Chapter 1. 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 {30|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 nevertheless 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. {31|32}

As I noted in my introduction to this book, the seminal work of Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition, was the first to explore the continuity of the Greek lament tradition from ancient times to the present day. [8] Alexiou studied the surviving laments of epic and tragedy, and traced their metaphors, themes, and diction in the laments of late antiquity, Byzantine literature, and modern Greek funerals. Since the publication of Alexiou’s work, many scholars have undertaken the study of lament, but Ritual Lament remains a basic guidebook to this incredibly rich and enduring tradition of women’s song. [9]

What Alexiou and other scholars of the Greek tradition have found is that Greek women’s laments have maintained a continuous tradition of song-making, that is both independent of and parallel to the stylized versions that have been preserved in epic, drama, and later Greek literature. Moreover, there is a great deal of comparative evidence from other cultures to show that the Greek tradition is by no means an isolated phenomenon, and that women all over the world have been since ancient times and continue to be today singers of lament. [10] It is very likely then, if not provable, that the laments of Greek epic, although performed by a male aoidos, would nevertheless have evoked for ancient audiences the songs of their mothers and grandmothers, performed at funerals upon the death of family members and extended relatives. In this way epic subsumes a distinctly feminine mode of singing within its own mode of expression, the dactylic hexameter, no doubt transforming it, but also maintaining many of its essential features.

A groundbreaking book by Aida Vidan can shed light on the dynamics of this process by which women’s song-making becomes incorporated into heroic narratives. Vidan’s book, Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women, publishes and analyzes for the first time women’s songs of the South Slavic tradition that were collected by Milman Parry and Albert Lord and which are now housed in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. With few exceptions, to date only the {32|33} men’s heroic songs collected by Parry and Lord have been published and discussed. [11] It was the study of the South Slavic epic tradition that prompted Parry and Lord to formulate their thesis that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed within a flourishing oral epic song culture by means of centuries old traditional techniques for composition-in-performance; this thesis revolutionized Homeric Studies. [12] Vidan’s book continues the work of Parry and Lord by introducing and publishing several of the women’s songs collected in the very same areas in the former Yugoslavia in which Parry and Lord collected the heroic songs that they compared to Homeric poetry.

Vidan shows that the women’s songs share traditional language and many themes with the men’s heroic songs, but they differ in important ways. The women’s songs, as one might expect, offer a uniquely female point of view on the action, and are performed in vastly different contexts such as weddings or intimate gatherings of female friends and relatives. This performance context in turn affects the content and length of the songs. Moreover, whereas the men’s songs that Parry and Lord collected are generally described as epic or heroic poetry, the women’s songs of this region can be divided in three basic (though often overlapping) groups: lyric songs, humorous songs, and narrative ballads. [13] Nevertheless, Vidan points out, formulas, blocks of lines, and themes travel with ease across genre boundaries. [14]

The women’s songs of the former Yugoslavia were at one time so pervasive in the culture that it has been argued by at least one researcher that the men’s heroic song tradition evolved out of that of the women’s songs. [15] The vast majority of the songs in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Litera- {33|34} ture are in fact women’s songs. [16] These so-called women’s songs, however, could also be performed by men. Of the 300 singers of women’s songs in the collection, 50 are men. Similarly, it is not unheard of to find a woman singer of heroic songs in the South Slavic tradition, particularly if the woman’s father was a singer. [17]

The distinction between women’s songs and men’s songs in this tradition seems to be the musical accompaniment (men’s/heroic songs were accompanied by a musical instrument, the gusle, women’s were not) and the setting (men’s songs were meant for public performance, women’s songs were sung in intimate settings), rather than the content or plot of the songs themselves: It appears then that there was a great deal of fluidity of genre and transfer between the women’s and men’s song traditions in the region surveyed by {34|35} Parry and Lord. Women were able to sing songs for each other that were sometimes nearly indistinguishable from men’s heroic poetry, [20] and men could learn and perform the song traditions of women. Vidan argues that such mixing of gender and genre in the composition and performance of these songs was most common in areas where division between the sexes was not strict. [21]

I have chosen to emphasize Vidan’s work on the women’s songs of the South Slavic tradition both because of its recent publication and because it extends the applicability of the fieldwork of Parry and Lord to Greek epic traditions. Moreover, much of Vidan’s work accords well with the wealth of comparative evidence available from the study of modern Greek women’s laments for the dead, even though the content and ritual function of modern Greek laments make them very different from the women’s songs of the South Slavic tradition. [22] In the modern Greek tradition, laments are a distinctly feminine mode of song. Because of its powerful and even subversive force it is to some extent disapproved of by men, but it is nevertheless appreciated for its beauty. [23] Anna Caraveli has pointed out that while only women perform ritual laments for the dead at modern Greek funerals, men may sing laments in other contexts, and that professional male musicians actively admire the laments of women. [24]

Caraveli argues that there are four registers of lament “in ascending order of efficacy and importance”:

1. Laments that are simply recited as poetry
2. Laments that are sung, but not on a ritual occasion or in an extraordinary emotional context
3. Laments that are sung in an extraordinary, heightened emotional context, but in an ordinary setting such as one’s home or the fields. {35|36}
4. Laments that are performed both in a heightened emotional context and on a ritual occasion (for example, tending the grave, memorial services, funerals) [25]

These four registers are indicative of the wide range of meaning and functions women’s laments can have within a given society. In her fieldwork Caraveli found that women sang laments in relatively unemotional and ordinary contexts, even as an accompaniment to everyday tasks, as well as in ritual settings. [26] Many sung laments are appreciated as poetry, independent of their initial emotional and compositional context, while maintaining a great deal of their emotional force. Laments are most often sung in the company of other women, in intimate settings, much like the women’s songs of the South Slavic tradition: “The existence of a muted, separate women’s world creates the opportunities for strong friendships among women. Rituals of shared grieving reinforce, intensify, and negotiate a great variety of relationships that often pass into daily narrative as metaphors of and codes for female experiences.” [27]

We may compare Caraveli’s analysis with the words of Ibrahim Hrustanovic, the son of one of the female singers in the Parry Collection:

Very often the female singers in the Parry Collection told Parry and Lord that they had learned their songs from their mothers, grandmothers, or other older women in their villages and towns. In this way stories, formulas, and themes were passed down over genera- {36|37} tions, and each generation learned the techniques of composition from the generation before. This process resembles the more formal process by which men in the South Slavic tradition learned to become composers and singers of heroic poetry. In The Singer of Tales, Lord describes the three step training process that oral traditional poets go through as they learn to sing tales before an audience and eventually become accomplished artists. [29] According to Lord, the first stage is one of listening and absorbing. In the second stage the singer begins to sing and has to learn to fit his thoughts and their expression into a fairly rigid form. The second stage ends when the singer can sing one entire song before an audience. In the third stage an increase in repertory and a growth in competency takes place. It ends when the singer becomes an accomplished practitioner of the art, and can provide entertainment for several nights.

One of the most important metaphors that Lord uses for describing the learning process is that of learning a language. In his chapter on the formula Lord writes: The process that Lord describes here, I would argue, is true of women’s songs as well. [31] Moreover, because women sing their songs both in formal rituals at which men are present, and informally in the presence of their children and family members, it is possible for the “language” of lament to be appreciated and assimilated by members of both sexes—even if the singing of those laments is the particular province of women. [32]

Lord’s comparison of traditional singing to a language is particularly appropriate when we consider that in the Greek tradition the language of lament is used to express a variety of emotions and experiences, including those of a bride as she leaves home, the joy of new love, the sorrow of lost love, the anxieties of a mother, and the anger of a widow. [33] Because ritual lamentation gives Greek women a public voice that they are not allowed in any other context, women can use lament to protest their position in life and the status quo. [34] This special mode of speech and song can then be manipulated and employed by women in even non-ritual contexts to comment on their lives and situations. [35] Framed within the poetic and social conventions of lament, women’s songs have the power to explore the full range of women’s experiences and to voice their concerns and emotions before the community.

This brief survey of the social context of women’s songs in the South Slavic and modern Greek traditions suggests that the laments of Archaic and Classical Greece and their counterparts in epic and tragedy at least {38|39} potentially served a similar function, namely, to speak about, comment upon, share, and even protest the experiences of Greek women, by way of a mode of speech and song that is the particular province of women. That women’s song traditions could be assimilated and incorporated into men’s poetry has been postulated by Richard Martin and others, who argue that the conventions and even emotional force of such songs is preserved within the overarching medium of ancient Greek epic. [36] Other scholars have gone so far as to suggest that women’s lament traditions are not merely incorporated into Greek epic, they are the very foundation of epic. [37] The comparative evidence discussed here offers many points of contact and support for the work of these scholars, and argues for a primacy of women’s song traditions within the poetics of a song culture like that of the ancient Greeks.

Turning now to ancient Greek epic, we find that the Iliad and Odyssey are infused with voices of lament at every point, and those voices are primarily the voices of women. [38] Although the poems of the Epic Cycle are now lost to us, it is clear from what we know of them that in these poems, too, laments for heroes played an important role. [39] Within the Iliad and Odyssey, so full of grief is epic poetry that it has the effect of inspiring mourning in those who are most connected to the ac- {39|40} tion. In other words, what is epic kleos—the latest entertainment [40] —for the generic audience of epic is a song of lament for those with a stake in the tale, with the result that the only distinction between a song of lament and epic poetry becomes the listener. So closely tied are penthos and kleos that in many instances within the poems themselves, they are the same thing. [41]

Thomas Greene has suggested that lamentation in epic collapses the boundaries between the audience and the heroic past, producing “a hallowed communion between the two.” [42] He argues that in fact the telos of most of the European poetry known as epic is tears, and that through tears the communion between past and present is most accessible. One way that this “hallowed communion” is achieved is through the rituals and lament traditions of hero cult. [43] The heroes of epic are characters in a traditional narrative, but they are also religious entities, who were regularly worshipped in countless rituals and festivals throughout the Greek world. [44] The songs of lament for such figures as Achilles and Odysseus within epic are an important part of ritual lamentation for the hero on the part of the communities for whom the epics are performed. [45] We know, for example, {40|41} that Achilles was ritually lamented by the women of Elis at sunset on the evening preceding the Olympic games. [46]

The lamentation of women in epic poetry, as in rituals of hero cult, emphasizes the mortality of the hero. At the same time, the overarching medium of epic poetry that includes these laments conveys upon the hero the immortality of kleos. [47] Epic kleos, as has been demonstrated by Nagy and others, has its origins in praise poetry. Epic narrates the klea andrôn, the famous deeds of heroes. The women’s songs of Greek epic and tragedy, on the other hand, narrate the loss of loved ones, the loss of homeland, and the loss of freedom experienced by captives of war. As Sheila Murnaghan has shown, “lament is at once constitutive of epic and antithetical to it, one of epic’s probable sources and a subversive element within epic that can work against what epic is trying to achieve.” Helene Foley argues similarly: “women historically played the role not only of physically lamenting the dead but of expressing and even acting on views that from Homer on challenged public ideology about death and glory.” [48]

How then do we explain the relationship between the sorrow and anger of lament and the glory of epic? Nancy Sultan has recently argued that women’s laments function as the inception point for a hero’s kleos: The widow’s lament traditionally expresses sorrow and anger while detailing the miserable plight of those left behind, but these same features are also {41|42} the first articulation of a hero’s deeds and his importance to the community. Andromache’s lament for Hektor in Iliad 24 illustrates this combination of sorrow and celebration: Andromache’s words are reproachful, as is typical of Greek laments for the dead, and tell Hektor of the suffering that she and their son will have to endure, now that Hektor has abandoned them in death. [50] But at the same time her lament establishes the memory of Hektor as the guardian and sole protector of Troy for all time. His death means the city’s destruction, the death of its men, and the enslavement of the women and children. But these same words initiate his kleos. Her grief, and the city’s grief, are Hektor’s glory. [51]

The laments of such figures as Andromache and Briseis therefore have a dual function. On the level of narrative they are laments for the dead, the warrior husbands and sons who inevitably fall in battle. They protest the cruel fate of the women left behind, and narrate the bitter consequences of war. The grief expressed by the women left behind is raw and real. But for the audience of ancient epic the laments for these husbands and sons are also the prototypical laments for heroes, who for them continue to be lamented and mourned on a seasonally recurring basis. The poetry of epic, as Thomas Greene observes, collapses the boundaries between the two forms of song.

In the Iliad, grief spreads quickly from individual to community. As each lament comes to a close, the immediately surrounding community of mourners antiphonally responds with their own cries and tears: [52] As I have argued elsewhere, Briseis’ lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 and the corresponding wailing it initiates exemplify the process by which personal grief is transformed into collective sorrow. [53] Briseis’ song extends not only to the collective experience of the women around her who lament their fallen husbands, but to the audience of the epic as well. It is not insignificant then that the final lament of the Iliad, sung by Helen (who is the cause of the war), ends not with the antiphonal wailing of the women (as at Iliad 6.499, 19.301, 22.515, and 24.746), but of the dêmos: ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ', ἐπὶ δ' ἔστενε δῆμος ἀπείρων ‘So she spoke lamenting, and the people wailed in response’ (Iliad 24.776).

Ancient sources attest that the grief within epic poetry did indeed manifest itself in the audience. In the classical period, for example, Plato provides us with the following exchange between Socrates and a rhapsode: Plato’s depiction of the effect of lamentation in epic has its own purpose within the dialogue and in the corpus of Plato’s writings as a whole, but if we can trust this passage even as an exaggerated approximation of the truth, it is clear that the laments of such figures as Briseis, Andromache, and Hecuba inspired a very tearful and emotional reaction in ancient Athenian audiences of the classical period, and probably throughout the history of epic performances. The passage suggests that the emotions that Aristotle posited as central to the experience of viewing tragedy, namely pity and fear, were elicited by epic as well if performed successfully.

These tears for the plight of the captive Trojan women and the fallen Trojan warriors are remarkable, and, as I noted in my introduction to this book, point to an appreciation for the plight of the defeated, regardless of {45|46} nationality or ethnicity. The extent to which the Trojans can be considered “barbarians” is a question that will have to be reserved for later chapters, but I submit already now that the emotional dynamics of lamentation in epic allowed an identification with the Trojan suffering that superceded national and ethnic loyalties. Because the laments of the captive women of epic formed a continuum with—and in fact evoked for the audience—the rituals and song traditions of Greek women, their emotional impact was potentially as powerful as that of the laments sung at actual funerals by the wives, mothers, and grandmothers of the community of listeners.

In the Modern Greek tradition, Caraveli notes that in some instances merely the first notes of a melody associated with lament were enough to cause a family of mourners to burst into tears. She writes: “Such reactions on the part of diverse audiences suggest that responses to specific styles of lament performances are, to some extent, learned. Not only are the texts of laments symbolic languages unto themselves, but performance components also carry symbolic associations, thus triggering ‘pain’ in the participants and facilitating the creation of an extraordinary emotional context.” [55] Nicole Loraux has made similar suggestions about the triggering effects of the music that would have accompanied the laments of Greek tragedy. [56]

I now propose to turn from Greek epic to Greek tragedy, where women’s laments play an equally important role in a medium that, like epic, belongs to men. In Greek tragedy, female characters are famously outspoken: they debate, praise, blame, make plans, pray, scheme, sympathize, narrate the past, and make speech acts. But if there is one thing that female characters do in tragedy above all else, it is lament. Both epic and tragedy then are infused with the grief of women, despite the fact that they are male oriented performance traditions. Epic poetry was composed and performed by men; tragedy was composed by men and all roles were performed by male actors. Women may have been in the audience, but the scholarly consensus seems to be that the dramas were not intended for the benefit of women, but rather for the benefit of the male citizen body. [57] {46|47}

Helene Foley’s well-known article entitled “The Politics of Tragic Lamentation” explores in detail the representation of women’s laments in tragedy and their relationship to the laws, customs, and attitudes of fifth-century Athens. [58] Foley shows that the laments enacted in tragedy, particularly those that are closely tied to funeral ritual, have a complex relationship with societal practices. Whereas in tragedy women perform elaborate public laments, tear their cheeks, and rip their clothing, laws enacted from the archaic period onward expressly prohibited these actions. [59] Other elements of the funeral ritual that take place in tragedy were likewise restricted by laws intended to curb the power and prestige of the aristocracy, while at the same time shifting loyalties from the oikos to the polis. [60] Building on the work of Alexiou as well as the fieldwork of scholars of modern Greek laments, Foley argues that the intent of these laws was to suppress the incendiary power of laments to initiate revenge. In order for the polis to be successful, aristocratic cycles of vendetta, in which the laments of women played a crucial motivating role, had to be put to an end. [61]

As women’s control over the funeral rituals was weakened and their voices of lament muted, new forms of public mourning began to supplant the aristocratic funeral. First, as Alexiou has shown, in the incipient democracy of Athens there was a gradual transfer of mourning rituals and their associated emotions “from the ancestor of the clan cult to the hero of the state cult.” [62] Similarly, as Athenians were increasingly called to serve the state as sailors and soldiers over the course of the fifth century BC, the epitaphios {47|48} logos, or state funeral oration, effectively replaced the private funeral for the honored war dead. The grandeur and solemnity of public funerals for the war dead became an important forum for Athenian state ideology. [63]

As Foley and others have noted, however, the laws restricting lamentation were never entirely successful: some laws apparently lapsed and were later repassed, and some customs known to have been prohibited by law are alluded to as still in practice throughout the classical period. [64] Lament continued to be the essential medium for the articulation of grief, as is evidenced by its unbroken continuity of form and function in Greek literary and artistic traditions and in popular culture, up to the present day.

Nicole Loraux, who has articulated most fully the displacement of women’s laments by the state funeral oration, has written several works that illuminate the role of lament in Athenian tragedy. [65] In The Mourning Voice, Loraux argues for a renewed appreciation of the emotional dynamic of Greek tragedy, which she stresses in contrast to the didactic and political aspects of Greek tragedy that have been the focus of discussion in recent decades. [66] She shows how tragedy came to be a legitimate outlet for lamentation and tears for the citizen body at the same time that women’s laments were being curbed by laws and the public funeral oration was beginning to supplant private mourning rituals. As Segal notes, building on the work of Loraux: “what is repressed in the austere official ceremony of the funeral oration, as we see it in Pericles’ funeral speech or in the epitaphios ascribed to Lysias, can appear in the unrestrained, though formalized and mythicized, laments in the tragedies.” [67] Noting that tragedy was not situated in the political heart of the city, in the agora, or on the Pnyx, where assemblies were held, but rather in the theater of Dionysus, Loraux argues that in the process of viewing tragedy the spectator learns that he is a mortal first, and a citizen second. She concludes: “through the evocation of mourning… the spectator will be overcome, and purgation will arouse him to transcend his membership in the civic community and to comprehend his even more essential membership in {48|49} the race of mortals. This has always been the final word sung, not so much to the citizen as to the spectator, by the mourning voice of tragedy.” [68]

Lament, therefore, seems as essential to Greek tragedy as it is to Greek epic, and perhaps more so. The mourning voices of women on the tragic stage are both reenactments of prototypical laments for heroes and also a vehicle for the exploration and release of contemporary sorrows. As Segal writes, “This weeping within the play also provides a cue for the desired and appropriate response of the audience, their participation in the emotional release of the theater.” [69] The weeping is crucial, and as we explore the captive woman’s lament in the ensuing chapters, we will have to address the question of just what the citizen spectators are weeping for. Does each audience member weep for his own sorrows, as in the response of the surrounding women to Briseis’ lament of Iliad 19? Or is there a larger, civic sorrow that can be released by the viewing of tragedy together as a citizen body?

I now turn to the captive woman’s lament itself, and its place within Greek tragedy. As we have already begun to see in my introduction to this book, the lamentation of the captive Trojan women in the tragedies of Euripides exemplifies the features of Greek lament that Alexiou has traced from antiquity to the present day. [70] I have suggested, moreover, that the captive woman’s lament combines at least two of Alexiou’s categories of lament, thereby forming a category in its own right that is the particular province of captive women.

I first became interested in women’s lament traditions, and more specifically the captive woman’s lament, while studying the speech of Euripides’ Medea, in which Medea details the plight in which Jason has left her. [71] Here is the climax of the speech: Medea’s speech has been cited by R. L. Fowler as a prime example of what he calls the “desperation speech” in Greek literature. In an exhaustive study Fowler argues that the desperation speech was a literary device with its ultimate origins in Homer that reached its full form in tragedy. [72] He describes the speech as a series of questions, which are rhetorically posed and rejected: The classic examples cited from tragedy are Sophocles’ Ajax 430-480 (spoken by Ajax) and Euripides’ Medea 502-519 (spoken by Medea). I will quote just a few lines of Ajax’s lengthy speech here: Fowler’s study leads him to conclude that the desperation speech is a feature of tragedy and the mark of the tragic figure.

In his investigation into the origin of the desperation speech Fowler naturally looks to the Homeric heroes, who often face comparable critical moments in the course of their trials that call for decisive action. I submit that there is another kind of speech in the Iliad, however, which is far more likely to be the true prototype of the desperation speech as it is used by Medea and Ajax. The laments of Andromache, Briseis, and Helen have a remarkably similar form to that which Fowler calls the desperation speech. What is the relationship between what Fowler calls the desperation speech, and what I have called the language of lament? [75]

To start answering that question, let us look at the words of Tecmessa, Ajax’s captive concubine, who replies to Ajax’s so-called desperation speech with one of her own. She describes how she was once the daughter of a wealthy father and then became a slave when Ajax sacked her town. Worried that Ajax will kill himself, she begs him not to leave her to become a Greek captive (for a second time) and an object of abuse, and pleads with him not to abandon their son to become a helpless orphan. Then in words that echo Andromache’s in the Iliad she exclaims: Tecmessa’s speech combines both the account of the resources she has lost with the rhetorical questions of the desperation speech proper. But these same features are typical of Greek laments. [76] These features are also of course particularly appropriate for the captive woman in a foreign land, who has nowhere else she can turn. Tecmessa here employs the language of lament even in advance of Ajax’ death in an attempt to save him and protect herself and her son.

We may compare, as a number of scholars have done, Tecmessa’s speech with that of Andromache’s speech/lament to Hektor in Iliad 6. [77] The content of Andromache’s speech in Iliad 6 resonates with other traditional laments in the Iliad, including her own laments in Iliad 22 and 24. Andromache is, from the standpoint of epic traditions, the quintessential lamenting and soon-to-be captive wife, even though her captive status is only foreshadowed and never actually realized in the Iliad. She says: The element of reproach, which has been noted as characteristic of laments, often takes the form of an accusation of abandonment. [78] Andromache does not reproach Hektor directly in this speech, as she does in Iliad 22 and 24, but she does warn him not to leave her a widow and their son an orphan. [79] Hektor admits he would rather die than see Andromache led off into captivity (6.464-465). Andromache herself expresses a wish to die if she loses Hektor (6.410-411), and this wish too is a common feature of laments. [80] The accusation of abandonment in both ancient and modern Greek {53|54} laments is typically accompanied by a description of the lamenting woman’s endangered position in the community. [81] Andromache here relates how she has lost the protection of all of her family members, and sets up Hektor as her last resource.

On this last point we may compare the way that Briseis too relates the deaths of her husband and brothers: Tecmessa’s speech makes use of many of the traditional lament techniques that Andromache’s does. Her speech is traditional, but I do not deny that a great deal of its power lies in its intertextual relationship with the Iliad. This intertextual relationship is not limited to Andromache’s proleptic lament for Hektor in Iliad 6, however; it is equally reminiscent of Briseis’ lament for Patroklos. [83] And when we understand that the speeches of Andromache and Tecmessa are in fact the laments of soon-to-be captive women, we can appreciate the connections between Andromache, Briseis, and Tecmessa on another level: all three are well-born women who become captive concubines. Andromache and Tecmessa once were and will again be social equals, and that symmetry is part of the power of Tecmessa’s speech. In fact Greek laments traditionally articulate a woman’s life history while they at the same time define a woman’s particular relationship with her community.

Tecmessa’s speech is therefore remarkable both for its traditional content as well as for the literary bridge that it creates between epic and tragic interpretations of captive women’s lament traditions. Like Andromache’s in {54|55} Iliad 6, the speech is not a formal lament for the dead. Ajax is still alive, and Tecmessa’s speech is in fact a speech and not a song (as will be many of the laments of Euripidean tragedy discussed in subsequent chapters). Nevertheless, Tecmessa makes use of the language of lament to give herself a voice and the opportunity to try to dissuade Ajax from killing himself.

In the Introduction, I adduced a lament speech from Euripides’ Andromache in which Andromache earns the pity of the Greek chorus when she couches her words within the traditional language of lament. Here too, the chorus pities and even praises Tecmessa: Αἴας, ἔχειν σ' ἂν οἶκτον ὡς κἀγὼ φρενὶ/θέλοιμ' ἄν· αἰνοίης γὰρ ἂν τὰ τῆσδ' ἔπη (“Ajax, I would wish you to have pity for her even as I do; for then you would praise her words”). As in the Andromache, lament earns approval and pity for Tecmessa where previous attempts to speak failed. Tecmessa recalls that when she attempted to dissuade Ajax from leaving in the middle of the night on his mission to kill the Greek captains, he dismissed her harshly: I submit that the “desperation speech” of Tecmessa is better understood as a manipulation of the genre of lament by a woman who needs to speak out in a desperate situation.

Recognition of the specialized speech in the laments of captive women in the Iliad calls for a re-examination of other desperation speeches in tragedy. The speech of Ajax in Sophocles’ play of that name is likely to be, as Fowler suggests, the model for many desperate deliberations in subsequent tragedy. I argue, however, that it is also through the laments of figures like Briseis and Andromache that we should read Tecmessa’s and perhaps even Ajax’s rhetoric of desperation. [84] Just as Odysseus laments like a captive woman, one of his own victims, when he hears the kleos of his deeds at Troy in Odyssey 8, Ajax experiences the helplessness of the woman he will leave behind, and voices it {55|56} in a speech of desperation that employs the rhetoric and traditional themes of lamentation. In this way, like the Iliad and Odyssey, the Ajax allows an Athenian audience, however briefly, to explore the agony and consequences of war by way of the sorrow of women, as it is expressed in the captive woman’s lament.

***

As I noted above, Tecmessa’s lament provides us with a perfect bridge between the captive women’s laments of epic and those of later tragedy. In the next chapter, I will explore another such intermediary, Aeschylus’ Persians. That play places the suffering of the defeated enemy before the eyes of the victorious Athenians a mere eight years after the battle of Salamis, amidst on-going hostilities with Persia. Because the battle itself takes place in Greece, no Persian women are taken captive. But the youth of a nation is cut down, and the women left behind lament their husbands and sons. Aeschylus’ play features a chorus of Persian elders who lament Persia’s lost youth, and by extension, Persia itself. As we will see, the laments of the Persian elders are often directly concerned with the plight of the Persian wives who have lost their husbands. Throughout the play the audience is invited to imagine the lamentation of the Persian women and to contemplate the battle from the perspective of the widowed women. Thus already in 472 BC the Athenians were capable of sympathizing with and even weeping for their worst enemy. The Trojan War tragedies, removed as they are by time and tradition, are not as extraordinary in their sympathy for the defeated as the Persians, but they too are part of a meaningful pattern that extends as far back as the Iliad. {56|}