The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy

Introduction

introduction What a pitiful sorrow it would be to hurl this primordial city down to Hades, the slave and quarry of the spear in the crumbling ash, destroyed and losing its honor at the hands of Achaean men and through the will of the gods, with its women overcome and taken into slavery—oh! oh!—young and old women alike, pulled by the locks of their hair, as if they were horses held by the mane, their veils all ripped and torn. The city, emptied, wails in many different voices of lament for its lost population. I am afraid in advance of the heavy doom that is to be. —aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes 321–321 Laments of captive women play a substantial role in the Greek literature that has come down to us. In the extract from Seven Against Thebes that I cite above, the chorus of Theban women lament in anticipation of disaster, envisioning with perfect clarity the simultaneous destruction of their city and the capture and rape of its women.That disaster is never in fact realized, since the Thebans are in the end victorious, but the laments of the chorus make clear what is at stake in the siege. The laments of the extant tragedies that deal with the Trojan War are similarly preoccupied with the plight of the captive Trojan women, who, foreign and enslaved, would in all other circumstances be completely without a voice in Greek society.2 1. The translations in this book are my own except where indicated.  -   2. Cf. Weil 1945 [translation by Mary McCarthy in Miles 1986, 191–92]: “here [in Attic tragedy] the shame of the coerced spirit is neither disguised, nor enveloped in facile pity, nor held up to scorn; here more than one spirit bruised and degraded by misfortune is offered for our admiration.” Due.indb 1 Due.indb 1 10/6/05 12:25:03 PM 10/6/05 12:25:03 PM 2 the captive woman’s lament This appreciation for the consequences that war brings about for women has a long history. In book 8 of the Odyssey, Odysseus is famously compared to a lamenting woman, fallen over the body of her husband, as she is being dragged away into captivity.            (Odyssey 8.521–31) The renowned singer sang these things. But Odysseus melted, and wet the cheeks below his eyelids with a tear. As when a woman laments, falling over the body of her dear husband who fell before his city and people, attempting to ward off the pitiless day for his city and children, and she, seeing him dying and gasping, falling around him wails with piercing cries, but men from behind beating her back and shoulders with their spears force her to be a slave and have toil and misery, and with the most pitiful grief her cheeks waste away, So Odysseus shed a pitiful tear beneath his brows. The simile is so striking because the generic woman of the simile could easily be one of Odysseus’ own victims. As Gregory Nagy has demonstrated, the simile picks up the narrative of the fall of Troy precisely where Demodokos’ song is interrupted, with the fight raging near the house of Deiphobus (Odyssey 8.516–20).3 Although the woman of the simile does not actually speak, the language of the simile has powerful associations with the lamentation of 3. On the internalized lamentation of Odysseus and the identification of the lamenting woman see Nagy 1979, 100–101. On Odysseus as one of his own victims see also Foley 1978, 7. Due.indb 2 Due.indb 2 10/6/05 12:25:03 PM 10/6/05 12:25:03 PM introduction 3 captive women elsewhere in epic, with the result that the listener can easily conjure her song.4 An equally striking simile is applied by Achilles to his own situation in Iliad 9:      (Iliad 9.323–27) Like a bird that brings food to her fledgling young in her bill, whenever she finds any, even if she herself fares poorly, so I passed many sleepless nights, and spent many bloody days in battle, contending with men for the sake of their wives. As we will see, Achilles too draws on the suffering of captive women in order to articulate his own sorrow, as he struggles against his mortality and the pleas of his comrades that he return to battle. By...