Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy (review)

Dué's study hopes "to show that the Athenians had a particular appreciation, inherited from epic, of the universality of wartime suffering to the extent that they could explore their own sorrows by experiencing that of their enemies" (5). In particular, the Trojan War, and above all its lamenting women, could provoke complex reactions, including a powerful evocation of sympathy for its enslaved survivors. Dué defines lament quite broadly in this study to include the use of language borrowed from traditional lamentation for the dead in non-ritual contexts. The form allows tragic choruses to narrate epic events from a female perspective that emphasizes suffering over kleos and permits a suffering woman to assert her will or manipulate the response of listeners. It even, Dué argues, lies behind speeches of high desperation by male characters such as Sophocles' Ajax (51–52). The response of the Athenian audience to tragic lament appears to have changed over time. The Persian Wars probably mediated the Athenians' experience of vengeful lamentation in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, whereas their own aggressive actions in the Peloponnesian Wars conditioned their response to Euripides' Trojan Women.

Chapter 1 offers a useful, up-to-date summary of the extensive previous literature on this topic by both classicists and anthropologists. Chapter 2 somewhat surprisingly turns to the lamentations of the chorus of old Persian men in Aeschylus' Persians. Dué wants to establish that Attic tragedy can evoke sympathy for barbarian enemies through the conventions of typically Greek lamentation, partly because lament provokes response primarily on an emotional rather than intellectual level.

Chapter 3 introduces a discussion of Euripides' three plays focused on Trojan war captives, Hecuba, Trojan Women, and Andromache. Dué argues that sympathy for the fall of Troy and its survivors is well established in Greek epic and the visual arts prior to the treatment of these themes in drama. In her discussion of Hecuba, she claims that the moving use of lament and related speech by Polyxena and Hecuba overrides the violence of the play's final revenge. Hecuba becomes "not a portrait of degradation and brutality, but the extreme of motherhood, and a symbol for sailors of endurance through suffering" (133). (Sailors will steer using the mark of Hecuba's grave [1273]; I doubt her maternal suffering is the issue for them.) Dué interprets the Trojan Women with its lamenting women along the lines of Neill Croally as "a challenge rather than a protest, as a questioning of imperialist ideology rather than a pacifist's prayer for peace" (149). Trojan women "are never fully enfolded in the Greek concept of the barbarian" (162), to the point where Euripides' Andromache far outshines the Greek Hermione in the apparently anti-Spartan Andromache.

Overall, Dué's well-researched but cautious book tends to shift the emphasis of previous studies rather than offer genuinely new interpretations. Her strong de-emphasis of the more ambivalent sides of lamentation, such as its tendency to provoke revenge or express anti-heroic perspectives, proves most problematic in her study of plays like Hecuba. Evoking Hecuba's maternal side without a sufficient exploration of Greek views of maternity is not enough to counter the complex evolution of the heroine, in part through lament, to a murderess of innocent children in an otherwise questionable political environment. Her daughter Polyxena's lament for herself before going voluntarily to her death counters rather than simply borrows from the traditions of lament. As in this case, the book's attempt to make one basic argument throughout results in overly schematic interpretations of the often rather different roles of lament in the equally different context of each play. For example, the masculinity of the chorus of Persians, who lament in a fashion not practiced by Athenian men, is more problematic for her argument than Dué allows, as is her acceptance of Jack Winkler's still highly controversial view that the members of the tragic chorus were ephebes. The provocative anthropological literature...