1. Alexiou 1971. See the discussion of the kommos (antiphonal lament) in Fantham 1982, 219-231.

2. Scholars have noted the possible influence of the Greek tragic chorus on the unattributed speeches of communal lament or protest in Roman epic from Ennius to Lucan and Statius.

3. Both terms denote the advocate's final emotional address, but while miseratio properly denotes the appeal to pity for his client, and conquestio the provocation of anger against the adversary, or a third party, these two functions often overlap.

4. Frag. lxi, ed. Skutsch: "O Romule Romule Die/ qualem te patriae custodem di genuerunt!/ 0 pater, O genitor, O sanguen dis oriundum!/ Tu produxisti nos intra luminis oras."

5. Livy 2.7.5 records that the married women mourned Brutus for a whole year because he had been so keen an avenger of woman's violated honor (the rape of Lucretia).

6. Lucan De Bello Civili 7.37-39. The laments are described as unbidden (virtually forbidden) because Caesar will be in absolute power over Rome.

7. Iustitium: Lucan De Bello Civili 2.18. On precedents for this decree, see Fantham 1992, 83.

8. See Lucan De Bello Civili 2.21-28 (comparison), 29-36 (behavior of lamenting women).

9. Livy 22.55.3-8: the women's laments for their war dead were so disturbing that by public decree they were confined to their homes and forbidden to make further public outcry.

10. "The vaulted walls echo with the wail and woe of women: the matrons wander, clutching at the doors/ embracing them, imprinting kisses" ("penitusque cavae plangoribus aedes / femineis ululant; ferit aurea sidera clamor. / tum pavidae tectis matres ingentibus errant/ amplexaeque tenent postis atque oscula figunt," Aeneid 2.487f., trans. Mandelbaum).

11. "The lamentations, keening, shrieks of women/ sound through the house, heavens echo mighty wailings" ("lamentis gemituque et femineo ululatu/ tecta fremunt, resonat magnis plangoribus aether," Aeneid 4.666-667, trans. Mandelbaum).

12. Wiltshire 1989, esp. 52-53 (in chap. 2, "Grieving Mothers and the Cost of Attachment").

13. "Wretched she runs out, and with a woman's wailing, tearing her hair,. . .  she fills heaven with her cries" ("femineo ululatu/ scissa comam . . . caelum dehinc questibus implet," Aeneid 9.477-480, trans. Mandelbaum). This is followed by fifteen lines of her lament in direct speech.

14. Hardie (1993, 49) comments: "Euryalus' mother is in fact entirely selfish in her desire for death"; but he acknowledges the influence of both Euryalus's own demand to die instead of his friend and his mother's demand for death on the Virgin's Lament in Renaissance Christian epics.

15. On Juturna's lament, see Barchiesi 1978.

16. "Quis deus, O Musae, paribus tot funera verbis/ evolvat? tantisque umbris in carmine digna/ quis lamenta ferat?" Punica 5.420-422.

17. Until recently there was little secondary literature on the Thebaid in English (or indeed other languages). Readers should consult Vessey 1973, which has a full bibliography of previous work; see also Ahl et al. 1986 and most recently Hardie 1993.

18. Besides the consolationes for the bereavements of Statius's friends, Silvae 2.6 and 3.3, see Statius's Epikedeia (Laments) for the wife of Abascantus, for his own father, and for his adopted child, Silvae 5. , 3, and 5.

19. I quote from Henderson 1991, his first and more complex paper.

20. Omitted in his English diagram: see Henderson 1991, 31. The Latin equivalence of lament is represented by eight forms: ei mihi, heu, gem-, plang-, quer-, lament-, fle-, dol-/ O. Three ( ei mihi, heu, 0! ) are cries of grief; the others are roots of descriptive nouns and verbs.

21. Henderson 1991, 78 n. 191.

22. Ibid. 60.

23. Thebaid 3.98-99, 102-103, trans. Melville. A. D. Melville's translation of the Thebaid, the first since J. H. Mozley's rather inaccurate Loeb version, may strike the American reader as too archaic, and so convey a more artificial impression of Statius's diction than his admittedly heightened epic language.

24. Makarismos, the blessing invoked on the honored dead (such as Virgil's blessing on Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9 ), is only a specialized form of the Greek collective epitaphios logos, for those who died in battle or the Roman laudatio, enumerating a man's virtues and achievements at his funeral.

25. Virgil is more sparing of personification but includes Grief with Avenging Cares ( Luctus et Ultrices . . . Curae ) among the phantasms that crowd the entrance to the underworld in Aeneid 6.274. As we shall see below, grief and vengeance are clearly and repeatedly associated in Statius.

26. Like the heroine of Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, but in that optimistic epic the heroine finds both her brother and fiancé alive.

27. The progressive articulation of response to sorrow /death between women's mourning (for the past) and men's call to revenge (for the future) echoes the contrast noted above between Euryalus's mother and Evander, or even between Lucan's matrons and warriors in book 2. On the Maeon episode and the role of Aletes, see also Ahl et al. 1986, 2830-2831 n. 19.

28. On the provocation of resentment against the Athenian generals, see Xenophon Hellenica 1.7.8; against the defeated Servilius Caepio, see Cicero De Oratore 2.201.

29. See further note 31 below.

30. Menoeceus is in fact singled out for this sacrificial death because he is the youngest descendant of the serpent-born, earth-begotten warriors who peopled Cadmus's city of Thebes. See further Vessey 1971.

31. Grief and weeping are stressed here too; cf. Thebaid 12.26, 32, and the miserabile certamen of 33-34, disputing claims over the dead.

32. Contrast Hardie 1993, 48: "The epic ends not with triumph but with lament, or rather with the praeteritio of lament, a programme to inspire another epic (808 novus furor ) to balance the programme at 1.33-45 for the epic we have already read." It will be clear that I see lament itself as a triumph-of a new kind.

33. Just before Parthenopaeus's death the goddess Diana, unable to prevent it, had addressed the boy: "You delight in the battles so bewailed" ("ululataque proelia gaudes, " Thebaid 9.724). Statius's application of ululare, the vocabulary of lament, to battle is new and almost programmatic. Diana's next words ("happy, and dying only for your mother," "felix et miserae tantum moriture parenti," Thebaid 9.725) thematically polarize male delight in battle and parental lament. But at the end that "only'' is corrected by Statius's own celebration of the mother's grief for "her son,/ Her son who kept his grace though blood was gone,/ Her son for whom two armies grieved as one"( Thebaid 12.806-807, trans. Melville).

34. See Ahl 1986, 2905.

35. I would like to express my warm thanks to Randall Ganiban for his valuable insights and suggestions, which have enriched and improved the written revision of this essay.