Dialoghi per voce sola. La cultura del lamento funebre nella Grecia antica

After the classic works by Eugen Reiner (1938) and Margaret Alexiou (1974, 20022), this book is the first attempt to provide a thorough investigation of the Greek lament as a ritual and as a literary form of poetry from the Homeric times to the Graeco-roman period. The fundamental questions which this work deals with are: which is the cultural meaning of the lament as a ritual expression? How does lament work? Which is the ritual strategy which rules the practice of lament? Which are the relationships between the traditional-anonymous lament and the poetic one? Can we notice historical developments and geographical differences in the ideas about death and, consequentely, in the form the lament assumed? In order to answer these questions, the researches about lament made on the field by eminent scholars of the Italian school of folk studies have been fully exploited. This excellent tradition of studies is widely underestimated (not to say unknown) in the scholarship about lament out of the boundaries of Italy. A regrettable phenomenon which excluded from the critical debate the very interesting ideas produced by the Italian scholars on this subject matter in the second half of the last century. To reference only the Italian works which the author is more indebted with, mention must be made of Alberto M. Cirese (1951), the first attempt to give a systematic reconstruction of the common practice to hire mourners to take part of funerals. Later, in 1958, appeared Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico by Ernesto De Martino, one of the best essays about lament ever published. After De Martino's book, Luigi M. Lombardi-Satriani and Marcello Meligrana (1989) and Alfonso M. Di Nola (1995 and 20032), enriched and revised De Martino's ideas about lament. The decisive results of these studies, together with other fundamental works about death, funerary cults, believes in afterlife (see above Introduzione), supplied the hermeneutic tools employed to analize the laments considered in this book, which is entirely devoted to the study of the Greek laments in classical antiquity. Thanks to the results of the folk and anthropological studies, it has been possible to tackle with relative ease the specific difficulties which the study of the Greek lament presents. First of all the ambiguous character of the documentation we must deal with. As a matter of fact, lament has been practiced for many centuries as a traditional and anonymous poetic expression devoted to fulfil ritual purposes during the funerals. Of this huge production (see ch. 2, also for a panoramic view on mythical tales connected with lament) we do not possess anything but indirect informations, preserved inside literary works which are not mainly concearned with lament. The only documents of the poetic lament are the scanty fragments of the threnoi by Simonides and Pindar (see ch. 4), which all belong to a very circumscribed period (from the middle of the 6th to the middle of the 5th century BCE) and which are all devoted to members of the aristocratic class. It would be very hard to understand Greek lament as a general cultural phenomenon by considering only the few fragments of the literary threnos. Luckily, to enlarge so a narrow point of view, we can exploit a considerable amount of texts which preserve sections or single expressions which can derive from the repertoire of lament. Among these texts the little corpus of laments witnessed by the Homeric poems (see ch. 1) and the larger corpus of laments inside Attic tragedies of the 5th century BCE (see ch. 5) occupy a distinguished place. To these two main corpora we must add the many poetic texts somehow connected with the death of someone (see ch. 3 and 6) and the large production of funerary epigrams of different periods (see ch. 3.1 and 6.5). Since all these texts have been composed neither to be part of a funerary rite nor with the declared purpose to witness ritual lament, it has been necessary to establish a criterion able to distinguish a text (or a portion of text) which can be considered a trustful source of knowledge about lament from a generic expression of sorrow, even if connected with the death of someone. In this book the criterion assumed is that of "function", that is "the purpose to which an expression aims at, according to the ritual strategy" (see ch. 1.4). This criterion has been developed in ch. 1, entirely devoted to the study of Homeric laments, and is based on the features of the folk laments as emerged in the works quoted before. Since functional criterion afforded good results when applied to Homeric laments, the functional analysis has been extended to all the texts considered in this book. The main results provided by this method of analysis are: a) lament was based on a simple system of recurrent functions (thirteen in all). Each function was achieved by specific themes, formulas and figures of speech. The features of this expressive system have been explained according to their ritual meaning . b) As the title of this book clearly displays, lament was a particular kind of dialogue between the livings and the dead, which can be defined a "solo dialogue". As a matter of fact, the most important expressions of the lament are devoted to the dead in second person and in form of questions, even if there is no chance to get an answer. After having called the dead by name or by other tender words, the mourner usually states his new condition. These statements are very frequent and can get the form of simple phrases in second person (like for example "you have died" or "X has killed you") or the form of questions like: "Where are you? Why did you die? Who did kill you? Why did you leave me alone? Don't you see how miserable I am now?". Dialogic form is the main characteristic of lament and it is the natural consequence of his true nature as a verbal action (see Austin 1962 for a general introduction to the theory of speech acts). By performing a lament, the mourner wants to modify reality and to shape reality into an acceptable order. The tender words the dead is addressed by modify his attitude. After having been assured of the love of his relatives and of the intensity of the sorrow he left to the livings, the dead, appeased by the ritual cares, must accept his new condition and eventually he must reach the place where all the dead are confined, the Hades. c) The performance of the lament assumed a choral form which derived from the strong solidarity between the group of persons present to the rite and the single persons more directly affected by the death of a relative. This person is usually charged with the duty to perform the lament alone and to direct the choral lamentation. The group supports the single mourner acting whatever he requests and even assuming the role of leader of mourning. d) There was no appreciable difference between the lament of the hired performers (see ch. 1.8) and that of the relatives and friends of the dead. As it is usual in an oral culture, the performances of the professionists in ritual contexts were assumed as a model by common people in order to learn the right way to execute lament. e) Lament, even when delivered by the relatives of the dead, has never been a spontaneous expression. On the contrary, thematic and formal stereotypes can be detected even in the most simple, and apparently more direct, lament. In this book each lament has been considered as a poetic text. f) Poetic threnoi composed by poets of great renown as Simonides and Pindar (a restricted phenomenon as we have already said) have much more in common with traditional lament than has never thought before. For example, a threnos by Pindar (fr. 128e (a)-(b) M.) preserves a refrain which makes this poem very similar to the more traditional forms of lament. g) The presence in the literary threnos of general considerations about death and human life requires a different explaination. Since lament was a speech of pragmatic nature strongly related to funerary rites, it is hard to imagine the threnos as a kind of philosophical thought about death, or as a forerunner of prose consolatio. The gnomic sentences appear to have not been employed with a consolatory function but as particular expressions fully connected with the strategy of funerary rite. For this reason, the category of "threnodic gnome"has been introduced, to distinguish a generic gnome from the peculiar function gnome assumed in the lament. h) Philologists have highlighted a tendence in the literary tradition to consider lament as a practice not suitable for men, nor adequate to people with high-level culture. This assumption is based on few texts like Archilochos' elegy to Pericles (fr. 13 W.2), a short fragment by Sappho (fr. 150 V.), Simonides' poem about dead at Thermopylae (fr. 531 PMG, but only if correction at v. 2 is kept), and on the polemic against the practice of lament expressed by Plato (Resp. 3. 387e-389a). All these texts have been reconsidered at the light of the ideas emerged in this book. The result is that all the poems quoted before cannot be considered as sentences with an absolute value. The authors of these poems are all somehow connected with the culture of lament, and in other cases appear to be respectful of funerary tradition. Once more, a deeper knowledge of ritual practice can provide the solution of the problem. Lament, in all his expressions, from the more passionate and emotional to the more self-restrained, is a transitory phenomenon. In general, the final goal of funerary rites is to give order to a potentially chaotic event like death was, and to avoid risks connected with this event. Once this function was fulfilled, there was no reason to indulge in so a painful attitude like that of lament and to extend the period of mourning beyond the ritual prescriptions. The sentences which seem to remove lament at all are, in reality, warnings to prevent the danger to be too much attached to mourning and to keep the practice of lament beyond correct terms. Eventually, it would be very difficult to consider lament not suitable to human beings since it was a practice which has always been devoted to everyone and which was also considered as a special honour tributed by the Muses or by the gods themselves to extraordinary people (see ch. 1.1, 2.3-5, 4.4). i) Thanks to a ritualistic approach, the relationships between epigrams inscribed and lament have been considered afresh. Epigram emerged as an indipendent form of expression with specific features, but in some specific cases epigrams appear to have assumed interesting elements from the repertoire of the lament, and in some other cases (rare, to tell the truth) can be considered as true laments in stone. The distribution of the texts analysed in this work is mainly (not strictly) chronological. Since lament (and funeral rite in general) is a social phenomenon (see Hertz 1905-1906), attention must be paid to the social and cultural changes which can have affected, in different historical periods, different social contexts. For this reason the historic approach appears to be the most useful to appreciate the developments of the repertoire of the lament produced by the diffusion of new ideas about death and afterlife, or, from a more literary point of view, by changes in poetic conventions and forms of communication. It would be very difficult to consider lament as a monolithic phenomenon, not affected by changes throughout all ancient times. More adequate seems to be an historical approach able to study lament as a cultural dynamic system. The most significant innovations in the culture of lament appeared first in those threnoi by Pindar which display orphic ideas about afterlife (see above 4.6). Already in these poetic texts, the ritual function of the lament ceased to be relevant. They simply describe a paradisiacal underworld which can be reached only by those who know the orphic doctrines about soul and his destiny after death. But it is impossibile to extend this radical innovation to all the laments from this period on. As we have already said, in other threnoi by Pindar we can see more traditional ideas about death and more traditional forms of the lament. Traditional features of the lament can be detected also in the texts of the following centuries, and even in the threnodic poems of the hellenistic period, when the divorce between text and occasion is well attested (see ch. 6). If we consider the everyday life of common people, then, we can affirm that little changed in the practice of lament from Homeric times to the end of antiquity. The last text examined in this book, that is the prose lament witnessed by Lucian (De luct. 13), demonstrates that for people belonging to the lower class themes, formulas, functions, performance of the lament were exactly the same as have been observed in texts coming from many centuries before.