BMCR 2008.10.26, Ann Suter, Lament: Studies in the Ancient

Ann Suter (ed.), Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and
Beyond.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford University Press, 2008.  Pp. x, 288.
ISBN 978-0-19-533692-4.  L41.00; $74.00.

Reviewed by Maureen Alden, The Queen's University of Belfast
([email protected])
Word count:  1715 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0720/2007023159.html)

Ann Suter, editor of Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and
Beyond, has put together a volume of eleven essays from senior
professors including Richard Martin, Alison Keith, and Ian Rutherford,
as well as from a range of younger scholars, mostly in North America.
Literary and iconographic evidence are used to reconstruct the order of
funeral rituals in different societies, and the role that lamentation
played in them. The volume is offered as an overview of critical
thinking on the subject of lament over the 25 and more years since
Alexiou's study of ritual lament in the Greek tradition concluded that
lament is a female-gendered activity in which men are not supposed to
engage, viewed in antiquity as a potential threat to male public and
military activities: the various attempts to restrict and control
lament are reflected in tragedy. This new collection will be useful to
students of Near Eastern archaeology and texts, as well as students of
Greek and Roman literature, iconography, and ritual. Although the most
extensive section is that on Greek material, the essays expand the
study of ritual lamentation to other genres of literature, other
cultures, and other periods. Issues of status, pollution and gender are
shown to be more complex and ambiguous than we had come to think. For a
hardback from Oxford, this is pretty good value overall.

In the introduction, Ann Suter explains the layout of the collection
and how it relates to previous scholarship on lament in the ancient
world: she also summarizes the essays and the achievements of the
collection, offering suggestions on how the groundwork of the essays
might be developed in further studies on lament.

Chapters 2 and 3: Other Cultures

In chapter 2, Bachvarova considers the galas, cross-dressing priests
whose ritual laments in a women's dialect of Sumerian, emesal, went
beyond the mourning of the human dead, focussing the attention of the
gods on human suffering to persuade them to relieve it. Other laments
by the galas were intended to avert divine anger before it occurred.
Mourning combines with invocation in songs to call back the dead and
disappeared. (This sounds like the Persae.) Bachvarova compares the
laments of these feminized men to those of the (male) actors who
dressed as women and recited lamentations in the tragedies performed at
the Festival of Dionysos. She proposes a route of influence through
Anatolian material to Dionysiac ritual, suggesting that the
similarities are more than typological.

In chapter 3, Rutherford discusses the Hittite texts that describe the
procedure for the 14-day funeral ritual that follows the great loss
(sallis wastais) experienced on the death of the king or queen and
culminates in his or her deification. Specialised female wailers,
taptara, perform group lamentation to accompany ritual action, or as an
antiphonal response to individual lamentation. The death of the royal
personage is represented as 'going to the meadow' (paradise?): the
wailers ask him/her not to 'pull the summanza cord' (which might sever
connection with the world of the living), and placate the deceased with
the prayer 'May your will be done'. The taptara are experts in ritual,
absorbing the pollution of death, and deflecting it from the community
as a whole. They are banished from the community's royal cult, which
symbolizes the continuing presence of the king.

Chapters 4-10: Greek Material

In Chapter 4 Brendan Burke suggests that Cycladic figurines, painted
with red and blue pigment, possibly indicating scratches and tears, are
our earliest representations of lament. However, he refuses to
interpret iconographic evidence from the Greek Bronze Age in terms of
later practice, choosing instead to focus on what Mycenaean funerary
art can tell us directly. The larnakes from Tanagra show a procession
of women with raised arms lamenting while others prepare the prothesis:
Burke argues that the scenes of hunting and contests represented on the
larnakes are also funerary. The processional scenes on the Agia Triadha
sarcophagus are explained as funerary ritual, and compared to those
described in contemporary Hittite ritual. Claiming a funerary context
for the Warrior Vase at Mycenae, Burke reinterprets the woman's raised
arms as a gesture of mourning, while the men engage in a funeral
procession or funeral games.

Perkell, in Chapter 5, reads the three laments that close the Iliad as
an invitation to the external audience to reflect on the poet's
thematic purposes in giving such prominence to the dirges by
Andromache, Hecuba and Helen in praise of Hector. She indicates the
disparity between Hector's desire for memorialization in terms of
heroic glory and the experience of the women, whose laments endorse
moral values in conflict with his heroic ambitions. She infers that the
laments for Hector, together with the words and deeds of Achilles,
question the poem's dominant ideology. This may be the case with other
epics ending in lament, such as Lucan's Bellum Civile and Beowulf.

Richard Martin in Chapter 6 studies Helen's lament for Hector in the
context of all her speeches in the poem. Although not characterized as
such, Helen's speeches often contain strategies or phrases of
<greek>GO/OS</greek> or <greek>QRH=NOS</greek>, so that the audience
would have recognized her diction as that of a mourner long before she
begins to lament for Hector. Comparanda from the modern tradition of
lament are used to elucidate several of Helen's speeches. She performs
both as soloist and chorus, and her dirge at the end of the Iliad
counterbalances the invocation to the Muse at the start. Martin applies
these insights to mediaeval and modern Irish poetry, where he detects
traces of an interlocutionary style of lament.

In Chapter 7, Karen Stears provides a detailed summary of
Archaic/Classical funeral ritual, describing women's activities at the
time of death, at the funeral, and throughout the mourning period.
Lament restates the ideology of male/public, female/private, but in
reality the boundary was fluid, and the display of women's lament
formed an essential part of the public face of the household. Full
reference is made to iconographic evidence, but only one illustration
accompanies the essay.

Suter, in Chapter 8, makes use of Elinor Wright's unpublished analysis
of metre and stylistic features characteristic of "full" and "reduced"
lament in tragedy. She challenges the assumption that lament is a
female action in the genre, and argues that males lament freely in the
plays, sometimes recovering moral authority in this way, and
reintegrating themselves into their society. Her view that male lament
was an integral part of tragedy from its origins in Dionysiac ritual
and hero cult complements the arguments of Bachvarova on the origins,
function, and gendering of lament.

In Chapter 9 Karanika illustrates how Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae
employs the forms of ritual lament in parodies of the Telephus, the
Helen, and the Andromeda. She also finds lament in the myth and rites
of the Thesmophoria, and claims that lament is defined and explicated
through parody in the Thesmophoriazusae.

Levaniouk discusses Erinna's poem, Distaff, a fragmentary text of the
fourth century BC, in Chapter 10. She demonstrates that this hexameter
poem in mixed dialect is so full of wedding diction and imagery from
epic and popular song that it constitutes a wedding song performed as a
lament for Erinna's companion, the dead Baucis. The poem is sung by one
girl, who is waiting for her own marriage, over another girl, one whose
attempt to negotiate the transition to marriage ended in death. Baucis
may be an archetypal figure, like Adonis. Levaniouk compares the poem
with the scenes, diction, and imagery of Odyssey 6 and Iphigenia's
arrival in Aulis as the bride of Achilles in Euripides' Iphigenia in
Aulis.

Chapters 11 and 12: Lament in Rome

Alison Keith in Chapter 11 investigates the significance of lament in
Lucan's Bellum Civile, where the death of Pompey heralds the death of
the Republic. Homeric models influence Cornelia's laments for her
husband, beginning with her anticipatory lament and swoon when she is
dismissed from the battlefield. Lament is shown to be an obligation
owed the dead man not only by his wife, but also by his social
inferiors, as exemplified by Pompey's quaestor, Cordus, who performs
funeral rites and lamentation for his murdered commanding officer. Cato
quells the mutiny that follows his public laudatio for Pompey by
appropriating the personal pleas for vengeance in Cornelia's final
dirge. The closing books of the epic follow the narrative course
Cornelia proposes, and thus affirm the power of women's lament in Rome.

Chapter 12 assembles the secondary evidence for the nenia, which in
earliest times was an incantation of mourning following a eulogy of the
deceased. The   nenia was performed by praeficae, professional female
mourners who marched in front of the coffin with the impersonators of
the ancestors, urging the deceased to join the other dead members of
the family. Dutsch attempts to reconstruct  the form of the nenia from
the parodies in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis and Catullus' mock dirge for
Lesbia's sparrow. The nenia appears to be used in other contexts of
transition and the crossing of boundaries.

Each essay is followed by its own notes and bibliography: there is no
general bibliography at the end to assist the reader trying to acquaint
himself with the previously published work on the subject. There is a
general index, but no index locorum.

A couple of things appear to have gone wrong with Burke's translation
of a passage from Schliemann's notebook 15A in the Gennadion Library in
Athens. The images of the Agia Triadha sarcophagus, figs. 4.7 and 4.8,
are small and difficult to discern: I had to use my own photographs to
follow the argument. A memorably misplaced hyphen on p. 218 produced
the term "cow-orker".

Different essays will appeal to different interests, and Suter's
collection offers a valuable corrective to what have become almost
ideological attitudes to lament in Greek tragedy. Perkell's reading of
the laments of Iliad 24 is humane and beautifully written. Martin
brilliantly suggests that Helen may be lamenting the occupants of the
Horse in the voices their wives would use to lament them. The essays on
Lucan and on the nenia should spark further work in the curiously
neglected study of lament in Rome. The Hittite and Sumerian material
invites profoundly important questions about influence between cultures
in the ancient world, and the cross-cultural influences are underscored
by the contributors' cross references within the volume.