# Lament A mourner does not simply weep; she argues with the dead. Margaret Alexiou’s study of the Greek tradition shows lament built on a ternary architecture, address, narrative, renewed address, in which praise and reproach, past and present, self and dead are held in a balance of opposites that she takes as the very basis of thought in the genre. Tragedy universalizes the form: in the choral odes a single death widens into an assessment of the futility of human life as such. The vocabulary confirms codification rather than spontaneity: Homeric usage already differentiates thrēnos from góos, a distinction classical writers later blurred, while the modern folk moirológia preserve the archaic antiphonal dialogue between living and dead. Even Christian liturgy could not escape the inheritance: Alexiou finds the Byzantine Epitáphios Thrēnos for Christ, with its weeping mother and beautiful dying son, closest in affinity to the ancient laments for Adonis. Murray Stein, reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies, gives the form its psychological charge, taking the legend of Linos as the mythic moment when daring first music pierced grief’s parched numbness. ## Primary passages ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > it is precisely this kind of balance of opposites which forms the basis for the development of thought in the lament throughout Greek tradition. --- ### Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998 > Is the legend of no avail, how in the lament about Linos daring first music once pierced through parched numbness; how it was only in startled space, which an almost divine youth had suddenly stepped from for ever, where emptiness first entered that motion that sweeps us away now and comforts and helps us. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > This is ternary form, ABA, in which the opening section, an address or appeal, is reinforced and modified by the intervening narrative of the second section. While by no means every lament conforms to this pattern, there is a sufficient number of examples, early and late, to establish its traditional basis beyond doubt. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > the protest to fate or lament for oneself, elaborated in drama to the highest point of tragic art, continued to flourish in popular tradition. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Two of the commonest words for lament are thrênos and góos. Although used with little distinction of meaning by classical writers, Homeric usage shows some differentiation. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > the dialogue between living and dead, performed by two antiphonal groups of mourners, is still a significant element in the modern moirológia, many of which are, precisely, laments ‘uttered by the dead man or by his tomb’. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > In the choral odes of tragedy it is extended from the essentially self centred expression of grief for one person’s death into a tragic assessment of the futility of human life in general. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > in its obsessive concern with the weeping mother and the beauty of the dying son, its closest affinities are with the ancient laments for Adonis. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > the mourner had died instead of the dead, or that they had died together, or that neither had ever been born; second, that the death had occurred at a different time or place, or in a different manner; and third, that the enemy of the dead might suffer the same fate. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > this ancient tradition of eastern origins was transformed and diversified in Greek mythology and literature into a fully personified story, sometimes involving violent death during hunting. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > at the laying out, both kinswomen and strangers, but more especially the latter, concentrate on praising the dead in a series of formal and well ordered verses in the third person, drawing from a common fund of conventional topoi. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Today there has been a great cry, the sun has darkened on the plain of Soloteri . . . Today there has been an earthquake . . . There is winter blackness, and day has turned into night. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > each fifteen syllable line of these laments may be followed by a refrain of eight or five syllables. Usually the number of syllables in the refrain is constant throughout, while the actual phrase may be varied. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > It is my mother who is weeping for me, and my wretched wife, with pain, with complaint, and with bitter grief. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > the old woman in a lonely house who, when awakened at midnight by the Nereids as they brought in a dead man and began a ritual lament for him, did not hesitate to join their lamentation, and was rewarded in the morning. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Moirologô would be exactly appropriate to such a practice. Even if the word is a hapax legomenon in ancient Greek, it is rooted in ancient traditional beliefs. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Elderly women at the tomb lament antiphonally for a child, probably at a memorial after the funeral, since the cross has been erected. On the grave are placed fruit and food, which are shared out among the women after the lament is finished. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Hymenaios has quenched every marriage torch on the doorposts and has torn the bridal crown to shreds, changing his usual song to Hymen into a lament for Adonis. --- ### Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974 > Epitáphios Thrênos (BG, MG): lament for Christ’s death and burial chanted in the Orthodox service on the evening of Good Friday and the morning of Easter Saturday. --- Canonical page: https://www.seba.health/concordance/lament/