Thrênoi to Moirológia: Female Voices of Solitude, Resistance, and Solidarity

Margaret Alexiou’s The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition offered a diachronic, comprehensive study of Greek ritual lament that emphasized continuities between ancient and modern lament traditions while incorporating stylistic and thematic analyses of lament texts. In the past three decades, Alexiou’s seminal work has been fundamental in shaping the field of lament studies; it has influenced scholars from such various academic fields as classics, comparative literature, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and folklore to engage in explorations of mourning that take into account textual, performative, and cultural contexts.¹ The anthropologist Anna Caraveli-Chaves, whose fieldwork emphasizes cultural issues of gender and lament in rural Epiros and Crete, has identified the following salient elements of modern Greek women’s lament: the role of the lamenter as mediator, or “bridge” between the worlds of the living and the dead; the aesthetics and function of ponos (“pain”); lament as vehicle for revenge; lament as an instrument for social criticism and protest; and finally the role of lament in establishing solidarity among the community of women mourners.² This essay explores the relationship between gender, lamentation, and death in the Greek tradition, making use of Alexiou’s diachronic paradigm and by expanding upon Caraveli-Chaves’ ideas regarding the social role of lament by examining and comparing ancient literary representations of women in mourning with authentic examples of women’s lament practices based on ethnographic material from modern rural Greece.

I shall focus specifically on the function of female lament as an expression of individual and collective pain (ponos; plural ponoi) and as a vehicle for uniting Greek women mourners through social bonding and solidarity in a community—what Caraveli-Chaves has termed a “sisterhood of pain”—by interweaving the threads of tragic descriptions of female mourning in Euripides’ Suppliants with analogous examples of documented female lament (moirológia) from modern rural Epiros, Crete, and Inner Mani.³ Female lamentation for the dead, both ancient and modern, is an emotive and expressive genre that voices an individual’s personal ponoi in her role as mourner—a voice of solitude; it also expresses a communal voice of collective grief, one of solidarity. Moreover, in the contexts of both ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary rural Greek society, female mourners use lamentation for the dead as a catalyst—more precisely, the “enabling event” (to borrow a term from John Miles Foley)—for expressing their essentially painful and sorrowful experiences in the world among the living and for protesting the power of the dominant patriarchal society (J. Foley 1995:64–65).

I intend to illuminate significant facets by which ancient and modern Greek lament traditions mirror each other in their function, theme, agency, and verbal art by using modern ethnographic evidence as a heuristic and interpretive device in order to better understand the ancient tragic texts. Such clear parallels in the modes of lament between material from the present and from the fifth century B.C.E. are not surprising. One might interpret the parallel thematic and functional elements of women’s laments for the dead as evidence of diachronic continuity and historical residue from ancient Greek tragic poetry through the contemporary laments in rural areas of Greece. Artemesia Kapsali’s modern lament for her husband Yiannis, for example (see below), expresses not only her grief for the loss of her husband but also embodies a voice that represents the community of Epirot women and mothers united in their feelings of helplessness and anger against war just as the chorus of Argive women in Euripides’ Suppliants manifests a collective voice of women and mothers bound by a “sisterhood in pain,” helplessness, and grief in their inability to properly mourn and bury their sons.

It is not my intention to privilege the ancient texts over modern performance contexts, nor to objectify or romanticize the modern Greek village moiroloyístres; for the voices of these women in black—voices that are otherwise marginalized in a distinctly patriarchal village culture—become instruments of cultural power in the context of lament performance. I intend, rather, to use the mirror images of ancient and modern women’s lament texts...