SECTION FOUR—
EPIC AND LAMENT
10—
The Natural Tears of Epic
Thomas M. Greene
In his magisterial study of epic, The Descent from Heaven, written over thirty years ago, Thomas Greene provided us with a rich way of reading the canonical epic tradition by focusing on scenes with messengers bearing news from the gods. His essay in this volume commands a similar sweep of epic texts in its attention to what Greene calls "the epic telos of tears." Moving from the oldest extant epic, the Babylonian Gilgamesh, to Milton's Paradise Lost, Greene traces the literary epic's profound engagement with grief and tragic ritual, thereby arguing for the capacity of the written epic to create a community of shared mourners.
The adventurous scholar who attempts in our day to say something fresh about that class of texts conventionally called epic is condemned to deal with a certain burden of suspicion. This suspicion will reasonably arise even if the scholar limits him- or herself, as I have been asked to do, to canonized texts of the European tradition. It isn't really clear that all those various poems can legitimately be huddled under a single generic umbrella. It isn't clear that the scholar's generalizations can survive all the inevitable exceptions that fail to prove but rather subvert them. It isn't clear what credence is due to a reader who fails to command all the relevant original languages—and few of us do command them all, least of all myself. Confronted with this formidable and justified burden of suspicion, one can proceed only humbly and pragmatically, moving with caution through the available texts and facts in the hope that some useful patterns will emerge.
One starting place for thinking about Homeric epic is the malicious little dialogue of Plato, the Ion. Socrates' interlocutor in that work is a fatuous rhapsode, quick to boast of his Homeric recitations and impervious to his companion's irony. But despite its irony, the dialogue can serve as a useful source for conventional attitudes toward Homeric performance. With Socrates' encouragement, Ion dwells upon his own emotional involvement in the poetry he recites, his ecstasy of intense feeling, above all on the tears he sheds as he chants Homeric verse. Socrates goes on to ask Ion if he is aware that he produces similar effects upon the spectators.
Yes, indeed [is the reply], I know it very well. As I look down at them from the stage above, I see them, every time, weeping, casting terrible glances, stricken
with amazement at the deeds recounted. In fact, I have to give them very close attention, for if I set them weeping, I myself shall laugh when I get my money, but if they laugh, it is I who have to weep at losing it. (Ion 525c-e)[1]
Tears, it appears, are the best criteria of the rhapsode's success; tears are actually the goal of his performance. It would be easy to dismiss as insignificant this exposure of Ion's artistic calculations if Plato didn't return to the same theme in a much more important and famous passage, the attack on allegedly antisocial poetry in book 10 of the Republic. Here again Plato links Homeric poetry with the pleasurable shedding of tears and in this case with tragedy.
I think you know that the very best of us, when we hear Homer or some other of the makers of tragedy imitating one of the heroes who is in grief, and is delivering a long tirade in his lamentations or chanting and beating his breast, feel pleasure, and abandon ourselves and accompany the representation with sympathy and eagerness, and we praise as an excellent poet the one who most strongly affects us in this way. (Republic 10 .605c-d)
This passage asserts what was already implicit in the Ion, the fact that the sharing of grief was perceived in the fourth century as the characteristic response to the most privileged poetry. The rhapsode Ion's pride in his power of eliciting tears does correspond to the objective judgment of his sober critic.
Plato of course was writing four centuries after Homer and cannot necessarily instruct us about the responses of archaic audiences to poetic recitations. But at least one distinguished scholar, John Herington, thinks there was little difference.[2] It may be worth noting at any rate that the proper response to heroic poetry becomes an issue almost at the outset of the Odyssey, when the bard Phemios's song of nostoi, "that bitter song, the Homecoming of the Achaians," is interrupted by Penelope in tears, commanding him to choose another subject. Penelope's grief stems from her own personal loss. But Telemachos's response seems to underscore the inevitable convergence of pain and song. "You must nerve yourself and try to listen," he tells her, as others listen to stories of suffering.[3] Penelope's tears here at the beginning anticipate her husband's tears when later in the poem he listens to another bard. But the scene which for our purposes is decisive is the reunion of husband and wife in book 23, that scene that the Alexandrian critics already described as the telos of the poem's narrative. Whether or not the remainder of the poem is authentically Homeric, Sheila Murnaghan has rightly called this scene "the definitive conclusion to the Odyssey's plot."[4] The dramatic power of the reunion lies in its mingling of joy with the bitterness of loss, so that the mutual tears stem from the inextricability of love and pain.
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms. . . .
The rose Dawn might have found them weeping still
had not the grey-eyed Athena slowed the night
when night was most profound, under the Ocean
of the East.
(Odyssey 23.259-262; 271-273)
That mutual release culminates and resolves the long story of the couple's privation. It responds to our first encounter with Odysseus, weeping alone on Calypso's island. The narrative of the hero is bracketed by tears, as indeed it is punctuated with more tears as Odysseus leaves Circe's shore for Hades, as he first glimpses his mother Antikleia, as he listens to Demodokos, as—once returned to Ithaka—he fails to recognize it, and as he is reunited with Telemachos. All those moments anticipate the final moment of poignant reunion, as does the incessant grief of Penelope throughout the poem and still other lachrymose scenes such as the episode at Menelaos's palace where the host, his wife Helen, their guest Telemachos, and even his companion Antilochos, all break down in sobbing and can only be restored by Helen's magical potion, so powerful that it inhibits weeping for an entire day.
The corresponding scene in the Iliad contrives a far more improbable mutuality, when the old king of Troy is led by Hermes to the tent of his son's killer. The supreme, shattering force of that confrontation lies in the blessed release of tears accorded Priam and Achilles together, a mutuality of grief so intense that it overrides the presence of the corpse of Hector.
So [Priam] spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving
for his own father. He took the old man's hand and pushed him
gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled
at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor
And Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again
for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house. Then
when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in sorrow
and the passion for it had gone from his mind and body, thereafter
he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand, and set him
on his feet again, in pity for the grey head and the grey beard.
(Iliad 24.507-516)[5]
It is hard to believe that the original audiences of the Iliad did not respond to this moment as fourth-century audiences apparently did. Achilles himself, Gregory Nagy has argued, has already become "the very essence of grief" within the poem.[6] The release in tears in that magnificent scene becomes ultimately a scene of mourning for all the unnumbered dead of the poem and the, war, the almost unbearable toll of the fallen that the narrative pitilessly records. That scene of unspeakable private grief is then followed by the public grief of Hektor's funeral, where each lament of the three principal women mourners is followed by the formulaic phrase "So she spoke in tears." In the calculating sentimentality of the rhapsode Ion, tears may have
been the pragmatic telos of the recitation, but in the severe and noble pathos of the two Homeric poems themselves, tears can properly be said to constitute the authentic narrative telos.
This is important because, as I now want to argue, the resolution of tears that ends both Homeric poems ends most of the European poems that we commonly describe as epics. Most of them conclude quite literally in tears, and those few that fail to do so tend to center on a pivotal scene of mourning. The only difficulty in making this argument is that the pattern is so common as to risk tedium in the enumeration. A brief overview will have to suffice.
Beowulf, like the Iliad, ends with a funeral for its eponymous hero, or rather with a double funeral. After the deep pathos of the hero's sacrificial death, his body is ritually burned, and the sound of weeping, writes the poet, mingles with the roar of the rising fire. The ashes are then buried in a barrow about which twelve warriors ride; their lamentation concludes the poem. In the Chanson de Roland, the grief for the betrayed rear guard when the main body of the army discovers its loss is itself epic in scope. Twenty thousand faint with sorrow; not a single knight fails to shed tears piteously. In the very closing lines, an angel appears to the battle-weary Charlemagne to send him off according to God's will on another expedition. "'God,' cries Charlemagne, 'how wretched is my life!' His eyes shed tears, and he tugs his white beard"(4001-4002).[7] That is the end of the poem, as the one supreme loss described earlier is assimilated into a lifetime of painful service. As for the Nibelungenlied, its final pages are damp with universal tears for the massive bloodletting it records, and as it happens, its last sentence is also devoted to the same theme: "Christian and heathen, wife, man, and maid, were seen weeping and mourning for their friends."[8] In the twelfth-century Russian epic Igor's Raid, the narration of the raid itself is overshadowed by the mourning that follows it, mourning that affects not only widows and survivors but even the bereaved landscape.
The grass droops with condolements
and the tree with sorrow
bends to the ground. . . .
The Russian women
have started to weep. . . .
anguish spread flowing over the Russian land.
(299-342)[9]
I will pass over the flood of tears shed in the Iranian Shahndma when the hero Rustam discovers too late that he has wounded unwittingly and fatally his son Suhráb.[10] But I hope that these cumulative examples will suggest that the primary epic as a genre is not so much concerned with heroic achievement in itself as with the affective cost of achievement. What the poem works
toward, what it leaves us with, is that acute personal recognition of pain, often the restorative sharing of pain, which it presents as the inescapable burden of action.
One might well ask why this should be the case, why so many communal poems in so many separate cultures should move toward this particular dramatic culmination. This is a mystery not easily penetrated, but perhaps a kind of clarification begins to emerge from these lines from the Iliad already quoted above:
When great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in sorrow
and the passion for it had gone from his mind and body, thereafter
he rose from his chair, and took the old man by the hand.
These lines do not indicate that Achilles' sorrow has been dissipated; they do not remove the burden of loss accumulated over the poem as a whole. They state rather that the passion of sorrow has been dispelled, meaning presumably that profound restless disquiet that has harassed and tormented Achilles since the death of Patroklos. Achilles has taken satisfaction in sorrow through the act of weeping, as presumably has Priam, and this satisfaction, this catharsis of passion, allows the one man to take the other by the hand. That peculiar satisfaction that does not repress loss but somehow finds it acceptable flowers in the aftermath of participatory mourning, and this satisfaction, this quiescence in tragedy, is a reconciliation that we as audience can share. If, as I've suggested, our grief in this scene resolves our shock from the unnumbered dead of the poem, we still feel the weight of that toll, but our passion also has yielded to somber quietude. We are left with a recognizable response to pain that we share with Achilles and Priam and those who mourn in the other poems I've quoted. Typically, epic grief is shared by two or more characters who are then joined by the audience. That shared stillness within tremendous ruin is what heroic poetry brings to us and brings us to, and the hard acquisition of that stillness derives from a ritual that many cultures have independently produced. It is of course a tragic ritual, and to recognize this is to understand better Plato's reference to "Homer or some other of the tragic composers," or his reference to Homer elsewhere in the Republic as "the most poetic and first of the tragic poets (Republic 10 .607a), or again Aristotle's assertion that "[Homer's] Margites . . . stands in the same relation to our comedies as the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies" (Poetics 1448b-1449a).[11]
The conclusion in tears, the epic telos of tears, is already found in the oldest extant poem that has earned the name of epic, the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, although in its case the climactic grief is solitary rather than shared. The hero Gilgamesh has become obsessed with his own mortality and has undertaken a long voyage to visit a certain Utanapishtim in quest of enduring life. His host first discourages his hopes but is finally persuaded to give
him a magic plant whose name is "The Old Man Becomes a Young Man," a plant "by which a man can attain his survival." But Gilgamesh carelessly allows a snake to rob him of the plant.
At that point Gilgamesh sat down, weeping,
his tears streaming over the side of his nose.[12]
A few lines later the poem comes to an end, leaving Gilgamesh with the tears of his mortality.
The tears provoked by the loss of a magical herb in this ur-epic seem to me paradigmatic. The pain of epic might be said to stem from a repudiation of that crude magic that is here stolen. The magic of the folktale, the magic of the spell, are designed to protect human beings from the kind of pain that epic confronts. It is true that remnants of magical power, for good or for evil, do survive in much heroic poetry, but when it matters most, they fail to mitigate the pain of existence, the pain that concludes and focuses the poem. Thus the wound from the boar inflicted on the young Odysseus can be healed with incantations, but incantations are powerless to bring the hero home from Troy. Just as Odysseus has to be bound to the mast to ignore the bewitching song of the Sirens, so the genre itself has to surrender that enchanting possibility of heart's ease. The Sirens sing: "Argos' old soldiery / On Troy beach teeming, / Charmed out of time we see"(Odyssey 12.241-243). Epic, we might say, refuses to be charmed out of time in that crude fashion the Sirens evoke. If it depends on a kind of enchantment, as it sometimes seems to claim, its power is of a finer temper than the Sirens evoke or the herb of Utanapishtim embodies.
Fortunately we do possess a body of legendary poetry that suggests what the primary epic might have been without the renunciation of magical solace. The collection of narrative poems gathered in the Finnish Kalevala represents a world that does depend quite explicitly on magic; in fact a large proportion of the text consists of spells. This circumstance affects, not surprisingly, the status of tears. In poem 41 of the Kalevala, the poet-seer Väinämöinen sings so sweetly that all of his auditors weep, as he himself weeps at the wonderful sound he produces. These are not the tears of existential pain but of aesthetic delight, and by the close of poem 41 they are in fact aestheticized. The singer wants his tears returned to him, and with his hermetic power he commands a goldeneye bird to collect them for him. And the bird obeys, returning the tears, which are now transformed into pearls.[13] These magical tears are marvelous jewels, brilliant to the eye, proof against erosion, innocent of suffering. Like the Sirens' songs, they are "charmed out of time." This aestheticization of the tears produced not by experience but by song—a song whose content we never learn—can usefully set off the severe resignation of epic tears that are irrecoverable, unbeautiful, subject to time. Epic grief refuses the facile comfort of the spell or the sorcerer or the mag-
ical herb in order to effect that difficult ritual of reconciliation that refuses to repress.[14]
Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon, writing on the oral epic tradition, suggest that "recitation sets up a kind of common 'field' in which poet, audience, and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three."[15] In that common field, the grief of the poet, the character, and the hearer seem to blend in a form of communion, and where the performer can be distinguished from the poet, his grief also joins in a necessary continuum. This continuum is metaphorized by Socrates in the Ion as a series of rings magnetized by a lodestone, beginning with the Muse, passing through poet and performer, and ending with the spectator (533d-e, 535e-536b). He might have added the ring belonging to the character, the Priam or Charlemagne or Gilgamesh. In the common field of performance, in the series of magnetized rings, the grief of the poet merges with the performer's, and the character's, and the audience's. Truly to listen to the epic is to enter that space where the conventional distinctions break down, Jean-Pierre Vernant's "au delà" of Mnemosyne, where the participation of past and present produces a hallowed communion between the two.
This communion, I submit, is most accessible through the sharing of tears. Tears break down most effectively those boundaries that epic presencing erodes. The sharing of tears provides a contact with a hero more intense than the wonder at his accomplishments; it levels the planes of human excellence, and it invites the intimacy of a simple shared humanity. This intimacy is thematized at least once in the Odyssey, when Odysseus in Hades tries to embrace his mother Antikleia but discovers that her body has no substance.
Now this embittered all the pain I bore,
and I cried in the darkness:
"O my mother,
will you not stay, be still, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well,
hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears' relief, the twinge of welling tears?"
(11.234-239)
The failure of the son to embrace his mother involves, apparently, an inability to weep with her. The "relief" of salt tears, anticipating the tearful release later with Penelope, seems indistinguishable from touching the other person. Touching with love and the welling of tears form a single experience. We would not distort greatly, I think, the experience of the Homeric poems, and more broadly of heroic narrative, if we allegorized this conflation of touching and weeping to describe the participation in heroic sorrow that is the goal of epic. The audience touches the actors of the poem and is touched
by them through the medium of the performer who is himself touched in two senses. Eumaeus the swineherd compares Odysseus the raconteur to "a minstrel taught by heaven to touch the hearts of men"( 17.680-681). We have every reason to believe that the hearts of a minstrel's audience were indeed profoundly affected. It is appropriate that the moment of supreme feeling, the moment of communion, should coincide, in Greece as elsewhere, with the contagion of grieving at the culmination of each narrative. It is this encounter of present and past in a common reality that distinguishes the primary epic from other narratives with lachrymose endings—Madame Bovary, for instance.
But for those of us who seek to understand the workings of the archaic imagination, we of course are obliged to reconceive the status of the heroic past in somewhat different terms. For us, that past is not a fragment of reality already immutable and perennial. It is rather a constructed reality that may or may not contain a grain of history, as the battle of Roncesvalles contains a minor attack on Charlemagne's rear guard by Basque Christians. The reality invented by a communal imagination, from our perspective, is a projection upon a dim past whose blankness is intolerable, whose stretches of vacuity leave a people without a common identity and must be filled in by myth. Primary epic solaces that unbearable insufficiency of the available past so that a people can know where it has come from, whom it has come from, and thus who it is. The epic bard draws upon a stock of legends and amplifies them with fresh detail. But in order for the communion of grief to occur, this construct projected upon the dark backward and abysm of time has to contain in itself that intuition of vulnerability and loss that can make a communion in sorrow conceivable. The heroic past as we perceive it is not an absolute given; it betrays the contingency of the imaginary shaped to allow a ritual of reconciliation. The projected past is arranged to invite that embrace of the living with the supposed dead, who, unlike Antikleia, are now made substantial. The narrative leading up to this intuitive embrace has to guarantee the nobility of the accessible past; it has to ensure that the pathos of the close will not prove cheaply sentimental. All preliterate societies project myths against the terror of historical ignorance; heroic poetry is produced by those societies whose projected myths prove themselves available for a particular kind of communion. A spiritual circuit is closed that involves both projection and assimilation, the progressive fabrication of a myth that is then rendered present through the magic of heightened language and is absorbed, as Eumaeus says, in the hearts of men.
In the passage from primary to secondary epic, that circle of projection and assimilation will continue to operate, but not without certain interferences. In the poetry of a literate society, the story retold no longer stems from the past but from a past among others, a past whose historical validity is always open to question. The poem functions to recall the heroic story but
also to ensure that the story keeps its distance along a chronological continuum familiar to the reader. The story to be projected, in order to permit an assimilation, no longer fills a historical void; it is obliged rather to clear away a past cluttered with history. The ritual of shared grief no longer springs spontaneously from a hallowed act of memory, but from the creative energy of a given authorial imagination. There are other interferences. One lies in the privacy of the act of reading, which now replaces the communal reception of a performance. Another interference lies in shifting ethical codes that may condemn the very act of weeping as demoralizing. And in a Christian poem, weeping characteristically is an expression of remorse for an individual sinful past that is not necessarily the reader's past. In view of these interferences, the surprising feature of latter-day epics is their continuity in grief with their generic forebears.
In European cultural history, the pivotal text that alters permanently the epic circle of projection and participation is the Aeneid. No one can deny its suffusion with lacrymae rerum, but the status of grief in Virgil is attended with profound ambivalence. In fact Aeneas's very usage of the over-familiar phrase in book 1 is exposed immediately to the poet's irony. Almost everyone, it seems, weeps at some point in the Aeneid, but the reader is not infrequently left uncertain how to respond. Venus weeps; Creusa weeps; Andromache weeps; Ascanius weeps; Evander weeps; Juno weeps; Sinon weeps; the hero repeatedly and unstintingly weeps. Most famously, Dido weeps, and so poignantly that Saint Augustine was compelled like countless other readers to imitate her. But the tears of Dido lead to suicidal neurosis, and the line between noble sorrow and demoralizing self-pity is progressively blurred as her story nears its terrible end. The Aeneid does move closer to authentic tears in book 11, in Aeneas's elegiac valedictory over the body of Pallas and later Evander's passionate lamentation. But book 12 swings back to a harsher polarization, which assigns the stigma of weeping to a series of hysterical females—Amata, Juturna, even Lavinia, and finally all the women of Laurentum wailing over their dead queen. Aeneas in the last book remains coldly dry-eyed, and the text, never more ambivalent, invites us with one of its voices to admire his self-control. Often the sharing of grief that the text invites seems to remain in an ethical limbo.
One familiar moment can be taken to encapsulate the force of tears in the Aeneid. Aeneas in the underworld sees Dido, or thinks he sees her, so wispy and clouded is her presence. Is she really there? He cries out to her anyway, weeping, protesting his reluctance to leave her at Carthage and begging her now to linger. With these protests, continues the text, he tries to soothe the burning spirit staring him down in fury, and summons tears—"lacrimas ciebat." Both Fitzgerald and Mandelbaum translate this phrase to say that Aeneas wept. But Virgil has already told us that. The verb ciere means "to stir," "to arouse," "to summon." Isn't it Dido's tears he wants to elicit, responding
to his own? We can't be sure, and one might take that undecidability to allegorize the poem's own ambivalence, full of tears but making ambiguous appeals to its audience.[16] Here at any rate is a moment of grief the modern reader can share, compounded of incipient regret, stirrings of guilt, love that is almost sincere, vague intuitions of loss, inextricable feelings of shadowy inadequacy voiced into the dim shadows around the speaker. Does she really hear him, if she's there? Does he succeed in stirring her tears? Or is he only summoning deliberately more of his own? Is he telling the full truth? "Quem fugis?" he asks; "Who is it you're fleeing?"—a radical question that might be read as putting his own selfhood in doubt. In this moment of supreme anguish and supreme indeterminacy, many modern readers will be able to participate.
Expressions of grief in the secondary epic of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance would furnish in themselves matter for a monograph, and in the space available I can recall only a few scenes that a monograph on the subject would have to consider. It would need to recall the titanic howling of Orlando in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, the scene that is located precisely halfway through the poem and from which it rightly takes its title. Orlando's berserk rage at the loss of Angelica is the mightiest and most fearful thing in that long poem; it transforms him into a murderous madman; nothing available to Ariosto can contain it, except a fanciful whimsy, which is transparently fictitious. That frenzy of suffering tends to be more muted in one of the darkest of Renaissance epics, Spenser's Faerie Queene, although it too contains moments of bitter tears. But even more significant than those moments is the repeated blunting of Spenser's heroic narratives by his characteristic pullback in book after book from accomplishment and affirmation, making the ostensibly successful story into a fable of regret. The Red Crosse Knight may be united to Una, but he is soon obliged to leave her, "The which he shortly did, and Una left to mourne." That deadening line ends the narrative of book 1, as the whole poem ends with a piercing cry for a culminating Sabbaoth that never comes.
In Spenser's poem as in other Christian epics, the communion of the reader with the fictive character no longer crosses so much a stretch of time but rather the gap between the particular guilty experience of the one and the other. The poet's principal task in these instances is to effect a presencing of the more or less invented character that specifies his or her guilt, but not so narrowly that the reader is unable to share sympathetically that remorse that the Christian epic takes as its telos. Thus Spenser's reader, not a resident of Faeryland, must be able to respond to the torture of Red Crosse by Penance, Remorse, and Repentance at the House of Holiness, where "his torment often was so great, / That like a Lyon he would cry and rore, / And rend his flesh" (1.10.28). The Christian poet projects a myth of redemption not on the darkness of the past but on the darkness of the errant human
soul in order that the reader can complete the projective circle with an assimilation of purgative pain.
The supreme example of that circle in Western literature is found in cantos 30 and 31 of Dante's Purgatorio, after Dante the pilgrim is faced with the beloved and accusing eyes of Beatrice. He turns instinctively to Virgil for support, only to discover that his guide has disappeared, after which, he writes, not all the earthly paradise could "keep my dew-washed cheeks from turning dark again with tears"(30.53-54).[17] .But this loss is only the beginning of Dante's ordeal, his own personal crisis in the poem, as he hears the reproving voice of the woman watching him reproachfully.
"Dante, because Virgil leaves you, do not weep yet, do not
weep yet, for you must weep for another sword."
(30.55-57)
The other sword is judgment for his life of sin after the death of his lady. The threefold repetition of the verb piangere (to weep) anticipates the pilgrim's conduct during the pitiless inquisition that follows, drawing tears so copious that he is briefly rendered incapable of speech. The moment of their anguished release is evoked by a simile of exceptional periphrastic elaboration, a simile that compares the rigidity of the sinner's heart to the snows of the Appenines, packed and congealed, until finally "the ice that was bound tight around my heart became breath and water, and with anguish poured from my breast through my mouth and eyes"(30.97-99). The scene between the accuser and accused is at once the most intimate of the poem, the most private exposure of his personal history, and at the same time a reenactment of the sacrament of penance, which requires those tears of contrition that are shed as well as the verbal confession of misconduct that the tears almost choke into silence. But after the snow has melted, after the hardened heart has publicly melted, then in effect the story of Dante's purgation is over. He is allowed to cross the stream of Lethe, which washes away the memories of evil action, and then the stream of Eunoe, which restores the memories of good. In all the remainder of the poem, Dante will witness much and learn much, but his own personal odyssey is over. Beatrice makes it clear that the journey through hell and purgatory has been necessary to melt the ice of his hardened conscience. Its melting was the true telos of the pilgrimage of the first two canticles.
The simile of the melting mountain snow will recur in the closing pages of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, a rich example of dialectical imitation, in the lachrymose reunion of the Christian knight Rinaldo and his former lover, the former enchantress Armida. The pagan armies have been defeated; Jerusalem has been won; Armida the infidel is contemplating suicide near the battlefield when the approach of Rinaldo causes her to faint. His tears revive her; his promises of devotion and service restore her, and like moun-
tain snows melted by the sun, she also weeps and surrenders her future to him. His tears, comments David Quint, signal "a new mutuality in their love," replacing the overheated narcissism that had earlier passed for passion.[18] The mutuality is reinforced by the mingling of tears, tokens of compassion, tenderness, and joy. Specifically, Armida's tears signal the repudiation of enchantment as Rinaldo's signal the sacrifice of heroic self-will. This scene, which really ends Tasso's narrative, recaptures that austerity of the post-magical, that surrender to common humanity, which we have already found in the stark endings of the older epics. In that surrender punctuated with weeping, Tasso's poem like so many others finds its goal.
We can finish this quick overview by recalling the close of the plot of Paradise Lost. The crisis of the marriage between Adam and Eve, which is also a crisis in the future of humanity, is resolved at the end of book io. Once they have fallen, they don't know who they are or where they are; they don't know what the future contains, if there will be any future; they don't know what their marriage will be, poisoned as it is by mutual rancor. Adam in a soliloquy searches for answers fruitlessly but ends, as he says, only in an "abyss of fears and horrors"( 10.842-844). It is Eve who takes the first step toward redemption by asking her husband's forgiveness, as he then accords it and asks for hers. Together they grope their way as a couple through the remainder of the book toward what, in Milton's view, is the only right solution.
they forthwith to the place
Repairing where he [God] judg'd them prostrate fell
Before him reverent, and both confessed
Humbly thir faults, and pardon begd, with tears
Watering the ground, and with thir sighs the Air
Frequenting.
(10.1098-1103)
With this ritual of contrition, a ritual not without its heroism, a future becomes possible for the marriage and for all of us.
The next two books will be devoted to that severe future, until husband and wife, fully instructed, are led out of the garden into a world of struggle and hope.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat. . .
Some natural tears they dropd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.
(12.641-642, 645-647)
In the Judeo-Christian history of fallen humanity, this marks a beginning, but in the history of epic poetry, we can read this passage retrospectively as a kind of end point. There would be later narrative works of epic resonance,
many marvelous works, but the specific mingling of credible human achievement with the perception of terrible cost would, after Milton, become more difficult to bring off. Its availability in Paradise Lost is already in doubt. Later, the projective circle of epic would encounter the interference of Enlightenment rationality. Milton's guilty couple wipe away their tears as a gesture of Christian hope, despite its severe constraints, but for Milton's posterity, that hope would become less constrained, and tears would be relegated to the bourgeois larmoyant. The ritual of reconciliation would become progressively rare or else conventionally facile. As Adam and Eve wipe their faces, they are wiping away something precious, the vestiges of a tradition; the chain of Plato's rings has slackened and dissolved.
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Disguise and Recognition in the "Odyssey ." Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nagy, Gregory.
1979.
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Quint, David.
1983.
Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Russo, Joseph, and Bennett Simon.
1968.
"Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition."Journal of the History of Ideas 29: 492.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre.
1988.
Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs: Études de psychologie historique. Paris: Éditions la Découverte.
11—
The Poetics of Loss in Greek Epic
Sheila Murnaghan
Study of lament has begun to be a major part of the feminist reinterpretation of epic, including both textual study and anthropological accounts of female lament in modern Greece. Sheila Murnaghan draws on this scholarship to trace a continuum from male lament, which turns the speaker back toward an affirmation of kleos and epic purposes, to female lament, which ignores the death-defying fame that epic provides as compensation for heroic loss. Murnaghan's essay makes an important contribution to debates about just how subversive lament can be in epic. In spite of the ways that female lament can seem to disrupt or challenge the heroic code, Murnaghan argues that epic cannot do without lament, since lament not only begins the process of generating praise from grief but also presents the body of the enslaved and mournful widow as inspiration for the creation of the husband's unending fame. Murnaghan's interpretation leads us to form a more polyvocal and performative—and less monumental—theory of epic than more traditional readings would, one in which the poem's celebration of martial and heroic values coexists with the challenges to those values raised by lament.
The classical epic exhibits a complicated, ambiguous, and sometimes troubled relationship to the genre of lamentation. The lament is at once constitutive of epic and antithetical to it, one of epic's probable sources and a subversive element within epic that can work against what epic is trying to achieve. Lamentation thus has an important role to play in current attempts to rethink the nature of epic, to challenge a vision of epic that can be summed up in the term "monumental." This vision, which is embodied both in critical accounts of the epic and in the claims various epics make for themselves (and which this brief summary inevitably caricatures), presents epic as a massive, univocal, and celebratory form of high art.
As a genre of poetry performed on a particular social occasion and having an important function within a major and pervasive social ritual, lament helps us to find the connections between epic and more occasional, more popular poetic forms; it allows us to trace epic's dependence on the "speech genres" of ordinary communal life[1] and to appreciate epic's more dialogic, polyvocal dimensions. For written products of oral traditions such as the Homeric epics, focusing on the poem's connections to lament helps us to recognize works like the Iliad and the Odyssey as originally themselves
forms of performed and performative speech embedded in specific social occasions.
As a genre of which the chief practitioners are women, lamentation also has an important role to play in feminist reappraisals of epic. The laments incorporated into the larger structures of epic may bear traces of authentic women's voices and offer women's perspectives on actions that are carried out primarily by men and primarily to promote male interests. For the Homeric epics, these projects are furthered by an ongoing, living tradition of women's laments in rural modern Greece, which have been collected and studied by anthropologists such as Anna Caraveli-Chaves, Loring Danforth and Nadia Seremetakis. The connection between these contemporary laments and those preserved in ancient Greek literary sources was established in Margaret Alexiou's groundbreaking work The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition and has been further analyzed by Gail Holst-Warhaft in her recent study Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. Through modern Greek women's laments, the Homeric epics can be placed in a poetic tradition that is performed, nonliterary, tied to ritual, female-authored, and remote from the supposed mainstream of Western European high culture: a tradition very different from the Homer-Virgil-Dante-Milton sequence on which comparative studies of the epic often focus.
Finally, the content of lamentation gives it an equivocal relationship to epic. As a grieving response to the loss of an individual, lamentation is an urgent expression of that person's value, and so is a form of praise. Lament is thus prototypical of epic as a genre that confers praise—kleos in Homeric epic—on the actions of heroes, and more particularly on the actions of dead heroes, who have earned their right to be praised through the manner of their deaths. Thus laments, along with panegyrics delivered to living leaders, lie at the source of many traditions of heroic poetry. But, unlike panegyric, lament is praise inspired by the speaker's sorrow and regret at the subject's loss. As C. M. Bowra puts it, "Lament is born from grief for the dead, and though praise is naturally combined with it, grief has the chief place."[2]
Lamentation threatens to undermine the kleos-conferring function of epic because it stresses the suffering caused by heroic death rather than the glory won by it; lamentation calls into question the glorification of death sponsored by martial societies and the epics that celebrate them. The anti-epic dimension of lament is explored in this volume for Roman epic by Elaine Fantham. In the drama of epic's realization of its generic identity, the female-dominated subgenre of lament plays a role analogous to that of epic's female characters in its heroes' realizations of their goals: originary yet marginal, indispensable yet subversive. And this is also the role of the locality Greece in the drama of epic's achievement of its place at the heart of the Western European tradition.
Although no actual women's laments survive from ancient Greece, their power can still be measured in the legal and literary responses they called
forth. Women's laments were felt to be sufficiently threatening to society, whether as spurs to violent revenge or as challenges to the value of dying for the state, that they were officially restricted through legislation, most famously that enacted by Solon in Athens in the sixth century B.C.E.[3] In addition, their functions were appropriated for the classical city by two state-sponsored literary genres. In one, the epitaphios logos, or public funeral oration, designed to glorify death in battle for the city and minimize its cost in individual suffering, women's laments are submerged in a new official, male-centered discourse.[4] But in the other, tragedy, women's laments are represented as part of a complex but controlled exploration of the social order and the threats that it faces, especially from the intense personal attachments expressed in lamentation.[5]
Like tragedy, the Homeric epics confront lamentation by representing it, incorporating laments into the larger structures of their plots. This is particularly the case in the Iliad, where the final third of the poem is centered on the consequential and much-lamented deaths of Patroclus and Hector. The discussion that follows will focus on how the Homeric epics depict their own relationship to lamentation, particularly as a transitional event that inhabits the border between experience and song. Because laments transcend the distinction between speech and act—in that a song of lament can equate itself with the activity of mourning the dead—lamentation plays a key role in the Homeric epics' remarkably thorough canvassing of the process of epic commemoration, from the moment of heroic death to its eventual glorification in everlasting song.
A sense that lament both is and is not to be equated with epic and with kleos-conferring poetry in general is conveniently expressed within Homeric poetry by a lexical distinction. The epics include two different terms for lamentation: threnos and goos. The threnos is the commissioned work of professional outsiders, "composed and performed at the funeral by non-kinsmen." The goos is a less formal composition, improvised in response to the grief of the occasion and always sung—or wailed—by the dead man's relations or close friends.[6] The threnos clearly represents the kind of formal, enduring artwork that the Iliad and the Odyssey see their events as turning into, even though the term is used only once in each epic.
Although rare, those references to threnos are significant, involving the commemoration in death of the Iliad's two chief heroes, Hector and Achilles. One occurs in the account of Hector's funeral at the end of Iliad 24, where we are told that professional singers were the exarchous threnon, "leaders of threnoi" (Iliad 24.721). This mention of threnoi is followed by three speeches labeled gooi delivered by Hector's female relatives Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen. The other mention of threnoi comes in the last book of the Odyssey, where we learn that the Muses themselves threneon, "sang threnoi" (Odyssey 24.61) at the funeral of Achilles. The connection between these threnoi sung
at Achilles' funeral and enduring kleos in poetry as compensation for heroic death is made explicit by the later lyric poet Pindar in a key passage in one of his odes: "Nor did songs desert him when he died,/ but the maidens of Helicon stood around his pyre and his tomb/ and poured forth a threnos full of fame [threnon poluphamon]./ For it seemed just to the gods/ that a great man—even though dead—be endowed with the songs of goddesses" (Isthmian 8.62-66). And threnos was the technical term for a genre of lyric poetry that continued the traditions of archaic epic—and may well also have predated epic and contributed to its development.
Although the threnoi mentioned in the Iliad thus fulfill the purpose Homeric epics claim for themselves and are evoked at strategically important moments of summing up in the plots of the two poems, they are not themselves actually represented. Rather, the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey—their accounts of the events that they are converting into kleos contain many references to the more informal, personal, performative, and transient form of the goos, and a number of gooi are actually quoted within the Iliad. The most structurally prominent are the three laments at Hector's funeral mentioned above, but these are preceded by Thetis's proleptic goos for Achilles and Achilles' lament for Patroclus in book 18 (Iliad 18.52-64, 324-342); by two laments delivered by Briseis and Achilles over the body of Patroclus in book 19 (Iliad 19.287-300, 315-337); by the spontaneous laments of Hecuba and Andromache when they learn of Hector's death in book 22 (Iliad 22.431-436, 477-514); and by Achilles' further lament for Patroclus during his funeral in book 23 (Iliad 23.19-23). In addition, much of the speech of women in the Homeric epics, although not formally marked off as lament, is closely related to the goos in language and theme.
As the epics thematize the creation of kleos out of the lived experience of heroic society, their many internal depictions of goos occupy an intermediate status between that experience and its reflection in song. This intermediate status can be seen in the way in which laments affect their audiences, evoking a markedly personal response in each listener. Far from drawing their listeners' attention to the glorious achievements of their subjects, these laments inspire them to think of their own sorrows, fragmenting their audiences into isolated and private mourners. This is especially clear in the responses of the women, both Achaean women and Trojan captives, who hear Briseis's lament for Patroclus: "Thus she spoke, grieving, and the women groaned in response, / with Patroclus as their excuse [Patroklon prophasin] but each for her own troubles" (Iliad 19.301-302; cf. 19.338-339,24.509-512).
These private, unarticulated experiences of grief stand at one end of a spectrum of possible responses to song presented in the Homeric epics. Next to them one might put Telemachus's weeping in book 4 of the Odyssey when he hears Menelaus and Helen tell stories about the Trojan War. Telemachus's weeping is to be compared to Odysseus's in book 8 of the Odyssey, triggered
by an actual performance of songs from the Trojan cycle by a professional bard. Odysseus's weeping is pointedly juxtaposed to the different response of the Phaeacians, which presumably most nearly reflects the response that epic expects for itself: in contrast to that of the women around the body of Patroclus, the response of the Phaeacians is communal (and one function of song dramatized in that episode is its capacity to promote social cohesion), detached from the experiences involved, and at the same time attentive to them. For audiences like the Phaeacians, epic song promotes forgetfulness of one's own personal concerns. Like the performers of praiseworthy acts, the listeners who allow that praise to be realized cannot properly perform their function if they are distracted by grief.[7]
As brief embedded narratives, the laments in the Homeric epics hint at a broader range of experiences than those that are selected to form the subjects of epic song, telling stories that are peripheral to the main plots of the larger epics or pointedly excluded from those plots. The memories evoked in laments are often of private moments, out of the arena of public, heroic action, such as the words of encouragement Briseis remembers hearing from Patroclus when her husband and brothers had all been killed (Iliad 19.295-299) or Hector's interventions on Helen's behalf amid the behind-the-scenes reproaches uttered in the Trojan court (Iliad 24.768-775). Unlike epic itself, which claims to provide an accurate record of past events,[8] the lament is, in part, a fictional genre, in that its speakers dwell on fantasies, hoped-for events that now can never take place: for example, the deathbed parting of Hector and Andromache, in which, as she regretfully imagines it, he would have stretched out his hands to her and would have spoken a special pukinon epos, a "wise word," that she could always have remembered in her grief (Iliad 24.744).
Between them, as they mourn Patroclus, Briseis and Achilles tell what is in effect a version of the story that the Iliad itself cannot tell, the impossible alternative to the Iliad's plot, Achilles' return to Phthia, a version in which Patroclus acts as Achilles' surrogate. Briseis evokes Achilles' marriage to her, which Patroclus was to have brought about: "You said that you would make me the wedded wife/ of Achilles, and would lead me in ships/ to Phthia, and would celebrate the marriage feast among the Myrmidons" (Iliad 19.297-299). Achilles imagines Patroclus filling in for him as father to Neoptolemus, introducing Neoptolemus to his patrimony: "Before this my heart in my chest had hopes/ that I alone would die far from horse-pasturing Argos,/ here in Troy, and you would go back to Phthia,/ so that you might bring back my son from Scyros/ in a swift, dark ship, and you might show him everything:/ my possessions, my slaves, and my great, high-roofed house" (Iliad 19.328-333).
Spoken largely by women, laments are the medium by which a female perspective on epic action makes its way into these male-centered texts.[9] Like
the modern Greek women's laments that descend from them (or from their real-life models), these public opportunities become testaments of what it is like to be a woman in a world focused on male interests and values. "Tears become ideas," to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Stephen Feld, and the unsettling experience of loss generates a description of the social structure as seen by its most vulnerable members. Extending the status of mourning as an imitation of death, lamenting women provide accounts verbal imitations—of the social death they experience when they lose the men through whom they are defined. Thus Andromache's laments for Hector stress her future as a captive, recalling her speech to him in book 6 where this prospect is linked to her total dependence: "Hector, for you are my father and my revered mother,/ and my brother, and you are my flourishing husband" (Iliad 6.429-430).
For Briseis, who has a similar history, Patroclus's death is a kakon ek kakou , "evil following on evil" (Iliad 19.290), one of a string of misfortunes consisting of the deaths of the men through whom she has known her place in the world: first her husband, then her brothers, now Patroclus, whom she was counting on to attach her to Achilles and resituate her in Phthia. With Patroclus's death, Briseis has been derailed on her widow's journey from the care of her husband back to her original family and on to a new husband. The link between lamentation and the social dislocations to which women are subject is made clear in a speech of Penelope's to the disguised Odysseus in Odyssey 19. There she describes her unresolved relationships to Odysseus (who is absent but not certainly dead) and to Telemachus (who is in transition from being a reason to stay in Odysseus's house to being a reason to leave it) as the causes of her constant mourning—she grieves and laments while going about her daily tasks—and of her similarity to the nightingale, whose song is a perpetual expression of female lamentation (Odysse y 19.509-553).[10]
Particularly interesting in this respect is Helen in her lament for Hector in Iliad 24, since she, like Briseis, represents a complicated variant on the wife who has lost her husband and is herself lost without him. Helen in Troy has clearly been a displaced person, whose sense of self-worth is no longer adequately expressed in her relationship to her nominal husband Paris and who is surrounded by blame from the other Trojans. It appears she has been attempting to repair her status, and her sense of her own value, by forming a link to the more admirable Hector. This effort is reflected in her seductive attempt to get him to sit down and stay when he visits her and Paris in book 6, where she also voices her regret at having followed Paris to Troy in the first place (Iliad 6.344-358). In book 24 she mourns Hector as a kind of champion who protected her position among the Trojans. She addresses him as "by far the dearest of all my brothers-in-law" and describes how "I never heard an evil or rude word from you,/ but if someone else in the halls should speak one,/ one of my husband's brothers or sisters or brothers' wives,/ or
my mother-in-law (my father-in-law was gentle always),/ you would check that person, advising against it" (Iliad 24.768-771). Like other speech forms embedded in the Homeric epics, lament is an agonistic genre, and mourning can be a competitive event.[11] Helen's jibe at the previous speaker, Hecuba, brings to light a normally hidden world of competition among women, centered on the validating attention of men.
Critics have noted that the laments delivered at Hector's funeral recall the speeches of the same three women earlier in the poem, and especially during the episode in book 6 when he encounters all three of them during his return to Troy. As noted above, Andromache in both places dwells on her future as Hector's widow, and Helen couples regret at her past behavior with an attempt to establish a tie to Hector. Hecuba's lament focuses on the favor shown to Hector by the gods, especially as expressed in the miraculous preservation of his body, and this recalls her maternal concern for his physical needs, as expressed in her attempt to get him to drink wine in book 6 and her pointing to her once-nourishing breast as she tries to keep him from facing Achilles in book 22.
This thematic repetition can be read as a formal device, a way of providing closure by making these laments sum up each speaker's previous role. But it can also be understood as an index of how fully women's speech is in general identified with the genre of lamentation, so that the themes of laments naturally show up in speech that is not marked as such. Penelope's metalament in Odyssey 19 makes it clear that lamentation is her perpetual mode, and it is striking how much of other women's speech in the epics shares the themes of formal laments. In this respect, epic resembles tragedy, the form that has been characterized as an appropriation and reworking of women's laments, in that women become speakers there primarily when something has gone wrong, and so their proper language is that of complaint.
For example, when in the story of Meleager told by Phoenix in Iliad 9, Cleopatra, Meleager's wife, succeeds where all others have failed in inducing Meleager to fight, her intervention is described in terms that suggest a lament.[12] We are told that she lisset' oduromene, "implored him grieving," and the content of her speech is a compressed version of one of the topoi of formal lament, the sufferings of a fallen city: "She told him all/ the troubles that come to people whose city is captured./ They kill the men; fire reduces the city to dust,/ and strangers lead away the children and the long-robed women" (Iliad 9.591-594). Cleopatra's identity as a mourner is underscored by her alternative name, Alcyone, which she gets from her mother, who like the halcyon, another bird who represents perpetual lamentation, constantly mourns her rape by Apollo.
Similarly, Richard Martin has pointed out that two speeches by women in the Iliad that are labeled with the term muthos, which designates speech that is also a significant form of social performance, are both effectively laments.[13]
One is Helen's response to Priam's request for an identification of Agamemnon during the scene on the wall in book 3 (Iliad 3.171-180). Helen's muthos begins with a statement designed to cement the relationship to Priam she later celebrates in her lament for Hector: "You are revered by me, dear father-in-law, and admired." It evokes the lost home and family she has left behind and includes a wish to have died rather than to have acted as she did: since she did not die, she is in a constant state of grief, to kai klaiousa teteka, "therefore I am wasted away with weeping." Like Penelope, who often expresses her sense of loss by voicing doubt about whether her life with Odysseus really happened, Helen concludes by identifying Agamemnon as her brother-in-law "if this ever was." The second muthos uttered by a woman in the Iliad is spoken (or rather "wailed," kokusen ) by Hecuba to Priam as he departs for the Achaean camp to ransom Hector's body (Iliad 24.200-216) and expresses grief both for her dead son and for her husband, who she feels sure will never return.
While lamentation is the main mode of female speech, it is not exclusive to women. Throughout the Homeric epics men are portrayed as uttering gooi and draw on the topoi of lamentation in their other speeches. This is particularly the case with Achilles, who is the only male character whose goos is actually quoted in Homer, and who stands out for his preeminence in all the speech genres of heroic life.[14] Achilles' use of lamentation is not, however, to be understood simply as a sign of his verbal competence; it is also a mark of the unusual, marginalized position he adopts in his project of winning kleos by staying out of battle rather than entering it. Achilles' alienation from male Achaean society leads him into a closer association with lamentation, which is registered in a variety of ways: his close tie to his mother Thetis, a figure especially identified with lamentation; his vision of himself in his speech to the embassy in book 9 as a mother bird, the archetypal figure of lamentation, as we have seen (Iliad 9.323-327); and most overtly in his actual laments, especially the one in book 19, which follows on and echoes the speech of Briseis, who is not only a woman but also a slave.[15]
Not only is Achilles' role as a speaker of laments atypical, but it is also limited by his ongoing allegiance to his identity as a warrior. This is clear from his earliest responses to Patroclus's death, in the exchanges he has with Thetis at the beginning of book 18. Achilles' situation at that point dramatizes one of the central and most enduring themes of lamentation, the contrast between the living speaker and the dead person.[16] This is underscored at the beginning of the book when, just before he learns of Patroclus's death, Achilles recalls the prophetic words of Thetis, who told him that the best of the Myrmidons would die eti zoontos emeio, "while I was still living" (Iliad 18. 10). In many mythic dramatizations of grief the mourner's survival is treated as more than a matter of chance, as he or she is portrayed as actually responsible for the death of the person who is mourned. A common version of this
is the figure of the murderous mother, most memorably represented by Procne, the woman who becomes the nightingale, whose unending lamentation both expresses her loss of her son Itys and represents her punishment for killing him.[17]
Achilles' story also represents the mourner as responsible for the death he mourns, and Achilles voices a painful sense of that responsibility:
nor was I at all for Patroclus the light of salvation,
nor for my other companions, of whom many were broken by splendid Hector,
but I sat by the ships, a useless burden on the earth.
(Iliad 18.102-104)
In the case of the male warrior, his responsibility demands not a state of perpetual lamentation, but the transformation of grief into action. With Achilles, the mourner's characteristic wish to die is modified into a resolution to avenge his loss:
Now there will be even for you endless grief
for your dead child, whom you will not receive again
returning home, since my spirit does not urge me
to live or to go among men, unless first Hector,
struck by my spear, is destroyed in his spirit
and pays back his despoiling of Patroclus, son of Menoetius.
(Iliad 18.88-93)
By prefacing his resolve with the grief it will cause for Thetis, Achilles acknowledges that the vengeful action that assuages his mournful wish to die will also itself lead to his death. The difference, of course, is that his death in battle will also bring him kleos, as his words later in the same speech make clear:
Now let me gain good glory [kleos esthlon],
and make some one of the long-robed Trojan and Dardanian women,
wiping tears with both hands
from her tender cheeks, groan bitterly,
so that they may know how long I stayed away from the war.
Don't hold me back from the battle, much as you love me.
You will not dissuade me.
(Iliad 18.121-126)
This speech also shows how Achilles' entwined aims of alleviating his pain and increasing his glory involve transferring his suffering to someone else, in this case a Trojan woman. The mourning of the Trojan woman is both requital for the death of Patroclus and a sign of Achilles' power; furthermore, her grief inspires awareness of Achilles' greatness in the particular form in
which he has been demonstrating it throughout the Iliad: the Trojans' lack of suffering during his absence from battle.
When Achilles introduces his resolve to fight Hector by telling Thetis she will have to grieve, he registers the way a warrior's glory brings suffering to his friends and relatives as well as to his enemy; this is particularly marked in the case of parents, whose grief for their slain sons responds to a misfortune beyond what is natural or expected. It is hardly surprising, then, that the hero's mother is often portrayed as trying to dissuade him from action, as Achilles anticipates that Thetis will at the end of the speech just quoted. This female impulse to block heroic action is linked to the predominantly female activity of mourning in the lamentlike muthos of Hecuba in book 24, mentioned above. There Hecuba explicitly proposes to Priam that, rather than him going off to approach Achilles, he and she should sit apart in the palace and weep for Hector (nun de klaiomen aneuthen/ hemenoi en megaro, Iliad 24.208-209—although she does go on to add that she wishes she could take revenge on Achilles by sinking her teeth into his liver).
In keeping with Achilles' role as a preeminent warrior, whose function is to turn grief into action, he becomes at the end of his story an advocate of keeping lamentation in its place. In his meeting with Priam in book 24, once he and Priam have experienced their parallel mourning—he for his father and Patroclus, Priam for Hector—the desire for goos leaves Achilles' mind and body, and he makes Priam stop mourning too, telling him: ou gar tis prexis peletai krueroio gooio, "There is no practical use to chilling lamentation" (Iliad 24.524). This determination marks Achilles' return, however brief, to the world of the male fighting force, for whom lamentation is a transient experience that merely punctuates recurrent action in battle.
The same tension between lamentation and heroic action is found in the meeting of Hector and Andromache in Iliad 6. In this episode of transitory connection between husband and wife, Hector, in effect, responds to Andromache by adopting her language. Hector draws on the conventions of female lamentation to express sympathy for Andromache's position, but he also recasts them so as to incorporate an emphasis on achieved kleos that is absent or muted in women's own laments. In a characteristically female attempt to restrain a hero's devotion to combat, Andromache asks Hector to return to the city wall and fight more defensively, basing her appeal on her past and future status as a mourner. She evokes her past losses of parents and brothers and urges him to pity her "so that you do not make your child an orphan and your wife a widow" (Iliad 6.432). The power of her appeal can be seen in Hector's sympathetic response, in which he echoes her proleptic grief and expands on her one-line account of her future. He speaks of his certainty that Troy will one day fall and says that no one's suffering—not his mother's and father's nor that of his many brothers—horrifies him as much as the thought of hers "when some one of the bronze-wearing
Achaeans/ leads you off weeping, having taken away your day of freedom" (Iliad 6.454-455).
Hector's use of the "ascending scale of affection"[18] to identify Andromache as the one for whom he grieves most links this speech to more formal laments, in which that motif is common as a way of asserting the intensity of the speaker's pain. Thus Achilles, in his lament for Patroclus in book 19, proclaims, "I could not suffer anything worse,/ even if I were to learn of the death of my father" (Iliad 19.321-322); and Priam responds to the news of Hector's death by thinking of Achilles, who has killed so many of his sons, "for none of whom, much as I grieve, do I mourn so much/ as for one, for whom sharp grief will carry me down to Hades:/ Hector" (Iliad 22.424-426).[19]
Hector follows this expression of concern with an even more detailed vision of Andromache's future humiliation as she is forced, suffering and against her will, to weave and draw water for her captors. But he then shifts gears to import into this vision an account of his own future kleos, for which Andromache will serve as a carrier. Turning his attention away from her pain, he imagines what she will signify to someone looking at her, and actually quotes that imaginary onlooker's words of praise for him:
And someone might say, looking at you shedding tears,
"This is the wife of Hector, who was the best at fighting
of the horse-taming Trojans, when they fought around Ilion."
(Iliad 6.459 -461 )
Even while grieving for Andromache, Hector is concerned with his future reputation, fantasizing about the figure he will cut in the eyes of a detached spectator at a later time, when what is best remembered is who was the best fighter and when the fighting around Troy has become a memory from the past. He briefly reconceives Andromache's captivity in a foreign land, not as a hardship, but as a means for transmitting his fame to a distant place and a different time. Thus this vision links the content of lament (the theme of the captive woman) to lament's possible function of promoting praise. The intrusion of this bit of proto-kleos here shows the inevitable limits of Hector's engagement with the language and perspective of lamentation. And, in any case, Hector's quasi lament itself comes already prefaced by his explanation of why he cannot honor his feelings of grief:
My spirit does not command me [to fight defensively]
since I have been trained to be excellent always
and to fight among the foremost Trojans,
winning kleos for my father and for myself.
(Iliad 6.444-446)
It has been suggested that Hector's projection of his own future kleos here is typical of him in particular, part of a pattern in the Iliad of characterizing
Hector as "a man already living in the poetic tradition that is to overtake him."[20] A similar quotation of future praise occurs in his next speech, his prayer to Zeus for his son Astyanax. There Hector's imagination fixes on the successful transmission of glory from father to son, which makes heroic achievement complete:
Zeus and the other gods, grant that this one,
my child, be, even as I am, outstanding among the Trojans,
and great in force, and may he rule over Ilium.
And may someone one day say, "This one is greater than his father,"
as he returns from battle. And may he bear bloody spoils,
having killed an enemy man, and may he delight the heart of his mother.
(Iliad 6.476-481)
Shortly afterwards, in book 7, there is also a passage in which Hector imagines the tomb of a man whom he has slain as inspiring a eulogy similar to that evoked by Andromache,: "This is the tomb of a man who died long ago,/ whom once shining Hector killed as he was excelling" (Iliad 7.8-90). The similarity of these passages points up how Hector's speech to Andromache assigns to his beloved wife a role that is typically that of a defeated enemy and thus supports the vision of heroic warfare as ultimately self-defeating expressed by Andromache when she opens her appeal to Hector with the words "Your force will destroy you" (Iliad 6.407). Indeed, Andromache performs in Hector's fantasy a function much like that of the unnamed Trojan woman whose mourning Achilles envisions as a mark of his success in avenging Patroclus. Since that woman is, in the event, Andromache herself, the Iliad reveals that Andromache's suffering actually benefits both of the mortal enemies Hector and Achilles: both win glory by causing her grief.
Although Hector's fantasy of Astyanax's future glory also incorporates Andromache as an enthusiastic observer of her son's achievements, Andromache's own laments for Hector share none of his interest in his future fame.[21] In general, the concern of lamenting women for their own sufferings means that they have no use for what concerns a warrior most: the disembodied reputation that outlives the services through which it is earned.[22] Their stress on the discontinuity created by death leads them to underrate the sense of unbroken tradition on which the notion of heroic immortality through kleos rests. This can be seen in the lament of Hecuba when she first learns of Hector's death:
Child, I am wretched. Why should I live, suffering as I am bitter sorrows,
since you are dead? You who were for me night and day
a boast [euchole ] throughout the town, and a benefit
to all the Trojan men and women in the city, who revered
you like a god. For you were for them a great glory [kudos]
while you were alive. But now death and fate have come upon you.
(Iliad 22.43 1-436)
Hecuba here speaks of Hector's fame as it was when he was alive, using terms—euchole, "boast," and kudos, "glory"—that are closely related to kleos, the term for eternal fame as realized in epic song, but connote the more provisional, time-bound character of a living person's reputation.[23] Her language actually attributes Hector's fame to herself and to the Trojans, reflecting the way in which such fame is shared between the living hero and his beneficiaries, who at once confer that fame by honoring him and partake of it. Here the widespread tendency of lamenters to dwell on the contrast between past and present[24] becomes an assault on the continuity of fame, which is what the Homeric warrior values above all else (as Hector's apology to Andromache, quoted above, makes clear). The praise contained in Hecuba's lament is undercut by the way she presents Hector's glory as tied to his living presence. In the context of Homeric poetry, then, women's laments are subversive, not just because they dwell on the negative consequences of heroic action, but because they ignore the death-defying kleos that provides a positive compensation for heroic sacrifice and constitutes a major function of epic itself.
Andromache's two laments for Hector focus on her widowhood wholly as a state of humiliation and pain and include a very different vision of Astyanax's future from that in Hector's prayer. In the first of them, she describes how Hector's physical death will lead to social death for his son. She predicts that Astyanax will be dispossessed of his ancestral lands, and gives a detailed account of the life of an orphan, whose father's death makes him panaphelika, "entirely cut off from his contemporaries" (Iliad 22.490). Included in this account is a quoted taunt that counters and inverts the quoted praise in Hector's prayer. As the orphaned child begs for food at a noble banquet,
a child with both parents living shoves him away from the feast,
striking him with his hands and taunting him with reproaches,
"Go away, you! Your father is not feasting with us."
(Iliad 2 2.496-498 )
Andromache sees Hector's death as disrupting the communication of glory between father and son in both directions. As she puts it, "Neither can you be for him,/ Hector, a benefit, since you have died, nor he for you" (Iliad 22.485-486). Instead, it brings to fulfillment the opposite, a bitter heritage of misfortune transmitted to Andromache from her father and shared by her with Hector. This community of suffering is stressed in Andromache's language: Hector's death proves that she and Hector "were both born to a
single fate" (Iliad 22.477-478); she describes her father as raising her dusmoros ainomoron, "he ill-fated, me bitter-fated" (Iliad 22.481), and herself and Hector as having produced Astyanax su t'ego te dusammoroi, "you and I ill-fated both" (Iliad 22.485). Andromache here resembles Briseis, for whom Patroclus's death belongs to an endless chain of misfortunes that was briefly suspended while he lived, a vision that is similarly conveyed through verbal repetition in Briseis's lament: hos moi dechetai kakon ek kakou aiei, "how evil following on evil comes over me always" (Iliad 19.290). Patroclus's death both activates and extends Briseis's previous misfortunes, the death of her husband and the destruction of her city, which Patroclus, while alive, had prevented her from mourning (Iliad 19.295-297).
In her second lament, delivered at Hector's funeral, Andromache again stresses Astyanax's ruined future and this time draws a direct connection between the battlefield achievements on which Hector prides himself and the suffering that await her and Astyanax. Addressing Astyanax, Andromache envisions two terrible futures for him:
And you, my child, either you will
follow me and there you will perform unworthy labors,
toiling for an ungentle man [pro anaktos ameilichou ], or some one of the Achaeans
will hurl you, taking you by the hand, from the tower, to a grievous death [ lugron olethron ],
enraged because Hector killed his brother,
or his father or his son, since indeed many Achaeans
bit the vast earth at the hands of Hector.
Your father was not gentle [ou gar meilichos ] in grievous combat [en dai lugre ].
(Iliad 24.732-739)
Hector's success in combat is intimately tied to both versions of Astyanax's future, both the murder that would be an avenging imitation of Hector's own actions and enslavement to an oppressive master, with whom Hector is identified by the echo of ameilichou, "ungentle" in ou gar meilichos "not gentle." Similarly, the grievous combat in which Hector participated is linked by the adjective lugre to the grievous death, the lugron olethron, of Astyanax and— a few lines later—to the grievous sufferings, the algea lugra, of Andromache herself (Iliad 24.742).
In the line that immediately follows this passage, Andromache identifies Hector's lack of gentleness as the reason that he is lamented:
Therefore [to] the people mourn him in the city,
and you have imposed unbearable lamentation and grief upon your parents,
Hector, and to me especially you have left grievous sufferings.
(Iliad 24.740-742)
This suggestive to, "therefore," links the praise implicit in lamentation to the brutality essential to combat.
As she gives voice to her role as the bearer of Hector's kleos, Andromache's words fill in what Hector's gloss over when he imagines her enslaved and mournful figure as the inspiration for a detached assessment of his excellence as a warrior. Making a connection that recalls Achilles' declaration in book 18 that he will reestablish himself as a warrior by making a Trojan woman mourn, Andromache insists that the creation of kleos begins with grief for the hero's friends and enemies alike. In doing so, she gives an implicit analysis of why heroic epic cannot do without lamentation, the genre in which "grief has the chief place," even though laments often seem to subvert epic's purposes or at least to distract us from epic's central claims. Before it can be converted into pleasant, care-dispelling song, a hero's achievement is measured in the suffering that it causes, in the grief that it inspires.[25]
Works Cited
Alexiou, Margaret.
1974.
The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowra, C. M.
1952.
Heroic Poetry. London: Macmillan.
Caraveli-Chaves, Anna.
1980.
"Bridge between Worlds: The Greek Women's Lament as Communicative Event. " Journal of American Folklore 93: 129-157.
Danforth, Loring.
1982.
The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Easterling, P. E.
1991.
"Men's kleos and Women's goos: Female Voices in the Iliad. " Journal of Modern Greek Studies 9: 145-151.
Feld, Steven.
1982.
Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expresssion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Foley, Helene.
1992.
"The Politics of Tragic Lamentation." In Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, edited by Alan H. Sommerstein, Stephen Halliwell, Jeffrey Henderson, and Bernhard Zimmermann, 101-143. Bari: Levante Editori.
Ford, Andrew.
1992.
Homer: The Poetry of the Past. Ithaca, N.Y. :Cornell University Press.
Holst-Warhaft, Gail.
1992.
Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature. London and New York: Routledge.
Kakridis, Johannes Th.
1949.
Homeric Researches. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.
Kirk, G. S.
1990.
The "Iliad": A Commentary. Vol. 2, Books 5-8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Loraux, Nicole.
1990.
Les mères en deuil. Paris: Seuil.
1986.
The Invention of Athens. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Martin, Richard P.
1989.
The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the "Iliad." Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.
Muellner, Leonard Charles.
1976
The Meaning of Homeric EUCHOMAI through Its Formulas. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck.
Murnaghan, Sheila.
1992.
"Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry." Classical Antiquity 11 244-264.
Nagy, Gregory.
1979.
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pucci, Pietro.
1993.
"Antiphonal Lament between Achilles and Briseis." Colby Quarterly 29 258-272.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia.
1991.
The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sultan, Nancy.
1991.
"Women in 'Akritic' Song: The Hero's 'Other' Voice." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 9: 153-170.
12—
The Role of Lament in the Growth and Eclipse of Roman Epic
Elaine Fantham
This essay focuses on an element of epic perhaps more often associated with tragedy: the lament, a necessary response to epic death, that reconciles the readers as well as the participants to great loss. Elaine Fantham develops for the Roman epic a theory of the function of public and private lament, reinterpreting in a Roman context the meanings of rituals of lamentation and grief that have been explored until recently more often in Greek than in Roman literature. She considers not only Virgil's Aeneid, but the earliest Roman epic, Ennius's Annales (finished before 169 B.C.E., though it exists today only in fragments), Lucan's De Bello Civili (an epic on the civil war completed between A.D. 62 and 65, when Lucan was forced to commit suicide after his involvement in a plot against Nero's life was discovered), and Statius's Thebaid, published in A.D. 91/ 2—epics that are much less well-known than Virgil's poem—and traces the use made by epic of both public and private lament. Fantham argues that only in the late and somber Thebaid of Statius does lament become a counter-movement equal in force to the deaths that are its occasion, itself serving as occasion and stimulus to further conflict that only divine intervention can resolve. Although she points out how often in Roman epic the language of lament is given to male figures and made to be part of an heroic response to loss, Fantham also reveals how in Virgil, and especially in Statius, private lament can become a "dangerous voice" that challenges the heroic ideology. Lament in Statius's poem is thus seen as outweighing heroic action, as the epic suffocates in a world too conscious of the negative motivation of deeds of "valor" (virtus ).
Lament is preeminently the women's contribution to celebrating the life and death of a man or a community. Sympathy and even pride in this women's theme are reflected in the number of distinguished women scholars who have studied the social role of lament in Greek civilization: see Nicole Loraux's Mères en deuil, Helene Foley's "Politics of Tragic Lamentation," and the work of Margaret Alexiou on ritual lament in ancient and modern Greece, which helped me to understand the background to lament in Senecan tragedy.[1] Alexiou's pioneer work has been followed by the social studies of Loring Danforth and Gail Holst-Warhaft on the nexus between lament and vengeance in Greek communities. It might well seem that the public and private aspects of Greek lament considered in these studies leaves no scope for either Ro-
man society or its literature to offer more than variations. Certainly many aspects of ancient lament are common to both societies, and the cultural preeminence of Homer has ensured that aspects of the great laments of the Iliad are reproduced in Roman literature and developed by each successive composer of Roman epic.
Epic is by no means the only poetic genre at Rome to incorporate references to and examples of lament, but although the laments of Senecan tragedy, for example, stay close to the Greek tradition, there are several ways in which Roman epic modifies and innovates. From the genre of history, and perhaps also from tragedy,[2] Roman epic introduces the public collective lament as a narrative movement, providing closure or renewed resolution. Secondly lament in post-Virgilian epic appropriates from the miseratio or conquestio[3] of forensic rhetoric the role of generating resentment (invidia ) against the adversary. This effect approaches but perhaps stops short of the Greek coupling of lament and revenge: given the formal, urban nature of Roman life and literature, we do not have instances of spontaneous familial laments without a larger political dimension. Finally, as I hope to show, lament, already a prominent narrative marker in Virgil's Aeneid, develops a self-conscious, reiterated, structural role in the gendered antiphony of male heroic death and female lament of Statius's Thebaid. Because of the many leaders and as many combats and deaths, Statius's great war epic is dominated and shaped by its recurrent laments. For this reason I will give far more attention to this late narrative than to the better known Aeneid, whose superiority Statius himself will honor precisely in the context of his final, authorial lament.
Ennius and Lucan: National Epic and Public Acts of Lamentation
Despite Roman epic's immense respect for the Homeric model, Rome's first self-styled poet, Ennius, created for the opening book of his national historical epic a new kind of lament, the mourning of the people deprived of their leader. Only fragments of Ennius' Annales survive, but one of their greatest and most memorable scenes, designed to match the great scene of Rome's ritual founding by Romulus, is the narrative of Romulus's mysterious disappearance and the people's grief for their lost leader until they are told that he will return to them as a god:
For some long while longing possessed their hearts until they cried out, "O Romulus, godlike Romulus, how great a protector the gods begat for us in you. O father, O begetter, O blood descended from the gods! You brought us forth into the realms of light."[4] (Ennius frag. lxi, ed. Skutsch)
Communal public lament, given by the married women of Rome to Lucius Brutus, their country's first liberator from the Etruscan monarchy,[5] is also
used in Lucan's epic of civil war, De Bello Civili, to anticipate the catastrophe of Pompey's death. For Lucan, Pompey, the failed defender of the free state of Rome, serves as a counterpart of those who created that state: here explicitly Lucius Brutus, but implicitly the city founder Romulus, and elsewhere Virgil's Aeneas himself. Lucan derives much of the emotional intensity in his epic from systematic anticipation of its tragic events: thus the poet foreshadows in book 7 the future public mourning for Pompey before we, the readers, live through the humiliating and treacherous scene of the great general's assassination by Egyptian conspirators. At the grim dawn on the day of Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus, Lucan marks his approaching death by describing the spontaneous laments not only of married women but of men, old men and boys.[6]
Indeed, for Lucan public mourning is so powerful a symbol that he marks the outbreak of civil war in his second book with all the symptoms of official and unofficial mourning. As if some national hero were dead, there is a public decree suspending business,[7] Rome's magistrates put off their ceremonial clothing, and the women spontaneously crowd to the temples with anticipatory lament, lament designed, we are told, to generate resentment (invidia ) toward the gods. It is natural to compare this with the ominous anticipatory grief of Andromache for Hector in Iliad 6, but Lucan himself does not make this point. Instead he compares the women's public prostration and wailing and tearing of face and hair to the private grief of a family dazed by a sudden death, where the mother is suspended between old fear and new grief.[8] The poet conjures up this public lament and its private analogy not to censure such female mourning as disruptive, but to use its desperation, as Livy did the lamenting widows after the defeat of Cannae,[9] to force upon the reader a full awareness of the death of liberty foreshadowed by this war. In this opening phase of Lucan's political epic the men do not lament but depart to join the opposing forces with grim resolve. Even Cato, the one man presented throughout this narrative as a model of right decision, mourns lost public liberty as if it were the greatest of private losses, grieving over the body of the Republic "like a father left childless by the death of his sons" (De Bello Civili 2.297-304). But he too will reconcile himself to serving in a conflict where the only integrity is on the side of the loser.
Virgil's Aeneid : Lament For Men and Cities
Lament for a leader, and lament for a doomed city, may converge and coincide. From Ennius it was the lament for a leader that survived in the imagination of later Romans: in Lucan, writing after Virgil, we have seen the deliberate assimilation by comparison of lament for the city and the individual.
In the Aeneid scenes of lamentation for fallen cities mark the course of war's destruction and articulate Aeneas's progress, starting with the fall of
his city, Troy. The first book presents to Aeneas (and to the reader) the I1iadic scenes depicted on Juno's temple at Carthage, including the women's supplication in Iliad 6, just before the death of Hector that brings on the end of Troy. In the next book Aeneas's retrospective narrative of his city's capture reveals the meaning of this scene of supplication, going beyond Homer's narrative to describe the wailing that fills the palace of Priam as women embrace the doorposts and await their capture.[10] Again Virgil ends his fourth book with the same shock and laments of women's wailing that follow the news of Dido's death. His language represents their grief for their dead queen and leader as mourning for the city itself. They wail as if Carthage itself were captured and crashing about their heads in flames.[11] From Troy to Carthage to Latium, Aeneas's course will be marked by laments until like another Dido, Queen Amata, wife of Latinus, brings on her own death, and the women of yet another city, including Aeneas's intended bride, fill the air with their cries.
As soon as the unhappy Latin women
have heard of this affliction, first Lavinia
rages; she tears at her bright hair and cheeks
of rose, then all the crowd around her raves;
the wailing fills the palace's wide halls.
The sad report goes out across the city.
Now hearts sink down, Latinus in torn garments,
dazed by his wife's fate and his city's ruin
defiles his aged hairs with filthy dust.
(Aeneid 12.604--611, trans. Mandelbaum)
Here too Virgil has created symmetry with the tale of Troy: for the women that we now hear wailing were seen offering their supplications to the goddess in the preceding book (11.478-481). Now Latinus is brought to defilement in the dust, like Priam, and like Hector, but not by the sword of a brutal Greek. This is the self-defilement of ritual grief at his wife's death and the attendant fall of the city.
These are scenes of communal lament. But in the second half of Virgil's epic, with its narrative of war in Latium, more than one private lament is articulated. In book 7 there is grief for both animal and human death, but no formal or direct speech of lament. This will come when the climate of violence mounts, and we follow the exploits and deaths of fully characterized heroes. The first of these laments, perhaps the most resonant with modern sensibilities, is the terrible outcry of the young warrior Euryalus's mother, on which Susan Wiltshire has written perceptively in her study of the tension between public duty and personal feeling in the Aeneid.[12] This woman is not even named; she is his mother (Aeneid 9.216f.), and Virgil introduces her obliquely, through the words of her son's lover, and his own last request
to his prince as he volunteers for their dangerous mission. We learn that this woman alone of the Trojan mothers has followed her son into the warfare of Latium, when she could have stayed with other women and old people in the peaceful Sicilian settlement (Aeneid 9.284-286). The young prince promises that he will treat Euryalus's mother like his own mother, Creusathe wife Aeneas lost in his flight from Troy—and if Euryalus should perish, will give to her his prizes, in gratitude for such a son.
The son does perish, and his head is paraded before the Trojan encampment on a spear point. And his mother, at the news, rushes to the walls, mindless of the presence of men and danger, and fills the sky with her laments—not just the ritual wailing already mentioned, but questibus (9.480), a word that denotes both lament and protest or complaint. [13] These are the protests of a survivor for whom life no longer has meaning. Childless, homeless, and driven by her natural grief that she cannot even bury her son, she cries out imploring the Rutuli who possess his body to kill her, unless perhaps Jupiter will pity her by enabling her to die. This is indeed a "dangerous voice," to borrow from Holst-Warhaft's title, but not as a generator of vengeance. Rather this mother's lament is dangerous to Trojan morale, and the fighting men are unmanned and brought to weeping, until the woman is unceremoniously bundled out of sight and into the hut where she belongs.[14]
In contrast to this painful indignity, the Aeneid has still to transmit the unrepressed laments of two immortal women and one man. Men of course did not perform ritual lament at Rome; in any formal ceremony their role would be that of walking silently in procession in hierarchically determined clothing, their identities transformed by wearing the death masks of their distinguished ancestors. Only the next of kin would be set apart to pronounce a formal eulogy or laudatio before the public and to light the pyre under the body at the place of cremation. At least some funerals hired professional women mourners, praeficae, to sing dirges, and one striking funeral relief from Amiternum shows all this—the bier, the procession, and the professional women mourners, but also the wife, now widow, with her arms raised in lament, flanked by her two children.
Yet the closest analogy to this mother's lament is the lament of another bereaved parent, Evander. Virgil has already reported the full funeral honors and brief farewell given by Aeneas over the body of young Pallas (Aeneid 11.96-98) before the boy's corpse is escorted back to his city and his father Evander. In his anguish the old man utters a speech almost identical in its opening movement to that of Euryalus's mother, longing for his own death (Aeneid 11.152-161), but it moves ahead from backward-looking grief to the need for vengeance on Turnus. Rather than delay the Trojans from renewing the action, Evander thinks as a commander and addresses his chosen successor, sending a last message or challenge to Aeneas: it is his duty to father and son to take Turnus's life (Aeneid 11.162-181). So too the nymph
Opis sent by Diana to protect Camilla moves from grief at her fated death to promise and implement vengeance (Aeneid 11.841-849). In contrast, Turnus's sister Juturna repeats the Iliadic pattern, anticipating her brother's fate as Andromache foresees the death of Hector, abandoning hope before the event.[15] Of all the laments in the Aeneid this alone must precede its occasion, because the epic by design ends at Turnus's death, denying the traditional reconciliatory closure of burial and mourning. But these laments by immortals cannot affect the mortal participants: they go unheard except by Virgil's audience—and his successor poets.
Virgil's too literal-minded imitator Silius Italicus understands the poetic challenge of lament. As he approaches the dreadful defeat of Trasimene he even transfers to lament the Homeric technique for enhancing a hero's feats in battle, addressing his muses to ask what god will provide his poem with laments worthy of such noble deeds. [16] But pious men felt that deaths needed lament, not necessarily a formal speech of lamentation but a sense of lamentation performed. This is why there is such a sense of completion withheld in the Aeneid. We, Virgil's readers, hear the immortal Juturna's fearful outcry at her enforced survival, but any potential consolation from human honor or sympathy for Turnus's fate is cut off beyond our knowledge.
Statius' Thebaid and the Thematization of Lament
Although Virgil raises lament above the status of an epic topos by his use of lamentation to mark the end of each failed community—Troy, Carthage, Latinus's city—it is only with Papinius Statius, the last of the Flavian epicists, that lamentation becomes a regular or required component of the rhythm and structure of epic.[17] Statius, who had received a Greek education in rhetoric and poetics from his father and was himself a professional poet, also composed extensive poems of lament for his patrons and on his own behalf.[18] Taking up some of the implications of John Henderson's study "Statius' Thebaid: Form Pre-made,"[19] I would like to illustrate how Statius's narrative exploits the rhetoric of lament as reaction to the action of combat and death. Henderson has made his readers fully aware of the prominence of lament and in the Latin version of his diagrammatic analysis enumerates its many forms in the epic.[20] This is brought out in his equation: "Thebes is a mother's lament. . . Ino: Ide: Eurydice: Jocasta: Ismenis: Atalanta . . . the clawed cheeks/ sockets of Menoeceus' mother . . . in her lament after Aen.9.'s Euryalus' mother."[21] Looking forward to the epic's final book, concerned primarily with the women's quest for fulfillment in lamentation, Henderson comments that Statius leaves the reader on "this one last New Mourning, with the women of Argos and Thebes to find their very own lament, since the epic cannot find breath more."[22] Yet since he interprets this epic as a poem governed by deferral, Henderson concentrates on the delaying of com-
bat, death, and lament, rather than analyzing Statius's careful and progressive construction of his narrative around the continuing alternation and causal reciprocity of grief and killing.
Structurally the poet of the "Seven against Thebes" certainly faced problems of deferral—the postponement of warfare to the last six of the twelve books, a legacy of both the Theban myth and the post-Virgilian tradition and the mythically determined denial and withholding of burial until the poem's last phase. He also had to meet the need for variation entailed by the reiterated deaths of the Argive leaders—six in all, the last the doubly-significant death of the adoptive Theban-Argive, the exiled brother Polynices—and a balancing array of Theban heroes.
Yet despite the enforced postponement of lament and burial for the Argive leaders, scenes of lament in the Thebaid match scenes of death in frequency and scale, in book 3, book 5, and every one of the last four books. The first miniature of future warfare occurs in book 2 when Tydeus as Argive envoy kills the Thebans sent to ambush him but spares one man, Maeon, to carry his message of defiance to the tyrant Eteocles. In the counter-movement of book 3 Maeon expresses his shame at survival and hatred of Eteocles in the public act of suicide. Here Statius offers both his own authorial praise for Maeon and a scene of Theban lamentation for his lost comrades, as a tragedian might reinforce the message of a monologue with a confirmatory chorus.
Such praises as Statius addresses to Maeon ("But you fine spirit, fine in death, shall never—your due reward—suffer oblivion. / . . . What strain of mine, blest seer whom heaven loves,/ what eulogy can add renown to match / your prowess")[23] are not, of course, lament but its complement, eulogy or blessing,[24] and the dozen authorial lines of praise and farewell to the dead man are eclipsed by what follows—the journey of the Theban bereaved to the site of ambush, and the single violent outbreak (fragor ) of their unanimous mourning and fury at the sight of their dead kinsmen
Now from the city wives death-pale and children
And ailing parents poured by broad highways
Or pathless wastes in piteous rivalry,
All rushing to their tears, and thousands more
For solace' sake throng too, and some were hot
to see the one man's deeds, that might's travails.
The road was loud with wailing and the fields
Rechoed cries of grief. Yet when they reached
Those infamous rocks, that ghastly wood, as though
None had bewailed before, no storm of tears
Had streamed, as from a single throat there rose
A cry of utter anguish. When they saw
The bloody carnage, frenzy fired them all,
GRIEF flaming fierce, with bloody raiment rent
stands there and beats his breast and leads along
The wives and mothers.
(Thebaid 3. 114-126, trans. Melville)
I quote this first instance of the recurring laments of the epic in extenso to bring out Statius's counterpoint of "deeds" (= killing) and lament. I have capitalized GRIEF (luctus ) to draw attention to what is still for Latin epic an innovation—the personification of sorrow, standing like a chorus leader and urging on the human lamentation. This, the first personification of grief to stalk among the living in Roman epic, marks the significance that grief and mourning will claim in the rest of the poem.[25] Next, Statius particularizes: Ide, her fertility enhanced as mother of twin sons, searches the scene of the ambush and "wails over every corpse."[26] Yet Ide's speech, when she finds her sons dead in each other's arms, stands for but still does not exhaust the lament of them all. Instead their bereavement finds its own epic model as an old father, Aletes, recalls a domestic myth of Theban suffering inflicted from above—the myth of Niobe whose children were killed in revenge by Apollo and Diana. One new detail is significant in his retelling of the myth: the Theban funeral processions for Niobe's children poured out of the gates "and mothers beat their breasts in hate of heaven," (invidiamplanxere deis, Thebaid 3.197). In this final phase Aletes turns to open denunciation of their undeserved losses caused by the guilt of a cruel king.[27]
Statius makes only too clear the use to which this mourning is put, to inspire anger and threaten punishment upon the head of Eteocles. But this, like Maeon's curse on Eteocles, is the male response to grief: both Greek and Roman political rhetoric knew how to exploit anger at the casualties of war against their own commanders, as the Athenians did when they paraded crowds of mourners for dead "kinsmen" to reproach the commanders in the naval battle of Arginusae, and as Antonius turned the Roman jury against Servilius Caepio for the casualties of his defeat at Arausio.[28]
Revenge is the companion of lament even in the neutral world of Nemea, where the accidental death of the child Opheltes is mourned by the immediate outcry of his nurse Hypsipyle ( Thebaid 5.608-635). The full outpouring of her lament makes possible a different emotional response from that of his parents—the restrained grief of the child's father (5.653-655) is contrasted with his mother's unwomanly demand for vengeance upon the distracted Hypsipyle (5.656-660). The child's solemn funeral celebration and games fill book 6, rounding off the epic's first, supposedly peaceful half.
In contrast the second half of the poem is constructed around a pattern of major deaths; only the Theban casualties receive formal lament, but each book will see one or even two of the Argive leaders meet death. Dying on
the battlefield, the adoptive Argive Tydeus earns a spontaneous outcry of loss and shame at his own responsibility and survival from his blood brother Polynices ( Thebaid 9.49-72): this death has a sequel when two young heroes attempt to retrieve Tydeus's body from under Theban guard and themselves die heroically, receiving from the poet a blessing and eulogy modeled on Virgil's salute to the young heroes Nisus and Euryalus.
In fact the ninth book is articulated by three laments for three of the four focal deaths. Beside Polynices' outcry at the loss of Tydeus the laments for the young Theban Crenaeus and Argive ally Parthenopaeus are distinguished not so much by their grief, as by their context and relation to the death. Statius offsets the lament of Crenaeus's immortal mother, the river nymph, for her son killed swimming in his grandfather's waters, (9.356, 376-403), with the forebodings, prayer, and lament of the nymph Atalanta when she discovers that her mortal son Parthenopaeus has left for the war against her will (9.608-635). The book comes to an end with his dying words to his distant mother.[29] Two premature victims fall on opposing sides in this one book, and the ordering of their death and its recognition in lament before and after the fact play chiastic variations on the expected sequence.
The same sequence of death, lament, and urge to revenge that we saw after the ambush in book 3 controls the last three books of the poem, but now the links are extended and reconnected in a crossing of causalities. The self-sacrifice of the Theban Menoeceus in obedience to the oracle that requires his death to save the city receives a traditional, perhaps typically uncomprehending woman's lament from his mother: "You, my cruel son,/ You rushed ahead, you doomed your wretched mother!" (Thebaid 10.802-823). Blind to his higher patriotic purpose, this unnamed successor of Euryalus's mother illustrates other psychological features in the depiction of grieving or aggrieved women in Roman epic and historical tradition—the tendency to think in terms of amour propre, and envy and blame of other women. When Opheltes' mother calls up vengeance against his nurse Hypsipyle it arises from Hypsipyle's direct responsibility for the child's death, but the lament of Menoeceus's mother is personalized in a different way—it is distorted by anger against her sister-in-law Jocasta, whose womb conceived both the offending Oedipus and their sons:
Was it to be a scapegoat for fierce Thebes,
A creature doomed, I reared you, glorious boy,
Like some mean low-down mother? What vile sin
Have I committed? What gods hate me so?
I have not shamed incestuous progeny
by monstrous intercourse, nor has my womb
Born grandsons to my son in wickedness.
It matters not! Jocasta keeps her sons
And sees them kings. Shall I then expiate
The war so cruelly . . . that Oedipus' two sons
May take turns on the throne?
(Thebaid 10.793-801, trans. Melville)
This self-centered resentment and reproach against divine injustice actually precedes the apostrophe to her dead son, further contaminated by her obsessive disavowal of any part in Menoeceus's heredity of warrior zeal, which she blames on his paternal inheritance.[30] In this mother's long speech there is more of anger than grief, more of protest than lament, and "the ill-starred woman's words would still have flowed,/ Filling the place with protests" (10.814-85) if servants had not confined her, again like Euryalus's mother, in demented isolation, to grieve as if she were some savage tigress.
In fact Statius's interpretation of the myth puts a new face upon Menoeceus's act of self-sacrifice for Thebes. In Statius it is the uncomprehending response, falling short of true lament, by both Menoeceus's parents that nullifies the sacrifice. The triumph of self over sorrow, of anger over grief, is more marked still in Menoeceus's father, Creon: his pain smolders longer and is more terrible. Indeed, Creon's anger will overwhelm not only his grief but his respect for divine law. But first Statius must carry through the deadly duel of the fratricides and the perverted mourning of their father Oedipus, whose curse had created their mutual loathing. Oedipus's grief leads him to lay angry hands upon himself, while Creon, now king, is further crazed by power and the curse that comes with the throne of Thebes, submerging any grief for his son in an almost universal hatred. Taking on the impiety and cruelty of the tyrant Eteocles, he repeats the tyrant's prohibition of all burial rites for the Argive dead (11.657-664).
Burial and lament now replace power over Thebes as the new object of human conflict. Statius opens book 12, like book 11 of the Aeneid, with the collective burial by all the Thebans of their unnamed casualties.[31] The lesser conflict between rival Theban kinsmen competing to bury the same unidentifiable corpses (Thebaid 12. 33-34) foreshadows the greater conflict between Creon's prohibition of burial and the determination of Antigone and other mourners to find and bury the bodies of their beloved and his enemies—but here too there will be conflict and competition between the bereaved.
The poet needs these straightforward Theban funerals to serve as foil to Creon's lament for Menoeceus, when he reappears, conducting his son's grandiose funeral rites. This speech—a perverted version of Virgil's Evander lament—is the last of the male laments in the Thebaid. Creon seems to start well, bewailing Menoeceus's death yet acknowledging the exalted divine status his heroism has won. But his mind has been perverted by his inheritance of the cursed throne of Thebes: first he tries to assuage the bitterness of new kingship without his son as heir by setting the scepter and
diadem of Thebes upon Menoeceus's corpse (Thebaid 12.88-92). His grief has turned sour. Even the scepter and diadem are set there to spite the shade of Eteocles, and grief yields to anger in the movement we have seen before, to anger and to Creon's oath sworn by his dead son to punish anyone who attempts to give burial to the Argive dead ( Thebaid 12.94-104). Statius marks the enormity of Creon's frenzy by the unprecedented division of the lament into two speeches and by the reactions of the bystanders. Such is the king's angry fury of grief that servants have to drag him away, as if he were some woman out of control.
Thus the burial of the Argive leaders remains as the last focus of conflict. Before the achievement of this burial under Athenian protection, and the moral resolution of the epic, the private sorrows of the house of Oedipus reach their emotional resolution. Polynices' corpse receives not one but two laments, as a Theban and an Argive, first from his Argive wife, who has scoured the battlefield by night to find his corpse ( Thebaid 12.322-346), then from both wife and sister, alternating their dirges as they "shared the tale of Thebes' and Argos' tragedy" ("mutuaque exorsae Thebas Argosque renarrant," Thebaid 12.390). These laments create a mise-en-abîme, a reliving of the whole epic, or rather a rival version of the epic Statius has just told, seen through women's eyes and in women's terms. But in this context lament becomes a kind of weird triumph. It is not just the quest for pathos that has led Statius to give such prominence to its formal utterance: indeed, he casts aside any hint of pathos when the Argive mothers and widows achieve access to their dead. For them lament is fulfillment. "Their laments rejoice [gaudent lamenta]," Statius says, "and their renewed tears are jubilant [novaeque exultant lacrimae]," as their mourning, homing on its physical object, leads them to the beloved bodies (Thebaid 12.793-795). No wonder that Statius substitutes his own voice for that of these triumphant mourners to bring his poem to a close:
Though Heaven should swell my voice a hundredfold
to free my heart, my strains could never match
those funerals of kings and commoners,
those lamentations shared.
(Thebaid 12.797-80 ), trans. Melville)[32]
F. M. Ahl has drawn on the affinity between Statius's reiterated lament for his young warrior Parthenopaeus[33] and his poem of lament for his adopted son, to stress a compassionate if pessimistic message that runs through the epic. As Ahl points out, "Innocence, beauty and life itself must almost inevitably be destroyed"—but the epic narrative itself is there to "prevent the inevitability. "[34]
This compensatory hope seems to me both more positive and more sentimental than the outcome of Statius's killing fields. Just as these recurring
speeches of mourning by the poet and his personages are a measure of the dead heroes' worth, so their iteration drives home Statius's message that this worth has been misused, and the grief is greater than the glory. There is no glory in this war. These heroes have died for nothing. There is no new liberty, no heroic code of values, to celebrate: there is only a tale of destruction willed by the gods as punishment for humankind. This war, like Lucan's, is a civil war, the negation of constructive, colonizing, or even defensive male achievement, and Statius's poem goes a long way to becoming the negation of epic. Although Statius has fundamentally the same message as Lucan, damning civil war as unheroic, antiepic, he differs from Lucan in his intensive use of lament as an instrument of condemnation, a verdict on human greed, cruelty, and folly. Lament has triumphed over heroics and put them to shame. Small wonder that the Thebaid had no Roman successor.[35]
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