Penthos

Πένθος is the formal Greek term for mourning — the disciplined, ritualized, often-sung carrying of irreversible loss. It belongs to the high register of grief: where akhos names the personal wound and pathos names suffering broadly, penthos names the ordered work by which a community holds death. Konstan observes that the term “has a somewhat formal register, like the English ‘mourning’ in comparison with ‘grief’,” noting that three of the four occurrences in Demosthenes fall in his funeral oration (Konstan 2006).

In Homer penthos is seated in the body. The early Greek mourner does not grieve in an inner subjectivity removed from the flesh; he grieves in the splanchna, the ētor that “wastes away” in longing, the thumos in which one weeps and laments (Padel 1994; Caswell 1990). Snell’s argument that the Homeric self is a plural aggregate of psychophysiological organs (homeric-plural-self) is the structural condition of archaic mourning: penthos is the affect of an embodied composite, not of a unified Cartesian interior.

The most consequential figure of penthos in the Iliad is the great public penthos for Hektor (XXIV 708), in which the singers lead thrēnoi and Andromache, Hekabe, and Helen lead the women in gooi. Achilles, in turn, leads the Achaeans in gooi over Patroklos (XXIII 17). The structuring antithesis is the kleos / penthos axis (see kleos-penthos-axis): for the uninvolved audience an epic story confers kleos; for the involved listener it inflicts penthos. The capacity for penthos in response to a story is the mark of belonging to it.

The post-Jungian elaboration runs through Hillman’s claim that “through depression we enter depths and in depths find soul” (Hillman 1989). Penthos is the classical name for the soul-making affect Hillman recovers as the via regia. It parallels the alchemical mortificatio and the nigredo-albedo-rubedo sequence: the dark phase of individuation through which old form is undone so that coniunctio may arise.

Relationships

• akhos
• goos-threnos
• kleos-penthos-axis
• thumos
• splanchna
• kradie-etor-ker
• pathos
• mortificatio
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• homeric-plural-self

Primary sources

• iliad (Homer, esp. XXIII 12–17, XXIV 708–745)
• odyssey (Homer, esp. i 326–352, iv 100–243, viii 73–540)
• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1994)
• nagy-best-of-achaeans (Nagy 1979)
• caswell-study-thumos-early (Caswell 1990)
• The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (Konstan 2006) — not yet a library page
• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953)
• A Blue Fire (Hillman 1989) — drawing from hillman-revisioning-psychology and hillman-alchemical-psychology