Aesthetics of Lament in Greek and Roman Elegy
Dictynna 16, 2019
In this paper, I explore how Greek and Roman poets alluded to the lamentatory background of elegy through the figures of the swan and the nightingale. After surveying the ancient association of elegy and lament (Section I) and the common metapoetic function of birds from Homer onwards (Section II), I analyse Hellenistic and Roman examples where the nightingale (Section III) and swan (Section IV) emerge as symbols of elegiac poetics. The legends associated with both birds rendered them natural models of lamentation. But besides this thematic association, I consider the ancient terms used to describe their song, especially its shrillness (λιγυρότης/liquiditas) and sweetness (γλυκύτης/dulcedo) (Section V). I demonstrate how these two terms connect birdsong, lament and elegiac poetry in a tightly packed nexus. These birds proved perfect emblems of elegy not only in their constant lamentation, but also in the very sound and nature of their song.
TYCHO, Revista de Iniciación en la Investigación del teatro clásico grecolatino y su tradición, 2024
This article presents the way in which Euripides uses the power of the ritual lament to present on stage how the principles and values of an existing political system are subverted during the war. As an example, passages of laments from the Suppliant Women are used, who succeeded in overturning political decisions on burial issues and inciting the Athenian public to resist Thebes’ decisions on its refusal to return soldiers’ corpses for burial during the first period of the Peloponnesian War. The same laments, directed by Nikos Charalambous in 1978, try to present the feelings of anger and despair of the Cypriots who, after the Turkish invasion and occupation of a part of the island (1974), have not yet managed to locate their lost people and dead compatriots. Charalambous staged Suppliant Women at the Theatrical Organization of Cyprus and discovered the way to appeal not only to the memory of his audience, who recognized their oikeia kaka through the lament of the mothers of Argos, but also, by reading alternatively the tragedy, he tried to use their recent tragic experiences in order to overturn the prevailing political situation after the invasion.
In this paper, we address the issues relative to the clothes used to dress the dead in traditional Greek culture. This is done on the basis of literary testimonies from popular artistic prose, and more specifically from the songs about death and the moirologia (laments or dirges), on the basis of ethnographic testimonies of the primary folkloric material in printed and handwritten collections. We examine all the types of clothes, the differentiations between urban and rural areas, according to social and economic class, and according to gender and age, but also the possible ritual uses of these clothes, as encountered in the death customs of the Greek people. Keywords: Death Customs, Dead Body, Clothes, Traditional Greek Culture, Moirologia.
On Women in Ancient Greek Culture, Drama and Education
International Journal of Scientific Research and Management
Women in ancient Greek culture, drama and education is a question which has been at the centre of the theoretical debate and creative experiences at least from the middle of the twentieth century until today. This paper proposes to revisit this question based on three principles. First of all, it refers not only to the dominant model of Athens but also to other parts of Hellenism, whose political systems may be democracies, tyrannies or hereditary kingdoms. Secondly, it draws its examples from the Greek metropolis of the 5th and the 4th centuries B.C., but also from other places and periods, which cover an area from the Mediterranean to Asia and a period long before and after the classical era. Thirdly, it envisages the question of ancient Greek women not only from the angle of culture, meaning literature and drama, but more generally in all the senses contained in the ancient term paedeia (παιδεία), including education. To clarify the meaning of this last point I would say that I a...
Stages of Grief: Enacting Lamentation in Late Ancient Hymnography
This essay explores the rhetoric and performance of grief by examining two related bodies of texts composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic: eulogies for deceased individuals (hespedim) and communal laments (kinot) for Jerusalem; also included are two "narrative laments" from the same corpus that construct the voices of grieving biblical characters. In the analysis, the dynamics among the living participants in the mourning rituals are investigated, as well as the ways rituals of individual grief and rituals of communal mourning shape each other. Throughout the analysis, specific rhetorical techniques associated with mourning in both the Jewish world and in classical Greco-Roman sources and early Christian materials merit particular scrutiny, as do the experiential components of rhetorical techniques such as refrains, antiphony, anadiplosis, and dialogue. Along the way, contextual features important for understanding the function and efficacy of these works are addressed: social setting, liturgical station, affinity for biblical texts, and the status of the mourned party.
Can a Woman Speak … or The Voices of the “Other” in Greek Tragedy
The production and performance of Greek tragedies in the fifth-century Athens was a male enterprise as theatre along with other social and political institutions remained an “exclusive ritual” where its “celebrants were all male.” Greek tragedies were preoccupied with masculine dilemmas of identity, while women excluded from the social and political arenas take a marginal place, being less differentiated as individuals than men. Not only women were denied property, education and vote rights but their speech and actions were limited so that a man was allowed ‘to speak’ for a woman in public. There were no “women’s voices to be heard in the theatre of Dionysus” (Griffith 117), despite the fact that a number of roles in the tragedies were female. In impersonating women, male actors used any means (gestures, steps, costumes) other than relying on female voice and language. The Athenian society shaped the identity, behavior and verbal expression of women different from men. Words appropriate for men’s speech would be improper and outrageous for a woman. Female speeches in tragedy include laments of grief, loss of the family or a beloved, prayer to gods for help. One of the symbols of female virtue along with chastity, obedience and modesty included silence, as the “highest prestige (doxa) a woman can earn is not to be mentioned in public” (Bouvrie 54). Women become the force of disruption and challenge of moral and cultural values in Greek tragedies. Those women who have access to language and take actions outside oikos “represent the greatest and most puzzling deviation from the cultural norm” (Foley 4). The goal of this paper is to examine how by means of language women ‘voice’ and fulfill the moral and social agency in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra, and Euripides’ Medea and Hecuba.