Hour 3. Achilles and the poetics of lament

3§1. There are two key words for this hour, akhos and penthos, and the meaning of both words is ‘grief, sorrow; public expression of grief, sorrow, by way of lamentation or keening’.

3§2. The word akhos is connected with the name of Achilles in the Iliad. And the meaning of the word akhos, which conveys intense grief, sorrow, and pain, is connected with a central theme that is linked with Achilles in the Homeric Iliad: Achilles is a man of constant sorrow. I have already used this phrase once before, in Hour 1, where I was thinking of the title of a traditional American folk song. I am thinking now also of an expression in Isaiah 53:3 as translated in the King James Bible: ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’. One of my major research projects over the years has been the study of this central theme of grief and sorrow as experienced by Achilles and by his people, the Achaeans. Essential for such a study are the principal words that express all that grief and sorrow, namely, akhos and its synonym penthos. We can see this theme of grief and sorrow already at the very beginning of the Iliad:

3§3. So, Achilles experiences akhos right away, and the grief, sorrow, and pain of this akhos modulates right away into kholos, anger.

3§4. Just as the word akhos is connected with the name of Achilles, its synonym penthos is connected with the name of an Amazon called Penthesileia. The story of Penthesileia the Amazon is preserved in an ancient plot summary of a lost epic, the Aithiopis or ‘Song of the Ethiopians’, attributed to Arctinus of Miletus, which belonged to a body of epic poetry known in the ancient world as the epic Cycle:

What we read here is all that we have left, unfortunately, about Penthesileia the Amazon in this ancient plot-summary. [3]

3§5. We must ponder a basic question about the plot of this lost epic, the Aithiopis, as retold by Proclus in his plot-summary. The question is this: when Thersites says that Achilles is in love with the Amazon Penthesileia, why is Achilles angry enough to kill him? My answer is this: it would seem that Achilles is in a state of denial about having fallen in love with the beautiful and powerful Amazon whom he has just killed.

3§6. As we know from the narrative about Thersites in Iliad II, we are dealing here with a character who understands the truth about heroes, even though he retells that truth in a distorted and offensive way that make the offended heroes want to kill him. A close reading of the Thersites narrative in Iliad II shows that there is a kernel of truth in what he says about Agamemnon and Achilles when he speaks in public about the big quarrel between those two heroes. [4] Thersites is {64|65} lucky to escape with his life for what he says here in the Iliad, but his luck finally runs out in the Aithiopis.

3§7. We know that Thersites was on to something when he mocked Achilles for falling in love with Penthesileia. We know this from the evidence of ancient vase-paintings, dating from the sixth and fifth centuries, where we see depictions of the actual moment when Achilles kills the beautiful Amazon.

3§8. These evocative paintings, which show the eye contact between Achilles and Penthesileia at the precise moment when he plunges his weapon into her beautiful body, convey a remarkable convergence of themes linked with death and sex - and we will observe many other examples of such convergence as we proceed in our readings from ancient Greek song culture. Coming up, in Hour 5, is an example from the lyric songs of Sappho, Song 31.

3§9. A big question remains: why would Achilles fall in love with the Amazon Penthesileia in particular? A key to the answer is the name of this Amazon, Penthesileia, which means ‘she who has penthos for the people [lāos]’. This name is a perfect parallel to the name of Achilles, the full form of which can be reconstructed linguistically as *Akhi-lāos and which is understood in the specialized language of Homeric poetry to mean ‘he who has akhos for the people [lāos]’. [5] Not only the names of these epic characters but even the characters themselves are beautifully matched. When Achilles and Penthesileia are engaged in mortal combat, as we see in the vase paintings, their eyes meet at the precise moment when he kills her. And what Achilles sees in Penthesileia is a female reflection of his male self. All along, Penthesileia has been his other self in the feminine gender, as even her name shows, and now he has killed her. The death of Penthesileia thus becomes a source of grief, sorrow, and overwhelming sadness for Achilles, this man of constant sorrow. Both these epic names - and the epic characters that are tied to them - have to do with themes of lament, as signaled by the words akhos and penthos. Both these words point to the ‘grief’ or ‘sorrow’ or ‘sadness’ of lament.

3§10. How, then, is ‘grief’ or ‘sorrow’ or ‘sadness’ expressed by lament? It is by crying and singing at the same time. When people like you and me cry, we just cry. When people in a song culture cry, they lament. That is, they sing while they cry, they cry while they sing, and this kind of singing is crying; this kind of crying is singing. {65|66} The physical aspects of crying are all integrated into the singing: the flow of tears, the choking of the voice, the convulsions of the body, and so on, are all part of the singing.

3§11. Anthropologists have collected many examples of laments that are sung and cried by persons in the depths of real grief. I could illustrate here by way of citing performances in Modern Greek contexts. There has been a great deal of ethnographic collecting of and research on laments in Modern Greek song culture. A particularly useful work that surveys the vast evidence is the book of Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. [6] But I choose here instead to focus on a lament in the context of a historically unrelated song culture. In doing so, I am engaging in typological comparison, which is a kind of comparative method that has to do with the study of parallelisms between structures as structures pure and simple, without any presuppositions. Such a mode of comparison is especially useful in fields like linguistics: comparing parallel structures in languages - even if the given languages are unrelated to each other - is a proven way of enhancing one’s overall understanding of the linguistic structures being compared. [7]

3§12. The lament I have in mind is a northern Hungarian lament, sung - and cried - by an old woman who was mourning two adult sons, both of whom were evidently killed in war. The recording of the lament was initiated many years ago by Zoltán Kodály, himself a Hungarian. Kodály was not only a celebrated composer (my late father, a pianist, was one of his pupils). He was also a respected ethnographer and ethnomusicologist who studied the song cultures of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. He arranged for the “live” recordings of a wide variety of folk performances (between 1934 and 1940), including laments. What I transcribe here is a part of the lament I have chosen: [8] Pondering the words of this lament, I note here especially the many ways in which the lamenting woman expresses here her feelings of losing control and order. There is a sense of disorientation that sets in, especially at lines 18 and following, and this disorientation leads to a time warp: at lines 32 and following, the lamenting woman’s memories modulate from the present to the distant past, back when she is still a young mother taking care of her loving child. Her lamenting words picture the child as he is kissing her, trying to comfort her, and the child’s words are quoted directly: I am so sorry, ‘Mommy’, I can’t help it, I didn’t mean to hurt you. The incapacitation caused by death is all-pervasive here. Earlier, at lines 20-21, the father too is pictured as incapacitated with grief, as if all his blood had been forcibly drained from his body.

3§13. It is a well-known fact, learned from ethnographic research on laments, that such sad songs centering on the death of loved ones can modulate into love songs. [10] And not only can laments modulate into love songs. The converse also happens: love songs can modulate into laments, especially in the case of love songs that center not only on lovers who are lost or dead but also on the loss or death of love itself. Just as laments express sorrow and love together in the course of mourning the death of a loved one, so also love songs can readily express the same two emotions of sorrow and love together. And why should a traditional love song be sad? It is because most traditional love songs are preoccupied with the theme of unrequited love. And, in most song cultures, love songs about unrequited love are felt to be deeply erotic.

3§14. I show here an example. It is a Hungarian love song, from the region of Transylvania, and the name of the love song is Szerelem, which means ‘love’. This song was used by the director of the film The English Patient (1996), both at the beginning of the film and also in the course of the action in the film, as for example in an intensely erotic love scene where the Hungarian character in the story of the film plays on an old “phonograph” machine a vinyl record of this love song. I give here the words of the first two stanzas only: When you listen to this song, you hear an example of stylized crying. That is to say, the singer is not really crying, since the crying is stylized.

3§15. In most traditional song cultures, including Greek song culture, laments and love songs are performed primarily by women, and many of the formal gestures of lament are specific to women. The performance of songs by women is a most important matter in ancient Greek song culture. And it is a most important matter to consider right now, as we study the Homeric Iliad, since the traditions of such performances pervade the Iliad. And I argue that Homeric poetry needs to be rethought in the light of the women’s song traditions that pervade it.

3§16. A moment ago, I mentioned formal gestures of lament that are specific to women. Now I point to an example of such a gesture in the singing of ancient Greek laments: women conventionally let down their hair while lamenting. This spontaneous but traditional gesture is an expression of loss of control and order in one’s personal life. There are also other spontaneous but traditional ways of expressing {66|67} loss of control and order, such as tearing your hair, scratching your cheeks, ripping your fine clothing.

3§17. In the case of letting down the hair, this ritual gesture is normally preceded by the equally spontaneous but traditional ritual gesture of ripping off the veil that holds the hair together and keeps it composed.

3§18. Here I repeat, from the Introduction to the book, my working definition of ritual and myth. Ritual is doing things and saying things in a way that is considered sacred. Myth is saying things in a way that is also considered sacred. So, ritual frames myth.

3§19. Once the veil is torn off, the hair gets let down and becomes completely undone. A spectacular example is the scene in Iliad XXII when the wife of Hector, Andromache, rips off her veil, which is the most elaborate headdress to be found in Homeric poetry, before she starts to sing a lament over the death of her husband. By ripping off this veil, Andromache is letting down her beautiful curly hair, violently undoing it. In effect, what the Homeric narration presents here to the mind’s eye is the complete undoing of a woman’s composure. Andromache will perform her lament, crying and singing, with her hair completely undone:

3§20. In the verses that follow, the beautiful song of lament sung by Andromache is quoted in full by the master Narrator (XXII 477-514). In order to appreciate this lament in context, we need to understand the scene of dishevelment that leads up to it, which I have studied at length in an article. Here is an abridged version of what I say about it there: [13]

3§21. The lament that is sung by Andromache when she sees the corpse of Hector dragged behind the speeding chariot of Achilles is arguably the most artistic and elaborate of all the laments quoted in the Iliad (XXII 477-514). It is also the most lengthy of all Homeric laments. Later on, toward the end of the Iliad, Andromache sings a lament at the funeral of Hector in Troy, and this lament too is quoted in full by the master Narrator (XXIV 725-745). And, earlier on, when Andromache speaks to her husband for the last time in a tearful farewell scene, her words correspond formally to the words of a lament that could have been sung, with adjustments, at the funeral of Hector, and these words too are quoted in full by the master Narrator (VI 407-439).

3§22. I need to say one more thing right now about the first of the three laments performed by Andromache: in this first lament, Andromache is singing and crying over the death of her husband Hector even before he dies. In this case, her lament is an act of premonition.

3§23. I offer here a typological parallel to Andromache’s first lament as an act of premonition. [15] It comes from the Korean film Ch’unhyang (2000), which is based on a traditional Korean p’ansori narrative about a righteous young woman named Ch’unhyang, who is of low social status but high moral principles.

3§24. I concentrate here on a scene from this narrative, in which the young woman breaks out in lament when she absorbs the sad news of a terrible fate that awaits her. In this scene, the secret husband of Ch’unhyang announces that he will abandon her, though only for a while, he claims. The reaction of Ch’unhyang is instantaneous grief. Her sorrow is mixed with feelings of love for her husband, and with feelings of fear and anger that she will lose him forever. She bursts into a lament, accompanied by ritual gestures, such as the violent tearing of her clothes, which is {69|70} a ritual premonition of the violence she will endure because of her low social rank, now that her high-ranking secret husband is leaving her. This violent tearing of clothes dramatizes her sexual vulnerability in the uncertain future that now awaits her. In the plot of the Ch’unhyang narrative, that vulnerability will turn out to be a grim reality for this abandoned woman, whose low social status makes her become the tragic victim of predatory men of high social status. Her lament is a premonition that anticipates this reality, as she keeps on crying and singing. And the master Narrator quotes the lament of Ch’unhyang as she cries and sings. This way, by quoting the lament of Ch’unhyang, the Narrator performs his own stylized crying and singing, which is more artistic than the lament of Ch’unhyang. When Ch’unhyang is lamenting, her crying and singing are more natural, not as musical as the stylized crying and singing of the master Narrator, and her lament echoes in a kind of delayed reaction the singing of her lament as performed by the master Narrator. In the middle of her lament, the macro-Narrative of the film shows flashbacks to happy moments in the past when Ch’unhyang is seen making love to her secret husband. These erotic flashbacks have the effect of intensifying the sorrow of Ch’unhyang as she thinks back to those happy moments in the past that preceded her excruciating pain and suffering in the present. And, conversely, her sorrow intensifies the eroticism of these flashbacks.

The first lament of Andromache

Hour 3 Text D

What Achilles sang

Hour 3 Text E = Hour 2 Text D

The song of Kleopatra

Hour 3 Text F (part of Hour 2 Text E)

Footnotes