The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy

Chapter One: Men’s Songs and Women’s Songs

Are the voices of women in men’s poetry representative of women’s independent song traditions? What role, if any, did women’s song traditions play in the shaping of men’s epic traditions (and, later, tragedy)? In recent years scholars have begun to suggest that women’s lament traditions may have played a crucial role in the development of epic and tragedy, which were traditionally performed by men.1 Sheila Murnaghan has noted, for example, that the majority of women’s speech in the Iliad and the Odyssey is closely related to lament in both language and theme.2 Epic poetry narrates the glory of heroes, the klea andrôn, but it also laments their untimely deaths and the suffering they cause by means of the mournful songs performed by the women left behind. Turning to the Classical period, we find that Greek tragedy is similarly infused with feminine voices and indeed femininity, as the work of such scholars as Helene Foley, Nicole Loraux, and Froma Zeitlin has shown over the course of the past two decades.3 While a definitive and comprehensive answer to the vexed question of the prominent roles women play in drama and their relationship to “real life” is yet to be found (and may never be), it seems clear at least that Greek drama employed the feminine to confront 1. Murnaghan 1999, Nagy 1999, and Sultan 1999. In the arguments that follow, I am heavily indebted to the work of these three scholars. 2. Murnaghan 1999, 206. See also Monsacré 1984, 137–96 and Dué 2002. Richard Martin (1989) has studied the many genres of stylized speech that have been incorporated into the genre of epic poetry, and he has shown that the Iliad and the Odyssey include within the overall epic frame the conventions and allusive power of a number of other preexisting verbal art forms, including prayer, supplication, boasting, and insulting, as well as lament (on lament, see especially Martin 1989, 86–88). 3. See especially Foley 2001, Loraux 1995 and 1998, and Zeitlin 1996, with references to earlier work therein. For the feminine aspects of the heroes of Greek epic, see Monsacré 1984. chapter one men’s songs and women’s songs Due.indb 30 Due.indb 30 10/6/05 12:25:11 PM 10/6/05 12:25:11 PM men’s songs and women’s songs 31 questions of masculinity. In the words of Zeitlin, “the final paradox may be that theater uses the feminine for the purposes of imagining a fuller model for the masculine self, and ‘playing the other’ opens that self to those often banned emotions of fear and pity.”4 Most recently in The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux examines the function of lamentation in Greek tragedy in order to explore the personal involvement of the audience in the emotional force of tragedy. Arguing against overly political interpretations of the function of tragedy, Loraux emphasizes the outlet that tragedy provides for grief in a city-state where lamentation and elaborate funerals for individuals had become restricted by law.5 During the Peloponnesian War, women’s rituals of mourning were supplanted by the grandeur of a state funeral for the citizens who gave their lives for the city, but in tragedy, women’s wailing takes center stage.6 In this chapter I propose to give an overview of the place of the captive woman’s lament in epic and tragedy within the history of Greek song traditions in general. I argue that the captive woman’s lament in Greek tragedy draws on a number of song traditions, and in doing so becomes a song tradition in its own right. To what extent the stylized laments of the captive women on the Greek stage echo the laments of actual slave women and prisoners of war residing in Athens is itself an extremely interesting but probably unanswerable question.7 Instead, in this book I seek to trace the development of the captive woman’s lament as a powerful theme within the poetic conventions of Greek tragedy, while also paying special attention to the instances where these conventions and their emotional dynamic can be shown to intersect with the documented songs and experiences of actual women. 4. Zeitlin 1996, 363. Loraux agrees with this formulation (Loraux 1995, 9). 5. Loraux 2002. On the legislation of lament in the Archaic period see, e.g., Alexiou 1974, 14–23; Loraux 1986, 45–49; Holst-Warhaft 1992, 114–19; McClure 1999, 45...