Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry 0198884575, 9780198884576

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Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece ANDROMACHE KARANIKA

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Andromache Karanika 2024 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2024938182 ISBN 978–0–19–888457–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Δήμῳ, πόσει ἐσθλῷ θυμολέοντι

Acknowledgements This book began many years ago, as I often wondered why there is so much interest in lament but less so in other oral genres, such as work songs or wedding songs. I have come to think that we are haunted by what I call the necropolis syndrome in disciplines that study the past. Just as much of archaeological knowledge stems from cemeteries and rituals around death, philology had its own share of that. It is almost as if there is a hidden sacred order in how we study things. My own fascination with feeling like an archaeologist of literature and with what literature does not tell us began more consciously during my time at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. in 2009–10 when I was working primarily on different projects. During that time, I started exploring the wedding theme in archaic and classical Greek poetry. Earlier drafts of my research were presented as lectures or talks. I have benefited from the feedback I have received by colleagues at many places (in order of presentations): Temple University; College of William and Mary; Smith College; Bates College; Harvard University; University of Texas at Austin; University of Kansas; UCLA; University of Washington; Florida State University; Fudan University; Shanghai Normal University; National Hellenic Museum in Chicago; Johns Hopkins University; UC San Diego, University of Virginia, and at different conferences, especially the annual meetings of CAMWS and the Celtic Conference in Classics in the last couple of years. A part of the section on “Seeing” in Chapter 1, on the Iliad’s Teichoskopia, has appeared in an earlier version in Trends in Classics (Karanika 2013); I am indebted to the article’s anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editors, Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos. I was extremely fortunate to have had a mentor in my graduate work who has provided an exemplum for me over the years: Richard Martin, ever kind and polytropos, read the entire manuscript before I sent it to the press. He caught multiple infelicities and helped me with both the big picture and small details of this book. I am grateful to him for all the help he has generously provided from my early graduate student years and on. I cherished the feedback from colleagues and friends who have read earlier drafts or discussed ideas in this book and I have benefited from conversations, small and big, that opened new vistas for me and helped me conceptualize and articulate materials presented in this book. Some of these conversations go back to my early years in the profession. I am grateful to Justin Arft, Antony Augustakis, Egbert Bakker, Yelena Baraz, David Frankfurter, Andreas Gavrielatos, Zina Giannopoulou, Mary and Jerry Gutenschwager, Emily Hauser, Aleah Hernandez, Karen Hersch, Vangelis Kyriakidis, André Lardinois, Seth Lerer, Olga Levaniouk,

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Vayos Liapis, Lisa Maurizio, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Gregory Nagy, Sarah Nooter, Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi, Nassos Papalexandrou, Anastasia E. Peponi, Ioannis Petropoulos, Vassiliki Rapti, Ruth Scodel, Richard Snyder, Eva Stehle, Christos Tsagalis, Angeliki Tzanetou, Erika Weiberg, Xiaoqun Wu, Maria Vamvouri, and Andreas Vlachopoulos. Andrew Zissos provided constant and invaluable intellectual and moral support. I owe the profoundest debt to Stratis Kyriakidis and Eleni Peraki Kyriakidou, my inspiring teachers from my undergraduate years in Thessaloniki, for their help and guidance throughout my academic journey. Thanks are due to my students who have heard me talk about this work, some of whom were in my Greek classes in which we read passages that I discuss in this book: Leonidas Aparicio, Taryn Boon, Angel Castillo, Mollie Chambers, Colette Johns, Arianna Kosiek, and Melina Koumantos. Josiah Ober was the first to point my research direction to the study of oral genres in Greek literature, and I owe a lot to his thinking. I am indebted to Véronique Dasen for her encouragement and insightful feedback on my work with games and the ludic context, which also informs this book. Laura McClure and Melissa Mueller have helped me throughout my career as friends and interlocutors on women in antiquity and have shared generously their work before publication. Corinne O. Pache was a kind reader whom I considered a kindred spirit, and I can only lament that she left us so soon. Vassiliki Panoussi, colleague, collaborator, and friend, has always been a source of support. Andrej Petrovic and Ivana Petrovic have helped me sharpen my thinking, broaden my vision, and discussed ancient and modern comparanda with me. Silvia Montiglio, whose own adventurous and bold mind in our field has been inspiring me, has revealed herself as one of my readers. I owe a lot to her guidance. Barbara Graziosi provided much-needed feedback and encouragement in the last stages of revisions. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript during the refereeing process and the review process for a promotion in my own institution. All the readers helped me improve the manuscript immensely and their generosity has meant a lot. Any errors that remain are entirely my own. Tyrus Miller, the Humanities Dean, Nasrin Rahimieh, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Associate Deans of Humanities at UC Irvine have been very supportive. Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the UC Irvine Humanities Center. My writing group at UC Irvine, and the dean’s initiative to help women and non-binary associate professors advance their research came at an opportune moment. I couldn’t have done this without the help of Amanda Swain and my colleagues from different departments in the School of Humanities: Catherine Benamou, Anke Biendarra, Viviana Mahieux, Nancy McLoughlin, Laura Mitchell, Laura O’ Connor, Alison Pearlman, Catherine Sameh, Roberta Wue, and everyone in our writing groups, as also Susan Klein and Joe McKenna who were always there for me. I am very grateful to Charlotte Loveridge at Oxford University Press for her rigorous work with this project, her support throughout, and her care. Jamie Mortimer, Saranya Ravi, and Kim Richardson and the managing and copyediting

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team at Oxford University Press have made the production process very smooth. Scott Garner provided valuable help in the last stages of this work and prepared the indices. Last but not least, thanks are owed to my husband, James Dimarogonas, and children, Andrew Dimarogonas and Ariadne Dimarogona, for their love and support throughout. I wrote this book for much of the time that my children went from middle and high school into college and their adult lives, and thinking about childhood and adulthood has shaped much of my thinking on the ancient world. During this period, I was encumbered with substantial professional service, from serving as a journal editor to department chair and CAMWS president, while also dealing with personal and family health issues. And, while I would have liked to have finished it earlier than I did, the external struggles made my ongoing nostos to this work a pleasure. Writing this book entailed a lot of doing and undoing, as with most of our work, a reminder of a Penelopean life in our profession.

Contents Note on Editions, Translations, Abbreviations, and Transliteration List of Figures

Introduction Entextualizing the Wedding Repertoire Book Overview 1. The Shadow of a Wedding: Sensing Archaic Poetics Seeing

xiii xv

1 8 10 14 14

Viewing from the Doorway Viewing from the Walls: A View into the Poetics of Weddings Lyric Looks and Half Bodies

14 18 27

Hearing Hearing Female Voices Hearing the Gossip? Inversion of a Wedding Ritual Tasting A Bride’s Trauma and a Bard’s Performance of Memory: A Bridal Catabasis Perspective from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter Touching Chasing a Hero, Changing into a Goddess: Nuptial Discourse and Context in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite Smelling Scents of a Wedding: Processions, Gifts, and Hidden Ideologies

32 32 37 39

2. The Poetics of Childhood: Wedding, Song, and Performance Typical Features of a Wedding Performance Salutations Makarismos Eikasia Picture Perfect and Iconic Couples: Looking Like a God, Seeming Like a Bride

Ludic Poetics and Tangible Time: Sappho’s “Weaving” and Gendered Temporality in Archaic Greek Performance Weaving Interruptions: Funeral and Wedding Motifs Ludic Sappho Hymenaios Hymenaios: The Sounds of Wedding Depicting Hymenaios Rustic Poetics Paean, Laments, Ululations, and Cries: A View into Sounds Wedding Songs and Laments: Not the Right Genre The Voice of the Maiden: Reading Iphigeneia’s Voices

39 51 51 60 60

70 70 70 72 78 84

89 89 94 102 102 110 114 122 125 130

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 Wedding Imagery Talking Trees: The Epithalamion Tradition in Theocritus Apples and Flowers

132 132 139

3. Returns and Nostoi: Recovering the Experience of the Bride Returns

144 144

Girls and Rituals: Weddings, Lament, and the Twisted Female Nostos Emblematic Couples—Problematic Stories: Escapes Generational Dysphoria: From Medea to Creusa Violence, Girlhood, and Motherhood in Myth: The Case of Euripides’s Ion Marriage and the Complexity of the Female Nostos Chryseis as a Heroine of Nostos Brides of Hades: A Female Catabasis The Return of the Bride Singing the Bridal Dress Haunted Returns

4. Decoding the Nuptial Poetics Multiple Codes in a Spin: Homer, Erinna, and Visions of Spinning from Early to Late Antiquity Spinning: Introduction Spinning in Homer and Classical Literature Spinning: From Literary to Visual Narratives and Anthropological Comparanda Erinna and Broken Friendships: Playing the Bride, Writing in Codes

144 151 159

163 166 166 169 173 173 178

184 184 184 185 195 200

The Poetics of Materiality Material Gifts and Flowing Tears Procession of Gifts: Networks of Voice, Networks of Matter Bride and Groom: Poetics of Materiality Addressing the Groom The Poetics of Interrogation Coming like a Groom: Homeric and Sapphic High Roofs Sappho’s Heights Door-Keeping Orestes as a Groom Body Landscapes and Emotions Emotion and the Face Bridal Landscape in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 6 Deceiving Zeus, Staging Desire: An Early Greek Ars Amatoria Dios Apatē and the Didactic: Art of Love Hera’s Oath (Il. 14.270–9) More Nuptial Poetics: Zeus and His Lovers The Bride and the Song: Comparative Approaches

207 207 210 214 217 217 222 223 225 227 229 229 233 236 236 240 242 244

Conclusions

251

Works Cited Index Locorum Index

255 275 282

Note on Editions, Translations, Abbreviations, and Transliteration For the ancient Greek texts, I generally follow the Oxford Classical Texts. For the text of Homer, I follow Allen’s edition in five volumes (Allen 1912); for the Homeric hymns, I cite the edition by Allen, Halliday, and Sikes (Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1936); for the text of Sappho and Alcaeus, I use the Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Lobel and Page 1955, reprinted in 1963). For the Hesiodic fragments, I use Merkelbach and West (noted as M-W, Merkelbach and West 1967, as it was supplemented in 1990 by Merkelbach and West, in the section Fragmenta Selecta, in Solmsen 1990). For Sophocles, I follow Lloyd-Jones and Wilson 1990. For Euripides, I use Diggle 1994. For Posidippus, I use Austin and Bastianini 2002. For Erinna, I follow the Lloyd-Jones and Parsons text in Supplementum Hellenisticum for the most part (Lloyd-Jones and Parsons 1983). For the Modern Greek materials, I generally follow Politēs 1925. For other references, I follow the texts and editions used by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®). All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I follow the conventions of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th ed.) for the names and works of ancient authors cited and other relevant abbreviations. Journal abbreviations follow the conventions of L’Année Philologique. I have transliterated most of the Greek names and terms throughout this book. I have used the English or Latinized versions of names (e.g., Helen, Iphigeneia, Achilles, and not Akhilles or other forms) with the exception of proper names that also refer to musical genres (e.g., I prefer Hymenaios/hymenaios and only use Hymenaeus when I refer to Latin sources). For other terms, I have followed the Library of Congress transliteration system.

List of Figures 0.1 Pointed Nose Painter, Attic black-figured “Tyrrhenian” amphora depicting a wedding procession, with a combat scene on the other side, c.550–545 . Terracotta, 47.2  29.7 cm (18 9/16  11 11/16 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California, Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, 96.AE.311. Public domain, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/107SM8#full-artwork-details.

3

1.1 Painter of Athens 1714, side B from an Apulian red-figured lebes gamikos depicting a woman and a youth, c.360–350 . H. 38.5 cm (15 in.), diam. 21 cm (8 ¼ in.). Campana Collection, 1861, K 196, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, the Louvre. Picture available through Commons Licensing, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Lebes_gamikos_Louvre_K196.jpg.

31

1.2 Terracotta bell-krater (bowl for mixing wine and water) attributed to the Persephone Painter depicting the ascension of Persephone from the underworld, c.440 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/252973

45

2.1 Terracotta squat lekythos (oil flask) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a seated woman facing Eros, c.420 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/244814

82

2.2 Red-figured kylix attributed to the Oedipus Painter depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes, c.470 , from Vulci. Vatican Museums, inv. no. 16541. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 generic license, https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Oedipus_and_the_Sphinx_of_Thebes,_Red_Figure_Kylix, _c._470_BC,_from_Vulci,_attributed_to_the_Oedipus_Painter, _Vatican_Museums_(9665213064).jpg.

83

2.3 Attic black-figured volute krater known as the François Vase, c.570–565 , Museo Archeologico, Firenze. By permission of Art Resource. Photo Credit: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

85

2.4 Attic red-figured pyxis decorated with marriage preparations. The seated bridal figure outstretches her right hand to accept a box from the woman standing before her. A woman with a beaded necklace stands behind the bride. Attributed to the Eretria Painter, c.440–415 . © The Trustees of the British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/284209001.

111

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  

4.1 Terracotta pyxis with lid, attributed to the Painter of Philadelphia 2449 depicting an interior scene with women conversing and working wool, c.460 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247535.

193

4.2 Master of Erfurt, Virgin Mary with a Distaff. Undated. Oil on canvas on wood, 27  19 cm. Inv. 1874. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Art Resource. Photo: Joerg P. Anders.

198

4.3 Attic red-figured double pyxis representing the epaulia, c.360–350 . Antikensammlung Berlin/Altes Museum, Inventar-Nr. 3373. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

211

4.4 Attic terracotta hydria: kalpis (water jar) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a bride with attendants and Eros, c.430–420 , H. 12 1/4 in. (31.1 cm), D. 9 1/8 in. (23.2 cm). Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1922, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/251203.

246

4.5 Attic terracotta lebes gamikos (round-bottomed bowl with handles and stand used in weddings) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a seated bride playing music with attendants, c.430–420 , H. 20 1/8 in. (51.1 cm), D. 8 3/4 in. (22.2 cm). Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247915.

248

4.6 Attic terracotta loutrophoros (ceremonial vase for water) depicting a bride and groom scene, c.400 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/244821.

249

Introduction The main goals of this book are to uncover the poetics of nuptial performances and how they shaped ancient Greek literature. A time filled with a great range of emotions, intense negotiations, and often unwanted migration from one’s home, a wedding is typically considered a rite of passage. As such, it navigates a transition for the private citizen, the polis, and the broader community. A well-studied and well-documented ritual for classical times in a plethora of archaeological sources, weddings were formalized in an extensive spectrum of time, while local variations gave it different nuances from place to place and time to time. Although primarily a family matter, ancient weddings were usually validated through a public procession that ended up at the groom’s oikos, engaging multiple households and involving individuals, families, and the village or civic context.¹ I first trace the wedding song tradition, its imagery, and tropes, seeking to explore how wedding poetics permeates ancient Greek literature, how it registered wedding performances in different genres, especially epic, lyric, and drama. Orally circulating texts, such as wedding songs, could have a life of their own but, beyond their original context, could also become an integral part of a different genre, especially epic and drama. I argue that what we now read within a literary frame preserves other oral genres—mostly lost to us, such as the wedding songs—and channels the complexity of human experience, behaviors, and emotions. The wedding ritual and theme have received significant scholarly attention both on their own and as part of broader gender studies and a gendered approach to Greek literature. John Oakley and Rebecca Sinos conducted a full-scale and detailed analysis of Greek classical iconography that depicts nuptial scenes, ranging from the betrothal to preparations for the procession, the repositioning of the bride in her new home, and rituals following the wedding night.² The betrothal (engyēsis) was primarily a negotiation and agreement between the groom and the father or guardian of the much younger bride. The wedding ceremony itself lasted ¹ As Redfield 2003: 111 notes, “Greek marriage is a family affair, in both its juridical and ritual aspects; a marriage is a private contract, which is not licensed or recorded by the state, and it is a family festival, which needs no priest or special invocation of the gods beyond those usual at family meals.” ² For a description of wedding rituals in ancient Greece and the wedding iconography, see Oakley and Sinos 1993: 9–47. See also Nilsson 1960; Redfield 1982; Hague 1988; Lissarrague 1996; Sabetai 1998; Sutton 1997–1998; Larsson Lovén and Strömberg 2010; Sabetai 2019. For the wedding ceremonies as a three-day affair, but also a discussion of iconography and different customs, see Oakley 2020: 189–211. For music, dance, and weddings, see Lambin 1992: 77–104; Lonsdale 1993: 206–33; Kauffmann-Samaras 1996; Oakley 2004; Budelmann and Power 2015: 261–5.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0001

2

, ,    

over three days. The first day would be the proaulia, which included bridal preparations, feasts at the bride’s house, and ritual offerings to the gods, especially Artemis and Athena, the so-called proteleia. The divinities of the proteleia were typically female.³ The proteleia, which could include the dedication of toys or other markers of girlhood, was the part of the marriage typically seen as the first rite of passage and as a part of nuptial rituals that showcases intersections with civic rituals.⁴ It is arguably one of the best-attested rituals in iconography and literature. The second day was the gamos, involving the married couple’s procession into the new home. During the gamos, following a bridal ritual bath, the procession (often with a chariot) was a central feature. This was the most popular scene on vases, already from black-figured vases (see Fig. 0.1), with red-figured vases depicting such nuptial processions from the late sixth to the fourth centuries.⁵ The third day was the epaulia, which involved the relatives and the community presenting gifts. The ancient sources indicate that gifts were presented to the bride in her new home and that they would be brought to the new home as part of a parade-like procession.⁶ Such processions were elaborate and had prescribed roles for different people and their movements. A boy carrying a torch would lead the procession; then a girl holding a basket would follow, and others would ensue bearing the gifts and the bride’s dowry. This gift giving has left its own mark on the archaeological record, and we know that gifts such as pots and vases, furniture, garments, and often jewelry and perfume for the new bride would be common. Lacking a marriage certificate or anything of the sort, the legitimation of a wedding depended on its public character. Despite it being a family affair, a wedding is witnessed by many.⁷ Any utterance, song, or ritual activity is a multidimensional socio-cultural expression. In ancient Greek weddings, relatives and other people could participate in different roles, and the setting of the spectacle throughout presented the bride as a protagonist, as the archaeological record eloquently showcases. The archaeological record presents us with snippets or brief vignettes of different moments, while the literary record gives us snapshots of possible wedding performances. While Greek cities had different laws, customs, and practices, there was a public tendency for regulation. Greek literature projects subtle ideologies about what ³ Pollux 3.38 mentions Artemis, the Moira, and Hera teleia. The nymphs are mentioned in Plutarch, Narr. Amat. 772b. ⁴ As Redfield 2003: 111 remarks, the proteleia exhibits intersections with the civic religion of precinct and temple; such examples can include the sanctuary of Nymphe in Athens outside the gates of the Acropolis or the sanctuary of Alexandra at Amyklae in Sparta. Other heroic sanctuaries that could have been places of proteleia are places dedicated to young women such as Iphinoe at Megara (Pausanias 1.43.4) or the Hyperborean Maidens at Delos (Herodotus 4.32–5). Prenuptial baths of the bodies (in myth and in cult) can find parallels in the bathing of cult images, see J. Larson 2001: 111. ⁵ Oakley: 2020: 202. ⁶ Eustathius’s commentary on Iliad 24.29, quoting Pausanias. See Oakley 2020: 208. ⁷ Several nuptial contracts survive from later times, especially Hellenistic Egypt. On marriage contracts for that period and the documentary practice, see Rupprecht 1998.

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3

Figure 0.1 Pointed Nose Painter, Attic black-figured “Tyrrhenian” amphora depicting a wedding procession, with a combat scene on the other side, c.550–545 . Terracotta, 47.2  29.7 cm (18 9/16  11 11/16 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California, Gift of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, 96.AE.311. Public domain, https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/107SM8#full-artworkdetails.

4

, ,    

constitutes a legitimate and productive marriage with the polis in mind.⁸ A good part of our record focuses on the ritual and celebratory aspects, with the free Athenian citizens being the target group. Metics were allowed to participate in many of the same rituals. More research needs to be done for us to have a clearer sense for the slave population.⁹ Certain periods have pursued nuptial themes in the evolving narratives about the oikos and the polis.¹⁰ Weddings are a marked ritual: they highlight change in people’s lives, and this happens in a way that is pronounced through actions, words, and ceremonies. It is an extraordinary event for most that usually doesn’t happen often and bears consequences on one’s life, livelihood, and identity. It offers the opportunity for celebration, music, and dance. However, given the ancient parameters of female agency and the early marriage age for women, the highly ritualized wedding processes mask the brides’ personal reactions—their deeper feelings about what could be a traumatic entrance into adulthood, as well as the feelings of the people close to them. Therefore, it is no surprise that death and marriage have an intimate interweaving of themes; look at the apparent similarities between funerals and weddings, from the washing of the dead body to its presentation and the funeral procession as parallels to the ritual washing of the bride’s body and the wedding procession. Part of my work has been inspired and informed by the many studies on ancient lamentation.¹¹ Lamentation, although not exclusively female, has been regarded as a platform for women’s speech and song but also a genre that has challenged social norms and often had to be restricted. Laments and wedding songs are oral works of art sharing familiar tropes and imagery, and they have both been widely popular vehicles for exploring the female presence in poetry.¹² The crossroads between wedding and death in imagery and ritual have been noted in classical scholarship. As Rush Rehm has shown with his groundbreaking study, drama intensely explores those themes.¹³ Tragedies like Sophocles’s Antigone or Euripides’s two Iphigeneias structure their narrative on how weddings are negated and how they can resemble death for the leading figures of the play and others around them. The staged uniqueness of both events—something that radically changes, if not ends, people’s lives as they knew it—makes their joint explorations a fertile field of unfolding mythic narratives. By using research that acknowledges the intersections between the two genres, I dive into the area of wedding performances that, like lament, have left a significant mark on ancient literature. ⁸ See A. C. Smith 2005 with an analysis of the iconographic evidence. ⁹ Foxhall 2013. ¹⁰ Badnall 2009: 108–9, 208–10; Pomeroy 1997. ¹¹ See Caraveli-Chaves 1980; Holst-Warhaft 1992; Rossi 1999; Holst-Warhaft 2000; Alexiou 2002; Dué 2002; Loraux 2002; Tsagalis 2004; Suter 2008; Martin 2008. ¹² For wedding songs in ancient Greece, see Contiades-Tsitsoni 1990; Badnall 2009; MacLachlan 2012: 34–41; Calame 2013: 116–25. For the interweaving of the theme of death and marriage in Greek imagination, see Jenkyns 1983; Seaford 1987; Redfield 2003; Foley 1994: 81–2, 104–5; Rehm 1994. ¹³ Rehm 1994.

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Moreover, while lament on the surface may seem to affirm patriarchal norms, it becomes subtly a channel that uses public performance and traditional speech to voice the female experience and emotion. From that perspective, nuptial performances present a complex and nuanced parallel case: wedding poetry builds on easily discernible typified discourse—such as external praise—and ritual discourse. Rituals like lamentation and weddings give a structure and path to navigate difficult lifetime events. The shock of death is easier to address when individuals or communities go through prescribed behavior.¹⁴ One follows an inherited path; there is little room for change or innovation. People steer emotional reactions through rituals by structuring actions or gestures or coordinating physical behavior. Rituals are performances, and as such, they stage how bodies and discourse express themselves. They have a set of words, hymns, or songs, often in a ceremonial setting and sequence. Silences are circumscribed, too. From greeting to eating, every detail for different activities follows a path forged by tradition. Weddings and funerals are often thought together. As Redfield notes, “the bride, like the corpse, is washed, perfumed, adorned with ribbons (tainiai) and crowned.”¹⁵ As famous movie titles (Four Weddings and a Funeral) hint at humorously, they are both distinct events that invite some communal participation. Community participation validates them. This detailed prescribing of every inch of human activity in certain events can be functional or even liberating because participants do not need to think of every detail. It can also be suffocating; rituals bring codification that allows for little maneuvering or individualization. Rituals, and especially wedding rituals, stage every movement and reaction—the way people dress, what they say or eat, how they walk. There is little room for deviation. It forms and imposes social groups (relatives, friends, in-laws), as people are often transformed into roles, having to adhere to expected duties. Lament has received significant scholarly attention, and the context of a funeral provides for rigorous and detailed elements, from the preparation of the body to communal dinners based on local customs and practices. Weddings present some similar patterns across many centuries and different cultures. There is often an expectation for prescribed behaviors in weddings. From the participants’ list to the processions and precise movements of the bride and group to the feast that follows a wedding, everything takes place in an almost scripted manner. At the same time, having a set of expectations facilitates and channels human movement and the expression of emotion even while restricting them. As Ronald Grimes writes, not every passage is a rite of passage, and passages “can be negotiated without the benefit of rites,” but rites afford a channeling mechanism, a

¹⁴ For ritual as prescribed behavior, see V. Turner 1967: 19–20.

¹⁵ Redfield 1982: 188.

6

, ,    

way through which people know how to behave. Rituals show the process and a set of expectations for those who participate but they retain reactions and emotions surrounding times of transition.¹⁶ As I argue here, the subtle nuances of the individual experience are registered in the formulaic elements of such rituals. Ancient texts capture the crystallized elements of the wedding song tradition, such as the expected praise for a bride and groom or other distinct nuptial features. They echo social processes as well as the sensation and sentiment they provoke. The sources that survive from antiquity are far more sensitive absorbers of human experience and emotion than we know. Weddings are often thought of as rites of passage. The term “rite of passage” is used to explore ways in which specific transitions in life are ritualized, as they constitute landmark points in private and public life worth celebrating or commemorating. Van Gennep’s tripartite division into separation, liminality, and incorporation has vastly influenced different approaches to what constitutes a rite, a passage, and a rite of passage.¹⁷ Although not necessarily conforming to concepts of human lifetime (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), this notion of entrance into a new phase, especially from childhood/adolescence into adulthood, permeates studies of human experience and expression in different fields.¹⁸ This book argues that the Greek wedding song, an integral part of a ritual seemingly thought of as a rite of passage, does not fully support the idea of a rite of passage but rather works toward its opposite: the nuptial tradition at its core registers a sentiment that goes against the notion of migration to another phase and place underscoring the idea of a return to one’s former home and self. To argue this, I look at the poetics of weddings and performances around weddings portrayed in Greek literature with a focus on the female experience. As I argue throughout this book, the surviving vestiges of wedding lore consistently make a gesture to the past. In other words, the passage registered through a wedding looks back in one’s time rather than forward. A wedding is often an interlude that facilitates, from a temporal perspective, a desire to return to an earlier phase of life, and Greek literature absorbed that. Early years are formative and take a grip on one’s life. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts maintain that those early childhood years unconsciously define future behaviors. In a way, everything is a return to one’s past—or is defined by our past. When analyzing narratives from the perspective of time and temporality, we often see that the ancient Greek wedding performance carries as its theme the projected trauma and steers the female experience not to the future but rather the past. Although informed by contemporary trauma theory and psychoanalysis, this is not meant to be a psychoanalytic study, nor is it a historical study. By seeking how

¹⁶ Grimes 2000: 15. ¹⁷ Van Gennep 1960. For recent criticism, see Graf 2003. ¹⁸ For childhood in ancient Greece, see Neils and Oakley 2003; Cohen and Rutter 2007; Golden 2015; Morillo 2018.

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traditional discourse has become an integral part of epic, lyric, and drama, we can further decipher the tropes and imagery of nuptial poetics as reflections of lived experience. Treating ancient literature within the nexus of lived experiences necessitates an anthropological approach. In anthropology, ritual practice and discourse are regarded as a tool to maintain social order and a necessary cohesive element for community building.¹⁹ As such, it transforms individual and collective experience emotionally as well.²⁰ One of the crucial expressive functions of laments in general, and of women’s laments in particular, is to address the deceased.²¹ Expressive statements (e.g., “you are leaving me a widow”) or interrogative remarks (“why are you leaving me?”) are frequent as a way to talk with the deceased in a last act. Similarly, in weddings, addressing the bride or the groom in a formulaic manner creates the ritual space. Performative utterances have a functional power, as they create reality. This is even more prominent in wedding scenes, where addressing the people and assigning roles to them (“groom” or “bride”) has a functional aspect. While some perspectives that analyze ritual poetics have focused on the “power” of language and how language and ritual have enduring influence, other trends go beyond the socio-cultural realm.²² The ritual space is the platform that manages personal and social expectations, tensions, and even emotions. For years, emotion has been a focal point among anthropologists from different perspectives: the universality of emotion, power mechanisms, or how cultural forces, such as language, shape emotions.²³ The discourse around weddings, even at the micro-level with brief salutations or other typical features, navigates a plurality of emotions for the participants. The anthropologist Victor Turner wrote that he “came to see performances of ritual as distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups became adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment.”²⁴ Although this is part of Turner’s greater theory and how he approaches different rituals, rites of passage, and their symbolism, we see that there is a foundational difference between the internal and the external environment, the events around one’s life and the reactions or sentiments that emerge out of them. Rituals can be mediators between the two. The vestiges that survive in ancient Greek literature of the nuptial performance tradition can be regarded as the external environment reflecting internal changes. But these should not be construed as opposites but rather as complementary and interpenetrating categories. After all, as scholars

¹⁹ Durkheim 1965 and Duranti 1997a: 1. ²⁰ Silverstein 2003: 38. ²¹ For anthropological work on Jewish lament (with a focus on women who were born in Yemen and moved to Israel), see Madar 2014. ²² Speech act theory enormously influenced our understanding of ritual poetics; see Austin 1962. For ritual poetics, see Urban 2001. ²³ For an overview of the most important trends in emotion research, see Wilce 2014. ²⁴ V. Turner 1967: 20.

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, ,    

have argued, “Expression organizes experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction.”²⁵ Precisely because expression channels experience by its mere utterance, stylization, and ultimately the expectation of a certain type of discourse, we need to acknowledge that a ritual poetics makes room for expressing experience and emotion, arguably even when circumscribing emotion and reaction. As Grimes has argued, “unlike objects, events happen then evaporate.”²⁶ They touch people and their communities, though, in profound ways.

Entextualizing the Wedding Repertoire Oral literary texts are in an undoubtedly unique position to absorb multiple voices and reactions from the performers and audience. As oral texts become transcribed, the dynamics of the moment are lost. The performers build their performances from a repertoire of myths, narrative types, and styles common to their audiences as they individualize and create their own products. In this dynamic process, other distinct genres are embedded into bigger narratives. As texts are abstracted from their originary, socio-culturally situated contexts, they begin a different journey in a new ensemble. This detachability of certain oral genres makes them distinct and simultaneously visible to the trained eye. Oral genres are not merely textual entities on their own or as part of a repertoire (as in the case of nuptial performances), but rather they are part of a greatly prescribed choreography of gestures, movements, and ritual activities. The textual elements I focus on in this book are small parts of complex social interactions. As those distinct oral products are lifted from their social context, the entextualization process makes them part of another textual tradition, which itself is part of ever-changing social interactions between performers and audiences. Nevertheless, recontextualization, when oral texts become integral parts of a different, often larger genre, acknowledges the originary contexts of production and even retains these interactional residues.²⁷ Recent anthropological work has discussed entextualization and replication, namely the attempt to reproduce the original context in the new context—in other words, exploring power dynamics by thinking of the anthropologist as someone who transcribes, preserves, and analyzes oral materials. Transcription of an oral text is not void of the original context that shapes it.²⁸ For example, while

²⁵ Volosinov 1973 [1929]: 85. ²⁶ Grimes 2014: 95. ²⁷ For the processes of entextualization, which I have used in my previous work (Karanika 2014) following Karin Barber’s exceptional anthropological work, see Barber 2007. I add to this by studying further the phenomenon from both a linguistics and an anthropology angle. The terms in italics refer to how these terms are used in Silverstein and Urban 1996 (introduction) and Urban 1996. For an excellent use of this theoretical approach in Classics, see Ready 2019: 15–23 and passim. ²⁸ Urban 1996.

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Greg Urban was in the P.I. Ibirama community in southern Brazil, he involved two men, one young and one old, to carry out transcriptions of tape-recorded discourse. There were substantial differences between how the two men situated themselves vis-à-vis the anthropologist; certain elements were easier and permissible to transcribe, such as the wailing performances, while others were more difficult. While Urban’s work is important for how anthropology works, using it to understand the oral processes can be further illuminating. In my previous work, I didn’t dwell on the question of whether ancient oral texts have a deliberate collector of detachable genres who replicates them in a way that fits the new narrative and entextualizes and recontextualizes them. In this book, I assume that there is deliberation in this process. In other words, including nuptial performances in an epic or adapting them in lyric poetry is not an innocent act—it involves a power dynamic. In the way Odysseus can listen to the Sirens, consume their song, and reproduce it at will, an epic or lyric performer, as also a tragic or comic poet, adapts shorter oral genres or adjusts the bigger narrative to a complex song tradition.²⁹ By doing so, performers consume those oral genres and give them new context as part of an overarching performative genre—and what matters for us even more, they crystallize them, by making them distinct elements of a different genre. The Odyssey analogy operates on many levels: just as the Sirens’ song comes to us through Odysseus as the principal narrator that encapsulates the performer’s task, similarly, vestiges of the wedding repertoire shaped and survived in other, often more expansive narratives. Odysseus’s episode with the Sirens shows every deliberation from the performer’s perspective: he triumphs over a struggle. But he also gives nuance and alternate voicing in his narrative. If this kind of mythical deliberation projected on the Odyssey holds—namely, having an agon between the solo and the collective, the male and the female, the voices that claim to know everything and the voices that adapt to others—then it might be more revealing for how a performer can see competitively other modes of music and performance and absorb them as part of a new ensemble. The best strategy for a competitive performer of this sort is to encompass the other voices. We have, in other words, a dominant literary world: like the big company that can easily savor new ideas and talent by buying them and making them a part of the big stock, poetic talent entextualizes the multiple voices, often of shorter genres, creating an oral text that has embodied a different tonality and musicality. As poets and performers polish the epic fabric, one should not forget that the wandering poets of the archaic world were professional poets who earned a living by performing their own pieces as they were echoing other performance genres. By doing so, they diversify their plot,

²⁹ For the Sirens episode in the Odyssey, see Doherty 1995, and for internal audiences and gender in the Odyssey, see Doherty 1992. For the Sirens’ song, see Pucci 1979 and 1998; Nugent 2008; Grethlein 2017: 3–15.

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, ,    

voicing, and performance, and they utilize tradition and familiarity, making their poetic product more appealing to audiences that are attuned to such performances. Such audiences could recognize the more minor oral genres within the larger performative context. Conversely, what gets crystallized through entextualization becomes definitive and normative in the process of literary transmission throughout the centuries. We understand how wedding performances worked by studying how they interacted with the poetic corpus within which they survived, such as epic or lyric poetry. They remain traceable as part of a different poetic program and agenda, and we may have a distorted sense of how they worked in performance on their own. What kind of music was there? What kind of gestures? Was there a ritualized movement? How were the audiences supposed to react? Was there commotion? Was there silence? We may never find accurate answers to these questions, but we can at least try to dive more deeply into their significance.

Book Overview This book is divided into four chapters, each with five sections. The first chapter senses Greek poetics with a focus on epic poetry: it discusses several texts with an intent view of how the different senses dominate in different genres, showing an aesthetic choice. It uses the five senses to examine a range of separate narratives, all refracting wedding poetics. From seeing to tasting, some narratives seem particularly invested in those senses in ways that need to be explored further; reading them together affords us a unique view of how multi-aesthetic ancient Greek poetry was. Poetry depends on mobilizing a sensual experience in an oral/ aural context. From a reading of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric hymns, and a brief look at Praxilla, we can make a strong case about how the wedding repertoire has permeated, shaped, and defined epic poetry among other poetic genres. The first section, “Seeing,” begins with the famous wedding scene on the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18 and investigates the theme of viewing a wedding as a marked scene with multiple meanings within the epic world. It then discusses the Teichoskopia, a seemingly anachronistic episode in the Iliad, and the odd encounter between Helen and the elders at the walls of Troy, which retains several wedding performance elements and material from the epic cycle. Moving away from epics, it concludes with a scene from Praxilla, an elusive authorial voice, and, more specifically, a fragment interpreted as a wedding song anchored around the viewing theme. The section on “Hearing” begins with Odyssey 6, the encounter between Odysseus and Nausicaa; it follows Odysseus’s awakening as he hears female voices around him and explores an episode replete with nuptial elements. The section on “Tasting” examines an until-now neglected aspect in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the recognition scene between mother and daughter and the

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digressing catalogue that Persephone narrates to her mother at the most critical time: when Demeter wants to find out what happened to her daughter, Persephone digresses into a catalogue of names of the girls she was with and then a mini catalogue of flowers they were collecting, instead of giving details about the abduction. This is odd communication, one would think. However, reading this scene from a trauma theory perspective, and as a case of hypermnesia, when mnemonic techniques operate on overdrive, one can conclude that the Homeric performer captures an expression of trauma. Persephone is managing her trauma, the return to her mother, and her mother’s tensions and anxiety, by choosing to dwell on the time with her peers. The section on “Touching” discusses the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and analyzes how crystallized vignettes and echoes of wedding performances, such as the praise of the bride, have shaped this hymn. The last section of the first chapter on “Smelling” explores Sappho fr. 44 and the wedding procession. It lingers less on whether this is a wedding song and instead reads it as a poem that has synesthetically captured community performances. Scent is linked to memory in contemporary cognitive studies. Sappho fr. 44 presents different senses, referring to powerful aromas and creating further meaning for the wedding scene. The second chapter discusses the elusive returns that the wedding repertoire enables through content and theme. I argue that the surviving wedding-related material preserves a desire to remain a child—it is a force against maturation. The first section examines some of the most typified features that were integral parts of the ancient wedding performance—salutations, praise of the bride and groom, blessings—as they can be reconstructed primarily from Homer and Sappho. The second section of this chapter explores the weaving motif in Sappho fr. 102 and compares wedding song imagery with epigrams and children’s lore perspectives as they have survived in ancient lexicography and other sources. By looking at some standard features, it argues for an inherent ludic element and a performance setting that resembles ancient games as we know them. The third section discusses the elusive hymenaios, a type of song and ritual cry and one of the oldest attested types of performances that hides a historiola, namely the memory of an abbreviated narrative its mere utterance alluded to.³⁰ The hymenaios references are present in the least expected moments, such as tragic discourse for death, which offers the opportunity to discuss the conflation between the wedding and lament tradition again. As Jendza notes, “tragedy pervasively co-opts a wide variety of lyric genres (paian, epinikia, partheneia, hymenaios, and thrēnos) through motifs, verbal and imagistic cues, specific tags, and thematic resonances.”³¹ Conversely, the hymenaios is also present in comedy, something that accounts for what I call the “rustic poetics” of the genre. This chapter further explores paeans and ululations as aspects that define a nuptial ³⁰ For historiolas and their significance in ritual and performance, see Frankfurter 1995 and 2001. ³¹ Jendza 2020: 7. For wedding songs in Euripides, see Baltieri 2011.

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, ,    

performance. The last part of this chapter focuses on the epithalamion tradition as it analyzes Theocritus’s Idyll 18, the imagery and performances it alludes to, and how it can constitute a remarkable piece of evidence for understanding the intersections between orality and literacy regarding the wedding song tradition. The third chapter focuses on the theme of returns and nostoi and seeks to trace how the performance of the wedding song tradition reflects the human experience. It begins by looking back at the wedding-lament conflation and reevaluates the idea of a wedding as a rite of passage. This chapter explores the narrative patterns when ancient literature presented brides. The “failed bride” motif is revealing on many levels. Such narratives utter what one fears and simultaneously show a desire to return to one’s childhood. This chapter also explores what I call “generational” dysphoria and how it is enacted in wedding narratives. The theme of nostos, the return and desire to return home, lies behind this desire to return. The female nostos and its complexity in ancient Greek literature becomes an angle from which to read wedding-related narratives. The next section of this chapter looks at emblematic couples and problematic stories. Thetis and Peleus, a favorite couple in the wedding song tradition, were far from projecting a story of marital bliss. Thetis personifies the return home as a mythical paradigm. As with nostos, elopement or escape becomes an essential motif. The following section moves to the theme of return and the uses of memory and childhood as poetic tools and narratives that capture emotion. The return of the bride is another motif that the last section of this chapter explores from a comparative angle with ballads from the Modern Greek folk tradition. A gendered reading can reveal that ancient Greek literature presents a parallel of nostos poetics for the female heroine. In other words, the mythical paradigm, which informs ritual and literary imagery, emphasizes the female return and the bride’s allegiance to the natal family. This pattern can be read as the equivalent of the male nostos theme. The few vestiges from female poetry (e.g., Sappho, Erinna) reinforce this idea beyond just the mythological narratives rehearsed in epic poetry and drama. The fourth and final chapter delves into decoding emotions through the wedding song motifs. It discusses the representation of spinning in ancient Greek literature and art. From Homer to Erinna, spinning is a consistent motif that alludes to a nuptial context; it mobilizes female social networks as it becomes a coded reference for double entendre, depending on the audience. This chapter revisits the emphasis on materiality and the poetics of interrogation present in nuptial contexts.³² It then moves to the bodyscape of the nuptial tradition, how certain parts of the body, especially women’s cheeks, become focal points for ancient narratives. The following section explores further materiality and looks at

³² For the poetics of interrogation, see Arft 2022.

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gifts as props in wedding narratives, both visual and literary. Gift giving is a complex negotiation and, as such, it guides nuptial behavior. Ancient processions were processions not only of people but also their things, gifts, offerings, value systems, and socio-cultural heritage. The final section examines a famous scene in the Iliad, the Dios Apatē, when Hera tricks Zeus to distract him from the war. This is a puzzling text that needs further decoding in the Iliadic narrative. I argue that this is an early Ars Amatoria, a didactic type of narrative for how to “make love” in this very peculiar micronarrative of the Iliad. Such texts could be part of a tradition of divine erotic encounters which combines magical elements and an exemplary form, as they have appropriated the more typified genre characteristics, like nuptial metaphors. When placed within the epic poem, they can provide relief as they have touches of comic features. Still, they can point to a tradition of sensual discourse meant to have an entertaining appeal to different audiences, including possibly a female audience. Such narratives present the epic’s goddesses initiating sex while challenging male dominance through channeled ways. As I hope to show, nuptial tropes are stylized, yet easily adapted, appropriated, and utilized in literature in ways that complicate narratives. Beyond the more explicit nuptial elements, though, the wedding theme is present in more intriguing and often coded ways. It intersects with more extensive narratives that have embraced wedding scenes or performances. The wedding poetics dwells on emotion, even if in elusive ways. Vase iconography and literary narratives point to the centrality of the theme, its flexibility as a distinct feature, and its multiplicity in meaning.

1 The Shadow of a Wedding Sensing Archaic Poetics

Seeing Viewing from the Doorway One of the most memorable descriptions of wedding processions in early Greek epic poetry is in Iliad 18. Hephaestus makes the shield for Achilles at his mother’s request, and after fashioning the earth and sky, the sea and sun, and the moon and stars, the first reference to a civilized world inhabited by humans is the two cities. One city celebrates weddings; the other, in stark contradiction, suffers strife. What stands out in this small vignette is how Hephaestus constructs a detailed and elaborate shield, the face of which bears many scenes consisting of different elements. There are two groups of scenes depicted on the shield: scenes of the universe and scenes of human life.¹ The description of the shield engages multiple topographies, and the presence of humans makes it more vibrant.² The shield presents a pluralistic art, one that seeks to focus on many different elements: weddings, strife, armies, and agricultural and pastoral scenes like vintage, cattle, dances, and more. As does a typical ekphrasis, this part of Book 18 seeks to steer the attention of the epic’s audience; it guides the audience of an oral poem into visualizing the collated narratives for each scene by describing multiple tableaux or creating an ensemble. Within the frame of the shield, Hephaestus stages what gets narrated in an episodic manner, one after the other; it is like viewing a documentary of a lost world, one snapshot following the other.³ It becomes intriguing then when, within these scenes, Hephaestus also inserts his internal ¹ Hardie 1985: 11. ² Minchin 2020. ³ The ekphrasis of the Shield of Achilles has invited much scholarly attention. Among different scenes, it represents certain types of performance, portrayed on an artifact combining the verbal with the visual (see R. B. Rutherford 2019: 29–31). Some scholars have seen an almost antagonistic relationship between the oral/aural and the visual. Heffernan 1993: 9 also remarks that as writing is in its nascent form of communications, the ekphrastic part may challenge audiences to hear verbal description against the visual representation. The descriptive mode becomes a pause for the epic’s action, inviting reflection and dialogue with the audience/readers of the poem (see Galand-Hallyn 1994: 199). Hephaestus and his craftsmanship can be read as parallels to poets and the art of poetic composition; see Alden 2000: 53–4. Byre 1992: 40 has argued that these scenes or sub-scenes “develop into stories with a plot,” expanding the narrative possibility of the poem. For poetics, inserting a visual scene like the shield as part of the epic narrative has been influential, especially in later Greek and Roman literature. See Friedländer 1912; Reinhard 1961: 401–11; Marg 1971; Squire 2013. Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0002

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viewers of the scenes. In the case of the city with the weddings, multiple things are going on: feasts, the leading of the brides with torches, the dancing of young men, the hymeneal song that rises through the city, flutes and lyres, and the women who watch in awe from their doorposts and marvel at the spectacle.⁴ The hymenaios sweeps through the city (νύμφας δ᾿ ἐκ θαλάμων . . . / ἠγίνεον ἀνὰ ἄστυ, πολὺς δ᾿ ὑμέναιος ὀρώρει, they were leading the brides from their chambers . . . throughout the town, and loud rose the hymenaios, Il. 18.492–3). There is more than just music and song here; we have an acoustic effect⁵ that involves movement, dance, and a sound experience in which everyone participates. Moreover, as Richard Martin notes, “rather than being given an opportunity to hear the words of the hymenaios, the audience ‘sees’ synoptically, by means of the poetic emphasis, an entire performance. We get not text but context.”⁶ This singular reference captures the sound that the different wedding songs collectively produce as one. It is as if the different voices can be reduced in the principal song that echoes throughout. And though the weddings, feasts, processions, and dances are the prominent aspects of the celebration, we have a reference to the privileged viewers: women, each at their doorpost, in this liminal position—almost part of the wedding but neither inside nor completely outside it (αἱ δὲ γυναῖκες/ ἱστάμεναι θαύμαζον ἐπὶ προθύροισιν ἑκάστη, and the women, each standing at her doorpost, were admiring, Il. 18.495–6). Instead, they are the ones who cherish a spectacle, as if this were set for them, which opens up a synesthetic dimension. Standing by the prothyron—just a bit outside, just a bit inside—is a marked perspective in Homer.⁷ This phrase registers a certain liminality. Similar patterns, which include a reference to a wedding, can be found in the Odyssey, in the story of Telemachus and the son of Nestor in Book 4 (4.20–2). When Telemachus goes on a coming-of-age journey to find the whereabouts of his father, he goes to Sparta, and he arrives at the time of the wedding of Megapenthes, Menelaus’s (but not Helen’s) son, while princess Hermione, the daughter of his hosts, Menelaus and Helen, is being sent off for her wedding to Achilles’s son. This possibly builds on the traditional theme of the hero returning to a place that celebrates a wedding. Similarly, Odysseus ⁴ On this scene, see Andersen 1976: 11; Taplin 1980: 5–6; Calame 2001: 84 (who notes that the chorus dancing to the pipe and lyre is male in the Iliad, an exception to patterns we see elsewhere); Karanika 2014: 122; Wasdin 2018: 19; Hersch 2021: 43. One can see the relation between the ekphrasis and the shield as an imagined artifact of visual art as a parallel to the relation between the audience (or readers) and the poem itself (see Becker 1995: 4). As Scully 2003: 29 has put it, the Shield of Achilles can be read “like an extended simile.” ⁵ The verb used to denote that the hymeneal song “arises” is the same as the one used for the Muses in Hesiod’s Theog. 70, ἐρατός . . . δοῦπος ὀρώρει, in a passage that also brings multiple senses together, presenting the “thudding” of the Muses as “lovely.” For more details on the epic’s appropriation of acoustic expressions like that, see Lather 2017: 132–3. ⁶ Martin 2020b: 41. ⁷ See the influential article by Wohl 1993. Although I analyze this from the perspective of female behavior, it is important to see similar patterns within a broader discourse of gendered behaviors. Graziosi and Haubold 2003 in their discussion of Homeric masculinity pay close attention to the encounter between Hector and Andromache in Iliad 6, which takes place at the Scaean gates, “half-way between home and the battlefield,” as they note (Graziosi and Haubold 2003: 69).

16

, ,    

returns to a setting when Penelope’s remarriage is at stake. Telemachus’s stop in Sparta mirrors this theme in the coming-of-age first part of the Odyssey.⁸ Just when a similar spectacle is presented with much of the same vocabulary, feasts, and dancers, Telemachus and his companion stand right in this liminal place. They are neither invited to nor participants in the wedding, yet they are still privileged viewers. The doorway marks the transition. In Book 8 of the Odyssey, Demodocus sings the song of Ares and Aphrodite, presenting a divine burlesque as Aphrodite’s extramarital affair with Ares is exposed comically with Hephaestus binding the couple with a web of chains and humiliating them in front of all the gods (Od. 8.266–367).⁹ While the story offers much ground for laughter for all the gods who witnessed it, it is worth pointing to some patterns in the structure of the story. We have an embedded narrative within the epic poem about performance that presents Demodocus’s extensive song and the audience reaction. The Odyssey’s narrative places a singer’s performance at the Phaeacians’ palace in a fair-like setting featuring music and dancing (Od. 8.257–65). The poem underscores Odysseus’s sense of admiration (Od. 8.265). In Demodocus’s song, the audience is the gods of Mount Olympus. The text makes a statement about the female audience: the goddesses. They stay back in their houses, while the gods stand at their doorposts, as the passage below indicates: θηλύτεραι δὲ θεαὶ μένον αἰδοῖ οἴκοι ἑκάστη. ἔσταν δ᾿ ἐν προθύροισι θεοί, δωτῆρες ἑάων· ἄσβεστος δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἐνῶρτο γέλως μακάρεσσι θεοῖσι τέχνας εἰσορόωσι πολύφρονος Ἡφαίστοιο. Each of the female divinities stayed at their home out of shame. The gods, givers of good things, were standing at the doorposts; an unstoppable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they were watching the crafts of multi-talented Hephaestus. (Od. 8.324–7)

There is a similar pattern here as with the wedding scene of Hephaestus’s shield of Achilles in the Iliad. In both, we have festivities and a merry atmosphere. In both,

⁸ On this theme, see Schmiel 1972, with further bibliography, and Alden 1987. ⁹ For a reading that investigates the subplots in the Odyssey and focuses on the theme of adultery (but also marriage, infidelity, and punishment) in the Greek literary context, see Alden 1997. Alden 1997: 513 presents the reception of this “risqué subject matter” in the ancient Greek literary world. For the “web of chains” and the repercussions of the weaving metaphor, fabric, and hyphos of the oral tradition reflected in the poem, see Holmberg 2003. For other readings of Demodocus’s song, see Newton 1987. See also Braswell 1982, who looks at Demodocus’s song as a story within a story that reflects on the action in the main narrative; Brown 1989 also discusses how this story does not exist outside the Odyssean passage, which possibly makes it an ad hoc invention of a poet who invents a “marriage” theme and then annuls it. Brown 1989: 286–7 discusses the importance of the liminal space, which brings the inside and the outside in contact as the space enabling the gods’ laughter, inducing public shaming.

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17

some viewers stand at the doorposts. Both scenes draw on a larger, yet ambiguous, trope of women-on-the-verge, that can imply aidōs but that also reinforces the presence of other figures as viewers and consumers of nuptial scenes. The male ridicule element is a familiar part of nuptial performances, as we shall see again when we revisit the nuptial undertones of this scene. In Book 11 of the Iliad, Nestor describes in a flashback how he met the young Achilles at his father’s palace.¹⁰ Peleus was making sacrifices when Nestor and his companion stood at the doorway (Il. 11.777) until Achilles brought him in and offered hospitality. Again, the doorway is the space that marks the boundary of someone who can view a ritual, such as a sacrifice or a wedding, in which they are about to participate, as the narrative indicates. The doorway is not for someone who is to be excluded, but quite the opposite. In the Odyssey, it is used at different times, for example when Odysseus arrives with Nausicaa at her father’s palace; Nausicaa first stops at the doorway, just before Odysseus is invited to go inside, where he will charm his audience (Od. 7.4).¹¹ Odysseus’s return to Ithaca is marked by him in the doorway in three different moments in Book 18 of the Odyssey (18.10, 101, 386). Before he takes control of his household, this transition phase is marked by the doorway as the liminal stage. In all the above narratives, we have more or less overt references to weddings: the scene on the shield, the wedding of Megapenthes, the one of Hermione, the potential-but-rejected-by-the-narrative wedding of Nausicaa, the coming of age of young Achilles, and the return of Odysseus.¹² Weddings are a spectacle throughout, and the main participants, the bride and groom, are at the heart of it with the family. At the same time, the broader community are spectators, some more privileged than others. The transitional phase, which is inherent for a wedding and its principal participants, is also transferred to others who stand in the doorway, a metaphorical space of the transition that is about to occur. Standing in the doorway is reserved not only for the spectator but can also refer to someone like Odysseus himself, who must reclaim his marriage and status. The shield’s women in Iliad 18 are more ambiguous and are only marked as spectators who marvel at the procession. Yet transition is a movement, and a wedding is characteristically a procession. From this perspective, the epic world ¹⁰ Nestor’s speech is “a paradigmatic exhortation,” as Pedrick 1983: 55 has argued. I am looking at how Nestor provides spatial references, which can be revealing about oral poetics. ¹¹ It is also used in the spectacle created by Hephaestus in the story of the adultery when Aphrodite and Ares were caught and chained by Hephaestus, who first stood by the doorway (8.304), completely enraged, as the text notes, and then all the gods were invited to laugh at the spectacle (8.325). We also see the same pattern when the companions of Odysseus at the island of Circe stand by the doorway before getting in, as they see her surroundings and hear her voice, in a scene where seeing and hearing are privileged as senses. ¹² See N. Austin 1991: 236, who writes that the weddings are “whisked off stage before we have had time to see the bridal couples” and discusses (1991: 238) the “Wedding Text” in the Odyssey. N. Austin 1991: 237 further notes that “introducing Nausicaa into the plot allows the poet to replicate not only the wedding ceremonies, but, more significantly, the simulated bride.”

18

, ,    

sweeps internal viewers as well as us (listeners, readers) into a sense of movement, and carefully places important characters at the doorway. Epic poetry is deeply invested in the notion of transition, just as it is in change and movement.¹³ The question is, why are certain characters or groups of people placed in the doorway? Is it only to prepare their entrance or to keep them as discreet outsiders while focusing more on the event described (as is the case with the wedding scene on the shield and the weddings in Sparta)? In the latter, both Hermione, the insider, the bride, as also the spectator, Telemachus, children of the two most important female figures of the Odyssey, Helen and Penelope, respectively, transition to a new phase, albeit in their own separate ways. Liminality and transition not only suggest contact of different phases but also contrast times and spaces. The shield of Achilles, an objet d’ art, an object to be viewed in the context of the Iliad, is itself an artifact that will stand in a phase of another transition: Achilles’s death. Marriage and death, weddings and funerals—these are very often intertwined. Marriages in epics are complex and shadowed by death in different ways. The marriage at the onset of the Trojan War, that of Peleus and Thetis, one that quickly dissolves, is marked by one of the most tragic moments, that of their son’s death, echoed throughout Book 18 of the Iliad.¹⁴

Viewing from the Walls: A View into the Poetics of Weddings In the epic world, viewing does not happen without further accounting of the act. Just as it is essential to note the object of one’s viewing, it is equally important to note where one stands: the positioning and angle of viewing matter. The first time a mortal woman is presented as a speaking character in the Iliad occurs in Book 3 with Helen when the poet looks inside a Trojan palace.¹⁵ Nevertheless, she is not presented as a speaking character until she leaves the domestic space and meets her father-in-law outside. Movement is important; the poem constructs thematic correspondence through analogies of Helen’s weaving and the world of war, in a narrative that shows movement in both space and time.

¹³ On transition and Telemachus’s acquiring of his adult identity, see G. R. Rose 1967; Cook 1998; Murnaghan 2002. For Telemachus as “godlike” when he first appears in Odyssey 1.114, see Martin 2020a: 368–74. Uses of such epithets are far from “mechanistic” (Martin 2020a: 368) and imply a viewer Telemachus as well, as Homer creates a complex motif of “seeing well / looking good” (Martin 2020a: 374). To add to this, the use of the epithet θεοειδής could be more revealing in the broader context of nuptial poetics shaping epic. ¹⁴ On this point, see Hubbard 1992: 29, who discusses how the sense of joy and festivity on the wedding scene of the Iliad “is counterbalanced by an ominous and tragic undercurrent.” ¹⁵ For Helen’s transformation from a “silent weaver” to a “public speaker” in the Iliad, see Roisman 2006.

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19

Helen’s address to Priam (Il. 3.172–80) is like a lament, abundant in the elements of grief and self-blame.¹⁶ Helen is a female character in Homeric poetry who thrives on the use of self-reproach, as Taplin and Worman have pointed out.¹⁷ Helen and Priam do not seem to be engaged in a conversation at first—Helen’s answer seems to move in a different direction, not really answering Priam’s inquiries. Her speech focuses on self-reproach. Similarly, when she speaks to Hector in Book 6 of the Iliad (344–58), she also blames herself. Reproach and self-reproach are poetic strategies attested in lamentation.¹⁸ Helen turns the blame away from herself through self-blame, voicing blame when her interlocutors do not. The word nemesis comes up frequently in scenes with Helen, from Helen herself and from those who converse with her.¹⁹ Her interlocutor, Priam, absolves her from nemesis when he says that “it is not a nemesis that Trojans and Achaeans would suffer such long-time woes for such a woman” (Il. 3.156). Helen’s connection with the notion of nemesis has deeper roots—as in the Cyclic Cypria, she is the daughter of Nemesis.²⁰ The subtle channeling of retribution and self-absolution by voicing self-blame is a key strategy available to the expert mourner.²¹ In this respect, the establishment of the traditional, domestic Helen is a key component of the sympathetic view toward her. She becomes the epitome of the female lament performer.²² Helen’s address to Priam in the vocative, “dear father-in-law,” is a stylized way to establish herself as kin of the Trojan king (Il. 3.172). As Martin has shown, such attempts to articulate the speaker’s position and the degree of kin affection “is a striking case of social poetics in action.”²³ While Helen would sound like a lamenter to an audience familiar with such poetic genres and practices, Priam’s discourse is quite different. Helen later adapts to Priam’s discourse and ends up answering his questions, tuning her performance to his. In a scene that is very much about epic self-referentiality—Helen weaves a web depicting the Trojan War—the epic poem here presents Priam using diction appropriate to traditional wedding performance. The two opposites, namely lament and wedding performances, are intricately interwoven. ¹⁶ See Ebbott 1999: 11–12, who argues that Helen’s character is a paradigm of the expert lament performer; see also Martin 2008 on Helen as an expert lamenter. ¹⁷ Taplin 1992: 118; Worman 2001: 21. Achilles (Il. 19.98–106), Hector (Il. 22.104), and even Agamemnon (Il. 9.115–19) also use self-reproach. Self-reproach is a distinctive act for a character. ¹⁸ While reproaching herself, she subtly moves the blame to Paris (Il. 6.350) by expressing the wish that she should “have been the wife of a better man.” In a delicate maneuver, she imitates Hector’s reproaches to his brother. On this, see Worman 2001: 28–9. For Helen’s self-reproach, see also Blondell 2010a. ¹⁹ Worman 2001: 29–30 makes this excellent point. ²⁰ Cyclic Cypria, fr. 9 (PEG, vol. 1). The association between Helen and Nemesis/nemesis is worthy of further exploration. ²¹ For Helen’s self-blame, see Sultan 1999: 37–9. ²² For Helen and her lament, see Ebbott 1999; Dué 2002; Pantelia 2002; Tsagalis 2004; Worman 2001. ²³ Martin 2008: 123.

20

, ,    

Characters in the Iliad develop their own distinctive speech style and are in constant contact with traditional speech genres.²⁴ In what follows, I propose a view of Priam’s speech that situates him in a nexus of traditional poetics, within which his discourse operates, highlighting how Priam’s speech acts have a profound effect on the narrative patterns being established in Iliad 3. The elders use an oblique form of eikasia, a rhetorical feature of wedding discourse par excellence—likening the groom or bride to a divinity—when they talk about Helen, as they see her going toward the walls: οἳ δ᾽ ὡς οὖν εἴδονθ᾽ Ἑλένην ἐπὶ πύργον ἰοῦσαν, ἦκα πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἔπεα πτερόεντ᾽ ἀγόρευον· “οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς τοιῇδ᾽ ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν· αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν . . .” When they saw Helen coming towards the tower, softly they spoke winged words to each other: “There can be no blame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should suffer pains for such a woman for so long; she is formidably like immortal goddesses to look at . . .” (Il. 3.154–8)

The section known as the Teichoskopia mobilizes active viewing. In a scene where Helen, incited by Aphrodite, goes with her two handmaids, Aethra and Clymene, to Troy’s Scaean gates, she and the elders of Troy engage in an active viewing of the battleground below. Panthous, Thumoetes, Lampus, Clytius, Hicetaon, Ucalegon, and Antenor, all veterans from battle, join Priam (Il. 3.146–8). The poet names them. They first see Helen coming toward the tower (Il. 3.154), at which moment they engage in gossip among themselves: she is so much like the immortal goddesses to them that there should be no blame on the Trojans and Achaeans who fight for so long (Il. 3.156–8). Just as one cannot place blame on a divinity, they cannot blame Helen for being the cause of this war. The subtle eikasia that is inserted here, as the elders discuss Helen’s resemblance to a goddess, is a deliberate choice by the poet: it alludes to Helen’s past while also projecting a divine status for the woman they see. The poet constructs a divine-like figure while pondering over the past and present of the war. Gazing is never an innocent act in ancient Greek literature, and certainly not in Homer as the elders indulge in viewing Helen as she moves. This is an important detail in the text: they do not view her in a static, statue-like mode; she is the one in full motion as their gaze is captured by her. Wedding discourse permeates this ²⁴ On speech-act theory and its presence in Homer, see especially Martin 1989. For a more detailed view of the presence of wedding performance tropes in the Teichoskopia, see Karanika 2013, an earlier version of ideas presented in this section.

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21

episode throughout. Helen is presented as someone who looks like one of the goddesses. This is not a simple simile here but one that captures what one would say to a bride. The traditional wedding performance mandates that the bride is addressed “like a goddess,” a formula prevalent in Homeric epic. The elders, gazing at Helen, adapt their collective speech to this formulaic wedding repertoire as they chat about her. The typical feature of likening the bride to a goddess or the groom to a god or king, known as eikasia—which this book discusses in different forms—dominates this scene.²⁵ As the elders engage in conversation with Helen, the scene takes a puzzling twist: Priam inquires about who is who in the battleground. He describes who he is talking about to Helen (Il. 3.170), a man taller than others. Again, we have the typical feature of a wedding performance, the eikasia, likening someone to a god or king, as Helen explains that the figure she is being asked about is Agamemnon: “ὥς μοι καὶ τόνδ᾿ ἄνδρα πελώριον ἐξονομήνῃς, ὅς τις ὅδ᾿ ἐστὶν Ἀχαιὸς ἀνὴρ ἠΰς τε μέγας τε. ἤτοι μὲν κεφαλῇ καὶ μείζονες ἄλλοι ἔασι, καλὸν δ᾿ οὕτω ἐγὼν οὔ πω ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσιν, οὐδ᾿ οὕτω γεραρόν· βασιλῆι γὰρ ἀνδρὶ ἔοικε.” “So give me the name of his huge man, the Achaean man who is so powerful and tall. Of course, there are others who may be a head taller, but my eyes have never yet seen a man so handsome or so royal, for he looks like a king.” (Il. 3.166–70)

From a plot-based reading of this scene, it would seem rather weird if the king of Troy did not recognize the king of the Achaeans, his chief enemy. Yet, it is precisely because this entire scene is modeled on wedding poetics that this odd dialogue, occurring in the tenth year of the Trojan War, develops in this manner. Priam continues the same wedding tropes in his references to Odysseus, whom he describes as somewhat shorter yet broader in the shoulders (Il. 3.193–4). Odysseus receives the most lines in the episode. Priam likens Odysseus to a thick-fleeced ram—again, a simile that is also typical in wedding repertoires, as brides and grooms can also be likened to animals or plants. While the reference to the ram echoes episodes in the Odyssey, such as the Cyclops, this also builds on traditional motifs and diction around the praise of the groom, who should appear more prominent. Odysseus uses the verb ἐΐσκω in Od. 6.152 when he likens Nausicaa to Artemis. That episode and Odysseus’s speech are an example of the use of wedding

²⁵ The nature and function of the eikasia and other distinct features of the wedding repertoire are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.

22

, ,    

tropes within the epic narrative. The simile comparing a mortal woman of marriageable age to a goddess closely resembles and recalls the common practice of comparing a bride to a goddess, especially to Artemis. Priam, in his reference to Odysseus, uses the same verb and produces an eikasia that connects him with an animal (Il. 3.197). The hidden wedding discourse continues when Priam asks about Ajax. Ajax is mentioned again with respect to his size and as someone who surpasses the others: τὸ τρίτον αὖτ᾽ Αἴαντα ἰδὼν ἐρέειν᾽ ὁ γεραιός· “τίς τὰρ ὅδ᾽ ἄλλος Ἀχαιὸς ἀνὴρ ἠΰς τε μέγας τε ἔξοχος Ἀργείων κεφαλήν τε καὶ εὐρέας ὤμους;” Τὸν δ᾽ Ἑλένη τανύπεπλος ἀμείβετο, δῖα γυναικῶν· “οὗτος δ᾽ Αἴας ἐστὶ πελώριος ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν· Ἰδομενεὺς δ᾽ ἑτέρωθεν ἐνὶ Κρήτεσσι θεὸς ὣς ἕστηκ᾽, ἀμφὶ δέ μιν Κρητῶν ἀγοὶ ἠγερέθονται.” And thirdly, the old man saw Ajax, and asked: “Who then is this other Achaean man, the mighty and tall one, the one standing out bigger than the Argives with his head and broad shoulders?” And long-robed Helen, revered among women, responded to him: “That is huge Ajax, the bulwark of the Achaeans! And Idomeneus stands to one side of him among the Cretans, looking like a god, while the leaders of the Cretans have gathered around him.” (Il. 3.225–31)

At this juncture, Helen responds in a dialogic way that acknowledges Priam’s views and speech style. She continues the catalogue by referring to Idomeneus, about whom Priam had not posed any question, with an eikasia that presents him as a god—a typical wedding trope. Her response appropriates Priam’s earlier style and introduces Idomeneus through a powerful simile by saying that he looks like a god, thus surpassing Agamemnon, who seems like a king, and Odysseus, who is likened to a ram. The use of eikasia and makarismos in the epic fabric evokes accents of weddingrelated traditional discourse. A story that fits perfectly within a larger narrative has its own capacity to evoke, through vivid imagery and similes, vignettes of distinct genres and performances that have been integrated into the epic style as part of the grand plot. A careful reading can discern moments when the Homeric narrative mirrors different modes of ancient performances that engage the female space. Through such glimpses, we get a revelation of poetic artistry; we see an intricately woven fabric of preserved performances in their entirety. Such codification available to oral performers allows not simply for decontextualization of a certain type of genre, allowing its detachment from a well-known context, but a

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23

recontextualization within a larger narrative, to which it gives a certain color and semiotic nuance. Adhering to traditional types of expression and incorporating them in an epic narrative endows the new work with additional codification and meanings that a well-versed audience of such performances should be able to grasp. Priam’s speech acts adhere to traditional rules around wedding discourse and, as such, give further meaning, creating a more extensive network of allusions and associations within the epic narrative of the Iliad. Another critical parameter is relevant here. Helen has a unique standing as a character in the Cyclic tradition. While her role in the Homeric epics is paramount, it extends beyond the narrow time frame of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Teichoskopia presents Helen as a viewer and interpreter, after having earlier depicted her as a creator of the tapestry that depicts the Trojan War itself. At the same time, the audience is aware of the outcome and her return to the Achaean side. The Iliad carefully portrays a liminal figure surrounded by her interlocutors in the Iliad who know her affinity to both sides. From this angle, Priam’s speech acts inevitably allude to Cyclic tradition and, specifically, to the tradition surrounding Helen’s suitors, a well-known story in Greek myth. Agamemnon is the starting point. According to a Hesiodic fragment (Hesiod, fr. 197.3–5 M-W), Castor and Polydeuces, Helen’s brothers, would have chosen Agamemnon if he had wooed for himself.²⁶ However, Agamemnon participated in the wooing not for himself but for his brother Menelaus. In the Hesiodic fragment, Agamemnon is the first participant in Helen’s wooing and is referred to as γαμβρός (the groom). The other heroes mentioned in the Teichoskopia (Odysseus, Ajax, Idomeneus) were all part of the narrow circle in the tradition of Helen’s suitors. If we compare the Iliadic Teichoskopia with the Catalogue of Women, the leaders that Helen describes as being prompted by Priam’s questions could be a shorter version of another catalogue in existence such as the one we have. What is further noteworthy is that the same order of heroes is kept.²⁷ Scenes of wooing and courtship were popular in epic poetry.²⁸ Suitors are prominent in the Odyssey, while the theme of a contest among prospective husbands is specifically mentioned by Penelope (Od. 18.276–9). Helen’s brothers, Castor and Polydeuces, played an important role in choosing the suitors.²⁹ In the Teichoskopia section, Helen explicitly brings up the name of her brothers in her speech to Priam (Il. 3.237–8). At the end of her speech, she mentions Menelaus in reference to Idomeneus. This is another intriguing moment because Helen’s reference to Idomeneus does not come in response to a previous question by Priam, but rather she mentions him on her own accord, which poses further

²⁶ For the wooing of Helen, see West 1985: 43; Cingano 2005. For ancient sources on the wooing of Helen see Stesichorus, fr. 190 Davies, Eur. Iphigeneia in Aulis 51–71; Isocrates, Hel. 39–41. ²⁷ See Tsagalis 2008: 122–8. ²⁸ Haubold 2000: 137–43. ²⁹ Cingano 2005: 133–5.

24

, ,    

questions. The Iliad uses pre-Homeric material, which could be part of the stock for Cyclic epic and reflected in the Catalogue of Women.³⁰ Helen ends the brief catalogue of heroes by saying she does not see her own brothers in battle and thus reinserts the notion of shame and guilt by introducing the possibility that the reason they did not come to Troy was that they were ashamed for their sister (Il. 3.242). The explicit reference to Helen’s brothers, whose role in the tradition of Helen’s wooing was well established, is no surprise. Instead, Helen astutely appropriates her answer to Priam by complementing his allusions to the tradition of the suitors. With respect to her brothers, she acknowledges Priam’s references to the tradition and regains her lamenting voice by mentioning again, at the end of her speech, the shame surrounding her. At the same time, her natal family takes first place, the brothers born from the same mother (Il. 3.238), and her place of origin (Il. 3.239). She also restores the image of her former self for a moment. Again, she becomes the bride for whom suitors were competing against each other. Her brothers did not come to Troy to fight; they are not part of her current situation, but any reference to them is to take her back to her past and impose that image on her interlocutors. The Teichoskopia replays themes, persons, and images familiar to ancient audiences from the wooing tales. The scene relates to the tradition of Helen’s beauty and the contests surrounding it. Kakridis views the theme of the marriage contest as central to this scene and interprets the Teichoskopia in the context of the ensuing duel between Menelaus and Paris.³¹ Both Kakridis and Postlethwaite suggest that Helen’s two competing husbands comprise a central episode, and the Teichoskopia introduces the pattern of the “viewing wife.” This does not explain the role and peculiarity of the viewing Priam. Homer presents a deeply human relationship in which Priam understands Helen’s delicate situation. In fact, one could even go as far as to say that Priam’s speech is the epitome of discreet behavior: he carefully avoids any question or reference to the former husband and maintains a sympathetic view toward her that seeks to put her on the Trojan side. Agenor and, finally, Helen herself will put the former husband back in the picture. Jamison has put the entire scene in the context of wooing and counter-wooing scenes in the cognate Indo-European tradition.³² The typology of marriage is complex.³³ As Jamison has shown, Sanskrit laws classify marriage according to the ³⁰ On this, see Tsagalis 2008: 96–134, who discusses how Helen’s bridal competition is a “heterodiegetic” (Tsagalis 2008: 119) event lying outside the plot of the Iliad, while there is a competition between her former and current husband in the Iliadic narrative. For the bridal competition for Helen, see Catalogue of Women frs. 196–204 (M-W). Clader 1976: 9 has argued that we have a representation of Helen’s own bridal competition back in Sparta. For a comprehensive study of the Catalogue of Women, see Hunter 2005. ³¹ Kakridis 1971. ³² Jamison 1994. ³³ Kakridis 1971 and Postlethwaite 1985 note the marriage context and propose that Helen’s placement in the epic narrative as a viewer on the walls is similar to that of the prize in a marriage contest. While I agree with the marriage context that they highlight, this view presents a challenge. Helen is the viewer, rather than being viewed, which creates an anomaly in the idea of her being a prize.

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circumstances under which the bridegroom takes the bride and a hierarchy system based on the protagonists’ social class. Such a typology reserves a place for marriage by abduction, which can be secured legally if the abduction took place according to societal norms. The Indian Ramayana and the Greek Iliad are centered on stories of abduction and their repercussions. Just as, in Indian epic poetry, Draupadi in the Mahabharata undergoes abduction and counterabduction, so does Helen undergo abduction and counter-abduction in the Trojan War. Having her point of view and portraying her as an active participant and speaker is an integral part of a traditional legitimacy that needs to be conferred. In this perspective, the dialogue between Priam and Helen is necessary to validate Helen’s position in a sophisticated system of honor and legality. The references to wooing scenes inserted in the speech of the heroes are not just allusions to other traditions but come from a process in which traditional discourse and narratives shape themselves as part of the oral poetic product. The Teichoskopia is not merely a chronologically misplaced catalogue of heroes. Through an active dialogue between Priam and Helen, the audience is prepared for the first Greek-Trojan encounter set as a spectacle for everyone to watch. The duel between Paris and Menelaus follows. The tradition of Helen’s many suitors is also an integral component of this entire episode. Priam uses wedding diction to reinstate Helen’s position as a bride, a woman about whom there is war—a bride worth marveling at. In both these scenes, we have a collective viewing, namely the women in the case of the Shield of Achilles and the old men of Troy in the Teichoskopia. Moreover, suppose we assume that the women, referred to as gynaikes, are older than the bride, which gives them a different force compared to categories such as parthenoi or korai, used elsewhere in the Homeric epics; in both these cases, we have an intense interest not only in collective viewing per se but also in viewers who are older than the people they look at. The women are certainly older than the bride and groom, just as the elders of Troy are older than the fighters on the plains. In the latter case, the elders’ viewing is guided throughout by that of Helen. The intense praise and simile-like discourse take another nuance when seen from this perspective. The allusion to the Cyclic world of epic looking back at the time of Helen’s suitors brings the scene back in time and space for the chief character, Helen herself. She becomes a bride herself, altering her status as a gynē and the wife of a prince of Troy; she is transported back to a time when she was a young bride, one to be married off to an Achaean leader. The scene momentarily shifts her to the time of her early youth when men vied for her beauty. One can argue

Moreover, her role is far more dynamic in the entire episode; she appears as a conscious speaker of her own role in the story, with masterful command over her kleos through her expert lamentation strategies. In this respect, her role needs to be seen in more active terms.

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, ,    

that this technique has multiple effects and gives restorative energy to Helen, whose past carries her through this difficult present. At the same time, this also momentarily erases the danger of war as the elders of Troy sympathetically view their enemies on the ground. One can even argue that the old men are also taken back in time. Antenor, in his address to Helen (3.204–24), reminisces about the time when Odysseus and Menelaus came to Troy right after Helen’s abduction; he talks about how he was the one to offer hospitality to them while remembering (and praising) Odysseus. His particular remark that Odysseus was far from impressive points to the way the poet employs multiple senses throughout, as Antenor mentions that, in fact, one would think Odysseus was a fool based on sight alone (Il. 3.220), until he “projected his great voice from his chest, and words like snowflakes on a winter’s day” (Il. 3.221–2). Voicing informs sight, as they expressed the moment when they were no longer astonished to see him, having heard this voice. This is a revealing moment, as Antenor remembers Odysseus and moves from recounting his physique to describing his voice with a simile to show how his skill in words made them see him differently. This image of Odysseus has made a memorable and lasting impression on Antenor, taking both Odysseus, via his image, and Antenor, back in time. The further emphasis on the hospitality Antenor offered to characters that eventually became Troy’s enemies underlines the momentary change they undergo through both the actual sight from the walls of the city and the image kept in their memory of Odysseus as the eloquent speaker. The wedding poetics that permeates this scene mobilizes the sense of sight more than anything else because collective spectatorship is privileged. Just as at a wedding multiple people view the main characters, Troy’s elders collectively look at the figures who wooed Helen. Each suitor is treated like a groom, someone being looked at by the others. The walls can also be considered a liminal space, marking the boundaries of a city; as such, they enable viewing into a different space, except here the epic discourse also enables viewing into a different time. Seeing opens a window to memory, and scenes from the past are fused into this oddly placed meeting between the elderly men and Helen. Just as a duel between Helen’s former and current husband is about to begin—one presumably poised to end the war if it was not for Aphrodite, who protects her favorite hero Paris—the veterans of Troy take a wide view of the battle and also the past of the war.³⁴ They marvel at the beauty of Helen, who remains the foreign bride, a renewed identity that is not easy for her to carry. She later reproaches Aphrodite (Il. 3.399–412), saying explicitly ³⁴ For Helen’s relation with Aphrodite and how this scene corresponds to earlier Vedic myth, see Suter 1987. For how memory works in Greek epic and the Greek mentality on memory, see Bakker 2002. Bakker 2002: 68–9 makes the important point that “Memory not only provides access to a reality that is ontologically prior; it also makes that reality present and is, as such, a strong mental experience. . . . Memory in Homer is not a retrieval of stored facts but a dynamic cognitive operation in the present, a matter of consciousness or, more precisely, of the activation of consciousness.”

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that the Trojan women would hold her at fault (Il. 3.412). Helen is a peculiarly liminal figure that the old men of Troy seem to have welcomed and forgiven for the woes she caused them. They converse with her at ease despite their differences in gender, age, ethnicity, and status. She similarly manipulates time and space for herself as she refracts her former bridal self when the suitors all vie for her. The language alludes to the wedding theme throughout as the scene projects the elders’ attempt to see the heroes on the battleground while using the nuptial language of praise and giving blessings. From another perspective, in Iliad 18, even if temporarily, the wedding scene on the shield of Achilles shields the epic from the brutality of war. A wedding is depicted on an artifact that accompanies the fierce warrior. A shield is meant to be viewed by the enemy. Conversely, the elders of Troy view their enemies and talk about them as if there is no war; they praise and even use the ritual act of makarismos, pronouncing their enemies blessed, just when a duel is about to begin. The wedding poetics that conditions both scenes gives a different tableau of war, one that the internal audience of the epic can view distinctly, one that can take the audience to a different time and space.

Lyric Looks and Half Bodies Praxilla is an elusive authorial voice. The fragmentary condition of Praxilla’s poems and the nature of these fragments have made scholars regard her as a courtesan poetess or a hetaera that produces scolia possibly for sympotic performance. She has been classified as a “folk” voice with all the negative connotations that this term has had in the history of classical scholarship until recently. Moreover, the paucity of the surviving fragments has contributed to possible distortions about her literary status. While Sappho composed poetry that has rightly been seen within a choral, female, often erotic, and nuptial context, Praxilla’s few lines have escaped critical notice and been dismissed as witty oral compositions for the moment without any more serious claim to fame. Yet even the very few verses that have come to us under her name reveal a sharp authorial voice that not only sheds light onto classical performance but also suggest channels of negotiation between groups of people and gendered perspectives on oral composition. Perhaps the most cited two lines are a fragment that, in a manner not unlike Sapphic scenes, presents a woman gazing through windows. Reading this as the lyric equivalent of looking through the doorway, one can see that the gaze through windows is a captivating image of a woman’s gaze. Most critics have interpreted the female figure too hastily as a prostitute or a courtesan. In fact, not unlike other poetic biographical traditions, the poetic voice has been equated with the authorial voice, and the assumptions made for the first-person speaker of the poem (who is

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, ,    

in this case assumed possibly to be a prostitute) have too easily been transferred onto the author; hence Praxilla has been regarded a prostitute herself.³⁵ More recently, Vanessa Cazzato has interpreted this as a wedding song and has rightly challenged the traditional reading that this is a courtesan song (in accord with the later tradition) that associates Praxilla with scolia or paroinia in the drinking song tradition.³⁶ Let us consider this fragmentary poem in detail: ὦ διὰ τῶν θυρίδων καλὸν ἐμβλέποισα παρθένε τὰν κεφαλὰν τὰ δ’ ἔνερθε νύμφα You who glance sweetly through the windows, maiden in the head, but a bride below. (Praxilla, fr. 8, PMG 754)

This short fragment which survives in Hephaestion’s Enchiridion³⁷ shows unambiguous affinity with a sympotic style of poetry that has influenced and survived on inscriptions on vases that represent sympotic scenes. This makes Praxilla a composer of convivial short poems with a possible ritual context. One other line presents a proverbial phrase attributed to Praxilla through a scholion to Aristophanes (Thesm. 529–30). The poem’s first-person voice gives advice to the companion (assuming it is a sympotic companion) to beware of a scorpion under every stone. The scorpion image conveys notions of deceit and backstabbing, thus making a suitable warning. In this sympotic context, however, most critics have seen the female figure of Praxilla fr. 8 as an address to a “loose” woman. Alan Cameron sheds doubt on this interpretation, whereas Eleonora Cavallini prefers a ritualistic interpretation in the light of a hymn to Aphrodite Parakyptousa in Cyprus.³⁸ Cazzato’s explanation aligns the poem with Sappho’s and Theocritus’s epithalamia to Helen and reads it as a nuptial song in the tradition of reveille songs, those performed in the morning after the wedding night.³⁹ While I find this interpretation convincing, which would put this fragment squarely within a fascinating network of missing voices performed possibly collectively and addressed to the young bride on her first morning as a wife, I think there is more at play with these two enigmatic lines. The fragment presents the twist in the second line, from the ³⁵ For an interesting perspective, see Graham 1998. Although I generally disagree with this interpretation, Graham very helpfully reads this against inscriptional evidence in Thasos, which prohibits women from looking out of the windows or from the roofs of the houses. ³⁶ See Cazzato 2016. See also Athenaeus 15.694a (15.49 Kaibel): καὶ Πράξιλλα δ’ ἡ Σικυωνία ἐθαυμάζετο ἐπὶ τῇ τῶν σκολίων ποιήσει. σκόλια δὲ καλοῦνται οὐ κατὰ τὸν τῆς μελοποιίας τρόπον ὅτι σκολιὸς ἦν—λέγουσιν γὰρ τὰ ἐν ταῖς ἀνειμέναις εἶναι σκολιά—ἀλλὰ τριῶν γενῶν ὄντων ὥς φησιν Ἀρτέμων ὁ Κασανδρεὺς ἐν δευτέρῳ Βιβλίων Χρήσεως . . . (FHG IV 342). ³⁷ 7.8, p. 24 Cornsbruch. ³⁸ Cavallini 1992; Cameron 1995; Cazzato 2016: 196. ³⁹ Cazzato 2016: 197–200 for the possibility of having this as a small part of a performance at the epaulia.

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maiden to the bride. The emphasis on viewing enhances the sensory aspect. Lyric “created its own diverse and manifold spectatorships,” as Peponi has put it, and this fragment is key to our understanding of ancient viewing.⁴⁰ The female figure is first presented as an onlooker, a gazer through a window or windows (depending on how we construct the noun θυρίδων). The word καλόν has often been read as seductively, but it might not be as charged as that and may simply mean beautifully or sweetly. It is an aesthetic reference that modifies the gazer and gives a quality to the kind of gaze she gives. But what is most interesting in this fragment is the fragmentation of the female body between maiden and bride, or, as has already been discussed, between the sexually experienced and inexperienced body. “Halfing” a female body is not new in the imagination. From mermaids to hybrid creatures such as the Sphinx or the Sirens, the woman’s head is seen as the locus of intellect and voice. The woman in the poem is “othered” even within the context of her own physical presence. Another way to look at it is a temporal fusion as the virginal status is separated with a twist from the marital status. Again, one needs to underline further that we do not have a gynē but a nymphē, which indeed makes this an excellent candidate for some type of wedding song. From this perspective, it is not an opposition between the virginal and the married, but rather a focus on the marrying phase, the moment when we have the transition from the one (virginal) to the other (married). Does that bring even more attention to the wedding as a ceremony and what follows? Quite possibly this nymphē highlights the transitory stage of the gazer, which makes this fragment even more alluring. Everything that emanates from the head in the ancient imagination—seeing, speaking, thinking, smelling, tasting—should remain virginal. If we read this poem from the angle of ancient senses, then this poem does not simply divide the virgin from the bride but prolongs the bride’s image and, thus, the sensual experience of being a bride. The body underneath is to be a bride, and it is unclear whether this would refer to pleasure, the cost of pleasure, or the trauma of becoming a gynē. The woman is grounded as a nymphē, one whose lower part of her body is that of her younger self. This age marker informs the gendered gaze that focuses on the bridal self. Furthermore, a bride is the object of everyone’s gaze during a wedding, a spectacle for the entire community to look at. Praxilla’s poem inverts gender and gaze dynamics by making the poem’s female figure the gazer. If that is the case, then it is even more likely that this is a women’s wedding song that asks the bride to reciprocate and return her own look back at, quite possibly, her former viewers. The receiver of others’ gazes becomes the gazer. The target of the gaze is not specified, but the quality is explicitly mentioned as kalon. Why is it important to delineate the kind of viewing that is being described?

⁴⁰ Peponi 2016: 1.

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, ,    

Because looking at someone is not an innocent act. When any looking takes priority in an oral narrative, it means privileging, isolating, or even focusing on a more specific target of viewing. As we have seen, the elders of Troy are, in a way, benevolent gazers. The typology of wedding discourse used in the epic aligns with the blessings adhering to a formulaic typology. Similarly, with little to connect it with formulaic diction, Praxilla’s gazer is also benevolent. This further implies that there is always the anxiety of the aggressive or violent gaze, which is congruent with ideologies about the evil eye that also permeate ancient poetry. Viewing brings a force with it that can translate into a positive or negative impact on the object. And any wedding scene has several sensitive objects of that viewing, not least the bride and groom, who are at the mercy of many onlookers. The viewing figure is a focal point for visual representation. The way a figure looks at others is a theme that artists explored intently. On the nuptial vase (lebes gamikos) from the Louvre Museum depicted in Figure 1.1, which possibly depicts a bride’s preparation, we have what could be read as a visual rendering of the Praxilla poem, namely the window where the head of a woman can be seen. Moreover, on the top of the vase, we also have the portrayal of another woman’s face.⁴¹ It is almost as if we have a Sapphic onlooker (as in Sappho fr. 31) or the gazing woman of Praxilla. This further suggests that the woman looking (as a bride or onto a bride, and possibly through a small window or door) could be part of a formulaic scene for weddings, which invites further exploration. The gazing is an important aspect. Moreover, in this particular vase, we see that the face depicted on the top of the lid is identical to the one depicted through the window looking at the seated figure, the bride, and has a different hairstyle compared to the bride. One explanation for this could be that the seated figure is one of the bride’s best friends, who is offering this gift. Observing the figure sitting behind the bride and touching her tenderly, one can notice the similarity between her face and the two faces above (which could also be attributed to stylistic techniques). Or this could be a surrogate or even a supplanted bride, perhaps alluding to lost folk narratives.⁴² While it is hard to say whether we have any allusions to mythical or other folk poetry, the presence of the naked young boy (who stands for the boy figure in rituals, or even the Eros figure, which is often present throughout such pottery), to whom the bride gives something to eat (such as figs, walnuts, or other desserts, expected food items at weddings), points to the ritualistic connections. Moreover, we might have through this depiction a memorialization of specific gift giving but also a snapshot of an important moment in a ritual which also idealizes the boy’s youth and beauty. Such an added viewer is needed as an extra

⁴¹ For the topic of locating female desire in vase iconography, see Toscano 2013, with some useful insights. ⁴² See the discussion on the Modern Greek ballad “The Bridesmaid Who Became a Bride” in Karanika 2014.

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Figure 1.1 Painter of Athens 1714, side B from an Apulian red-figured lebes gamikos depicting a woman and a youth, c.360–350 . H. 38.5 cm (15 in.), diam. 21 cm (8 ¼ in.). Campana Collection, 1861, K 196, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, the Louvre. Picture available through Commons Licensing, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lebes_gamikos_Louvre_K196.jpg.

reminder that the viewer of the vase participates in this viewing setting from the other side. Weddings are inextricably connected with the act of viewing as a primordial force. There is no wedding without viewers, and the ritual itself is anchored around internal and external viewing: the veiling and unveiling of the bride and the way the procession leads the couple to their home. It is no wonder that we see this explored intently in different literary but also visual scenes.

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, ,    

Hearing Hearing Female Voices After Odysseus is shipwrecked on the island of the Phaeacians, he falls asleep, exhausted after his journey; he is woken up by voices of young women (Od. 6.117, 122) who shouted as they were playing with their ball and Nausicaa sent it by mistake to a deep eddy near where Odysseus was sleeping.⁴³ They are the voices of Nausicaa and her companions and handmaids. Nausicaa, at Athena’s admonition, had gone away from her city with her father’s help. Athena’s plan for Nausicaa was to arrange for the washing of clothes, a kind of washing that does not seem ordinary but alludes to wedding preparation. When Nausicaa had asked her father to put up a wagon, she referred to her brothers’ dancing activity, which implicitly introduces a space where one meets future spouses, as an excuse (Od. 6.63–5). In contrast, her father understood she had something else in mind: her own wedding, an idea instigated by Athena, who appeared disguised in Nausicaa’s dream. Odysseus’s arrival at Scheria has nuptial overtones throughout.⁴⁴ He is a stranger who comes from far away to a place where there is a princess of marriageable age. They meet outside the city. Epic poetry marks the countryside as a dangerous place for young women, a topos for abduction or rape in archaic literature.⁴⁵ Odysseus is found naked and lost, not knowing where he is. Nausicaa has the task of guiding Odysseus as he reenters civilization. In a way, if we were to view them as a potential couple, they would appear to have inverse roles: Nausicaa is the one to lead him back into a city, a new (even temporary) home, the Phaeacian palace where the stranger Odysseus meets the king and queen of the Phaeacians. She further instructs him on how to behave and how to supplicate the queen, and she leads the way discreetly, making Odysseus aware of potential gossip (Od. 6.275–85). Odysseus realizes her house is the place that will enable him to continue his journey. With all the nuptial nuances, Nausicaa has a groom-like presence as she is the one to lead Odysseus to her home. Before this happens, though, it is by hearing the female voice that Odysseus realizes he is alive and wonders where he is. He ponders whether he has arrived at a land of cruel, wild, unjust people or hospitable, god-fearing people. He woke up when Nausicaa threw the ball in the wrong direction and then the girls screamed for quite some time. The playful atmosphere is interrupted, and as it disrupts Odysseus’s sleep, it becomes the background of his awakening and, eventually, his reentry to a cultured world. The collective young female voice came from all around: κουράων ἀμφήλυθε θῆλυς ἀυτή (Od. 6.122). He likens the voice to that of ⁴³ For this episode and Odysseus’s encounter with Nausicaa, see Segal 1967: 341–2; Cairns 1990; Doherty 1995; Dougherty 2001; Arft 2022. ⁴⁴ See also Lateiner 1992; Oakley and Sinos 1993; Karanika 2014. ⁴⁵ See Dougherty 2001.

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nymphs, those dwelling at peaks of mountains or river springs and meadows (6.122–4), and he then wonders whether it is human speech. σφαῖραν ἔπειτ᾽ ἔρριψε μετ᾽ ἀμφίπολον βασίλεια· ἀμφιπόλου μὲν ἅμαρτε, βαθείῃ δ᾽ ἔμβαλε δίνῃ· αἱ δ᾽ ἐπὶ μακρὸν ἄϋσαν. ὁ δ᾽ ἔγρετο δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς, ἑζόμενος δ᾽ ὥρμαινε κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν· “Ὤ μοι ἐγώ, τέων αὖτε βροτῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἱκάνω; ἦ ῥ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ ὑβρισταί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι, ἦε φιλόξεινοι, καί σφιν νόος ἐστὶ θεουδής; ὥς τέ με κουράων ἀμφήλυθε θῆλυς ἀϋτή· νυμφάων, αἳ ἔχουσ᾽ ὀρέων αἰπεινὰ κάρηνα καὶ πηγὰς ποταμῶν καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα. ἦ νύ που ἀνθρώπων εἰμὶ σχεδὸν αὐδηέντων; ἀλλ᾽ ἄγ᾽, ἐγὼν αὐτὸς πειρήσομαι ἠδὲ ἴδωμαι.” The princess then threw the ball to one of her attendants; while she missed her attendant, she ended up sending the ball in a deep eddy; they all screamed for quite some time. This woke up revered Odysseus, who, as he was sitting, was having whirlwind thoughts in mind and heart: “Alas, now, in whose land have I now arrived? Are they arrogant, wild, and unjust? Or are they hospitable with fear of god in their minds? It feels like a young female voice came echoing around me! Perhaps of nymphs whose dwelling are the mountain peaks, the river springs, and the grassy meadows! Maybe I am at last somewhere close to people with a human speech? But let me try it out myself and see.” (Od. 6.115–26)

His first words are described as thoughts (what he was pondering in his mind and heart, 6.118). Most editors print these words as direct speech, and rightly so. He says “ō moi egō” (“alas” or “oh, my”), which is the first-person musing of a man waking up after a disastrous shipwreck. These words are not described as speech, but they convey his first reaction to the voices he heard. It is worth analyzing the order in which his thoughts appear. The first reaction is wonder when he asks himself whether he is in a land of savage people. From a more pragmatic point of view, the text avoids any expression of fear. The Odyssey records obliquely what should be the first emotion and reaction in such a situation. The second thought moves implicitly to hope, as he wonders whether he has arrived at the land of people who would offer hospitality, which is what ultimately happens. The next thing that he remarks anchors his thoughts to his immediate reality and that of a young female voice that came to him. Again, he first attributes the origin of the voices to nymphs before entertaining the thought that it is a human voice that has reached him. Following his first awakening in this

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, ,    

new place and the encounter with Nausicaa, then, like a bride being led by a groom, Odysseus is led by Nausicaa to her home. From this perspective, the gender inversion that the text entertains, and Odysseus’s initial expression of masked fear, are even more significant.⁴⁶ This expression of emotion can capture the fear of a bride who wonders what her husband will be like. A bride, like Odysseus here, can be seen as a shipwrecked person who arrives in an unknown land. We have a subtle simile here, so the idea that he thinks the voices are those of nymphs can resonate differently if we consider the double entendre the word “nymphē” can create. Being in the countryside and hearing young women’s voices is dangerous for a man.⁴⁷ The fear of being seized by nymphs or divine creatures is a well-rooted superstition. It is a clever acknowledgment of mortal vulnerability, showing subtle respect for the divine more broadly. This is put clearly within nympholepsy narratives.⁴⁸ As the poem brings attention to Odysseus’s inner thoughts, Odysseus is empowered as a narrator. Reading this scene from the symbolic expressions of nympholepsy in Greek literature and epigraphy, one could say that a frenzied or “seized” man who comes in contact with the nymphs is not resourceless but rather acquires increased knowledge and eloquence.⁴⁹ Odysseus’s character in Odyssey 6, the book that marks Odysseus’s survival and rebirth, is intriguing because he resembles a quasi-bride and a quasi-nympholept, at a unique moment in the epic narrative that marks Odysseus’s return. Odysseus decides to go and find out where he is for himself, as the text describes him resembling a mountain lion—another hidden eikasia—and marks the process of his coming back to culture.⁵⁰ Yet, as this episode has been framed within a nuptial context, Odysseus can only rely on his mind and eloquence to ensure his survival. He doesn’t even have clothes; he needs to be reborn into the world of civilized humans as he comes out of his wilderness, which the lion simile only accentuates. That the text inserts the reference to the nymphs is a subtle gesture toward him being close to a feminine world. It also portrays him as a figure getting closer to the divine realm, about to acquire more knowledge and power. This reference, though, of entertaining the thought that the voices he heard could be voices of nymphs, brings him closer to nuptial poetics, which he will utilize in more detail as he addresses Nausicaa.

⁴⁶ For the Phaeacian episode and a different application of fluidity of gender in this episode, see Bassi 1998: 130–1, especially on the scene of Odysseus’s adornment later. ⁴⁷ See Gross 1976; Karakantza 2003 for the semiotics of rape. See the reception of this scene by Walcot in Morrison 2014: 37 and the address to Nausicaa as a nymph. ⁴⁸ We will return to those when discussing the nuptial context in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. ⁴⁹ See Connor 1988 and Pache 2011, who discuss nympholepsy and bring in the later epigraphic record and the reference to Socrates in Plato, Phaedrus 238c. For a more detailed analysis of this perspective, see the section below that discusses the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. ⁵⁰ On the lion simile, see Glenn 1998 and Watrous 1999.

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The meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa is possible when the divine mediator, Athena, lifts the usual conventions.⁵¹ In other words, Athena must intervene for this encounter to occur between her favorite hero and Nausicaa, and not have Nausicaa flee. Fear is registered for such an encounter for the young woman, too, throughout Greek literature. Athena puts “courage” in Nausicaa’s heart and takes away fear from her limbs (Od. 6.140) as Nausicaa meets Odysseus, who then takes the role of a suppliant. He ponders whether to touch her knees, as one expects in a well-registered supplication gesture, or talk to her from a distance so as not to scare her (Od. 6.141–7). He decides not to touch her but keep some distance. Twice, the text uses language that brings the concept of profit (Od. 6.145, 148) to convey how Odysseus thought of gaining from the situation, another implicit reference to the wedding subtext. When he addresses her, he repeats what was in his thoughts earlier and calls her an anassa, a term addressed to the divine. He asks whether she is a goddess or a mortal and then takes the route of the goddess to present the eikasia. As it is typical in wedding performance to liken the bride to someone else, Odysseus likens Nausicaa first to Artemis in looks and stature. This is because the landscape he imagines when he first wakes up is one of mountains, rivers, springs, and meadows, the landscape of the cult of Artemis—but also the landscape of nuptial poetics. Earlier the narrator of the epic poem discusses Nausicaa, comparing her and her maids to Artemis and her companions, the nymphs, a sight at which the mother Leto rejoices. I have argued elsewhere that this simile captures a song.⁵² The text implies that the female voice is what wakes Odysseus up and brings him back to the conscious state. In all cases, and in a world of competitive narrators’ voices, Odysseus assumes the role of the Odyssey’s chief narrator, which he will hold for the following few books of the Odyssey when he narrates his adventures to the Phaeacians. Likening Nausicaa to Artemis in his supplication to her is his first strategy when he addresses the young woman who will lead him to her home first and facilitate the journey back to his homeland.⁵³ The indirect praise that likens a young woman to a goddess is part of the formulaic diction of eikasia, one of the genres of speech associated most closely with hymnic discourse, ritual, and wedding ritual specifically. That Nausicaa is a princess of the island’s elite makes the eikasia even more appropriate. The epic artistry presents the subtle change in the narrator’s voice in both collaborating and competing terms. Odysseus proceeds clearly from the eikasia to the makarismos, the other most typical feature of wedding diction, namely the formal and ritualized

⁵¹ For Nausicaa and her leading role, especially as a negotiator throughout the Phaeacian episode, see Doherty 2008 (and esp. 68–9). ⁵² Karanika 2014: 53–68. ⁵³ See Doherty 1995: 168 for the paucity of female narrators inside the epic and the role of female networks.

36

, ,    

pronouncement of the couple and other participants as “blessed.” The makarismos is likely a remnant of ritual language and hymnic style that has shaped nuptial discourse. As Odysseys says, if she is not a goddess and is a mortal, he pronounces “thrice-blessed” her father and mother as also her brothers (Od. 6.153–4) and goes on to say that the most blessed of all is the man who will lead her to his home with gifts (Od. 6.158–9). This is the moment when the wedding diction used throughout Odysseus’s speech becomes more explicit. After the typical makarismos, he returns to eikasia in different terms, in which he cleverly inserts his identity as a performer. Odysseus, in his address to Nausicaa, plays the role of the performer who addresses a bride, but this is the moment when he underlines it further as he presents himself as a wandering poet. He tells her that she looks like a “young shoot of a palm tree” (Od. 6.163) in Delos, an apparent reference to poetic contests and the winner of those contests. In this way, Odysseus presents the simile of Nausicaa, referring to the prize of poetic contests at the island of Apollo, brother of Artemis, subtly bringing in his earlier eikasia by craftily making the young woman part of the competitions to which he alludes. He again sensitively brings himself and his addressee to the forum of poetic competition to gain her support and collaboration. Poets win through collaboration, and this is what Odysseus aims at, taking the expert performer’s persona that he reflects here and throughout the Phaeacian episode. The supplication, which alludes, line by line, to the nuptial poetics that shaped it, ends with a wish addressed to Nausicaa. Odysseus reveals the most complete address to a bride: it should include an eikasia, a makarismos for her family, and a wish for her and the couple. The typified wish of “may the gods give you anything that your mind desires” is both general and targeted (Od. 6.180). The second line specifies his expectation for what she desires: a man, a home, and homophrosynē, the concept of marital harmony (Od. 6.181). Odysseus has come full circle to win Nausicaa’s help, who will address him in return. She, too, has become an expert performer highlighting the hospitality that he is to receive from the Phaeacians. This intensely nuanced episode, shaped by nuptial undertones, gives Odysseus the role of the wandering poet, which he will resume more forcefully at the palace. Moreover, it gives us an in-depth view into how typical performances have permeated the epic fabric and have shaped narrative expectations. Odysseus is not the groom, although this is a possibility the text toys with. He establishes himself as the expert performer after hearing the voices of the young women. He becomes a stronger performer after encountering, hearing, and absorbing women’s voices (as is also the case later with the Sirens, in Book 12 of the Odyssey). He encounters the female point of view better than anyone and carefully hears their voices, aiming to adjust his poetic style. He is strategic with his first address to the princess, fully aware that his survival depends entirely on its successful delivery.

  

37

Hearing the Gossip? Inversion of a Wedding Ritual Odysseus emerges as a winner, knowing that his journey is about to start again. Having removed himself from being a groom but playing with the idea that he might be, the poem portrays Nausicaa with a keen knowledge of the anthropology of her island. After offering him food and drink, she tells him how they will reach her city and describes the fortress and its harbor. She tells him that she will lead the way (Od. 6.261) and gives him the details of how he is supposed to follow her. Nausicaa is aware of the power of gossip in a small place like this. She does not want to hear what others might have to say in evil-spirited talk against her. She even utters the imagined words that could be heard about her (Od. 6.276–84), as if giving voice to the many voices she is trying to shun: “Who is the one who follows Nausicaa, a handsome, tall man, but a stranger? Where did she find him? Surely, he will become her husband. She may have brought some shipwrecked man who lost his ship, one of faraway men or maybe a certain god came to her, an answer to her prayers, coming down from the sky” (Od. 6.276–81). When a character in epic poetry reproduces what others say or may say about them, it is particularly revealing for the kind of refraction of speech—and in this case, everyday speech—that the epic encompasses. Nausicaa offers a series of thoughts about what any onlookers could utter. It is as if she is bringing different voices together, voices she seeks to suppress. She is certainly not waiting to be the target of malevolent gossip. As a young woman of marriageable age and one from the most elite family on the island, she knows that any movement of hers is susceptible to public scrutiny, which can quickly make her life difficult. If she is seen with a foreigner, she is even more likely to be the subject of gossip, and she knows she will be deemed to be dishonoring her people by not choosing one of them as a husband. That the man near her can only be seen as a potential groom is a given fact that she simply cannot ignore. When Nausicaa mentions that she does not want people to hear about her return to the palace, she shows an intimate knowledge of the many vulnerabilities young women face; gossip is not easy to grapple with. Gossip is well known to be a form of social control. In this episode, we have Nausicaa’s “imagined” gossip of others about her, meaning the kind of gossip that she is expected to address. The audience sees the fear of the young woman fully laid out here. She knows that if such things are heard, this will be a great “shame” for her (oneidea, Od. 6.285). This passage reveals the many pressures and shaming mechanisms at work that do not need to be attributed to specific people but collectively can create an impossible situation for young women.⁵⁴ One of the worst possible scenarios of this

⁵⁴ For gossip in ancient Greece, see Cohen 1991 and the excellent chapter by Eidinow on “genres of gossip” in Eidinow 2015.

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, ,    

gossip would be if people said that she is with a man against her parents’ will (Od. 6.286). The nuptial overtones in this episode take a darker turn as Nausicaa explains the shaming mechanism in young girls’ lives and the dangers of going against the family’s will. The sixth book of the Odyssey moves from the collective voice of Nausicaa’s circle to the collective voice of people outside her circle as they play the guessing game about their princess and the man she is seen with. At the same time, it also proceeds to the voicing of Odysseus’s thoughts, then hers. In this way, Nausicaa represents the concerns of any woman in her situation. She controls what is to get out while also strategizing Odysseus’s return to the world of the polis. This episode throws much light on the internal life of young women, their worries, fears, and emotions; it encapsulates how people’s words can be pervasive and invasive in a young woman’s life. It is not without reason that she seeks not to have anyone hear of her and Odysseus and to maintain full control of her situation; it is for this reason that she goes out of her way to prescribe to Odysseus the route, the time, and the details of how they are supposed to reach the palace. Nausicaa goes first, and Odysseus follows at a distance to avoid the small town’s gossip. Gossip is a genre of communication that thrives on the sets of conventions that it also perpetuates.⁵⁵ Although Nausicaa acknowledges it as a force on her life that has repercussions for her actions and movements, gossip is not only about others’ control of one’s life but also about how one manages it as a form of communication. It is a product of social networks; it can be fluid. Anything that sparks attention as something potentially significant—which the encounter with a stranger can be—becomes a focus for gossip: it acts as a conduit of behavioral conformity to social norms as they are being formed and imposed. The fear of gossip further highlights the episode’s nuptial nuances. The mere reference to gossip becomes a subtle acknowledgment of what people will assume, in a way that reinforces the episode’s earlier tone. Odysseus and Nausicaa’s encounter and entrance to the city of the Phaeacians echo and reverse the wedding ritual. Odysseus encounters Nausicaa with her attendants and talks with Nausicaa, who then leads him with a careful plan to the palace and her home. They do so while bringing the “dowry” all washed and prepared on wagons in movements that recall different stages of the wedding ritual. Another inversion takes place as the gifts are given to the male figure. The hospitality scene is mapped onto nuptial scenes. The whole return to the city can be read as an inversion of a wedding ritual. If a bride is the one to be led to the groom’s house, as per the ancient ethos, then this episode has the complete opposite structure. Odysseus becomes the bride who needs to be escorted to

⁵⁵ For an analysis of gossip and the difficulties of analyzing “obvious” phenomena, see Bergmann 1993.

  

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the palace of the Phaeacians, and who, with accurate and well-orchestrated movements, needs to reach the king and the queen, and ultimately receive their many gifts. The road takes them through characteristic landscapes connected with nuptial or funerary scenes: a spring and a meadow are highly reminiscent of journeys to a different world (Od. 6.292). The reference to the poplar trees, the spring, and the meadow are also markers of a journey to the Underworld, as the texts from another tradition, those of the Orphic golden lamellae, attest.⁵⁶ This further alludes to the concept of a wedding as a catabasis; only a carefully orchestrated and ritualized movement can bring someone back.⁵⁷ Odysseus is to go through a prescribed route, reach the palace, and wait until the wagon with Nausicaa and her maids arrives. She then informs him of what he will find inside the palace and how to approach her parents: first he should approach her mother as a suppliant; she makes clear to him that the continuation of his journey depends on her (Od. 6.310–15). The entire Book 6 ends with Odysseus’s prayer to Athena; he prays to receive the friendship and pity of the Phaeacians. The inverse wedding ritual aims to restore Odysseus to his own home, but in the meantime he has to be the displaced “bride” at another’s home. Nuptial undertones have shaped this episode in rich and multiple ways that echo the emotions, especially the fears, and also the formulaic diction around wedding performances. Notably, the text refers to Odysseus as godlike. This may be part of a formula that refers to Odysseus throughout the Odyssey, yet it also brings a subtle eikasia as Odysseus proceeds to someone else’s palace, with someone else’s clothes, following a young woman’s instructions.

Tasting A Bride’s Trauma and a Bard’s Performance of Memory: A Bridal Catabasis Perspective from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter It is commonplace that mortal women in early Greek epics appear in groups. Every time a heroine enters the narrative, there are references to her maids, companions, or peers: Helen, Nausicaa, and Penelope appear with their maids. A solitary presence is rare and can be a hidden marker of abduction and forced slavery narratives, as is the case with the unnamed Phoenician woman in Eumaeus’s story in Odyssey 15, who is an embedded speaking character

⁵⁶ The brief narratives on the surviving golden lamellae present a similar landscape and focus on instructions on guiding the dead into the Underworld. For this, see Edmonds 2004. ⁵⁷ For the Underworld tones throughout this episode, see Arft 2022.

40

, ,    

(Od. 15.424–9).⁵⁸ References to divine figures do not quite fit in the same parameters, although there are similarities that need further analysis. While the companions are often mentioned collectively, referred to as handmaids or with similar markers, in some cases the text gives the names of figures attending as companions or attendants of the central female figure. Some scholars characterize the naming or grouping of several individuals as mere lists, as most notably the Nereids in Iliad 18.38–49, where the names are clearly mentioned. It is noteworthy that this list consists of divine figures.⁵⁹ Other references fall within the definition of a catalogue (Od. 11.225–330), when an extended narrative is given or briefly alluded to for each name, as is the case with the catalogue of heroines that Odysseus sees in the Underworld. Catalogues of women were popular in antiquity and often presented not just names but abbreviated stories behind the women listed. The Νekyia’s catalogue of women, as well as the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, offer a window into understanding how these narratives worked.⁶⁰ Lists or catalogues often commemorate and group things together, but as such, they channel memory and manage personal and collective experience and history. As mentioned in the previous section, weddings can be like a catabasis. This section explores the moment of female catabasis par excellence—Persephone’s abduction—paying attention to how the Homeric text frames Persephone’s own words. It seeks to read a specific list of young women in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from the point of view of trauma theory, to capture what lies beyond the sheer mnemonics of such a list, and to recover how archaic poetry sensitively refracts an intimate and intense emotional world—that of the reluctant young bride. Catalogues were frequent in antiquity in all forms and media: catalogues of soldiers or inscriptions of cities that have acted or intend to act as one. Such individuals and entities are catalogued together if they are meant to be remembered collectively. Cities often present lists of fallen soldiers. The collective or commemorative act of remembering bravery often adumbrates personal experience and dramatic moments with paramount repercussions for the life of the one and the many. Such lists often convey a panegyric or a sense of victory without focusing on the dark experience behind those who died or suffered for a cause. From catalogues of ships to lists of women, the effects of catalogic reference are

⁵⁸ Eumaeus’s narration to Odysseus embeds this woman’s story: she was abducted by pirates and then sold into slavery. She does not mention her name but only her place of origin, Sidon, and her father’s name, Arybas. ⁵⁹ Sammons 2010; Minchin 2016. ⁶⁰ For the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, see Hunter 2005 and Ormand 2014; for the catalogue of women in the Nekyia, see Cook 1995: 67; Doherty 1995: 112; S. Larson 2000; I. Rutherford 2000; Doherty 2008; Gazis 2018; Nelson 2021. For lists/catalogues in literature and more recent scholarship, see Kyriakidis 2007, who was the first to produce a detailed and nuanced study on catalogues in literature and how they accentuate narratives from Homer onward, and Laemmle, Scheidegger Laemmle, and Wesselmann 2021; for lists and catalogues in different genres, see A. Kirk 2021.

  

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different. The Iliadic catalogue of ships projects power and infinity. In contrast, the Odyssean catalogue of women in the Nekyia is “a kind of foil to the Catalogue of Ships” which does not name an “uncountable multitude.”⁶¹ Catalogues in epic reproduce texts that are susceptible to alteration and multiplicity.⁶² Epic lists are not the same as epigraphic or historical evidence. The aesthetic and acoustic effect of lists and catalogues has received significant scholarly attention. Whitman, writing of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, gives the perspective of an ancient audience and the oral effect: “read aloud,” as he puts it, the scene gives the impression through the “inexhaustible” catalogue of the “movement of an army on the march.”⁶³ In the case of lists of female names in early Greek literature, an anthropological perspective views the collective naming of women as a representation of female choral activity.⁶⁴ Daily life in an ancient community entailed all kinds of relations, synergy, and cooperation for basic activities, such as food preparation, child rearing, textile making, and agricultural work, to name a few. Choral activity, as reflected in early Greek epics with singing and dancing, marks the special and even circumstantial settings that brought smaller or larger communities together. Named individuals or, in some cases, unnamed groups of women (attendants, nymphs, young women, and older women, among others) are present as distinct groups. By further contextualizing the presence of named (or unnamed) groups of women and how they function within specific narrative frames, we can understand in more depth the dynamics of relations represented in early Greek epics. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (418–24), Persephone herself gives a list of the nymphs present at the time prior to her abduction. She presents this list at a moment of climax: when her mother wants to find out what had really happened to her daughter, Persephone inserts a digression in her answer by listing the twenty-one friends she was with in a meadow plucking flowers, in a scene filled with symbolism about the imminent change in life (such as marriage or death or both): τοιγὰρ ἐγώ τοι, μῆτερ, ἐρέω νημερτέα πάντα· εὖτέ μοι Ἑρμῆς ἦ[λθ]᾽ ἐριούνιος ἄγγελος ὠκὺς πὰρ πατέρος Κρονίδαο καὶ ἄλλων οὐρανιώνων ἐλθεῖν ἐξ Ἐρέβευς, ἵνα ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδοῦσα λήξαις ἀθανάτοισι χόλου καὶ μήνιος αἰνῆς, αὐτὰρ ἐγὼν ἀνόρουσ᾽ ὑπὸ χάρματος, αὐτὰρ ὃ λάθρῃ

⁶¹ For “an elusive poetics of infinity,” see A. Kirk 2021: 51, and for the “foil” of the Odyssean catalogue of women, see A. Kirk 2021: 52. ⁶² Sherratt 1990: 813. ⁶³ Whitman 2013. ⁶⁴ Calame 2001.

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, ,     ἔμβαλέ μοι ῥοιῆς κόκκον, μελιηδέ᾽ ἐδωδήν, ἄκουσαν δὲ βίῃ με προσηνάγκασσε πάσασθαι. ὡς δέ μ᾽ ἀναρπάξας Κρονίδεω πυκινὴν διὰ μῆτιν ᾤχετο πατρὸς ἐμοῖο, φέρων ὑπὸ κεύθεα γαίης ἐξερέω, καὶ πάντα διίξομαι, ὡς ἐρεείνεις. ἡμεῖς μὲν μάλα πᾶσαι ἀν᾽ ἱμερτὸν λειμῶνα, Λευκίππη Φαινώ τε καὶ Ἠλέκτρη καὶ Ἰάνθη καὶ Μελίτη Ἰάχη τε Ῥόδειά τε Καλλιρόη τε Μηλόβοσίς τε Τύχη τε καὶ Ὠκυρόη καλυκῶπις Χρυσηΐς τ᾽ Ἰάνειρά τ᾽ Ἀκάστη τ᾽ Ἀδμήτη τε καὶ Ῥοδόπη Πλουτώ τε καὶ ἱμερόεσσα Καλυψὼ καὶ Στὺξ Οὐρανίη τε Γαλαξαύρη τ᾽ ἐρατεινὴ Παλλάς τ᾽ ἐγρεμάχη καὶ Ἄρτεμις ἰοχέαιρα, παίζομεν ἠδ᾽ ἄνθεα δρέπομεν χείρεσσ᾽ ἐρόεντα, μίγδα κρόκον τ᾽ ἀγανὸν καὶ ἀγαλλίδας ἠδ᾽ ὑάκινθον καὶ ῥοδέας κάλυκας καὶ λείρια, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι, νάρκισσόν θ᾽ ὃν ἔφυσ᾽ ὥς περ κρόκον εὐρεῖα χθών. αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ δρεπόμην περὶ χάρματι, γαῖα δ᾽ ἔνερθε χώρησεν, τῇ δ᾽ ἔκθορ᾽ ἄναξ κρατερὸς πολυδέγμων. βῆ δὲ φέρων ὑπὸ γαῖαν ἐν ἅρμασι χρυσείοισι πόλλ᾽ ἀεκαζομένην, ἐβόησα δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὄρθια φωνῇ. ταῦτά τοι ἀχνυμένη περ ἀληθέα πάντ᾽ ἀγορεύω.

“Well, mother, I will tell you everything just as it was. When coursing Hermes came swift with the message from father Zeus and the other Heavenly Ones that I should leave the Darkness, so that you might set eyes on me and cease from your wrath and your dreadful resentment against the immortals, I at once jumped up in joy; but he surreptitiously placed a pomegranate seed into me, a honey-sweet food, and forced me to taste it against my will. As to how he snatched me up through the crafty design of Zeus, my father, and took me off to the recesses of the earth, I will explain and go through it all, just as you ask. We were all frolicking in the lovely meadow—Leucippe and Phaeno and Electra and Ianthe, and Melite and Iache and Rhodeia and Callirhoe, and Melobosis and Tyche and Ocyrhoe with eyes like buds, and Chryseis and Ianeira and Acaste and Admete, and Rhodope and Plouto and enchanting Calypso, and Styx and Ourania and lovely Galaxaura, and Pallas the battle-rouser and Artemis profuse of arrows—and we were picking lovely flowers, a mixture of gentle saffron and iris and hyacinth and rosebuds and lilies, a wonder to behold, and narcissus that the broad earth put out like saffron. I was picking them with joy, but the earth beneath moved, and there the mighty lord, the one who receives many, leaped out of the ground. He went off below the earth with me despite my great resistance in his golden chariot, and I screamed aloud. Although I am in grief, I am telling you the whole truth.” (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 406–33)

  

43

Demeter’s inquiry focuses on one specific question: whether Persephone has eaten any food given to her by Hades (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 393–4).⁶⁵ She specifically mentions that if she has tasted anything, she would have to return to the Underworld for one-third of a year. Persephone’s response is the longest speech in the hymn.⁶⁶ Persephone responds that she has indeed tasted something. The wording is intriguing here because the subject is Hades, who made her taste “a honey-sweet food” (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 412) by placing a pomegranate seed into her. Taste and pleasure are often linked in antiquity, especially because taste is a multimodal sense; it involves tactility and the olfactory sense.⁶⁷ The reference to the quality of the food as “honey-sweet” adds the emphasis on taste, and so is the fact that she didn’t taste it on her own but was given it by an external force. She then says that he made her taste it against her will (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 413), one of the most important details of the hymn which has attracted a lot of attention. The narrative of the hymn has too conveniently been read as an initiation rite, as Persephone is initiated into a new life. The narrative of the hymn itself, though, goes beyond initiation and focuses on the mother’s quest for her daughter and the reunion of mother and daughter. If indeed it reflects cultic elements, it is far more likely to reflect an hieros gamos (“sacred wedding”), as Suter has convincingly suggested, and an older phase of the mother-daughter cult, rather than a female initiation into adulthood.⁶⁸ Tasting the pomegranate has been equated to the sexual experience forced upon Persephone through forced marriage. But tasting something is also a marker of transcending boundaries.⁶⁹ Ancient descriptions of wedding rituals tend to linger on the foods appropriate for the occasion. From quince to apple or from figs to nuts, some foods are linked to sexuality, others to prosperity, and others to a sense of sweetness perceived to permeate ritual activity. But the blood-red color of the pomegranate, with its complex symbolism of fertility, sexuality, and death, creates multiple connections: from the loss of virginal blood to the bleeding that can lead to death. Moreover, as a ritual act, tasting brings allusions to transcendence or migration from one place to another. Even in rituals today, such as the holy communion, tasting is integral to notions of crossing the boundaries between the mortal and the divine. The Greek Orthodox wedding ritual retains the tasting of wine from a common cup by the couple, reinforcing the idea that tasting is the sense that enables transcendence, transportation, and transfiguration. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone’s tasting of the pomegranate seed is contrasted with Demeter’s refusal to taste nectar or ambrosia (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 47–50)

⁶⁵ On Demeter’s insistence on finding out if Persephone has had the food that Hades gave her, see Ormand 2014: 136–7. ⁶⁶ For direct and indirect speech in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Beck 2001. For Persephone’s speech as the longest speech in the hymn, and also for the insight that “the exchange heals the rift that started when Persephone was abducted at the beginning of the poem,” see Beck 2001: 71 (emphasis is mine). ⁶⁷ See Rudolph 2018a and 2018b. ⁶⁸ See Suter 1992. ⁶⁹ See Warren 2018.

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, ,    

while she was wandering on earth looking for her lost daughter.⁷⁰ The lack of food here, and the lack of divine food more specifically, marks the inverse path from the divine to the earthly realm and the epiphany of the goddess transformed into an older woman. Following the reunion of mother and daughter, and once the immediate question of whether there was consumption of food is addressed, Persephone moves on to say what happened; at this point, she gives the names of her friends with whom she was at a lovely “meadow” (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 417). Though earlier Persephone’s companions were mentioned in the hymn as a group, now Persephone names her companions as individuals. Enumeration of female names was a practice well known in antiquity and in various formats (e.g., inscriptions with names of priestesses) and is deeply connected with commemorating people as a group and as individuals (with further ramifications). But for an oral text, such a listing can be viewed as a speech that intends not just to name or commemorate but, more importantly, to stage the speaking character while functioning as a tableau that blends the past with the present. Persephone’s performance brings her past into her present.⁷¹ It has already been noted that naming the companions makes Persephone’s narration of her experience seem subjective.⁷² Indeed, this enumeration is not a mere list: it is a structured image that is an integral part of the narrative. It complements the basic theme of the separation and reintegration of mother and daughter—the restoration of a previous order, one that does not quite fit in the previous terms of the two women being constantly together.⁷³ In other words, the emphasis here is on forced marriage, presented by the speaker in a manner that seeks to eliminate everything that happened after the violent trauma and instead restore the earlier time of innocent bliss and of being one of the girls in the group. Lists can be as an easy-to-dismiss, dull, or digressive moment in the oral (or written) text, or they can be regarded as a mise en abyme, but they convey strong messages about the presence of collective groups. My analysis will rest on two pillars: The first is a narratological one: the naming comes from Persephone herself as a speaking character as she comes back from the Underworld (see Figure 1.2 for a representation of this scene on classical vase iconography). The second one is an anthropological one informed by trauma theory, which sees

⁷⁰ See Lord 1994: 183. ⁷¹ In my reading of Persephone’s performance within a performance, I have followed Bakker’s views on the poem as a “cognitive flow” and the performance as a “deictic now,” which have helped me analyze this scene from a different perspective. See Bakker 2003: 52–3 and Bakker 1997. ⁷² See Foley 1994. ⁷³ For the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship, see the excellent remarks and critique by Helen Morales in Morales 2007: 97–8, who discusses, inter alia, the sexual politics of myth and how compelling the Demeter and Persephone story has been for feminist writers. Some of the criticism that Morales has offered is also valid, in my view, for feminist scholars, for whom this myth has been central.

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Figure 1.2 Terracotta bell-krater (bowl for mixing wine and water) attributed to the Persephone Painter depicting the ascension of Persephone from the underworld, c.440 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/252973

Persephone’s temporal insertion as her attempt at creating and sustaining an alternative of her choice. Regarding the first pillar, Persephone appears as an internal performer, addressing her mother at a critical moment. The scene in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter can be compared to the naming of the Nereids in Iliad’s lamentation scene (18.38–49), in which the sea nymphs express solidarity and support for Thetis, as well as to the similar listings of the Nereids in the Hesiodic Theogony (243–62), the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, following the enumeration of rivers. Some of the names are shared—Melite, Ianeira, and Acaste are also named in the Iliad— while Plouto, Electra, and Ianthe appear in the Theogony passage. In the Iliad, the context is one of lamentation as the Nereids gather around Thetis, underscoring

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, ,    

the mother’s anxiety and pain. The naming is both a pause and a crescendo in performance, creating an amplification effect: the naming of each one amplifies the sounding effect here. σμερδαλέον δ᾽ ᾤμωξεν· ἄκουσε δὲ πότνια μήτηρ ἡμένη ἐν βένθεσσιν ἁλὸς παρὰ πατρὶ γέροντι, κώκυσέν τ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔπειτα· θεαὶ δέ μιν ἀμφαγέροντο, πᾶσαι ὅσαι κατὰ βένθος ἁλὸς Νηρηΐδες ἦσαν. ἔνθ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔην Γλαύκη τε Θάλειά τε Κυμοδόκη τε, Νησαίη Σπειώ τε Θόη θ᾽ Ἁλίη τε βοῶπις, Κυμοθόη τε καὶ Ἀκταίη καὶ Λιμνώρεια καὶ Μελίτη καὶ Ἴαιρα καὶ Ἀμφιθόη καὶ Ἀγαύη, Δωτώ τε Πρωτώ τε Φέρουσά τε Δυναμένη τε, Δεξαμένη τε καὶ Ἀμφινόμη καὶ Καλλιάνειρα Δωρὶς καὶ Πανόπη καὶ ἀγακλειτὴ Γαλάτεια, Νημερτής τε καὶ Ἀψευδὴς καὶ Καλλιάνασσα· ἔνθα δ᾽ ἔην Κλυμένη Ἰάνειρά τε καὶ Ἰάνασσα, Μαῖρα καὶ Ὠρείθυια ἐϋπλόκαμός τ᾽ Ἀμάθεια ἄλλαι θ᾽ αἳ κατὰ βένθος ἁλὸς Νηρηΐδες ἦσαν. τῶν δὲ καὶ ἀργύφεον πλῆτο σπέος· αἳ δ᾽ ἅμα πᾶσαι στήθεα πεπλήγοντο, Θέτις δ᾽ ἐξῆρχε γόοιο· Then terribly did [Achilles] groan aloud, and his queenly mother heard him as she sat in the depths of the sea beside the old man her father. Then she uttered a shrill cry, and the goddesses thronged about her, all the daughters of Nereus who were in the depths of the sea. There were Glauce and Thaleia and Cymodoce, Nesaea and Speio and Thoë and ox-eyed Halië, and Cymothoë and Actaeë and Limnoreia, and Melite and Iaera and Amphithoë and Agave, Doto and Proto and Pherusa and Dynamene, and Dexamene and Amphinome and Callianeira, Doris and Panope and glorious Galatea, Nemertes and Apseudes and Callianassa, and there were Clymene and Ianeira and Ianassa, Maera and Oreithyia and fair-tressed Amatheia, and other Nereids who were in the depths of the sea. With these the bright cave was filled, and they all beat their breasts together, and Thetis was leading their lamenting. (Il. 18.35–51)

Unlike the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in neither the Iliad nor the Theogony do we have a first-person enumeration. To a reader, lists can be a moment of text to be skipped, especially with so many Greek female names together. But from the orality perspective, as Elizabeth Minchin reminds us, it is a completely different story. As she points out, citing epic performance in the tradition of Kyrgyzstan, a list holds the audience’s attention in a special way. It is one thing to narrate a story and another to show a concentrated application of memory in performance. It is a feat to accomplish, one that can be applauded at the end of the enumeration.

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Choosing from the traditional repertoire of names and possibly inventing those names in a meaningful way are challenging tasks. For the Nereids in Iliad 18, the association with the ocean is all around, as Minchin further suggests.⁷⁴ Names such as Glauce (“gray-green”), Cymodoke (“wave receiver”), Speio (“grotto”), Halia (“belonging to the sea”), or Ferousa (“bearing”) have an evocative power. The element of fluidity is one that further marks the notion of transition, one of death, which is the center of that scene. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, though, makes a different choice. The names of the nymphs playing with Persephone at the moment of her abduction don’t so much make a connection with the ocean but rather highlight the connection with the name of Plouton (the name of one of the girls is Plouto). One could conjecture different ways those names could be relevant to the scene in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter because the names relate to streams or flowers in a meadow, or the first name Leucippe can allude to an image of horses, not unlike how the scene of the abduction was imagined already from antiquity with Plouton coming on a horse chariot. From the performance point of view, when one listens to a list, the audience knows that something is different and we have the showcasing of a performance within another performance. In other words, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we have the self-presentation of a speaker/performer who inserts a list, something that, in most other cases, is reserved for the omniscient narrator of the epic. Persephone draws further attention to this showpiece of companions, which leaves us with another question: Why does the epic poem present one of the two main characters to do this? And why at this particular moment? Epic poetry opens a window onto an all-female lyric world (similar to the scene that presents Nausicaa with her companions in Odyssey 6). I want to reroute the discussion of this puzzling detail in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter by comparing Persephone with Nausicaa, aiming to throw more light on understanding how such references to female groups functioned. While Persephone’s companions are listed, Nausicaa’s companions, as we saw earlier, remain unnamed and “subordinated” (explicitly marked as servants). The reference to Artemis is a typical and much-discussed feature, and it is not incompatible with female choruses of young girls, especially those of marriageable age. In the Odyssey, the simile that connects Nausicaa with Artemis is filled with choral references, suggesting that lyric poetry has been captured within an epic oral text. Artemis has nymphs as her companions, but no naming takes place. Both scenes present a strong female speaker, but there are two crucial differences: first, Persephone is a divine figure, and second, Persephone has crossed a threshold that Nausicaa has not.

⁷⁴ Minchin 2016.

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, ,    

What is noteworthy in Persephone’s list is the reference to the last two members: none other than two virgin goddesses, Athena and Artemis (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 425).⁷⁵ Persephone anchors her narrative around her existence as a maiden and reinstates herself with her earlier group while negotiating her parting from her mother. From a trauma theory perspective, listing the individuals of someone’s past at a critical moment becomes part of the process of remembering while accepting a new reality. Recalling a moment of collective activity is not just a rhetorical digression. It seeks to project on the audience a frame of mind and guide any potential reaction. It forms an integral part of an attempt to speak the unspeakable. Persephone is a figure who needs to recover from trauma. Early Greek epic captures the reemergence of a voice for someone who retrieves the memory of abuse but does so in a complex scenario. How victims remember trauma is a controversial topic for many, with different theories coming from cognitive sciences, psychology, and other fields. Some researchers argue for the activation of episodic and nondeclarative memory. Episodic memory focuses on certain aspects of the event, while nondeclarative memory focuses not on language but on actions, the reminiscence of which conditions trauma. In such a perspective, Persephone’s narration underscores the nonverbal elements of her activity: ἄνθεα δρέπομεν (“we were picking flowers,” 425); the list of flowers follows together with the reference to Persephone’s own voice, which only appears as a scream, ἐβόησα δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὄρθια φωνῇ (“I screamed with a shrill voice,” 432). In today’s cognitive inquiries, one of the key questions is whether memory of traumatic events differs qualitatively from memory of ordinary events. It is often the case that recalling and subsequently retelling a traumatic event might linger from amnesia to hypermnesia. Hypermnesia often involves long lists of things, actions, and people around the traumatic event. Remembering trauma is an arduous process.⁷⁶ Persephone’s insistence on naming her companions and a shorter list of the flowers shows the concerted effort to focus on details, making it an overt case of hypermnesia. Hypermnesia can be a defense against abuse and trauma.⁷⁷ As a result of the “overexcitement” of this faculty, we have a temporal fusion; namely, a specific moment of the past does not just compete with the present but takes it over. The over-exaltation of memory throws the temporal sense out of balance and recreates a new sense of being in the present. At the same time, this becomes a performative survival strategy in a present that offers more challenges, including facing the authoritative, angry mother. When Hermes goes to Hades to ask him to release Persephone to her mother, he says explicitly

⁷⁵ On the inclusion of Athena and Artemis, see Arthur 1977: 13. As Arthur 1977: 13 remarks referring to Euripides, Helen 1315 and Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae 2, “other versions of Persephone’s rape emphasize virginity itself rather than childish innocence, by including the goddesses Artemis and Athene among Persephone’s companions.” ⁷⁶ See McNally 2003. ⁷⁷ Steinberg 1995: 61; Karr 2022.

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“so that her mother may set eyes on her and cease from her wrath and her dreadful resentment against the immortals” (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 350).⁷⁸ Aggression and gaze come together in different terms. The formula ὀφθαλμοῖσι ἰδοῦσαν, quite frequent in epic poetry, is used differently in a female context as opposed to a male-female context. The scene of recognition between mother and daughter emphasizes the “seeing with one’s eyes” throughout. Seeing is necessary in order to stop one’s anger; in contrast, in a male-female context, seeing can be the onset of aggression, as is the case in Iliad 16.179–86, when Hermes sees Polymele among the singing maidens on the dancing floor of Artemis and sleeps with her secretly, later having a son. Eudorus, one of Achilles’s comrades, presents the same pattern of female sexual initiation happening around the choral space of Artemis. Persephone’s return to her mother entails the realigning of her relationship with her mother, which presents its own complexities in the mother-daughter drama. In other words, there are multiple fronts, as Persephone also faces an authoritative mother, one revealed by the usage of the term mythos, a word associated with an authoritative utterance. It is not incidental that Persephone states in line 410, “so that you may cease from your wrath.” A complex psychological profile is compressed and presented in formulaic terms. In other words, Persephone comes to terms with her own (new) life and guides her mother’s reaction to her experience, channeling the past into her future. The epic text in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter crystallizes lyrical moments and codifies the negotiations between natal and married families. Persephone’s forced marriage does not prevent her return to her natal all-female world. In the last part of this section, I want to bring our attention to how Persephone’s listing problematizes the self through the multiplicity effect: she names all of her companions before the time of her union with Hades and creates both a bonding moment for her mother (by reinstating the image of collective virginity, chaperoned by the virgin goddesses) while also creating distance between her past, present, and future, with and without her husband, with and without her mother. The naming of the companions presents Persephone as an expert performer at the technical level, as mentioned at the very beginning of this discussion, but also, through hypermnesia, she manages the memory, trauma, and difficulties resulting from this. As a performance, it also seeks to channel the desired temporal sense that Persephone projects for herself—not that of her prior (and future) life with her mother or past and future life with her husband in a shared world. Persephone’s ideal past becomes her present in her speech to her mother. By listing her companions, she conditions her story for her mother and enacts a

⁷⁸ For Demeter’s wrath as part of a pattern in narrative structure, see Nickel 2003.

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, ,    

performance of girlhood, as if restoring her virginity and the time before her abduction by Hades. She looks emphatically towards her past. From this perspective, one can read this moment of the hymn as the contrary—or a kind of reaction—to the ideology and aesthetics behind Sappho’s poem that mourns the loss of her maidenhood, as will be discussed. Persephone emerges as a figure who channels deeply rooted strategies of negotiating trauma and emotion and addressing authority in ways that mark the narrative distinctly. This epic voice resorts to naming as an act of resistance, unlike choral poetry, which names very few individuals (as in Alcman), or epic models, where external narrators list names. Persephone has chosen to explicitly name her former companions restoring their image together along with their former selves and lives. They are not named merely as a group (nymphs or oceanids) but as individuals; by naming them, their leader not only recreates a moment from memory but also memorializes herself as a peer among them. She further socializes trauma while recreating the uninterrupted selfhood that she desires, that of the delightful meadow. Female tasting of a fruit is an old narrative trope. Eve’s tasting of the fruit in Genesis, often read as the beginning of the expulsion from paradise, can also be seen as the encapsulation of transition into trauma. From a feminist perspective, even though this is presented as a voluntary action, trickery and deceit come from indulging, and this is a scene that has been projected over the centuries as the original sin. Yet, as Cixous has put it, reading, knowledge, and taste go together, and tasting is the first thing that happens. As the fruit is consumed, humanity enters a state of trauma.⁷⁹ Tasting is a step toward knowing and suffering. There is no going back; it becomes a one-way street. It is no wonder that eros in Sappho is portrayed as “bittersweet”: γλυκύπικρον (Sappho fr. 130.2). This adjective describes the complexity of something you taste and therefore get to know from intimate experience. Back in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, tasting the pomegranate signals Persephone’s crossing to the other side, away from her mother, as has been argued. But from a trauma theory perspective, the emphasis on taste does something more: Persephone’s account acknowledges the force she has received— because she was not willing to taste what was violently given to her. But it becomes a temporal reference, one that enables her to remember what was prior to tasting. If tasting the pomegranate marks her life forever and becomes an irreversible point of reference, Persephone’s character seeks to restore her earlier life. And she can only do that imaginatively through narrative by becoming once again one of the many friends she was with. In other words, Persephone restores, even if momentarily, her earlier virginal self, playing in the meadows with her many friends.

⁷⁹ See Cixous 1988.

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Touching Chasing a Hero, Changing into a Goddess: Nuptial Discourse and Context in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, sung in praise of the goddess of love whom Zeus tricked into mating with a mortal hero, raises vital questions concerning what the mortals’ relationship with the divine world should be.⁸⁰ Recent scholarly trends on this hymn have focused on its themes of power and authority; its possible cultic elements from a local, Panhellenic, and comparative perspective; and its relation to other aspects of epic poetry.⁸¹ Aphrodite’s speeches, before and after her epiphany to Anchises, present a divine world with affinities in diction to the Homeric world, the Hesiodic apparition of the Muses, and Sappho’s representation of the goddess. This type of discourse generates a complex epic narrative, and nuptial elements are an integral part of this linguistic strategy. At the same time, it brings into focus a more nuanced reading of ancient sexuality.⁸² Many have read this hymn as a cultic offering to the goddess Aphrodite, but the hymnic frame detracts from the storytelling, which presents a complete narrative in a rather light and humorous context.⁸³ Just like larger narratives, shorter hymnic narratives can be read from the oral poetics angle with an audience-minded focus. With such a perspective, I argue, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is not unlike other epic poems, a rich depository of speech genres and performances that audiences were well familiar with; as such, it may help us recover aspects of lost lore. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite presents a quasi-wedding of a female character, in a setting in which all initiative is placed on the “bride” who appears in the epiphany to Anchises. Anchises is not a character in the Iliad, although he is referred to as Aeneas’s father.⁸⁴ If the entire hymn can be read as part of the traditional form of praise poetry, which it subverts, then it is worth studying the mirrored subgenres of praise poetry that it includes.⁸⁵ This section seeks to uncover the nuptial discourse and the wedding performance tradition present in

⁸⁰ For a structuralist reading of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which acknowledges how it presents mediation between mortals and immortals, see Segal 1974. For divinity and humanity as “co-equal poetic themes,” see Schein 2012; Clay 1989; P. Smith 1981. ⁸¹ For the latter, see Faulkner 2008 for a recent comprehensive commentary. For the performance context and possible connections with Troad and local aristocracy see Faulkner in Bouchon et al. 2012, and Clay 2012 for a different view on the same matter in the same volume. ⁸² For a reading that focuses on sexuality in Greek literature more broadly, starting a discussion with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite regarding Aphrodite “not unlike a Homeric woman” (p. 2), see Sissa 2017. See also Cyrino 2013. ⁸³ For a reading of the hymn as a tragicomedy of errors, see de Jong 2014: 135–66, the thoughtprovoking chapter 6 on “Narratology and Epic.” ⁸⁴ For the story background and how it relates to the Iliad, see Olson 2012: 2–9 and Brillet-Dubois 2011. ⁸⁵ See Bergren 1989.

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, ,    

the hymn by focusing on Anchises’s address to Aphrodite and comparing it to Odysseus’s in Odyssey 6 and other moments of Greek literature. Both addresses, Odysseus’s to Nausicaa and Anchises’s to Aphrodite, have the combination of praise with eikasia, namely the initial likening of the addressee to a goddess. As argued earlier, Odysseus’s address to Nausicaa is part of a competitive frame, with allusions to poetic agons, in which Odysseus comes forth as an expert wandering poet (Od. 6.162–4), while Nausicaa responds to his address accordingly. In like terms, Anchises’s and Aphrodite’s speeches to each other in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite are also part of a competitive frame. In both Odyssey 6 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the male and female encounter happens away from a civic setting as both central figures are placed away from their communities. By viewing the central characters as performers, we can delve into wedding poetics and see some gendered patterns. Consider the male performance: beyond the formulaic praise that is a crucial feature of wedding poetics, both addresses end in a way that make us think of a certain typology followed by performers. Although fit to function within the greater narratives in the Odyssey and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, respectively, this shared typology gives a strong indication of ritual nuptial discourse patterns. Let us briefly recall Odysseus’s address to Nausicaa: when Odysseus first meets Nausicaa, he expresses wonder and aporia about how to address the female figure in front of him—whether as a goddess or a mortal. And the verb γουνοῦμαι frames his entire speech as a supplication. “Γουνοῦμαί σε, ἄνασσα· θεός νύ τις, ἦ βροτός ἐσσι; εἰ μέν τις θεός ἐσσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν, Ἀρτέμιδί σε ἐγώ γε, Διὸς κούρῃ μεγάλοιο, εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ᾽ ἄγχιστα ἐΐσκω . . .” I clasp your knees, my queen—are you a goddess, or are you mortal? If you are a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, I liken you most nearly in looks and in stature and in form . . . ” (Od. 6.149–52)

He ends his address with a direct prayer for pity, eleaire (Od. 6.175), addressing Nausicaa as anassa, a word also used to address divinities. Following with imperatives, he asks the princess to show him the city and give him clothes to wear (Od. 6.178): ἀλλά, ἄνασσ᾽, ἐλέαιρε· σὲ γὰρ κακὰ πολλὰ μογήσας ἐς πρώτην ἱκόμην, τῶν δ᾽ ἄλλων οὔ τινα οἶδα ἀνθρώπων, οἳ τήνδε πόλιν καὶ γαῖαν ἔχουσιν. ἄστυ δέ μοι δεῖξον, δὸς δὲ ῥάκος ἀμφιβαλέσθαι, εἴ τί που εἴλυμα σπείρων ἔχες ἐνθάδ᾽ ἰοῦσα.

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Instead, my queen, have pity; for it is to you first that I have come, having endured many grievous toils, and of the others who have this city and land I do not know anyone. Show me the way to the city, and give me some rag to throw around me, if perhaps you had any wrapping for the clothes when you came here. (Od. 6.175–9)

The praise for Nausicaa in the first part of his speech is not just formulaic; it shows a strategy and makes us go deeper into the ancient performer’s mind. In blunt terms, this rendering of an ancient intertwining of praise and supplication had a practical goal to ensure the performer’s survival. But the mechanism with which this address to the young female figure unfolds is variegated. When Odysseus likens Nausicaa to Artemis, he creates another layer: he puts the mortal princess in divine shoes and makes her act like a goddess in his supplication case. This performance strategy is more intriguing when we think that Odysseus is the encapsulation of the wandering poet. Just as Odysseus, the expert performer, supplicates Nausicaa to ensure that his journey will continue, any performing poet depends on his audience for their livelihood. What the hero does is give a subtle message to epic audiences: praise and supplication can ensure that the wandering poet continues his journey. The inclusion of the nuptial discourse that masterfully combines praise and supplication can serve a twofold purpose: to please and guide the audience to ensure that the poet thrives. How does the hymn poet/performer construct his praise in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite? When Anchises addresses Aphrodite and expresses the eikasia, he likens her to Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, Themis, Athena, a Grace, or a Nymph. Xαῖρε, ἄνασσ᾽, ἥ τις μακάρων τάδε δώμαθ᾽ ἱκάνεις, Ἄρτεμις ἢ Λητὼ ἠὲ χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη ἢ Θέμις ἠϋγενὴς ἠὲ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη, ἤ πού τις Χαρίτων δεῦρ᾽ ἤλυθες, αἵτε θεοῖσι πᾶσιν ἑταιρίζουσι καὶ ἀθάνατοι καλέονται, ἤ τις νυμφάων, αἵτ᾽ ἄλσεα καλὰ νέμονται, ἢ νυμφῶν, αἳ καλὸν ὄρος τόδε ναιετάουσι καὶ πηγὰς ποταμῶν, καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα. σοὶ δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἐν σκοπιῇ, περιφαινομένῳ ἐνὶ χώρῳ, βωμὸν ποιήσω, ῥέξω δέ τοι ἱερὰ καλὰ ὥρῃσιν πάσῃσι· σὺ δ᾽ εὔφρονα θυμὸν ἔχουσα δός με μετὰ Τρώεσσιν ἀριπρεπέ᾽ ἔμμεναι ἄνδρα, ποίει δ᾽ ἐξοπίσω θαλερὸν γόνον, αὐτὰρ ἔμ᾽ αὐτὸν δηρὸν ἐῢ ζώειν καὶ ὁρᾶν φάος ἠελίοιο, ὄλβιον ἐν λαοῖς, καὶ γήραος οὐδὸν ἱκέσθαι.

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, ,    

Hail, lady, whoever of the blessed ones you are that have come to this house, whether Artemis, or Leto, or golden Aphrodite, or high-born Themis, or bright-eyed Athena. Or, maybe, you are one of the Graces that come hither, who bear the gods company and are called immortal, or else one of the Nymphs who haunt the pleasant woods, or of those who inhabit this lovely mountain and the springs of rivers and grassy meadows. I will make you an altar upon a high peak in a far seen place and will sacrifice rich offerings to you at all seasons. And you feel kindly towards me and grant that I may become a man very eminent among the Trojans; and give me strong offspring for the time to come. As for myself, let me live long and happily, seeing the light of the sun, so that I come to the threshold of old age, a man prosperous among the people. (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 92–106)

In both Odyssey 6 and here, the nuptial context becomes explicit. The “bride” Aphrodite is put into a chorus of illustrious divine women, including her “real” self. An identity game opens for the multiplicity of selves that Aphrodite brings with her appearance to Anchises. Anchises, as a performer, alleviates his own tension in front of the woman’s unnerving beauty but also, in formulaic terms, treats her like a bride and a goddess at the same time, promising to make a temple and offer rites to her. Through praise, he appropriates her to the divine, but he also concludes with a prayer requesting personal excellence, glorious offspring, and a long and happy life (lines 103–6). But what is more interesting is that the full narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite presents an inversion of the eikasia motif as the catalyst in her seduction approach.⁸⁶ While, in a nuptial context, the bride is likened to a goddess, in this hymn the goddess purposefully likens herself to a bride and presents herself to her groom, mobilizing wedding vocabulary. She even makes concrete reference to the gift exchange that is to take place and to her parents (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 136–41). Aphrodite, like Odysseus in Book 6 of the Odyssey, is the suppliant; she specifically tells Anchises that she beseeches him, using the term γουνάζομαι (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 131): ἀλλά σε πρὸς Ζηνὸς γουνάζομαι ἠδὲ τοκήων ἐσθλῶν· οὐ μὲν γάρ κε κακοὶ τοιόνδε τέκοιεν· ἀδμήτην μ᾽ ἀγαγὼν καὶ ἀπειρήτην φιλότητος πατρί τε σῷ δεῖξον καὶ μητέρι κέδνὰ ἰδυίῃ σοῖς τε κασιγνήτοις οἵ τοι ὁμόθεν γεγάασιν· οὔ σφιν ἀεικελίη νυὸς ἔσσομαι, ἀλλ᾽ εἰκυῖα. πέμψαι δ᾽ ἄγγελον ὦκα μετὰ Φρύγας αἰολοπώλους εἰπεῖν πατρί τ᾽ ἐμῷ καὶ μητέρι κηδομένῃ περ· οἳ δέ κέ τοι χρυσόν τε ἅλις ἐσθῆτά θ᾽ ὑφαντὴν

⁸⁶ For a reading of seduction scenes in a comparative perspective, see Currie 2016.

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πέμψουσιν, σὺ δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ἀγλαὰ δέχθαι ἄποινα. ταῦτα δὲ ποιήσας δαίνυ γάμον ἱμερόεντα, τίμιον ἀνθρώποισι καὶ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσιν. Now I beseech you by Zeus and your noble parents (no humble people would have produced such a child as you): take me, a virgin with no experience of love, and show me to your father and your dutiful mother, and your brothers born of the same stock; I shall not be an unfitting daughter-in-law for them, but an appropriate one. And send a messenger quickly to the Phrygians of the darting steeds, to tell my father and my anxious mother. They will send you gold in plenty and woven cloth, and you must accept the many fine dowry gifts. When you have done that, hold a delightful wedding feast that will impress men and immortal gods. (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 131–42)

In his first response, Anchises correctly addresses the apparition in front of him as a divinity. Podbielski has shown that Anchises responds with all the elements of a cult hymn: hymnic invocation of χαῖρε, a catalogue of analogue names, and the promise to build her an altar and make seasonal offerings.⁸⁷ Unlike Odysseus, who at the sight of Nausicaa entertains both alternatives, addressing his comments to either a goddess or a mortal (“are you a goddess” or “a mortal,” Οd. 6.149), Anchises acts as if he has not even considered the possibility that his apparition is not divine. A fully detailed “cult” hymn is in order, the appropriate speech act, whether he already recognizes her or is testing her identity. The narrative elements are complex throughout. One can even say further that when Aphrodite first appears in disguise to Anchises, he treats her like a statue. Aphrodite becomes an iconic figure one prays to in a quid pro quo context: the prayer’s wishes are to come true as the result of a perfect ritual performance. Prayer and nuptial wishes come together as Anchises asks for prosperous offspring and a long life. Odysseus finds Nausicaa in a choral setting that echoes Artemis cults, whereas Aphrodite finds Anchises and offers him an abduction story from the chorus of Artemis, one that includes both nymphs and other maidens—a story about none other than Hermes, the god who crosses boundaries. The abduction motif operates in reverse order compared to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although in both hymns the abduction is projected on the young bridal figures, Aphrodite and Persephone, respectively.⁸⁸ The boundaries of mortal existence have already been crossed: Aphrodite places her assumed identity amid nymphs and other maidens. The whole episode echoes a pastoral, non-civic context, with touches of wilderness: Anchises is featured as a hunter of wild beasts, while Aphrodite oscillates from being the one who dominates to the one being dominated, leaving Cyprus

⁸⁷ Podbielski 1971 reads the Homeric hymn as a literary text. See Walcot 1991. ⁸⁸ For the abduction motif and its presence in wedding iconography, see Jenkins 1983.

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, ,    

and going to Troy.⁸⁹ Both figures are drawn away from their communities— Anchises from his Trojan community, and Aphrodite from the divine realm in her real and assumed identities. Their “wedding” is meant to happen outside the city, away from families or friends in what can be read as an untamed imitation of the marriage ritual. Anchises is a hunter with trophies—the assumption of his role outside the polis. Aphrodite inverts the abduction motif as she hunts down the hunter. Aphrodite goes away from her divine world and, in her performed identity, presents an abduction story. Abduction stories are not uncommon; beyond the obvious Helen mytheme, we see them in Odyssey 15 (Eumaeus and his nurse), and the best-known version in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, as mentioned and discussed earlier. But for the male interlocutor, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, as Corinne Pache has astutely remarked in her work, the hymn narrative can also be placed within the context of nympholepsy narratives.⁹⁰ Aphrodite is abducted from a chorus of nymphs and others, and Anchises, not knowing her identity, in his first address to her imagines her to be a figure coming from a chorus of nymphs and other divinities. The nympholepsy narrative context, though, adds another dimension: the epistemic issue. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite underlines the epistemological problem of sensing, understanding, interacting with, and ultimately, even touching the divinity. Aphrodite’s speech after her epiphany makes references to Eos and Tithonus, another couple that is popular in wedding song, poetry, and performance. While most of the examples of unions between a female goddess and a male mortal seem to offer tension, this narrative in the assumed identity of Aphrodite highlights the underlying lore of nymphs seizing the mortal. Nympholepsy presents some symbolic expressions in Greek literature and epigraphy that point not simply to the notion of a frenzied or “seized” man who encounters nymphs, but rather to the increased knowledge and eloquence that comes with it. In a revealing passage from Phaedrus 238c, for example, Socrates interrupts his speech on the reasons for yielding to the non-lover rather than the lover to ask Phaedrus, “Does it seem to you as it does to me that something supernatural is happening to me?” Phaedrus replies that he believes a “quite unusual rhetorical fluency [euroia] has seized” Socrates. Socrates replies, “Hear me then in silence, for I really believe there is something supernatural about this place. So if as the speech goes on I often become nympholept, do not be surprised, for I am already not far from speaking in dithyrambs.” Although this is a later classical reference, it still shows a connection between nympholepsy and a distinct eloquence; speaking “in dithyrambs” is markedly different from daily discourse. ⁸⁹ See Bickerman 1976: 276, who writes that “we are witnessing a pastoral idyll.” ⁹⁰ Pache 2011; Connor 1988.

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In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, we twice have a unique combination that is similar to the passage in Phaedrus—eros is followed by epos: Ἀγχίσην δ᾽ ἔρος εἷλεν, ἔπος δέ μιν ἀντίον ηὔδα (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 93), Ἀγχίσην δ᾽ ἔρος εἷλεν ἔπος τ᾽ ἔφατ᾽ ἔκ τ᾽ ὀνόμαζεν, (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 144). One would think that this is a combination that would make sense, given the sounding effect it would produce with only one consonant different, yet the aorist of the verb αἱρέω for seizing is also revealing.⁹¹ Both times the formula is used, Anchises is seized by eros, which then enables epos. In my reading, just as Odysseus constructs the identity of the paradigmatic performer and wandering poet, similarly Anchises is also the paradigmatic performer who has been empowered by his sudden emotions. Scholars who have worked on “touch” from an anthropological perspective highlight the relation of touch to the imaginary.⁹² Being able to touch and be touched opens a spatial-imaginary dimension that expands memory through tactility and proximity, which translates into a deeper epistemological sense of self and others.⁹³ Touch implies intimate knowledge of the world around us, from objects to bodies, and creates a sense of epistemological authority. When touch is gone, its memory opens the space for further insight and imagination. The nympholepsy that implies a total seizure by a different creature also denotes the passing of intimate knowledge from the spiritual/divine being to the human. It is no wonder, though, that this hymn is so filled with references to tactility. The nympholepsy context helps us better situate the multiple references to different female divine figures in Anchises’s address to Aphrodite. According to epigraphical evidence regarding nympholepsy, multiple divinities are mentioned, as is the case with the cave in Pharsalus dedicated to the nymphs by a certain Pantalces.⁹⁴ In fact, much of the authoritative inscriptional language, such as oaths, makes multiple references to divinities, as if in a chorus. Then by placing the female figure appearing to him in the context of many divinities, Anchises generates the effect of multiplicity, creating possible identities for Aphrodite, but also acts in accordance with ritual practice that likes to see many divinities coming together. In that respect, Anchises shows a deep understanding of the unwritten ritual laws and becomes, like Odysseus in the Odyssey, a paradigmatic, empowered performer able to move from eros to epos. Aphrodite’s responses adhere to his nuptial references of eikasia, but she moves on to present her own nuptial element of wedding lore: a story of abduction. The plurality effect in Anchises’s eikasia is met with the singularity effect in Aphrodite’s version: she was abducted by one divinity alone, namely Hermes, who chose her out of the many nymphs for the one husband in her story. Aphrodite

⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁴

For the language of “seizure” used here and the Iliad, see Blondell 2010a: 2–3. See Seremetakis 2019: 115–18 for an overview of current anthropological scholarship. See Paterson 2009: 782. SEG 1.1923, 247, edition by Decourt, Inscriptions de Thessalie I. See Wagman 2016.

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, ,    

presents a story to Anchises making a god, Hermes, the figure responsible for her abduction, something that would absolve Anchises from any complicity: the initiative was a god’s.⁹⁵ In other words, the male expert performer in form is supplemented with the female expert performer in content. The male performer addresses a “bride,” placing her in the context of many other divine creatures, putting her in a chorus, whereas the female performance focuses on her leaving her chorus and circle of peers. But let us take another angle on this: the short hymnic address, which presents a perfect form in Anchises’s address, meets storytelling within the frame of a larger hymn performed by a performer who imitates someone else’s voice. Moreover, Aphrodite’s response to Anchises openly underlines her epistemic superiority at the level of linguistic code. A detail that has received much attention from linguists and philologists alike, Aphrodite’s comment that a nurse taught her to speak Trojan (112–13) shifts the attention, even if briefly, to the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the epic world. It is not uncommon to see the role of a nurse as an authoritative one within the epic tradition, one that carries over to later literature.⁹⁶ While searching for her lost daughter, Demeter, in her assumed identity at Eleusis, also took the role of a nurse who knows women’s works. But Aphrodite absorbs the knowledge of her Trojan nurse and makes it her point of superiority, in a narrative that can reflect intercultural relations.⁹⁷ When Helen came to Troy, the epic did not register any linguistic difference or difficulty. Helen is a figure associated with knowledge, as she herself claims in Odyssey 4.250, when she stresses that she is the only one with the full epistemic perspective of Odysseus’s action at the final hours of Troy when he entered the city; she was the only one to recognize him (Od. 4.245). In that scene, Helen blamed Aphrodite, as the divinity who had made her forget her daughter and husband. Sappho’s reference to Helen in fr. 16 is not unlike Aphrodite’s coming to Troy (Sappho, fr. 16.9).⁹⁸ Blaming Aphrodite is not new—Helen blames Aphrodite in Iliad 3 (Il. 3.399–412), as we saw earlier in this chapter. The mortal self of Aphrodite in the hymn, like Helen in Iliad 3, reproaches her divine self. But in her appearance as a mortal, Aphrodite also makes sure she declares—as do the Delian Maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Sirens to Odysseus, or the Muses to shepherd Hesiod—that she has a special skill and knowledge and a wider repertoire of linguistic codes available. Let us now return to the wedding discourse. By putting together Odysseus’s address to Nausicaa and Anchises’s address to Aphrodite, we see that the ⁹⁵ On this scene and Aphrodite’s presence in Greek epic more broadly, see Boedeker 1974 and Suter 1987. ⁹⁶ For the figure of the nurse in the Greek literary tradition, see Pournara Karydas 1998. ⁹⁷ For an interpretation that focuses on Aphrodite as a figure that relates less to the love theme but more to politics, dominance, and war (something that has even eschewed the interpretations of Aphrodite as a literary figure as well), see Pironti 2007. ⁹⁸ For Sappho, epics, and the affinity with the Homeric hymns, especially the one to Aphrodite, see Kelly 2020.

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crypto-wedding discourse comes in the form of prayer and supplication, one that seeks ultimate survival and prosperity for the male hero and his descendants, one anchored around the iconization of the “bride” figure in front of them. Could this be an indication of wedding addresses, possibly by paid performers to the bride? It is unprovable, but yes. The eikasia puts the male performer in the shoes of someone inspired by the divine, like Hesiod’s shepherd, Odysseus in the presence of the Sirens’ song, or the nympholept who acquires heightened eloquence and knowledge when he goes back to his community. If we push that line of inquiry further, then Aphrodite’s multiple identities can help us go deeper in our understanding of this text. If abduction is about the wedding moment, then the multiple selves are about the “bride’s” identity as she is a figure shared abruptly between the natal and married family. From this perspective, Aphrodite’s bilingual self can acquire further meanings; she embodies multiple linguistic identities just as she crosses the divine and mortal boundaries through her epiphany. By reflecting nuptial poetics, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite also focuses on the actual wedding process in an inverted way and without any community participation. When Anchises and Aphrodite are about to have sex, their touching is very closely circumscribed. He first takes her hand (λάβε χεῖρα, 155) in a movement that is typical of a wedding gesture or a groom taking the bride by hand. He then removes the “shining adornment,” namely bracelets and necklaces, then her girdle, which is a conventional formulaic way of signaling toward a sexual act (λῦσε δέ οἱ ζώνην, 164), before taking off her clothes and sleeping with her. This is a scene that also recalls the prototypical mortal bride of the Greek archaic epic, namely Pandora.⁹⁹ When Aphrodite reveals her identity to Anchises, the first thing that Anchises does is cover his face in a blanket (ekalypsato, 183). At this point, we have the inverse anakalyptēria, a distinct part of the wedding ritual, after a quasi-wedding. The text throughout plays with nuptial discourse and the choreography of a nuptial ritual or its inversion. After Aphrodite’s epiphany, Anchises realizes the situation he is in and decides to supplicate Aphrodite by touching her knees. Late antique references validate the nuptial context from a performance perspective. Hymns to Aphrodite (although we don’t have any evidence that this was the case for this specific Homeric hymn) were sung at Christian weddings well until the fourth century . John Chrysostom condemned the practice as corrupting for the young “blushing” bride, and as Bickerman put it, he “would also condemn our Hymn and for the same reason.”¹⁰⁰ The text finishes with Aphrodite offering her musings on Tithonus and Eos, an antiparadigm of a goddess with a mortal, but one dear to the wedding repertoire, as we shall see. Aphrodite gives details to Anchises about the birth of their son, ⁹⁹ See Bergren 1989: 11–13. ¹⁰⁰ Bickerman 1976: 229, who quotes John Chrysostom, Hom. Supra I Cor. 7.2 (P.G. LI 211).

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, ,    

how he will be raised by nymphs, when he will be brought to her, and what to say. Aphrodite is about to become a mother, the telos of a wedding for many, yet motherhood will not be a defining feature for her because her son will be raised by others. The hymn is playful throughout, presenting the semi-forced union, arranged for her by Zeus as revenge for what she does to all the gods. It is almost as if motherhood doesn’t touch her. The text oscillates between revealing and covering, truth and lies, from beginning to end as the “bride” Aphrodite is only a “bride” for a bit and in private. Her anakalyptēria is to reveal her true identity and ultimately leave for the sky as the poet moves to another hymn. She touches the earthly domain no longer.

Smelling Scents of a Wedding: Processions, Gifts, and Hidden Ideologies Any ritual activity from antiquity, not unlike contemporary practices, marks itself as something special by enlisting all the senses, and that of smell, in particular. Incense, bridal aromas, or breaths of people who come together create distinctive scents around wedding rituals, and they can intensify the nuptial context. Understanding how the sense of smell worked in antiquity is one of the most elusive tasks. Can the description of a perfume make us grasp it? One knows too well today that the olfactory aspect can be defining for many aspects of our lives, as, for example, for how relationships turn out, how crowds mingle (or not), and how people can attract each other or not. The ancient Greek literary corpus occasionally presents references to smells that can be pleasing, charming, delicate, mesmerizing, attractive, floral, familiar, but also zesty, musky, strong, smoky, disgusting, or suffocating. These are just a few adjectives one can find attributed to scent. Describing a smell can take different grammatical forms, adjectives, verbs, and nouns, while these descriptions can evoke emotions and reactions and define aspects of ritual intimately associated with specific scents. Archaeological evidence points to the rich scents around weddings with perfume boxes depicted on many of our wedding vases as also unearthed in the archaeological record. Nuptial baths were an essential aspect of ritual preparation and engaged scents in their own way.¹⁰¹ A text that presents one of the most famous mythical wedding processions makes direct and revealing references to scent, which deserves more attention. Sappho’s fr. 44, which offers an account of the wedding of Hector and Andromache, brings epic material closer than any other lyric poem. Although among the most extant of the poems in the Sapphic corpus, it is among the most ¹⁰¹ As J. Larson 2001: 111 notes: “There exist numerous myths of bathing goddesses; we can be confident that many of these reflect rituals in which the cult image was bathed.”

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neglected in scholarship. It has been labeled as a wedding song¹⁰² and has been read with a focus on its performative context,¹⁰³ its place in early Greek oral tradition, and its relation with epic poetry, especially the Iliad.¹⁰⁴ Sappho herself, or rather the Sapphic persona, which elsewhere appears like an epic hero, as Ferrari has noted, diffusing and presenting her own name in various moments of her poetry, does not appear here.¹⁰⁵ We don’t have the characteristic Sapphic “I” that we do in other poems. In fact, of all the poems that survive, this is perhaps the most polyphonic of all. The relationship of Sappho with the Homeric epic is perhaps as mystified as her own identity. Recently several scholars, most notably Meyerhoff and Steinrück, have challenged the Homeric background against which a part of Sapphic poetry stands; they argue instead about a closer relationship with the Cyclic tradition and the Homeric hymns, the composition of which is closer to the time of Sappho to the extent one can speak with any certainty about this.¹⁰⁶ Following this line of thought, I would like to take a rather unorthodox view and argue that fr. 44’s Hector and Andromache function outside the Iliadic account, without eliminating it from the greater mythic frame. Instead, fr. 44 focuses on a different moment of the myth that could be of use to the performative context within the poem’s narrative, that of the wedding. Sappho’s connection with epithalamia and wedding songs is not new. Indeed, Sappho composed wedding songs that could be performed at different moments of the wedding ritual. Let us first look at this fragment in more detail, then proceed to some comparative texts that can illuminate it further, and finally discuss the essential question: If indeed this is a song connected with a wedding, why does a couple that has such a tragic end become Sappho’s focus? I will conclude by offering a view about the kind of refashioning of epic material that happens here, and the refracted ideology. First, the poem: the view focuses on the leading of Andromache by Hector on a ship from Placian Thebes to Troy. The first part is possibly a counting of the gifts that the herald announces. Then the whole city participates in movement and voice. Let us trace those: The women of Ilion yoke the mules to the wagon on which they step, married and unmarried women together. As Hector’s sisters, the daughters of Priam form a distinct group. The men yoke the horses to the chariots. Then we have a lacuna, which possibly talks about the couple or maybe the gifts offered. The poem then moves on to the music of auloi and krotala; from there to the song of the maidens, the smells of myrrh, cassia, and incense, and the two final comments, the older women’s ululation, as a distinct ritual cry, and the men’s paeans for the “godlike” couple.

¹⁰² Merkelbach 1957. ¹⁰³ Roesler 1975; Lardinois 2001. ¹⁰⁴ Kakridis 1966; Saake 1971; F. Ferrari 1986; Schrenk 1994; Bowie 2010. ¹⁰⁶ See Meyerhoff 1984 and Steinrück 1999.

¹⁰⁵ F. Ferrari 1986.

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, ,     Ἔκτωρ καὶ συνέταιρ̣ [ο]ι ἄγ̣ οι̣ σ’ ἐλικώπιδα Θήβας ἐξ ἰέρας Πλακίας τ’ ἀ [π᾿ ἀι]ν άω ἄβραν Ἀνδρομάχαν ἐνὶ ναῦσιν ἐπ’ ἄλμυρον πόντον· πόλλα δ’ [ἐλί]γματα χρύσια κἄμματα πορφύρ[α] καταύτ[ . . ]να, ποί̣ κι̣ λ’ ἀθύρματα, ἀργύρα̣ τ̣’ ἀνά̣ ρ[ι]θ̣ μα [ποτή]ρ[ια] κἀλέφαις. ὢς εἶπ’· ὀτραλέως δ’ ἀνόρουσε πάτ[η]ρ̣ φίλος· φάμα δ’ ἦλθε κατὰ πτ̣ όλιν εὐρύχο̣ ρ̣ ο̣ ν φίλοις. αὔτικ’ Ἰλίαδαι σατίναι[ς] ὐπ’ ἐυτρόχοις ἆγον αἰμιόνοις, ἐ̣ π̣ [έ]βαινε δὲ παῖς ὄχλος γυναίκων τ’ ἄμα παρθενίκα[ν] τ . . [ . . ].σφύρων, χῶρις δ’ αὖ Περάμοιο θυγ[α]τρεσ[ ἴππ[οις] δ’ ἄνδρες ὔπαγον ὐπ’ ἀρ̣ [ματ π[ ]ες ἠίθ̣ εοι, μεγάλω[σ]τι δ̣ [ δ[ ]. ἀνίοχοι φ[ . . . . . ].[ π̣ [ ´]ξα.ο[ < desunt aliquot versus > [ἴ]κελοι θέοι[ς [ ] ἄγνον ἀολ[λε⌊ὄ̣ ρ̣ ματ̣ α̣ ι̣ ⌋[ ]νον ἐς Ἴλιο[ν ⌊αὖλος δ’ ἀδυ[μ]έλης̣⌋ [ ]τ’ ὀνεμίγνυ[το ⌊καὶ ψ[ό]φο[ς κ]ροτάλ⌋[ων ]ως δ’ ἄρα πάρ[θενοι ⌊ἄειδον μέλος ἄγν̣⌋[ον ἴκα]νε δ’ ἐς α̣ ἴθ̣ ̣ [ερα ⌊ἄχω θεσπεσία̣ γελ̣ ⌋[ ⌊πάνται δ’ ἦς κὰτ ὄδο⌋[ ⌊κράτηρες φίαλαί τ’ ὀ⌋[ . . . ]υεδε[ . . ] . . εακ[.].[ ⌊μύρρα καὶ κασία λίβ⌋ανός τ’ ὀνεμείχνυτο ⌊γύναικες δ’ ἐλέλυσδο⌋ν ὄσαι προγενέστερα[ι ⌊πάντες δ’ ἄνδρες ἐπ⌋ήρατον ἴαχον ὄρθιον ⌊Πάον’ ὀνκαλέοντες⌋ ἐκάβολον εὐλύραν, ὔμνην δ’ Ἔκτορα κἈ⌋νδρομάχαν θεοεικέλο[ις

“Hector and his companions are bringing the lively eyed, graceful Andromache from holy Thebe and ever-flowing Placia in their ships over the salt sea; and (there are) many golden bracelets and (perfumed?) purple robes, ornate trinkets and countless silver drinking cups and ivory.” So he spoke, and nimbly his dear father leapt up, and the news went to his friends throughout the spacious city. At once the sons of Ilus yoked the mules to the smooth-running carriages, and the whole crowd of women and (tender?-) ankled maidens climbed on board. Apart (went) the daughters of Priam . . . and unmarried men yoked horses to chariots, . . . and greatly . . . charioteers . . . (gap of several verses) . . . like gods . . . holy . . . all together . . . set out . . . to Ilium, and the sweetsounding pipe and cithara were mingled and the sound of castanets, and maidens sang clearly a holy song, and a marvelous echo reached the sky . . . and everywhere in the

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streets were . . . bowls and cups . . . myrrh and cassia and frankincense were mingled. The elder women cried out joyfully, and all the men let forth a lovely high-pitched strain calling on Paean, the Archer skilled in the lyre, and they sang in praise of the godlike Hector and Andromache.¹⁰⁷ (Sappho, fr. 44.5–34)

Sappho’s fr. 44 could function as a kind of a proem that could be performed before the banquet hosting the members of the bride’s and groom’s families.¹⁰⁸ This would explain the careful setting of the various groups. It is possible, assuming that we would like to assume that there is an external wedding performance context, that this could also be performed as a mythic script while the actual movements, songs, or acts of different groups that follow a couple are being choreographed. The result has a multi-media effect. All senses are mobilized: from the initial touch between the couple when Hector leads (in what we assume is the classic gesture of leading a bride to the groom’s home), to the sight of the beautiful gifts, to hearing the different types of song, and smelling the right mixture of perfumes. Taste is the only thing missing, alluded to only perhaps through the objects and their potential use, as is the case of the goblets of silver and ivory. The couple is referred to as “godlike” in a typical poetic gesture, as this is characteristic of an eikasia, a central motif in wedding poetics. The poem is ultimately about the departure of a woman, a theme not incongruent with the rest of the Sapphic corpus. Departures are not meant to be easy but are instead ritualized and channeled through specific angles. It would be productive to redirect our view away from what can also be seen as part of epic material and follow another fragment that discusses a different kind of wedding: Hesiod fr. 211 (M-W), where we have explicit reference to the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, a divinity and sea nymph with a mortal king. The two poems can be read as parallels in a tradition of stylization of collective community performance. While community voices and marked performances are alluded to in Homer’s wedding scenes, the structure and traditional discourse present in actual wedding songs in the ancient oral tradition shape poetic diction in multilayered ways. As several scholars have noted, it is puzzling that the couple at the center of Sappho fr. 44 is that of Hector and Andromache, certainly not registered as a “blessed” couple in the light of the epic narrative. The Iliadic narrative ends with Hector’s death, while the death of the couple’s son gives them an even more tragic

¹⁰⁷ Translation by D. A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library (Campbell 1990). ¹⁰⁸ F. Ferrari 2010: 133, 184–5.

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, ,    

nuance. From the same perspective, neither is the wedding of Thetis and Peleus without its own share of misfortune. This is another couple that didn’t live together, and they too lost a son prematurely. Sappho’s fr. 44 also recalls the wedding of Paris and Helen, another favorite wedding in the Cyclic tradition.¹⁰⁹ Nor is the couple of Eos and Tithonus one without its share of unhappiness, another beloved couple in the wedding song tradition. Although this is not incompatible with Sapphic poetic undertones that connect the “bitter” with the “sweet” and prevalent ideologies that reject excessive praise, there are more connections that help us explore further the wedding discourse in archaic poetry. In both Sappho fr. 44 and Hesiod fr. 211 there is emphasis on the one hand on the “possessions,” ktēmata, that are part of the choreography of objects in weddings, and on the other on the community participation in the event. Peleus in Hesiod fr. 211 is addressed with a makarismos in what appears to be a collective performance (“they all said,” line 6). They address Peleus as “thrice-blessed” and “four-times happy,” after a brief narrative that praises his power over many people. The makarismos is at the center of wedding performances. The poems do not seem interested in myth in its wider spectrum. Instead, we have very focused lyric poetics: it is the moment of the wedding and wedding procession in the case of Sappho fr. 44 that matters. Wedding scenes often present what I would like to call the aesthetics of the moment. Like taking a picture that saves a snapshot of the ritual, oral text celebrates through song the most memorable wedding moments (and also those expected and repeatable in other weddings). In other words, while there is a greater attention to a moment that can be immortalized without worrying (at least on the surface) about the rest of the story, the poem adumbrates the fabula in its continuum. What happens to the mythical couple in the different narratives that circulate is irrelevant. Rather, the emphasis is on the performance and the ritual with its many participants, sounds, and smells. The wedding procession is the center of the poem’s attention without any hint of the stories about the couple. Both these fragments also emphatically present the community involvement—it’s not just about the couple; in fact, the couple does not make the performance, but it is the entire community that partakes and endows the performance with different voices that are clearly echoed as part of the wedding. It is as if the community not only authorizes the wedding but also validates the performance and furthermore underlines that the paradigmatic moment comes from the performance itself and not from the fountain of the greater myths it draws from. The references to the gifts that are part of the procession further become material anchors of the procession that underlines material wealth.

¹⁰⁹ For this view, which contrasts the Cypria’s celebration of the couple and arrival in Troy of Paris and Helen with that of Sappho’s Hector and Andromache, see Spelman 2017a.

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Some scholars have emphasized the connections with death scenes. Shrenk connected the reference to the gifts in Sappho fr. 44 with the catalogue of Priam’s treasures offered as ransom for the body of Hector, which are, in turn, reminiscent of Andromache’s “dowry.”¹¹⁰ Likewise, in Iliad 18.84, Achilles mourning the death of Patroclus makes notable allusions to Peleus’s gifts. There are indeed striking similarities between the most celebrated wedding scenes and the objects offered as ritual reminders for funeral purposes. I argue that the focus on the “gifts” on the one hand, and the evocation of communal performances on the other, are necessary and distinctive markers of wedding discourse in epic and lyric poetry. Just as in Hesiod fr. 211 the collective address to Peleus is clearly marked, Sappho fr. 44 is one of the most polyphonic moments in early Greek literature. The many gifts and the many voices are conjoined and become the focal point of wedding scenes. The emphasis is not on the story but on the act; the performance is the focus. In this way, the collective performance can redefine myth, can cast away its tragic overtone. By focusing on the wedding moment, it evades anything bad; it evades any evil that people thought may come by the inevitable excessive viewing that comes out of such an event by skillfully evoking but not dwelling on the continuation of a story that includes tragic events. In other words, we have a mystic act of rediverting mythic material and redefining myth by capturing the moment that is ad hoc relevant (in our case, the wedding). The poetic lines compartmentalize myth.¹¹¹ At the same time, by naming the mythic couple, the poem uses the myth as a scapegoat that will carry away any harm. The wedding couple is the center of attention, as everybody is looking at them. Sappho’s poem redirects the viewing onto the participants, in different groups, as also the gifts and elements of the wedding procession take the gaze away from the couple itself. But there is more here that is in absolute accordance with Sapphic poetics. In using Hector and Andromache Sappho refashions earlier epic. The story of Troy begins with one departure but also one arrival into Troy, that of Helen. Helen’s problematic departure and her welcoming into Troy led to its destruction. Sappho here chooses to dwell on the other side of the coin: namely, the happy departure of Andromache from her hometown into Troy, which we all know eventually made her move on to another forced journey when Troy was captured. And that is the women’s story of having to leave. By highlighting movement, we know that this is

¹¹⁰ See Kakridis 1966 and Schrenk 1994. Levaniouk 2018 has looked at this poem within a women’s performance tradition which included songs of lamentation and epic (or “near-epic”) songs that were composed and performed by women. She presents a strong case for Sappho’s fr. 44V to fit the profile of such a performance originally intended for a wedding festival. See also Wasdin 2018: 140–1 and 184. ¹¹¹ For compartmentalization and contradictions of myth from a perspective of orality, see recently Scodel 2019. For a reading that sees how knowing Andromache’s fate contradicts the celebratory element expected from an elite wedding occasion, see Rissman 1983. Rissman 1983 regards Sappho’s fr. 44 as part of an actual wedding celebration.

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, ,    

the procession that will eventually lead to more movement. The poem does not dwell on the tragic aspect of the heroes but only highlights one moment in their lives: a wedding procession when most of the movement is done in procession with others joining the couple and participating in their wedding, with everybody around them. However, would anyone who heard this not know the myth in its continuum? As much as the wedding performances are about the moment, the day, and not the diachronic aspect of the fabula around the main characters, it is hard to forget that these figures partake in deep tragedy and the two weddings do not ultimately last; quite the opposite: they both evade any expectation of a common blessed life until old age. There is something deeply elusive going on. The reference to scent, the most elusive of the senses, as I would like to further argue, underscores the different ideological projections that this poem subtly makes. Scent refers to social status, and exotic perfumes are a match for a royal couple of a legendary city like Troy. Myrrha, kasia, and libanos are all meant to be expensive and powerful scents that define the moment but also contribute to its memorability. Referring to a scent at a particular moment makes the moment cognitively more durable to memory. Sappho’s poem twice presents the language of mixing in this fragment, one about the sounds, the other about the scents, clearly circumscribing the performative elements that come together. But for the combination of these specific scents, we do not have examples until much later in Greek literature and, even then, mostly in medical literature. While clearly underlining the aesthetics of beauty that permeate this episode, the scents’ connection to primal memory makes them even more intriguing as a central reference. Scents are likewise used in funerary contexts, another aspect that bridges the communal and the wedding performance with the funerary allusions. A scent is both very momentary, meaning something one smells for as long as this is near you, but also supersedes the moment by becoming memorable. One can recognize a scent again when coming close to it. It is also the product of a combination of elements. From this angle, the explicit reference to scent also alludes to how the myth itself works in this episode. The reference to the couple operates at the plot level, but can one really forget the continuum of time for the storytelling around these mythical figures? Surely not for such well-known stories. To an audience that knows well the story about the future of that couple, this story persists and cannot become unforgotten. Such a momentary but also a memorable allusion to scent evokes further how myth itself worked. Scent becomes an agent that can diffuse the elements of a story in its entirety from beginning to end and refocus the attention on the present. Wedding scents are meant to be pleasant in the moment. Yet scent mobilizes other senses. It is a distinct element of a story, event, or performance and is linked with a deeper sense of memory. If one cannot forget how the myth evolves, then the stories could be haunting. Nevertheless, the presentation that lingers on the sounds and smells

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reroutes one’s understanding and focus as if exorcizing any reference of the tragic that can be associated with them. Scent is linked to a present performance. Any reference to this sense can trigger memories that refer to this performance. Scent is at the same time temporary and perennial. It is no wonder that certain rituals are so intimately connected with certain aromas. The aromatic element can be an expected agent that validates the performance of ritual in the present. Through certain aromas, the present meets the continuum and the olfactory cues are crucial in creating the right atmosphere for ritual participation. In the corpus of Greek literature, while scanty, references to scent can reveal how they intersect with cognition and memory. The reference to smyrna, or myrrh, is explicitly a ritual reference connected with sacred spaces, temples, altars, and their surroundings. The scent of myrrh is characteristic of Delphi for Apollo in Euripides’s Ion (89, 1175). In the last choral section of Euripides’s Trojan Women, the chorus addresses Zeus in an almost reproaching manner, asking him whether he has “betrayed” (Tr. 1062) his own temple in Troy, the one that gave “smoke of myrrh” to the sky (Tr. 1063–5). The temple of Zeus is deeply linked with this olfactory cue, which brings the memory of the past when the temple and altar were always exuding the appropriate incense for the god. Similarly, in a fragment from Sophocles’s Laocoön, the same reference to an altar is linked with the scent of myrrh: λάμπει δ’ ἀγυιεὺς βωμὸς ἀτμίζων πυρὶ σμύρνης σταλαγμούς, βαρβάρους εὐοσμίας And fire shines on the altar in the street as it sends up a vapor from drops of myrrh, exotic scents. (Soph. fr. Laocoön 370–1)

In these references, which connect Trojan altars and temple with the scent of myrrh, the scent is a reference that guides the audience to a bliss of the past. Scents are meant to be evocative, and, as such, they channel to a past, and in this case a Trojan past of prosperity. There may be more to what we have in the Sappho fragment with her references to myrrh, a scent also used in funerary contexts and closely connected with a sense of exoticism, beyond the Greek world. To go back to an earlier question: What about the knowledge that this wedding did not end as a long and happy marriage, but was radically and tragically cut short by the death of the husband and child? Andromache is a figure that does not get much attention in the surviving epic, but we know that she restarted her journey when she had to leave Troy. A perverse reversal is happening here, as widowhood and deprivation of motherhood brought her back to the vulnerable position of being a young woman of still marriageable age. She is one of the few mythical figures who had to restart her entry into motherhood after the fall of

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, ,    

Troy. Similarly, Peleus and Thetis also lose a child, as Achilles, the audiences know too well, met his death at Troy. The two paradigmatic couples both end up separating for different reasons and both are struck by the death of their male child, in the case of Astyanax when he was still a baby, whereas for Achilles when he was still a young man. Could it be then that those couples idealized in the historiola of wedding performances carry a different type of ideology here when celebrated for their weddings? Beyond the performance of the moment, these stories are too well known not to bring echoes to the full temporal spectrum of the mythic narratives. The ancient audiences compartmentalized what was given to them, and it didn’t seem to matter whether the end was not a “happy end.” But more is going on here. Historiolas are not meant to be instructive or didactic, but they can have deeper meanings. Uttering the story of a couple that had a tragic end, even if that is not the point at a wedding when the song/performance is about the couple’s wedding, is very likely to resonate with deeper superstitions. Could one, after all, take the full glory of the illustrious wedding when everything is perfect? Just as nothing is one-sided in life, myth can’t quite point to an all-perfection, certainly not even when its own divine system was not conceived without its “mortal” flaws. Exposure to everybody’s viewing can be dangerous for the ancient world; the deeper resonances of “evil eye” that we could safely project to percolating contexts make the choice of the momentary bliss an obliquely didactic one, as stories in their continuum have many turns.¹¹² Any perfection is a tableau for the moment and the song can celebrate that. Bliss vanishes just as the song vanishes. We have a very complex set of emotions, superstitions, and not always concrete and utterable fears; even the references to the divine, as with songs celebrating Aphrodite or Thetis, subtly allude to death and detriment. This is not unlike what I call the poetics of childhood, a topic I explore more in the next chapter. Children’s songs are often innocently about death, disaster, and trauma. All that is typically uttered in the most playful of performance contexts, often in games. This is a global phenomenon when the “ring around the rosie” game could refer to the Black Death in England or the “tortoise” game to the story of a nameless mother whose son died, leaping into the sea. The latter, while an innocent game on the surface, points to some hidden motifs that we also see here in the wedding performance: the very subtle non-uttered reference a myth can make to death while joyfully celebrating a wedding. The celebrated couples went through loss. Yet the children’s song utters such loss, and no one thinks about it consciously. The leaping of the son who died is the signal of the moment of leaping during a game, and nothing more, but the song carries with it the hidden

¹¹² For evil eye superstition and a sample of different approaches, see Dodds 1971 [1973]; Herzfeld 1981; Lykiardopoulos 1981; Faraone 1991; Dundes 1992; Bohigian 1997; Berger 2012; Elliott 2016.

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didactic element that functions in psychological and community terms; death is part of a community and is something that games instruct their players very innocuously to coexist with. The wedding song is not far from there: it prepares its participants and audience very subtly by compartmentalizing myth that is hard to process. Allusions to exotic perfumes can help diffuse the difficulties inherent in the stories.

2 The Poetics of Childhood Wedding, Song, and Performance

Typical Features of a Wedding Performance Salutations The most primordial act of conversation that recognizes the presence of another person is a greeting. Greetings can take different forms. A greeting can acquire a marked meaning when used in a specific ritual context. It is often considered a formulaic and necessary expression that the proper ritual etiquette demands in certain occasions. Weddings have many formulaic expressions in different cultures and contexts. If one hears the expression “you may kiss the bride,” one immediately comprehends the wedding context. For ancient weddings, while reconstructing the ancient wedding performance from the existing literary sources involves a great level of speculation, we often have the sense (when that was not always the case) of a diachronic and diatopic uniformity. We have, from various early sources, the strong indication that some salutatory form would be used to address the newlyweds. Some form of addressing the principal characters with hail or rejoice would be part of an anticipated ritual utterance. A greeting, in other words, or a salutation, can initiate or perhaps conclude a dialogue among people but can also seal a social transaction ritually. This section analyzes the typical nuptial features and the types of utterances necessary for ancient Greek weddings. Malinowski regards greeting as a special kind of speech as “phatic communion”— a “first formula” that seeks to establish “links of fellowship.”¹ Jakobson adopts the term and further discusses phatic communication to identify basic communicative exchanges.² Speech act theory defines greetings as “expressives,” while Bach and Harnish classify them as “acknowledgments,” namely expressions that convey “perfunctorily if not genuinely, certain feelings toward the hearer.”³ When looking

¹ Malinowski 1936: 314–15. ² Jakobson 1960: 357. Although Malinowski’s “communion” and Jakobson’s “communication” may seem to be used as alternatives, they are not. Both terms, however, refer to the type of utterances, such as greetings or questions about the weather, that seek to establish some bonding and friendly relations, especially while opening and closing stages of verbal encounters, with the ultimate goal of keeping open the channels of communication. ³ Searle 1976; Bach and Harnish 1979: 51. See also Duranti 1997b.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0003

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at the wedding context, a ritual greeting seems integral to wedding performance, perhaps even validating it as a ritual per se. Addressing a bride and groom in a formulaic way enacts the beginning of a ritual utterance that acknowledges the special status of the receiver of the greeting. One can even say that the greeting itself, as good speech theory would like, makes the bride and groom, orally registering the wedding. As Searle argues, speaking a language means taking part in “a rule-governed form of behavior.”⁴ Behavior is not simply the result of language with all its rules—syntactic, grammatical, and semantic—it is part of “a theory of action.”⁵ Textual evidence does not give us much information about the possible nonverbal expressions, gestures, or ritual movements accompanying the greeting. We can only rely on stylized vase depictions that certainly give some information but not the full spectrum of communication patterns established around salutation. The following three poetic pieces (two fragments from Sappho and a line from Theocritus’s Idyll 18) showcase the importance of a formal greeting and the act of uttering the role for the people they address, namely addressing them as “bride” or “groom.” Although arguably both Sappho fragments are parts of longer poems, the formal greeting is what has captured the attention of lexicographers and these lines have survived as stand-alone lines. The verb rejoice (χαίρω), typically also translated as “hail,” is used in different forms: the first is more immediate in the imperative, and the second oscillates between the optative and the imperative, whereas the line quoted in Theocritus in the third example uses the optative only. χαῖρε, νύμφα, χαῖρε, τίμιε γάμβρε, πόλλα . . . Hail, bride, hail, worthy bridegroom, many . . . (Sappho, fr. 116) †χαίροις ἀ νύμφα†, χαιρέτω δ’ ὀ γάμβρος Rejoice, bride, and hail to the bridegroom. (Sappho, fr. 117) Χαίροις, ὦ νύμφα· χαίροις, εὐπένθερε γαμβρέ. Rejoice, bride; rejoice, groom, with a good father-in-law. (Theocritus 18.49)

Salutations like the ones above can mark a ritual performance. People expect a kind of a crystallized utterance used in such contexts as a recognizable moment that “stamps” the beginning of the wedding ritual as such. These lines proclaim the role of the addressees as part of long-standing traditions that acknowledge the marked context of a wedding not only visually (as many classical vases portray) but also verbally, using such typified features. The performer greets the bride and ⁴ Searle 1969: 41.

⁵ Searle 1969: 17.

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, ,    

groom in Sappho in what appears to be a standardized greeting.⁶ Theocritus adds the father-in-law. The verb that carries the greeting rejoice is present in all examples. Addressing the people by their roles frames the event they participate in and marks this utterance as a detachable, reusable salutation. Salutations do not create the performative act by themselves. Together with other distinctive linguistic patterns, salutations contribute to a wedding discourse.

Makarismos One of the most common types of a speech act during an ancient Greek wedding is the makarismos, namely addressing someone as “blessed.” The epithet makar is most often used in reference to the gods in a formulaic expression. Yet pronouncing someone blessed is a stylized act that needs further analysis. Such a pronouncement seems, on one level, to confer a profound judgment about human life. It is, however, rooted in a tradition of ritual canonization that negotiates relations and codifies patterns of reciprocity and appropriation of the other. More than anything, it conveys a perspective on time and the poem’s sense of temporality. Greek literature warns against mortals appearing as blessed, implying that this is a divine trait. The Solonian view, rooted in traditional wisdom and presented in Herodotus, against pronouncing anyone blessed seemingly projects an ideology that is not always supported by ritual practice in specific contexts, as is the case with the wedding.⁷ The makarismos is a marked address from one individual to another in what appears to have originated from a mystery cult setting. It addresses someone who has seen the mysteries and experienced true knowledge of communication with the divine.⁸ As such, it implies notions of inclusion and exclusion. From that perspective, it also delineates a movement of one individual to become part of another entity or group. The great majority of the attestations of the epithet makar in epic poetry are paired with the word theos, with very few exceptions: referring to the “blessed gods.”⁹ In the Iliad, for example, there are very few cases where the epithet does not refer to gods. In one case, when it refers to ⁶ For Sappho’s wedding songs and the continuity and consistency of the nuptial theme, see Reitzammer 2016: 46, who writes that “although Sappho’s poetry is removed in space and time from Classical Athens, her epithalamia [wedding songs] fragments are our best-preserved examples of songs sung at weddings. In general, the images and metaphors associated with Greek weddings remain relatively consistent over time.” See Dale 2011 for a discussion of the ancient evidence and how the epithalamia were placed within Sappho’s corpus on account of their meter. On the Alexandrian division of Sappho’s books, see Prauscello 2021. ⁷ Herodotus 1.32. In Solon 4c, gods are the ones referred to as “blessed.” The idea expressed in Herodotus—that one cannot be proclaimed “blessed” until the end of their life—is not explicitly mentioned in Solon’s writings. See Lewis 2009: 132–3. ⁸ Burkert 1987: 16–17. ⁹ Examples from the Iliad of the makares theoi are the following: Il. 1.339; 1.406; 1.599; 5.340; 5.819; 6.141; 14.72; 14.143; 15.38; 20.54; 24.23; 24.99.

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Agamemnon, it appears in a passage of Iliad 3 and in the Teichoskopia that echoes wedding discourse, as I showed in the previous chapter.¹⁰ The most common remnant and reflection of the makarismos in ancient Greek discourse, which stems from a formalized tradition of praise, is the one we find in nuptial contexts, where the groom, bride, or their kin and family are pronounced as makares. Let us consider the example from Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women, which presents the adjective with full force: . . . . . . .] Φθίην ἐξίκετο μητέρα μήλων, πολλὰ] Κ̣ τήματ’ ἄγων ἐξ εὐρυχόρου Ἰαωλκοῦ, Πηλεὺ]ς̣ Αἰακίδης, φίλος ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσιν. λαοῖσιν] δὲ ἰ[δ]οῦσιν ἀγαίετο θυμὸς ἅπασιν, ὥς τε πό]λιν [ἀ]λάπαξεν ἐύκτιτον, ὥς τ’ ἐτέλεσσεν ἱμερόεν]τ̣ α̣ γ̣ [ά]μον, καὶ τοῦτ’ ἔπος εἶπαν ἅπαντες· “τρὶς μά⸥καρ Αἰακίδη καὶ τετράκις ὄλβιε Πηλεῦ, . . . . . ].ο̣[.] μέ[γα] δῶρον Ὀλύμπιος εὐρύοπα Ζεύς . . . . . . . . . ].[ . . . . μ]άκαρες θεοὶ ἐξετέλεσσαν· ὃς τοῖσδ’ ἐν μεγάροις ἱε⸥ρὸν λέχος εἰσαναβαίνων . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . πατ]ὴρ ποίησε Κρονίων . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . περ]ί̣ τ’ ἄλλων ἀλφηστάων . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. χθονὸ]ς ὅσ̣ [σ]ο̣[ι καρ]πὸν [ἔ]δ̣ ουσι ] he came to Phthia, mother of sheep, bringing [much] wealth from spacious Iolcus, Peleus,] Aeacus’s son, dear to the immortal gods. The spirit of all [the people] who saw him was astonished at how] he had sacked the well-founded [city], and how he had fulfilled a lovely marriage], and all of them said this speech: “three times blessed, son of Aeacus, and four times happy, Peleus, ] Olympian far-seeing Zeus, a great gift ] the blessed gods have fulfilled; he who in these halls going up into the holy marriage bed the father,] Cronus’s son, made ] beyond the others who live on bread all those who eat the fruit [of the earth (Hesiod, fr. 211 Merkelbach-West)¹¹ ¹⁰ There are only four instances when the adjective makar does not modify the noun gods or the name of a god in the Iliad, in one instance referring to Agamemnon (3.182) in the scene of the Teichoskopia that, I argue, comes from a wedding-related tradition, in another instance referring to Menelaus (4.127). In a third instance, it is used for an unknown man in a simile (11.68), and finally by Priam in 24.377, referring to “blessed parents” in what arguably can also stem from wedding or ritual discourse more broadly. ¹¹ Cat. 152 (Text and translation by G. W. Most, Loeb Classical Library, Most 2018).

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, ,    

The nuptial makarismos is one that, on the surface, seeks to extol the couple by giving them temporary divine status. Suppose the original application of the adjective makar is indeed to be seen in conjunction with the divine. In that case, its application to a mortal can be read as part of a ritualized praise technique that focuses on the couple, the individual, or their family. As such, it is not meant to be understood as a permanent label, but within the specific ritual context that extemporizes the addressee. In the instance of the Hesiodic fragment, we may have one of the oldest uses of a makarismos presented as a collective utterance (“all of them said,” l. 6). In what appears to be a ritualized wedding context, this becomes a voice of collectivity that both sets Peleus apart as the addressee and places him in a divine setting amid the makares theoi, who are also mentioned explicitly at the end. Peleus, after all, is being married to a divinity, so the makarismos toward him and the reference to the group of the gods is a verbal act that conjoins a man and a goddess. If we view the makarismos as a speech genre, it is essential to note that this speech genre can be an interpretative device that reflects not only the addressees but also the speaker in the context presented.¹² Homer’s two most eloquent examples—and those that have attracted attention concerning this otherwise understudied feature—are from the Odyssey (6.154–8 and 11.483), and both are used by Odysseus. The first is part of a captatio benevolentiae strategy on the island of the Phaeacians, whereas the other is addressed indirectly to Achilles in the Underworld (Od. 11.154–5). Let us consider Odysseus’s supplication here: “Γουνοῦμαί σε, ἄνασσα· θεός νύ τις ἦ βροτός ἐσσι; εἰ μέν τις θεός ἐσσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν, Ἀρτέμιδί σε ἐγώ γε, Διὸς κούρῃ μεγάλοιο, εἶδός τε μέγεθός τε φυήν τ’ ἄγχιστα ἐΐσκω· εἰ δέ τίς ἐσσι βροτῶν, οἳ ἐπὶ χθονὶ ναιετάουσι, τρὶς μάκαρες μὲν σοί γε πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ, τρὶς μάκαρες δὲ κασίγνητοι· μάλα πού σφισι θυμὸς αἰὲν ἐϋφροσύνῃσιν ἰαίνεται εἵνεκα σεῖο, λευσσόντων τοιόνδε θάλος χορὸν εἰσοιχνεῦσαν. κεῖνος δ’ αὖ περὶ κῆρι μακάρτατος ἔξοχον ἄλλων, ὅς κέ σ’ ἐέδνοισι βρίσας οἶκόνδ’ ἀγάγηται . . . ” “I am your suppliant, my queen! Are you a goddess, or are you mortal? If you are a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, it is to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, that I liken you in your looks, height, and form. But if you are one of the mortals who live on the earth, thrice blessed then are your father and your revered mother, and thrice blessed your brothers. Great must be their joy always in their hearts because of ¹² For different approaches to what constitutes the reason for calling someone olbios and a tracing of how makarismos addressees change, from the rich to the wise, see Gladigow 1967.

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you, such a tender flower, as they watch you entering the dance. But that man in his turn is blessed in heart above all others, the man who will win you with gifts and lead you to his home . . .” (Hom. Od. 6.149–59)

While at one level, the makarismos confers honor on the addressee(s), in reality, it is a type of speech that is more revealing for the figure(s) practicing it. A whole etiquette of what constitutes proper behavior lies behind the conventional usage of greetings and praise, which can be as revealing for the proclaimed “blessed” people as for those who use this utterance. Odysseus, as the master storyteller and, in many ways, the absolute connoisseur of rhetorical artistry, uses the makarismos twice: In the case of his address to Nausicaa given above, it is not addressed to her directly but rather her parents (thus her origins or past), brothers (her present), and future husband (her future), in ways that draw from the wedding repertoire. By naming the future husband as the makartatos, he opens a window of potential self-praise, leaving the possibility that this husband could indeed be him.¹³ Nausicaa, after all, does not know him, nor does he know her, but all possibilities are on the table. In my analysis, I am building on Lorenzo Garcia’s work on temporality. As Garcia has argued, “when Homer’s characters speak and act . . . they are acutely aware of time as both an abstract concept as well as a force that produces great change.”¹⁴ Odysseus grasps this opportunity to control time through the makarismos and make it work to his advantage. His speech act operates within the specific narrative context and timeframe created by the epic poem but also within the greater circulating tradition that marks it as an atemporal speech act, the one context echoing the other. Whereas most recent work on time and temporality has focused more on constructions of the past and memory making, the Odyssey presents a forum for temporal projection into the future.¹⁵ The use of nuptial discourse within a supplication context is part of this strategy employed by the poet. Similarly, in his address to Achilles, Odysseus shows a controlled grasp of time, during which Achilles is proclaimed makar only in a comparative manner and concerning others in a specific timeframe. Odysseus, as the speaker, is the one who controls time, but Achilles responds with the famous lines that present the context of the Underworld as one of decay. Time in the Underworld is interrupted by Odysseus’s intervention at Achilles’s request, in an address that brings into discussion Achilles’s father Peleus (also subject to old age and death) and son Neoptolemus: one is a reference to the hero’s past, the other to his future. While

¹³ For a reading of the makarismos in the Odyssey and the specific use of the makartatos as part of the heroic identity, see Dova 2000. ¹⁴ Garcia 2013: 23. ¹⁵ Bassi 2016; Grethlein 2010.

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, ,    

Achilles is bound by death, his questions about his father and son condition this sense of eternity and timelessness intersecting with mortality. The Iliadic references, though, offer a different type of formalized usage of the makarismos, and the association with the notion of makar. I focus on references from the Iliad, particularly on Priam’s use of it in the Teichoskopia section, where, in his address to Helen, he uses a type of stylized discourse that is usually associated with someone who is both older and a king. Nevertheless, the puzzling makarismos he utters for Agamemnon (Il. 3.182–90) can give us a deeper understanding of how this speech act works when we examine further the parameters of time and space in the storytelling embedded in his address. While acknowledging Cyclic evocations here (namely the tradition of the suitors of Helen, some of whom are mentioned in the Teichoskopia in the same order as in the Hesiodic Catalogue, as mentioned in the previous chapter), Priam’s speech is in perfect accordance with his presence throughout the poem. He appropriates a greater sense of time while addressing others. He provides a brief story that brings the space of Phrygia and a distant time of the past in ways that can be further revealing about the role of the makarismos as a speech genre on its own, as we see below. Ὣς φάτο, τὸν δ’ ὁ γέρων ἠγάσσατο φώνησέν τε· “ὦ μάκαρ Ἀτρεΐδη μοιρηγενὲς ὀλβιόδαιμον, ἦ ῥά νύ τοι πολλοὶ δεδμήατο κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν. ἤδη καὶ Φρυγίην εἰσήλυθον ἀμπελόεσσαν, ἔνθα ἴδον πλείστους Φρύγας ἀνέρας αἰολοπώλους, λαοὺς Ὀτρῆος καὶ Μυγδόνος ἀντιθέοιο, οἵ ῥα τότ’ ἐστρατόωντο παρ’ ὄχθας Σαγγαρίοιο· καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν ἐπίκουρος ἐὼν μετὰ τοῖσιν ἐλέχθην ἤματι τῷ ὅτε τ’ ἦλθον Ἀμαζόνες ἀντιάνειραι· ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ οἳ τόσοι ἦσαν ὅσοι ἑλίκωπες Ἀχαιοί.” Thus he spoke, and the old man looked at him in admiration and told him: “Blessed son of Atreus, child of fate, blessed by gods, many sons of the Achaeans are now your subjects. I came to Phrygia before, a place rich with vineyards, and there I saw a great many Phrygian men with swift-moving steeds, the men of Otreus and godlike Mygdon, who were then encamped along the banks of the river Sangarius. For I too being their ally, joined their ranks, on the day the fighter Amazons came. But even they were not as many as were the bright-eyed Achaeans.” (Il. 3.181–90)

The most crucial difference is that Priam does not use a makarismos to address someone directly. Agamemnon is only an addressee in name; the real addressee and receiver of the actual makarismos is Helen. Agamemnon never gets to hear it, with Helen being an intermediary of some sort. Throughout the Iliad, as Joel

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Christensen has shown, Trojan rhetoric (and here I would focus on Priam in particular) depicts an attempt to marginalize dissent and maintain an “embattled unity at the status quo.”¹⁶ Still, Priam uses a registered verbal genre that any traditional oral culture would be deeply aware of as an important part of its soundscape. One could call it a kind of para-literary genre of speaking.¹⁷ The ancient scholia to these lines note that Priam’s makarismos as an indirect and not a direct address is fitting for an enemy. It looks toward the past, as again would be fitting for an older person’s utterance. It moves from the one person called “blessed” to the many people that fought against each other. At the same time, it situates the speaker within a group of allies (καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼν ἐπίκουρος, Il. 3.88), projecting a time and space that also refers to the Amazons in a rare reference as one of the many people who fought against the Achaeans. There can be little doubt that we have the insertion or allusion to other epic poetic material here. If we were to apply classical speech act theory, we would see that there are several disconnects: while it could stand as a locutionary and illocutionary act, an utterance that underlines its own significance as a marked event—a kind of beatitude, so to speak—it acquires an idiosyncratic perlocutionary force upon the speaker, hearer, or others.¹⁸ According to Briggs, speech act theory is a hermeneutical tool for “self-involvement” within the text.¹⁹ Speech act theory demonstrates the knowledge that a community is interpretive of itself and the world in which it operates.²⁰ By examining the speech acts of a particular social body, various patterns emerge that provide explanation, correction, or confirmation among its members. What matters are the utterances a community employs in describing a shared reality—not simply the reality of itself or even another reality—which may come from the past or be projected onto a future.²¹ The theme of a marriage contest is central to this scene where Helen is placed before two competing husbands. Priam’s speech is the epitome of discretion in avoiding any reference to her former husband, showing a sympathetic view toward Helen that seeks to include her on the Trojan side. The use of wedding-like diction, such as the makarismos or the eikasia, found throughout this episode,

¹⁶ Christensen 2015: 47. ¹⁷ See Martin 2020b. ¹⁸ See Austin 1975, who submits that the locutionary act is the act of saying something. With speech or words, the utterance is transmitted. As Austin elaborated, it is “the utterance of certain noises . . . the utterance of certain words . . . the utterance of them with a certain meaning” (1975: 92–3). Austin further discusses the illocutionary act. This is the “performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (Austin 1975: 99–100). This act involves the significance or force of the utterance; see BeDuhn 2002: 86. Examples would include promising, blessing, declaring, warning, and the like. These words convey the functionality of the illocutionary act (cf. Wolterstorff 1995: 37). ¹⁹ Briggs 2001: 5–17. Self-involvement is described as the speaking subject investing him or herself in a state of affairs by adopting a stance toward that state of affairs (Briggs 2001: 148). Social conditions are like thermostats, which make speech acts possible (cf. Briggs 2001: 63–7). ²⁰ The community is strengthened through its language (speech acts), both in addressing its existence in the world and in the world of its own existence (cf. Verhey 2007: 22–3). ²¹ cf. Petrey 1990: 40–1; Esterhammer 1993: 288.

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, ,    

reinstates Helen’s position as a bride, a woman about whom there is a war that is not over yet. It also inserts an image of past wars that projects alliances against the Amazons. Like the temples whose pediments projected legendary battles, such as the Amazonomachy, Priam’s speech also projects an iconic moment of a shared past. At the same time, the Helen that the Iliad projects is one that points to her past, the early bride for whom there were suitors and competition. Helen responds to Priam’s questions in an epigrammatic way, as Elmer has shown.²² Priam’s use of beatitude is also an attempt to control space and time.²³ Already Plutarch’s reference to this scene and the scholia underline that this is a fitting way for an enemy to be placed in the space of outside vs. inside. The dialogue takes place in Troy, and Priam situates himself as an outsider for Agamemnon and the other heroes. He does not address Agamemnon directly; Helen is his only interlocutor. The two are in a kind of competition for space, but even more for time. Here we have the inversion of a makarismos: The makarismos is the speech genre that opens a window of opportunity to put the speaker’s point of view regarding temporality in focus. While Odysseus points to an indefinite yet potential future when speaking to Nausicaa, or to both past and future when addressing Achilles (Od. 11.483), in the two cases in the Odyssey, Priam uses the makarismos to point to his own defined past, creating an implicit comparison between the “blessed” Agamemnon and himself. The makarismos is not a static, old speech formula but one that opens a bridge that links different times and spaces, and Priam’s gesture is one toward a past long gone by.

Eikasia Comparisons or similes are some of the most salient features of the wedding song tradition, possibly a remnant of actual ritual performance at weddings. Grooms and brides—especially brides—are compared with a divinity, as we saw in Homer and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. It is conceivable that this originated with aristocratic weddings, and it is for this reason that it might have found a home in the more extensive epic fabric in conjunction with elite figures or goddesses. Sappho’s fragments offer a window onto our understanding of the presence of eikasia in the wedding song tradition. We often have comparisons with the natural world, as is the case when the bride (or the bride’s virginity) is compared to an apple out of reach of the malodropēes (the apple-pickers) (fr. 105a), or a hyacinth ²² There are at least three epigram-like utterances between Priam and Helen in the Teichoskopia. See Elmer 2005: 4, Il. 156–8, 178–80, 200–2. Elmer (2005: 33–4) makes the crucial point that Helen writes and discusses further the early association of the female voice with writing and visual presentation. ²³ Beatitudes are an intentional type of utterance that affirms the speaker’s role while also creating some common ground as an expected utterance for the speaker and audience. For how beatitudes work in a different context, such as in biblical literature, see Howell and Lioy 2011.

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trodden underfoot (fr. 105c). In perhaps the most famous example, in fr. 115 Sappho asks the following question: τίωι σ’, ὦ φίλε γάμβρε, κάλως εἰκάσδω; ὄρπακι βραδίνωι σε μάλιστ’ εἰκάσδω. To what may I compare you most beautifully, dear bridegroom? To a tender sapling I compare you the most. (Sappho, fr. 115)

Sappho explicitly flags the use of her eikasia by introducing a question-and-answer paradigm, asking a question—“To what may I compare you with?”—in what could be a playful act. Such clear flagging in the production of an oral text underlines the speaker’s perspective and hidden wish for their utterance to be memorable and repeatable, and also possibly replaceable with another word that fits.²⁴ Although only fragments survive, ancient sources refer to Sappho’s use of comparison as a well-registered feature of her wedding poetry. In two testimonia, Himerius speaks of Sappho comparing the girl to an apple or the groom to Achilles (Or. 9.16 = Sappho, fr. 105b) or to the god Ares (fr. 111). As we will discuss further, comparing with heroes or heroines seems to be an essential aspect of nuptial poetics. In Sappho fr. 117a, she compares the groom to prize-winning horses and the bride to the tenderness of roses.²⁵ In a slightly different mode, Sappho’s fr. 96.6–9 portrays Arignota as outshining the Lydian women, like “the rosy-fingered moon after sunset, surpassing all the stars,” in what seems to be a classic reference to partheneia and wedding song imagery.²⁶ The reference to Lydian women could be an indication that Lydia is the place of the wedding in this poem. Sappho may have worked on commission composing wedding songs and poetry but was also responsible for presenting them. In any case, it puts the wedding song repertoire squarely in the context of choral music. As Stehle has put it, Sappho “might have acted as producer, choreographing and rehearsing the chorus.”²⁷ In a seminal article on Latin epithalamian poetry, Denis Feeney contextualizes the feature of the simile not only within the Graeco-Roman tradition but also more broadly. He cites examples from the first chapter of the Song of Songs (1.13–14) thought by many to be part of the wedding song tradition. In his detailed study of Catullus, Feeney further notes that in Catullus 62, we find similes in hexameter ²⁴ Explicit flagging of an oral text draws attention to the speaker’s perspective and frames an utterance as a performer’s intent to make words “stick” in a special way. In other words, it is part of an effort to entextualize types of utterance and make them distinct and new. I am inspired by Jonathan Ready’s analysis of the mechanisms of entextualization in epic that, in my view, apply well to lyricexplicit flagging of utterance types, see Ready 2019: 34–6. ²⁵ See Mich. Ital. Or. ad Mich. Oxit. for Sappho fr. 117a. ²⁶ For a reading of Sappho fr. 96, along with frs. 16 and 17 reflecting poetic memory, see Calame 2012. ²⁷ Stehle 1997: 277.

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verse. He rightly speculates that Catullus may have known more of Sapphic wedding poetry and her use of similes that have been lost to us.²⁸ As he further writes, the wedding song tradition “has an agonistic relationship with the epic tradition, and similes are part of this competitive rivalry, with the epithalamium marking off distinctive subject-matter for its own similes, as if to claim that this is the genre where simile is really at home.”²⁹ This is a valuable insight when focusing on similes and the role of the eikasia in ancient poetry. In my reading, the epic absorbs and reflects the wedding song tradition and functions as a repository of different oral genres that leave their mark through the hexameter verse. The choice to include wedding diction in epic, then, can only be seen as a deliberate act from the epic poet’s perspective, seeking to appropriate another genre. Feeney has made some astute observations on the kind of overlap there is between similes in Greek and Latin poetry and the epic tradition. As he remarks, in the wedding song tradition, we do not find similes of comparison with the sea, which are plentiful in epic poetry, nor with rocks, fields, wheat, rivers, storms, wild animals, or even domestic animals. The epithalamium mobilizes “developed comparisons with gods or heroes, whom epic treats not by analogy but in diegesis.”³⁰ This is further attributed to the nature of the Greek and, subsequently, Roman marriage, which functions as a monogamous institution that situates the wedding in a deep ritual history as it negotiates “the strange procedure by which we yoke together like and unlike, finding a certain kind of resemblance in the clash between sameness and difference.”³¹ When we consider these three fundamental features together—salutation, makarismos, and eikasia—we see that the performances around weddings indeed negotiate differences, as they try to bring together not just the couple but even the households with their vested interests. Poets using these features must tread carefully around other underlying ideologies, such as to what extent one can call someone blessed, when to greet or compare the other with a divinity without crossing the fine boundary into hybris. Similarly, the different types of comparison individually carry elusive cultural notions. When Odysseus assimilates Nausicaa to a young shoot of a tree, he utilizes the same cognitive forces that are also active in other genres, as we shall see later when examining Theocritus’s epithalamion. The branch of a tree can be a symbolic representation of something transportable and mobile, which makes it a fitting simile for the reality of young women in antiquity. Unlike the entire tree, such as the olive tree where Odysseus and Penelope’s bed was carved, a branch can be grasped, taken, and displayed as a trophy, as was the case in Delos for poetic performances in Odysseus’s account. A plant lacks the ability of volitional movement, and when cut off, it becomes a remnant. Some plants can create new roots in certain conditions, so nature’s spectrum of parallels ²⁸ Feeney 2013: 73. ³¹ Feeney 2013: 95.

²⁹ Feeney 2013: 74.

³⁰ Feeney 2013: 74.

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is variegated. In similes such as the ones presenting the bird, the flower, the rose, the apple, we can find additional cultural meaning that informs poetic cognition of a metaphor or simile.³² From a cognitive perspective, similes combine different performance genres; as in epic, one extended simile can capture a shorter lyric performance.³³ In shorter or lyric performances, it becomes a central reference point that guides the memory and helps the performer and audience visualize certain scenes and keep a strong memory of a performance. Lakoff suggests that metaphors highlight certain aspects of concepts while hiding others.³⁴ The presentation of people as plants is complex and draws from notions of growing, sprouting, withering, and cutting, which apply and shape the poetic diction.³⁵ Imagery in poetry also corresponds to artistic renderings. Apples and plants are part of the wedding imagery on vases that depict wedding scenes. Beyond such occasional references in poetic representation, which are highly charged symbolically, we need to pay attention to what could be depicted further on dresses, blankets, embroidery, and other works intended for consumption around a wedding. Wedding rituals, feasts, and festivities involve staging and decoration and that seems to have been the case for the ancients as well. In other words, the mobile dowry of handmade items intended for the newlyweds and their household would surely have a penchant for specific decorative motifs that innocuously convey their own presence as wedding-related objects. That the poetic similes would be part of a broader repertoire of motifs circulating in imagery is attested in both the represented world of poetry as well as archaeological evidence that provides further indications about decoration and body wear. In Iliad 22.440–1, Andromache weaves and embroiders on her weaving a rosette-like pattern when she discovers that her husband is dead.³⁶ This reference to textile work and the specific pattern gives us a rare glimpse into what would have been an artistic reflection of creativity. Patterns of flowers or birds are expected references in wedding scenes on vase iconography but are also likely to be part of patterns produced via different means, such as weaving, embroidery, and more. Oral and visual discourse have many similarities. This is especially the case in anthropological comparanda, as in Greece, where we see Modern Greek folk poetry regularly featuring motifs in embroidery or weaving around the same context. A ship, a bird, the stars, and the diverse world of plants are featured often in Modern Greek folk songs as also in textile arts. The bride is seen as a partridge, a star, the moon, an apple tree, or a lemon tree; the wedding bed is a tree or a ship, and the indications from embroidery and textile work suggest that many of the ³² For how the similes’ conceptual framework operates in epic, see Ready 2018. I follow Ready’s use of “frame semantics,” which highlights how systems of concepts operate together in lexical structures (Ready 2018: 231–40). ³³ See Karanika 2020b. ³⁴ See Lakoff 1993. ³⁵ See Kövecses 2010. ³⁶ For this scene, see Segal 1971 and Konstan 2016: 9–10.

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same motifs are there as well. The imagery of song and space weaves together the ritualized or decorated moment but also has a life beyond the specific celebration. Unsurprisingly, elements that carry the imagery in poetry are present in artistic representations that focus on the bride. A series of vases in classical iconography portrays, in a formulaic fashion, a seated female figure, often with Eros present, which gives this a nuptial context. In the oil flask (lekythos) depicted in Figure 2.1, the bride figure, to whom Eros brings a casket presumably filled with bridal paraphernalia, extends her hand on which there is a bird. The bird here is like a pet,

Figure 2.1 Terracotta squat lekythos (oil flask) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a seated woman facing Eros, c.420 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 244814

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Figure 2.2 Red-figured kylix attributed to the Oedipus Painter depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx of Thebes, c.470 , from Vulci. Vatican Museums, inv. no. 16541. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 2.0 generic license, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Oedipus_and_the_Sphinx_of_Thebes,_Red_Figure_Kylix,_c._470_BC, _from_Vulci,_attributed_to_the_Oedipus_Painter,_Vatican_Museums_ (9665213064).jpg.

and as is expected, the associations of flying, or the departure of a bride, make this a most fitting presence on the visual scene. Yet, as it is noted on the Metropolitan Museum’s website, the bird is juxtaposed with the winged Eros and is given a prominent position that invites further inquiry. Metaphors spring from the mind’s associations, and it is only natural that what we get from poetry is reinforced in visual representations. The gift-bearing Eros seems to be in direct relation with the seated woman. Nothing hinders their gaze, and they both seem to be engaged in the activities of the wedding ritual. Let us compare this scene with other scenes that present other seated figures, such as the famous Oedipus and the Sphinx on a red-figured kylix attributed to the Oedipus Painter (Figure 2.2). There is a similarity in the characters’ positioning. Oedipus here is a man who will soon be married and will embark on his journey, and both Oedipus and the young woman face a winged creature of the opposite sex. While the Oedipus representation can be contextualized through the well-known myth, the pattern of two facing figures, with winged figures depicted as hybrid or other possibly divine creatures (and notably the Sphinx is far from being depicted as a

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monster here, quite the opposite), points to common themes. The underlying subtext of the hero before the adventure suggests that such encounters are never innocent. Just as the eponymous seated hero will open a new chapter in his life, similarly the anonymous seated bride will depart for her journey. The wedding context is an underlying theme for both. Oedipus will also marry his mother after defeating his opponent. The typology of staging encounters in certain ways further shows the framework within which poets or artists placed their figures, with the wedding context being an invisible arc behind these images. Winged figures bring surprises and a sure shake of one’s life.

Picture Perfect and Iconic Couples: Looking Like a God, Seeming Like a Bride Much of our knowledge of funerary rituals and lamentation practices comes from the archaeological evidence and an interpretive approach that combines the visual narrative with the textual one. From the earliest representations of vase iconography, we see an apparent affinity between what survives on vases and what we read in our sources. Processions are an essential part of civic life. The ekphrasis of the Shield of Achilles gives an overview of wedding rituals and processions, merging the visual and the oral epic discourse aesthetics. A poet creates what they imagine an artist would create. This symbiosis of poetic creativity, performance, and the imaginary work of art focuses on important scenes of daily life with few mythological references. Wedding festivities often praise the bridal couple by referring to them as looking “like gods.” The ritual representation shows that the chariot or, later in classical Athens, cart that may have carried the couple in procession could be part of a scene representing them “like gods.”³⁷ The black-figured representation of Kleitias and Ergotimos, known as the François Vase in Florence, shows a procession (Figure 2.3); it depicts a wedding scene in its central register. This representation has names inscribed to identify some of the figures, possibly taken from myth, so this is not a generic procession but rather an exact equivalent to the Hesiodic fragment we read earlier, the wedding procession of Peleus and Thetis. They are the paradigmatic couple that are featured in poetic and visual sources. The François Vase, which quite possibly was itself a wedding gift, carefully blends the divine with the mortal world and presents emphatically nuptial connections.³⁸ Other depictions, especially

³⁷ Sinos 2020: 24. ³⁸ For an overview of interpretations of the François Vase and its significance, see Shapiro 2013. For the wedding theme on the François Vase, see Stewart 1983: 66–70; Morwood 1999. Neils 2013 argues not only that the nuptial theme is present through the depiction of the Peleus and Thetis wedding but

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Figure 2.3 Attic black-figured volute krater known as the François Vase, c.570–565 , Museo Archeologico, Firenze. By permission of Art Resource. Photo Credit: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

those coming from classical times, present the bridal couple walking on foot but marking them as the focal point, with the groom leading the bride. From this perspective, both chariot processions and the leading of a person into the new space are not unlike ritual practices that include processions and initiation rituals of different sorts. Like Peleus and Thetis or Paris and Helen, Dionysus and Ariadne make another iconic couple.³⁹ In the famous frescoes of the Villa of the Mysteries outside of that there are other bridal connections, such as Theseus and Ariadne, the Centauromachy, possibly the Ambush, and the Calydonian boar scene. For the vase itself as a possible wedding gift, see Lezzi-Hafter 2013. ³⁹ By using the term iconic, I refer to the frequent usage of certain myths within certain contexts. Calame suggests that the circulation of some myths in ritualized community settings, such as victory odes, wedding songs and funeral laments, meant that myths were used with a “pragmatic” effect. See

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Pompeii, a scene that has attracted significant scholarly attention and has, for the most part, been interpreted as depicting an initiation ritual in the context of Dionysiac ritual is replete with visual allusions to a nuptial setting. We often see the theme of Dionysus and Ariadne as a couple (or their encounter in Naxos with Ariadne as a sleeping figure) in different mosaics, vase paintings, and ivory reliefs.⁴⁰ As Richard Seaford has shown, initiation rituals and weddings “interpenetrate” each other.⁴¹ This is one of the most prominent scenes that blends aspects of initiation and nuptial preparations so forcefully. It is not incongruent with earlier vase iconography practices that bring Dionysiac elements to nuptial scenes. Conversely, the idealized couple of Dionysus and Ariadne could be an excellent candidate for a representation of what is projected as emblematic of marriage ritual and context: looking like a god, seeming like a bride. Already from early on, in Hesiod’s Theogony, they appear as a couple that is fixed in epic memory while the many visual representations corroborate the two as an archetypal couple: Xρυσοκόμης δὲ Διώνυσος ξανθὴν Ἀριάδνην, κούρην Μίνωος, θαλερὴν ποιήσατ’ ἄκοιτιν· τὴν δέ οἱ ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀγήρων θῆκε Κρονίων. Dionysus, with his golden hair, made blond Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, his blooming wife. And the son of Cronus made her immortal and never aging for his sake. (Hes. Th. 947–9)

While Ares is often regarded as the paradigmatic groom in the Sapphic world, the figure of Dionysus also dominates nuptial imagery.⁴² The association with fertility and festivity invites a reading that makes us excavate deeper for what could be Dionysiac elements in wedding poetry. That Ariadne was seen as a bride is already attested in Xenophon’s Symposium, the scene with which this work concludes. This risqué passage has attracted much attention, not least because it appears as a mime.⁴³ For our purposes here, as the text tells us, Ariadne appears adorned like a “bride,” and the audience views a wedding scene as an explicitly sexualized act. While the mimetic and performative character of this cannot be understated, the text keeps the façade of a wedding procession into the bridal chamber. When presenting such scenes in literature, there is a pattern of assuming loud music in the background and projecting the soundscape. As we see in this case, the Bacchic rhythm was played on the flute as Calame 2009 passim, esp. 98–9, 116–18. See also the important point by Johnston 2015: 185, who writes that “these myths are not historiolae . . . but rather extended metaphors that invite us to consider the salient characteristics shared by the two individuals or situations that are offered for comparison.” ⁴⁰ LIMC III, 2 1986: 406–19. ⁴¹ Seaford 1987. ⁴² For Ares as the groom, see Nagy 2013: 118. ⁴³ Whether this can be seen as evidence for actual mimetic practices, see Hobden 2004: 122n7 with further bibliography.

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Ariadne entered and sat on her throne. Xenophon describes, in a literary ekphrasis, a moving spectacle that brings together two protagonists in nuptial visual and literary narratives. While Ariadne is seated, Dionysus starts dancing around her, and then the two embrace each other. Although she is not comfortable in the scene, she still reciprocates the embrace: Ἐκ δὲ τούτου πρῶτον μὲν θρόνος τις ἔνδον κατετέθη, ἔπειτα δὲ ὁ Συρακόσιος εἰσελθὼν εἶπεν· Ὦ ἄνδρες, Ἀριάδνη εἴσεισιν εἰς τὸν ἑαυτῆς τε καὶ Διονύσου θάλαμον· μετὰ δὲ τοῦθ’ ἥξει Διόνυσος ὑποπεπωκὼς παρὰ θεοῖς καὶ εἴσεισι πρὸς αὐτήν, ἔπειτα παιξοῦνται πρὸς ἀλλήλους. ἐκ τούτου πρῶτον μὲν ἡ Ἀριάδνη ὡς νύμφη κεκοσμημένη παρῆλθε καὶ ἐκαθέζετο ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου. οὔπω δὲ φαινομένου τοῦ Διονύσου ηὐλεῖτο ὁ βακχεῖος ῥυθμός. ἔνθα δὴ ἠγάσθησαν τὸν ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλον. εὐθὺς μὲν γὰρ ἡ Ἀριάδνη ἀκούσασα τοιοῦτόν τι ἐποίησεν ὡς πᾶς ἂν ἔγνω ὅτι ἀσμένη ἤκουσε· καὶ ὑπήντησε μὲν οὒ οὐδὲ ἀνέστη, δήλη δ’ ἦν μόλις ἠρεμοῦσα. ἐπεί γε μὴν κατεῖδεν αὐτὴν ὁ Διόνυσος, ἐπιχορεύσας ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις φιλικώτατα ἐκαθέζετο ἐπὶ τῶν γονάτων, καὶ περιλαβὼν ἐφίλησεν αὐτήν. ἡ δ’ αἰδουμένῃ μὲν ἐῴκει, ὅμως δὲ φιλικῶς ἀντιπεριελάμβανεν. After that, a special seat was placed inside the room, and then the man from Syracuse came in and said to all, “Gentlemen, Ariadne will now enter the chamber that she shares with Dionysus. Then Dionysus will come in, a bit tipsy after drinking with the gods, and approach her, and then they will play with each other.” According to that, first came Ariadne appearing like an adorned bride and sat on the special seat. Then, while Dionysus was not yet appearing, the Bacchic tune was played on the pipes. There they admired the dancing master. As soon as Ariadne heard the melody, her reaction was such that everyone would know she heard with great delight. And she didn’t greet Dionysus, nor did she rise, but it was apparent to all that she could barely sit still. But when Dionysus looked at her, he came dancing and, in the loveliest manner fell to his knees, put his arms around her, and kissed her. She seemed to be embarrassed but then tenderly embraced him back. (Xen. Symp. 9.2–5)

While certainly fictional and possibly exaggerated, the presence of music and the type of music that fits within a sympotic experience is worthy of further attention. If the imagery of a quasi-wedding scene and a named figure entering like a bride could be put on a tableau or mime like this, and one that Xenophon says inspires others to seek marriage, then there is more that Xenophon is doing here. He uses an inverted eikasia: while brides are typically presented as heroines or goddesses, here we have the figure of a heroine, Ariadne, presented as a bride. A quasi-wedding scene becomes an integral part of a male sympotic event, while Xenophon seeks to exhort a didactic message. But the inverted eikasia makes the bridal figure (rather than the divinity or heroine) the paradigmatic one for beauty. Again this, as a

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rhetorical strategy, extolls the unnamed bride as a figure of beauty par excellence to which others, including heroic and divine figures, can be compared. Dionysus and Ariadne, like Peleus and Thetis, are part of the repertoire of figures that can transform a visual or oral literary narrative by giving it the nuptial nuance that marks discourse and visual scenes alike. Externalized from the mythological or even cultic context in which they are typically found, they become nuptial icons, transferable from iconography to text, in narratives corroborated by visual and sound elements. The tableau above shows how such scenes work in the minds of people viewing figures like Dionysus and Ariadne or listening to those names in performance. Like the eikasia, the imagery that is expected becomes part of the wedding discourse, which can be translated into visual motifs in different works of art or artifacts, such as vases and embroidery. The audience or viewer expectation is not unlimited, nor can it include much of a surprise element, as it builds from a stock of metaphors and similes. In a Pindaric fragment, which could be part of the wedding tradition, where we have a parade of figures for the chorus to bring in a hymn, we see the following names and scenes: Cadmus, the Spartoi, Heracles, Dionysus, and “the wedding of white-armed Harmonia.” Pindar makes a reference to Harmonia in a Theban context, and it might be that he is referring to a wedding song tradition that has a local element.⁴⁴ Ἰσμηνὸν ἢ χρυσαλάκατον Μελίαν ἢ Κάδμον ἢ Σπαρτῶν ἱερὸν γένος ἀνδρῶν ἢ τὰν κυανάμπυκα Θήβαν ἢ τὸ πάντολμον σθένος Ἡρακλέος ἢ τὰν Διωνύσου πολυγαθέα τιμὰν ἢ γάμον λευκωλένου Ἁρμονίας ὑμνήσομεν; Could it be Ismenus, or Melia with the golden spindle, or Cadmus, or the sacred race of the Spartoi, or Thebe with the dark-blue fillet, or Heracles with his all-daring physical strength, or Dionysus with his delightful honor, or the wedding of whitearmed Harmonia that we shall sing for in our hymn? (Pindar, fr. 29.1–6)

Suppose this is indeed part of a wedding song repertoire or an allusion to the wedding song repertoire. In that case, the projected choral element in the hymn is especially noteworthy because it points to a distinct mythological world from which the song tradition draws. Dionysus, Harmonia, and the Spartoi are also references with local value for Thebes and Pindar’s projection of nuptial icons. As ⁴⁴ See Rutherford 2001.

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in much of our other surviving poetry, the wedding repertoire has its favorite protagonists and frequently mentioned names.

Ludic Poetics and Tangible Time: Sappho’s “Weaving” and Gendered Temporality in Archaic Greek Performance Weaving Interruptions: Funeral and Wedding Motifs The epic representation of women’s speech is framed around the theme of work— most notably weaving. Female speech acts are carefully staged and constructed with work as a background or often lamentation as the mode through which they are channeled. Epic poetry embeds its characters socially in a nexus of relations within the epic world and employs communicative strategies that reflect the sensitivities of real people: for example, Helen’s self-reproach after the presentation of her weaving or Penelope’s lament-like discourse as she weaves in the absence of her husband have many anthropological parallels in human behavior under certain circumstances as part of a survival mechanism. Penelope weaves at day, unweaves at night, but her work is never interrupted per se until she must finish it; an interruption would mean marriage (for herself) or death. Textile activity becomes a way of communication that opens a different female dimension in the Odyssey, as female characters are presented in distinct spaces controlling their time. It is puzzling that although the epic world is filled with coded references such as weaving, which, among other things, measure poetic time, a similar coded language is almost absent in lyric poetry, and especially Sappho, who is arguably the most genuinely feminine voice of the archaic poetic production.⁴⁵ Epic narrative follows more linear modes of temporal development. As such, poetic time finds its measure, and as ancient scholiasts have already remarked about Penelope’s plan, “as long as the fabric is upright, marital union is not possible.” Lyric time, however, is far more flexible and can create intricate fusions between past, present, and future. Lyric temporality is like a thread that can twist and turn, producing elaborate and complex patterns. From such a perspective, Sappho’s sole reference to weaving in a two-line fragment (fr. 102) is noteworthy for the lyric corpus but also in line with textile activity as a signifier of feminine notions of time. Often cited as a poem that describes the onset of young love, the girl addresses an older woman as a mother and tells her that she can no longer weave because of her desire:

⁴⁵ Papadopoulou Belmehdi 1994. For Penelope’s weaving and its significance as a poetics mechanism valorizing the process, see Clayton 2004: 83–125. For weaving and temporality, see Karanika 2020a.

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, ,     γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον πόθωι δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι’ Ἀφροδίταν Sweet mother, I can no longer weave on my loom, overwhelmed with desire for a young person, thanks to slender Aphrodite. (Sappho, fr. 102)

This brief fragment has been read with a rather romantic naivete at almost face value, showing a weaving scene between two women. One could read it, however, as part of Sappho’s wedding repertoire. It establishes a close communication between two women: one older, addressed as a mother, the other younger, about to leave her home pursuing her desire. I want to shift the discussion to what I hope is a fruitful dialogue with other texts that challenge any romanticism in this piece and see it as part of a different poetic program at work in Sappho and what I believe is a sophisticated case of the Greek wedding song tradition. First of all, despite and beyond the mask of desire, this poem is distinctive of the trope of interruption. Penelope’s daily weaving of her father-in-law’s shroud and nightly erasure of her work is a cyclical activity—one can call it a ritual activity that happens every sequence of day and night. Interrupted textile activity signifies death at a literal or symbolic level. Such glimpses can be seen later in epigrammatic poetry that, in my view, show the culmination of deeply rooted ideologies. Epigram 49 of Posidippus, like his Epigram 55 about Nikomache,⁴⁶ presents the interrupted weaving of another girl, called Hegedice.⁴⁷ Unlike Epigram 55, Epigram 49 does not dwell on day or night, but instead it gives the age of Hegedice, an eighteen-year-old girl (l. 3), and it refers to the end of her weaving (the clear-sounding shuttles, ll. 3–4). Simultaneously, the epigram refers to the girl’s singing: “τὸ . . . χρύσεον στόμα κούρης . . . ζοφερῶι τῶιδε μένει θαλάμωι” (“the maiden’s golden mouth . . . remains in this gloomy chamber,” ll. 5–6). Several epigrams and epitaphs attest to the giving up of weaving as a funereal motif. At the same time, notions of life as a thread that the fates can cut reinforce the ⁴⁶ ₁ πάντα τὰ Νικομάχης καὶ ἀθύρματα καὶ πρὸς ἑώιαν|₂ κερκίδα Σαπφώιουϲ ἐξ ὀάρων ὀάρους|₃ ὤιχετο Μοῖρα φέρουσα προώρια· τὴν δὲ τάλαιναν|₄ παρθένον Ἀργείων ἀμφεβόησε πόλις,|₅ Ἥρης τὸ τραφὲν ἔρνος ὑπ’ ὠλένος· ἆ τότε γαμβρῶν|₆ τῶν μνηστευομένων ψύχρ’ ἔμενον λέχεα. ₁ Everything about Nikomache, all her pretty things and, come dawn,|₂ as the sound of the weaving pin [kerkis] is heard, all of Sappho’s love songs [oaroi], songs sung one after the next,|₃ are all gone, carried away by fate, all too soon [pro-hōria], and the poor|₄ girl [parthenos] is lamented by the city of the Argives.|₅ She had been raised by the goddess Hera, who cradled her in her arms like a tender seedling. But then, ah, there came the time when all her would-be husbands,|₆ pursuing her, got left behind, with cold beds for them to sleep in. (Translation by G. Nagy, slightly modified). For interpretation, see Gregory Nagy. 2016.01.07. “Weaving while singing Sappho’s songs in Epigram 55 of Posidippus.” Classical Inquiries, https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/weaving-while-singing-sapphos-songs-inepigram-55-of-posidippus/#:~:text=Accordingly%2C%20the%20songs%20of%20Sappho,metaphorically%20as%20a%20musical%20instrument. ⁴⁷ For Posidippus possibly drawing from Sappho’s repertoire, see Spelman 2017a: 253n74.

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elements of textile work as a death metaphor.⁴⁸ There are some Modern Greek parallels where the interruption of weaving signifies imminent marriage or death, which I have discussed in my earlier work.⁴⁹ In this much darker reading of this possible wedding song in Sappho fr. 102, the ideology projected is that of interruption, one that comes through the language of overpowering and that alludes to fighting and defeat through the participle δάμεισα. The second very puzzling detail is the closed (again, somewhat idiosyncratic for a reference to the Sapphic circle) relationship of a mother and daughter. The Sapphic “I” often addresses an authoritative figure, such as a divinity (Aphrodite), as in fr. 1. The vocative mother refers to an authoritative figure, such as a nurse or simply an older figure, or even Sappho’s older self in a temporal leap. Furthermore, the address of a daughter figure to the “mother” figure in the poem as “sweet” is most unusual. Such a type of address does not occur until much later in Greek literature—and that is only a male addressing the mother as “sweet” (in the tradition of the Alexander Romance or later in the Byzantine period in the epic poems of Digenes Akritas). In fact, the only comparable archaic text that brings into complete focus the mother-daughter relationship is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, discussed earlier, and the mother there is a most controlling (Greek mother) figure, not someone to whom one can easily make a proclamation such as the one made in Sappho 102 about being defeated by desire or love.⁵⁰ There are, of course, mother-daughter references in tragedy (HecubaPolyxena in the Trojan Women, which fits my paradigm, as we shall see), but epic does not present many examples. An exception to that is the reference to the mother-daughter duo when the little girl clings to her mother’s garment in Iliad 16.6–11, when Achilles speaks to Patroclus, referring to Patroclus as a little girl, in a simile that opens a window onto the tragic reality of women’s enslavement at war, as Kathy Gaca has shown, and not just as an interlude of peace in the narrative of war.⁵¹ The text there is as follows: “τίπτε δεδάκρυσαι, Πατρόκλεες, ἠΰτε κούρη νηπίη, ἥ θ’ ἅμα μητρὶ θέουσ’ ἀνελέσθαι ἀνώγει, εἱανοῦ ἁπτομένη, καί τ’ ἐσσυμένην κατερύκει, δακρυόεσσα δέ μιν ποτιδέρκεται, ὄφρ’ ἀνέληται· τῇ ἴκελος Πάτροκλε τέρεν κατὰ δάκρυον εἴβεις . . .”

⁴⁸ For this metaphor on inscriptional evidence, see Rossi 1999: 36n49. ⁴⁹ Karanika 2014: 182–200. See also Snyder 1981. For an interpretation of this fragment (along with others) as an example of affective reactions, see Tsagarakis 1986: 2–3. For fr. 102 as evidence of a Sapphic circle of women who operated together, see Wilson 1996: 117–28. ⁵⁰ For a reading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter which focuses on perspectives of old age, see Pratt 2000, who also discusses Sappho as another example of sources interested in the feminine perspective and experience of old age (Pratt 2000: 55–6). For Sappho and old age, see Falkner 1995: 71–107. ⁵¹ Gaca 2008.

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, ,    

Why have you been crying, Patroclus, like a girl, a small child, who runs by her mother’s side and asks her mother to pick her up and touches her mother’s garments, and holds her from moving; in tears, she looks at her until the mother finally picks her up. Just like her, Patroclus, you are shedding tears . . .” (Il. 16.7–11)

The little girl touches her mother’s garments in tears. The reality ahead of them is bitter, and the simile makes a gesture, as epic similes do, to other types of performances and an enhanced sensory narrative and soundscape, as is the case here with reference to crying and to the tactile sense explicitly mentioned. Mother and daughter are closely united, whereas in Sappho’s fr. 102, the daughter leaves the mother in what I think is distinctive of Sappho’s bittersweet aesthetics, from the perspective of a young girl. She leaves, first and foremost, her loom. We often forget the close tactile relationship between women and their looms as not just tools but an overpowering object presence in households. Looms require intensive and focused tactile work; it is precisely this tactility that challenges life’s temporal frame. The creative work resulting from this intense manual work becomes an agent of time and space beyond one’s own lifetime. If Sappho fr. 102 is from a wedding song, as I think it is, then it is worth looking into how it captures the voice of a girl leaving her weaving, what it does to the mother-daughter romance, and how it plays with the time of separation as the one that coincides with that abrupt end of the weaving. Ancient weddings were the formal closure of childhood and marked the entry into adulthood. As such, dedications and offerings of toys are well documented. Outside the archaeological record, an epigram from the Palatine Anthology describes the dedication of a young bride’s veil. Another epigram highlights the dedication of the bride’s tambourine, and also her hair and clothes. From Sappho’s severance from weaving to the dedication of one’s clothes and hair coverings, we see a consistent separation from things that would otherwise be in close tactile contact with a girl or young woman. It is almost as if those movements to leave one’s weaving and dedicate one’s clothes and toys push a sense of forced nakedness away from previous work and pleasure. The following epigram communicates the same sentiment: Ἀλκιβίη πλοκάμων ἱερὴν ἀνέθηκε καλύπτρην Ἥρῃ, κουριδίων εὖτ’ ἐκύρησε γάμων Alcibia dedicated her sacred veil for her hair to Hera, when she came to the time of her lawful wedding. (Anth. Pal. 6.133)

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Another epigram highlights a bride’s tambourine, ball, hair, and hair net in what seems to be the literary representation of deeply rooted customs: Τιμαρέτα πρὸ γάμοιο τὰ τύμπανα τάν τ’ ἐρατεινὰν σφαῖραν τόν τε κόμας ῥύτορα κεκρύφαλον τάς τε κόρας Λιμνάτι, κόρᾳ κόρα, ὡς ἐπιεικές, ἄνθετο καὶ τὰ κορᾶν ἐνδύματ’ Ἀρτέμιδι. Timarete, before her wedding, dedicated her tambourine, her lovely ball and the net that covered her hair, as also her dolls, and their dresses, a maiden to a maiden, as it is fitting, to Artemis Limnatis (of the lake). (Anth. Pal. 6.280, 1–4)

The symbolic cutting of the future bride’s hair and the offering of her weaving are also well documented and ritually attested in different cultures as loci of transition (we can compare ancient weddings with Modern Greek baptisms, priest ordinations, etc.). Passage from one phase to another is equated with maturing and leaving behind a carefree world of childhood. The dedication of a toy or the abandonment of weaving is nothing but the material locus of symbolic death. The literary representation of the passage into death is strikingly similar to a passage into a marriage. When a young woman dies, the formal lamentation or epitaph often presents some juxtaposition to a wedding. Lament draws from a fountain of motifs about departure. While scholars have debated if and to what extent childhood is marked as a distinct phase of life in antiquity, ritual markers highlight points of transition from one phase to another.⁵² A wedding, after all, was a social contract and public manifestation of a new couple that would form the basis of an oikos unit in the community. As such, it involved ritually prescribed preparations that included sacrifice, offerings, and nuptial baths, followed by dancing and feast, the anakalyptēria, and the procession. Communal singing and dancing adorned the celebratory atmosphere, often masking individual and family tensions, anxieties, and negotiations. The wedding song was an essential aspect of this ambiance. While not much of that survives, in what follows I propose to “excavate” some of the few vestiges of ancient wedding songs, seeking to uncover the ludic structure that lies underneath. By exploring the interdiscursivity between children’s games and wedding and lament lore our understanding of archaic poetics and communities deepens. ⁵² For recent views on ancient childhood and the terminology used to denote it as a distinct phase, see Cohen 2007a: 3–4; Golden 2003: 14; Lawton 2007: 43–55; Grossman 2007: 310; Golden 2015. For the different stages from babyhood to adolescence with an emphasis on girls, see Beaumont 2000; Dillon 2002; Demand 2004; Molas Font 2016; Morillo 2018: 136–48. For representation in art, see Beaumont 2003; McNiven 2007: 85–93; Cohen 2007b.

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, ,    

Ludic Sappho One of the dominant perspectives on Sappho is to look for ordinary speech genres as the origins from which literary genres derive.⁵³ Parts of Sapphic poetry functioned like parallels of the Homeric hymns, which both invoke the divine and present an extended narrative of the prayer kernel. I like the concept of a kernel because I am looking for what constitutes the basic core structure of an oral poem that can be expanded. For Sappho, prayers to female deities, lamentations, and stylized praises of brides are distinct oral genres that relate to oral performances that a large part of ancient audiences would be familiar with. Although there is substantial controversy and a great spectrum of scholarly opinions on the performance aspect, function, and role of Sappho’s poetry, there is no doubt that she was famous in the ancient world, among other things, for her wedding song repertoire. The wedding theme remains prominent in other parts of her oeuvre as, for example, in fr. 44 discussed earlier. A poem about the wedding of Hector and Andromache is one of the few that have a more panoptic view of the wedding procession, with full references to senses (touch, smell, seeing, and hearing, in particular). In most of her poems, Sappho’s usual emphasis is on the woman, and in particular the young woman; the Sapphic “I” addresses a girl and often refers to the onset of emotions of love or the girl’s departure. There is often an element of reproach, one I would like to call an iambic touch, on what essentially constitutes Sappho’s ludic element. For example, one of the lesser-explored fragments (fr. 49) addresses a girl and points to the girl’s gracelessness: ἠράμαν μὲν ἔγω σέθεν, Ἄτθι, πάλαι ποτά . . . σμίκρα μοι πάις ἔμμεν’ ἐφαίνεο κἄχαρις I loved you, Atthis, a long time ago . . . you seemed to me such a small and graceless child.⁵⁴ (Sappho, fr. 49)

The iambic element appears also in fr. 57, in which Sappho is supposedly deriding a certain Andromeda (not the mythical Andromeda): τίς δ’ ἀγροΐωτις θέλγει νόον . . . ἀγροΐωτιν ἐπεμμένα σπόλαν . . . οὐκ ἐπισταμένα τὰ βράκε’ ἔλκην ἐπὶ τὼν σφύρων;

⁵³ Lardinois 2001: 75.

⁵⁴ From Plut. Amat. 751d.

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And what country girl charms your mind . . . dressed in country clothes . . . not knowing how to pull her rags above her ankles? (Sappho, fr. 57)⁵⁵

Sapphic verses are fresh with a direct, intimate, boundary-breaking voice that is seemingly candid and genuine—so much so that it resembles, as I suggest further, a child’s voice, one that can articulate emotion often in crude terms, as the Sapphic voice can do. Children’s songs, just as any oral repertoire, spring from shared experiences in a social context. Some reflect child’s play and children’s social upbringing and often include teasing and reproach, whereas others absorb the adult world and allude to topics like work—such as weaving—death, separation, and trauma translated in different imagery. The closed circuit of mother and child is also an integral aspect of child poetics. Similar themes are reflected in poetry that could be read as a lullaby with a distinctive use of a masked imperative, a reference to the natural world of animals, and the close contact of mother and child, figuratively.⁵⁶ Let us consider the following from Sappho: Ἔσπερε πάντα φέρων ὄσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ’ Αὔως, †φέρεις ὄιν, φέρεις† αἶγα, φέρεις ἄπυ μάτερι παῖδα. Ηesperus, you who brings everything that shining Dawn scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring back the child to the mother. (Sappho, fr. 104a)

There is a marked fluidity between children’s and adults’ genres in oral culture. It is commonplace to think that children’s genres mirror adult genres. To give one example, in a collection of Yiddish children’s folk songs, we have detailed descriptions of weddings in which the children playfully imitate adult roles; there are dialogues in which kids play the roles of in-laws, or dialogues between the “bride” and “groom.”⁵⁷ Beyond the apparent one-way absorption of so-to-speak adult themes, orality works in complex ways. Lyric imagery permeates and informs adults’ and children’s repertoires in far less distinct ways, so it should not be thought of as a one-way process. The more clearly labeled wedding songs present the associative imagery and leaps that connect the bride and groom to the world of divinities, heroines, or nature, as in Sappho fr. 115, as discussed in the previous section:

⁵⁵ The fragment survives through Athen. 1.21c (1.38 Kaibel). ⁵⁶ For lullabies in antiquity, see Pache 2004: 108–12; Frankfurter 2009; Karanika 2014: 160. For the reference to time and dawn, in particular, see Wilson 1996: 111, who remarks that dawn appears also in Sappho, frs. 103.10, 123, 157, and 104a, where dawn is “juxtaposed with Hesperus—the evening star— to portray a double-sided, perpetual natural process.” ⁵⁷ Rubin 2000.

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, ,     τίωι σ’, ὦ φίλε γάμβρε, κάλως ἐικάσδω; ὄρπακι βραδίνωι σε μάλιστ’ ἐικάσδω To what, my dear bridegroom, may I compare you well? To a tender sapling I compare you the most.

On one hand, we have the serious eikasia, likening the bride and groom to gods or heroes. On the other, there is a lurking ludic aspect, possibly even reflecting social practices such as public teasing of the groom during wedding ceremonies. Let us consider the following two examples (frs. 110a and 111): θυρώρωι πόδες ἐπτορόγυιοι, τὰ δὲ σάμβαλα πεμπεβόηα, πίσσυγγοι δὲ δέκ’ ἐξεπόναισαν The door-keeper’s feet are seven fathoms long and his sandals are made from five ox-hides; ten cobblers worked hard to make them. (Sappho, fr. 110a) ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον ὐμήναον ἀέρρετε τέκτονες ἄνδρες ὐμήναον. γάμβρος †εἰσέρχεται ἴσος† Ἄρευι, ἄνδρος μεγάλω πόλυ μέζων. Raise high the roof-beam! Hymen! Raise it, you carpenters! Hymen! The bridegroom is coming like Ares, much bigger than a big man. (Sappho, fr. 111)

Eikasia enables imaginative but also playful associations. Rebeca Hague has connected Sappho’s eikasia with that of sympotic games.⁵⁸ The eikasia of the bride has more of a complimentary than a “derisive vein,” as she notes.⁵⁹ The

⁵⁸ Bringing references from Xenophon, the use of eikon in Aristophanes’s Wasps and Birds (which could be further enhanced with references from Plato’s Republic, where Glaucon sees eikasia as a game). See Hague 1983. ⁵⁹ Hague 1983: 133.

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socially accepted and ritually circumscribed behavior of wedding-related humor is often crude.⁶⁰ This relates further to broader poetic traditions. Sappho’s poetry has a more intricate route of genesis, much of which springs from young girls’ songs. In Sappho fr.114, a young female voice expresses the desire for her lost virginity. Lament has rightly been remarked as a critical aspect of this poem’s background. Nevertheless, the poem presents personification in distinctly Sapphic terms (just like her chelys, her lyre is personified, as we see in fr. 107). As Sarah Nooter notes: “Lyricism, in this fragment, appears to arise from the musicality of meter, but also from these other elements that make speech strange. Repetition, alliteration, metaphor, apostrophe, and personification make certain utterances distinct and strip them of their pedestrian, prosaic quality.”⁶¹ Virginity is the addressee that flees the Sapphic “I” in no other way than women flee their beloved. Let us examine the surviving two lines: (νύμφη). παρθενία, παρθενία, ποῖ με λίποισα †οἴχηι; (παρθενία). †οὐκέτι ἤξω πρὸς σέ, οὐκέτι ἤξω†. (bride). “Virginity, virginity, where will you go when you’ve left me?” (virginity). I’ll never come back to you, (bride), I’ll never come back to you. (Sappho, fr. 114)

As the poem survives, we have all the characteristics of a game. First there is dialogue; secondly, we have personification; thirdly, there is duplication in the question (“virginity, virginity”), which corresponds to another duplication in the answer (“I’ll never come back to you,” twice).⁶² This poem is not unlike other tag games. The structure of question and answer and the duplication recall the most famous example of girls’ games, the so-called tortoise game.⁶³ The tortoise game, ⁶⁰ In the wedding song in Lucian’s Symposium (41), the guests laugh at the end, which is indicative of the atmosphere sought. For an example of crude jokes and the inversion of wedding song tropes in invective, the best example should be Archilochus 196a, which probably stages an otherwise rejected woman creating the inversion of nuptial praise. For an excellent discussion of this poem, see Petropoulos 2008. Here is Archilochus 196a, 7–9: . . . καλὴ τέρεινα παρθένος· δοκέω δέ μι[ν εἶδος ἄμωμον ἔχειν· τὴν δὴ σὺ ποίη[σαι φίλην. A beautiful tender girl! I think she has an exquisite form, get her as your lover. For Archilochus and the wedding theme with special reference to the cult of Hera in Paros (as Hera gamēlia and Hera teleia), see Nagy 1990: 399–400. ⁶¹ Nooter 2012: 15–16. ⁶² For repetition in Sappho’s wedding songs, in approximately half of the surviving fragments, see Sandin 2014. For how this fragment presents a distinctive Sapphic sensibility blurring the boundaries between speaker and addressee, gesturing to the indeterminate status of “virginity” as the addressee between past and present, abstract and concrete, see Purves 2021: 182. ⁶³ For a presentation of the tortoise game and its function, see Karanika 2012, Costanza 2017, and Costanza 2021, with a diachronic reading of other contemporary Greek tag games.

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, ,    

or “Cheli-Chelōne,” presents this wordplay. The word cheli-chelōne presents a duplication of the first part of the noun chelōne, or possibly reflects what the girls would say: “Catch me, tortoise” (in Greek: Hele (me), chelōne). Let us see this game in more detail: ἡ δὲ χελιχελώνη, παρθένων ἐστὶν ἡ παιδιά, παρόμοιόν τι ἔχουσα τῇ χύτρᾳ· ἡ μὲν γὰρ κάθηται, καὶ καλεῖται χελώνη, αἱ δὲ περιτρέχουσιν ἀνερωτῶσαι χελιχελώνη, τί ποιεῖς ἐν τῷ μέσῳ; ἡ δὲ ἀποκρίνεται ἔρια μαρύομαι καὶ κρόκην Μιλησίαν. εἶτ’ ἐκεῖναι πάλιν ἐκβοῶσιν. ὁ δ’ ἔκγονός σου τί ποιῶν ἀπώλετο; ἡ δέ φησι λευκᾶν ἀφ’ ἵππων εἰς θάλασσαν ἅλατο. Torti-tortoise, a girls’ game, is rather like the pot, one girl sits and is called “tortoise,” and the others run around asking her, Torti-tortoise, what are you doing in the middle? And she answers: I am weaving a web of Milesian wool. And they shout back: And how did your son die? And she says: he jumped from white horses into the sea. (Pollux, Onomasticon 9.125)

The tortoise song is particularly intriguing because it presents the fluidity between the themes of weaving and lament translated into children’s mode of performance and imagery. Sappho’s so-called lament for virginity is a very complex poem.⁶⁴ If we were to put it in more ludic terms, this song is nothing but a tag game from the point of view of the player who loses—as virginity is forever gone, just as death causes permanent departure. Sappho’s virginity line poses an existential contradiction. If indeed this is perceived as a tag game, repetition is the clue to ludic poetics. Even if one speaker says: “I will not come to you,” the player of a game comes back again and again! If then the performance contradicts what the song says, then Sapphic poetics can perfectly undermine the reality created in song: virginal time can be restored, like the player who will come back. There is only one condition: participation in the play. ⁶⁴ Stehle 1997: 280 rightly asks, “Did the bride herself sing them, or did a chorus of parthenoi, speaking for the bride? The lines could be choral or solo, but in the latter fragment ‘virginity’ answers the girl who regrets its going, an arrangement that suggests at least two voices.”

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Sappho’s fr. 1, modeled on ritual language (prayer and magic), with the “palindromic” speech of Aphrodite, presents the same tag game—a more serious version of what ancient girls loved to play in a circular way:⁶⁵ . . . τίς σ’, ὦ [Ψά]πφ’, [ἀδικήει; καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,

Who wrongs you, Sappho? If she runs away, soon she shall pursue; if she does not accept gifts, she shall give them instead; and if she does not love, soon she shall love even against her will. (Sappho, fr. 1.19–24)

This Sapphic fragment is filled with movement by different figures. Running away and returning are central movements. Centrifugal and centripetal forces compete. The intense movement in this poem resembles game-like activity. The second part of the tortoise game is structured around two people fleeing and coming back. Any dialogue that survives about ancient games is between two people, whereas the others run around, as these roles alternate. Tag games are based on movement, circularity, repetition, and touching; constant movement and tactility are important. Just as textile activity is based on the tactile sense, this kind of game cannot exist without reference to the sense of touch. In this reading, fr. 102 channels the voice of a young girl escaping her weaving, an activity she handles daily in the presence of her mother figure, whom she also escapes. The girl’s voice comes out as bold and assertive. The Sapphic “I” in other parts of the Sapphic corpus addresses women with their names (e.g., Gongyla, Anaktoria, Agariste, Atthis)—often those who have fled Sappho. But in fr. 102, from the perspective of the fleeing one, the address is a generic one to the “sweet mother.” Naming or not naming is an important act that needs more attention, and the fragmentary nature of the poem doesn’t help with this. In Sappho fr. 122, we have a line in which a “tender girl” picking flowers is present (which Athenaeus links with Persephone):⁶⁶ φυσικὸν γὰρ δή τι τὸ τοὺς οἰομένους εἶναι καλοὺς καὶ ὡραίους ἀνθολογεῖν. ὅθεν αἴ τε περὶ τὴν Περσεφόνην ἀνθολογεῖν λέγονται καὶ Σαπφώ φησιν ἰδεῖν ἄνθε᾿ ἀμέργοισαν παῖδ᾿ † ἄγαν † ἀπάλαν.

⁶⁵ Petropoulos 1993.

⁶⁶ Athen. 12.554b (12.79 Kaibel) and Campbell’s translation from Loeb.

100

, ,    

For it is natural that those who think themselves beautiful and ripe should gather flowers. This is why Persephone and her companions are said to gather flowers, and Sappho says she saw: a tender girl picking flowers (Sappho, fr. 122)

There is no name for the “tender girl.” But again, tactility is at work. The moment of one girl picking flowers points to Persephone. The Sapphic line surviving through Athenaeus echoes Persephone’s act. But Sappho mentions only one girl, without any name, in this brief vestige of a possible narrative about Persephone. This very brief Sapphic fragment is another interesting parallel to the Persephone narrative discussed in the previous chapter. A moment of connection with the earth and the focus on a “tender” girl picking flowers is the one-line image that survives from this poem. We have no reference to Persephone’s companions or their names here. Yet the connection between a chorus leader and her companions is paramount for the lyric world. It is the moment of touching and picking flowers that captures the poetic imagination, the same moment that the epic’s Persephone presented in her explanation to her mother who was eager to know what had happened. But the epic’s Persephone named her companions first. This epic voice resorts to naming as an act of resistance; the central character seeks to be reunited with her former companions in her own narration of the events, right before the moment the earth opened as she reached for a toy—an athyrma, as it is mentioned in Greek (καλὸν ἄθυρμα λαβεῖν, Hymn. Hom. Cer. 16)—a clear reference to the ludic world of hers. The ludic element and the references to toys and the playful atmosphere capture the desired sentiment of young women. It is the emotion of comfort and bliss that the poetic “I” seeks to project. Sappho’s figures like Persephone cherish the time with their peers. Persephone’s desire is to be with her group. She becomes a child again and works from a child’s perspective, turning time against the reality of her violently imposed marriage, to the time she was picking flowers and about to touch an athyrma.⁶⁷ The athyrma is deeply connected to the bridal figure but also becomes a subtle reference to trauma. The word is most famously seen in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (l. 35), when Hermes, as soon as he is born, has an encounter in a meadow with the tortoise. The tortoise becomes an athyrma for him, a toy he effectively

⁶⁷ For athyrma in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and its associations, see Arthur 1977.

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obliterates. The tortoise’s shell becomes a medium for the poetic song and voice of Hermes’s making. As Emily Hauser remarks, we have here a “highly disturbing rape-analogy which appropriates the tortoise’s female creativity through her literal physical overpowering by the man.”⁶⁸ Not only that, but once she is killed, she will become a feast companion (daitos hetairē, 31). The voiceless female animal becomes the locus of male violence and the source of a voice of pleasure in a way that is described in ludic terms, as she becomes a toy and a companion for feasts. Hauser further notes that we have a “perverted marriage metaphor” as Hermes brings the tortoise to his house, not unlike a groom who takes a bride forcefully “in a grotesque parody of a wedding ceremony.”⁶⁹ This is only at the beginning of a long trajectory of perverted wedding themes, one that is prevalent in tragedy, as we will explore further. The ludic element can be a mask to hide deep trauma and violence. To return to the mother-daughter relationship. Sappho’s young girl in fr. 102 is speaking to the mother figure, marking the moment of her departure. As she is to leave, she is meant to leave behind any work she may have left unfinished. As I have argued in my earlier work with comparative evidence from the Greek folk tradition and ballads about a young bride who fell into misfortune, there is an almost primordial sense that half-woven textiles are meant to be finished. With patience and time, something can be woven; it can also be unwoven, like Penelope’s web. But if it is half-woven, then it will need to be completed, and that completion will bring change. If that holds, then Sappho’s speaker in fr. 102 will return, just as Aphrodite promises the named Sappho in fr. 1 that her lover will return, and just as Persephone returns. A comparative view from anthropology provides an additional illuminating view: Jane Sugarman, in her study on wedding songs of the Albanian Prespa, writes that the songs have a generic format, but when performed, people use the names of the bride or groom, respectively, both personalizing them and also “forcefully” reminding the audience about their departure into a new world.⁷⁰ Sugarman argues that what is essentially accomplished is not personalization but rather depersonalization as the bride and groom join the “legions” of other brides and grooms for whom the same repertoire has been sung. In other words, it is like an oral epitaph. Moreover, ⁶⁸ See Hauser 2023. See also the excellent reading of this scene as a perverted wedding. ⁶⁹ As Hauser 2023: 70 remarks: “Hermes physically takes control of the tortoise, picking her up (labōn, 34; aeiras, 39) and carrying her (pherōn, 40) into the house in a grotesque parody of a wedding ceremony. Where the bride would normally be escorted in procession to enter the husband’s household, here the tortoise is taken (pherōn, 40) into the house by force. The perverted marriage metaphor is made even more potent by the fact that Hermes first encounters the tortoise ‘as he crosses the threshold’ (23) of the cave, symbolic of the woman’s liminal position and her transfer from her previous home to that of her husband in the wedding ceremony.” ⁷⁰ Sugarman 1997: 260–2.

102

, ,    

they enumerate the names of the unmarried ones in their midst. Naming comes in two forms: individual and collective. The collective enumeration is reserved for those not yet married and not at the center of the ritual. Collective naming is a signifier of girls’ playful collective past or present. However, individual naming, such as in Sappho, often situates the moment of departure and becomes an oral epitaph, almost like a curse that condemns the person who fled in the crudest iambic mode of Sapphic poetry.⁷¹ Curses often have names, but when they don’t, it is because they are depicted with all their power to render someone nameless. Sappho presents both cases: lamenting a named companion’s departure but also presenting girls with a nameless status, just as they were touching and leaving something, such as a textile or a flower. The ludic is not something that occurs for one person—it takes at least two to play a game— but it takes one, in the ancient mind, to flee forever in marriage or death, and Sappho keeps reminding us of herself and the others who fled.

Hymenaios Hymenaios: The Sounds of Wedding It is often assumed that Hymenaios, the god of wedding and wedding performance, was evoked in ancient weddings, as several passages from classical drama attest. It has been suggested that, as a nuptial divinity, he is not known before Euripides and is therefore likely to be a classical innovation in the divine spectrum—something not uncommon, especially in the second half of the fifth century onwards.⁷² Similarly, the figure of Gamos is not attested before the fourth century.⁷³ Pindar refers to Hymenaios not simply as a ritual cry but possibly as some hymnic performance referring to the homonymous figure (Thren. fr. 128c.7–9), along with other heroes of similar standing, such as Linos and Ialemos; all three are often conflated with ritual cries, and their names are synonymous with certain types of performances, in which these names are loudly performed:⁷⁴ ἁ μὲν ἀχέταν Λίνον αἴλινον ὕμνει, ἁ δ’ Ὑμέναιον, ἐν γάμοισι χροϊζόμενον [Μοῖρα] σύμπρωτον λάβεν, ἐσχάτοις ὕμνοισιν· ἁ δ’ Ἰάλεμον ὠμοβόλῳ νούσῳ {ὅτι} πεδαθέντα σθένος· ⁷¹ See frs. 71, 95. ⁷² Meister 2019: 56. ⁷³ Meister 2019: 56n142. ⁷⁴ For the relation between Hymenaios the god and the ritual cry, see Muth 1954. For cases of homonymy between the name of deities and types of performance or song, see Rutherford 2001: 12–13.

   

103

. . . the one sang the ailinos hymn for the clear-sounding Linos; another sang of Hymenaios; him the Fate got at his wedding, just there at the very first touch, with the last hymns; another sang of Ialemos, whose might was fettered by a flesh-rending disease. (Pindar, Thren. fr. 128c.6–10)

All three figures have stories that involve untimely death. Linos has separate traditions that are possibly conflated. Moreover, stories for other heroes, such as the Egyptian Maneros, are transferred into this one—one referring to an adult hero and the other to a baby hero, both of whom died prematurely.⁷⁵ The song, a stylized grape-harvesting song, subtly evokes the figure. The mere reference to a name can bring well-registered narratives about this figure, as the song activates a nexus of stories behind the abbreviated song reference. In this way, it functions like a historiola, namely an abbreviated mythic narrative, which remains a testament to a complex and rich oral tradition. As with Linos and Ialemos, Hymenaios was both a personal name and a type of song and ritual cry. As such, the emphatic sounding of the name Hymenaios as a proper name and a type of performance simultaneously presents a historiola. Historiolas operate as mnemonic techniques, and as such they are captured in other poetic genres (as in epic or lyric) and can constitute a powerful fragmented or refracted narrative. It is no wonder that historiolas are at the heart of magical or other ritual practices that are believed to empower the participants through the amplification effect, as one name stands for a much bigger and richer tradition of stories, songs, and rituals.⁷⁶ That there was a hymenaios song labeled as such is something we know from various sources. Already from archaic Greek, in Sappho frs. 111 and 44, when a wedding procession is described, we see scenes of people singing the hymenaios, which refers to a specific song in a nuptial context. The invocation “Hymen, O Hymenaios” comes to us more explicitly in song in the adaptation of wedding songs on stage, both tragic and comic. Cassandra invokes Hymenaios in a twisted wedding song in Euripides’s Trojan Women. The end of Aristophanes’s Peace also brings the same invocation and a remnant of what would have been part of a wedding performance. The tragic reference in Euripides presents a solo performance coming from the actor playing the doomed heroine. Conversely, the comic reference in Aristophanes ends Trygaeus’s quest for peace on a happy note with a collective song and dance.

⁷⁵ See Karanika 2014: 127–32. On Linos and sources on the hero and song, see also Alexiou 2002: 57–8, who discusses the lament song tradition possibly reflected in Sappho 140b. See also Pache 2004: 68–70. For earlier considerations see Farnell 1921: 27–30. ⁷⁶ For a fuller analysis of historiola in magic and ritual at large, see Frankfurter 1995. For its application in the oral tradition and the work song tradition, in particular, see Karanika 2014: 201–3.

104

, ,    

What in one case is a solo appropriation of hymenaios, in the other it presents a collective performance. That it was a popular genre is beyond any doubt. This distinctive use in different genres hinges on how it is performed: as a solo or by a choir—the first twisted, the second bright and merry. Cassandra sings her own “chorusless” hymenaios, as Naomi Weiss puts it, instead of a lament, the expected genre. Euripides presents a vibrant lyrical song that is an odd but compelling twist on a genre.⁷⁷ Let us see Cassandra’s hymenaios in Euripides: ἄνεχε, πάρεχε, φῶς φέρε· σέβω φλέγω— ἰδοὺ ἰδού— λαμπάσι τόδ’ ἱερόν. ὦ Ὑμέναι’ ἄναξ· μακάριος ὁ γαμέτας, μακαρία δ’ ἐγὼ βασιλικοῖς λέκτροις κατ’ Ἄργος ἁ γαμουμένα. Ὑμὴν ὦ Ὑμέναι’ ἄναξ. ἐπεὶ σύ, μᾶτερ, †ἐπὶ δάκρυσι καὶ† γόοισι τὸν θανόντα πατέρα πατρίδα τε φίλαν καταστένουσ’ ἔχεις, ἐγὼ δ’ ἐπὶ γάμοις ἐμοῖς ἀναφλέγω πυρὸς φῶς ἐς αὐγάν, ἐς αἴγλαν, διδοῦσ’, ὦ Ὑμέναιε, σοί, διδοῦσ’, ὦ Ἑκάτα, φάος παρθένων ἐπὶ λέκτροις ἇι νόμος ἔχει. πάλλε πόδ’ αἰθέριον, ἄναγε χορόν— εὐὰν εὐοῖ— ὡς ἐπὶ πατρὸς ἐμοῦ μακαριωτάταις τύχαις. ὁ χορὸς ὅσιος. ἄγε σὺ Φοῖβέ νιν· κατὰ σὸν ἐν δάφναις ἀνάκτορον θυηπολῶ. Ὑμὴν ὦ Ὑμέναι’ Ὑμήν. χόρευε, μᾶτερ, χόρευμ’ ἄναγε, πόδα σὸν ἕλισσε τᾶιδ’ ἐκεῖσε μετ’ ἐμέθεν ποδῶν φέρουσα φιλτάταν βάσιν.

⁷⁷ See Weiss 2018: 113. On the Euripidean engagement with traditional material as a way to engage the audience while pushing it to new directions, see Weiss 2018. It needs to be noted further that the meter of the hymenaios is a combination of dochmiac and iambic. Another example of a wedding song fused with lamentation is Evadne’s monody in Euripides’s Suppliant Women, in which Evadne, following her husband’s death, recalls the splendor of her wedding to Capaneus before committing suicide, as she proclaims she “will go to the bridal chamber of Persephone.” Eur. Supp. 1022, cf. 1006–8, 1029–30, see McClure 2017b: 163.

   

105

βόασον ὑμέναιον ὢ μακαρίαις ἀοιδαῖς ἰαχαῖς τε νύμφαν. Lift it, bring it, light it! I revere, I light (see, see) with torch fire this holy place. Lord Hymenaios! Blessed is the bridegroom, blessed too am I, married to a king’s bed in Argos! Hymen, O Hymenaios, Hymen! For you, mother, in tears and laments keep grieving my dead father and our dear homeland, but I am at my wedding, lighting the torch, giving it for gleam and light to you, O Hymenaios, and to you, Hecate, for a virgin’s wedding as is the custom. Lift and shake your foot, strike up the dance (Euhan! Euhoi!) just as in my father’s happiest days! The dance is holy! You Phoebus lead it! For I serve in your temple crowned with laurels. Hymen, O Hymenaios, Hymen. Dance, mother, dance! Lead the dance and turn your foot in this way and join my feet in this dear movement. Sing loudly the wedding song, songs and shouts of blessings to the bride! (Eur. Tr. 308–37)

In this ode, we see an inverted makarismos (311–12, 327) addressed to the groom and the bride by the “bride” Cassandra, again showing a generic twist.⁷⁸ One cannot utter a makarismos about oneself but only for others. By usurping a wellknown performance, Cassandra positions herself as a tragic figure in an ode that places importance on the act of performance, the music, and dance as she invokes Hymenaios. The double invocation, one to Hymenaios and the other to Hecate (322–3), marks Hymenaios as a divine figure of similar standing to Hecate for the lives of young women. The second strophe of her song puts all the focus on the dance. She evokes the singing cry and then calls her mother to dance in what may have been a formulaic expression, “χόρευε, μάτερ, χόρευε” (dance, mother, dance, 332). Cassandra tells her mother what to do and how to position her feet and body before calling other women to participate. Cassandra, a forced quasi-bride, mocks the wedding song tradition by performing a frenzied dance as she becomes a different type of spectacle-bride—not being led through the procession but leading herself as she prophesizes how she will take revenge through this wedding for what is happening to her and her people. There can be little doubt that the ingredients of this choral ode are indeed parts of the wedding song tradition, only reshuffled in a different context and presented as an ecstatic Bacchic performance. After the makarismos and invocation of Hymenaios, the second half of Cassandra’s hymenaios uses multiple imperatives toward her mother. Even after Hecuba has expressed her plea to stop, she continues with those imperatives. Cassandra’s imperatives are relentless, one for every line (353–7). She asks her mother to crown her, rejoice, and escort her on her way. The imperative is a ⁷⁸ For the makarismos and its manipulation in tragedy, see Halleran 1991: 114, who cites various instances of a manipulated makarismos, and the thorough treatment in Swift 2006. As Swift 2006: 246 remarks: “The fact that these conventions were well enough known to be parodied so many centuries later suggests that they formed a deep-rooted and long-lasting part of the traditional wedding song.”

106

, ,    

performative element from speech act theory that draws attention to the action that happens as it is uttered. When it is clustered to this extent, it becomes emblematic of the performer’s attempt to control an uncontrollable situation. Yet from the perspective of the wedding song tradition, she delineates wedding performance and ritual in a manner that brings the tragic element to the front. Cassandra is not unlike other young brides who are led toward a forced wedding, and by making a plea to the person who gave birth to her, she emphasizes even more the trauma inherent in weddings. When asking her mother to enact all the ritual elements, she presents herself as an initiator of a ritual that cannot and will not happen. It is not a wedding but a funeral that will follow. Unlike funerals, though, where the bride is lamented by her mother, here we have the inverse pattern: the bridal figure jumps into her distorted wedding ritual, which is no other but her own impending death. Cognizant of that, Cassandra is a tragic figure who invokes visions of light as she is about to embark on her journey to darkness. Mother and daughter once again become a tragic couple as Hecuba asks the chorus to exchange her wedding songs with their tears.⁷⁹ But for a historiola as an abbreviated narrative lurking in the hymenaios performance, which allows for such generic twists as in Euripides’s Trojan Women, we need to consider the hero Hymenaios, the figure associated with the song and performance at weddings. Some sources refer to Hymenaios as the son of Apollo and one of the Muses (Schol. Pind. Pyth. 4.313) or the son of Magnes and the Muse Clio (Schol. Hes. Op. ap. 1; Suda s.v. Θάμυρις). Later Roman sources make him the son of Dionysus (Sen. Med. 110), whereas some earlier Roman sources present accounts that seem conflated with stories about Dionysus. In one version, Hymenaios travels to Eleusis with other girls who were taken by pirates. His beauty made him look like one of the girls. He fought and defeated the pirates; he then ended up falling in love and marrying one of the girls (Serv. Schol. Aen. 4.99). Narratives that bring pirates into a divine or semi-divine frame also recall Dionysus, who was well known from early Greek accounts to be present in stories as a defeater of pirates. Other accounts associate Hymenaios with Dionysus and weddings, but also dying prematurely (Serv. Schol. Aen. 4.127, quoting Cornelius Balbus). This association with Dionysus makes the tragic usage and manipulation more consonant with the tragic poems. From this perspective, Hymenaios alludes to figures like Linos, Lityerses, and Ialemos, who have conflated origins. Linos is also associated with Apollo, and they are all projected into types of musical performances in certain contexts. While the Apollo connection accounts for the ⁷⁹ The chorus recount Helen’s journey. Cassandra’s twisting of wedding songs has its counterpart when the chorus reflect in their song the wedding song that the Trojans sang for Helen, songs that were doomed to be twisted (701–11), a hymenaios turned into lamentation. For a careful analysis of the complexity in the voices and songs alluded to, see Nooter 2017: 144–73. Wedding songs, lamentation, but also flashbacks from the past and projections in the future through the play’s prophetic voices, are intricately interwoven.

   

107

musical element, the mythology is cryptic. The pirate story seems a late addition, whereas Hymenaios’s gender fluidity is congruent with stories about similar figures, including Linos. This projection of an elusive figure to the sound of ritual cries and wedding songs shows elements of conflation as well as innovation, while locking Hymenaios into a nuptial context. But it is the elusive element that gives Hymenaios a fluidity not only of gender but also of genre between romance and mourning—and a reduction and fixation as a type of ritual cry and song. The emphasis is on the repeated and collective utterance of the names “Hymen, Hymenaios,” evoking the hero Hymenaios in tragedy. The one-word ritual cry facilitates an easily recognizable context of performance while creating an outlet for expression through the very naming. Beyond the historiola, such ritual cries serve another role, releasing intense emotion and even trauma. As such, the alliteration, repetition, the very performance of uttering the name Hymenaios captures not only abbreviated narratives about the figure but, even more, becomes a way to capture intense, not always defined emotions. The crying out for Hymenaios becomes the type of invocation that blends the address to the hero Hymenaios and the hymn. The name doubles for the rather cryptic figure and the ubiquitous genre of performance in his honor. This operates in the same way one addresses Hypnos, the personification of sleep, in lullabies, in well-registered utterances such as the Modern Greek “Sleep, come and get it [the child]” (“Ύπνε μου, πάρε μου το”). Hymenaios needs to be understood as emerging from a context like a lullaby rather than a cultic setting. It underscores the situation at hand, namely the wedding in which the wedding “divinity/hero” is invoked just as the charming slumber is invoked for a child by its mother. Unlike a lullaby, though, this is supposed to be a vibrant song with a refrain that was easily recognizable to ancient audiences. This makes it a marked speech act like the “Happy Birthday” song today for birthday contexts. In perhaps the earliest reference to the hymenaios song, in Iliad 18.493, in Hephaestus’s depiction of a wedding on the shield of Achilles, we have the reference that the song “arose” (“πολύς δ᾽ὑμέναιος ὀρώρει”). The use of this verb with the added epithet polus suggests that this is the type of song that is known to many, and that the performance had many participants. One can imagine a situation in which people would sing the song and it would “arise”—in sound, volume, and numbers of people singing it. It is worth considering how the performance of wedding songs was perceived from the early archaic texts to later literary sources. In Homer the song “arises,” and Sappho also gives a clear indication of the type of loud performance that possibly focused more on sound and its effect rather than the words themselves. In Sappho 44.31–3 we have a reference to the older women’s performance described with the verb ἐλέλυσδον, whereas the men’s performance is considered as an ἰαχή (γύναικες δ’ ἐλέλυσδο⸥ν ὄσαι προγενέστερα[ι/⸤πάντες δ’ ἄνδρες ἐπ⸥ήρατον ἴαχον

108

, ,    

ὄρθιον/⸤Πάον’ ὀνκαλέοντες⸥ ἐκάβολον εὐλύραν). Euripides also refers to hymenaios as ἰαχή (Eur. IA 1035–8), a shout performed with the accompaniment of musical instruments. All this shows the resounding aspect of a loud collective performance that people were expected to participate in. In fact, loud performances of this sort were not unlike a more military or panegyric type of performance that brings elements of valiance and victory. If that was part of the procession, then a wedding has more in common with a city uniting for war—both of which have connotations of fighting and an emphasis on sounds. In a performance like ululation, it is the production of sound itself rather than the melody, song, or lyrics that matters the most. When literary genres entextualize actual performative genres, they place them as part of larger narratives. In the case of lullabies, when they are embedded or presented as literary imitation, they become, as Pache has persuasively argued, “danger markers.”⁸⁰ Similarly, the reference to Hymenaios, especially in tragedy, is also a danger marker. When Cassandra sings the hymenaios song and evokes the god of marriage when we do not have a proper marriage, she knows too well the irony that is projected through this, but also in her way she marks the danger that she is destined not to escape. The evocation to hymenaioi as wedding songs in the plural suggests a set of different songs to be performed collectively. Collectivity refers to both the sets of songs and the performers. Clear references to a controlled sense of modesty for the bride accompany those hymenaioi, which seem to have a completely different function of a genre exerting social control over the group of young women perceived as performers. In an Aeschylean fragment from the tragedy Semele or Hydrophoroi, we again have a choral reference to the beautifully sung hymenaioi: νύμφαι ναμερτεῖς, κ⸤υδραὶ θεα⸥ί, αἷσιν ἀγείρ⸤ω Ἰ̣ ν̣άχου Ἀρ̣ γείου ποταμοῦ παισὶν βιοδώροι⸤ς, αἵ τε π̣ αρίστανται πᾶσιν βροτέοισιν̣ ἐπ’ ἔργ̣ [οις, εἰ[λ̣ απίναις θαλίαις] τ̣ ε̣ κα̣ ὶ̣ εὐμόλποις ὑμ[εναίοις, καὶ τ[ελέουσι κόρας ν]εολέκτρους ἀρτιγάμ̣ [ους τε, λευκο.[⏑ – ⏔ – ⏔ –]μ̣ μασιν ε[ὔ]φρονες [–  φῶς δεκ̣ [⏑ – ⏔ – ⏔ – ⏑]περ ὄμματός ἐστ̣ [ιν· αἰδὼς γὰρ καθαρὰ καὶ ν[υ]μφο̣κ̣ όμ̣ ος μέ[γ’] ἀρ̣ ί̣ [στα, παίδων δ’ εὔκαρπον τε[λ]έ̣ θει γένος, οἷσ̣ [ιν ἐκεῖναι ἵλαοι ἀντιάσουσι μελίφ[ρονα] θ̣ υ̣ μ̣ ὸ̣ ν [ἔ̣ χουσαι, ἀμφότεραι, σύμεναι μ[ὲν ἀρήγειν, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε τ̣ ραχεῖαι στυγεραί τε καὶ̣ [ἀμφ’ ὠδῖσι βαρεῖαι ἀ]γ̣ χίμολοι· πολλὰς μὲν [ [ ]γον εὐναίου φωτὸ̣ [ς ξὺν σ]έ̣ λ̣ α̣ σίν τε μίτραις [τε ⁸⁰ Pache 2004: 110.

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HERA Infallible nymphs, glorious goddesses, for whom I collect alms, life-giving daughters of the Argive river Inachus, who attend upon all mortal act[ivities,] feasts and weddings with their beautiful music, and they bring maidens new to the bed of marriage, white [ . . . e]yes (?) [they are (?)] kindly, light . . . [ . . . ] . . . of the eye . . . [ . . . ] For modesty is pure and is by f [ar] the best adorner of a bride, and a rich crop of children are born to those whom [they] come to meet in propitious mood, with a honey-sweet spirit, goddesses who come in two ways, sometimes to assist, and other times, harsh, hateful, and heavy with toils as they approach; many women . . . [ . . . ] [ . . . ] . . . of a wedded husba[nd . . . ] [ . . . ] and with . . . headbands [ . . . ] (Aesch. fr. 355.16–30, Mette)

Similarly in a Euripidean fragment, a collective reference to the hymenaioi is marked as “solemn” (semnoisi, Eur. fr. 781.35, from Euripides’ Phaethon).⁸¹ As Weiss argues, Euripides is hyper-mimetic and engages with choral tradition, but he also refashions it. He thus presents new musical trends that both embed and change traditional choral sounds, taming them for a new musical and poetic taste. Pindar also uses the reference to Hymenaios to portray extreme danger in Pythian 3, in which the account of Coronis’s adultery against Apollo and consequent death begins with the observation that she waited neither for the marriage feast nor for the hymenaioi:⁸² οὐκ ἔμειν’ ἐλθεῖν τράπεζαν νυμφίαν, οὐδὲ παμφώνων ἰαχὰν ὑμεναίων, ἅλικες οἷα παρθένοι φιλέοισιν ἑταῖραι ἑσπερίαις ὑποκουρίζεσθ’ ἀοιδαῖς· She did not wait for the marriage feast to come, nor for the cry of full-voiced hymenaioi, such things with which maiden companions of the same age love to murmur in evening songs. (Pind. Pyth. 3.16–19)

⁸¹ See Naomi Weiss 2018: 235, who suggests that “The musical innovation of Euripides’ late work partly lies, then, in its traditionalism. We are still left, however, with the question of why he incorporates these traditional elements of choreia so extensively, and what his use of them may suggest about his involvement with the new musical trends of his day. In this concluding discussion, I propose that Euripides is pushing the dramatic possibilities of mousikē to their full extent to develop a new form of engagement with his audience and that this is closely tied to the New Music more broadly.” ⁸² Weiss 2018: 114.

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, ,    

Let us pay attention to the voicing echoed in these lines. Pindar emphasizes both the collectivity (παμφώνων) and the kind of cry (ἰαχὰν) as the wedding sounds par excellence. The choice of words reinforces the connections with battle cries and the concept of civic unity. Collectivity, the notion of companionship, and people coming together as one are integral parts of the gendered performance alluded to here.

Depicting Hymenaios Weddings are events for the public, often presented with a generosity deemed to benefit the entire city.⁸³ In a passage from Aristotle, a wedding is explicitly marked as an event for the entire city, sponsored by a man of magnificence, whose gifts are likened to votive offerings (EN 1122b35–1123a5). Like funerary iconography, which often presents processions of people, chariots, and gifts, wedding iconography, as Meister puts it, elevates those to the sphere of heroic and divine representation with certain underlying ideologies, as I discuss further.⁸⁴ The allusion to sound performances does the same in an oral context. Whether sounds and cries or songs, oral performance frames the occasion differently and contributes to the heroization of its key figures. In classical times, there is a wealth of information about the wedding ritual, primarily as it is depicted in vase iconography. This explains, to an extent, why the ritual part has been explored mostly through the rich archaeological record, even if the surviving record is still a mere fraction of the production that undoubtedly presented wedding scenes.⁸⁵ All stages of what would typically be a three-day event were depicted in different scenes, often with an attempt to uncover the mystery of the women’s chambers and what went on in there. The figure of the bride is central in many of these scenes, which often show different aspects of preparation and, thus, temporal tableaux that follow one after the other, with the figure of the bride possibly repeating itself. Many of these vases were part of the ritual in different ways: some were vessels used in the bridal bath. Other ornamented ceramic objects include jewelry boxes. In those wedding scenes, vases are often depicted as a token of transaction or objects of ritual. It is not atypical to find vases depicted on vases in different types of scenes, so the meta-level of ancient vases’ function is underscored. In the wedding scenes, they are emphatically present. We see objects interacting with human figures in complex ways. They seem beyond simple containers—rather a steering part of the ritual and a locus for the viewer’s attention. Ancient literature uses the wedding song tradition in a strikingly similar manner. Wedding performances are subtly echoed or inserted into both the big ⁸³ For events as public and social events, see Lyghounis 1991: 163–4 and 172. ⁸⁴ Meister 2019: 67. ⁸⁵ See Oakley and Sinos 1993; Redfield 1982.

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epic themes, like the famous contest story at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and in epic diction, especially the use of praise and conferring of blessings. In Figure 2.4, the names of the participants are inscribed. The image refers to Nereus’s daughters. Glauce is helping Thaleia, the bride, in a classical adornment

Figure 2.4 Attic red-figured pyxis decorated with marriage preparations. The seated bridal figure outstretches her right hand to accept a box from the woman standing before her. A woman with a beaded necklace stands behind the bride. Attributed to the Eretria Painter, c.440–415 . © The Trustees of the British Museum, https://www. britishmuseum.org/collection/image/284209001.

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, ,    

scene where another woman offers a jewelry box. The bride plays with what looks like a ball, and a mirror above her highlights further the adornment element in bridal scenes. The emphasis on these objects can be read as a parallel to what happens in poetry. Genres of different songs—like the hymenaios—make up the fabric of epic or tragedy. Just as the vases depicted on other vases, this showcasing of a song guides audiences, viewers, and readers in subtle ways. As Melissa Mueller puts it, “art always makes itself out of other works of art . . . yet some artists make a point of more consciously flagging their restructuring, recycling, and repurposing of components familiar from elsewhere.”⁸⁶ This is exactly what happens in both art and poetry. Different types of vases were considered more “feminine” vessels, such as the loutrophoroi-hydriai, whereas others were more “masculine,” such as the loutrophoroi-amphorai.⁸⁷ Those loutrophoroi often depict processions, especially with women carrying gifts or offering a wreath, accompanied by a chariot. In one scene, we have a nuptial chariot procession with a siren on each side of the vessel, which underscores even further this close relation between iconography and poetics that needs to be investigated further.⁸⁸ Just like the loutrophoros, a type of vase used in funerary and wedding contexts, the song and invocation to Hymenaios lend themselves to shifting contexts in different genres, in ways that ancient poets knew too well how to play with. Poetic genres had their own hidden rules. The archaeological evidence documented well in the greater Athens area from the archaic times provides significant clues about the symbolic function of objects that were important actors, if not agents, of wedding rituals and their performative roles. Many of these vases would remain as part of the bridal “trousseau.”⁸⁹ In an important loutrophoros-hydria, a black-figured vase from the sixth century, which depicts a loutrophoria procession at its body, we have the word ΥΜΕΝΑΙΟΣ inscribed as a testament that this is a vase found in the sanctuary of the Nymphe, the protectress of marriage and wedding ceremonies. This was a small open-air wedding sanctuary in Athens, close to the sanctuary of Asclepios from the seventh century onward, where many prenuptial rites were performed, as also indicated by the imagery of its vases.⁹⁰ The Athenians dedicated different types of vessels, especially loutrophoroi and perfume bottles, as votive offerings, and other objects like spindle whorls, figurines, and painted plaques. This vase by the Lydos Painter, currently at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, presents the Judgement of Paris scene on its body, and on the neck is a procession of women and youths playing pipes, with a frieze below featuring animals and

⁸⁶ Mueller 2016: 3. ⁸⁷ Sabetai 2014: 57; Moesch 1988. ⁸⁸ Papadopoulou-Kanellopoulou 1997, plates 85–102 for wedding loutrophoroi coming from the nymph sanctuary. ⁸⁹ Sabetai 2014: 53. ⁹⁰ Sabetai 2014: 56–7.

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floral motifs between sphinxes. The inscription on the vase’s neck is revealing. It reads “[Υ]MENΥMENAIEΥΥMEAIE” in complete letters.⁹¹ If this is a vocative with extended vowels, trying to imitate the way the song was performed, then it becomes one of the most intriguing pieces of material evidence for the ancient wedding song tradition. The sounding itself is of interest here; the way the inscription reads implies a vocality and a possible collectivity in sounding out the word. This could be an attempt to represent visually well-known vocal elements. Could one say this is a more primordial sense of musicality? Or a sense of sounding that, through collective performance (as in a paean), has a shamanic effect on a community? The binding of many people’s voices within a certain group creates a network of people and their voices, which is meant to unite and overcome the world around them with their sound. This sound effect, in other words, becomes a focal point of a ritual. Just the sheer exertion of muscular power that can be manifested in voicing is a feat—one meant to charm or mesmerize the listeners. It combines a sense of joy, victory, and terror simultaneously. One can scream out of joy but also out of terror. Such vocality captures the ambivalence in emotion and can be the outlet for antithetical, if not complementary, responses to the event. In the loutrophoros described above, the inscription refers to the context of the scene and not a specific figure like Eros, as happens in later classical times, or a personification of the concept of hymenaios, or other concepts associated with a wedding (such as Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, who follows the bride). Could we juxtapose other names invoked in iconography? Think of the Euphronios krater depicting the death of Sarpedon, where Hypnos and Thanatos are well marked, both winged figures not unlike Eros or Hymenaios; the latter, however, are typically depicted as younger figures.⁹² Both Hypnos and Thanatos are presented in a context of death, a definitive element, when the body of Sarpedon lies beneath them. The visual representations frame them as personified deities. But the Hymenaios reference seems to be doing something more: it highlights vocal performance visually. It becomes the script of sounding and extends the image into acoustics, creating a multi-sensory experience when viewing this vase. Image, sound, viewing, singing, speaking, and listening are craftily intertwined.

⁹¹ For this vase of c.540  in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, see Beazley 1971: 45 and Pandermalis, Eleftheratou, and Vlassopoulou 2014: 51 plate 42. The vase presents a mock inscription (transcribed as: “[υ]μενυμεναιευυμεαιε”) which plays with the invocation YMENAIE). The fourth and fifth of the preserved letters are upside down, and so is the fifth letter from the end. See Beazley 1971: 67, who gives the seventh letter from the end as lambda. For the image, see the Acropolis Museum website, https://theacropolismuseum.gr/en/loutrophoros-11 (accessed May 22, 2024). ⁹² Still the Euphronios krater is an early vase, so as one expects with many of the gods depicted in late archaic or early classical times, they are bearded, thus older-looking figures.

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, ,    

Rustic Poetics Aristophanes is well known for blending different musical genres in his comedies. Partheneia and dithyrambs are no strangers to Aristophanic verses. In his Birds, he presents Cinesias, a dithyramb poet, who uses the aviary metaphor when expressing his wish to become a nightingale. This wish refers to the sweetness of the nightingales’ singing, legendary in the Greek literary representation. Metaphors that connect bird singing with human singing are quite common. In the final scene of the Birds, the play’s protagonist Peisetairos is led with his bride, Basileia, on stage while the chorus sings a hymenaios, a wedding song. This song brings together all the necessary ingredients expected of a traditional wedding song: the address to Hymenaios, the makarismos to the groom, and the reference to Eros, who is presented as an officiant at the wedding of Zeus and Hera, which is the mythological exemplum used. This wedding song becomes the exodos, the choral song that leads the actors and chorus offstage, in this case strongly resembling a wedding procession that leads the married couple to their home in the presence of their community. The song seems dignified, although the caricature comes from the groom and bride, who have settled in the weird fantasy world of birds and bird-like humans. If we have a lament twist and a marker of danger in tragedy, then comedy creates a twist for burlesque with further ramifications. The reference is again in the plural, hymenaioi. Let us see how these hymenaioi and then hymenaios (in the singular) are evoked: . . . ἀλλ᾿ ὑμεναίοις καὶ νυμφιδίοισι δέχεσθ᾿ ᾠδαῖς αὐτὸν καὶ τὴν Βασίλειαν. ΧΟΡΟΣ (στρ)Ἥρᾳ ποτ᾿ Ὀλυμπίᾳ τὸν ἠλιβάτων θρόνων ἄρχοντα θεοῖς μέγαν Μοῖραι ξυνεκομισαν ἐν τοιῷδ᾿ ὑμεναίῳ. Ὑμὴν ὤ, Ὑμέναι᾿ ὤ. (ἀντ) ὁ δ᾿ ἀμφιθαλὴς Ἔρως χρυσόπτερος ἡνίας ηὔθυνε παλιντόνους, Ζηνὸς πάροχος γάμων Ὑμὴν ὤ, Ὑμέναι᾿ ὤ. Ὑμὴν ὤ, Ὑμέναι᾿ ὤ. With wedding and bridal songs, please welcome him and his queen! CHORUS

   

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Once, the Fates blessed the union of the mighty lord of the lofty throne of the gods with Olympian Hera with such a wedding song. Hymen! Hymenaios! Hymen! Hymenaios! And blooming Eros, with his golden wings, guided straight the reins as the officiant at the wedding of Zeus and blessed Hera. Hymen! Hymenaios! Hymen! Hymenaios! (Ar. Av. 1729–43)

References in the singular or plural create a spectacle of words and sounds. The reference to Eros as chrysopteros is indeed fitting as he, too, is a figure with wings— and certainly imagined as such in art. There is one detail here, though, that needs more attention: Eros is not only winged but also described as someone who is amphithalēs. Commentators have noted that this is not a coincidence but rather an allusion to wedding rituals. Ritual informs wedding poetics, so even brief references like this further underscore ideologies in the background. The word amphithalēs refers to the ritual that demands a young boy, whose parents are both alive, to be an active participant. According to one lexicographic source, the ritual in Athens was to have a boy go around with a crown made of spine (akanthas) and oak, carrying bread and uttering the proverbial phrase “I fled evil, I found something better.” Ancient commentators relate that to the adoption of a different type of food as opposed to a rustic, raw “paleo diet.” Such rituals, though, can shed light on the words and the ideologies behind them. Ἔφυγον κακὸν, εὗρον ἄμεινον: ἐπὶ τῶν μεταβολὴν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς κρείττονα οἰωνιζομένων. Ἀθήνησι γὰρ ἐν τοῖς γάμοις ἔθος ἦν ἀμφιθαλῆ παῖδα ἀκάνθας μετὰ δρυΐνων καρπῶν στέφεσθαι, καὶ λίκνον ἄρτων πλήρη περιφέροντα λέγειν, Ἔφυγον κακὸν, εὗρον ἄμεινον. Ἐσήμαινον δὲ ὡς ἀπεώσαντο μὲν τὴν ἀγρίαν καὶ παλαιὰν δίαιταν, εὑρήκασι δὲ τὴν ἥμερον τροφήν. I fled evil, I found something better. This is used for those that project for themselves as an omen a change to the better. For among the Athenians, there was the custom to have a child whose parents are alive go around wearing a crown of spine and holding the fruit of oak and a full basket of bread saying: “I fled evil, I found something better.” They meant that they pushed away the wild and old diet, but they have found civilized food. (Plutarch, Paroem. 16)⁹³

Pollux relates this to a different custom that also presents a young boy and girl in what appears to be a playful ritual that was supposed to take place during the epaulia, the third day of the wedding, when gifts were given to the bride. A young girl lies with the groom, and a boy lies with the bride at the father-in-law’s house.

⁹³ This is from Proverbia Alexandrina (Alexandrian Proverbs) attributed to Plutarch.

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, ,    

Although it certainly seems odd, this is another fertility ritual—which does not have to be read from a sexual perspective—that rather attests to the involvement of children in wedding rituals. . . . οἱ δὲ καὶ τὰ διδόμενα δῶρα τῇ νύμφῃ καλοῦσιν ἐπαύλια. ἡ δ’ ἀπαυλιστηρία χλανὶς ἀπὸ τῆς νύμφης ἐν τοῖς ἀπαυλίοις τῷ νυμφίῳ πέμπεται. καὶ τῷ μὲν νυμφίῳ τότε ἐν τοῦ πενθεροῦ παιδίον ἀμφιθαλὲς θῆλυ συγκατακλίνεται, τῇ δὲ νύμφῃ ἐν τοῦ γαμβροῦ ἄρρεν. ὁ δὲ καλούμενος παράνυμφος νυμφευτὴς ὀνομάζεται καὶ πάροχος· . . . And they call the gifts that were given to the bride the post-wedding presents. And the garment as the bride leaves the premises of her house and is being sent to the groom’s place is called the pre-wedding garment. And then at the father-inlaw’s house a girl both of whose parents are alive lies with the groom, and a boy with the bride in the house of the groom. And the so-called best man is named a groomsman and an officiant of the wedding. (Pollux, Onomasticon 3.40)

In both cases above, we have the active participation of children in ways that are perpetuated in contemporary times: the presence of flower girls or boys or ring boys, or bridesmaids—typically little girls, in some cultures. Why are children so central to the ritual performance of a wedding to the extent that in some cases they were even required to utter certain words? These words were the performative validation of what seems like an incantation ritual, with the memory of rustic aspects accentuated by the child’s crown. Bringing children into wedding rituals can be given multiple meanings and is in line with other rituals as well as with divinatory practices. As Johnston has persuasively argued, children have been seen as purer, more straightforward, and exact practitioners of divinatory practices. They are more likely to do as they are told, but they are also perceived by outsiders as more trustworthy.⁹⁴ This combination of external trustworthiness and reliability regarding how a ritual is expected to be conducted is an asset that promotes children’s participation. The wedding ritual plays with a notion of “innocence” a child carries, but it also introduces an element of sympathetic magic, if we focus more on the rustic aspect of our first source. Children are meant to evolve and grow physically and emotionally, just as culture evolves from nature into a more sophisticated culture (which, of course, a lexicographic source is more likely to emphasize). It would be a cliché to think also of rites of passage and the importance of having agents of fertility, such as children, branches, and fruits. The symbolic element is vast and obvious, as children prepare for future roles.

⁹⁴ Johnston 2001.

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Roman wedding rituals, perhaps influenced by Greek rituals, exhibit some of the same features. Varro provides the earliest evidence for how children would be used in wedding rituals: a camillus carried a cumerum, namely a box thought to contain ritual objects in the procession (Varro, Ling. 7.34); boys furthermore would utter obscenities (Varro, Sat. Men. 10, Cèbe); the bridegroom scattered nuts for the children, who gathered them with a lot of noise, so as to bring good luck, according to Catullus (61.128–34), Festus (Paulus-Festus 179.8–9L), and Servius (on Ecl. 8.29).⁹⁵ Again, fruit and nuts, invested with symbolic meaning and presented as good luck bearers, were ubiquitous in ancient weddings, and children were the primary agents that introduced those in the ritual. The role of children in religion and ancient rituals needs to be investigated further. Throughout different mythological wedding narratives, the Greek examples present an attempt or desire to restore life prior to the wedding, as we shall explore more in the next chapter. Indeed, the heroic figures in our epics tend to project a desire to go back in time. Whereas weddings have been thought of as a classic rite of passage, the presence of children is puzzling. It has been read as some form of initiation for the young child, an interpretation that has prevailed consciously or unconsciously in ancient studies. But if we regard many performative genres, like epics, as absorbing deeper ideologies and forces, there is no indication that this is the case. Epic poems, in particular, record emotions, reactions, and mindsets that need to be explored in more detail. In my reading, children need not be regarded as agents of a rite of passage but as a different force: a reminder of what cannot and should not be lost. In other words, they can also subvert what happens by being themselves and becoming a temporal anchor of a specific time—childhood. While the concept of childhood itself is elusive in different cultures, the notion of the miniature man is indicative. Children are consistently portrayed as mini adults in art, from the Bronze Age and the Thera frescoes to classical vase iconography. They look like adults but are distinctly smaller in size. They are invariably present in ritual scenes: figures like the young girl in the Thera fresco alongside another (slightly) older female figure in the crocus gatherers scene in the Thera fresco, or the Corinthian votive tablet from the Pitsa cave. Children are not only present but seem to play a catalytic role.⁹⁶ For a child, the performance of a wedding is like a play. If we trust Pollux’s testimony, a boy and a girl are introduced ritually as miniature players to the world of their future community rituals. However, from their perspective, they are not solemn agents but actors in a play. It is not coincidental that playful versions of adult rituals have been observed from antiquity onwards. If we analyze the semiotics of play and how children are participants while learning ritual language ⁹⁵ Mantle 2002. For the Roman wedding, see Hersch 2010 and Panoussi 2019. ⁹⁶ For the crocus gatherers in Thera, see Vlachopoulos 2008. For the Pitsa votive offering, see Zachos 1985 and Larson 2001: 232–3.

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, ,    

through observation and active participation, their distinct identity as miniature players sets them apart. Nevertheless, distinct as they may be, they are necessary insiders for the rituals. A sense of adherence to ritual purity is important, and those rituals could not be adequately conducted without the presence of children. One could argue that just as the children are supposed to learn from the bride and groom, the bride and groom—especially the bride—are supposed to keep something of the children they still are. The children-ritual-agents are easily thought of as the active learners of what lies ahead. Yet they can participate in this ritual only in this context because they are children. In a way, this status is unique. They are as unique as the bride or the groom, often with one male, or one male and one female child being the “children-agents” of the ritual. One can too easily make assumptions based on our own preconceptions about childhood—children are often thought of as naïve, tender, and developmentally impressable. Nevertheless, as research in different cultures and times has consistently and conspicuously shown, children can often act in ways that are brutal and cruel rather than innocent.⁹⁷ Even tag games and playground activities often result in vilification and rough play. The so-called children’s cruelty in games, storytelling, and children’s lore is an aspect many have studied.⁹⁸ Collectively, children are more likely to engage in what could seem to contemporary aesthetics to be obscene and aggressive behavior, and ritual action can perpetuate that. Children’s songs and games often engage with the most difficult of themes and translate them in ways that hard realities like death, cumbersome labor or ridicule can be conveyed in the game format. It is a combination of learning and desensitization that get activated as part of a greater socialization context in which younger generations adapt to sociocultural expectations and embody behaviors and reactions for the world around them. Children’s repertoires employ this sense of cruelty as extreme rusticity, which earlier scholars would even call primitivism, congruently with folk rustic poetics, as I argue here. The wedding rituals and songs actively participate in this temporal fusion and diffusion. The most accurate presentation of crudeness as part of wedding poetics can be observed in the last part of Aristophanes’s Peace (with repetition of the phrase τρυγήσομεν αυτήν, “we will harvest her,” 1339–40), where hoarseness intertwined with play and rusticity constitute the heart of the comic world. The comedy ends with what seems like a ritual celebration. As Calame has put it, this celebration marks “the return of agricultural plenty and of women’s fertility that ends the play” and takes the form of a wedding song that celebrates the union of the play’s protagonist Trygaios with Opora.⁹⁹ Opora, like Basileia in the Birds, is a largely

⁹⁷ On children, games, and violence (and war) and how games can reproduce violence, see the comments by Dasen 2022: 15–16 with further bibliography. ⁹⁸ Opie and Opie 1960. ⁹⁹ Calame 2019: 123.

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silent abstract figure; they both become part of the wedding procession at the end of these plays. This song is in Aeolian meter and reads like a folk marriage song that invokes the wedding god, Hymenaios. The hymenaios has long been recognized as a melic genre (together with the paean, the dithyramb, and the citharoedic nome, as the name was later coined), which, as with many of the others, Aristophanes repurposed and inserted in his theatrical world. This theatrical world of Aristophanes also highlights what we don’t have from ritual enactments of the hymenaios and wedding song tradition. At the same time, Aristophanes has preserved a good part of what would make these songs easily recognizable to their contemporary audiences. The connection with agricultural fertility and rustic poetics masks what, in ritual performance, is the collective aggression of “harvesting” the bride—also a pun for the name Trygaeus (“harvester,” “winemaker”). While in the play, the embedded violence is mollified, as Opora, a cornucopia figure, is the personification of harvest, Aristophanes still signals that violence is inherent in the song at the end of the play. The metaphor of harvesting is persistent in different cultures for wedding performances, typically applied to the bride. Beyond the harvesting semiotics, the obscenity applies to the metaphor of the fig, a euphemism for genitals, that the song plays with: “his is big and thick, hers is sweet, the fig” (Peace 1351–2). And the refrain steers the dance and feasting-like atmosphere. The performers are all male, whereas the Opora-bride appears as a silent figure; it could well be a theatrical prop brought on stage. After all, the representation of Peace is also a statue. The female presence is diffused in three personified figures, Peace, Cornucopia, and Theoria—the last two being Peace’s attendants—which are essentially props or prop-like presences on stage. It becomes an all-male ritual with repeated cries to Hymenaios that indicate the sustained ancient meter in this type of song. It also implies possible rituals around the groom only, transferred to the final wedding procession that invites everyone to a feast. A chorus of allmale characters and a male protagonist perform the hymenaios, while the bride is the muted recipient of verses. It is striking that no women participate. The wedding song is not an exclusively female genre. The wedding is a ritual instance (one of a few) in which women’s public appearance and utterance is not only acceptable but imperative. The play’s last line is about eating cakes, typical of a wedding feast, as Trygaeus and Opora go off-stage. The notion of plentifulness in food and dance and feasts that follows is quite fitting for a play that has focused on restoring peace and demands a break in war through this wedding scene. Beyond this sense of abundance that the play evokes, the fictional wedding that ends this play has a temporal dimension: it seeks to go back in time and restore the time of peace. While the performance concerns the here and now, Peace belongs to the past and needs to return. From a temporal perspective, the play attempts to reverse time, bringing the notion of a golden age world that needs to return to

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humanity; the wedding of Trygaeus and Opora enables the return to a cherished and missed past. Going fast forward in the chronology of Greek literature and the world of the Greek novel, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, a second-century  novel, focuses on the innocent and even naïve love of two abandoned kids who grow up in a pastoral setting and are eventually initiated into the world of erotic love after a series of adventures. The entire novel is framed as an ekphrasis, namely a description of a work of art that captures the story of Daphnis and Chloe. The novel is long and, from one perspective, follows the pattern we see in comedy, ending with a wedding. Closing with a wedding scene is typical of different literary and visual narratives, especially in genres that bring a fantastic or romantic atmosphere. For the ancient world—and the world of the Greek novel in the Roman period—the wedding as a telos is an expected final scene that establishes the celebratory element for closing scenes and narratives. The difference in Daphnis and Chloe is that it focuses less on the wedding per se and more on the wedding night. The couple is led into their chamber as the other participants play flutes and bear big torches. The narrative resists echoing what would be the appropriate song for the occasion. Instead of an epithalamion, they sing outside the doors, but not a hymenaios. Instead, they sing “as if they were plowing the earth” with a “cruel and rough voicing”: τότε δὲ νυκτὸς γενομένης πάντες αὐτοὺς παρέπεμπον εἰς τὸν θάλαμον, οἱ μὲν συρίττοντες, οἱ δὲ αὐλοῦντες, οἱ δὲ δᾷδας μεγάλας ἀνίσχοντες. Καὶ ἐπεὶ πλησίον ἦσαν τῶν θυρῶν, ᾖδον σκληρᾷ καὶ ἀπηνεῖ τῇ φωνῇ, καθάπερ τριαίναις γῆν ἀναρρηγνύντες, οὐχ ὑμέναιον ᾄδοντες. Δάφνις δὲ καὶ Χλόη γυμνοὶ συγκατακλινέντες περιέβαλλον ἀλλήλους καὶ κατεφίλουν, ἀγρυπνήσαντες τῆς νυκτὸς ὅσον οὐδὲ γλαῦκες: καὶ ἔδρασέ τι Δάφνις ὧν αὐτὸν ἐπαίδευσε Λυκαίνιον, καὶ τότε Χλόη πρῶτον ἔμαθεν ὅτι τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς ὕλης γενόμενα ἦν ποιμένων παίγνια. When the night came, they all sent them into the chamber, some playing the pipe, others playing the flute, and others holding large torches. And when they were near the doors, they sang with rough and harsh voicing, as if plowing the earth with tridents, without chanting the hymenaios. Daphnis and Chloe went to bed naked, embraced and kissed each other, and stayed up all night like owls. And Daphnis did some of the things that Lycainion had taught him; it was only then that Chloe realized that what was happening in the woods was only pastoral play. (Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 4.40)

Erotic tenderness is juxtaposed to the song that is heard outside, typically thought to be the song that masks the bride’s cries and sexual trauma. The novel uses rustic metaphors and the idea of harvesting or plowing, which we find in Aristophanes. This metaphor persists in ancient thought and imagery about the wedding or

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wedding night. The harsh voice is also an indicative echo and captures the expected trauma of the young girl, as we have a transference: the sense of harshness that one may feel is transferred onto the voice that imitates the emotional reaction. This reference to sound further encapsulates the roughening of the sexual act that Chloe is experiencing for the first time, as she realizes that what she had earlier for a long time with Daphnis in the forest was nothing else but “play.” The last word of the novel is plays (παίγνια) and marks the changes she is experiencing in sexuality. This last word also masks the rough transition into the sexual world. The word παίγνιον has a long presence in Greek literature. For the Second Sophistic world, it could be a reference to the plurality of meanings this word could have: it has a rhetorical force, with a sophistic touch, especially in Plato (Plt. 288c) and the fragments of Gorgias (fr. 11.132), as a saying that is meant to play with words, but it could also be a ridicule in Hellenistic poetry. Apollonius Rhodius (fr. 13.1) calls his competitor Callimachus a paignion (“Καλλίμαχος τὸ κάθαρμα, τὸ παίγνιον, ὁ ξύλινος νοῦς”). Callimachus uses the word in a more pastoral setting, where the word is associated with playful acts and a comedic ambiance. A paignion can signify a genre of literature and music often associated with improvisation or less-polished work.¹⁰⁰ As such, the word in the Second Sophistic context of the novel is a charged term that not only refers to improvisation, incomplete acts, and sexuality but also becomes a term that marks incomplete, unpolished, or even unfulfilled activity—something that permeates the notional index of this term throughout. The word paignion points to the past remembered as playful. Erinna refers to playthings in a more female context (fr. 1b.19). We see it as part of the poetics of reminiscence of what the girls used to have in their all-girl environment. With all the different connotations, from rhetorical to literary, it can often refer to playthings and toys, some of which are tangible. The irony here is that the earlier touches, now vanished, in this scene are the abandoned playthings. It can also be read as a subtle reference to the abandonment of toys by young women before their marriage. Play is a thing of the past, and the novel, which is an excursus on the life of the two young children in their plays, is a plaything that is now to be abandoned as they discover new modes of engaging with their senses, exploring their sexuality. Thus, having this word as the last word of the novel is doubly semiotic. The former life and the novel as a work of art, and a work in progress, is now cast as a thing done and past. The rhetoric of temporality is again at work here: the novel reaches its end just as the heroine loses what she now perceives as belonging to her past. That she learns this at the time of her wedding is no coincidence again; just as the wedding marks the end of the novel, a life chapter ¹⁰⁰ In a fourth-century  comic fragment (Ephippus, fr. 7, Kock, titled Empolē), it is used for musical playing joining pipes with the lyre, which when done well produces the maximum pleasure (ἡ ἐν τοῖσιν αὐλοῖς μουσικὴ κἀν τῇ λύρᾳ/ τοῖς ἡμετέροισι παιγνίοις·/ . . . τόθ’ ἡ μεγίστη τέρψις ἐξευρίσκεται).

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, ,    

closes as the protagonists abandon their former life and the novel as a world of play. However, the former life, perceived as paignion or playful as it was, remains idealized, and the past is captured in the novel and painting as the inspiring tableau to withstand time. Once again, the temporal forces look backward.

Paean, Laments, Ululations, and Cries: A View into Sounds In Sappho fr. 44, which is a snapshot of a wedding procession, drawing from Iliadic and pre-Iliadic material presenting the wedding of Hector and Andromache, as it mobilizes all senses, there is one moment that marks the poem’s polyphony: the older women’s ululation and the men’s paeans (l. 31).¹⁰¹ Cries like that seem to have been a regular part of ritual activities, often reflecting a collective cry (although one could not necessarily exclude a solo performance or even an antiphonal performance of a solo accompanied by choral cries). The ululation is a standard feature in different cultures and is seen as a cry of victory, joy, or even the complete antithesis, extreme grief. That this cry, which surpasses the need for linguistic code, is recorded as an older women’s cry is worthy of further attention and anthropological study. As a counterpart, the paean cry, possibly performed by men if we take Sappho’s words at face value, can be another element for a gendered performance of what would be a ritual cry. Ululations are usually discussed only as cries, but there is no evidence that some other narrative cannot be part of them; they can begin, conclude, or simply accompany other performances at specific moments. This section looks at the importance of understanding ululation as a distinct performance. In much of today’s world, ululation could be regarded as a remnant of an old, raw kind of voicing connected with ritual. It can be seen as an exotic item, often as stemming from a pre-literate world, possibly expressing visceral emotion or reaction. It can validate certain types of ritual, performance, or circumstance but also disturb and register as a mass voice interruption, objection, and protest. It is still present in different parts of the world, and there have been studies in its many contexts in different places: Algeria, Indonesia, Marocco, Palestine, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, among others. It has captured cinematographic interest, while it also appears not as a focal point but no less fleetingly as part of a more prominent presence within a ritual or other settings.¹⁰² Often present in victories,

¹⁰¹ Although we don’t know much about this song’s setting or performance style, it is quite possible that it was composed for a wedding (see Stehle 1997: 278–9). As Stehle proposes, when the song refers to the parthenoi’s music, it is entirely possible that they sang it (Stehle 1997: 279). This aligns with the self-referentiality I note for art and poetry. It could also be a “morning song” performed after the wedding night as the couple is greeted again (Stehle 1997: 280). ¹⁰² Ululation is captivating in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). See BurnetteBletch 2019 for a compelling analysis that could be illuminating for ancient materials.

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funerals, and weddings, it can also spark a protest or celebrate a speech. The reason it has received little scholarly attention among anthropologists, let alone classicists and historians, is that it tends (although not exclusively) to be a gendered performance, namely by women, and is therefore seen as a marginalized feature. Another reason is the “ambiguity of its status in music,” as it is somewhere on the border between speech and song, performer and audience, and, I would also add, ritual practitioners and participants.¹⁰³ Some scholars have rightly approached it as a socially “engaged” phenomenon, and therefore it is seen as an audience response, the type of which one can say would be similar to applause, laughter, or booing. But if we see it as an interactive phenomenon, then its codes are more complex. In ululation, the voicing, seemingly of the same style, can acquire different nuances and, when performed collectively, can both channel emotion and also steer reactions in all kinds of situations. When it is performed in a celebratory context at a wedding, which is what interests me in this case, we should see it as an expression of solidarity for the group of its performers (e.g., older women in Sappho fr. 44) but also of some form of approval for the ritual at hand. Sappho’s recording of the women’s ululation seems to fit within a paradigm of celebratory context. But the ululation in anthropological studies, as we have it, can quickly move us to different directions. In all cases, the effort is concerted; it typically comes as a collective voice and can affirm or even undermine the context within which it operates. In Iliad 6, we see ululation as an accompaniment of prayer—and, in that case, a failed prayer, one of the few in the Greek epic tradition that are marked as such. Athena did not listen to the women of Troy, as the text remarks, thus nullifying the dedication of the captive Sidonian women’s peploi, in an extraordinary passage that explores how divine and human perspectives intersect.¹⁰⁴ Oral texts record the presence of ululation in ritual contexts, however ululation, as we see here, can be deeply intertwined with a procession or with offerings of precious objects and ritual dedications. The most crucial detail in Sappho’s presentation of the female wedding ululation is that it is a dynamic voicing that happens while there is a procession, namely while the bride is being led to her new home. If we can read more into this, then the ululation as an extreme voicing can be the channeled and communal projection of emotion for what is happening to the bride as she is being led away from her home. That this must come from older women brings into focus the female emotion. It can be a moment that fuses collective fear and trauma, presenting a ceremonial ritual speech act that operates beyond linguistic codes and grammar. It transcends linguistic barriers, acting as a kind of universal voicing, although the deeper nuances of ululation may remain culturally sensitive. ¹⁰³ See Kuipers 1999: 491 for these categories with further bibliography. ¹⁰⁴ See Karanika 2016.

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, ,    

Cries can be powerful but, just like the gifts that are paraded at weddings or other ritual acts, they can also be ambiguous. It is this ambiguity that makes ululations more intriguing. The same type of cry in different contexts can express joy, grief, victory, or fear; it becomes a voice stamp that, in the context of a wedding, seems to validate ritual activity. That it is specifically older women who ululate at the wedding gives a special gravitas to their performance. It shows ritual authority and marks their group as integral to the event. While we see ululation as a marked act of expressing a collective emotion in a way that is not discernible to all, nothing precludes ululation from being used in a non-ritual way. In contemporary Morocco, in a study of domestic workers, it is noted that in a morning meeting, as household workers arranged the tasks of the day, one young eighteen-year-old started ululating in front of the vast number of laundry items, “lamenting how much laundry she had to do.”¹⁰⁵ As ritual acts can do, this ululation intersects with a material quotidian task: the washing of clothes. This reaction can be read as humorous, releasing tension while expressing hopelessness and a sense of being overwhelmed. As a cry not fit for such a situation, the other women note its distinct mark of the moment, and they explicitly call it out. At the same time, as in ancient literature, clothing and activity around textiles become intertwined with female ululations, revealing a complex emotional world behind such voices. Ululations create networks of people. The purpose of this cry is to reverberate beyond the immediate space or the range within which a voice can be heard. It is often collectively performed, and through the power of many it can reverberate even more and even further. One of the implicit purposes of ululation is to enhance the space in which one’s voice can be heard. In other words, acoustics work in space, and the space can be extended as the voices become louder. Moreover, ululation can create echo when performed in appropriate places. It has the power to energize voicing itself by creating echo or inviting others to follow similarly while also cutting through the limits of space. The result can have a chilling effect on the power of voice and voicing, which is only enhanced when multiplied and performed by more people or when reflected in echo. In the previous chapter, we saw that the wedding of Andromache and Hector, taken out of the well-known temporal fabric of the Iliad and looking back at the wedding moment, shows poetics of compartmentalization.¹⁰⁶ The ululation as part of the Sapphic fragment, with all its ambiguity, can become an out-of-time cosmic utterance that aligns the victorious and the joyous with the darkness of the anarchy of sound, one that does not follow a particular melody or meter. It exceeds linguistic boundaries and is not confined to a specific language or linguistic code to convey meaning. Sharp voicing is also synonymous with ¹⁰⁵ Montgomery 2019: 167. ¹⁰⁶ For what I call poetics of compartmentalization, see Scodel 2019.

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marking danger; however, a wedding ululation reroutes this sharp voicing in what, on the surface, is a joyous context to undermine one-sided views and deepen the semiotics of sound and its contexts.

Wedding Songs and Laments: Not the Right Genre Sappho’s poem juxtaposes the older women’s ululation with the men’s performance of the paean. The paean is a genre that has received significant scholarly attention.¹⁰⁷ A paean song or a paean cry can be a simpler form (from the perspective of narrative, plot, and vocabulary) but could still function in more sophisticated ways as an invocation to the divine that needs to be uttered in a certain way. We do not necessarily understand the full context. Paeans promoted shared values and were often the platform, through song and dance, for ideologies and values to be passed on to the next generation. The performance context is diverse and could be part of a ritual, community event, and even a symposium. The celebratory aspect in paeans is intertwined with apotropaic elements—they are performed to “avert” evils. As Ian Rutherford remarks, “only in the case of the wedding παιάν is there no evidence for anything more elaborate than the παιάνcry, but even in that case the general conceptual similarity between παιάν-cry and παιάν-songs forbids us to rule out the possibility that παιάν-songs might have been performed also.”¹⁰⁸ The possible apotropaic character of a paean seems to match a conceivably similar function of the ululation, to release intense emotion and, in a stylized way, reroute fear. That paeans were present at weddings seems to be the case not only from the early Sappho fr. 44 but also in Aeschylus, when Apollo sings a paean at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. In addition, the end of Aristophanes’s Birds presents us with a paean, interpreted as a wedding song.¹⁰⁹ Moreover, Aristophanes gives us the expression γαμήλιος παιών in his Thesmophoriazusae in this passage, which is a parody of Euripides’s Andromeda.¹¹⁰ ὁρᾷς; οὐ χοροῖσιν οὐδ’ ὑφ’ ἡλίκων νεανίδων κημὸν ἕστηκ’ ἔχουσ’, ἀλλ’ ἐν πυκνοῖς δεσμοῖσιν ἐμπεπλεγμένη κήτει βορὰ Γλαυκέτῃ πρόκειμαι. γαμηλίῳ μὲν οὐ ξὺν παιῶνι, δεσμίῳ δέ,

¹⁰⁷ Note I. Rutherford 2001 and Käppel 1992. For connections between the paean cry with ululations and other types of related cry (e.g., ἀλαλή), see I. Rutherford 2001: 18–23. ¹⁰⁸ I. Rutherford 2001: 8. ¹⁰⁹ In TrGF iii 350; see I. Rutherford 2001: 56n77. ¹¹⁰ This passage is also referred to as one of the fragmenta Euripidea, fr. 122 (Nauck).

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, ,     γοᾶσθέ μ’, ὦ γυναῖκες, ὡς μέλεα μὲν πέπονθα μέλεος, ὦ τάλας ἐγώ, τάλας . . . Do you see? Not in dances nor with girls my own age do I stand with a muzzle; but rather enchained in tight bondage am I set out as food for the beast Glaucetes. Cry for me, women, not with a wedding paean but one of bondage, for wretched things I suffer, I the wretched one, alas, woe is me . . .¹¹¹ (Ar. Thesm. 1030–8)

Although a parody here, the scene selected is that of Andromeda being chained and muzzled (κημὸν ἔχουσ’) as food for the beast (κήτει βορὰ) in wording full of alliteration: Andromeda is presented as not only a sacrificial victim, but a sacrificial meal offered to the named sea monster, Glaucetes, a name that itself alludes to the sea. Andromeda juxtaposes her position to the one expected of a woman her age when there are dances with her peers and a wedding paean. This wedding paean seems to be a well-registered reference to an expected performance, the function of which we can piece together from multiple sources. The clear label makes the case that it was very well known. The maiden as a sacrificial victim is a pattern that is registered throughout the ancient world. Similarly, Euripides creates a stark contrast between what should be performed for a young woman and what is now requested in lieu of the wedding paean. Andromeda asks for a lament as a substitution for her wedding paean. Substituting the wedding song with a lamentation is part of a revealing pattern for this antithesis, used in tragedy and later in epigrams. The intricacies and twists of a mythic plot can be expressed by referring to types of performance, paean, or lamentation. The person in a certain situation or condition likes to reflect on or mention what she should have been doing instead. A projection of what is “normal” or “expected” for girls of her age is a topos that we see here associated with Andromeda and elsewhere with Cassandra, Iphigeneia, Antigone, and other heroines. An important feature of tragic discourse is to echo the appropriate performance from a gender and age perspective as an underscoring of what is unnatural and then tragic. Although this specific excerpt is given to us via Aristophanes in a comic manner, the fact that Aristophanes chose this passage ¹¹¹ Notably the ‘wretched” (μέλεος) who has suffered wretched things (μέλεα) is a pun to the song (melos) on stage. I translated the γοᾶσθέ μ’ as “cry for me” as an allusion to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” line in the famous Evita musical as a way to suggest how different types of songs and musicality can be effective on stage.

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as a highlight of his parody shows how well typified this is. At the same time in the context of the Thesmophoriazusae, the allusion to a celebration vs. funeral lament (considered opposite genres of performance) is also the source of humor for an episode that seeks to make fun of acting and performance itself. It is as if we have a Monty Python echo of Shakespeare meant to entertain as one recognizes the recontextualized misfit. For our purposes here, though, it is essential to note that characters like Andromeda, as we can imagine her in the context of the eponymous Euripidean work, or Iphigeneia, who metapoetically mentions what she would be doing if she were in Athens (ἐν καλλιφθόγγοις ἱστοῖς, Eur. IT 222), can be powerful figures as they juxtapose their life of imprisonment to that of what the audience expects a girl their age should have. Performance on stage constantly alludes to what should be performed given the age and gender of certain figures. This is a feature worth studying in more detail, as drama points to genres and types of performance, often through opposition and juxtaposition to others. For example, in Aeschylus’s Choephori, the chorus indicates the situation with Orestes’s arrival as Electra mourns her father, and it does so by expressing a wish that the god should give “κελάδους εὐφθογγοτέρους,/ ἀντὶ δὲ θρήνων ἐπιτυμβιδίων/ παιὼν . . .” Although here expressed as a wish, the anti (l. 342) is central to the expression of the wish. Χο. ἀλλ’ ἔτ’ ἂν ἐκ τῶνδε θεὸς χρήιζων θείη κελάδους εὐφθογγοτέρους, ἀντὶ δὲ θρήνων ἐπιτυμβιδίων παιὼν μελάθροις ἐν βασιλείοις νεοκρᾶτα φίλον κομίσειεν. Chorus: But even in this, a god if they choose can still turn your sounds into more joyful ones, instead of laments at a tomb, a paean in the royal halls may bring the bowl of new-mixed wine we love. (Aesch. Ch. 340–4)

Notably, a wish should be expressed by giving the two opposite types of keladoi, of utterances and performances; the paean prevails. One sees here that beyond poetic embellishment, the way a wish is carried brings further nuance to our understanding of the expression of such speech acts. Why does a wish have to be ultimately defined by what is arguably conceived as its opposite? Why should a paean be mentioned as the wished outcome instead of the laments at the gravesite? To go even further, we see that the wish also has a spatial component: the lament “at the gravesite” (θρήνων ἐπιτυμβιδίων, 342) is further contrasted with the paean in the royal halls (μελάθροις ἐν βασιλείοις, 343). Performance and space are intricately interwoven, with the spatial reference immediately following that of the performance (θρήνοις vs. παιών).

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, ,    

Throughout the corpus of tragic poetry, there are many instances of a frame of one song or utterance being presented in competition with another. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, with Cassandra’s performance as the culmination, we see this feature of referring to the genre that stands in total antithesis to the situation at hand. This is intensified further by a unique awareness of the voice or song that dominates contrasted with the one that should have been performed. As Seaford has put it, “Wedding ritual in tragedy tends to be subverted.”¹¹² In Agamemnon, Cassandra enters like a bride to Apollo.¹¹³ The language of wedding processions is used throughout as Apollo leads Cassandra as her bridegroom, and not Agamemnon.¹¹⁴ When she says that “my oracle will no longer look from underneath the veil like a newly married bride”) she conflates her two identities: a prophet who cannot be heard and a bride who cannot be married (ll. 1178–9). In this way, as Robin Mitchell-Boyask astutely remarked, presenting herself with a vocabulary that alludes to wedding rituals while carrying her prophetic attire further allows “Aeschylus to locate Cassandra in an inverted system of associations that poignantly capture her predicament: a bride who is not a bride, a prophet who is not a prophet, both roles under the control of Apollo.”¹¹⁵ The resolution will only come from Athena and her use of peithō, or persuasive power.¹¹⁶ Yet the image of Cassandra as the one who can see the Furies remains in everyone’s mind as Athena persuades the Furies to leave. As has been argued, to a certain extent, Cassandra becomes one of the Furies since, like the Furies, she is an outsider, a Parthenos who tracks down the “blood” of the house like a dog (Ag. 1092–3, 1184–5, 1309), violently rejects Apollo, and then restarts the cycle of vengeance by invoking Orestes as an avenger.¹¹⁷ In many ways, Cassandra is not unlike the tortoise we mentioned earlier in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. The female animal and the Trojan princess are forcefully controlled by the two gods, Apollo and Hermes respectively, incidentally the two protagonists of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. In both cases, the disempowering is focused on the voice; one becomes a tool for Hermes, the other for Apollo. The tortoise acquires the voice that Hermes has crafted through her death, whereas Cassandra is doomed to die as a disempowered prophet, prolonging the suffering

¹¹² Seaford 1987: 106. ¹¹³ Mitchell-Boyask 2006. ¹¹⁴ This is not atypical in tragedy. See McClure 1999: 169 who writes that Andromache in Euripides’s Andromache describes her journey to Greece after the fall of Troy as “a kind of bridal procession, similar to the one that had earlier taken her to the house of Priam.” ¹¹⁵ Mitchell-Boyask 2006: 278. ¹¹⁶ For the role of persuasion, see Battezzato 2017. ¹¹⁷ Mitchell-Boyask 2006: 294. As he further writes, “Athena reminds all of the centrality of the Oresteia’s concern with the proper functioning of marriage and childbirth, two events denied to Cassandra because of her experience with Apollo. Her initial and most substantial promise to the enraged Furies is to receive the first fruits of sacrifice before childbirth and marriage rites . . . Marriage will now be restored. There will not be another Cassandra, nor another Iphigenia.”

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through knowledge. She knows exactly what will happen to her. Both the tortoise and Cassandra suffer and die a tragic death. The juxtaposition of funeral vs. wedding is showcased in Telemachus’s speech to one of the suitors, Ktesippus, in the line “καί κέ τοι ἀντὶ γάμοιο πατὴρ τάφον ἀμφεπονεῖτο/ ἐνθάδε,” “instead of a wedding, your father would be preparing burial rites for you here” (Od. 20.307–8). Telemachus turns into his father as the perpetrator of the slaughter, in an aggressive mode. When reading the Aeschylus passage against this Odyssean reference, we see that the reference to burial rites is a warning, but also an imminent threat, presented from the perspective of the aggressor. Agamemnon has “sacrificed” his daughter, just as Telemachus and Odysseus intend to kill the suitors. Telemachus’s line declares their intention openly, in an “easy” prophetic moment, as something about to happen. This type of phrasing, “instead of laments” or “instead of weddings” (“ἀντί θρήνων”/“ἀντί γάμων”), is a forceful antithesis for the performer to bring, showcasing generic twists. This juxtaposition is a feature embedded in different types of poetic speech but also in funerary epigrams, both literary and inscriptional, as well as other types of speech, which warrants further attention. Consider the following example by Theodoridas in the Palatine Anthology: Θεύδοτε, κηδεμόνων μέγα δάκρυον, οἵ σε κώκυσαν μέλεον πυρσὸν ἀναψάμενοι, αἰνόλινε, τρισάωρε, σὺ δ’ ἀντὶ γάμου τε καὶ ἥβης κάλλιπες ἡδίστῃ ματρὶ γόους καὶ ἄχη. Theodotus, you have brought many tears to your people who mourned you lighting the wretched pyre; ill-fated, you died too young, instead of your wedding and your youth, you left your sweetest mother with lamenting cries and deep grief. (Anth. Pal. 7.527)

The dead person is lamented in this epigram as his relatives cry for him. The standard lament feature is that he left woes and laments for his mother instead of marriage and youth. It is further worthy that he is addressed as ainolinos, a hapax here. An epithet that refers to being unfortunate in one’s thread (linos) of life, it brings all the associations of ritual and beliefs about fate echoed as a hidden and subtle historiola behind the word. The figure of Linos, a young man who also died prematurely, is subtly echoed in this reference.¹¹⁸ In a typical mode, the epigram addresses the dead while referring to the people around him (the relatives) only to then focus on the lamenting mother, ending with the image of the mater dolorosa. The juxtaposition is used again for those dying young. ¹¹⁸ See Pache 2004; Karanika 2014.

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, ,    

The Voice of the Maiden: Reading Iphigeneia’s Voices The ultimate antithesis between wedding and death, via sacrifice, lies in the story of Iphigeneia. This well-known narrative has seen the most important treatment in Euripides’s two surviving tragedies. Iphigeneia is led to her sacrifice while made to believe she is heading to a wedding with Achilles. Myth likes to see her as someone who pays for her father’s error when Agamemnon angers Artemis. The prophet Calchas prophesizes that she must be sacrificed for the winds to help the ships’ sails. The sacrifice of a maiden (or a child) is a well-known theme. But the twisted plot to bring Iphigeneia as if to a wedding, and the false pretense offered to her mother, is a haunting aspect of the myth. One immediately notes the parallel between sacrifice and wedding, the converging semiotics of wedding and death with images of the bleeding girl and the bleeding sacrificial animal.¹¹⁹ One of the most chilling descriptions of how Iphigeneia was led to the sacrificial altar is in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. As Iphigeneia is taken to the sacrificial altar, her crocus robe drops. The Aeschylean text, though, chooses to use a synecdoche here and refers to her dress as κρόκου βαφάς, (Aesch. Ag. 239) “the dyes of the crocus.” The word βαφάς can easily allude to blood stains, as attested in Greek literature.¹²⁰ Conversely, the crocus is the origin of the color but simultaneously a reference to maidens’ rituals, such as crocus gathering, with further significance, which is worth exploring. Persephone’s abduction occurs as soon as she sees a crocus flower, among others, when the earth gaped below her. From the crocus gatherers in Thera’s prehistoric frescoes to the classical krokōtos peplos, the crocus flower is a solid reference to transitions and the wedding moment.¹²¹ Aeschylus inverts it here by fusing the image of falling clothes with the dropping of blood. The text mentions her robes and emphasizes how the ministers were instructed to hold her like a young goat—another detail that juxtaposes maiden and sacrificial animal—and then gag her to keep her from uttering a curse against the house. The description is breathtaking when it focuses on Iphigeneia’s glance toward her sacrificers: the girl hoping for some pity in a moment that iconizes her. Interestingly, the text comments that this was an image as if from a painting, possibly alluding to visual representations of the scene as Iphigeneia is being dragged away to be sacrificed. Because she can’t otherwise move or speak, Iphigeneia has only one way to defend herself: her eyes.¹²²

¹¹⁹ See Osborne 1993. ¹²⁰ Although most attestations are later, such as οὐ γὰρ ἡ φύσις τελείαν ἐπέθηκε τῷ αἵματι τὴν βαφὴν (Galen, De Urinis 19.587), the number of attestations makes this a strong allusion. ¹²¹ See Day 2011 with a diachronic view from the Bronze Age. ¹²² See the excellent analysis by Gurd 2005: 17, who writes that “Iphigeneia casts bolts from her eyes at her slaughterers while pouring her robes to the ground and standing out, as though in a painting; that is, her silence, her nakedness, and her being transformed into the kind of visual object that can be

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That she casts her sight like an arrow fuses even further the image of the young woman with that of an archer, quite fitting for a figure who will ultimately be saved by the archer divinity, Artemis, the divinity she will serve. The arrow on its own can be seen as an aggressive element, but it also aligns the future priestess with her goddess. Her inability to speak is further intensified by her look and her desire to make a connection with her sacrificers: those for whom she had often sung during feasts at her father’s halls. The text adds that she didn’t just sing, but she sang paeans, with her “virginal” voice: φράσεν δ᾽ ἀόζοις πατὴρ μετ᾽ εὐχὰν δίκαν χιμαίρας ὕπερθε βωμοῦ πέπλοισι περιπετῆ παντὶ θυμῷ προνωπῆ λαβεῖν ἀέρδην, στόματός τε καλλιπρῴρου φυλακᾷ κατασχεῖν φθόγγον ἀραῖον οἴκοις, βίᾳ χαλινῶν τ᾽ ἀναύδῳ μένει. κρόκου βαφὰς δ’ ἐς πέδον χέουσα ἔβαλλ’ ἕκαστον θυτήρων ἀπ’ ὄμματος βέλει φιλοίκτωι, πρέπουσά θ’ ὡς ἐν γραφαῖς, προσεννέπειν θέλουσ’, ἐπεὶ πολλάκις πατρὸς κατ’ ἀνδρῶνας εὐτραπέζους ἔμελψεν, ἁγνᾶι δ’ ἀταύρωτος αὐδᾶι πατρὸς φίλου τριτόσπονδον εὔποτμον παιῶνα φίλως ἐτίμα. After a prayer, her father told his attendants to lift her up high above the altar, with all their strength, as if she were a young goat, face down, so that her garments would fall; and to place a gag on her beautiful mouth which would restrain any speech that might include curses against the house—by the violence of the bridle and the forced lack of speech. Then, as she let her saffron robe fall on the ground, she struck each of her sacrificers with a piercing glance in supplication from her eyes, looking as if in a picture, wanting to address them; for she had often sung where men would gather at her father’s generous table, and with her virginal voice she would lovingly offer a paean in honor of her father’s prayer for blessing at the third libation. (Aesch. Ag. 231–47)

vividly described are all part of the narrative: in this story, Iphigeneia turns into an image. At the moment of her death, she is transformed, not into an animal but into a mimetic representation, a painting.”

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, ,    

The text in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon intertwines Iphigeneia’s intense gaze of despair with reference to her past singing at feasts.¹²³ Those she sang for are now leading her to sacrifice. Her singing at a marked moment, as her father uttered the prayer for the third libation, is now even further juxtaposed to her father’s current stance as Iphigeneia becomes his victim. Voices and songs are echoed while Iphigeneia’s iconized gaze is explicitly the center of attention. Iphigeneia wanted to speak to her sacrificers but could not. What makes her desire to speak to them even more intense is that not only does she know them, but she also sung for them, and did so complementing her father’s prayers. This could be read as a misfit or a misrepresentation of practices. Yet the text clearly shows that Iphigeneia performed her paeans with her full authority deriving from her father. The allusion to her former ritual song does not seem to be out of place, but rather seems to invest her with some authority, one that will correspond to the position she will assume. There is no reason to think that a young maiden’s voice would not be appropriate in a setting like this, with the father permitting, performing jointly a paean in a prayer. But that this is commemorated at her wedding/sacrifice is what makes this more puzzling. Aeschylus creates a network of rituals alluded to here: the former prayers, the wedding that never materialized, and the sacrifice that never happened. The feast song that Iphigeneia performed was also powerless to help her. All three rituals are ultimately negated as Iphigeneia is transported to a different world.

Wedding Imagery Talking Trees: The Epithalamion Tradition in Theocritus Theocritus’s Idyll 18 is a literary epithalamion alluding to the practice of singing songs outside the newlywedded couple’s door. The performers in the poem are girls, Helen’s peer group, addressing a song to Helen and Menelaus. In the Ptolemaic Hellenistic context, practices of praise in the literary tradition can have a political nuance as the poem ultimately addresses the Ptolemaic rulers as the receivers of the praise.¹²⁴ Arsinoe as Helen and Ptolemy as Menelaus take

¹²³ As I. Rutherford 2001: 124 suggests, the paean was known for being ambiguous. There were cases in which the use of the joyful paean was to be followed by a reversal. The συμπόσιον-παιάν that Iphigeneia participated in (namely, responding by chanting ἰή παιάν) can be read to contrast with the παιάν “that would have accompanied her sacrifice.” ¹²⁴ For a reading that reads occasional poetry (including epithalamia) within the Ptolemaic context, including the possibility of presentations/performances in royal symposia, see Barbantani 2017.

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mythic dimensions that elevate them to divine status. At the same time, Theocritus reads through his verses earlier poetry and myth and weaves them into his knowledge about customs and ritual moments that reflect wedding rituals. Scholarship on this poem has discussed the Hellenistic context and the poem’s complex intertextual references.¹²⁵ What interests me the most is the kind of cult practice with the metaphorical and symbolic language that is used, which adheres to earlier conventions. Theocritus’s poem becomes an eloquent example of how the wedding song tradition was perpetuated but also, in this literary version, how it could also subvert ideologies about the couple. The poem has an overtly playful and optimistic tone. It defines itself as an epithalamion and dancing song that young girls performed outside the newlywedded couple’s door, imitating the tradition of hymeneal songs. Much of it draws from a pool of wedding song imagery and expression that is highly reminiscent of Sappho—and possibly fragments of Sappho that we do not have and cannot reconstruct.¹²⁶ Faraone has recently argued that there were wedding performances in dactylic hexameters (and reads Theocritus 18 and Catullus 62 as remnants of this tradition). In his view, Theocritus’s poem imitates both content and format (namely meter) of this type of tradition, which goes back to Sappho.¹²⁷ Although the projection of Hellenistic chorality is probably not part of a performative context like the lyric or tragic choruses, the self-referentiality of the chorus points to several connections with the earlier traditions.¹²⁸ The choral tone permeates the entire poem, presenting the girls, Helen’s friends, as they coordinate rhythm, song, and movement to create a resounding effect. ἄειδον δ’ ἅμα πᾶσαι ἐς ἓν μέλος ἐγκροτέοισαι ποσσὶ περιπλέκτοις, ὑπὸ δ’ ἴαχε δῶμ’ ὑμεναίῳ· They all sang in unison, creating a rhythm with their elaborately meandering steps, and the hymenaios resounded through the palace. (Theoc. 18.7–8)

¹²⁵ See Noussia Fantuzzi 2017; Lane 2006; Brillante 2003; Damon 1995; Pantelia 1995. ¹²⁶ See Acosta–Hughes 2010: 34. As he further notes, “Sappho is further, though, a poet specifically of Helen and of Helen’s loves,” which makes this Theocritean epithalamion carry more Sapphic tones. For connections with Sapphic elements, see White 2001. For Theocritus 18 as a literary representation of the epithalamion genre, see Di Meo 2009; Montes Cala 1999. For a reading that also considers the ekphrastic element, namely the representation of the poem as an ekphrasis of a painting that depicted choral activity, with parallel readings from Philostratus’s Imagines, Catullus 64: 50–268, and Moschus’s Europa 50–61, see Lamari 2008. For Helen’s centrality as a figure, see also Michon 2005, and Stern 1978 for Helen and the tradition of duality of divine and mortal status. For the affinities with Gorgias’s Helen, see Luccioni 1997. ¹²⁷ Faraone 2020. ¹²⁸ For the representation of chorality in Theocritus as well as Apollonius and Callimachus, see Noussia-Fantuzzi 2017.

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, ,    

The girls first address the groom with subtle sexualized and humorous jokes as questions.¹²⁹ Yet the girls’ perspective dominates as they tell him that because he was going to sleep early, he should have left the girl alone by her mother’s side: εὕδειν μὰν σπεύδοντα καθ’ ὥραν αὐτὸν ἐχρῆν τυ, παῖδα δ’ ἐᾶν σὺν παισὶ φιλοστόργῳ παρὰ ματρί παίσδειν ἐς βαθὺν ὄρθρον, ἐπεὶ καὶ ἔνας καὶ ἐς ἀῶ κἠς ἔτος ἐξ ἔτεος, Μενέλαε, τεὰ νυὸς ἅδε. If you were so eager to go to sleep early you should have slept by yourself and left the girl to play with the other girls until dawn, at her loving mother’s side, for she will be your bride the day after next and the day that will come to light after that, Menelaus, and all the years to come. (Theoc. 18.13–16)

The relationship between mother and daughter is the central natal relationship that a marriage disrupts. The girls recreate with their presence an all-female world that ostracizes, albeit temporarily, the groom, in a union that brings mother and daughter to the center of their song and activities. The mother-daughter motif ritually governs moments of passage (e.g., a wedding or a death). It is a particularly strong reference in epitaphs, funerals, or tombstone epigrams that exemplify that relationship and praise the deceased girl’s skills (ll. 33–5). This epithalamion further brings the same praise for the young bride’s handiwork and refers to her emphatically as a pais (“young maiden”), with the verb paisdein used to underscore the young girl’s youth and where she belongs. Epigrams often address the skill in weaving or embroidery of the deceased and try to monumentalize their voice or musical skills. This epithalamion marries the funereal with the wedding tradition by doing precisely that: praising the bride’s handiwork and her skill in playing the lyre. Just as they are about to lose touch with their peer, the girls make special reference to the sense of touch by referring to Helen’s musical and handiwork expertise. In essence, the girls in their performance act as if they want to momentarily seize back their playmate. While most readers have read this, and rightly so, in conjunction with Sapphic poetry, the girls’ performance echoes the partheneia tradition and alludes to the ¹²⁹ For humorous undertones in the contrast between Helen and Menelaus, see Konstan 1979. Richard Hunter 1996: 155–7, writing about Idyll 18, has astutely remarked that Theocritus’s embedded performance is structured into five units, symmetrically, divided by the ritualistic cry and evocation to Hymenaios, creating the effect of choral poetry. In stanza 1, the newlyweds are the addressees, where we have a gentle reproaching of the groom being drunk or asleep and the exhortation for the bride to stay with her playmates; in stanza 2, the bride alone is the addressee, and is compared with her peers; similarly, stanza 3, using present tense, brings Helen’s comparison to Spartan wives and extolls her talent in wool spinning, weaving, and the lyre, with all the metapoetic references these stand for. Stanza 4 uses the future tense to discuss the tree ritual performance by the maidens, and stanza 5 returns to optative blessings for the newlyweds, wishes for children, mutual love, and prosperity.

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mother-daughter theme, as in the Hymn to Demeter, which also brings the death and wedding themes together.¹³⁰ The opening of the choral performance recalls Alcman’s partheneia, using metaphorical language typical of such songs. Helen stands out like a cypress tree in a field or garden or a Thracian horse adorning its chariot. ὧδε καὶ ἁ χρυσέα Ἑλένα διεφαίνετ’ ἐν ἁμῖν. πιείρᾳ μεγάλα ἅτ’ ἀνέδραμε κόσμος ἀρούρᾳ ἢ κάπῳ κυπάρισσος, ἢ ἅρματι Θεσσαλὸς ἵππος, ὧδε καὶ ἁ ῥοδόχρως Ἑλένα Λακεδαίμονι κόσμος· Thus did golden Helen also stand out among us. As a tall cypress rises high to adorn some fertile field or garden, or as a Thracian horse adorns its chariot, just so is rosy Helen the ornament of Sparta. (Theoc. 18.29–32)

Arboreal and animal imagery is familiar in archaic and classical poetry and echoed in Theocritus here as part of a well-registered formula of praising a bride. Metaphorical rendering of this type is not just a phenomenon of poetic or figurative language. It is part of the conceptual process. In other words, we study not just words but how a mind thinks and converts thought into language. Metaphors, therefore, are not a sign of beautified language but of primary conceptualization. As such, they can be open to different interpretations.¹³¹ The metaphor here presents a relation: Helen adorning Sparta like a cypress tree adorning a field or a garden, or a Thracian horse adorning its chariot. In all cases, the conceptualization process creates a focal point within a larger entity of which it is part. This focal point is the driving force, as in the chariot, or the most visible point, as in the cypress tree. The combination of the two metaphors, one of movement and one of steadfastness, brings a context of belonging to an entity but also steering it visually. The two metaphors oppose each other when one considers the aspect of mobility: the tree is a static image, whereas the horse is its opposite, one of mobility. Suppose we were to map Helen’s mythology on the two seemingly contradictory images. In that case, we see that this could be seen as part of Helen’s story: that of mobility in a context of war, as part of the Trojan War narratives, and that of her past and future in Sparta. Even if this is part of an epithalamion for her marriage to Menelaus (presumably referring to the temporal phase in Sparta

¹³⁰ For a reading that considers comparisons with Sappho and Alcman, see Acosta-Hughes 2010: 29–39. Dagnini 1986: 43 also notes the intertextual connections in Theocritus, Sappho, and Alcman. See also Hunter 1996: 150 who further discusses how Theocritus alludes to archaic poetry and further discusses Stesichorus. ¹³¹ Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Turner 1987.

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, ,    

without any echo of the Trojan War saga), this is part of her overall tradition that could be read here and could explain the contradiction. The girls remember the shared life of play with the bride. As Acosta-Hughes astutely remarks, “at the same time the songs themselves are recollections of an earlier lyric and of its scenes of occasional performance,” as the opening words “once upon a time in Sparta” point to.¹³² Let us see the girl’s chorus here: ὦ καλά, ὦ χαρίεσσα κόρα, τὺ μὲν οἰκέτις ἤδη. ἄμμες δ’ ἐς δρόμον ἦρι καὶ ἐς λειμώνια φύλλα ἑρψεῦμες στεφάνως δρεψεύμεναι ἁδὺ πνέοντας, πολλὰ τεοῦς, Ἑλένα, μεμναμέναι ὡς γαλαθηναί ἄρνες γειναμένας ὄιος μαστὸν ποθέοισαι. πρᾶταί τοι στέφανον λωτῶ χαμαὶ αὐξομένοιο πλέξασαι σκιερὰν καταθήσομεν ἐς πλατάνιστον· πρᾶται δ’ ἀργυρέας ἐξ ὄλπιδος ὑγρὸν ἄλειφαρ λαζύμεναι σταξεῦμες ὑπὸ σκιερὰν πλατάνιστον· γράμματα δ’ ἐν φλοιῷ γεγράψεται, ὡς παριών τις ἀννείμῃ Δωριστί· “σέβευ μ’· Ἑλένας φυτόν εἰμι.” Beautiful and gracious girl, now you are a woman of the house. But we shall go early tomorrow to the running course and the flower meadows to gather fragrant garlands, and we shall have many thoughts of you, Helen, as suckling lambs miss the udder of the ewe that bore them. We shall be the first to plait for you a garland of low-growing trefoil and to set it on a shady plane tree; and we shall be the first to take smooth oil from its silver flask and let it drip beneath that shady plane. In the bark there will be an inscription, so that a passerby may read in Dorian style, “Revere me: I am Helen’s tree.” (Theoc. 18.39–49)

Multiple speech acts take place here. The girls collectively address the bride and describe what can read like a wedding custom: they are all urged to go to the running course and meadows to gather garlands. This symbolically recalls Helen, the bride, so the act of gathering flowers or making garlands reads like a memorial for the departed. The simile that follows compares the girls’ desire and emotions with the sheep that must be weaned; this simile brings both the animal and the mother-daughter relation into a maturation context. Their performance, though, ends most emphatically with the ritual culmination, namely taking oil in a silver flask and dripping it on a shady plane tree and carving an inscription that says in Doric dialect, “Revere me: I am Helen’s tree.” The dendroglyph acquires a voice and connects the speech act of the girls in the post-nuptial bridal cult with

¹³² Acosta-Hughes 2010: 38.

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the imaginary passerby’s speech act; the passerby reads what they carved on the tree. The tree is the mediator that transfers the voice to the passerby. This scene can be read from a linguistic, historical, and literary perspective. The references to words carved into the bark of a tree, mainly with erotic context, can have different meanings.¹³³ One can see them operating similarly to inscriptions on walls or graffiti. To these, I would add the inscriptions on vases, which can become a testament to the artist’s hand, often highlighting beauty with phrases like kalos. While they can be seen as the rustic version of graffiti, carving names and other phrases onto a tree carries the aura of nature; the medium is a living thing. It is also connected to magical notions of life that still grows, as passages from Vergil’s Eclogues and Ovid’s Heroides show (“as the trees grow, let the loves grow”), denoting that the inscription and its message grow with its carrier.¹³⁴ The inscription is like a visible growing fetus on the main body on the tree, one that has its own life but one that cannot be separated from that of the tree. While much anthropological analysis pays attention to the magical notions around the tree, it is worth distinguishing the extensions created through arboreal figurated language. Odysseus addresses Nausicaa as a branch, whereas Helen’s speech is transported onto a tree inscription to mark the tree as belonging to her.¹³⁵ The tree asks to be revered because Helen’s tree opens a window onto cult practices. Pausanias refers to a cult of Helen, Dendritis in Rhodes (3.19.9–10), and a sanctuary in the Plane Tree Grove (Platanistas) (3.15.3).¹³⁶ Helen’s status has oscillated between the divine and mortal, with cult practices in different places. She is known in literary references as the leader of a chorus.¹³⁷ While reading the Theocritus passage as evidence for cult practices is tempting, I am interested in reading it from the perspective of imagery and metaphor conception. Trees can outlive humans.¹³⁸ To address this to a royal couple in the Alexandrian court, this transference seems pertinent—the tree can translate into a family tree that proclaims Helen (and who Helen stands for in Theocritus’s poem) as the ultimate ancestor. But the imagery runs deeper and possibly evokes cults that allude to the tree’s longevity. The plane tree is attested in Greek literature as a tree celebrated for its size, beauty, and usefulness in providing ample shade, traits that relate to bridal imagery. Tree metaphors are complex, and cultural specificity can alter their meaning. I am not arguing for the universal ¹³³ For a full account and analysis, see Kruschwitz 2010. ¹³⁴ Verg. Ecl. 2.2.2. See also Ov. Her. 5.23–4. ¹³⁵ Odysseus compares Nausicaa with a palm tree in Delos, one that he once saw. For the comparison with an ernos in Odyssey 6.162–7, see Ford 2019: 119–20. ¹³⁶ Brillante 2003 argues that while lines 9–21 and 49–58 form the core of the epithalamion referring to the Platanistas cult, lines 22–48 constitute a reference to the Therapne cult outside of Sparta. ¹³⁷ Cf. Aristophanes, Lys. 1314–15. Helen dances in the festival of Hyacinthus in Euripides (Hel. 1465–70). For discussion of these passages in relation to Theocr. Id. 18, see Calame 2001: 192–3; Brillante 2001–2: 48–9. In Alc. fr. 1, a reference to the cult at Platanistas has long been detected. See the bibliography in Brillante 2003: 184n13. ¹³⁸ See Gowers 2005.

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conceptualization behind linguistic formation here. But what is interesting in this case is that tree (as well as animal) metaphors lie at the origin of conceptual maps that connect people with the broader natural world.¹³⁹ The request to revere the tree fixes Helen as its possessor. Ritual has a material locus. The tree is the materialized locus of Helen’s presence in the precinct projected in the poem. We may have lost more concrete narratives about the connection between Helen and her tree; the tree or its wood could be featured in different ways as part of a narrative that got crystallized. The talking inscription lends a voice to the tree, which in turn connects the material tree with the image of Helen. This cult, with all its cryptic imagery, gives us a fascinating clue about the audience’s reaction in thinking the tree is sacred because of Helen. At the same time, because of the Dorian linguistic code used in this inscription, it marks a boundary. Several cultures use the idea of a talking tree—or, as in this poem, the inscription on a tree—as a phenomenon closely connected with prophecy or notions of change and restoration. While the sound of a tree is usually construed as unintelligible and only decipherable by a few, the inscription in a specific code makes a statement. Native American stories present the talking palo verde trees, which made noises needing explanation regarding the coming conquest and colonization.¹⁴⁰ Tribal oral traditions highlight the role of women as the principal decipherers in narratives about negotiating imminent change, language barriers, and ruptures in sociocultural orders. The mind uses the image of a tree to think about language, culture, and sacred space, and it transfers that onto a metaphor that animates voice in forms that exceed the ecology of the human species. As is typically expected, the girls’ hymeneal performance ends with an address to the bride and groom and a prayer. The prayer oscillates between optatives and imperatives, ending with a final address to the wedding god, Hymen. They pray to Leto to provide noble children, to Aphrodite for mutual love, and to Zeus for prosperity. In a typical hymnic fashion, the end of the epithalamion is a request like other nuptial performances for love, children, and prosperous life. The imperative, reminiscent of lullabies, asks the newlyweds to sleep breathing love and desire in each other and not to forget to wake up. Lullabies often hide a fear about not waking up, so it is possible that we have more oral genres interwoven here. The pattern here is that optatives are for deities, whereas the imperatives are used for the immediate addressees of the song. The final optative is reserved for the god of marriage, Hymen: “Ὑμὴν ὦ Ὑμέναιε, γάμῳ ἐπὶ τῷδε χαρείης” (“Hymen, o Hymenaios, may you have pleasure in this marriage”). This brings attention to the transition from the wedding to the marriage, and the temporal leap of the initiation into the continuum.

¹³⁹ See Rival 2020.

¹⁴⁰ See Jagodinksy 2016.

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The prayer-like end of the girls’ address to Helen as the idealized bride brings this performance close to the bardic performance of Odysseus in Odyssey 6 in his address to Nausicaa. From the archaic poetry’s perspective, one would expect a male bard to adopt this discourse of final prayers and wishes toward his addressees. Here we see an inversion by having the maidens’ chorus use this typology. Their wishes for noble children and prosperity are very much that of a performance one would expect to be addressed to a bride and groom. Hidden praise toward specific divinities is also present. Leto becomes the paradigmatic mother of illustrious children, and the prayer creates a trio of divinities close to the couple: Leto, Aphrodite, and Zeus. While Leto and Aphrodite appear often in hymnic invocations related to weddings, Zeus gives a more patriarchal order to this song. It is only with the turn to Hymen that the performance becomes more playful again, bringing to focus the emotion of joy. Yet for a girls’ performance, this song has a very public, almost male interface. There is no sense of intimacy in the girls’ activities or reminiscence about shared everyday activities before the wedding; instead, the performance is reduced to typical praise, prayer, and the reference to a cult practice they will do (not something shared in their common past). The plea to the passerby of Helen’s tree is a plea to everyone hearing this song. In other words, Theocritus takes up Sapphic and epic moments that correspond to a public type of performance, fitting archaic elements with a mythology that corresponds well to the royal wedding at hand. The idyll’s reader has the illusion of participating in a seemingly exposed all-female world, tasting its naivete, youth, and joy, while, in essence, it is all part of a publicly intended type of song. Nothing has been communicated or revealed that could indicate an all-girls code. As such, the reader is like the passerby who can revere Helen’s tree and Theocritus’s poetry and enjoy the occasion of the wedding song as one that can be addressed to a specific couple but also eternalize typical features of wedding poetry.

Apples and Flowers In one of the most famous fragments of Sappho believed to be a wedding song, the bride is assimilated to an apple that the “apple-pickers” could not fetch. Sappho makes it clear: this apple did not escape their notice, but they could not reach it.¹⁴¹ Several scholars have looked at the idea of ripeness or the apple’s unreachability, and the poem has been connected with the Atalanta myth and the

¹⁴¹ Following the reference in Himerius Or. 9.16 (page 82 Colonna), who writes that “it was Sappho who compared the girl to an apple . . . and likened the bridegroom to Achilles and put the young man on a par with the hero in his achievements,” the wedding context seems the most plausible scenario for this fragment.

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, ,    

idealization of virginity—or seen as invective against older brides.¹⁴² The wedding song tradition, like children’s songs, as we have seen earlier, could be crude and address what the songs would stage as “anti-bride” figures.¹⁴³ Consider the Sapphic fragment below: οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρωι ἐπ’ ὔσδωι, ἄκρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτωι, λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ’, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐδύναντ’ ἐπίκεσθαι As the sweet-apple reddens on the bough-top, on the top of the topmost bough; the apple-gatherers have forgotten it—no they have not forgotten it entirely, but they could not reach it. (Sappho, fr. 105a)

Fruit was a common reference point in wedding performances and ritual. On several vases, the bride is seen holding an apple.¹⁴⁴ Plutarch advises eating quince or apple before the wedding night. But beyond its ritual presence, the apple is a mythological reference for wedding contests, from Eris’s apple to the fairest to Atalanta, the indomitable virgin who refused to get married until a man defeated her in a footrace. She was finally defeated when Hippomenes, following Aphrodite’s advice, threw apples in her way, which slowed her down as she picked them up. Apples are invariably associated with the bride. They are a distinct, tangible, and edible element, found in narratives around sexuality and marriage in different cultures and different times. Much has been written about the apple as a symbol of pleasure, sexuality, and as a binding element: once one tastes it or keeps it, it becomes the concomitant of a journey into new territories. Adam and Eve’s apple is already charged with meaning for the archetypal couple and has multiple connotations in view of how the story evolves. This ubiquitous metaphor calls for more attention. Why would it be so present in ritual in so many different contexts? Even in traditional Greek weddings last century in Epirus, brides were meant to go to the procession holding an apple, and in some cases, as in Thrace, holding an apple filled with coins in the right hand and a mirror in the left hand. That the bride’s hands would be full is also an element charged with symbolism (from fertility to ideologies about housekeeping and more). Yet the apple has become, from a cognitive perspective, a metaphor that, besides the fertility ¹⁴² For a review of the scholarship on this poem, see Griffith 1989. I follow Griffith 1989: 55, who argues that the poem “describes the bride in a positive point-for-point correspondence.” ¹⁴³ For an analysis of how the invective works in the wedding song tradition, see Petropoulos 2008. As Petropoulos 2008: 129 notes for Archilochus’s Cologne Epode, invective clichés can be part of the “stock ‘anti-bride’ of the traditional Fescennina iocatio, which is a sub-genre of ‘blame poetry.’ ” For blame tactics and the reversal of nuptial praise, see also Petropoulos 2003: 49. ¹⁴⁴ Reitzammer 2016: 48.

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connotations, has a long presence in ritual from early on. As Faraone has argued, apples are part of erotic rituals, mostly associated with women. Faraone discusses the so-called apple charms, which are quite revealing. The myth of Atalanta, which presents Atalanta taking apples as the “gifts of golden Aphrodite,” presents a quasiconsent: Atalanta is not forced to take the apples, which implies that she made a choice or was seduced by the beautiful apples, which cost her the race. The apples work only if she picks them up.¹⁴⁵ If rituals lie at the heart of poetics, then we can have a better look into how metaphors are formed, and the cognitive process of how certain references become powerfully emblematic. Faraone cites several apple charms. Tossed apples or charms were part of incantation rituals from the early Middle East to Roman times. In a cuneiform collection of Neo-Assyrian ritual texts dating to the ninth century , we see the act of giving an apple or pomegranate as a seduction ritual to elicit voluntary lovemaking: “Its ritual: either to an apple or to a pomegranate you recite the incantation three times. You give (the fruit) to the woman (and) have her suck the juices. That woman will come to you; you can make love to her.”¹⁴⁶ Similarly in another apple charm found in Greek from the time of Augustus, we see the typology of this type of incantation that seeks consent and sexual activity. This type of continuity suggests further that there is a close relation between foods that are consistently present in rituals such as weddings, incantations, and the mythic narratives that animate them. For Atalanta, the apple has a magnetic force; it becomes something that invites her to take it and lose control. Eve in the biblical narrative is not very different in that respect. The inviting power of the apple becomes a powerful representation of ritual in visual sources. As such, its reference, cryptic as it may be, carries a ritual historiola at its kernel that colors its presence in mythic narratives in ways that are not dissimilar to the incantations that survive. It becomes the locus of the attraction. There is more to this Sappho poem, however. Just like the Theocritean poem discussed earlier, which playfully imagines a group of women and makes the carving on the tree for an imagined passerby, we see here the imagined outsiders: the apple-pickers. This could of course refer to notions of contest so embedded in ancient Greek nuptial poetics. While the passerby in Theocritus is one person, the imagined apple-pickers are a plural entity, and no one wins the apple. It is worth looking in more detail at the repetition that is so characteristic of Sapphic wedding poetry. The first line describes the apple at the top branch. The second line amplifies this position: not just at the top, but at the very, very top. Then it adds that the apple-pickers have forgotten it. The third line, as we have it, refutes the earlier statement by saying “no, they have not forgotten it, but they couldn’t reach it.”

¹⁴⁵ Faraone 1999.

¹⁴⁶ For discussion, see Faraone 1999: 75.

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, ,    

The repetition, the plural subject, the refuting of the statement and its correction, and the placement of an unwinnable apple are all markers of a ludic ambiance. This could very well be part of a choral performance, in which we have two groups: one group, presumably of girls, saying the first two lines, and another group reaffirming the position of the apple. The apple itself could refer to the bride or simply a figure acting as a bride. If this was part of a children’s song, then it could well be that a version of this game made it into wedding poetry. While it is hard to reconstruct the precise context, we could think of this poem as a singing game between two groups.¹⁴⁷ The reference to the top could also refer to gestures of reaching or even leaping to get an imagined apple from an imagined tree as the center of the game, all acted out by the players with their movement and gestures. If we read this as a singing game, then we can see the mimetic character of it. I suggest we also read one of the following fragments as part of the same performative context, namely the one that refers to the trampled hyacinth. In the triad of fragments 104a, 105a, and 105b, the second and third are placed explicitly in a nuptial context, whereas the first one, fragment 104a, discussed earlier, echoes a lullaby. This too presents elements we have seen above: imagery and repetition.¹⁴⁸ The grouping of these fragments makes sense. What I am arguing is that an added element has shaped Sapphic epithalamia: children’s poetics. Sappho’s lines have a broad spectrum of origin, from lullabies to actual singing games; similarly, wedding songs refract younger voices, which have definitively but subtly shaped the ancient Greek oral genres of performance. The following is considered a lullaby, as mentioned earlier: Ἔσπερε πάντα φέρων ὄσα φαίνολις ἐσκέδασ᾿ Αὔως, †φέρεις ὄιν, φέρεισ† αἶγα, φέρεις ἄπυ μάτερι παῖδα. Hesperus, you who bring everything that shining Dawn scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring back the child to its mother. (Sappho, fr. 104a)

In my reading, these poems have a different common denominator, namely the idea that we have children’s voices reflected in them. Although they are rich in intertextual connections, if we pay more attention to the act of trampling and its possible significance if acted out in performance, then the two poems can be read as parts of singing games that originate from play. Let us see the hyacinth poem: οἴαν τὰν ὐάκινθον ἐν ὤρεσι ποίμενες ἄνδρες πόσσι καταστείβοισι, χάμαι δέ τε πόρφυρον ἄνθος . . .

¹⁴⁷ For singing games, see Sanches and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 2016: 69ff. ¹⁴⁸ See Sandin 2014.

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Like the hyacinth which shepherds tread with their feet in the mountains, and on the ground the purple flower . . . (Sappho, fr. 105c)

Sappho presents another important symbol, the hyacinth, in wedding diction. The hyacinth is already a registered reference in Homer, when Odysseus appears in front of Nausicaa: Athena makes his hair look hyacinthine (Od. 6.231) in a passage filled with nuptial undertones. But in this Sappho fragment, the note is dark and refers not just to the plucking of the flower but rather to it being trampled by shepherds. The darkness evoked here—and its near nonsensicality—brings this closer to ludic poetics. In most of the attempts to interpret these poems, the emphasis has been on the nouns and their potential symbolism or place as a hermeneutic tool. And this may still be true, as these poems are part of very complex oral poetics that touch on the ritualic, but also on the ludic. This small fragment is replete with meaning we have lost. The shepherds, already from Hesiod’s Theogony, are associated with ignorance, and it seems not unlikely that Sappho here is like one of the Muses in the Theogony’s proemium, reproaching the shepherds more subtly for trampling on the hyacinth. The verb trampling denotes a collective violent move from multiple men toward one flower in ways that allude to trauma or fear of rape. It is a vivid image, and the hyacinth’s mythology is associated with death and violent death, more specifically with the myth of Hyacinthus, the lover of Apollo who was shot by Apollo’s arrow, or the flower that came forth from the blood of Ajax. Such associations with death are found in myths about the injustice done to heroes, especially an untimely and undeserved death that came upon them. Untimely death is not an unknown feature in children’s songs—quite the opposite. Considering the tortoise-mother figure who claims to have lost her son jumping into the sea (and hence, as Pollux said, the performers imitate the movement) and contemporary songs about destruction and death, then the topic of loss is even more fitting. If we shift our focus from the nouns in these Sapphic fragments to the verbs, and if we read them as the traces of utterances of groups responding to each other, then our view can change. The verbs indicate playful movement, in which the apple-pickers and the shepherds are imagined in a role play. Ludic poetics could enter the wedding repertoire as a gendered performance.

3 Returns and Nostoi Recovering the Experience of the Bride

Returns Girls and Rituals: Weddings, Lament, and the Twisted Female Nostos The nuptial discourse and references to weddings are distinct and discernible in Greek poetry. I suggest further that in conjunction with nuptial themes, we often have an underlying adjacent theme of return. If we think of Telemachus in Book 4 of the Odyssey, as he witnesses a wedding, he remains an outsider fated to return to his hometown. Telemachus observes the wedding festivities and absorbs the tableau of wedding pleasure that unfolds before he returns to Ithaca.¹ Similarly, the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3 presents an episode filled with nuptial references focusing on Helen, the central protagonist, who will return to Sparta. To note a similar pattern for the episode with Odysseus and Nausicaa in Book 6 of the Odyssey, also filled with nuptial undertones, seems redundant, as everything is about, ultimately, Odysseus’s return. Any reference to the Peleus and Thetis wedding, one that involves a goddess, as also references to divine figures, such as Persephone and Aphrodite, among others, in epic contexts with nuptial undertones all refer to some notions of return. Weddings and returns are intricately connected. Wedding as a theme does not appear on its own. Poets weave it with the nostos theme, as also with lamentation. In classical literature, and tragedy in particular, the narrative presents a far more elaborate conflation of wedding, nostos, and lament. Weddings and laments have many things in common as rituals and narratives. Nostos, on the other hand, which might seem antithetical to wedding poetics as a wedding implies a passage to a new phase of life, governs nuptial performances in profound ways. The forces for nostos ultimately take over the nuptial theme. Greek tragedy consistently and abundantly plays with the “marriage to death” pattern that seems to have been a particularly effective channel to project twists of

¹ As Christensen 2020 has shown, reading the Odyssey from the perspective of modern cognitive psychology, Telemachus is a figure who has been “suffering from a deficient community, which has deprived him of a proper learning environment” (Christensen 2020: 48). Observing the wedding in Sparta becomes a learning opportunity for him.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0004

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fate in a way that the audience would sympathize with more deeply. The wedding song as a tradition lends itself to this kind of conflated synergy between the joyous moment and the tragic outcome; the procession that could be a happy occasion often turns into death. It is almost as if lamentation and wedding songs are the two sides of the same literary coin. It is not simply the centrality of processions that defines weddings and funerals as rituals but also the deeper connotations of human fragility evoked in both. Antigone’s death occurs where she was supposed to have her wedding with Haemon. She describes the death as if she is about to get married, whereas in a similar tone, Phaethon’s death occurs on his wedding day. We see a persistent pattern that intensifies the tragic by undermining the expectation of the seemingly joyous.² The negation of a wedding, as in Hippolytus, brings the subtle motif of the “failed” bride or groom as the time or place of a wedding twists into that of a funeral. The three tragedies that feature the protagonist’s return are the so-called happyended dramas that include nostos, namely the Iphigeneia in Aulis, Iphigeneia in Tauris, and Alcestis. Nuptial overtones, an avoided pseudo-wedding in the first two cases and the return from the Underworld in the third, feature the theme of return with a view from the female figure. A closer look at these plays shows that the focus is on the return without necessarily making a point about what situation the return will bring, playing with the assumption that the return is the telos that brings an end to misery. Iphigeneia’s trauma, stemming from her father’s manipulation and lies, is accentuated as she experiences a violent and brutal reality in which she becomes the perpetrator of violence as the priestess and sacrificer-inchief. The play emphasizes the process of making the return possible without completely avoiding the references to the coerced role of being a priestess with sacrificial duties.³ The blood imagery permeates the play in chilling terms, and that this is happening in lieu of a gamos is the foundation on which the edifice of ² See Rehm 1994, who was first to trace the “marriage to death” motif meticulously, a book that I return to and that has shaped my thinking over the years. There is more than just an “oxymoron” or an “attraction to opposites,” but, as he put it, “in some tragedies the juxtaposition proves so forceful that one ritual seems to engender the other” (Rehm 1994: 4). See also Swift 2010: 251–2, who has made important observations. See also Visvardi 2017: 71 about the experience of marriage as ritual death “common to most brides in Athens.” As Coo and Finglass note (2020: 9), “in the extant plays, marriage rarely (if ever) manifests itself as a positive and straightforward transaction or state of affairs, and notably it is the women whose interventions generally help to bring things to a catastrophic end: so we find characters who cause death and destruction after their husbands introduce a mistress into the household (Clytemnestra, Deianira) or abandon them for another woman (Medea), wives who take or desire to take an adulterous lover (Clytemnestra, Phaedra) and women who commit suicide because of some aspect of their marriage (Deianira, Evadne, Jocasta, Phaedra). In addition, the overlapping imagery and symbolism of marriage and death means that we also find strong nuptial association even in the cases of unmarried girls who die by suicide, sacrifice or murder (Antigone, Cassandra, Iphigeneia, Polyxena, the daughter of Heracles).” ³ On the importance of the theme of sacrifice in Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Tauris, see Sansone 1975; Zeitlin 2011; Latifses 2018. See also Goff 1999, who reads Iphigeneia in Tauris and the presence of rituals in it as an Athenian expression of anxiety about war. For marriage and sacrifice in Iphigeneia in Aulis, see Foley 1982.

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, ,    

Iphigeneia’s character as a priestess has been set up.⁴ The “failed” bride is an efficient killer of people imagined as “others.” She becomes a coerced warrior, an Amazon-like figure who was not tamed but tamed others, was not killed but killed, and did not bleed as a young bride but made others bleed. The return is the only solution in which she finds her land and oikos without the need to be integrated as a wife but as a priestess. What makes this play particularly intriguing, from my perspective here, is the etiology behind the return of Iphigeneia to Greece and Brauron, which was a historical receiving place of votive offerings of different sorts by young girls.⁵ The site was intended primarily for rituals for younger girls, although it is possible that prenuptial rituals also took place there. The younger girls were the ones “playing” the “bear” in expiation of the death of a bear beloved to Artemis. Excavations in Brauron have brought to light ancient girls’ toys, such as dolls, as toys were votive offerings to the goddess. The interweaving of play with ritual here makes us miss what could be the performances of these girls. What songs did they sing, if any? What roles did they play, and how? Did regular games that ancient girls played have a presence in Brauron? It is difficult to imagine that it would all be an entirely solemn enterprise for girls as young as eight. Let’s take at face value girls’ performances in the Artemis myth. There must have been a playful, perhaps even competitive, element in the roles they were possibly enacting, with the theme of the return being an active element: they all need to return to Brauron, the place of children’s rituals, before their wedding day, to give back the toys and elements of their childhood.⁶ The place, as such, is the repository of childhood items and childhood itself, but one that women would return to in different stages of their lives.⁷ The participation was probably not at the scale of the entire polis, which further suggests the importance of the narrative for select groups and the inherent social competition behind different groups of the polis. The attraction of the ritual was not just the one-time participation but rather the concept of once a member of the arkteia, always a member of the arkteia. In other words, rituals like that, such as the arrhēphoroi, take their value from the fact that one participation brings honor for one’s lifetime, an honor that one can always return to and claim as theirs in perpetuity.⁸ ⁴ For Iphigeneia as a priestess, see McClure 2017a. ⁵ As Redfield 2003: 106 notes, “The aitia of the ritual are about difficult relations with fathers and brothers because it is a rite not of union with a husband but of separation from the family.” For the sacralization of girls in Brauron, see Redfield 2003: 98–110. ⁶ For details on the arktoi in Brauron, see Pearlman 1983. See also Ar. Lys. 641–7, and schol. Ar. Lys. 645. For the nuptial character in the iconography of scenes pertaining to the arkteia, see SourvinouInwood 1991: 118–23. ⁷ Brauron was imagined as the place that enacted similar initiatory rituals to male ephebic rites in Athens. See Vidal-Naquet 1986: 97–9. Euripides’s IT presented on stage a fundamental etiology for the cult of Artemis which was important in women’s lives, and younger women’s, in particular, which must have contributed to the play’s popularity in antiquity. See Hall 2013: 43. ⁸ See Lysistrata’s proud claiming about her honor’s roll in Athenian ritual (Ar. Lys. 663–73).

     

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The rituals at Brauron have long been regarded as initiation rituals. More recently, Faraone finds faulty the claim that we have initiation rituals behind Brauron and that the comparison with either the male ephebic rites or the rituals in honor of “huntress” Artemis in Arcadia and the narratives associated with those can be misleading.⁹ He further argues that there has been more than a singular ritual over the years and that the rituals in Brauron, as also in Mounychia, should be seen not so much as initiatory but rather as part of the “appeasement” of a dangerous goddess, or “sacrifice” asking for protection rituals. In other words, we have an aggressive form of prayer that does not just ask; instead, through seemingly playful and innocent elements, ritual acts in Brauron allude to harsher narratives of people killing a sacred animal, an avenger divinity sending a plague to people, and demanding that young girls stand as a sacrifice to appease the goddess.¹⁰ As Faraone argues convincingly, one of the most interesting parallels for such rituals is the “state-mandated albeit private prenuptial ceremony (often called the proteleia) performed by the bride or by the bride and groom together, often in a shrine to Artemis, in order to protect the bride herself from that dangerous goddess, either generally or more specifically in the dangers of childbirth.”¹¹ Rituals like that do not have a preparatory or initiatory nature. One element of the narrative that is often overlooked is that we have the return of the goddess as an avenger divinity. The young girls become a “bear” (arkteuein) and return their toys as tokens to the goddess, while the proteleia as a ceremony returns to rituals seeking protection.¹² When comparing Brauroneia with arkteia, we need to acknowledge that later sources may conflate the “ursine” service in both. Both rituals probably involved wearing a saffron robe (krokōtos) and sacrifice to Artemis but, as Faraone remarks (2003: 62), neither “was in any way concerned with an agegrade initiation, a mystery cult or with any kind of preparation for or indoctrination about marriage.” Euripides refers to Iphigeneia herself as a proteleia (IT 718), making her the “would-be bride” in the “sacrifice.”¹³ The aition of the arkteia has a clear resemblance to the Iphigeneia story: both have Artemis in the center place, while a sacrificial victim (a deer in the Iphigeneia myth and bear or fawn in the arkteia ritual) becomes the locus of propitiation and aversion of violence for the girl. Euripides does not make an explicit reference to the arkteia ritual in his plays, yet

⁹ See Faraone 2013: 47 and Polinskaya 2013. For Euripides and Brauron, see Ekroth 2003. For Iphigeneia and ritual, see Wolff 1992. For the arkteia and how ritual is behind the plot in Euripides’s IT, see Tzanetou 1999–2000. ¹⁰ Or with sacrifices of goats in Mounychia, as the Embaros story shows. ¹¹ Faraone 2013: 60. ¹² For the proteleia and its associations with Athena, Artemis, and other divinities, see Parker 2005: 440. ¹³ Dillon 2020: 40.

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, ,    

the sanctuary where the ritual takes place is explicitly mentioned, so it becomes unlikely for any audience or reader not to make some connection.¹⁴ In Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Tauris, the protagonist proclaims her selfless act of choosing death to open the way for the expedition to Troy. At the same time, her sacrifice remains a thorny moment that casts a shadow on the narrative of Troy that will almost haunt it, as it becomes the reason why the heroes’ nostoi are not easy to achieve: the expedition itself lies on shaky moral ground that involves violence to a maiden’s body. Yet, as has been noted, “Despite this ambiguity, however, she still essentially remains a facilitator of a male movement that complies with the need of the community.”¹⁵ Iphigeneia has a forced migration; her life was saved when her own father endangered it with the pretext of a wedding, and she got transported far north. When she returns to Greece, making Brauron her new base, her new role will compensate for the violence she caused and the violence she almost received. With her return, it is almost as if the shadow upon the nostoi of the heroes of the Trojan War is lifted so that they can now return. Unlike the stories featuring male heroes, there is no trace of “consent” in her journey or any reason for taking it up. Her travels result from her travails, but she goes away and manages to come back closer to her natal land. A version of a nostos is partly achieved, and restoration and compensation have occurred. Iphigeneia shares characteristics with the Cassandra we see on stage. In a study that has illuminated the homecoming space and how space is a permeable and flexible category that also accounts for spectators and their perception, Rehm notes: “Cassandra’s entrance into the palace represents a complex of ‘homecomings’: that of a foreign slave incorporated by sacrificial ritual into the house of her new masters (Ag. 1035–46, 1056–9, 1296–8, 1310); that of a ‘wife,’ brought by her husband via marriage cart to her new domicile (950–5, 1039, 1070–1); that of the dead Iphigeneia’s living stand-in, who (as a Trojan) must pay along with Agamemnon for what happened at Aulis. Above all, Cassandra’s entrance marks the final, and singularly authentic, arrival from Troy.”¹⁶ The two heroines are modeled on a perversion of the bridal departures and returns. The ancient spectators would have perceived this intensely when considering the accompanying sounds and movements that reflect a nuptial setting. Similarly, several male heroes achieved a return with some restoration and amplification of their former role. A return can never fully restore time, space, and prior condition.¹⁷ The experience of the Trojan War has marred the return

¹⁴ See scholars who see an implied connection of the play with the ritual of the arkteia: Cropp 2000: 55–6; Tzanetou 1999–2000: 201–3; Swift 2010: 201; Biffis 2018: 171. ¹⁵ Biffis 2018: 169. See also Scheer 2018. ¹⁶ Rehm 2002: 81–2. For Cassandra as a potential bride and the complexities of the nostos theme, see Christensen 2019. ¹⁷ For the bride in ancient Greek marriage as a liminal figure who could never leave the natal family nor be integrated into the spousal family, see Gernet 1983. Gernet 1983 also considers the role of the

     

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just as Iphigeneia’s journey was marred by the violence inflicted on her. Like Telemachus in the Odyssey, tragedy’s Iphigeneia is a member of a deficient community that sought to destroy her physically, using her as a scapegoat. Her existence was threatened before it became threatening and even lethal to others.¹⁸ She had to pay the price, one put in sacred/ritual terms and justified by the divinity but not by her ethics. She achieves a quasi-nostos. In that regard, her nostos is the closest to the male war journey, which inflicts murders and killings at war. Iphigeneia’s nostos can be seen as morally ambiguous and as a redemption. The return of the non-bride and priestess is neither easy nor without a cost. This makes it part of the nostoi tradition that complicates returns in mythic and other literary narratives. With perhaps very few exceptions, such as the old hero Nestor, who might be a paradigm of old age and heroism, female heroines who return fit in the similar quasi-bride, failed bride, or non-bride paradigm. The wedding eluded them for different reasons, and a return of some form still occurred. This becomes a pattern that survives in narratives diachronically. The Modern Greek folk tradition embraces the figure of the wandering or returning bride, which becomes a powerful motif.¹⁹ In the ballad of “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune,” the young woman, who while weaving left her work unfinished, got married, went away, fell into misfortune, and returned. The poetics of interruption are at play here as the interrupted weaving acts like a force in the poem that makes her return home to finish it, echoing notions of magic. In patterns very similar to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the “bride” returns; we have a recognition scene with her mother and the young woman’s position in her old home is restored. The story can also be read as a parallel of the prodigal son pattern, where we also have a return of the son and a restoration to his old home by his father. In the prodigal son parable, the central figure, the one of the aberrating man, is the son, presenting the story from the father’s perspective; similarly, the “bride” figure gives the perspective of her natal family.²⁰ Audiences of oral traditions such as these are meant to sympathize with the father or mother who has “lost” their child through miscalculation, marriage, or other events. The ballad of “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune,” not unlike the Homeric Hymn to

epiklēros as a particular example. For a thoughtful analysis of gender spaces in the Greek imagination, see Konstantinou 2019, who discusses space in myth for divine and mortal women from the perspective of mobility. ¹⁸ Reading young heroes in terms of how they relate to their parents can give us more insights into character development. I read Iphigeneia as a more extreme parallel to Telemachus, who also lacked a father to protect and teach him. For scholarship on Telemachus that has influenced my thinking of Iphigeneia here, see Heitman 2005: 50–62 and Christensen 2019 and 2020. ¹⁹ For a fuller analysis of this ballad in conjunction with the narrative of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Karanika 2014: 192–203. ²⁰ I follow the narrative of the prodigal son parable in the gospel according to Luke 15.11–32.

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, ,    

Demeter, gets us in feminine territory. Throughout the poem, the protagonist who is named (Rene) is referred to as “bride.” The question is why. The female nostos of the bride or non-married woman becomes a reminder of things that can and do go wrong, as is typically the case in such narratives. Then the status does not change; she remains a “bride,” as if this is a prerequisite for the return home. In other words, the narrative carries the aura of the figure’s status in their natal home, so that they can return to it, despite anything that may have happened in between. Just like Persephone, who returns to her mother and restores her former self, the in-between is washed away or treated as a narrative that will not alter the character’s original status as a daughter. But for the male archaic heroes, the return is the ultimate goal. Similarly, for Iphigeneia, her goal is her exit from her gruesome priesthood and ultimate return. This is such a compelling motif that in narratives featuring a bride’s return, the achievement of nostos overshadows any prior misfortune. But like the Modern Greek ballad in which the woman is called a bride, Iphigeneia returns not married. Similarly, Persephone returns without immediately disclosing to her mother what happened with Plouton but restores through her narrative act moments before the abduction as she plays with her friends. In many such narratives, any initiation to a new phase is canceled, as it occurred either forcibly or against one’s will: the emphasis is on the return and the restoration of one’s place in the former home and context. As such, any crossing to a different phase of life (such as the bride’s transition to the married phase) is erased. The bride in this pattern never becomes a wife but returns as a bride. The in-between crossing is either effaced, underplayed, or brushed over, underscoring the return as the principal feature of the narrative. When Persephone returns, she reconstructs her choral moment, how she was made to leave the circle of her friends. Iphigeneia’s return in myth is reflected in the shared experience of the arkteia ritual for young girls. Similarly, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite leaves Anchises by entrusting their son to the nymphs (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 250–90). Returning suggests finding one’s group or else reactivating chorality in one way or the other. To give another example, the chorus of the Oceanids addressing Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, also remarkably self-conscious of their shared past and present, refer to the “very different” song they used to sing for Prometheus as part of the wedding rituals before his wedding with Hesione, their sister. The reference to a song type accompanying the ritual bath is particularly resonant here, as also the indication that sisters of the bride could perhaps sing this, suggesting a more complex gendered performance of wedding songs. The Oceanids do not disclose to whom their songs were addressed but imply that the occasion of their sister’s and Prometheus’s wedding brought them in their full singing capacity of a complete wedding song repertoire, from the bridal bath to the nuptial chamber, as they contrast the mode of choral singing in this context.

     

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τὸ διαμφίδιον δέ μοι μέλος προσέπτα τόδ᾿ ἐκεῖνό θ᾿, ὅτ᾿ ἀμφὶ λουτρὰ καὶ λέχος σὸν ὑμεναίουν ἰότητι γάμων, ὅτε τὰν ὁμοπάτριον ἄγαγες Ἡσιόναν πιθὼν δάμαρτα κοινόλεκτρον. And this song flew away with its wings utterly different, this wedding song, which I sang in honor of your bridal bath and bed on your wedding when you wooed and led my sister Hesione to be your wedded wife. (Aesch. Prom. 555–60)

The chorus here use the change of song to poignantly underline the change of fate for Prometheus and their sister, who is back with them, as is assumed. There is one important detail in their address to Prometheus: the participle πιθὼν and its allusion to the role of persuasion in wedding rituals. Prometheus is acknowledged as someone who has persuaded the Oceanid nymph, a detail that gestures towards consent. Τhe reference to Hesione as κοινόλεκτρος, a word used only in Aeschylus to refer to Cassandra in Agamemnon, a captive woman who did not consent and was enslaved (Ag. 1441), and here to Hesione, a wife (δάμαρτα κοινόλεκτρον), creates a stark difference between the two figures, complicating the reference to persuasion. Hesione’s return to her natal circles with her sisters is neither registered nor even alluded to. It is a conjecture that one makes based on the storyline. The myth has variants, and the figure of Hesione is elusive itself. Maybe she is not a failed bride but a wife whose husband failed her or someone who had to return to the world of the sea nymphs to which she belonged. As such, she is a foil for the other most famous sea nymph, Thetis, perhaps the most famous bride featured in wedding songs.

Emblematic Couples—Problematic Stories: Escapes The two couples that are consistently featured in wedding songs, and also depicted in vase iconography, are Thetis and Peleus and Helen with Paris or Menelaus. Both myths feature a divine or semi-divine figure like Thetis and Helen, respectively, and both brides elope. While Helen leaves Menelaus for Paris, then later leaves Paris for Menelaus, Thetis elopes away from her mortal husband, Peleus. Thetis was a shape-shifter, undergoing metamorphoses as she tried to avoid the wedding, only to succumb to marriage and motherhood but eventually leave her husband.²¹ Myths about female shape-shifting prolong the time about female agency as they ²¹ For Thetis, see Yamagata 2020. For a discussion of Thetis and her mobility in the Iliad, which is similar to the other Olympians, and its significance, see Konstantinou 2023.

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, ,    

undermine the time towards fixity and exchange, which is especially true for brides.²² The two stories are intricately linked as the events of the wedding of the one (Thetis and Peleus), as a stage for the judgment of Paris scene, led to the fate of the other (Helen and Menelaus/Paris). Helen did not undergo metamorphosis but the tradition of her existence as a phantom also suggests the versatility of her presence in myth, one that continued after her marriage and that transcends materiality. Viewing these two figures together as the two prototypical brides in the wedding song tradition can be illuminating, no less because their own stories in myth reflect old wedding rituals that span many centuries and different regions. These figures stem from a tradition that may have wanted to present them without agency in both cases. Thetis is a “victim” who succumbs to Zeus’s will and has no choice but to marry Peleus and carry out a prophecy. In contrast, Helen is a “victim” of another goddess, Aphrodite, who made her into a trophy for winning the beauty contest. In contrast, their appearance in early Greek epic suggests otherwise. They are both independent figures, emblematic presences with the type of diction that reflects other female performances (wedding songs, laments, etc.), and are used in the poetic tradition in diverse ways, possibly reflecting a gendered usage. Sappho’s Helen is inherently mortal, disregarding the tradition in which she also has a divine aspect, which is attested in cult. As Martin has shown, her epic persona encapsulates the master lamenter showcasing a poetic figure that can absorb other genres of performance which are refracted in her speech, including the wedding performance, as discussed earlier.²³ But in one poem in Alcaeus, typically read as a sympotic poem, we see the juxtaposition of the two most important figures of wedding poetry, Thetis and Helen. This poem seemingly celebrates one bride par excellence, Thetis, and makes specific reference to her legendary wedding—a testament to the myth’s centrality in wedding-related poetry; the poet seems to frame Thetis through the presence of Helen in its beginning and end. As Blondell has astutely remarked: “Thetis often appears as a paradigmatic bride (for example on wedding vases) but this is in part, paradoxically because of her notorious reluctance to be married (which betokens a proper virginal purity).”²⁴ Alcaeus makes no gesture of acknowledging here the complex tradition of Thetis’s shape-shifting but renders her a “normative figure.”²⁵ The juxtaposition of Helen and Thetis could not be starker, as Thetis is stripped from her multifaceted presence in epic to become a virginal bride tamed by her husband.

²² On that, see Canevaro 2018: 261, who writes: “As a commodified object, a woman who marries enacts a moment of exchange . . . In myths of shape-shifting, women delay or manipulate this moment, whether as bride or slave, and thus undermine the process of exchange. They become, as Luce Irigaray put it, the commodities that refuse to go to market.” ²³ See Martin 2008. ²⁴ Blondell 2010b: 355–6. ²⁵ Blondell 2010b: 356.

     

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ὠς λόγος, κάκων ἄ[χος ἔννεκ᾿ ἔργων Περράμῳ καὶ παῖσ[ί ποτ᾿, Ὦλεν᾿, ἦλθεν ἐκ σέθεν πίκρον, π[ύρι δ᾿ ὤλεσε Ζεῦς Ἴλιον ἴραν. οὐ τεαύταν Αἰακίδ [ς ἄγαυος πάντας ἐς γάμον μά [αρας καλέσαις ἄγετ᾿ ἐκ Νή[ρ]ηος ἔλων [μελάθρων πάρθενον ἄβραν ἐς δόμον Χέρρωνος· ἔλ[υσε δ᾿ ἄγνας ζῶμα παρθένω· φιλό[τας δ᾿ ἔθαλε Πήλεος καὶ Νηρεΐδων ἀρίστ[ας, ἐς δ᾿ ἐνιαυτόν παῖδα γέννατ᾿ αἰμιθέων [φέριστον ὄλβιον ξάνθαν ἐλάτη[ρα πώλων· οἰ δ᾿ ἀπώλοντ᾿ ἀμφ᾿ Ἐ[λένᾳ Φρύγες τε καὶ πόλις αὔτων. As the story goes, because of evil deeds, bitter grief came once to Priam and his sons from you, Helen, and Zeus destroyed sacred Ilium with fire. Not of the same kind, was the graceful maiden whom the noble son of Aeacus married, having invited all the blessed gods, taking her from the palace of Nereus to the home of Chiron; he loosened the holy maiden’s girdle, and the love of Peleus and the best of the Nereids flourished; and within the year she gave birth to a son, the finest of demigods, blessed driver of brown horses. But they perished for Helen’s sake—the Phrygians and their city. (Alcaeus, fr. 42)

Although most scholars seem to agree that we have a Helen and Thetis contrast here, since the name Helen is a reconstruction,²⁶ it is possible that a deeper contrast is implied between Peleus and Paris beyond the two brides.²⁷ Or that the attack is mainly on Paris and not on Helen, as the man who chose the “impure” wife who could only complicate things further for himself and his city that perished.²⁸ Neither of the female figures’ stories is presented in any detail and Alcaeus uses allusive poetics for two elusive figures in this poem.²⁹ ²⁶ Voigt reads Ἐ[λέναι at line 15 and D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 1.256 Ὦλεν in line 2 (which was also proposed by D. L. Page in his Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta). ²⁷ See Stehle 1997: 236–7; Rösler 1980: 235–6. Burnett 1983: 190–8 regards the two marriages, Thetis’s and Helen’s, respectively, as complementary as they both involve the destruction of Troy in their extended versions. ²⁸ For this suggestion, see Blondell’s remarks in Blondell 2010b: 353n19. For Alcaeus 42 as a poem not functioning on its own but possibly as a response to other poetry, see Caprioli 2012. See also Stehle 1997: 236. ²⁹ See Caprioli 2012: 34. Indeed, the poem has been thought to fit within a sympotic “Carpe diem” spirit, and Alcaeus is not as interested in the female characters per se (see Kantzios 2018 for more details).

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, ,    

Thetis, who is consistently a complex figure in the epic tradition, one that often appears as she emerges from the sea, and one who has become synonymous with bereaved motherhood, has her complexity erased in this poem. Her story is reduced to what Thetis from the continuum of the tradition would detest: a woman in our imagination, her initiation into sexuality in marriage by a mortal man. Yet Alcaeus chooses to celebrate this specific moment, ignoring anything else that could allude to her shape-shifting past, her elopement back to the ocean, and her bond with her natal world after she gave birth to her son. The focal point is the wedding, when the son of Aeacus (referring to Peleus) leads Nereus’s daughter to Chiron’s home, which results in the birth of the extraordinary Achilles, whose valiance destroyed Troy. The poem refers to Thetis’s body as it is impregnated, but Thetis is not named in the poem, whereas Peleus and Helen are. Helen’s appearance in Alcaeus seems more consistent as the origin of the Trojan War (also in Alcaeus, fr. 283 Campbell), a poem that brings the transgressions of Paris and Helen, paired with each other.³⁰ What is further noteworthy in Alcaeus 42 is the reference to Cheiron and the choreography of movement in space: from Nereus’s palaces (melathrōn), Thetis is led by the son of Aeacus into the house of Cheiron, ἐς δόμον Χέρρωνος, Alc. 42.9. Could that be a pun on the name Cheiron being close to Charon, as typically the phrase can be read as a reference to the phrase associated with the house of Hades? As Emma Aston has astutely remarked, Thetis and Cheiron are intricately interwoven in the way they are present in myth, both being antithetical and complementary figures, being Achilles’s mother and surrogate father figure, respectively. She comes from the world of fluidity and the ocean; he, on the other hand, comes from the world of “fixity” and the mountains.³¹ Thetis is a complicated figure. As Aston has remarked, her son invokes her “malignant” powers as she is not always a benign presence or the pleading mother we see in the Iliad. She is deeply connected with Thessaly. The name Sepias for a promontory on Mt. Pelion underscores the mythological connection with Thessaly; there are accounts of Thetis shifting into a cuttlefish (sēpia), a metamorphosis into a creature that can react to danger by masking and blurring its presence, a feature consistent with Thetis’s fluid presence.³² In one version, Thetis is even made a daughter of Cheiron. It is not clear whether Alcaeus would know an alternative tradition of Thetis being a daughter of Cheiron, as we only know this from postclassical sources, and she is clearly mentioned as a daughter of Nereus in this

³⁰ For Helen’s presence in this poem, see Boedeker 2012: 69–73. ³¹ See the excellent article by Aston 2009, who juxtaposes Thetis and Cheiron and their appearance in literature while also looking for their cultic connection as Thessalian figures. For Thetis and Cheiron, and also Cheiron’s role in Peleus and Thetis’s wedding, see Gregory 2019: 30–3. ³² For a detailed analysis of Thetis’s presence in the early Greek tradition, which also analyzes possible links between Thetis and Medea (and sources in which Medea marries Achilles) and the Argonautic tradition (including a love affair between Thetis and Jason), see Cingano 2023.

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passage. However, that Thetis is being received into the house of Cheiron, a pun of a kind of death for her, makes Cheiron appear not only as the educator of Achilles, as is known from the epic tradition, but also as one that shapes Thetis into the bride she has become. His fixity has tamed her fluidity. To a contemporary audience, a move from a palace to a house seems like a downgrading. That Thetis’s wedding is a downgrading in her mind, as also in the common imagination, there is no doubt; after all, she is a goddess married to a mortal. But Cheiron seems to be the mitigating figure that intervenes and not only makes the wedding happen but, in Alcaeus’s version, is the catalyst for making Thetis a paradigmatic bride. Why would Alcaeus do this? Such a poetic move has to do with the performance setting of this type of poetry. The sympotic, male, aristocratic context is not mutually exclusive with the wedding context: quite the opposite. The focus on the reference to the prototypical wedding and the making of an emblematic bride, tailored to aristocratic ideology, makes this an excellent candidate for the type of wedding performance celebrated within a male setting, as it promotes a masculine ideology. This could very well be a gendered performance at a wedding feast, meant as advice to the groom or perpetuation of the male aristocratic ideology. The discourse of olbos, although also part of the “epinician vernacular,” can point to a male sympotic appropriation of wedding songs and epinician language.³³ In other words, with the theme of weddings so central, and the sympotic context possibly a given, this could easily be the type of wedding song that would be enacted at actual wedding feasts and other symposia promoting a well-registered male ideal. Thetis’s past is erased, while her future is only present with reference to her only child and the clan’s male heir. That this is propaganda that reduces any female reaction to the role of the loving bride and mother of the glorious son is an understatement. Yet Thetis is juxtaposed with Helen, who has notoriously left not one but two husbands. Helen’s status as a wife twice and her returns are the stark antithesis of Thetis’s fixity as a bride. Ancient audiences were well known to compartmentalize mythic information. Ruth Scodel wrote an important article in the 150th anniversary volume of TAPA rereading Perry’s work regarding the ancient audience’s capacity to be served certain aspects of a myth which are neither complete nor accurate, as the myth would be known in a fuller spectrum of narrative.³⁴ Yet ancient audiences enjoyed and were comfortable with such compartmentalization. If anything, from what we see now, this not only was the norm but was expected and encouraged. The mythical material, especially concerning the presentation of women, was relayed in piecemeal fashion that could easily promote one ideology, undercut another,

³³ See Kantzios 2018: 8n21. Compare also Pindar’s Pyth. 3.88–95, which proclaims Peleus as the mortal who has achieved the “penultimate happiness”; see Kantzios 2018: 14n40. ³⁴ Scodel 2019, also discussed earlier.

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, ,    

and give a boxed narrative within its own parameters. Knowing a fuller spectrum of the narrative or, in other ways, understanding that myths have variants does not detract from the pleasure of any given narration of mythic events and angles that present a certain aspect and scene like the one here. Alcaeus’s song captures the moment of the leading of the bride. This operates in tandem with vase depictions from late archaic and classical times that present a staging opportunity for a specific scene. There is a significant correlation between the kind of staging that lyric poetry like Alcaeus’s poem presents and the kind of staging of the bride that the vase iconography chose to focus on. The poem and the visual perspective focus on a vignette, a scene that can be powerful in transmitting its message. The poem presents the exemplary mythical bride with no past, only briefly referencing her future of motherhood, in a highly reduced, easily transmissible form. You see it, consume it, and absorb it immediately. From a cognitive perspective, this kind of brief narrative, unlike a historiola, which draws from a fountain of tradition as it alludes to depths and layers of narrative that have been reduced, aims toward an iconization of a character. This iconization also serves a certain ideological agenda. Alcaeus’s poem, as we have it, ends with Thetis’s introduction to motherhood. Thetis, like Creusa, whom we discuss next, is another figure who is forced into sexual union and motherhood. Thetis becomes a “mater dolorosa” in the end, and the poem alludes to the Trojan end that involves her son’s death. Let’s read this from the perspective of Julia Kristeva’s essays on motherhood (and the “Stabat mater” essay in particular).³⁵ We see that the maternal body is the site of the “infolding” of the “other.” Being a mother means remaining the same while also experiencing permanent alterity. As Kristeva put it, “a mother is a continuous separation, a division of the flesh.”³⁶ The physical pain of becoming a mother becomes the epitome of motherhood and the maternal body’s being. As she put it, “One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain . . . a mother is always branded by pain, she yields to it.”³⁷ Aeschylus relates the ambiguity of the paean song, discussed in the previous chapter, when he presents Thetis referring to none other than Apollo’s performance at her wedding with Peleus.³⁸ Apollo, the god of music and paeans, performed a paean cry at the wedding, which delighted Thetis. Yet it was the same god who killed her son.

³⁵ Kristeva 1986: 178. ³⁶ See Ziarek 1992: 102. Kristeva has been criticized for her views on motherhood and feminism. Although I don’t necessarily agree with her theoretical stance throughout, I find her views on the maternal body as a locus of infinite separation as I read it illuminating for my purposes here. ³⁷ Kristeva 1986: 169. ³⁸ This is in one of the unattributed Aeschylean fragments (fr. 350 Radt). See discussion in I. Rutherford 2001: 124–5.

     

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τὰς ἐμὰς εὐπαιδίας νόσων τ᾿ ἀπείρους καὶ μακραίωνας βίου, ξύμπαντά τ᾿ εἰπὼν θεοφιλεῖς ἐμὰς τύχας παιῶν᾿ ἐπηυφήμησεν, εὐθυμῶν ἐμέ. κἀγὼ τὸ Φοίβου θεῖον ἤλπιζον στόμα ἀψευδὲς εἶναι, μαντικῇ βρύον τέχνῃ· ὁ δ᾿ αὐτὸς ὑμνῶν, αὐτὸς ἐν θοίνῃ παρών, αὐτὸς τάδ᾿ εἰπών, αὐτός ἐστιν ὁ κτανὼν τὸν παῖδα τὸν ἐμόν. . . . about the excellent son I would have, that he would have a long life and never know sickness; and after saying that I would have a god-loved fortune in everything, he struck up a paean which delighted my heart. And I hoped that the divine mouth of Phoebus, imbued with prophetic skill, would prove to be free from falsehood. But he who sang that song, he who was present at that wedding feast, he who said these things, he was the one who killed my son. (Aesch. fr. 284a Mette)

In this fragment, Thetis appears as a speaker who gives us the full extent of the tragic irony in her fate, signaling the wedding song as an omen for the duplicity of the god who performed it and of the genre itself.³⁹ It would be helpful to analyze Thetis’s role as a mother with a comparative approach. Let us compare the idealized mother figure of the son who died prematurely with the Virgin Mary. We can see some intriguing similarities that will help us comprehend archaic lyric poetics and the marriage performance tradition in greater depth. The biblical tradition of the devout young girl whose encounter with the archangel made her realize the drastic change that she would experience, was followed by a betrothal to a man, the adventurous birth of a divine child in a cave-like setting in a world where the natural and supernatural converge in multiple narratives. When focusing on the figure of the Virgin Mary, the next important episode in a sequence of many stories, other than the interlude of the Canaan wedding and Jesus’s first miracle of turning water into wine, is that of the grieving mother at the son’s crucifixion and death, until the time of her own death (or dormition) comes. The complete narrative that comes through the gospels and other sources can be iconized in vignettes that have become memorable, with the image of the mother and baby on her lap being by far the most important before we move to the image of the grieving mother at the crucifixion. Most of the other figures around this story, or even elements of the plot, are ultimately reduced to one scene: the image of the mother with the infant. The Madonna and Child form ³⁹ As Rutherford 2001: 125 put it: “To a reader aware of the genre’s ambiguity, and its strong association with Apolline violence, Apollo’s singing a παιάν at the wedding might appear to have been itself an omen of the future.”

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, ,    

a two-figured iconic moment, with, of course, a great degree of variation in its rich tradition of representation throughout the centuries in different places. This is obviously far more complex, as religious/cultic narratives are built around that iconic moment. We see, though, a tendency to have an iconic representation which both helps establish and promotes the role of the mother.⁴⁰ This is only one brief example, given here as an associate leap and parallel to make us understand the iconization technique of a poet/singer. Thetis’s image is reduced to that of the bride, as she often appears on vases in archaic and classical times. This iconization and reduction at the same time work well within the specific social, political, and ideological contexts that they help promote. From a forced bride, she becomes a mourning mother, one who can only return to her natal world with her sisters. Thetis’s role for Alcaeus’s sympotic audience, which is comfortable with this reduction technique, is that of the bride. Alcaeus’s listeners can easily ignore, overlook, or even momentarily completely forget anything else they may know about this specific figure. Instead, they indulge in this staging, which can bring a masculinized pleasure of confidence to their mind as the kind of audience that can be caressed by images of beauty and submission. What better example, then, than a divine bride brought to submission by a mortal king? But do audiences and viewers need to remember the rest of the story? Alcaeus manages to transform the story of the non-willing bride into one that not only submits but also even indulges in the pleasure of the sexual encounter, letting herself not only enter someone’s home but also a different world. To put it bluntly, the male phantasy becomes the social desideratum as the poem too easily erases any female sentiment, resistance, and fear. Alcaeus’s bride does not leave her groom; from being a bride she becomes a hero’s mother. There is no return to her father, as the rest of the epic tradition has trained us to know, and there is a kind of audience that likes this angle and celebrates it elsewhere. Iconization works well towards erasing details that could be uncomfortable to some in order to promote the masculine aristocratic goal, which remains oblivious to the female experience. Epic and lyric presentation modes are different from each other. We see that the epic subtly absorbs a multilayered narrative and discourse. The epic’s Thetis has returned to her father, just as the son turns to her in moments of need. In her fluid world of the Nereids, she is a pillar of a narrative that is steered by her presence, as she is thrown into a world that decides for her (Zeus), while she can put up resistance and return to her natal world. The narrative forces in Alcaeus, however, want the heroine to belong back in her pre-married life. But since motherhood

⁴⁰ My concept of iconization that I use for poetry here, as well as my interest in how motherhood is conceived and how impregnation and pregnancy are projected poetically, has been influenced by the work on the portrayal of the human fetus by Véronique Dasen, who focuses on material culture. See Dasen 2007. For the maternal body and the representation of the fetus, see also Dasen 2015: 113–52.

     

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occurred, she has been introduced to and reduced to the pain that brands her: a bride who eloped carrying her maternal body in a continuous separation. The young Thetis and the eternal Thetis can only exist in disunity.

Generational Dysphoria: From Medea to Creusa The older Van Gennep initiation model as a platform of interpretation for ancient rituals proves problematic when they are paired with narrative tropes that resist the passage to a new phase. Most female figures portrayed in early and classical Greek literature and myth are more concerned with resisting any initiation. Even with figures who voluntarily move into marriage (if we were to consider marriage initiation into a new phase), the theme of return lurks there as well, even if it involves violence, as with Medea.⁴¹ Medea can be read further as a figure who conforms to this pattern of the “failed” bride who returns. In Apollonius’s account, a trio of goddesses imposes their will on how Medea’s encounter with Jason is to evolve. Medea does not have complete control of her emotions; she is made to fall in love with Jason, making the coerced, overwhelming love the steering wheel of what is to come. It is striking how this character, with full agency and even knowledge of magical arts, is deprived of her agency as she is geared to a new direction by forces superior to her. Eventually, her agency will take over as she kills her children to avenge Jason’s betrayal. In this complex story, as infanticide can be read in so many ways, one thing to consider further is that this fits with the canceled bride motif.⁴² Medea returns, obliterating her past as a wife and mother. This is part of the wiring inherent in the heroines’ DNA: in other words, a female return cannot take place unless the past is somehow erased, as if it never happened. Medea could not go back to her native land, leaving her children behind. If her status as a wife was annulled by Jason, then her subsequent status as a mother cannot stand either. For her to continue her journey, she has to proceed as she left, namely as a woman whose misfortunes (even of her own doing) are left behind and any evidence of her entering the phase of wife/mother is expunged. Returns can only occur with restoration of a former self in some way. The mythic logic in those patterns lies in what Silvia Montiglio has astutely identified: “wandering and wedlock do not mix.”⁴³

⁴¹ For a juxtaposition of Iphigeneia and Medea from the viewpoint of how both use the language of public good or public terms, see Walsh 1979. For Medea as an example of the heroic woman taking control of her affairs with a determination that is at odds with classical prose writing on women, see Goldhill 1986: 115–17. ⁴² Medea exhibits “godlike” behavior in the final scene of Euripides’s Medea, not unlike other tragic gods who appear aloof from mortal affairs; see Swift 2017: 89. ⁴³ See Montiglio 2005: 17. The Greek mythopoetic tradition is not comfortable with wandering women, often marking them as maddened, which is especially the case for married women (e.g.,

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, ,    

Medea’s case complicates this pattern when we consider the greater tradition that portrays her as having a son from Aegeus, Medus, who ends up becoming the king of the Medes. From this perspective, her re-virginization through her homecoming operates within the Greek context, even though another son continues to live. In addition to the patterns that run through such myths, otherness exhibits itself dominantly. Medea’s other son, by some accounts a son of Jason, by others a son of Aegeus, is placed within a non-Greek context.⁴⁴ While the Euripidean tradition presents Medea as a figure of destruction, Valerius Flaccus, in his version of the Argonautic journey, situates her within the context of her natal family as her father’s daughter in ways that echo Homeric daughters. As Andrew Zissos remarks: “The reworking of the Homeric passage is characteristically thoroughgoing and meticulous. There are close and intricate correspondences on the level of motivation, description, dialogue, and even imagery. Just as Nausicaa’s physical splendour is illustrated by a simile comparing her to the goddess Artemis (Od. 6.102–8), so Medea’s is by a simile likening her to the goddess Proserpina.”⁴⁵ As Murnaghan has argued, maternity and mortality have a strong connection.⁴⁶ According to Murnaghan, this partly explains the cultural tendency towards murderous mothers in Greek culture. In a way, murderous mothers act like gods: they are the ones to give but also to deprive of life itself. It is maternity/ motherhood that generates mortality by the very act of giving birth. From that perspective, the wedding song performed at the occasion that prepares a couple to be generators comes close to the occasion of closure of life. They are projected as operating in similar terms. The likening to a goddess can have multiple registers, including the inherent danger to act like a goddess. Many mythical marriages involve some heroic journey, killing a monster, and the hero’s return, which can also result in a wedding. In what can be seen as a folktale motif, Perseus marries Andromeda after the monster is defeated, as does Oedipus Jocasta; Jason marries Medea, which suggests the motif of completing a task as one lurking behind the male nostos.⁴⁷ This motif arguably applies more explicitly to male characters. At the same time, we have either death (Jocasta) for the heroines themselves or for their children (Medea). In the first two cases, the bridal figure is problematized (with Jocasta being someone

Euripides, Bacchae), but there is a continuity indeed between a virgin’s and a married woman’s mad wandering (Montiglio 2005: 18). Mad wandering is associated with the murder of children, which is very pertinent in Medea’s presentation in Euripides. ⁴⁴ I owe this point to my colleague Andrew Zissos, when we were discussing homecomings in the epic tradition. For Medus as a son of Jason, see Hesiod, Theogony 1001; for Medus leaving Athens, see Apollodorus 1.9.28; Hyginus, Fabulae 26–7; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 4.56.1. On Medea as the king’s daughter, defined by her natal family, in Roman epic, and Valerius Flaccus’s treatment of her, see Zissos 2012. Relevant to the point I am making here is the passage in Valerius Flaccus 1.5.343–9, which Zissos 2012 discusses. ⁴⁵ See Zissos 2012: 101. ⁴⁶ See Murnaghan 1992: 243, 248–9. ⁴⁷ Bremmer 2021: XVII.

     

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already married, Medea never having a proper wedding), but we have failed motherhood in different ways. Three out of four of Jocasta’s children, Antigone and her brothers, end in premature death, with Ismene being a lost daughter of sorts in the Oedipus saga. In the case of Medea, the mother’s killing of her own children or their premature death in earlier narratives, as connected with the cult of Hera, a patron divinity of wedding, also show a point of disjunction. Such narratives equate motherhood with its negation or dysphoria (especially in Oedipus’s case), which carries into the next generation, and result in death— both for Medea’s children and Antigone as Jocasta’s daughter, as the ultimate carrier of generational/origin dysphoria. Antigone annuls her wedding moment, making it a wedding that can only be resolved through death by both parties, bride and groom to be. Marriage dysphoria is more explicitly expressed in tragedy by Electra in Euripides’s eponymous play. Near the end of the play, the appearance of the Dioscouri, brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra, figures pivotal in ancient wedding discourse, remark that Electra should be owed no pity, as she now “has a husband and home; she has suffered no other pitiful things except that she is leaving the city of the Argives” (Eur. El. 1311–13). As Nick Lowe remarks, this comment by the twin gods presents what can be seen as a “heroic lack of human emotional intelligence that only Euripidean machine-gods can display.”⁴⁸ To this remark, Electra responds with a spectacularly explicit phrase that can be seen as encapsulating the experience of her marriage: καὶ τίνες ἄλλαι στοναχαὶ μείζους ἢ γῆς πατρίας ὅρον ἐκλείπειν; What agonies (stonachai) are greater than leaving behind the border of one’s fatherland?⁴⁹ (Εur. El. 1314–15)

The word stonachai, which brings epic echoes and is used by Euripides here, is a deliberate choice to describe the emotion experienced by Electra. This phrase equates her marriage with leaving her fatherland, and the emotional situation which has the intensity of an agony that is not momentary but is instead described as a permanent trait of her married life. Electra is registered as a wife, not a bride, someone who has crossed that threshold, and as such, no full return can occur.

⁴⁸ Lowe 2018: 189. ⁴⁹ See Lowe 2018: 190. Lowe also remarks that the gēs patrias in the Greek text is “a close echo of Odysseus’ ‘nothing sweeter’ than one’s patris at Od. 9.28 and 34.”

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, ,    

While the emotion brings epic overtones, the reference to the fatherland seems inherently tragic and is used about the experience of marriage and beyond. Medea conveys a similar sentiment in the following extraordinary phrase, putting it in slightly different terms, namely that there is nothing worse than to be deprived of one’s fatherland and native space: μόχθων δ’ οὐκ ἄλλος ὕπερθεν ἢ γᾶς πατρίας στέρεσθαι. There is no greater trouble than to be deprived of one’s native land. (Eur. Me. 652–3)

The patria gē is a reference point for figures in different tragedies, including Hippolytus (1148), the Trojan Women (162, 857), Ion (483), Helen (522), Rhesus (932), and Sophocles’s Antigone (806). The tragic conception of the female existence in faraway lands is formulated through the sudden or even violent separation from one’s native land, identified as such with reference to the patrilinear space (“fatherland”). It is consistently portrayed as the ultimate privative experience that brings intense emotions and experiences. We also have collective marriages, such as that of the Danaids, as well as the myth of the Proitids.⁵⁰ In the story of the Danaids, Danaus instructs his fifty daughters to kill their husbands, sons of Aegyptus, on their wedding night. They are like “double agents” who wed but not lead a married life.⁵¹ They all do so except for Hypermnestra, whose husband respected her desire to remain a virgin. This is a rich story that possibly relates to ritual practices and alludes to the element of water and fluidity in multiple ways—the Danaids themselves may have been water nymphs that got assimilated into this story; hence their Underworld punishment to carry water in ever-leaking jugs. In this narrative, we have the crossing of a marriage threshold and the immediate return to their status as daughters (and not wives) through the cancellation of marriage. This marriage is annulled through murder, for which expiation (in some versions by Athena and Hermes) or punishment is expected.⁵² Yet we have one and only one Danaid who spares her husband’s life as she crosses the marriage threshold in that moment. Myths have shocking displays of personal and collective violence; as such, they deserve more attention to the cultural and ideological currents that shape them.

⁵⁰ For collective weddings, see Gernet 1981: 39–45 and 203. ⁵¹ For the privileging of natal families in Greek myth, see Lyons, who was the first to note the importance of the female adherence to her natal space (2012: 10–13, 85–8). As she astutely remarks (2012: 87), the woman in Greek myth “can be imagined as a kind of double agent, part of two families, that of her birth and that which she enters by marriage, but belonging fully to neither.” ⁵² The role of divinities in the myth of Danaids is intriguing. For a consideration of Ares and the nuances the presence of the god of war brings to the myth complicating the Danaids’ victimization and even enhancing their agency, see Konstantinou 2020.

     

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Violence, Girlhood, and Motherhood in Myth: The Case of Euripides’s Ion No other play brings the annulled bride figure and, with it, the trauma of rape more than Euripides’s Ion. Creusa, raped by Apollo, becomes pregnant and, without telling her father, carries the pregnancy and gives birth to a son whom she later exposes to die. Stories of exposing a child proliferated in myth and can be interpreted in different ways. Ion, like Oedipus, is destined to be king, but while Oedipus’s presence brings plague to his city, one that he doesn’t know was of his own doing, Ion’s story evolves differently. Ion is brought up as a pious servant in Delphi, serving Apollo, not knowing he is his father. Unlike Oedipus, Ion does not seek his identity.⁵³ The Creusa plot, romanticized as her child’s father is a god with the offspring returning to Athens as a king and god’s son, narrated in one of the few tragedies with a “happy” end that glorifies the city of theater, is still replete with the trauma of rape.⁵⁴ The tragedy often refers to the violence and the inversion of what would have been a “wedding,” so nuptial language twisted into new contexts permeates the text. ἔστιν γὰρ οὐκ ἄσημος Ἑλλήνων πόλις, τῆς χρυσολόγχου Παλλάδος κεκλημένη, οὗ παῖδ᾽ Ἐρεχθέως Φοῖβος ἔζευξεν γάμοις βίᾳ Κρέουσαν, . . . ... γαστρὸς διήνεγκ᾽ ὄγκον. ὡς δ᾽ ἦλθεν χρόνος, τεκοῦσ᾽ ἐν οἴκοις παῖδ᾽ ἀπήνεγκεν βρέφος ἐς ταὐτὸν ἄντρον οὗπερ ηὐνάσθη θεῷ Κρέουσα, κἀκτίθησιν ὡς θανούμενον. There is a well-known Greek city which has been named after Pallas, goddess of the golden spear. Here Phoebus mated by force with the daughter of Erechtheus, Creusa . . . she carried to term the burden of her belly. When her time came, Creusa gave birth in the house, then carried the baby to the same cave where she was forced to mate with the god and exposed the baby there to die. (Eur. Ion 8–11 and 15–18) ⁵³ If we read those tragic plots with a psychoanalytic perspective, it is interesting to juxtapose Ion with Oedipus as two “abandoned” children focusing on abandonment, a theme too familiar for ancient audiences. After all, exposure and survival are linked as an “epiphany of divine or heroic identity.” See Pedrick 2007: 38. In my reading above, Creusa is also an abandoned figure who also makes a homecoming of her own. ⁵⁴ See Rabinowitz 1993: 191, who underscores Creusa’s violated body. Hoffer 1996 also reads the suffering inflicted on Ion and the state. In a reading on the story of Helen as presented in Colluthus’s Abduction of Helen, an intriguing text in a different context, Morales 2016: 76 makes a very astute point: “rape generates rape at the level of story” in mythological tales, which she takes further to the level of discourse and how different myths in different authors are conflated (e.g., Claudian’s Proserpina is “through and against” Helen). This point about generation of rape narratives holds for different genres and is worthy of further attention in scholarly work.

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, ,    

Creusa not having been a proper bride or mother (now married to a nonAthenian, Xouthos) tries to find news of her son from the oracle of Delphi. She goes there first with her husband following, to inquire about their childlessness. Ion meets Creusa, and sympathy builds up, whereas Xouthos, who is told to greet the first man as his son, is more forthcoming towards Ion, who is the first man he sees. Creusa learns that Xouthos might have a son, and out of fear of bringing back a non-Athenian born as the future king of Athens, plots with an old (unnamed man) to poison Ion. Ion is saved as a passing bird drinks the poison intended for him; having escaped the death meant for him, he seeks revenge. Creusa finds refuge at the altar of Apollo. In the end, the Pythia, a prophetess and a “mother” figure, works the recognition scene, as the recognition tokens, which Creusa had left for Ion when she abandoned him, are brought to him, and Creusa recognizes Ion as her long-lost son.⁵⁵ Ion, in the moving end when mother and son are reunited, narrates his life just as his mother tells him her sorrows. Beyond the nuptial vocabulary (the word gamos is repeated throughout in the play, as in l. 941, when Creusa tells the old man, Φοίβῳ ξυνῆψ᾽ ἄκουσα δύστηνον γάμον, “Against my will, I was coupled with Phoebus on a bed of misery”) we see that the young boy recognizes the possibility that he is the offspring of a “wronged” woman and speaks to his mother with tenderness. In one moment, he asks her whether she bore him in girlhood: ΙΩΝ ὤμοι·: νόθον με παρθένευμ᾽ ἔτικτε σόν; ΚΡΕΟΥΣΑ οὐχ ὑπὸ λαμπάδων οὐδὲ χορευμάτων ὑμέναιος ἐμός, τέκνον, ἔτικτε σὸν κάρα. ION: Ah! Were you a young girl when you gave birth to me? Was I born a bastard? CREUSA: My wedding that brought you to light, my son, had no torches or dances. (Eur. Ion 1472–6)

Creusa responds that she had no wedding of torches and dances. Both mother and child have had a difficult childhood, and the recognition of this fact binds them. Creusa, in narrating to her newly discovered son the truth about his origin, fuses the language of virginity and the forced motherhood she experienced in order to come to terms with the act of exposing her child. When she bore him without her parents’ knowledge, she first wrapped him with a textile that she herself had made, the work of her “maiden” hands, her loom’s “wanderings.” This phrase is ⁵⁵ For the typology of the tokens and the recognition scene and how it unfolds, see Sloan 2016. The play has some intriguing similarities with Aeschylus’s Oresteia; for the agonistic relationship with the Oresteia, see Rynearson 2014. For the depiction of violence and rape, see Hoffer 1996.

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emblematic of the interruption of her maidenhood: she was made to “wander,” leaving behind her early youth’s “imperfect” weaving for the child, not a mature woman’s work. Textiles and the female body are particularly interwoven in the Greek imaginary. Having been “bound by fear” (l. 1498), she wraps the newborn with her maiden handiwork. None of the handiwork was destined for something like that, and yet her maiden handiwork is what embraces her newborn and soon to be exposed infant. In a way, her handiwork retains her status as a girl. ΚΡΕΟΥΣΑ δεκάτῳ δέ σε μηνὸς ἐν κύκλῳ κρύφιον ὠδῖν᾽ ἔτεκον Φοίβῳ. ΙΩΝ ὦ φίλτατ᾽ εἰποῦσ᾽, εἰ λέγεις ἐτήτυμα. ΚΡΕΟΥΣΑ παρθένια δ᾽ ἐμᾶς λάθρα ματέρος σπάργαν᾽ ἀμφίβολά σοι τάδ᾽ ἐνῆψα, κερκίδος ἐμᾶς πλάνους. γάλακτι δ᾽ οὐκ ἐπέσχον, οὐδὲ μαστῷ τροφεῖα ματρὸς οὐδὲ λουτρὰ χειροῖν, ἀνὰ δ᾽ ἄντρον ἔρημον οἰωνῶν γαμφηλαῖς φόνευμα θοίναμά τ᾽ εἰς Ἅιδαν ἐκβάλλῃ. ΙΩΝ ὦ δεινὰ τλᾶσα μῆτερ. ΚΡΕΟΥΣΑ ἐν φόβῳ, τέκνον, καταδεθεῖσα σὰν ἀπέβαλον ψυχάν: ἔκτεινά σ᾽ ἄκουσ᾽. CREUSA: And in the tenth circling of the moon, I gave birth to you secretly for Phoebus. ION: If this is true, what dear to me news you tell me! CREUSA: my mother’s I wrapped the work of my maiden hands around you, my loom’s unsteady weaving. I did not hold you to the milk of my breast, a mother’s nurturing, nor did I bathe you, but in a remote cave, for the beaks of birds a thing to kill and feast on, you were cast out to die. ION: What a dreadful deed that was, mother!

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, ,     CREUSA: My son, by fear was I constrained when I cast away your life! I killed you against my will! (Eur. Ion 1486–1500)

There is an inherent contradiction between her parthenia spargana and her kerkidos planous. The spargana are the fabric with which to embrace and protect a newborn. That they are called parthenia makes a striking juxtaposition as she transfers her virginity into the symbol of motherhood. Her misfortune is indicated by the adjective planous. The wandering and erring of the shuttle, as an instrument of agency for a woman, is what has captured the tragic wandering that ensued. In many narratives, the cloth element has a haunting power. What one leaves behind makes a return. In the poetics of interruption, a half-woven or even an abruptly interrupted textile that was given away has a gravitational force; a return will take place. It is no wonder that at this pivotal moment of the reunion, Creusa’s former handiwork, reappropriated to become the baby’s first clothes, although not meant to be for this, comes back to claim her as a mother. In a play that is very much about autochthony, the essence of Creusa’s tragedy is that she cannot become a bride or mother to her born child. Her journey must violently bypass these stages with regard to Apollo; violence was inflicted on her, and she inflicted violence by exposing her son. In her words, she describes it as murder. She herself has never left Athens, and, in a fast-forward action, we see her married in Athens. The final reunion with her son moves from her wronged girlhood to her restored motherhood.

Marriage and the Complexity of the Female Nostos Chryseis as a Heroine of Nostos Achieving kleos and nostos are arguably the main goals for the epic hero, and kleos and nostos, which are pivotal themes in Greek epic poetry, can also be seen as oppositional forces.⁵⁶ Kleos can be achieved without nostos, as with Achilles. While it is a commonplace to note that the Iliad’s first word describes an emotion, Achilles’s anger when Agamemnon took away Briseis from him, it is often overlooked that the first book of the Iliad deals with the complexity of female nostos through Briseis and Chryseis. Both girls were taken forcefully from their

⁵⁶ Achilles is a figure who cannot completely detach himself from the Achaean cause even when he is enraged and leaves the active fight; he has sabotaged his own nostos by remaining in the camp. For the complementarity and also the inherent antithesis between kleos and nostos, see the illuminating remarks by Murnaghan 2011: 44–5 and 110–11.

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communities. The Iliad’s first book presents a rare but achieved female nostos, that of Chryseis, the daughter of the priest Chryses, who gets his daughter returned thanks to Apollo’s intervention. Chryseis is a powerful silent figure, portrayed without emotion, as if she is a prop in a scene, acting on what is mapped as an inverted wedding, but also ultimately enacting a successful female nostos story. Mythological journeys are uneven for the female protagonists, often creating the general conception of the nostos as a primarily male heroic concern, while the positive paradigm is that of the woman waiting at home like Penelope. The paradigm of Clytemnestra is also given a lot of attention, especially in the Odyssey, as a protagonist in the negative male nostos story par excellence. Yet both female and male nostos are more complex than a simple linear narrative can do justice to. Looking at some stories from the broader poetic tradition, one sees a definite concern and often an uneasiness about the female journey and what it involves. The Iliad’s version of Chryseis’s nostos is about a forced slavery imposed on the young girl, which her father was able to change. Already in Book 1, we see Chryseis safely back to her father and her fatherland, Chrysa.⁵⁷ Later classical tragic renderings of the myth bring different facets of the same tales. Sophocles dealt with this in a lost drama called Chryses in which, as Tanja Scheer has astutely noted, “it seems that the author was aware of the ambivalent aspects of a female nostos, and that he adapted the tale for an Athenian audience of the fifth century .”⁵⁸ In this tragedy, as we know it from Hyginus (Hyg. Fab. 120), Iphigeneia and Orestes, on their way home, arrive at the island of Sminthe, where they meet their half-sibling, Chryses the younger, Chryseis’s son by Agamemnon. Chryseis had claimed that she was a virgin upon her return to her father, but she was already pregnant, attributing the pregnancy to Apollo. Like Creusa and Cassandra discussed previously, the mythical figures implicated with Apollo have complex journeys.⁵⁹ A return home can never be completely unblemished, unproblematized, and simply straightforward. Travel as a concept in antiquity entails a transformative quality that, in more than one case, leaves a certain tarnish on reputation or a hero/heroine traversing ethically ambiguous lines. This is true for both male and female nostoi, and it can refer to both the travels and the things that happen during them (Odysseus losing his companions) or things happening at home (Odysseus finding his palace in Ithaca taken over by the suitors, with what follows afterwards). In a sense, Chryseis’s return, one without a wedding but with the consequences of the forced slavery and rape that intervened, is presented in its

⁵⁷ For a reading that emphasizes the etymology of female names around Agamemnon in the Iliad, see Hoffmann 1992: 29–31. ⁵⁸ Scheer 2018: 138. ⁵⁹ On Apollo as a failed lover, see F. Kakridis 2009.

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, ,    

complexity even though the Iliadic narrative brushes over those details.⁶⁰ The tragic narrative doesn’t make Chryseis the protagonist but rather her son (by Agamemnon) in a sibling reunion story but it cannot leave untouched what the epic simply implies. Iphigeneia and Orestes have embarked on their own nostos, which also poses ethical questions since Iphigeneia was made a priestess with the grim duty of conducting human sacrifice. They meet their brother from a different mother, one who was forced to become a mother by their father, which also problematizes the mythical background. Although much of the epic material focuses on the male nostos, it nevertheless brings the entanglement of the female presence vis-à-vis the male return and the female journey on its own, primarily by looking at situations of violence, uprooting, and forced leaving of one’s home.⁶¹ Purgation and sacrifice (Il. 1.306–17) are necessary preparations before Chryseis’s departure from the Achaean camp.⁶² As with Chryseis, a nostos that is fulfilled despite the odds and one closely connected with the idea of marriage, the Odyssey pairs Odysseus, the nostos hero par excellence, with Nausicaa in a scene that is—as already mentioned—filled with nuptial characteristics.⁶³ The poem presents the two figures in almost antagonistic terms with regard to their speech performances, so the pairing of a returning hero with a girl of marriageable age can be another angle through which return can be further analyzed. Epic myth relates nostos with marriage too intensely. Similarly, Penelope, when Odysseus returns, faces a situation of having to choose a suitor.⁶⁴ In a way, her lack of nostos as the epitome of the waiting wife is a façade as she ⁶⁰ Lycophron in his Alexandra 187 had a version in which Iphigeneia herself is also a daughter of Chryseis. This brings together two different nostoi stories as it makes them a mother and daughter duo, both with their deeply problematized nostos and stories of violence perpetrated on or by them. ⁶¹ On the trauma to those left behind, see Weiberg 2024. For the distribution of spoils, and how women are being “allotted” to army leaders, see the article by Ready 2007: 4–13, who pays attention to a crucial detail, namely how epic renders the decision making about the spoils. Achilles says that the Achaeans were the ones to pick out Chryseis for Agamemnon (Il. 1.369) and reiterates multiple times that similarly the Achaeans picked out Briseis for him (Il. 1.162, cf. Il. 1.276, 1.392, 16.56, 18.444), which has implications for my reading here. If we read those lines from the perspective of violence and its silenced presence in epic, then we see here that the agency is given collectively to the army camp against those named women. In a reversal of marriage patterns, the many men lead the girls to their forced lives, and like Iphigeneia, Chryseis and Briseis appear as having no agency on their fate as others take their bodies. ⁶² The narration of the return of Chryses’s daughter is part of a tragic pattern in the Iliad, as the offended Achilles and the abused priest of Apollo are presented in parallel terms; see Rinon 2008: 23. For a reading that looks at the “circulation” of bodies, as well as ransom, and how the theme of revenge and mourning shapes the circulation of Briseis and Chryseis with regard to Achilles, see Staten 1993: 342–50. For the intersections of temporality and reciprocity, Agamemnon’s errors in returning Chryseis belatedly and its ramifications, see Widzisz 2012. For how the elements of nature seem to create an effect, and especially wind, see Purves 2010: 328, who looks at an important detail about the epic’s presentation of Chryseis’s nostos: “After the successful sailing that returns Chryseis to her father, the Achaean ships remain hauled up on the shore for the full length of the poem, facing not sea breezes but the metaphorical storms of violence and warfare that are stirred up on the plain.” ⁶³ For nostos as a theme in the Odyssey, see Heitman 2005: 11–13. For how the episode dwells “obsessively” on the possibility of Nausicaa’s marriage with Odysseus, see Louden 1999: 7ff. ⁶⁴ For Penelope’s wedding and Odysseus’s “instructions to remarry,” see Alden 2017: 128–31.

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manages the prospect of a new marriage, and, therefore, the possibility of a new journey for her, which she resists. In the case of Chryseis, tragedy, as we saw based on the testimonia we have, distorts the theme of nostos and chooses to dwell on different aspects of it.⁶⁵ Even motifs like bathing and clothing, which are typically present in scenes of nostos and play an integral role in Odysseus’s return home and his reintegration to his previous world, get distorted in the case of Agamemnon. Odysseus’s bathing and clothing are to be contrasted with those of Agamemnon, when he achieves his nostos only to be killed when he reaches home. Similarly, Iphigeneia, who must wash her hands as she is about to kill people who arrive at the Taurian shores, deprives others of their nostos just as she stays there deprived of her own. When Chryseis arrives at her fatherland, after Odysseus leads her to her father and leaves her in his hands, in this inverted wedding scene, the first thing that Chryses does as he is about to lead a sacrifice to the god is to wash his hands (χερνίψαντο, Il. 1.449). Nostos for both men and women has complex patterns in its presentation in Greek literature, intricately echoing the wedding theme.

Brides of Hades: A Female Catabasis Sophocles’s Antigone declares when she knowingly and willingly walks into her death that her wedding will be with Acheron (Ant. 815). Antigone as a figure has been studied extensively and from different angles. Antigone’s agency and how it is expressed in tragedy is an important perspective for many scholarly works. But this peculiar expression that she is about to wed Acheron is one of the earliest attestations of the bride of Hades theme expressed in a first-person narrative by the heroine herself. While Persephone is abducted and taken to Hades against her will, Antigone’s stance is emblematic of her own agency and willingness in this, so this formulation of becoming a bride to Hades gives a nuance that needs further investigation, beyond the theme of Totenhochzeit. In a way, walking to her death can also resemble a suicide. Virgin suicides are a topic beloved in the Greek literary tradition as a way for a young woman of marriageable age to define her status, eternalize it, and negate the transition into the status of a married woman. That tragedy depicts this as a firstperson initiative makes it even more worthy of attention. Antigone defies a tyrant’s new rules while aligning herself with the ritual norms as she has received them. She is more than a “resistance” figure. The heroine who is given a voice in Sophocles’s tragedy emphatically chooses to honor mourning rituals but defies wedding rituals. Just as the mourning and wedding rituals compete, they are also

⁶⁵ For this distortion and how it is used, see Alexopoulou 2009.

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, ,    

intertwined. The projected wedding with Acheron is with a supernatural groom, as Antigone practically rejects her earthly groom, her fiancé, Haemon. As Griffith has remarked, “gender lies at the root of Antigone’s problems.”⁶⁶ Haemon, as Antigone’s fiancé, is also a figure who leads himself into death instead of marriage. His suicide is described in almost erotic terms, as has been shown.⁶⁷ We need to acknowledge more the gender fluidity of both Haemon and Antigone as figures who wrestle between binaries, action and inaction, loyalty and defiance, family or city, wedding or death. As Peter Miller has recently argued, Haemon’s death is described as a defloration when seen in the light of medical literature. He “penetrates himself and bleeds in a cave, which is described as a wedding chamber, and during what are referred to as wedding rites (1240–41).”⁶⁸ In other words, the binaries of masculine vs. feminine action or death are inverted. The play problematizes masculinity and femininity, underscoring the gender fluidity in its young characters, ultimately constructed as an answer to the oppressing binaries around the figures. Hades as a divine groom is a theme which throughout Greek literature is connected with a sense of female agency; even young women, becoming brides of Hades, walk into their own destruction by dying. Yet this motif also showcases the rejection of initiation into a new phase prescribed for but not decided by women. In the brief treatise Peri Partheniōn within the Hippocratic corpus, we have the portrayal of an illness that affects young girls of marriageable age who experience visions of daimones and a desire for death. As Abby Walker has recently argued, the socially constructed “nature” of ancient Greek girls, experiencing social vulnerability around this period of life and a fear of failure to complete the transition into adulthood, meant that they explored suicide as a means to exert agency. This is a recurrent theme: from the classical mythical figure of Antigone to the fourth-century virgin Christian women who wanted to preserve their chastity for Christ, the divine groom, young women defied the expectation of marriage and chose to die by reframing it as a wedding with a divine husband. A common thread runs from Antigone to the Hippocratic corpus and Christian women, with Hades/ Bridegroom/Christ becoming a way to substitute one marriage for another, except that the substitution is their choice. As Walker further argues, in all these texts, we ⁶⁶ M. Griffith 1999: 51. ⁶⁷ See Craik 2002: 89–90; Miller 2014: 170–1; Ormand 1999: 79–98. See also McClure 2017b: 163 on Evadne in Euripides’s Suppliant Women, who commits suicide to join her husband Capaneus in his death, in a self-sacrifice mode which is described in heroic terms. Evadne is referred to as a “bride” (and not as a mother, although she was a mother to a son, Sthenelus, whom the play does not mention). ⁶⁸ Miller 2014: 171. Miller also underscores the similarities with Sophocles’s construction of Deianira in the Trachiniae, who also kills herself in a bridal chamber (Soph. Tr. 913) using a doubleedged sword (930–1) and who refers to wedding rites (920). In the tragic ways of killing a woman, where we have a mostly bloodless death (Loraux 1987: 14), Deianira’s and Haemon’s deaths, both reported by a narrator (messenger in Antigone, nurse in the Trachiniae), conform to a more complex pattern, one can even say “transgendered,” as Wohl 1998: 35 suggested for Deianira. For Liebestod as described in Antigone 1237–41, and Antigone as a “bride of Hades,” see Goldhill 1986: 102–4.

     

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have the pattern of disrupted female transition and the anxiety of being stuck between socially constructed categories. As she puts it: For the Christian virgins, bridal imagery is both a strategy for relief and the impetus for that strategy. Initially the marriageable virgin’s choice to remain a lifelong virgin seems to alienate her from her society and its social institutions. Having rejected marriage and childbirth, the female virgin is a social anomaly. Her lack of place means a dangerous lack of authority over her. In becoming a bride of Christ, her obedience and sexual loyalty to Christ was made equal to that of a bride to her betrothed.⁶⁹

Older scholarship focused on the ritual logic in such scenes, claiming that unused powers of reproduction, as would be the case with virgin deaths, enhance the notion of fertility possessed by an earth goddess, a sort of fertility rite manifested in those narratives and rituals.⁷⁰ Antigone’s insistence on administering proper rituals has understandably invited attention to the female role in ritual. More recently, scholars urge for more caution when privileging specific gender roles in death rituals.⁷¹ But as we investigate this now, we see that the quest for agency in a world built of binaries (obey or disobey, family or city, religious mores or human law, among others) is the steering motif. But beyond the agency, in such narratives, we can see how the emotional world is circumscribed, conditioned, but also expressed albeit in formulaic terms. Without supposing a universality of emotions that can be an underlying structure for the expression of emotion in such terms and actions, it is worth understanding why this formula of a wedding to a divine groom can channel emotions. When we study the death over marriage theme, the operative word should be “choosing.” These figures choose death over marriage. In other words, existing patterns are rearranged in a way that gives agency. Substituting a narrative that places an actual groom with one that places a chosen supernatural/divine groom reveals a complex emotional world: fear of what is coming, resistance to what is decided by others, allegiance to the status of girlhood can all go together as multiple underlying currents that bring the explosion of a chosen death. It is a control mechanism but one that can be socially acceptable within the norms imposed. It becomes a coded way of formulating agency. When opting to leave the socially prescribed path, the need to join another community emerges. By becoming a bride of Hades, one is not left alone but joins a community of other brides through a shared experience.

⁶⁹ Walker 2020: 94. ⁷⁰ H. J. Rose 1925. ⁷¹ See Hame 2008, who argues against the assumption that many make from tragic narratives that women were the predominant players in Greek funeral rituals.

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, ,    

Nostos is often intertwined with death or even conceptualized as death. That the female nostos is so intricately interwoven with marriage makes the female nostos echo lament and the motif of catabasis, otherwise primarily associated with male heroes. Persephone achieves her nostos but it involves a catabasis and return. The pattern of the failed bride also recalls a type of catabasis. The bride returns only after she has been through severe hardship in a way that brings her status down. Iphigeneia’s sacrificing of strangers makes her touch blood and death too intimately to not be seen as a catabasis. Conversely, Odysseus’s catabasis and the meeting between Odysseus and his mother is also a distorted nostos, as his mother is the person he expected to be at his home when he is to return. When nostos cannot happen, then catabasis offers a solution. When Persephone returns, the motif of the bride of Hades or bride in Hades is dominant, creating a “mental image.”⁷² Antigone famously says that she will marry Acheron (Ἀχέροντι νυμφεύσω, 816), while her burial chamber is presented as a bridal chamber in a conflation (804–5, 891–4, 1204–5), as mentioned earlier.⁷³ The motif of the bride of Hades is prevalent and offers an alternative to marriage while presenting an alias for it only with a more illustrious bridegroom. It implies migration from one space to the other but also negation of any return in the strongest possible terms. Dying before marriage transforms the dead young woman into a bride of Hades, making the status before any transition happens permanent. From now on, she can only be referred to as a maiden or bride, but not as a wife. While a nostos is erased, the reference to her as a bride also negates any possibility of completing a transition to a new phase. By remaining a perennial bride, she rejects altogether the possibility of leaving her natal family. A bride is about to step into a new life, only keeping this as a permanent title also erases nostos because the transition to the new phase never occurs. What may seem like a catabasis affords the possibility of a perpetual bridal presence. While one’s life may end, the characterization of the young woman as a bride gives her the illusion of the potential crossing, which never materializes, as she remains a forever bride. Death occurred, but marriage did not quite occur. In the case of Antigone, she remains a part of the natal family as she also had to negotiate the trauma of her brothers’ death.⁷⁴ It is no wonder that in most epigrams, the natal family mourns the “bride” (often the mother, father, sibling, but not the groom). A husband can mourn the wife, but the perpetual bride belongs to her blood relatives. From such a perspective, even the marriage of Persephone shows the centrality of natal families. As has been noted, Persephone’s

⁷² The transference of the “bride” to the funereal realm brings “visual connotations” with lasting effects. See Nünlist 2009: 194; Haubold 2013: 37; Ready 2018: 231. ⁷³ See Loraux 1987: 38 for the distinction between Bride of Hades, and bride in Hades, as a stronger and weaker version of the same motif. More recently, see Mackin 2018 for a discussion that also brings in ritual representations of this motif, as well as an analysis of Athenian burial ritual which embodies this ideology. ⁷⁴ See Butler 2000.

     

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marriage cannot be viewed as successful but rather as a failure, as Persephone spends a great time away from her husband, and she does not produce any children.⁷⁵ The bridal reference is not just a reference but a new identity. The catabasis, in other words, is not incompatible with nostos, as she never leaves the natal point of reference. She does not need to return because she technically never left. The multiple ideologies around what a wedding does for the bride intersect ultimately with the notion of return, potential return, or no need for return if one never left. They also show a fluidity; change does not have to be permanent. Wedding rituals may have been read as preparation for transition, but ultimately, as Gloria Ferrari has argued, brides do not experience the irrevocable transition to a new phase. Instead, marriage procedures, from the betrothal to the transfer of a woman to the groom’s house (ekdosis), are “governed by a basic metaphor of commercial transaction out of which spins a series of interrelated metaphors that are employed in rituals and in literary imagery.”⁷⁶ Just as the iconography of weddings points to the artificiality and reversibility of any changes, textual references position the “bride” figure closer to her natal family, even if this involves a catabasis rather than a nostos.

The Return of the Bride Singing the Bridal Dress Modern Greek ballads often dwell on the theme of the bride’s return. In one, referred to as “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune,” discussed briefly earlier in this chapter, folk poetics provide a different tweak to the theme of the returning child. As mentioned, a theme that also circulates in the prodigal son parable is that the returning child brings joy to the parent who receives it. Semiotically, we tend to see a one-parent reception of the child, and in both the biblical story and the Modern Greek folk ballad, the child is being received by the same-sex parent, the son by the father, and the daughter by the mother, respectively. In the Modern Greek ballad, we have a daughter who does not fall into misfortune out of her own doing but instead returns to her mother’s house from “foreign lands.” In this ballad, the mother recognizes her daughter in a moving recognition scene after she hears her daughter’s song as she sings at the loom, where she goes to finish what she had left unfinished when she married. I have analyzed this before in

⁷⁵ Mackin 2018: 224. ⁷⁶ G. Ferrari 2002: 183. For a discussion of the vocabulary of betrothal and ekdosis as replete with language about the economics of a transaction, see G. Ferrari 2002: 181–6.

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, ,    

conjunction with recognition narratives such as the one in the Hymn to Demeter which presents a mother-daughter romance.⁷⁷ What is further remarkable in this ballad is the song that becomes the aural recognition token, one that fuses different genres of performance: a work song that addresses her handiwork and her former tools for weaving, but also a clearly labeled wedding song that we know was quite popular in different manifestations in various places around Greece. It is like a lyrical monologue where the younger woman, repeatedly and emphatically referred to as “bride,” addresses her work tools.⁷⁸ It is as if the plot negates any transition to a married phase. Την πήραν και τη βάλανε στον αργαλειό να υφάνει Κι ώριο τραγούδι αρχίνησε, σα να ήταν μοιρολόγι. —Διασίσι, πολυδιάσιδο, καλού καιρού δασμένο, διασίδι, όταν σε διάζουμουν, ήρθαν οι συμπεθέροι, διασίδι, όταν σ᾽ετύλιγα, ήρθαν μ᾽αρραβωνιάσαν, κι όταν σε μισοκόπισα, ήρθαν για να με πάρουν, κι η μοίρα μου το ηθέλησε να ᾽ρθω να σε ξυφάνω. They took her and put her at the loom to weave, And she began a lovely song, as if it were a lament. —My warp, my dear warp, woven in good times, my warp, when I was weaving, the groom’s family came, my warp, when I was wrapping you, they came to betroth me, and when I left you in the middle, they came to take me, but my fate wanted that I come back to finish you off. Της νύφης που κακοτύχησε (“The Bride who Fell into Misfortune”) ll. 38–44

The emphasis on threads, weaving, and weaving tools points to the imagery of fate around a thread that someone’s hand leads, showcasing tactile aesthetics. The making of the bridal dowry or the bridal dress is often the focal point for wedding songs. While this independent folk song has found a perfect place within the extended ballad narrative and becomes the channel of the recognition scene and the catalyst that will unite mother and daughter, it also presents some further crucial elements in understanding the ancient and modern wedding song tradition. Ballads, like larger or shorter epic poems, include the shorter lyric traditions and can evoke them openly, as in this ballad of “The Bride who Fell into ⁷⁷ Karanika 2014: 192–200. ⁷⁸ For full text and translation, see Karanika 2014: 193–4. My translation here is slightly different.

     

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Misfortune,” or as is the case more subtly in others. The song above, arguably in a work-song context as a weaving song, is attested separately as a wedding song. We have a panoptic of oral performance at work as different genres are interwoven. While ballads have a plot with a beginning, middle, and end, the greater lyric tradition evoked tends to be more circumstantial: it has embraced songs one would sing to praise the bride or groom, songs the bride would sing as a weaving song, or songs performed during the formal preparation for a wedding. Yet these shorter ones that also survive often independently are more ad hoc songs, often narrating the wedding ritual itself, elaborating on it, or presenting ritualized aspects of a wedding. In some cases, as in the cases of work songs that have been turned into wedding songs, an additional characteristic is worthy of more attention: there is a subtle allusion to magical practices, not necessarily marked as such. Namely, we may have a case that the song preserves magical practices or alludes to them; a song could be a remnant of a chant or even be performed as such, yet the inclusion within the ballad or even its independent performance may not be openly connected with magic as such. In the case of the ballad of “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune” her song addresses the “warp.” One of the most typical characteristics of magical incantations is to address the tools of the trade. In the ballad’s embedded song, the woman creates a narrative around the warp’s work, which she was steering. She got married when her handiwork was half-done and will finish it now that she has returned. The idea of half-done work is haunting in different traditions around the world: Penelope’s half-done work has a magical connotation. What she leaves unfinished drags her to complete the task. As she negates her own work by “unweaving” it, she is drawn into a self-induced circle of constant work. The thread she steers ultimately steers her life in a manner that evokes sympathetic magic. In another popular short wedding song, of which different versions circulate around Greece, the performers (typically a chorus of women collectively) address the bridal dress and praise its splendor. The expected magnifying effect is introduced right at the beginning, as the song itself relays that ten maidens and eighteen tailors were sewing it with a distinctive arithmetic precision. In this short song, again, we have an embedded wedding song, of which different variations survive independently. The work and wedding themes are interwoven emphatically. The performers introduce a song within a song, as one girl (“like May’s lily, young and fresh like the dawn”) combines sewing with singing. The song within a song is no other than a magical incantation, which has appropriated the praise and the blessings tradition. The solo performer, referred to as the young girl, could be imagined as the bride-to-be or a bridesmaid. She expresses the wish to the bride (and, in another interpretation, herself) to have as many years and as many blessings as the decorations on her dress, with the same line repeated at the

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, ,    

end, namely the wish to have as many years and as many blessings as the stitches on her dress. Της λυγερής το φόρεμα, της νύφης το φουστάνι της νύφης το φουστάνι, δέκα κορίτσια το ᾽ραβαν και δεκοχτώ ραφτάδες και δεκοχτώ ραφτάδες. Κι ένα κορίτσι λυγερό σαν του Μαγιού τον κρίνο και δροσερό σα χαραυγή, ράβει και τραγουδάει. Όσα στολίδια νύφη μου έχει το φόρεμά σου τόσα να ᾽ναι τα χρόνια σου και τόσα τα καλά σου. Νύφη στο νυφοστόλι σου ανάβουν δυο λαμπάδες στον ουρανό παν οι φωτιές, στη γη οι νοστιμάδες. Όσες ραφές και βελονιές έχει το φόρεμά σου τόσα να ᾽ναι τα χρόνια σου και τόσα τα καλά σου.⁷⁹ Τhe slender girl’s dress, the bride’s dress, the bride’s dress, Ten maidens were sewing it, and eighteen tailors, and eighteen tailors. And one girl, slender like May’s lily, fresh like the dawn, sews and sings. May, my dear bride, you have as many years and as many blessings like the ornaments on your dress. Bride, on your bridal way, they are lighting two candles, and the fire goes into the sky, the delicacies to the earth. May, my dear bride, you have as many years and as many blessings, like the stitches and needle piercings on your dress.

This song is strategically elusive. On the one hand, we have the image of the dress and the maidens and tailors working on it, a chorus of people performing handiwork, and on the other, one maiden becomes the leader who is singing as she is sewing. The two images could or could not be connected. It is not clear whether the singing maiden is one of the ten girls working on the dress. Why would that matter? The figure of the singing maiden as she works could be the leader of the chorus, so to speak, among the other working girls around her. The other part that is not clear is whether she is the bride, in which case this would be a self-addressing incantation or whether she addresses one of the girls in the bride’s entourage who leads the chorus. The performers of the song could be in a nuptial setting—while ⁷⁹ For the first part performed from Lesbos, see https://www.domnasamiou.gr/?i=portal.el.songs& id=730. I have recorded a different song in Pelion, which talks about the blue (presumably blue-eyed) girl, in my personal archive.

     

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making the bridal dress—or they could perform this simply as a song that is beloved and evoked in different occasions, including that of work. Although this is labeled as a wedding song in a bridal context, it can also be performed in other circumstances, something that shows not only the intergeneric connections but even more the multiplicity that a song like this enables for the characters of its narrative and its performers. A daily task, such as sewing here, is transformed into a ritual act in the nuptial context. Domestic tasks and household tools can often be ritualized, while a simple song can allude to an incantatory utterance. The young woman here who is using the needle on a bridal dress becomes a ritual agent who transforms the domestic space and time into a ritual.⁸⁰ The utterance of a blessing which evokes sympathetic magic (“may your years be as many as the adornments on the dress”) presents a rather subdued ritual moment which the wedding context energizes in a covert way: through a work song. Rituals of binding or charming were often connected with domestic tasks and simple gestures of daily tasks that needed to be completed. It is precisely the availability of the material aspects (tools like a needle) that makes the transformation into a ritual activity possible, only here, in an evocation of a collective event, the making of a dress to be seen publicly, plural aesthetics and solo performance are merged. The gendered soundscape is particularly intriguing: while the song implies wealth and aristocracy for this bridal dress, with ten young girls and eighteen tailors working on it, it is the figure of the one girl that takes center stage: as a prima ballerina in this chorus of skilled men and women, she stands out due to her beauty and talent in both sewing and singing. The order of these activities is significant, as it is the first that enables the other. The work at hand is the initial platform for the song to be sung and then for the song to become a crypto-charm amid references to beauty, work, and blessings. The remaining nuptial activity with the lighting of the bridal candles is also evoked and adds to the ambiance that the song within the song creates. As mentioned earlier, and as is often the case in bridal poetry, metapoetic awareness is consistently present. The song, performed presumably at weddings, refers to a proto song, an exemplum of a bridal song sung by a young woman, among others, as they all work on the bridal dress. The incantation is simple and straightforward and could even be regarded as a naïve recasting of the ritual blessings in a more personalized manner, coming from one close to the bride (if not the bride herself). In this case, the aesthetics of this song are not that far off from vase paintings that present wedding preparations, in which the figure of the bride, as it is believed, is featured in more than one scene around a vase, as if we have small vignettes that compose a scene. The young woman who works on the bridal dress becomes the group leader as she performs ⁸⁰ For the ritualization of domestic tasks throughout the ancient and medieval world, see most recently Frankfurter 2021.

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, ,    

her song, which seeks to bestow blessings on the coming event. Could we have a working bride? Could the young woman be the figure of the bride? She stands out in ways that make it a possible association in folk poetics. In this case, if we have the bride’s song, as a song within a song, in a framing that makes the young woman and her solo song the focal point, the focus of the evoked soundscape makes more sense. This exemplifies the equation between “I” and “we” but also the collective and the solo work together. Suppose we are meant to understand the “I” as expressing personal experience. In that case, we should not forget that in performance, the song evokes the solo song but is performed by a chorus of many women participating. Just as the many workers of the bridal dress are the song’s focal point in its first half, we have many people who typically sing this song collectively. Those working on the bridal dress are like the song’s actual performers: working in unison. Other instances in folk literature support such a stance. We often have the character of the bride herself that weaves or embroiders, and then anything she may leave half-done or undone becomes a haunting element in the narrative, which will bring her back to her former home and work. The Penelopean doing and undoing suggests a deeper cognitive association. Anything that is not quite finished or completely undone retains a captivating power in ancient imagination.

Haunted Returns In the ballad of “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune” discussed earlier, the bride who leaves her handiwork half-finished resembles a magic practitioner. She got married, went away, misfortune came, and then she came back and was reunited with her mother as she came to finish what she was working on. Each working move of her hands brings a line to her song. Like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, this ballad focuses on two women, and the plot of a return for a figure that remains a “bride.”⁸¹ The bride that leaves and returns from faraway lands is a theme that runs through many folk traditions. One of the best-known and studied ballads of the Modern Greek folk tradition is the ballad of “The Dead Brother” (Του νεκρού αδερφού), which relays the story of a mother with nine sons and one daughter. When matchmakers come from Babylon for the young girl, eight brothers are against marriage so far away, whereas the ninth, Konstantes, tells his mother they should give her to the foreign lands so that when he goes there he will have someone, he won’t be a “stranger.” The mother is distressed, and Konstantes takes an oath. As in ancient literature, an oath is one of the most powerful speech acts, and this ballad enhances it. He takes an oath that whatever it takes, death or disease, he will bring her back. After some time, Arete, the sole sister, goes away, and all the brothers die. The mother, being alone, laments for her sons, but she reserves a bitter curse for Konstantes for sending her daughter away. Lament is ⁸¹ For a reading of this ballad with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Karanika 2014: 182–200.

     

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known to be powerful, but this lament is staged as one with a curse embedded in it. The ballad carefully marks those speech acts, the oath and the curse. Folk narratives often present embedded speech acts like an oath and a curse: such acts can only be fulfilled. The poem even explicitly states that the curse was so powerful that Konstantes came to life to fulfill his former oath to his mother and bring his sister back. Let us see some snippets of this ballad that can reveal more: Μάνα με τους εννιά σου γιους και με τη μια σου κόρη, την κόρη τη μονάκριβη την πολυαγαπημένη, την είχες δώδεκα χρονώ κι ήλιος δε σου την είδε! Στα σκοτεινά την έλουζε, στ’ άφεγγα τη χτενίζει, στ’ άστρι και τον αυγερινό έπλεκε τα μαλλιά της.

5

Προξενητάδες ήρθανε από τη Βαβυλώνα, να πάρουνε την Αρετή πολύ μακριά στα ξένα. Οι οχτώ αδερφοί δε θέλουνε κι ο Κωσταντίνος θέλει. «Μάνα μου, κι ας τη δώσομε την Αρετή στα ξένα, στα ξένα κει που περπατώ, στα ξένα που πηγαίνω,

10

αν πάμ’ εμείς στην ξενιτιά, ξένοι να μην περνούμε. —Φρόνιμος είσαι, Κωσταντή, μ’ άσκημα απιλογήθης. Κι α μόρτει, γιε μου, θάνατος, κι α μόρτει, γιε μου, αρρώστια, κι αν τύχει πίκρα γή χαρά, ποιος πάει να μου τη φέρει; —Βάλλω τον ουρανό κριτή και τους αγιούς μαρτύρους,

15

αν τύχει κι έρτει θάνατος, αν τύχει κι έρτει αρρώστια, αν τύχει πίκρα γή χαρά, εγώ να σου τη φέρω». Και σαν την επαντρέψανε την Αρετή στα ξένα, κι εμπήκε χρόνος δίσεχτος και μήνες οργισμένοι κι έπεσε το θανατικό, κι οι εννιά αδερφοί πεθάναν,

20

βρέθηκε η μάνα μοναχή σαν καλαμιά στον κάμπο. Σ’ όλα τα μνήματα έκλαιγε, σ’ όλα μοιρολογιόταν, στου Κωσταντίνου το μνημειό ανέσπα τα μαλλιά της. «Ανάθεμά σε, Κωσταντή, και μυριανάθεμά σε, οπού μου την εξόριζες την Αρετή στα ξένα!

25

το τάξιμο που μου ταξες, πότε θα μου το κάμεις; Τον ουρανό βαλες κριτή και τους αγιούς μαρτύρους, αν τύχει πίκρα γή χαρά, να πας να μου τη φέρεις». Από το μυριανάθεμα και τη βαριά κατάρα, η γης αναταράχτηκε κι ο Κωσταντής εβγήκε.

30

Κάνει το σύγνεφο άλογο και τ’ άστρο χαλινάρι, και το φεγγάρι συντροφιά και πάει να της τη φέρει. Παίρνει τα όρη πίσω του και τα βουνά μπροστά του. Βρίσκει την κι εχτενίζουνταν όξου στο φεγγαράκι. Από μακριά τη χαιρετά κι από κοντά της λέγει:

35

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, ,    

«Άιντε, αδερφή, να φύγομε, στη μάνα μας να πάμε. —Αλίμονο, αδερφάκι μου, και τι είναι τούτη η ώρα; Αν ίσως κι είναι για χαρά, να στολιστώ και να ‘ρθω, κι αν είναι πίκρα, πες μου το, να βάλω μαύρα να ‘ρθω. —Έλα, Αρετή, στο σπίτι μας, κι ας είσαι όπως και αν είσαι».

40

Κοντολυγίζει τ’ άλογο και πίσω την καθίζει. Στη στράτα που διαβαίνανε πουλάκια κιλαηδούσαν, δεν κιλαηδούσαν σαν πουλιά, μήτε σαν χελιδόνια, μόν’ κιλαηδούσαν κι έλεγαν ανθρωπινή ομιλία: «Ποιος είδε κόρην όμορφη να σέρνει ο πεθαμένος!

45

—Άκουσες, Κωσταντίνε μου, τι λένε τα πουλάκια; —Πουλάκια είναι κι ας κιλαηδούν, πουλάκια είναι κι ας λένε». Και παρεκεί που πάγαιναν κι άλλα πουλιά τούς λένε: «Δεν είναι κρίμα κι άδικο, παράξενο μεγάλο, να περπατούν οι ζωντανοί με τους απεθαμένους!

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—Άκουσες, Κωσταντίνε μου, τι λένε τα πουλάκια; πως περπατούν οι ζωντανοί με τους απεθαμένους. ... Βρίσκει την πόρτα σφαλιστή και τα κλειδιά παρμένα, και τα σπιτοπαράθυρα σφιχτά μανταλωμένα. Κτυπά την πόρτα δυνατά, τα παραθύρια τρίζουν.

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«Αν είσαι φίλος διάβαινε, κι αν είσαι εχτρός μου φύγε, κι αν είσαι ο Πικροχάροντας, άλλα παιδιά δεν έχω, κι η δόλια η Αρετούλα μου λείπει μακριά στα ξένα. —Σήκω, μανούλα μου, άνοιξε, σήκω, γλυκιά μου μάνα. —Ποιος είν’ αυτός που μου χτυπάει και με φωνάζει μάνα; —Άνοιξε, μάνα μου, άνοιξε κι εγώ είμαι η Αρετή σου».

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Κατέβηκε, αγκαλιάστηκαν κι απέθαναν κι οι δύο. Mother with your nine sons and your one daughter your only daughter, the one who is dearly loved, you had her for twelve years and the sun never looked at her. She was washing her hair in the dark, combing it with no light, and was braiding her hair at the stars’ light. Matchmakers came from Babylon to take Arete far away to the strange lands. The eight brothers are unwilling but Constantine consents. “My mother, let us give Arete to the strange lands, the strange lands where I walk, the strange lands where I go. So that if we go far away, we will not be like strangers.” “You are prudent, Constantine, but you have spoken poorly.

      And if death comes, my son, and if sickness comes to me? And if bitter fate or joy comes, who will fetch her for me?” “I am putting the heavens as a judge and the holy martyrs, if death comes, if sickness comes, and if bitter fate or joy comes, I will bring her to you.” After they married off Arete to the strange lands, and a leap year came and angry months, and death befell and the nine brothers died, the mother was found alone, like a lonely reed in the fields. She was crying in all the tombs, she was lamenting in all but in Constantine’s tomb she was letting her hair loose. “Damn you, Constantine, and thousand times damn you, you who exiled Arete to the strange lands, what you promised me, when will you do this for me? You put the heaven as the judge and the holy martyrs, if bitter fate or joy comes, you would go to bring her to me.” And from the thousand “damn you” and from the heavy curse the earth was shaken and Constantine came out. He makes the cloud his horse and the star his bridle, and the moon his companion to go and bring her to her. He takes the mountains behind and the mountains in front, he finds her as she was combing her hair out in the moon, he greets her from afar and from close by he tells her: “Come on, sister, let us leave, let us go to our mother.” “Oh, my little brother, what is the rush this time? If it is for a good reason, let me adorn myself to come but if it is for bitter reasons, then let me put on black clothes.” “Come, Arete, to our house, and be as you are.” He brings the horse down and makes her sit behind him. On their way, birds were singing, but they weren’t singing like birds or like swallows, they were singing and speaking in human speech. “Who saw a beautiful bride dragged by a dead man?” “Did you hear, o Constantine, what the birds are singing?” “Little birds, let them sing, little birds, let them speak.” And then further away, other birds were saying: “Isn’t it a shame and unfair, a curious thing indeed that the living men walk with those who are dead!” “Did you hear, o Constantine, what the birds are singing that the living walk with those who are dead.” ...

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, ,    

She finds the door locked, and the keys taken and the house’s windows tightly fastened. She knocks hard on the door, the windows creak, “If you are a friend, cross and come, if you are my foe, go, and if you are the Bitter Hades, I have no other boys and my wretched dear little Arete is away, in strange lands.” “Come up, mother, open, come up, sweet mother!” “Who is knocking on my door and calling me ‘mother’?” “Open, dear mother, open, and it is me, your Arete.” She went down, they hugged each other, and they both died. (Παραλογή Tου νεκρού αδερφού, 1–52, 73–82) In a tour de force, this ballad echoes the two most powerful speech acts, oath and curse, the son’s and mother’s, in competition and collaboration with each other. They will both be fulfilled, echoing magical beliefs. Konstantes finds Arete, who keeps wondering why he looks so different, leading her to her mother, and the moment of recognition is cut short by their embrace and subsequent death. We have little information about how and when this ballad was composed, but one clear thing is the allusion to nuptial poetics in the first part, which focuses on the mother-daughter relationship. The mother takes care of her daughter, and the scene is redolent with magical allusions and the language of bridal songs as well as bridal preparations. The mother carefully washes and combs her daughter’s hair under the light of the star, named Avgerinos, often a simile used for the groom in folk wedding songs. The ambiance of darkness and night intensifies the magical elements of the ballad as it paces the wedding negotiations, Konstantes’s oath, Arete’s departure, the mother’s laments and curse, and ultimately the daughter’s return. In both these ballads, “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune” and the ballad of “The Dead Brother,” the young woman returns. Lament and nuptial poetics are carefully interwoven and alluded to throughout. These narratives are less about the bride’s departure and more about her return. In the first, the bride comes back as a prodigal son figure, and the ballad ends in a solemn but happy tone, whereas the second is more sober and darker. The poem ends by marking the mother-daughter embrace and death as an abrupt final iconizing moment for this narrative. For both shorter and longer folk narratives, we see a language of similes, metaphors, and, at times, emotions, often with references to female work.⁸² It is not atypical that the longer of such narratives allude to epic and tragic patterns of

⁸² For similes in epic, see Minchin 2001: 138–9 and Canevaro 2018: 162–5, both of whom regard similes as being more than adornment or imagery, guiding image making and interpretation. For similes as subgenres, which epic as “super-genre” has utilized and included, see Martin 2020b: 47–71.

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the return of the bride or the young woman. The wedding preparations and prenuptial settings, often elaborately described, are only an excuse for the moment of the return, which captures the folk attention—so much that it erases anything that happened until the return, including the marriage. As such, it perpetuates the image of the “bride” as an eternal figure who left but ultimately returned to her natal embrace, dead or alive.

4 Decoding the Nuptial Poetics Multiple Codes in a Spin: Homer, Erinna, and Visions of Spinning from Early to Late Antiquity Had nature me deformed fac’de, Or had I not Vlysses seene, Or had he neuer me embrac’de, Or in his bed had I not beene: Then maiden-like had bin my care, Not widdowlike, thus neede I fare. With distaff thus I needed not drudge, Nor yet with wheele have worne my hand: Nor want of sleepe needed I thus grudge, Nor tired thus a-twisting stand¹

Spinning: Introduction In Peter Colse’s late sixteenth-century pamphlet, Penelope is given a voice and a poetic “I” which oscillates between praising Ulysses, her absent husband, and complaining about her solitude filled with wool working: Had she not gotten married, she would not have had to work with those tools like a spindle and a wheel that fill her time, energy, and domestic space. A desire to redo her personal story permeates the poem. She refers to the different types of tools for spinning, a task that can be done sitting or standing. As she does so, she brings up spinning in three different lines. The connection with number three, as three were the Fates, is a well-registered motif. The reference to spinning tools is her way to rewire her life and take a new thread, even if only in her fictional world and with her imagined voice. Spinning gives her the platform for that “I,” one of which she is in charge and control.

¹ In Peter Colse’s 1596 pamphlet Penelope’s Complaint: or A Mirrour for wanton Minions (B3), Penelope complains that by marrying Ulysses she got solitude; if she had avoided such a marriage, she says, she would have avoided spinning as the preliminary stage of wool working. In three of the four lines here, we have reference to the wheel (sitting woman) and drop spindle (standing woman) as the tools of spinning. Spinning gives Peter Colse’s Penelope the voice of complaint. See Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 112.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0005

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Spinning is present in scenes filled with nuptial references. This section revisits the representation of spinning in ancient Greek literature and art and its intersection with nuptial poetics. It argues that spinning is a motif that represents the mobilization of female social networks as it becomes a coded reference for double entendre, depending on the audience. It particularly focuses on the subtle ways spinning authorizes female speech in literature. From Arete in Homer to Erinna’s Distaff and Annunciation scenes in late antiquity, literary record and visual imagery make a case for multiple spins of meaning.²

Spinning in Homer and Classical Literature Spinning is a mobile wool-working task; it does not require spatial fixation, yet it is usually connected with the female space. A metaphor for poetics, poetry making, the unraveling of a story or narrative elements but also the spinning of fate, it is one of the activities most densely imbued with meaning in literature and art. Mobility and nobility are often connected in archaic Greek poetry, so the patterns present in Homer and elsewhere stem from deeper linguistic and cultural contexts and become a well-registered literary sign of female presence. Let us first see who the spinners in Homer are, and how spinning forms a gendered ideological and poetic pattern in epic. In the Odyssey, individual women who are portrayed spinning occur in a wellregistered pattern: married queens, all of whom seem to exert a considerable amount of agency upon themselves and others, and certainly in their immediate space—Helen, Arete, and Penelope, in order of appearance in the poem. More notably, all these three women are also connected with the production of song and kleos. They are actively not only managing their time but, even more, navigating complex situations in their homes. These women are not alone; they stand out but are surrounded by other women, often maids. In some cases, their wool working is a tool that places them in a more extensive network of women. Melissa Mueller has seen textiles as a coded form of communication that allows women to “circulate” their kleos independently of them.³ Gifts can be dangerous in Greek literature, yet Mueller reads them as the material locus the literary tradition projects onto them as traces of female networks. These female networks are depicted as actively participating in others’ lives, if not designing them. Helen receives gifts from other women, as the Odyssey text very clearly notes; Alcandre’s

² For visual accounts of spinning, see Stears 2001. For the Fates spinning in Homer, see Dietrich 1962 and Pantelia 1993. For connection with destiny and its close association with funerary but also wedding and giving birth contexts in the Roman world, see Cottica 2007. ³ Mueller 2010.

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distaff and basket are gifts given by a woman to another woman, evocative of everything that gift giving is in Homer: hospitality but also a sense of danger, a detail that I will revisit. Helen herself gives a gift to Telemachus for his future wife—the ultimate product of wool working that started with a distaff. This is a wedding gift, in other words, in a situation without a wedding (Od. 15.125–6). Helen’s gift registers nuptial undertones, but no wedding is in the immediate present, past, or future for Telemachus at the time of their encounter. This is a crucial detail, as Helen’s wool working itself is enabled by prior gifts, such as Alcandre’s distaff. The tool facilitates the process, so the distaff that Helen brought from Egypt back to Sparta facilitated her gift. Let us look at this passage in more detail: ἐκ δ᾿ Ἑλένη θαλάμοιο θυώδεος ὑψορόφοιο ἤλυθεν Ἀρτέμιδι χρυσηλακάτῳ ἐικυῖα. τῇ δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἅμ᾿ Ἀδρήστη κλισίην εὔτυκτον ἔθηκεν, Ἀλκίππη δὲ τάπητα φέρεν μαλακοῦ ἐρίοιο, Φυλὼ δ᾿ ἀργύρεον τάλαρον φέρε, τόν οἱ ἔδωκεν Ἀλκάνδρη, Πολύβοιο δάμαρ, ὃς ἔναι᾿ ἐνὶ Θήβῃς Αἰγυπτίῃς, ὅθι πλεῖστα δόμοις ἐν κτήματα κεῖται· ... χωρὶς δ᾿ αὖθ᾿ Ἑλένῃ ἄλοχος πόρε κάλλιμα δῶρα· χρυσέην τ᾿ ἠλακάτην τάλαρόν θ᾿ ὑπόκυκλον ὄπασσεν ἀργύρεον, χρυσῷ δ᾿ ἐπὶ χείλεα κεκράαντο. τόν ῥά οἱ ἀμφίπολος Φυλὼ παρέθηκε φέρουσα νήματος ἀσκητοῖο βεβυσμένον· αὐτὰρ ἐπ᾿ αὐτῷ ἠλακάτη τετάνυστο ἰοδνεφὲς εἶρος ἔχουσα. ἕζετο δ᾽ ἐν κλισμῷ, ὑπὸ δὲ θρῆνυς ποσὶν ἦεν. αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἥ γ᾽ ἐπέεσσι πόσιν ἐρέεινεν ἕκαστα . . . And Helen came from her fragrant high-roofed chamber, appearing like Artemis with the arrow of gold; and Adraste came with her, and gave her a beautifully constructed chair, and Alcippe brought a rug of soft wool and Phylo a silver basket, which Alcandre had given her, the wife of Polybus, who lived in Thebes, in Egypt, where great wealth of things can be found in their palaces. ... And separately, his wife gave to Helen also beautiful gifts—a golden distaff and a silver basket with wheels, with rims gilded with gold. The house servant Phylo brought this basket and placed it beside Helen; the basket was filled with finely spun yarn, and across from this basket was the distaff, ready with violet-dark wool all around it. So Helen sat on the chair, with a footstool for her feet below, and she immediately with her words questioned her husband for each matter and said . . . (Od. 4.121–8, 130–7)

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Epic tends to present scenes with work tools, like the distaff above, before presenting female speech. But in this scene, more is going on as the poet describes the different objects with details of their origin and traces of past gift giving to Helen. As Mueller has put it, “Helen has effectively inserted her name into the royal lineage of Ithaca: she has positioned herself as chief designer, or architect, of Telemachus’s future marriage.”⁴ To add to this, Helen, without giving many details, aligns herself with the future of a man’s wedding by giving him a preemptive wedding gift. From this perspective, she is like the famous Fates “designing” the sequel to Telemachus’s story. She creates a thread that leads to his marriage and a linear connection between herself and his undisclosed and absent wife, as someone from the younger generation, but aligns herself with his mother, the noted queen of Ithaca, and her kleos, as has been argued. If she acts like a Fate on Telemachus, she does so discreetly and with limits; she names a wife, but not the wife, in a “to be continued” fashion. Telemachus is only an intermediary; what matters to her is the women’s network, one that has absorbed her presence by virtue of a former gift (Alcandre’s distaff) and one that she places herself into by virtue of a present gift for a future purpose. Why does it have to be named as a wedding gift? It could easily be a hospitality gift like Alcandre’s, yet it is specifically mentioned as a wedding gift for a future wedding. This allows Helen to enhance her agency in the situation at hand by functioning as a prophetess. She herself, at some point, notes that she is prophesizing: τὸν δ᾿ Ἑλένη τανύπεπλος ὑποφθαμένη φάτο μῦθον· “κλῦτέ μευ· αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ μαντεύσομαι, ὡς ἐνὶ θυμῷ ἀθάνατοι βάλλουσι καὶ ὡς τελέεσθαι ὀΐω. ὡς ὅδε χῆν᾿ ἥρπαξ᾿ ἀτιταλλομένην ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐλθὼν ἐξ ὄρεος, ὅθι οἱ γενεή τε τόκος τε, ὣς Ὀδυσεὺς κακὰ πολλὰ παθὼν καὶ πόλλ᾿ ἐπαληθεὶς οἴκαδε νοστήσει καὶ τίσεται· ἠὲ καὶ ἤδη οἴκοι, ἀτὰρ μνηστῆρσι κακὸν πάντεσσι φυτεύει.” τὴν δ᾿ αὖ Τηλέμαχος πεπνυμένος ἀντίον ηὔδα· “οὕτω νῦν Ζεὺς θείη, ἐρίγδουπος πόσις Ἥρης· τῷ κέν τοι καὶ κεῖθι θεῷ ὣς εὐχετοῴμην.” Long-robed Helen took the word from him and spoke with authority: “Hear me, and I will give you my prophecies as the immortals put them in my heart, and as I think things will be fulfilled. Just as this eagle came from the mountain, where his kin can be found, and where he was born, and snatched up the goose that was being raised in the house, so shall Odysseus will make a return to his home after many toils and many ⁴ Mueller 2010: 12.

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, ,    

wanderings, and he shall take his revenge; in fact, even now he is at home, and is sowing the seeds of evil for all the suitors.” Then again inspired Telemachus answered her: “May Zeus, the loud-thundering husband of Hera, grant this; then I would even pray to you, as to a god.” (Odyssey 15.171–81)

Nothing a Homeric character of this standing would say is left without it becoming reality. She subtly utters a prophecy for Telemachus, acting like the chief designer of his fate, but also ceding to his mother for the specifics. In other words, we have a collaborative agency here: Helen’s crypto-prophecy unfolds in a phatic statement to be finished by Penelope, the ever-finisher of her own wool work. Like collaborative poets, who in a seemingly agonistic relationship, work together towards a common goal of profit for poetic activity, enhancement of their status, and agency in their professional lives and civic presence as they change places, Helen, an expert poet again, actively seeks collaboration.⁵ Her act of giving is not innocent, just as no gift in Greek literature is entirely innocent. It will continue the “memory of her hands” through someone else’s hands. Everything is a matter of timing. Helen could not give this gift outside of a wedding context as she wants to be part of a situation that ties Telemachus with her memory, ushering herself into the next generation of another kingdom. Gifts are most appropriate when they are part of beginnings, as a wedding is, but the timing is critical. When that time comes for Telemachus, he will follow. For Helen, as the chief architect of this enhanced network of women, this means that we have the management of time and temporality. The choice of the words ἐς γάμου ὥρην (Od. 15.126), gesturing to the appropriate time for this wedding, presents Helen outside of time, precisely like a Fate would be. These are not synchronous actions, nor does Helen function synchronically in the poem. Her story precedes the Trojan War of the Iliad and its aftermath of the Odyssey and will long exceed it. Like a divine figure, Helen can function outside time and on her own terms. “δῶρόν τοι καὶ ἐγώ, τέκνον φίλε, τοῦτο δίδωμι, μνῆμ᾿ Ἑλένης χειρῶν, πολυηράτου ἐς γάμου ὥρην, σῇ ἀλόχῳ φορέειν· τῆος δὲ φίλῃ παρὰ μητρὶ κείσθω ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ. σὺ δέ μοι χαίρων ἀφίκοιο οἶκον ἐυκτίμενον καὶ σὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν.” ὣς εἰποῦσ᾿ ἐν χερσὶ τίθει, ὁ δ᾿ ἐδέξατο χαίρων.

⁵ On bards’ performance and collaborative poetics, see the very insightful paper by Martin 2000. The views in this eye-opening paper about how bards worked in performance, collaborating with each other, have shaped how I view the female presence and speech act, and how it unfolds here.

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“In my turn, I am giving this to you as a gift, my dear child, a memory of the hands of Helen, for the day of your much-wished marriage, for your bride to wear it. But until then, let it lie in your halls with your dear mother as its intermediary keeper. And for yourself, I wish that you may return joyfully to your beautifully built home and your native land.” Thus, she spoke and put it in his hands, and he took it gladly. (Οd. 15.125–30)

Helen’s wool working relates to her nostos. She herself has achieved her nostos. The distaff and all the gifts she has received and their memorialization in poetry become material references to her achievement of nostos, the kind that not even Odysseus has managed to achieve. Helen has left, returned, and brought gifts; she is seen when they celebrate her daughter’s wedding as Hermione is about to leave, making the homecomings of the past merge with the departures of the present. There is one other figure associated with spinning but also nostos, a nostos not of her own but of her husband’s: Penelope, a figure connected with time par excellence, as her famous ruse manages time. For Heidegger being and time are unfinished entities. If we were to read Penelope’s weaving from that angle, we would see that both her being and time are unfinished. Penelope goes against any expectations of her products outliving her; she is focused on one thing only: to enable new beginnings. The goal is not to finish a product but to always begin. It is from this perspective that we have a cyclical time. Penelope suppresses any desire to surpass time, meaning that while we have references to textiles throughout epic poetry, their own journeys, their own time, one that can outlive their creator’s, Penelope actively engages in the undoing of what could memorialize her hands, in sharp contrast with Helen. When Penelope meets anew the disguised Odysseus on Ithaca, for her a stranger, she similarly sits, spinning thread (17.96–7). Spinning is a code for beginning. She can’t begin to weave unless she has the thread ready. Her connection with the beginnings of women’s work is emphatically placed here, as she is about to set off a new wedding for herself. The text plays between the perspectives. She will have to choose a suitor, yet the stranger/husband will be a new marriage for her as the scene signals new twists to the plot and a nostos that will be achieved. The other important woman who first appears as sitting silently at the hearth and “spinning sea-purple thread” is Queen Arete, an enigmatic Fate-like figure who is single-handedly responsible for Odysseus’s nostos. As Justin Arft has noted, spinning connects Arete to “the matrix of gendered roles for mortal women in the epic.”⁶ All these women are implicated in new beginnings. In terms of the appearance in the Odyssey of those three spinners, we see Helen first, who acts almost simultaneously with Arete as Odysseus is still in limbo, and Penelope as

⁶ Arft 2022: 237.

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, ,    

Odysseus’s nostos unfolds. Arete is central to Odysseus’s nostos in unique ways. If spinning has a prophetic flavor to it, as we saw with Helen, Arete fulfills that as a prophet and agent. She acts like a prophet and Fate-like figure at the same time, acting not like a queen but like a Moira. As Arft has put it: “Of all the types of transitions and transformations Scheria might afford Odysseus, this transition from cyclic, martial, wandering hero to nostos hero is the single most important sea change in the epic, and Arete is its primary facilitator.” It has already been noted that Arete has been functioning like a Totenkönigin (or “queen of the dead”).⁷ Several scholars have discussed her as someone with divine status, which is explicitly mentioned in the Odyssey:⁸ ὣς κείνη περὶ κῆρι τετίμηταί τε καὶ ἔστιν ἔκ τε φίλων παίδων ἔκ τ’ αὐτοῦ Ἀλκινόοιο καὶ λαῶν, οἵ μίν ῥα θεὸν ὣς εἰσορόωντες δειδέχαται μύθοισιν, ὅτε στείχῃσ’ ἀνὰ ἄστυ. She is honored and has always been so honored by her children and by Alcinous himself and by the people, who look upon her like a goddess, and address her accordingly as she goes through the city. (Od. 7.69–72)

Arete’s interrogation of the identity of Odysseus, which stems from a long history of the centrality of such interrogations in epic and ritual, can also be read as part of an inverted “prophetic” encounter. Odysseus comes to her, she doesn’t know who he is, but this doesn’t matter to her, so she will not insist on uncovering his identity. It is Alcinous who will retrieve Odysseus’s story. Arete is the one to enable its beginning. As Martin has astutely suggested, Odysseus’s entrance into the palace of the Phaeacians could have been based on a model of instructions for a trip to the dead that ancient audiences knew well. It could well be then associated with those “map and script” texts.⁹ Then Arete’s distaff as part of her placement on this map and script is even more evocative than we expect, as it is placed within a ritual setting of expectations of a divine, Fate-like figure, with full authority as people look up to her like a divinity. Looking back at these three spinners, Helen, Arete, Penelope, they stand out in a macroscopic reading of the epic as those spinning the thread of Odysseus’s nostos. They are all queens who steer the poetic plot as they guide the main hero. Weaving and wool working are a marker of time (not only of space), as has been argued.¹⁰ These activities function like a clock that measures time, as in Penelope’s ⁷ For the transition of Odysseus to a nostos hero and the quote above, see Arft 2022: 238. For Arete as a typological multiform, see Arft 2022: 108. For Arete as a “queen of the dead,” see WilamowitzMoellendorff 1920: 491–2. ⁸ See Skempis and Ziogas 2009; Frame 2009: 341–9. For affinity with Persephone as an Underworld queen, see Nagler 1980: 105 and Cook 1992: 248–9. See also Cook 2012. ⁹ Martin 2020a: 205–16; see also Arft 2022: 114–16. ¹⁰ Karanika 2020a.

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case, but the absence of the product also negates time. Weavers have a unique sense of time; time is part of their measuring, but it also reflects productivity and value (weavers know all too well how many hours or days are necessary to make something). Spinning, though, is a different story. Spinning enables weaving; it enables beginnings, so it is charged with a different meaning. This close association with marriage and a nuptial context (in Arete’s case with Nausicaa, we have seen the nuptial context throughout) bring it close to the matronas of the Odyssey, who are also themselves in some form of bridal role: Helen, herself a bride and mother of the bride, sending a gift for a wedding of Telemachus with a nondefined bride; Arete, a mother of a bride-to-be, Nausicaa, an eligible bride; Penelope, herself a mother of Telemachus, mother of a groom, but also connected with Helen, and she herself a target bride for one of the suitors with no wedding date in sight. What we see even more, is that the bridal role is played in weddings that have not yet been fully arranged, but with a sense of indeterminacy.¹¹ The text also marks the intersections with the maternal aspect. In Od. 17.96, Penelope is explicitly mentioned as a mother, in a narration that seems to give Telemachus’s perspective. Similarly, Arete is seen (Od. 6.53) spinning sea-purple fabrics just when the text marks her as a mother (μητρί, Od. 6.51) of Nausicaa, who boldly brings a stranger into the palace at Athena’s stirring. Spinning is a double reference that steers the hero’s life while creating a network of spinners in the poem, one that forces us to read the poem from a different perspective. As a tool of poetics, it helps unfold the narrative, and it creates a network as it passes on memory and the opportunity to make a mark in a story. As a nuptial reference, it leaves the image of an object that is not easy to forget. The distaff then becomes like a literary prop but a prop that is essential to help the narrative unfold.¹² I have argued before that the work context authorizes female speech in Homer. Before any woman begins to talk, we have a reference to some form of work (weaving, washing, cooking, etc.). However, spinning seems marked with additional nuance as it authorizes an intersection of motherhood and bridal presence.¹³ When thinking about how oral poetics embed female speech in specific contexts, the role of those fixed objects such as looms or distaffs needs more disentangling. In other words, how do literary props function as tools of poetics? How do they correspond to visual props? Why is it that certain patterns need to be followed with certain types of characters and contexts? These props, if they are part of a stage, are not mere commodities. They are references to material anchors within the immaterial poem for the audience of a poem to visualize; they function ¹¹ For the concept of indeterminacy regarding Penelope and the Odyssey, see Katz 1991. ¹² I am inspired by Mueller’s work in tragedy regarding the importance and centrality of props on stage. See Mueller 2016. Epic is not theater, but objects help to set a scene for the listener. ¹³ Collective work is different, as we see with the fifty Phaeacian servant women who also spin in a scene that idealizes female domestic work against male seafaring (Od. 7.103–7).

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, ,    

as material mnemonics for the poet/performer to construct the verse. Distaffs are transferable from person to person, place to place, and time to time. Even as literary or visual motifs, they have a long presence. They can be gifted, appropriated, stolen, or sent away. Moreover, they have been registered as a symbol of industriousness, precisely due to their mobility, as spinning can be a parallel and continuous task (it can be part of a pastoral or domestic setting, such as tending to a child or animals, walking, and more) imbued with the symbolism of industriousness but also control over the fates of others. Moreover, although spinning is a task one can do alone, scenes with distaff often portray the spinning woman in company of other women, as in Figure 4.1. As the loom is the locus of ruse in Greek poetry, and the distaff places characters within a nexus of others through gift giving, these objects have an interesting parallel. Just before the suitors’ slaughter, Telemachus, claiming his authority, asks his mother to tend to her “loom and distaff” while the “bow” is a male affair (Od. 21.352–3). This implicit distinction between loom/distaff and bow makes those objects gendered anchors. Important objects in the Odyssey are gifts and the text gives their genealogy, so to speak. Odysseus’s bow, which he stretches like a poet who handles a lyre, also has a history as a gift.¹⁴ The simile that presents Odysseus and his bow as if it is a lyre provides hidden nuances that transfer the war and killing element of one object onto the other. A distaff, like a bow, has the potential to wound and even kill. In other words, we have a hidden inherent duplicity. In medieval manuscripts, we have the theme of the distaff being weaponized and turning into a stick to hit someone; this becomes a gendered fight, with a woman (or women) hitting a man.¹⁵ The Odyssey, though, through its treatment of important objects, registers something more: just like the man’s bow, the woman’s distaff can completely change a situation. The item often thought to be symbolic of female virtue marks female authority, but it can become a tool for the use of force. Cognitive processes subtly register such duplicity and complex semiotics. Historical distaffs, made of wood, just as those memorialized ones made of silver or gold that occur in different narratives, can outlive someone, like the fabrics they help produce. Their sheer reference carries a sense of materiality and a pseudo-sense of immortality. It is no wonder that in some cultures we have historically attested burials of female bodies with a distaff as an offering to be forever sealed.¹⁶ The importance of the distaff in the myth of the Fates makes it a ¹⁴ For the simile that presents Odysseus’s stringing of the bow like a poet’s use of the lyre (Od. 21.406–9), see Tracy 1990: 129–30 and Ready 2018: 121–2. For the “genealogy” of the “great bow,” see Tracy 1990: 124 and Ready 2011: 84. For Penelope and the bow, see Ahl and Roisman 1996: 253. ¹⁵ See Shartrand 2020. ¹⁶ Lipkin 2013 notes numerous examples in pre-Roman Italy (interestingly, age seems to have been a factor, with younger individuals more likely to have a weaver’s sets, while older individuals were more likely to be buried with a distaff; Lipkin further suggests that burial with a distaff and spindle was the clear marker of the mater familiae—the female head of house).

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Figure 4.1 Terracotta pyxis with lid, attributed to the Painter of Philadelphia 2449 depicting an interior scene with women conversing and working wool, c.460 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247535.

most appropriate burial offering. In their study of Renaissance clothing, Jones and Stallybrass note that to understand the significance of clothes, “we need to undo our social categories, in which subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to ‘pick up’ subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute

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, ,    

subjects through their power as material memories.”¹⁷ The thread used to make clothing precedes the product and gives this malleability to the fabric, which is produced following the thread’s hidden movements. The semiotics of spinning operate on different levels. One of the premises of this book is that early Greek poetics, in the oral context, create meaning that goes beyond what one can discern and perceive in verse and stems from deep socio-cultural contexts and charged linguistic variations. In the Iliad, we have a metaphor that uses the imagery of both spinning and feasting: Achilles was “winding off [like thread] the many things he suffered with him [Patroclus], running through [like a spit of meat] the wars of men and grievous waves” (Il. 24.7–8: ἠδ᾽ ὁπόσα τολύπευσε σὺν αὐτῷ καὶ πάθεν ἄλγεα/ ἀνδρῶν τε πτολέμους ἀλεγεινά τε κύματα πείρων). Similarly, the verb τολυπεύω is transferred from the female domestic sphere to the male military activity to denote the making of war (Od. 1.238; 14.368). In Herodotus, the distaff becomes a locus of gendered juxtaposition: τῆς δὲ Σαλαμῖνος τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον ἐπεκράτεε Εὐέλθων, ὃς τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖσι θυμιητήριον, ἐὸν ἀξιοθέητον, ἀνέθηκε, τὸ ἐν τῷ Κορινθίων θησαυρῷ κεῖται. ἀπικομένη δὲ παρὰ τοῦτον ἡ Φερετίμη ἐδέετο στρατιῆς ἣ κατάξεί σφεας ἐς τὴν Κυρήνην. ὁ δὲ Εὐέλθων πᾶν μᾶλλον ἢ στρατιήν οἱ ἐδίδου· ἡ δὲ λαμβάνουσα τὸ διδόμενον καλὸν μὲν ἔφη καὶ τοῦτο εἶναι, κάλλιον δὲ ἐκεῖνο, τὸ δοῦναί οἱ δεομένῃ στρατιήν. τοῦτο γὰρ ἐπὶ παντὶ τῷ διδομένῳ ἔλεγε, τελευταῖόν οἱ ἐξέπεμψε δῶρον ὁ Εὐέλθων ἄτρακτον χρύσεον καὶ ἠλακάτην, προσῆν δὲ καὶ εἴριον· ἐπειπάσης δὲ αὖτις τῆς Φερετίμης τὠυτὸ ἔπος ὁ Εὐέλθων ἔφη τοιούτοισι γυναῖκας δωρέεσθαι ἀλλ’ οὐ στρατιῇ. Now Evelthon was ruling over Salamis at this time, and he dedicated that spectacular censer at Delphi which can be found in the treasury of the Corinthians. Pheretime came to him, asking him for an army to bring them (her and her son) back to Cyrene; Evelthon was willing to give her anything else, just not an army; when she accepted what he gave her, she said, “the gift was fine,” but it would be better to give her an army just as she had asked. And she would say this for every gift until at last Evelthon sent her a golden spindle and distaff, and also added the wool, and when Pheretime uttered the same words as before, he answered that such gifts, and not armies, were gifts for women. (Her. Hist. 4.162.3–5)

Once again, a distaff is mentioned regarding a leading female figure, who also acts here as a mother on behalf of her son. The reference to a golden distaff makes it acquire almost mythical dimensions, alluding to notions of wealth and authority associated with the material it is made of.

¹⁷ Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 2.

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Spinning: From Literary to Visual Narratives and Anthropological Comparanda Classical iconography presents abundant evidence of women’s textile work (weaving, spinning, etc.), which needs to be seen as part of an oikos iconographic program in classical Athens. Textile work was featured so prominently in iconography that one can talk about a possible visual agenda.¹⁸ Textile work has been linked to hetaeras. In my view, we don’t have enough of a convincing case that the distaff is a reference to a hetaera, or certainly not solely to a hetaera (but I wouldn’t exclude it either).¹⁹ My purpose is not to go over a list of all the attestations in Greek literature and art, nor to discuss the hetaera debate for classical vases. As Bundrick has persuasively argued, the scenes depict overwhelmingly Athenian citizen women, and especially married women.²⁰ As in the literary accounts, we have the depiction of women working; scenes in which figures hold or are near items necessary for textile production but not working actively (near distaffs, looms, etc.); thirdly, scenes that might not focus on textile production, but feature props related to it. Of all those three categories, the third is the largest in different types of vases, which, on its own, can indicate the audience addressed through these scenes, as an alabastron used for perfume is more likely to appeal to a female audience either in Athens or abroad (e.g., Western/Etruscan consumers).²¹ There are often associations with mythological women (e.g., the Chiusi skyphos by the Penelope painter), but the majority do not have such references. In fact, the underlying contexts suggest that we have such a multiplicity of images of spinning, enough to make the distaff an object that is associated with new beginnings and authority, while creating a nuptial but also a maternal reference. This multiplicity of associations is a central feature in literary but also visual narratives. Textile production was a particularly evocative scene, with hidden messages depending on place, time, and context. A weaving scene intended for a consumer in Italy for burial purposes is not the same as one intended for sympotic vases. Yet this motif has a certain universality that also gives it versatility. And what is even more important for me, is that such scenes have had an enduring impressibility; it is hard to think of Penelope without her loom, or Arete, as I read her, without her distaff. Nor can one think of scenes with these characters without the distaff or loom as essential props.

¹⁸ See Osborne 1991: 270 for why the motif was part of the iconographic agenda. For wool working as the chore frequently represented in iconography, see Oakley 2020: 11–14. ¹⁹ For the link between prostitution and the textile industry, see Fischer 2013. ²⁰ Bundrick 2008: 286. For women of all classes earning money through textile production, see Brock 1994: 338. Bundrick 2008 interprets the representations of women weavers as a positive metaphor for their contribution to the oikos and the polis, while Oakley 2004: 19–74 recognizes similar domestic scenes on white-ground lekythoi as a metaphor for the well-working oikos. See also Brock 1994. For representations of wool workers on Attic gravestones, see Kosmopoulou 2001: 300. ²¹ Bundrick 2008: 286.

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, ,    

To understand the cognitive processes that impose such scenes on our mind in literary or visual narratives, it would be helpful to compare them with an eloquent example that presents the spinning motif. Let us compare those ancient literary scenes with another scene of a spinning woman, depicting a figure that was iconized early on. In what follows, we see the reference to spinning intersecting with one of the most complex narratives that cuts into the quasi-nuptial context (in an attempt to bypass it), projecting a divine-like presence while also underscoring the maternal aspect. In one of the Protoevangelium stories considered one of the earliest accounts of the Annunciation story, the Virgin Mary receives the Archangel Gabriel, who brings the news of her destiny while she is spinning. Spinning here again signifies the maternal and a new beginning of a pregnancy that negates the role of the masculine.²² The Annunciation story has been approached from many angles (psychoanalytic and socio-cultural, among others) and shares many elements with forced coming-of-age stories for heroines who meet an invisible or otherworldly groom, like Psyche in the “Amor and Psyche” tale of Apuleius and others.²³ The appearance of the angel has also seen various interpretations. The Greek text, in the gospel according to Luke, which relays the Annunciation scene (1.26–8), is emphatically vague about any specifics of the setting in which Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary. Was it a domestic or was it an outside setting? The visual artistic rendering has been mostly free from scripture in creating a context for it. The one literary version that presents the spinning background may or may not have been in the artist’s mind. As with an obedient Penelope engaged in textile production, we have the absence of a husband. Like Arete and Helen, the spinning female becomes a quasi-divine figure with authority that crosses times and other people’s destiny. The angel’s greeting also recalls nuptial contexts, one that seeks to extoll but also separate the bride/figure from all other women, as is typically the case with the salutation, makarismos, and eikasia motifs.²⁴ It includes a salutation (as in nuptial greetings), proclaims the addressee as “blessed,” as in the makarismos, and greets her as if she is a goddess, creating the effect of an eikasia. The

²² See Waller 2015 and Anderson 2019, who discuss the Protoevangelium of James as the origin of variant stories, which among other things presents Mary at the Annunciation scene as spinning (10.1–11.2). For the iconography that connects weaving and spinning with Virgin Mary, see Evangelatou 2003. ²³ From Voltaire’s mocking of the Annunciation story to Diderot’s parallels between the Annunciation story and the Greek myth of Zeus descending in the form of a swan upon Leda, this was a scene that has attracted attention. See Waller 2015. For a representation of the spinning Virgin Mary in Byzantine art, we have an icon of Bogorodica (Theotokos) spinning yarn from Mileševo Monastery, dating to the thirteenth century, as well as a Byzantine icon from Ohrid (twelfth century). ²⁴ The angel greeted Mary, says Origen in the third century, “with a new address,” a greeting not found “anywhere else” in the scriptures, and therefore one that was “reserved for Mary alone.” See Origen, Homiliae in Lucam 6.37, who discusses the greeting: Ξένον αὐτῇ τινα ἀσπασμὸν εἶπεν, ὃν οὐχ εὗρον ἐν οὐδεμίᾳ γραφῇ· φέρε δὴ περὶ τούτου ἐξετάσωμεν. Τὸ «χαῖρε κεχαριτωμένη» εἴρηται. (He presented her with a strange greeting, one that I didn’t find in any scripture, let us explore this. The “hail, Mary, full of grace” has been said).

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nuptial context in the Annunciation scene is recognized and emphasized in different writers and poets, for example, in Romanus Melodus, who addresses Mary famously as the “unwedded bride” (νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε).²⁵ Let’s read the Annunciation scene as an inverted marriage scene. The presence of spinning helps negotiate the awkwardness embedded in this narrative, placing the Virgin Mary into motherhood and matrona roles as she navigates cycles of female life literally through a quick spin while conveniently conveying the images of virtue. It is an act of domestication through a mobile wool-working tool with which Virgin Mary crosses her line to becoming a mother. At the same time, this visual imagery resonates with female viewers. As Catherine Gines Taylor puts it: “antique symbolism of this [spinning] motif suggests that it was used to define femininity for Christian women in ways that defined the ascetic imperatives of virginity, and instead fostered the opposite sentiment.”²⁶ Although many studies have focused on virgin saints and martyrs and stories of celibacy for women, the early Church was defined far more than acknowledged by the role of married women or those who wanted to marry. The spindle and distaff certainly “did not originate as Christian symbols for use on objects widely disseminated to the lay population” but were part of an “effortless” often didactic message about idealized womanhood that was fitting to appropriate.²⁷ The visual presence of the distaff circulated widely. In an ivory pyxis of the fifth or sixth century  in Berlin, we see Mary standing on the left with a distaff and holding a spindle firmly.²⁸ In a literary hagiographic text, a vita of St. Mary of Egypt, we have St. Mary’s words in a first-person narration: “I lived by begging and often by spinning coarse flax fibers . . .”²⁹ There is an uninterrupted tradition of spinning in visual and literary imagery associated with elite, holy, or powerful women, as in Figure 4.2. The most popular medium, not surprisingly, is the depiction of the spinning Mary or other saints on fabrics or other products of textile work, as with embroidery on a pillow cover. Such scenes were prolific, and to depict the working holy woman on an actual product of textile work is meaningful. We have Mary drawing a thread from the distaff in a Rhenish painting of about 1400 and in prints by the early seventeenthcentury French engraver Jacque Bellange, including an Annunciation scene in which Mary sits by a basket spinning and a Cupid-like angel holds her distaff. At the time, as it has been argued, a “sacred gestational power attributed to spinning in such images shifts to a more social register in representation of Saint Elisabeth of Thueringen, an aristocratic woman who insisted on sharing the spinning ²⁵ See Romanus Melodus 9.6.9–10: ἄγγελος καὶ οὐκ ἄνθρωπος πέλεις σὺ ὁ λέγων μοι·/ Χαῖρε νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε; (that you are an angel and no human being, you who are telling me, Hail, bride who cannot be wedded?). While the adjective is typically translated in dictionaries as “unwedded” I translate it here “who cannot be wedded” which shows the nuance in its use. ²⁶ Taylor 2018: 65. ²⁷ Taylor 2018: 70. ²⁸ Taylor 2018: 71, fig. 15. ²⁹ See the text of this vita translated in Talbot 1996: 80.

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, ,    

Figure 4.2 Master of Erfurt, Virgin Mary with a Distaff. Undated. Oil on canvas on wood, 27  19 cm. Inv. 1874. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Art Resource. Photo: Joerg P. Anders.

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carried out by her fellow nuns.”³⁰ It is a much-represented visual image. Similarly, Saint Elspeth is shown in a print by Hans Baldung Grien holding a distaff, thread, and spindle with five other spinning women. Spinning signals beginnings but also mobilizes female networks. Also, on a needleworked pillow cover in silk on linen of c.1600, we have the depiction of Eve spinning and Adam digging up tree roots, but Eve holds a nursing infant with her right hand while also supporting a distaff. As it has been noted, “as a woman spins thread to clothe a baby, she sustains its physical life and places the child in a social system of clothing. The threads she spins will cover the child’s body, shape it, and be internalized as tactile memory and social form. And such external threads define how fragile the line is between biological life and death—a line as fragile as a thread that, at any moment can be cut,” making overt the connections with the Fates’ spinning.³¹ To return to the Annunciation scene, the late antique artists marry a scene that has a past with what promises to be the future. As it has been argued, the Annunciation is an extraordinarily rich story, some might say “archetypal.” It has become deeply embedded in our cultural history. In the emphatic absence of a groom, the angel appears as a figure that merges a rich visual and literary scene of appearance in front of a woman as winged Eros, the groom, but also as an angel that initiates a new beginning.³² Not touching the hand, he leads Mary to a new life; her virginal body becomes a maternal body, positioned in a new space as the genderless angel leads her from the ether to the semi-domestic space. Such a scene would bring multiple codes to the viewers of the late antique world. We have one thing that does not change: The spinner is a woman, and as Mary is subtly imposed visually as a mater (since she cannot be a matrona), the matrona appropriations are carried through. In literary or visual narratives, objects that help stage a scene carry significance. The distaff is both domestic and mobile, suitable for personal and collective work, an indicator of a network of people in space and time, and a consistent reference for gift-giving and status (and often marital status). It can be a wedding gift but also accompany a burial. A distaff is an item that operates on multiple levels. It can indicate certain things, but it can also blur meanings depending on who discusses it. The male interlocutors use it to point inwards as with Telemachus when he tells his mother to go inside and tend to her works, the loom and the distaff (Od. 21. 350–1). It is, however, ironic that while denying mobility in outside spaces, a distaff, although associated with domestic work, is transportable and mobile. The distaff played an important role in the folk customs of different places. In Serbia, young men courted girls by carving out of wood for them an often ornate

³⁰ Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 117 and 119. ³¹ Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 116. ³² For an analysis of different visual narratives of the Annunciation scene and how the idea of “consent” is negotiated in Byzantine texts and images, see Betancourt 2020: 19–59. Betancourt also discusses spinning as a critical element of some Annunciation scenes; see Betancourt 2020: 40–51.

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distaff or spindle. As part of the marriage ritual, the dever—the groom’s brother— offered his new sister-in-law a gift of a distaff with some wool on it and a spun thread already started, which had a purpose: to acknowledge her as a new adult of their family. The thread signifies a new beginning, a symbol of the newlyweds’ future together. As expected, references to the distaff found their way into wedding songs, and interestingly, songs of flirtation, like the Kolenike Vreteno (knee spindle).³³ In the evenings, women would often gather, especially in the fall, winter, and early spring, spinning together, when boys would also join. Singing and flirting while spinning was ubiquitous. If the girls liked someone, they would tell him that they had lost a vreteno, and should they find one, boys ought to bring it to their gathering that night. A well-known folk song, the “knee spindle” (kolenike vreteno), tells the story of a mother who raised “two young sons, in bad times, in years of hunger, by her distaff and her right hand alone.” The mother’s presence, as in the Homeric poems, is placed near a distaff. Distaffs function like frames, they are not objects without meaning. To frame a scene means to direct the focal point and prepare the minds of the audience, which is attuned to this frame. The cognitive process that goes on in the background is worth exploring. From a cognitive linguistics point of view, such references can provide important insights into deeper structures and processes, but also into the ways they can operate as a shifting reference for different audiences; from a gendered perspective a female audience might understand something in a completely different way.³⁴ Would that reference be a prompt to read an image or a text in a coded way?

Erinna and Broken Friendships: Playing the Bride, Writing in Codes Communication within a community network in a coded way so that others cannot decipher the deeper meanings is not new to history. In one notable case, in China, women developed the script known as Nüshu, which seems to have been most popular in the nineteenth century in Hunan’s Jiangyong county. The goal was to provide a platform and, with it, a freedom of expression for those who learned it. Nüshu was a phonetic but, at the same time, unspoken script in use by those whom some thought to be illiterate, which some believe to date to much earlier periods (the Song dynasty, 960–1279, or the Shang dynasty, more than three thousand years ago). One could argue that it was a kind of Kunstsprache, a

³³ https://svilenkonac.net/2016/02/22/преслице-и-вретена-spindles-distaffs/ (accessed October 7, 2021). ³⁴ See Horst 2020: 67–82.

   

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sort of amalgamation of four different dialects not known outside the boundaries of Jiangyong. A complex history that often sought to erase the memory of the feudal or imperial past kept it secret until the 1980s.³⁵ The content and genre of what women expressed in this linguistic form is remarkable. Although Nüshu was not practiced as a spoken language, women would use Nüshu expressions or phrases on different occasions (e.g., when performing nursery songs or expressing regrets or complaints, usually about their marriage). What is particularly interesting is that one of the most important uses of Nüshu came from marriage. Traditionally, after a wedding, the bride would leave her parents’ home and move into the groom’s house. The bride would often feel isolated in her new role, so Nüshu provided a means for women to express sadness and lament broken friendships to one another. The newlyweds’ move-in process would involve handing over a Sanzhaoshu or “Third-Day Book” made from cloth and given to the bride three days after her wedding. The bride’s mother and close friends would express their sorrow and loss in the book, while good wishes for future happiness would be recorded in the first few pages. The remaining pages would be left blank for future thoughts as a personal diary. All this suggests that female networks in different cultures could operate on multiple levels. The public interface is not the same as the private. If, as I read it, spinning operates like a coded reference, why is Erinna’s poem titled “Distaff”? We know that this title was used for Erinna’s poem by the Suda, but we have a clear sense of its reception as a work of art with this title attached to the poem from early on.³⁶ The title does not seem to be uncommon. If we were to do a parallel reading with Theocritus Idyll 28, also titled “Distaff,” we would see some of the associations such a title carries. While one cannot assess whether Erinna was a competitor of Theocritus, that title can indicate that the distaff signified a poetic tool also in circulation.³⁷ For Theocritus’s “Distaff,” the poem, like the distaff, is a gift for a married woman. Theocritus’s “Distaff” is centered around a doctor’s wife, which poses further questions about possible associations with healing. Theocritus is playing with the long tradition of distaffs present in literature, and one can easily recognize the figure of Helen and her distaff lurking in the background. Helen, in the role of a φαρμακεύτρια, could be part of Theocritus’s complex allusion. The distaff could also be a tool that alludes to practices of magic, a theme dear to the Theocritean literary world.

³⁵ Source: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200930-nshu-chinas-secret-female-only-language? fbclid=IwAR1Tc2hsOaZLQsbkQonjY3WQSz3iBWzguW99VhO7Qfo-4ADnW7nYDpZTXZY. ³⁶ See Gutzwiller 2020a, who discusses Callimachus, Aetia 1.5, in which he acknowledges Erinna as his predecessor in the aesthetic program he offers, and Gutzwiller 2020b for the work metaphors and how they function metapoetically in Hellenistic aesthetics. ³⁷ For a discussion of the title and the different views proposed, see West 1977: 96 and Neri 1996: 181–4. For a more recent textual discussion, see Neri 2003.

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, ,    

Erinna’s Distaff, though, is highly idiosyncratic. On the one hand, it exhibits all the traits one would expect from a “feminine” touch in poetry, Erinna constructing herself as an heiress to Sappho.³⁸ Motifs like addressing a female friend, evoking the context of death and wedding, reminiscing about childhood, childhood games, the reference to the mother, a monster, and the weaving tools put this squarely in the realm we think of as female poetry in ancient Greece. Many read it as a lament, privileging the “wailing” for the presumed dead Baucis, Erinna’s friend. Erinna herself is mentioned in ways that can be read like the insertion of the name Sappho in Sappho’s poetry. However, as Levaniouk has persuasively argued, the “wedding is the center of gravity for all the feminine themes of the Distaff: Baucis dies on her wedding day, while Erinna is waiting and preparing for her own. The importance of the theme is clearly marked by the double invocation of Hymenaios in lines 51 and 53.”³⁹ Crafting the life of a poet by taking elements from a poem at face value has a long-standing tradition in Greek literature, and Erinna is no exception.⁴⁰ Like the “I” of her Distaff, the poem’s creator must be nineteen, grieving, while adopting an authoritative voice for her now missing friend. But are we falling into the same trap as those ancient readers? Are we still reading this poem too literally by interpreting it as a lament? The poem alludes to girlhood with its hidden nuances. It also carries the weight of its title, so we need to look more deeply into the complex meanings this brings. To be sure, the poem does indeed mention a distaff. And a distaff can be interpreted within the multiple semiotics of gift giving that Erinna must have known well from Homer onwards. It could also be a metonymic reference, with the poem itself being a gift, perhaps even a wedding gift. Yet this poem seems to be doing much more. Erinna’s title Distaff operates in a distinctly feminine context in a coded way; it registers sorrow and crafts prima facie what reads like a lament while also conveying blame. It utilizes the poetics of memory and reminiscence, alluding to a girls’ game, the tortoise, which itself is part of coded language, only shared and understood within the group of its children performers. In a way, the distaff is to be seen next to the tortoise as a reference to closed networks that had their jargon and could apply their own authoritative speech. The reference to the tortoise game remains elusive, but Erinna echoes well-known lyrics that she would not have to present in full detail as, presumably, the tortoise game circulated widely. Why would the poetic “I” bring so many references together to older female figures: mother, Mormo, and tortoise? There are three female figures, one human (mother), one animal (tortoise), and the other hybrid (Mormo), that arguably dominate the poem. Let us look at the poem in more detail:

³⁸ Arthur 1980: 65. ³⁹ Levaniouk 2008: 201. ⁴⁰ See Graziosi 2002 for the tradition of Homer’s vitae.

    (col. I)

5

10

15 (col. ii)

20

25

30

35 (col. ii)

40

].ν̣ [ ]εοι.[ ]. ]ε κώρας· ].ι νύμφαι· ] χελύνναν σ]ελάννα· χε]λ̣ύννα· ].ε̣λῆς[ ]ω̣ .ει· ].αφυλλοις[ ].λασσ̣ει· ].ανν̣ .ν· ]νί.απέξα[ ].[..]υ̣κυμα[ ] λε]υκᾶν μαινομέν[οισιν ἐσάλαο π]οσσὶν ἀφ’ ἵ[π]πω[ν αἰ]α̣ῖ ἐ̣γ̣ ώ, μέγ’ ἄϋσα· φ[ ] χ̣ελύννα ..].ομένα μεγάλας̣ [ ] χορτίον αὐλᾶς· τα]ῦτα τύ, Βαῦκι τάλαι̣[να βαρύ στονά]χεισα γόημ[ι] τα]ῦτά μοι ἐν κρα[δ ]παίχνια κεῖται θέρμ’ ἔτι· την[ ].υ̣ρ̣ομες ἄνθρακες ἤδη· δαγύ[δ]ων τεχ̣[ ]ίδε̣ς ἐν θαλάμοισι νυμ[φ]αι.[ ]έες· ἅ τε ποτ’ ὄρθρον μάτηρ αε[ ].οι̣σιν ἐρεί̣θο̣ις τ̣ηνασηλθ[ ]ν̣ α ἀμφ’ ἁλιπαστον· ..μικραισ.[ ]ν̣ φόβον ἄγαγε Μορ̣[μ]ώ ..].εν μὲν κ.[ ].ατα ποσσὶ δὲ φοιτῆι τέ]τρασιν, ἐκ δ’ [ἑτέραν ἑτέρας] μετεβάλλετ’ ὀπωπάν. ἁνίκα δ’ ἐς [λ]έχος [ἀνδρὸς ἔβας, τ]όκα πάντ’ ἐλάλασο ἅσσ’ ε.[ ]..ηπιασ..τ.[ ] μ̣ατρὸς ἄκουσας, Β̣ αῦκ̣ι ̣ φίλα· λαθα . . . ε.[ ]. Ἀφροδ̣ίτα· τ̣ῶ τυ κατακλα̣[ί]οισ̣ ατα[ ].[ ] . . . ε λείπω [· ] ο̣ὐ [γ]άρ μοι πόδες . . . .[..].[ ]..ο δῶμα β̣έ̣βαλοι· οὐδ̣’ ἐσιδῆν φαε̣.[ ]κυν οὐδ̣ὲ ̣ γοᾶσαι γυμναῖσιν χαιταισ.ν[ ].νικεος αἰδὼς δρύπτει μ’ ἀμφι̣ πα[ρῆιδας α..[ ]δε π̣ [ρ]οπάροιθ[εν ἐννεα̣[και]δέκατος .[ Ἠρ̣ιν̣ ν̣ α[..]ε φίλαι π.[ ἀλακ̣άταν ἐσ̣ορει̣[σα γνωθ’ ὅτι τοικ[ αμφ..ι̣κ.σ.ε.[ ταῦτ’ α̣ἰδ̣ ώς μ.[

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, ,     παρθε̣[ν]ί̣οισ . . . [ δερκομένα δ’ ε̣κ̣[ καὶ χαιτα.α̣ν̣ .[ πραϋλόγοι πο̣λιαί, ταὶ γήραος ἄνθεα θνατοῖς τῶ τυ φίλα φ.[ Βαῦκι κατακλα̣[ αν φλόγα μι̣ν .[ ὠρυγᾶς ἀϊοισ.ο[ ὦ πολλὰν ὑμεν̣ [ π]ολλὰ δ’ ἐπιψαυ[ π]άνθ̣ ’ ἑνός, ὦ υμ[ αἰαῖ Βαῦκι τάλαιν[α

. . . of a girl . . . brides . . . tortoise . . . moon . . . tortoise . . . with leaves . . . [you leapt into the deep?] wave . . . from white [horses] with maddened feet (15) . . . “aiai,” I shouted loudly, a tortoise . . . the yard of a great court, that’s why, poor Baucis deeply moaning, I lament . . . these [games?] lie in my heart, still warm; but these . . . are already ashes (20); of dolls . . . in the bed-chambers, brides . . . at dawn . . . mother . . . to the wool workers, those . . . sprinkled meat with salt, to the little ones . . . Mormo brought fear (25), on her head (were) big ears, and she roamed on . . . [four] feet and changed her appearance [from one into the other], but when you went into your husband’s marriage bed, you forgot everything which you heard from (your?) mother, dear Baucis . . . Aphrodite [set] forgetfulness . . . [in your heart] (30), that’s why, weeping, but I leave other things, for my feet cannot . . . from the house, nor can I look at you . . . nor lament you with loose hair . . . but shame tears me [around my cheeks] . . . always before . . . nineteen . . . Erinna by the dear . . . looking at the distaff . . . know that (40) . . . these things, shame . . . to the girls . . . looking and . . . soft speaking, white hair are for mortals the flowers of old age, that’s why, you dear Baucis, lamenting . . . fire . . . hearing cries (50) . . . o Hymenaios . . . touching . . . all for one . . . o Hymenaios . . . aiai wretched Baucis. Erinna, Distaff 1–54⁴¹

The mere reference to the game (and its song) and the childhood doll becomes a common code about practices and meanings for this closed group and a larger group of young girls. The separation from games is a registered motif from the

⁴¹ For Erinna’s text, I follow for the most part Lloyd-Jones and Parsons 1983: 187–9, with slight changes. I have also used some of the reconstructions in the text by West 1977, (e.g., in ll. 15–6; l. 19, where I read “games” for παίχνια, and ll. 26–7, where I read “four” feet (ποσσίν τέτρασιν) for Mormo. West (1977: 101) notes that νύμφαι may be dolls, brides, or nymphs. Levaniouk 2008: 201–4 and Natoli, Pitts, and Hallett 2022 have also produced more accessible texts, going beyond a merely papyrological rendering. Bowra was the one who first connected the repeated appearance of χελύννα with the game χελιχελώνη which was rejected by Michelazzo Magrini 1975 who pursued the meaning “lyre” connecting it with Sappho’s “lyre” and presenting a wedding context on a moonlit evening (σελάννα). For Erinna’s poem as a farewell poem acknowledging the wedding context, see Rauk 1989.

   

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Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which Persephone, upon her return, voices her trauma in a coded way as she is being taken away from her group. In Erinna, though, we have one member of the group almost scolding the other, the girl who supposedly died while reminiscing not only on collective games but also on how they played the “bride” together. Do we have an actual or a metaphorical death for Baucis? Are we reading this poem too literally by assuming there was a real death behind it? One of the Palatine Anthology epigrams (7.712) seems to suggest so, as a sequel so to speak to the alleged death of the bride Baucis: Νύμφας Βαυκίδος ἐμμί· πολυκλαύταν δὲ παρέρπων στάλαν τῷ κατὰ γᾶς τοῦτο λέγοις Ἀΐδᾳ· “Βάσκανος ἔσσ᾿, Ἀΐδα·” τὰ δέ τοι καλὰ σάμαθ᾿ ὁρῶντι ὠμοτάταν Βαυκοῦς ἀγγελέοντι τύχαν, ὡς τὰν παῖδ᾿, Ὑμέναιος ἐφ᾿ αἷς ἀείδετο πεύκαις, ταῖσδ᾿ ἐπὶ καδεστὰς ἔφλεγε πυρκαϊᾷ· καὶ σὺ μέν, ὦ Ὑμέναιε, γάμων μολπαῖον ἀοιδὰν ἐς θρήνων γοερὸν φθέγμα μεθηρμόσαο. I am the tomb of Baucis, the bride, and as you pass by the much-wept pillar, say to Hades of the Underworld: “Hades, you are envious.” The signs you see on the stone will tell you the most cruel fate of Bauco, how her bridegroom’s father lighted her pyre with torches that had burnt while they sang the wedding hymn. And you, Hymenaios, adjusted the tune of the wedding song to the crying expression of lamentations. (Anth. Pal. 7.712)

The interweaving of the lament and wedding tropes, so well registered in the Greek tradition, calls for an entirely different approach. As with Persephone, who seeks to come back and reinstate her former self, Erinna’s first-person narrative here seeks to do the same for her “dead” friend, Baucis, who, like Persephone, is lost somewhere between wedding and death or perhaps in an unhappy or even traumatizing marriage. Erinna’s poem has more affinity with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as it crafts a blend of a voice: one combining Persephone, who is lost and found, and the authoritative, strict mother. The girl who reproaches her (former) companion speaks like a mother would, and this is openly acknowledged in the poem. Erinna invites Baucis to remember their childhood. In Greek poetics, as I have shown in the first chapter, remembering childhood can be synonymous with recovering from trauma. If we think back to the different moments of “recollection poetics” from the Iliad onwards, when we have a young girl remembering, we often have a situation of trauma. Characters like Briseis, Persephone, Electra, or Iphigeneia show their past trauma when they remember their past lives. In other words, Erinna’s “I” offers Baucis the benefit of reuniting with the closed

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, ,    

circuit of her childhood, just as Persephone is trying to reunite with her friends in her account to her mother about her disappearance, offering first the list of her friends’ names and then flowers. The flowers are not just a visual prop of the landscape in epic style. It is a concrete visual reference, a coded reference to this strange intersection of registering a wedding as death and death as a wedding, which is also the case with Erinna’s Distaff. Erinna’s Distaff also registers material anchors: the childhood dolls. This is part of a recovery process when trauma victims seek a “safe” spot of their past from which they can spin their life’s thread again. The connections between distaff and maturity or, even more, motherhood run through Greek thought deeply. One of the Palatine Anthology epigrams that takes Erinna’s life and poetry at face value is the following (9.190): Λέσβιον Ἠρίννης τόδε κηρίον· εἰ δέ τι μικρόν, ἀλλ’ ὅλον ἐκ Μουσέων κιρνάμενον μέλιτι. οἱ δὲ τριηκόσιοι ταύτης στίχοι ἶσοι Ὁμήρῳ, τῆς καὶ παρθενικῆς ἐννεακαιδεκέτευς· ἣ καὶ ἐπ’ ἠλακάτῃ μητρὸς φόβῳ, ἣ καὶ ἐφ’ ἱστῷ ἑστήκει Μουσέων λάτρις ἐφαπτομένη. Σαπφὼ δ’ Ἠρίννης ὅσσον μελέεσσιν ἀμείνων, Ἤριννα Σαπφοῦς τόσσον ἐν ἑξαμέτροις. This is the Lesbian honeycomb of Erinna; and although it might be small, it is all infused with honey by the Muses. Her three hundred lines are equal to Homer’s, although she was just a nineteen-year-old girl. Either with the distaff in fear of her mother, or at the loom she stood a dedicated worshiper of the Muses. As much as Sappho is superior to Erinna in lyric songs, so much Erinna is superior to Sappho in hexameters. (Anth. Pal. 9.190)

This epigram once again shows the ongoing presence of the mother as an authoritative figure with control over her children’s lives. The distaff as the locus of the mother’s attention is another reference to the close link between spinning and motherhood. This poem also registers Erinna’s fear of her mother, which is multiply revealing and constitutes yet another moment that makes the mother a key figure. Erinna constructs the poetic “I,” revolting against the obedient daughter syndrome by acknowledging her past experiences with her friend. By considering the mother figure central in Erinna’s poem, we may decipher another connection with the sentiment evoked in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and how Demeter’s role appears as a figure of authority. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, as shown earlier, exemplifies the young woman’s fear of telling her mother what has happened to her. The desire to revisit the moments with her girlfriends before anything happened is part of a healing mechanism. Persephone

   

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didn’t die, but she became the eternal bride of Hades; just as in the other epigram of the Palatine Anthology, Baucis and Erinna are referred to in similar terms as brides of Hades. This calls for an entire reconsideration of what is happening in this poem and its complex generic spins in ways that are more likely to complicate our understanding of Erinna’s poetry than simplify it. Erinna hexametrizes Sapphic elements but with further twists by taking on generic traits of customs and practices that we can only barely begin to understand. Ultimately what Erinna’s poetry does is to register bridal trauma as death. The friend’s actual or metaphorical death also brings the death of a friends’ group and life as the girls knew it. The distaff is the gift Erinna passes to her friend(s) as a consolation and testament to their shared routes. The distaff for Erinna is deeply associated with gifts to married women, like Helen’s distaff, which was a gift to her. Like Helen’s distaff, the poem/distaff allows one to put a spin on their story and make a new beginning.

The Poetics of Materiality Material Gifts and Flowing Tears Song celebrates the wedding gifts, which are commemorated in a way that reveals the complexities of gift giving in the ancient world, especially within a nuptial context. In epic poetry, the celebrated wives are also projected as once paradigmatic brides for whom many gifts were given. This subtle reference to the many gifts a woman received as a bride, the material things that mark her wooing, is an image that can be haunting. The bridal gifts practically mark one’s identity, and the epithet polydōros (much-gifted or wooed with many gifts) opens a window onto our understanding of the female presence in early Greek poetry. Why is it that important, years after their wedding, to refer to the two exemplary wives of the surviving epics, Andromache of the Iliad and Penelope of the Odyssey, as much gifted (polydōros)? After all, their presence in the respective narratives is many years after they appeared as brides. Nevertheless, this epithet conveys part of their identity in ways that can shed more light on how their impact and emotional world are crafted in the epic tradition. The reference to gifts becomes part of the figure’s presence as the bridal moment is kept and extended. The epithet polydōros is used in Homer three times for wives projected as brides in their past. Let us begin with Andromache, called polydōros in Iliad Book 6 (6.394), just before she is about to meet her husband in a tender break from the brutal battles outside of Troy in an episode that has received much attention and admiration:

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, ,     Ἦ ῥα γυνὴ ταμίη, ὃ δ’ ἀπέσσυτο δώματος Ἕκτωρ τὴν αὐτὴν ὁδὸν αὖτις ἐϋκτιμένας κατ’ ἀγυιάς. εὖτε πύλας ἵκανε διερχόμενος μέγα ἄστυ Σκαιάς, τῇ ἄρ’ ἔμελλε διεξίμεναι πεδίονδε, ἔνθ’ ἄλοχος πολύδωρος ἐναντίη ἦλθε θέουσα Ἀνδρομάχη, θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος Ἠετίωνος, Ἠετίων, ὃς ἔναιεν ὑπὸ Πλάκῳ ὑληέσσῃ, Θήβῃ Ὑποπλακίῃ, Κιλίκεσσ’ ἄνδρεσσιν ἀνάσσων· τοῦ περ δὴ θυγάτηρ ἔχεθ’ Ἕκτορι χαλκοκορυστῇ.

So spoke the housekeeper, and Hector left in a rush from the house back over the same way along the well-constructed streets. When he had passed through the great city and come to the gates, the Scaean gates, by which he was about to go out to the plains, his wife, Andromache, came to meet him, the one who was wooed with many gifts, daughter of great-hearted Eëtion, Eëtion who lived beneath the foresty Placus, in Thebe under Placus, and who ruled over the men of Cilicia; it was his daughter that Hector, clad in bronze, had as his wife. (Il. 6.390–8)

Hector has come inside the walls of Troy looking for his wife and discovers that the older women are out praying. The scene carefully choreographs the characters’ movements as Andromache runs toward her husband. This is when the poet glimpses into her past: she is his much-gifted bride, but before that, she was Eëtion’s daughter in a different place. The focal point moves from her husband to her father, whose daughter Hector had married. When Andromache is about to address Hector, she stands close to him, crying (Il. 6.405–6). As the text oscillates from the moment her identity was defined by whose daughter she was to refer to her as the wife of Hector, it presents her crying. This aligns with the plot as it evolves, but the choice of epithets with the surrounding references is not accidental. Andromache’s past, present, and future are starkly juxtaposed as she moves from being the figure with the many gifts to the figure with the many tears, which will only increase as the narrative progresses. When Hecuba begs her son not to engage with Achilles in battle, Hecuba, at the beginning of Iliad 22, makes one more reference to her daughter-in-law Andromache as a polydōros wife (Il. 22.88): τῶν μνῆσαι, φίλε τέκνον, ἄμυνε δὲ δήϊον ἄνδρα τείχεος ἐντὸς ἐών, μὴ δὲ πρόμος ἵστασο τούτῳ, σχέτλιος· εἴ περ γάρ σε κατακτάνῃ, οὔ σ’ ἔτ’ ἔγωγε κλαύσομαι ἐν λεχέεσσι, φίλον θάλος, ὃν τέκον αὐτή, οὐδ’ ἄλοχος πολύδωρος· ἄνευθε δέ σε μέγα νῶϊν Ἀργείων παρὰ νηυσὶ κύνες ταχέες κατέδονται.

   

209

Remember these things, dear child, and ward off the enemy from inside the wall, and do not stand to face him; he is horrible! For if he kills you, never will I cry for you on your bier, a dear offshoot that I, myself, bore; nor will the wife you wooed with many gifts; but far away from us by the ships of the Argives swift dogs will devour you. (Il. 22.84–9)

The mother becomes chillingly prophetic as she tells him that if he goes outside, she will not even be able to mourn him properly, but rather, “swift dogs will devour” him. This is a prelude to the scene which presents Priam making a special plea to recover his son’s body. Hecuba’s reference to both herself as the mother and his wife not being able to mourn him brings another subtle reference to Andromache as a bride, yet in a context of mourning and tears. Similarly, in the last book of the Odyssey, just when Odysseus, not disclosing his identity, is about to meet Laertes, his father, we have one more reference to Penelope as polydōros (Od. 24.294). Laertes, thinking that he is talking to a stranger who at some point knew something of his long-lost son, tells Odysseus: . . . οὐδέ ἑ μήτηρ κλαῦσε περιστείλασα πατήρ θ’, οἵ μιν τεκόμεσθα· οὐδ’ ἄλοχος πολύδωρος, ἐχέφρων Πηνελόπεια, κώκυσ’ ἐν λεχέεσσιν ἑὸν πόσιν, ὡς ἐπεῴκει, ὀφθαλμοὺς καθελοῦσα· τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων. Neither did his mother dress him for burial and cry for him, nor his father, we who gave him birth, nor did his wife, the one wooed with many gifts, prudent Penelope, lament her own husband upon his bier as was fitting, when she had closed his eyes; for that is the prize of the dead. (Od. 24.292–6)

For Penelope, he uses the epithet “prudent,” referring to her intellectual abilities and her wisdom, and marks her as a much-gifted wife, right in the context of presenting her in tears lamenting her husband. These lines contrast the image of the bride who received many gifts to the lamenting wife. Although the use of this epithet is not extensive, it is put in the context of married women, giving the depth of temporality in the epic verse by alluding to their presence as brides in a continuum. It is an eclectic and synoptic way of merging different temporal landscapes and revealing a kind of emotional spectrum for these wives in tears. The combination of the subtle yet clear reference to their past selves with a tearful present suggests that we have more than just wedding poetics at work here. The poet uses epithets that one expects in a wedding context to convey

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, ,    

information about the characters and their emotional world, as rich and sorrowfully deep as the number of gifts they once received. The exact reference to the gestures and body movement in both cases (Penelope closing Odysseus’s eyes, Andromache rushing to her husband) is further indicative of their standing as wives in a complex narrative that presents female presence in epic in codified terms.

Procession of Gifts: Networks of Voice, Networks of Matter Just as epic and lyric often refer to singing activity and performance, the visual representations on vases with nuptial scenes have their share of metapoetic references by depicting offerings of such vases or giving clues about their function in ritual. Archaic and classical vase paintings present a wealth of evidence of nuptial rituals. The economy of weddings has left its material vestiges in finds of vases that stayed within families or continued to circulate as they were recycled to be used functionally or ritually (from weddings to funerary rituals). Solonian laws, among others, sought to restrain the excessive display of opulence; yet, in classical times, we have an even greater number of vases that circulated as part of the wedding ritual or as gifts presented to the new couple. The literary evidence suggests that there was a day dedicated to the presentation of gifts and other items brought for the new couple. There was a parade of gifts during the epaulia, the day following the wedding, when the offerings or the “uncovering” of the gifts (anakalyptēria) took place. The circulation of commodities and gifts as people passed from one house to the other, and especially that of the bride to the groom’s house, shows the intense emphasis on movement and the idea of seeing humans and objects as they transit into new spaces. As the bride moves into her new home, the objects that follow her as material anchors from her past or her prior space become the visual reference point of a new life, but one deeply connected with her previous life. The objects that are paraded are containers, meaning they themselves are the conduits of other items (such as jewelry and beauty items) or items that touch the body (such as clothes or combs). The presentation of gifts is ritually prescribed, while children lead the procession: a boy wearing a white cloak and carrying a torch, with a girl serving the role of the kanēphoros bringing a basket. As later sources describe the presentation of gifts on the day after the wedding: . . . the day of epaulia is that after the bride is first quartered in the groom’s house, and epaulia are also the gifts brought by the bride’s father to the bride and groom in the form of a parade, on the day following the wedding. He [Pausanias] says that a child led it, wearing a white cloak and carrying a flaming torch, and then came another child, a girl, carrying a basket [kanēphoros], and then the rest, bringing vessels, unguents, clothing, combs, chests, bottles . . . (Eust. Commentary on Iliad 24.29; see also Suda and Etym. Magn. s.v. epaulia)

   

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The gifts are perceived as items that not only circulate from one place to the other, but once the movement is finished at the end of a wedding, they colonize the new space. This procession of people and things, especially given the role of a kanēphoros, resembles civic ritual processions in honor of a divinity. The presentation of clothing and its dedication to a goddess (as, for example, in a prayer requesting assistance from a divinity) has its counterpart here in the wedding ritual, in which a family affair is the microcosm of the civic performance. The eikasia in the oral texts has its counterpart in the ritual semiotics, as gift offerings are presented to the bride, as if to a goddess. The fourth-century  pyxis in Figure 4.3 highlights a procession moving towards the bride who is the seated figure, and can be read alongside

Figure 4.3 Attic red-figured double pyxis representing the epaulia, c.360–350 . Antikensammlung Berlin/Altes Museum, Inventar-Nr. 3373. Licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 unported license.

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, ,    

Pausanias’s description of the epaulia.⁴² It is almost as if Pausanias had this scene in mind, which shows the stylization in such processions with their clearly defined roles: first, we see the youth carrying a torch; then the kanēphoros, a young girl with a basket; then other women carrying gifts. What is further significant for my argument here is that the women carry other vases such as a lekanis, a lebes gamikos, and two loutrophoroi hydriai. The figure of Eros, hovering above the figure of the bride with the ribbon, underscores the nuptial context. Vases connected with nuptial rituals both served immediate needs as functional objects during the event of the wedding but would also be used for feasts later on or to serve other needs of the family. At the same time, they became part of the new house’s collection of items of beauty for consumption and as beautiful objects for display. As Victoria Sabetai has noted: Vase-painting iconography was an important means of communicating cultural ideals and wishful thinking aimed at the families and individuals involved in the wedding ceremonies. Special vessels decorated with nuptial scenes figured prominently in the rituals at home and in their commemoration at sanctuaries, thus being part of the public visual culture of the Athenian polis.⁴³

While these vases are an immense resource for understanding nuptial rituals, what they cannot convey, even as they represent the rich network of people and objects/ gifts, are the accompanying songs and other performances. One would not expect such processions to be conducted in silence, but rather as people interacted with each other, these were loud moments. One can certainly see the woman on the top part of the pyxis making what can be interpreted as an inviting gesture for another to join the procession (or even the song or dance), as would likely be the case. As has been argued, one does not need an overt connection between image and vase function; namely, nuptial vases did not need to be decorated with obvious nuptial iconography.⁴⁴ As Oakley and Sinos have suggested, the documented growth in the number of nuptial vases and the emphasis on the bridal preparations in wedding iconography could be connected to the emerging legislation and general social concern regarding what constituted legitimate citizenship. It is possible that this was a way to celebrate and make more conspicuous the nuptial rituals as a preamble to legitimate citizenship. This is not incongruent with the literary attestations (for example, in Pausanias and Pollux), which also engage with the presence of wedding songs and rituals in prior literature, especially comedy, as texts that increasingly present family rituals as civic rituals. As noted earlier, there are several similarities between the roles in wedding rituals and ⁴² It is also possible that this is not the epaulia but rather the anakalyptēria procession towards the groom’s home, as argued by Oakley and Sinos 1993: 38. See also A. C. Smith 2005. ⁴³ Sabetai 2019: 33. ⁴⁴ See Smith 2005: 9 and Oakley and Sinos 1993.

   

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festivals celebrating a divinity (for example, procession, weaving and wool working, the dedication of handiwork, etc.). The previous section considered the metapoetic awareness of early Greek versification in presenting the bride figure, and the stock epithet of polydōros, celebrating the bride who has received many gifts. The idea of gift giving is central to a wedding and was celebrated even more in visual representations, especially in vase iconography. A similar metapoetic awareness can be traced, as material gifts are paraded on the vases. Just as language memorializes gift giving, exemplifies the presence of many gifts, and iconizes female figures (like polydōros Penelope) as brides who had received many gifts, art iconizes the bride and the gifts around her. Classical art often presents scenes of adornment and beautification referring to rituals, merging the private with the public. This metapoetic element continues in Greek literature and is shown to be particularly sensitive to materiality and the representation of sound or the lack thereof. A bride is also like a bard. As a bard brings charis, a bride is conceived as a figure adorned by charis. As has been argued, the “work of charis in poetry is to soften an audience.”⁴⁵ A bard works for the pleasure his skills can induce in his audiences; he goes from place to place. Similarly, women are perceived as mobile. Like a bard who gets paid for his skills, the gifts that a bride receives become part of her identity. Literary references to wedding gifts show a semiotic ambiguity.⁴⁶ The wedding gift from a goddess, Aphrodite, becomes a focal point in a scene filled with death in Iliad 22, when Andromache’s veil, Aphrodite’s gift to her, falls as she rushes to find out news about Hector: κρήδεμνόν θ’, ὅ ῥά οἱ δῶκε χρυσῆ Ἀφροδίτη ἤματι τῷ ὅτε μιν κορυθαίολος ἠγάγεθ᾽ Ἕκτωρ ἐκ δόμου Ἠετίωνος, ἐπεὶ πόρε μυρία ἕδνα. The veil that golden Aphrodite had given her, on the day that Hector with his shining helmet brought her away from the house of Eëtion, after he offered myriads of gifts wooing her. (Il. 22.470–3)

The veil (krēdemnon) touching the bridal body or face is a focal point here, fusing the moment of her wedding with the funeral that will come. Like a protective element that left her, she is now to face her husband’s death. The poem, at this critical hour, presents Andromache with an emphasis on her natal roots. Despite the many gifts, her origin is what defines her, whose daughter she is, like the other

⁴⁵ Maclachlan 1993: 114.

⁴⁶ For an incisive account about gifts, see Lyons 2012.

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, ,    

captive women of Troy. Gifts are elusive, they can leave you, like Andromache’s veil, a divine gift, no less. The one “named” gift, the veil, is the one that falls, as if of its own volition, but the many gifts that came with her to Troy are still a memory and a collective reference. Material gifts can outlast their owners’ lives, but they can also become memorial offerings.

Bride and Groom: Poetics of Materiality Sappho’s fr. 103, which is in fragmentary condition, coming from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, is likely a version of a wedding song. A song is evoked within the poem. As with Sappho’s fr. 44, which we discussed earlier, the performance with all its details receives much attention. In fr. 103, the bride and groom get special mention together with the Muses and Graces, in a way typical of a performance that also refers to itself. The slender song and the playing of the lyre are celebrated in a fashion that makes us wonder why it is so important to talk about a song within a song. Unlike the poetic tradition reflected in the Iliad or Odyssey or even in Pindar, where the wedding is a topos that has shaped the greater poetic fabric, Sappho’s fragments are the closest vestige to actual wedding performances, which also celebrate the performance itself. As we saw earlier in the case of the Modern Greek song, comparative evidence suggests that the song is at the front and center of a wedding, as if there is a need to celebrate the vocal together with the visual. The song and any speech act validate the ritual. Wedding rituals cannot exist without words. As the bride and groom are at the center of the wedding ritual, performances and specific objects associated with weddings become visual and aural anchors for wedding poetry. Let us look at Sappho fr. 103, a part that is clearly marked to be included in her Epithalamia: [].εν τὸ γὰρ ἐννεπε[.]η προβ[ [].ατε τὰν εὔποδα νύμφαν [ [ ]τα παῖδα Κρονίδα τὰν ἰόκ[ολπ]ον [ [].ς ὄργαν θεμένα τὰν ἰόκ[ολ]πος α[ [ ]. . ἄγναι Χάριτες Πιέριδέ[ς τε] Μοῖ[σαι [ ].[. ὄ]πποτ’ ἀοιδαι φρέν[ . . . ]αν.[ [ ]σ̣ αιοισα λιγύραν [ἀοί]δαν [ γά]μβρον, ἄσαροι γ̣ ὰρ̣ ὐμαλικ[ [ ]σε φόβαισι θεμένα λύρα .[ [ ]..η χρυσοπέδιλ[ο]ς Αὔως [

(5)

(10)

   

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. . . for . . . speak . . . (Sing of) the bride with her beautiful feet . . . . . . the violet-robed daughter of Zeus . . . . . . putting aside anger . . . violet-robed . . . (Hither,) holy Graces and Pierian Muses . . . when . . . song(s) . . . the mind . . . . . . hearing a clear song . . . . . . bridegroom, for annoying (to?) companions . . . . . . her hair, putting down the lyre . . . . . . golden-sandaled Dawn . . . (Sappho, fr. 103.4–13)

Self-referentiality is an important aspect of Greek lyric poetry, and it is emphatically present in poems associated with wedding performances. When we have a reference to a song, a material register is also needed. In the song above, the lyre is the visual reference pointing to the song being performed. The poem highlights the beauty of the bride’s feet (eupoda). This feature seems to be typical, as we see it elsewhere, especially with figures that are important in nuptial poetics. Thetis is described as ἀργυρόπεζα (silver-footed, Il. 18.369 and 381). Similarly, ankles and ankle epithets are ubiquitous in epic and lyric poetry relating to women, and often in partheneia, as in Alcman 1, where the poet draws attention to Hagesichora’s ankles at a dramatic moment (Alcm. 1.78).⁴⁷ The epithet in Sappho 103 used for Dawn includes a reference to what Dawn would be wearing on her feet: her golden sandals: χρυσοπέδιλ[ο]ς Αὔως (l. 13). Bride and Dawn are the two figures, the one mortal and the other divine, both referred to as swift in a manner that alludes to dance and movement. The golden sandal becomes a glorified reference that intensifies the sense of movement of Dawn and time, one that needs technical assistance from the sandals, a sign of aesthetic beauty and materiality that catches the eye. At the same time, this becomes a subtle reference to the greater sense of adornment at the center of a wedding ritual. The figure of Dawn, an illustrious bride in the greater mythical spectrum, could be another abbreviated reference, alluding to the story of Eos and Tithonus, a couple that, like Peleus and Thetis, have had their own share of divine/mortal combination and lack of luck, yet both couples were eroticized and projected as iconic couples. References to such mythical figures do not need

⁴⁷ See D. Winkler 1977.

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, ,    

to account for what is narrated in the broader span of mythological time but can focus on specific moments. Eos is one of wedding poetry’s beloved divinities. In Theocritus’s Epithalamium for Helen, which we saw earlier, the poet compares Helen with Aos: Ἀὼς ἀντέλλοισα καλὸν διέφανε πρόσωπον, πότνια Νύξ, τό τε λευκὸν ἔαρ χειμῶνος ἀνέντος· ὧδε καὶ ἁ χρυσέα Ἑλένα διεφαίνετ’ ἐν ἁμῖν. Dawn, in her rising, revealed the beautiful face, lady Night, and the bright spring as the winter withers, just so golden Helen was appearing in our midst. (Theoc. 18.26–8)

Helen appears in an ethereal epiphany in a way that resembles the coming of the day, like Dawn. In this way, two figures connected with epithalamian poetry are linked, as the one is conflated into the other. Hagesichora in Alcman is also associated with Helen, who is in turn associated with Dawn and the elusive figure of Aotis. Hagesichora is καλλίσφυρος, a word used in contexts of abduction and restoration, as with Ino (Od. 5.333) and Persephone, who is τανίσφυρος (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 2). The emphasis on the human body as well as on objects for the body, and especially those of the bride and groom, is a recurrent pattern. Another Sappho fragment (fr. 141), which comes via Athenaeus, records the libations and prayers offered for the bridegroom using similar poetic language. This fragment presents Hermes as the one who pours wine for the gods; the visual register is the jug from which Hermes, as a mythical figure, pours to the gods, with special mention of the drinking cups. Once again, the poem mixes sight with sound and focuses on the movement of a different kind, that of mixing and serving wine, and offering a libation and blessings. It is not clear who the mythical figure is here as the featured groom. However, it would not be out of place to conjecture that we have a wedding featuring gods as its guests, similar to the celebrated wedding of Peleus and Thetis in Cypria, at the center of the wedding song performance. κῆ δ’ ἀμβροσίας μὲν κράτηρ ἐκέκρατ’ Ἔρμαις δ’ ἔλων ὄλπιν θέοισ’ ὠινοχόαισε. κῆνοι δ’ ἄρα πάντες καρχάσι’ ἦχον κἄλειβον, ἀράσαντο δὲ πάμπαν ἔσλα τὼι γάμβρωι.

   

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A bowl of ambrosia had been mixed, and Hermes took the jug and poured wine for the gods. They all held drinking-cups made of bronze, and they offered libations and prayed for all kinds of blessings on the bridegroom.⁴⁸ (Sappho, fr. 141)

As is typical, and we find this consistently in different sources, there is a need to record collective voicing for weddings. As we see in multiple references in epic, lyric, and later in Hellenistic poetry, one of the most persistent features is that the wedding performances, including song, blessings, or other utterances, often present voicing in some unison. The order in this poem is straightforward: holding the drinking cups, pouring the libation, and then following with prayers. The key word is πάμπαν, a word that encapsulates the need to offer prayers for all kinds of things. The word καρχάσιον, another form of καρχήσιον, refers to χαλκήσιον, what seems to be a special drinking cup used in sympotic or, as here, in wedding contexts. Holding this precious cup is what initiates the collective performance of blessings, prayers, and libations. As with the previous poem, there is a need to mark unique sounds, such as that of a musical instrument, and here that of the metal drinking cup, making clear material references. Materiality becomes an essential reference in wedding performances, often associated with a sense as immaterial as sound. The material anchors can be different things, such as drinking cups, musical instruments, sandals, or other clothing, and are often a reference to something that plays a role in the ritual itself. The mythical references, to the extent that we can detect them here, and the allusions to mythical weddings are often accompanied by distinctly tangible terms, revealing the aesthetics of materiality. Such concrete points become reference points in a poem and mitigate the distance of the myth with the pragmatic of the ritual performed. The mythical element is relayed in tangible terms through the references to sounds and objects that would be around actual weddings.

Addressing the Groom The Poetics of Interrogation One imagines that actual weddings would involve an address to the groom. Such an address would be direct and gendered. It would focalize the groom as the recipient of typical wedding discourse. In some cases, possibly in a male-only or a private performance at the groom’s home before the wedding, the tone can even

⁴⁸ Loeb translation by Campbell.

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, ,    

be reproaching, as Theocritus’s Idyll suggests. Again, Theocritus’s epithalamion draws its plot from the mythical world, as an all-female chorus addresses Menelaus as the groom. The collective address remains ludic and is presented in a way as if this could be addressed to any groom. The tone of such performances is jovial and reproaching, as the song utters questions that are direct yet part of the social process as they tease the groom in what seems to be a formulaic way. The performers consist of other young men, friends of the couple, or even a wider part of the community attending the wedding. Such teasing would have been expected at weddings and Theocritus seems to reproduce such wedding lore. It is even possible that he reproduces Sapphic elements from the broader wedding poetry. From an anthropological perspective, once again we see the ludic reproach in a way that recreates an atmosphere of intimacy, yet one that openly alludes to female networks and ultimately steers the address to the groom. Οὕτω δὴ πρωιζὰ κατέδραθες, ὦ φίλε γαμβρέ; ἦ ῥά τις ἐσσὶ λίαν βαρυγούνατος; ἦ ῥα φίλυπνος; ἦ ῥα πολύν τιν’ ἔπινες, ὅκ’ εἰς εὐνὰν κατεβάλλευ; εὕδειν μὰν σπεύδοντα καθ’ ὥραν αὐτὸν ἐχρῆν τυ, παῖδα δ’ ἐᾶν σὺν παισὶ φιλοστόργῳ παρὰ ματρί παίσδειν ἐς βαθὺν ὄρθρον, ἐπεὶ καὶ ἔνας καὶ ἐς ἀῶ κἠς ἔτος ἐξ ἔτεος, Μενέλαε, τεὰ νυὸς ἅδε. ὄλβιε γάμβρ’, ἀγαθός τις ἐπέπταρεν ἐρχομένῳ τοι ἐς Σπάρταν ἅπερ ὧλλοι ἀριστέες, ὡς ἀνύσαιο· μῶνος ἐν ἡμιθέοις Κρονίδαν Δία πενθερὸν ἑξεῖς. Ζανός τοι θυγάτηρ ὑπὸ τὰν μίαν ἵκετο χλαῖναν, οἵα Ἀχαιιάδων γαῖαν πατεῖ οὐδεμί’ ἄλλα· ἦ μέγα κά τι τέκοιτ’, εἰ ματέρι τίκτοι ὁμοῖον. ἄμμες δ’ αἱ πᾶσαι συνομάλικες, αἷς δρόμος ωὑτός χρισαμέναις ἀνδριστὶ παρ’ Εὐρώταο λοετροῖς, τετράκις ἑξήκοντα κόραι, θῆλυς νεολαία, τᾶν οὐδ’ ἅτις ἄμωμος ἐπεί χ’ Ἑλένᾳ παρισωθῇ. Have you fallen asleep so early, my beloved bridegroom? Are your knees too heavy? Do you love your sleep? Or were you drinking too much when you were put to bed? If you were eager to go to sleep early, you should have slept alone and left the girl to play with the other girls at her loving mother’s side until the early dawn, for she will be your bride the day after next and the day that dawns after that, and all the years to come. Blessed bridegroom, a good man sneezed; what an omen of your success as you came to Sparta with the other aristocratic suitors: among heroes, you alone will have Zeus, son of Cronus, as your father-in-law. You are sharing a bed with Zeus’s daughter, an Achaean girl like no other who walks on this earth; a child of hers will indeed be great

   

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if it resembles its mother. We, the whole group of her peers, of similar age, who run together and anoint ourselves in the same way as men at the bathing places of the river Eurotas, a young group of four times sixty girls—not one of us is excellent when compared with Helen. (Theocritus, Idyll 18.9–25)

Theocritus presents the girls reproaching the groom for not letting the young bride (referred to simply as a girl, with the Greek term pais) stay longer with her mother and girlfriends to play until dawn. In other words, the poem stages a premarital life of continuous playful time. The Sapphic ludic element that we discussed earlier returns in Theocritus as a signature reference to the bride. Toys and games are central to wedding poetics, masking a plea for return to childhood. What stands out, though, is the reference to the number of girls participating in this chorus: four times sixty. That two hundred and forty girls are part of this chorus is a significant number meant to impress and overwhelm. Although it is not untypical to make the audience do a calculation to grasp the number, this rendering offers a sense of order. The girls will say later that they are like boys, and this reference to the number 240 magnifies the chorus that now addresses the groom. The girls remain unnamed, but the force of the number is something that the poem highlights, which, in a Spartan context, becomes more powerful, as we have this implicit equation of a female chorus with an army unit. The set of questions that the girls pose to the groom in lines 9–11 (Have you fallen asleep so early, my beloved bridegroom? Are your knees too heavy? Do you love your sleep? Or were you drinking too much when you were put to bed?) is another way by which they seek to overwhelm their addressee. The sheer number of inquirers and the poetics of interrogation introduced here are possible reflections of folk poetics that use the questioning tone to emphasize the speakers’ presence, creating communication dynamics that seek to seize the attention of the addressee and audience. The poetics of interrogation is a traditional feature often used in epic to open a window of communication with a stranger. In the Odyssey, we often have formulas like Τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν as part of an exchange mechanism when more is expected from the stranger/addressee. Arete addresses Odysseus (Od. 7.238), Telemachus the disguised Athena (Od. 1.170) in this way. Similarly, the poetics of interrogation is not absent from discourse around death.⁴⁹ Most notably, in the Orphic Lamellae, we have brief inscriptions of questions one after the other seeking to identify the deceased. Δίψαι αὖος ἐγὼ καὶ ἀπόλλυμαι· ἀλλὰ πιέ‹ν› μοι | κράνας αἰειρόω ἐπὶ δεξιά, τῆ‹ι› κυφάρισσος. | τίς δ’ ἐσσί; πῶ δ’ ἐσσί; Γᾶς υἱός ἠμι καὶ Ὠρανῶ ἀστερόεντος. |

⁴⁹ See Arft 2022.

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, ,    

I am parched with thirst, and I perish. But give me a drink from the everflowing spring on the right, where the cypress is. “Who are you? [Whose are you?]” I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven. (Orphic Lamella B3, Bernabé 478, Eleutherna, 2nd–1st c. )

In Theocritus, we have a set of questions that stem possibly from formulaic dialogic contexts and have also survived in funerary contexts, as also here in ritualized wedding discourse. In one example of a traditional wedding song from Modern Greek folklore, questions are central in the poem in ways that can be revealing about this modality of interrogation. Βαρέθηκα, μπιζεύτισα, για μια γειτόνισσα μου, Κάθε πρωγί, στην πόρτα μου να με ρωτά πού πάγω —Πού᾽σαν αψές, λεβέντη μου, πού ής᾽ναν ιψές το βράδυ; —ν᾽ιψές, ν ήμουν στη μάνα μου, προξές στην αδελφή μου κι απόψη, μαυρομάτα μου, θα κοιμηθούμε αντάμα σι πάπλουμα μεταξουτό, σι πουπουλένιο στρώμα Κι ως πρέπει τ άσπρο άλογο σι πράσινα λειβάδια Ν έτσι θα πρέπ᾽κ᾽η νύφη μας με του γαμπρό σε άσπρα μαξιλάρια⁵⁰ I am getting tired of a neighbor girl Every morning she’s at my door, asking me where I’m going “Where were you last night, young chap, where were you the night before?” “Last night I was at my mother’s, the night before at my sister’s, and tonight, black-eyed girl, we will be sleeping together under a silk quilt, on a downy mattress.” As the white horse goes on the green meadows, So our bride and groom will get to the white pillows.

There is a striking similarity in the themes, images, and poetic dialogues between the ancient and Modern Greek examples. The question to the groom about where he spent the days before the wedding and the groom’s response that brings the bed coverings at the focus as a material trigger seem part of recurrent traditional discourse patterns. In the Modern Greek folk song above, the references to the white horse and the green meadows allude to the sexual union that will follow on the “white pillows.” The imagery of color, animals, and nature is integral to nuptial poetics. In this folk song, we do not have a direct

⁵⁰ Lyrics and music provided in Frye 1973: 107–8.

   

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association between one element (for example, the horse) with either the bride or the groom, but what we know from ancient lyric imagery seems to be part of a broader repertoire of metaphors and images around wedding songs that transcend linguistic barriers. Notably, in Theocritus 18, right after the chorus’s questions to the groom, we have the simile of Helen appearing as a tall cypress to adorn a garden, or like a Thessalian horse. This is typical of the Alcmanian partheneia language that Theocritus uses here. He further alludes to weaving, with a concrete material reference to the wool working of the bride, one that also echoes the musical activity, as loom and lyre come together explicitly in Theocritean poetics (Theoc. 18.25): Ἀὼς ἀντέλλοισα καλὸν διέφανε πρόσωπον, πότνια Νύξ, τό τε λευκὸν ἔαρ χειμῶνος ἀνέντος· ὧδε καὶ ἁ χρυσέα Ἑλένα διεφαίνετ’ ἐν ἁμῖν. πιείρᾳ μεγάλα ἅτ’ ἀνέδραμε κόσμος ἀρούρᾳ ἢ κάπῳ κυπάρισσος, ἢ ἅρματι Θεσσαλὸς ἵππος, ὧδε καὶ ἁ ῥοδόχρως Ἑλένα Λακεδαίμονι κόσμος· οὐδέ τις ἐκ ταλάρω πανίσδεται ἔργα τοιαῦτα, οὐδ’ ἐνὶ δαιδαλέῳ πυκινώτερον ἄτριον ἱστῷ κερκίδι συμπλέξασα μακρῶν ἔταμ’ ἐκ κελεόντων. οὐ μὰν οὐδὲ λύραν τις ἐπίσταται ὧδε κροτῆσαι Ἄρτεμιν ἀείδοισα καὶ εὐρύστερνον Ἀθάναν ὡς Ἑλένα, τᾶς πάντες ἐπ’ ὄμμασιν ἵμεροι ἐντί. Rising Dawn revealed the beautiful face, lady Night, and beautiful is the bright spring at the end of winter; just so did golden Helen appear among us. Like a tall cypress that rises high to grace some fertile field or garden, or like a Thessalian horse that adorns its chariot, just so is rosy Helen Sparta’s jewel. No one knows textile work so well, as it comes from her basket yarn, or patterns at the elaborate loom from the tall beams with a closer weft once she has woven it with her shuttle; no one knows so well how to strike up the lyre in singing hymns to Artemis and broad-breasted Athena, as Helen, in whose eyes all desires dwell. (Theoc. 18.27–38)

The imagery of horses, trees, meadows, and gardens, and then references to wool working or weaving or even the bridal dowries of handiwork, are endowed with complex associations that enrich the genre of wedding songs.⁵¹

⁵¹ In another wedding folk song from Greece (see Frye 1973: 187–8 for lyrics and music) we see the same set of interrogation poetics, in a song that asks about the identity of the owner of an orchard, and then moves to the wedding dance and the “handkerchief” of the groom.

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, ,    

Coming like a Groom: Homeric and Sapphic High Roofs In two moments in the Odyssey, both of which mark the beginning of a journey, that of Telemachus and that of Odysseus, respectively, the two heroes, younger and older, son and father, come to the scene in a distinct pattern. They first enter the palace, which they look at in admiration. A formulaic line follows for both, describing the palace’s splendor: as if the sun and moon shone through the highroofed palace. Both appear as strangers who will soon receive hospitality in scenes replete with nuptial elements. Telemachus, in Odyssey 4, comes to Sparta when there is a wedding. He is not invited, but he becomes a guest, an uninvited guest who enters the palace. Odysseus in Odyssey 7 comes to the palace of the Phaeacians after meeting the king’s daughter. These two scenes, both scenes of hospitality, both involving male guests at a king’s palace where the queens, Helen and Arete, are dominant figures, exhibit some of the same patterns for the heroes’ entrances in a way that steers the narrative.⁵² In both scenes, the guests enter a lofty palace and the poet follows the hero’s eyes: first they enter and then look and marvel at the high-roofed construction. For Telemachus, the narrative is as follows: ἅρματα δ’ ἔκλιναν πρὸς ἐνώπια παμφανόωντα, αὐτοὺς δ’ εἰσῆγον θεῖον δόμον· οἱ δὲ ἰδόντες θαύμαζον κατὰ δῶμα διοτρεφέος βασιλῆος· ὥς τε γὰρ ἠελίου αἴγλη πέλεν ἠὲ σελήνης δῶμα καθ’ ὑψερεφὲς Μενελάου κυδαλίμοιο. αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ τάρπησαν ὁρώμενοι ὀφθαλμοῖσιν, ἔς ῥ’ ἀσαμίνθους βάντες ἐϋξέστας λούσαντο. Then they tilted the chariot against the shining entrance and led them into the divine palace. And they looked and admired as they passed through the palace of the king, a king cherished by Zeus; for there was a splendor as if from the sun or moon over the high-roofed house of illustrious Menelaus. But when they filled their eyes with delight in seeing they went into the polished baths and bathed. (Od. 4.42–8)

In Odysseus’s entrance to the palace of the king and queen of the Phaeacians, we see how the palace is described in similar terms: . . . αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς Ἀλκινόου πρὸς δώματ’ ἴε κλυτά· πολλὰ δέ οἱ κῆρ ὥρμαιν’ ἱσταμένῳ, πρὶν χάλκεον οὐδὸν ἱκέσθαι. ὥς τε γὰρ ἠελίου αἴγλη πέλεν ἠὲ σελήνης ⁵² For Arete’s presence in the Odyssey, see Arft 2022.

   

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δῶμα καθ’ ὑψερεφὲς μεγαλήτορος Ἀλκινόοιο. χάλκεοι μὲν γὰρ τοῖχοι ἐληλέδατ’ ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα, ἐς μυχὸν ἐξ οὐδοῦ, περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο· . . . but Odysseus went to the famous palace of Alcinous. As he was standing there, many things were going in his mind and heart before he reached the bronze threshold; for the high-roofed palace of great-hearted Alcinous had a splendor as if a ray from the sun or moon passed it. The walls that stretched from this side and the other from the threshold to the innermost chamber were bronze, surmounted by a cornice of cyanus. (Od. 7.81–7)

If we examine both these scenes in detail, the similarities are striking: the hero’s movement, the viewing, the wonder at the sight, and the reference in both to the high-roofed room which shines like the sun and moon. This pattern presents a metaphor worth exploring further: how did it land here, and how did it permeate the structure of a hospitality scene when we have the entrance of a guest? The nuptial element, as Telemachus visits at a time of a wedding, is overt. Later in the story he will be given a gift from Helen’s own hands, explicitly for his wedding, something placed indefinitely in the future, while Penelope is the intermediary guardian of the gift, as already discussed. With Odysseus’s advent to the Phaeacians, he will receive gifts to enable his return. In the broader context of gift giving, the wedding plot, and the sun and moon simile, the reference to the guest’s viewing of the palace and the impression of its loftiness are significant features of how epic discourse unfolds. Reserved for figures like Menelaus and Alcinous, the grandeur of their palace must match their heroic stature. In both cases, the narration becomes obsessed with details about materiality: for each thing, the poem gives details about materials or colors, something that reveals the cognitive process in scenes of a guest’s entrance in such a context. But the formula about the high roof in a broader context is more significant, as both those figures enter as guests. Their entrance is like a groom’s entrance. They are viewing characters, and the loftiness of the dwelling is what impresses them first. A bride is like a goddess, a groom like a god, or a figure worthy of entrance to a grand palace. A high roof is a measure of status, a reference to divine-like presence. The simile that brings the sun and moon in a formula that discusses the high-roofed dwelling of a king could be an oblique reference to wedding song poetics. Divine-like figures demand lofty spaces. Loftiness is an epic feature, but there is more to this high roof, as we shall see in the next section.

Sappho’s Heights Through Sappho, we have vestiges of words addressed to the groom with explicit rustic joking and sexual references to virility. References to performances with a

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, ,    

phallic joking undertone must have had a long history and are not unique to ancient Greece. While there is no doubt that this type of humor obscures aggression and may indeed mask fear and social tension during a transition, it creates a performative ensemble in which we have no distinct boundaries between performer and audience. Friends or family or companions of the groom take over the performance. Professional singers may not have been necessary for such performances. Instead, anyone from the groom’s social circle could participate and lead the game-like festivities. The jokes are typically sexually overcharged, as one would expect, with oblique gestures to the consummation of the marriage and masculinity. They may indeed hide deeper fears for the female and fears also for a new social order. But why would that be part of a wedding repertoire? What kind of needs does it affirm or appease? The language of rustic ridicule seeks to ascertain existing hierarchies and dynamics and even reinforce the notion of manhood not by creating a new allegiance but by subverting a unified oikos. While this can be read as a rite of passage, it extolls the current order of male companionship more than any passage. Interestingly, we have references to physical virility but not to the act of consummation more directly.⁵³ The projected spectacle remains the phallus, which can tear apart the roof of the house. If one imagines a male group performing this type of song, the house is reaffirmed as a male territory adumbrating any female presence. In other words, the song showcases the male power to destroy a physical oikos by tearing down its roof, all presented in an all-male context. ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον· ὐμήναον· ἀέρρετε τέκτονες ἄνδρες· ὐμήναον. γάμβρος †εἰσέρχεται ἴσος† Ἄρευι, ἄνδρος μεγάλω πόλυ μέζων. On high the roof; the hymenaios, raise, carpenters, the hymenaios. For a groom is coming, equal in stature with Ares, Much bigger than a big man! (Sappho, fr. 111)

⁵³ For the phallic humor based on hyperbole in these poems, see Zellner 2008: 439–40 and G. S. Kirk 1963. See also Killeen 1973, who juxtaposes this with (Page) PMG 851a: ἀνάγετ’, εὐρυχωρίαν ποιεῖτε τῷ θεῷ· ἐθέλει γὰρ [ὁ θεὸς] ὀρθὸς ἐσφυδωμένος διὰ μέσου βαδίζειν.

   

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Another unremarked aspect is that the overt and over the top reference to male sexuality is not incongruent with hidden notions of possession, wealth that includes the house, and the right to undo the house and its roof as a given.⁵⁴ The song’s lyrics do not mention shaking the foundations of the house nor do they discuss the notion of roots but instead want the roof undone. This is interesting from a psychoanalytic perspective, as the temporary extension of a part of the body is imagined causing physical destruction projected onto the air, not the ground. The performer reaffirms the groom’s right to do so, and the fellow performers are imagined as co-carpenters who will help him rebuild. The tectonic metaphor casts the poem in very material terms. Fellow performers are addressed as tektones. Their role is entangled in this projection of material wealth; they can join the groom’s doing and undoing, destroying and rebuilding the house. As sexual innuendos mingle with construction references, the male role chooses to undo the constructed space. It then becomes a collective enterprise of group aggression that seeks to reaffirm their group boundaries by supporting each other in endeavors that have the semiotics of deconstructive behavior. The epic high roof and the lyric parody of the high roof involve the coming of a new man in the house and reflect cognitive processes behind the making of epic formulas and lyric/folk songs. Lofty homes can provide the opportunity for dirty jokes, but ultimately the two genres give a close indication of the importance of materiality in wedding poetics.

Door-Keeping The grammarian Hephaestion transmits the doorkeeper poem, an epithalamion referring to the gigantic doorkeeper, possibly one of the groom’s friends who guards the bridal chamber. θυρώρωι πόδες ἐπτορόγυιοι, τὰ δὲ σάμβαλα πεμπεβόηα, πίσσυγγοι δὲ δέκ’ ἐξεπόναισαν The doorkeeper’s feet are seven fathoms long, and his sandals are made from five oxhides; ten cobblers labored on them.⁵⁵ (Sappho, fr. 110a)

⁵⁴ For connections between virility, wealth, possessions, and the “economies of manhood,” see Nappa 2018: 167–96. ⁵⁵ Text and translation from Loeb, Campbell’s translation, adapted.

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, ,    

Echoing the ambiance of the poem discussed previously, the representation of the body’s enormity highlights sexual activity. The two poems should be read together: if the house cannot hold the groom and the room needs to be torn down, so the doorkeeper is imagined as a giant with huge feet.⁵⁶ When parts of a person’s body become an entity of their own or a creature of its own to which the person is reduced, the boundaries between people and things are blurred.⁵⁷ The doorkeeper is constructed as a creature that requires equivalently giant sandals; those, in their turn, needed many cobblers to make them.⁵⁸ Both poems refer subtly to manual work, that of a carpenter and that of a cobbler. Sappho’s version of this poem referring to the doorkeeper poses intriguing questions about its possible performance context. It is in Aeolic dactylic tetrameter catalectic, as Hephaestion notes. Hephaestion, who has an interest in meter, marks it as distinctly different from other possible “groom” songs. Moreover, as Demetrius notes (Eloc. 167), Sappho makes “very cheap fun of the rustic bridegroom and the doorkeeper at the wedding, using prosaic rather than poetic language.”⁵⁹ These two points can allude to a performance context that is not exclusively male, but refracted through a possible female performance. My suggestion is that we have a female group performing and mercilessly mocking not only a ritual but also the groom’s group. The emphasis on size could even come as a derisive response to the groom’s size. The groom needs carpenters to fix the roof, the doorkeeper needs cobblers to make his shoes. The progression, though, doorkeeper>feet>sandals>cobblers, shows an intriguing externalization: we have a progression from the person who is the object of attention and sarcasm to a part of his body, to an object for this part, to the makers of this object. The logical sequence of moving away from the specific person to a professional group alludes to children’s folk songs that present sequential images, one linked to the other through a chain of actions or figures that lead from one to the other. One can list several parallels from folklore across the world of rhymes, games, and songs that amply present this feature. In a well-known Modern Greek folk children’s rhyme, using alliteration, we find a progression of different actions and things that happened, projecting images with a) the candle which lit b) the veil that c) the maiden embroidered, and then d) a mouse, followed by a series of animals: the mouse that ate e) the wick, which was the one that produced

⁵⁶ The doorkeeper, according to Pollux, kept the bride’s friends from coming to her rescue. ⁵⁷ Hutchinson 2008: 125 discusses the aesthetics of Catullus’s corpus and the importance of “objects” in it. He discusses body parts, and especially the mentula, the penis, as a locus for metamorphosis. Catullus draws from a rich tradition of Greek and Latin literature. Arguably, Sappho’s poetry is part of this trajectory, albeit in an oral context which operates differently. ⁵⁸ For an insightful reading that looks at the ten cobblers as an “interchangeable and anonymous collective,” while the doorkeeper is an inherently “unnamed, antiheroic figure” that also “provides a meta-commentary of sorts of its own dislocation and repurposing, inviting us to consider the stakes of transposing part of an epic assemblage into lyric’s fictional world,” see Mueller 2023: 71. ⁵⁹ Translation by Campbell.

   

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f) the light, followed by a progression from the mouse to g) the cat, from the cat to h) the dog, from the dog to i) a piece of wood that killed the dog, from j) the fire that destroyed the wood, to k) the river that put down the fire, to l) the bull that drank the river, to m) the hunter/butcher that killed the bull.⁶⁰ While such a connection might initially seem arbitrary, sequential thinking which creates images that are vignettes in a mosaic of a folk song is characteristic of folk children’s poetics. From this perspective, the movement from the doorkeeper to the cobblers, via the foot and sandals, is nothing but an organic part of folk poetics at work. If, as I would like to suggest, this was performed by girls and not necessarily by boys, or even a mixed chorus, then the image of the giant doorkeeper is proliferated (to the many cobblers): from the one body, to the two feet, to the two sandals, to the five oxhides needed for their leather, to the many cobblers; the imaginary gargantuan creature needs a proliferated number of items by association. The initial image of terror for the girls, if we assume this is a scenario of the doorkeeper keeping away the bride’s friends, is then diminished and diluted through the folk poetics of proliferation and reduction. Such songs may be part of the scoffing repertoire, which could indeed have functioned as an antipode of the male performance. It could be performed by two groups, namely the carpenters versus the cobblers. As with many children’s rhymes, these types of songs communicate fears but also dispel them in an innocuous way as the different groups of imagined creatures and roles compete with each other in a formulaic fashion.

Orestes as a Groom Hermione’s wedding in the Odyssey is an exceptional event. The daughter’s departure is to take place after the mother’s return. In Odyssey 4, Telemachus goes to Sparta as a double wedding occurs: Menelaus’s son and daughter are getting married. The wording for Hermione echoes nuptial language; she is referred to as erateinē (Od. 4.13), an epithet that alludes to desire and pleasure. Language of pleasure permeates the episode. Telemachus, as “audience,” participates in the pleasure of what he experiences: a wedding feast and music.⁶¹ Hermione is presented as having the physique of golden Aphrodite. The poem has once again absorbed nuptial elements, while the performer alludes to a song performance by a “divine” bard (Od. 4.17), showing the centrality of song for the occasion.

⁶⁰ For a full version of this children’s rhyme, see https://www.domnasamiou.gr/?i=portal.el.songs& id=302 (accessed April 20, 2023). ⁶¹ On how pleasure is communicated to the audience, and, in this episode, how the phorminx player/singer contributed to the audience’s pleasure, see Ready 2018: 175–6.

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, ,     υἱέϊ δὲ Σπάρτηθεν Ἀλέκτορος ἤγετο κούρην, ὅς οἱ τηλύγετος γένετο κρατερὸς Μεγαπένθης ἐκ δούλης· Ἑλένῃ δὲ θεοὶ γόνον οὐκέτ’ ἔφαινον, ἐπεὶ δὴ τὸ πρῶτον ἐγείνατο παῖδ’ ἐρατεινήν, Ἑρμιόνην, ἣ εἶδος ἔχε χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης. ὣς οἱ μὲν δαίνυντο καθ’ ὑψερεφὲς μέγα δῶμα γείτονες ἠδὲ ἔται Μενελάου κυδαλίμοιο, τερπόμενοι· μετὰ δέ σφιν ἐμέλπετο θεῖος ἀοιδὸς φορμίζων, δοιὼ δὲ κυβιστητῆρε κατ᾿ αὐτούς, μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντες, ἐδίνευον κατὰ μέσσους.

He was leading from Sparta the daughter of Alector for his darling son, the mighty Megapenthes, who was born to him from a slave woman. But to Helen, the gods revealed no further offspring, after she first gave birth to lovely Hermione, who had the beauty of golden Aphrodite. Thus, they were feasting with delight in the great highroofed hall, the neighbors and relatives of illustrious Menelaus; and among them the divine singer was singing to the lyre, and two tumbling dancers were whirling around them, leading the song and dance. (Od. 4.10–18)

Ancient myth often stages sons doubling their father’s lives and daughters the lives of their mothers. Hermione, like her mother, is known to have had two husbands, to have married Achilles’s son. However, the story about Hermione’s and Orestes’s wedding was well known and circulated widely in ancient narratives. Euripides’s Orestes, one of the tragedies with a “happy-ending” finale, with Apollo as the deus ex machina, presents Menelaus betrothing Orestes to his daughter. The language of betrothal is worth observing in more detail, especially as it can be read as a vestige of actual (albeit elevated) formulaic discourse addressed by a father to his son-in-law. Menelaus uses an oblique makarismos, saluting his daughter and the “blessed” house she is about to dwell in. Considering the myth, the epithet olbion is an oxymoron, but in the context of ritualized language, it is possibly a trace of the actual nuptial language. The details about the position or status of a home do not matter here; what matters is the wedding discourse that has permeated tragic poetry; by using this type of discourse, Euripides refashions myth through closure. Με. ὦ Ζηνὸς Ἑλένη χαῖρε παῖ· ζηλῶ δέ σε θεῶν κατοικήσουσαν ὄλβιον δόμον. Ὀρέστα, σοὶ δὲ παῖδ’ ἐγὼ κατεγγυῶ, Φοίβου λέγοντος· εὐγενὴς δ’ ἀπ’ εὐγενοῦς γήμας ὄναιο καὶ σὺ χὠ διδοὺς ἐγώ. Απ. χωρεῖτέ νυν ἕκαστος οἷ προστάσσομεν

   

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νείκους τε διαλύεσθε. Με. πείθεσθαι χρεών. Ορ. κἀγὼ τοιοῦτος· σπένδομαι δὲ συμφοραῖς, Μενέλαε, καὶ σοῖς, Λοξία, θεσπίσμασιν. Menelaus: Hail to you, Zeus’s daughter! I deem you to be fortunate since you will go to live in the gods’ blessed home. Orestes, I betroth my daughter to you, as Phoebus commands. You are a noble marrying into a noble house, may you benefit from this marriage, as well as I who give her to you. Apollo: You, each, walk where I command you, and dissolve the conflict. Menelaus: We must obey. Orestes: I, too, agree. I am at peace with what occurred and your oracular commands, Loxias! (Eur. Or. 1673–81)

Menelaus performs the speech act. Like an oath or curse, the act of engyē, of betrothing one to another, is a speech act. This is very similar to contemporary well-known proclamations such as “I pronounce you husband and wife.” Such brief speech acts are essential to putting the oral stamp on an activity. As such, when Menelaus tells Orestes, “I betroth my daughter to you,” it becomes the validation of the activity at hand, and a necessary ritual component. Ritual here pertains more to the sphere of civic behavior, without which certain things cannot happen. The language of profit is also employed to seal the deal (εὐγενὴς δ’ ἀπ’ εὐγενοῦς/ γήμας ὄναιο καὶ σὺ χὠ διδοὺς ἐγώ, Eur. Or. 1676–7), while Apollo as the deus ex machina is projected as a divine officiant. Proclamations are no simple matter: they are the ultimate speech act, and for weddings, unless a certain discourse is employed, no wedding takes place. Euripides’s Orestes records this language, and we have every reason to think that this is not an extraordinary type of speech, but rather corresponds to the actual historical practice of using a line or two to validate the task at hand in a civic context.

Body Landscapes and Emotions Emotion and the Face The complex intersections between marriage and death in tragedy have been explored in detail by scholars. Tragedy utilizes the epithalamion to signify the reversal of fate and absolute despair, as with Cassandra’s evoking of the hymenaios. Conversely, we know that lament is a feature of wedding lyrics, one that possibly evokes the death of the hero Hymenaios or the lament for Adonis (as in Sappho fr. 140). Similarly, Sappho fragments 107 and 114 present features of the lament. Sappho fr. 114, discussed earlier in Chapter 2, showcases a lament for the

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, ,    

loss of virginity put in simple (ludic) terms. But tragedy explored the thematic, ideological, and social complexities and implications of the intersections between lament and wedding like no other genre. Many tragedies play with the wedding song and present it in a twisted way on stage to enhance the element of spectacle, affinity with an audience that would recognize it, and pathos. Virginity and bleeding are problematized for both female and male characters, as is the case with Antigone, Haemon, Phaethon, or Hippolytus, employing the topos of the main character shunning marriage. Such tragedies present sweeping social forces and expectations, the tragic aspect arising as the protagonist escapes a wedding to remain steadfast to the sense of their celibate self. We often have a preemptive lament of the loss of maidenhood, as is the case with Aeschylus’s Danaids, who lament the loss of their maidenhood: τὼς καὶ ἐγὼ φιλόδυρτος Ἰαονίοισι νόμοισι δάπτω τὰν ἁπαλὰν εἱλοθερῆ παρειὰν ἀπειρόδακρύν τε καρδίαν· γοεδνὰ δ᾿ ἀνθεμίζομαι δειμαίνουσ᾿, ἀφίλου τᾶσδε φυγᾶς Ἀερίας ἀπὸ γᾶς εἴ τίς ἐστι κηδεμών. So I, too, a lover of laments in Ionian tunes, Ι strike my soft, sun-touched cheek and my heart ignorant of tears; I reap the flowers of sorrow, fearing whether there is any protector of these friendless exiles from the Land of Winds. (Aesch. Supp. 70–7)

Multiple texts show how characters feel forced to remain in the parental or natal family or sacred band of ritual: Antigone remains the daughter of Oedipus, never becoming the wife of Haemon, and Hippolytus remains the devotee of Artemis. Here, the Danaids, as a collective chorus, use the wedding discourse to avoid marriage.⁶² They lament the loss of maidenhood in their future. They express emotion vividly in a way that marries lament and wedding song, as they use the imagery of flowers to project their grief (γοεδνά δ᾽ἀνθεμίζομαι) and fear. Aeschylus brilliantly interwove the two genres, and one can only lament missing the musical aspect of the Ionian tunes. The chorus explores the themes of tender youth and grieving heart in ways that evoke a Sapphic style, making it all the more likely that this part reflects wedding lament in a more staged way. However, it is crucial to note the explicitness with which Aeschylus channels the emotions of grief and fear and how they are reflected on the female body, with the ⁶² For this allegiance to the natal world of heroes/heroines, see Lyons 2012.

   

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cheeks as the main point of reference. The cheeks are the locus for suffering and fear in the Iliad. The language here also alludes to Homeric diction (especially with the epithet εἰλοθερή). In a simile in Iliad 3.35, the feeling of acute fear is shown as grasping someone by the cheek, the kind of fear one has when seeing a snake. The phrase δεδάκρυνται αἱ παρειαί, as in Od. 20.353 (cf. Il. 22.491), is one of the many examples where tears and cheeks go together. The cheeks are a locus of fear but also beauty. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the phrase κάλλος δὲ παρειάων ἀπέλαμπεν (l. 174) marks the reference to cheeks underscoring the beauty of the goddess, alluding to an eikasia. In Euripides’s Hecuba, Polyxena tells her mother before she dies: δὸς καὶ παρειὰν προσβαλεῖν παρηίδι (Hec. 410), as she concludes a few lines down: ἄνυμφος ἀνυμέναιος ὧν μ’ ἐχρῆν τυχεῖν (Hec. 416). The word pareia appears persistently in Sophocles’s Antigone. In one of the most celebrated love songs, we have the contradiction of the pareia as the locus of the erotic emotion where love manifests itself: Χο. Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, Ἔρως, ὃς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, ὃς ἐν μαλακαῖς παρειαῖς νεάνιδος ἐννυχεύεις, φοιτᾷς δ’ ὑπερπόντιος ἔν τ’ ἀγρονόμοις αὐλαῖς· Chorus: Love invincible in battle, Love who falls upon our possessions, who spends the night upon a girl’s soft cheeks, and travels over the sea and through the homes of dwellers in the countryside! (Soph. Ant. 781–6)

This ode seems to allude also to erotic singing. The only body part signaled out is a maiden’s cheek, as the receptor of erotic sentiment. To understand how emotion is staged in ancient discourse, it is imperative to see the body landscape that emotion inhabits. Erotic desire dwells on the cheek, the same part where tears land in scenes of funeral and lamentation. There is little reference to the face, and the cheeks become the body’s micro-part that invites the projection of eros. As the part of the face that received the first tears, and as one that is known to change color, this polysemy of color and texture makes the cheeks a particularly vulnerable and much-commented aspect of human physique. In a way, it is the representation of the visible space that can either be the locus of beauty but can also easily present the emotional state of the person, especially that of erotic desire—as active emitter or receiver—or grief; this is where tears first land on the face. Whereas, as a marker of beauty, it seems a more “permanent” reference, often but not exclusively associated with unmarried women, as a marker of emotion, it conflates the permanent with the temporary.

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, ,    

The adjective kalliparēios is revealing, as it is often used in epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry. In the Iliad, it is emphatically used of both Briseis and Chryseis, two slave brides, at the beginning of the epic. For both these women, it is used within the context of “taking the bride.” For Chryseis (Il. 1.143, 310, 369), we also see sacrificial references to the hecatomb, as well as the role of her father in claiming back his daughter, whereas for Briseis (Il. 1.184, 323, 346), the allusions to “taking” her and the bridal procession are more evident, as Agamemnon claims her. In all the three instances in which Briseis is referred to as “beautifully cheeked,” we have the use of the verb agō (lead) in the same line. Briseis, with the beautiful cheeks, is being led. This interchangeability of the same epithet for both these women in this context suggests that it may be a specific locus of reference in song and poetry as a marker for a bride or, as here, for a captive woman. The seeming dichotomy of grief and desire and the visible space they inhabit on the body prove that the cheeks are a vulnerable point for female presence. In epic, the epithet is reserved for both married and unmarried women. Among married women, we see it more than once used for the Trojan Theano and for Helen. Goddesses like Demeter and Hera are also beautifully cheeked, again in a narrative context that shows their presence at moments when they are vulnerable. As is often the case, adjectives are not meant to be simply formulaic but can hide a wider nexus of registers behind them. The seemingly static kalliparēios, which is a fitting adjective for brides and a marker of beauty, can reveal more when we examine the context in which the adjective appears. Both Briseis and Chryseis are figures being exchanged or taken violently, and both exemplify the bitter fate of a young captive woman. The beautiful cheeks are also those filled with tears, and the ambiguous reference there can open a window to a more nuanced understanding of the term. Besides these two figures, it is used in Iliad 9 (9.665) for a woman called Diomede. Diomede is a captive that Patroclus himself abducted from Lesbos. She is referred to as the daughter of Phorbas. As with Chryseis, the poem presents the origin of the two captive women; it makes special mention of their fathers and places of birth, which could also suggest a possible aristocratic origin. Even if that is not the case, the reference to the fathers, Chryses and Phorbas, can indicate that these two women have a notable presence in the epic tradition, which traces their lineage. This twisted reference to the father’s name can acquire more meaning when considering the paternal presence in weddings. It also underscores the importance of the natal family, as discussed earlier. In the case of married women, the most notable is Theano, the Trojan priestess referred to as kalliparēios twice in a few lines (Il. 6.298, 302). Theano serves as the priestess and the head of the older Trojan women’s delegation, summoned by Hecuba, who dedicate a robe to Athena in a prayer that the goddess, as the text emphatically and distinctly tells us, denounces and rejects. The dedication of a

   

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garment not made by Trojan hands but by enslaved Sidonian women is a faux pas,⁶³ and the kalliparēios Theano is leading this group. Could this reference to Theano, twice within five lines, be more revealing about how this adjective functions? It is placed in a scene that shows how the goddess rejected their prayer; thus, it could even be read as a precursor of the tears that will run on women’s cheeks, making a gesture toward future emotion. From the narrative perspective, each usage seems to be loaded with more context than we realize. For the divine Iliadic spectrum, it is used to refer to Themis (Il. 15.87), in a context of divine conflict, and Leto (Il. 24.607). The Odyssean usages are further illuminating. Helen is referred to as kalliparēios (Od. 15.123) just when she is about to give a robe as a gift to Telemachus, with the famous line that she is giving him the memory of her hands (Od. 15.126). This reference shows that, as in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, in the two cases in which the adjective refers to a married woman, Theano and Helen, the epithet appears in a robe dedication and textile work context. In the Iliad, we have the ritual error marked by the text, as the robe was the product of Sidonian women’s hands, whereas in the Odyssey, it was the product of Helen herself; this suggests a closer correlation between women’s ritual gestures and their handiwork. In the Odyssey, it is also used for Melantho, the sister of Melanthius the goatherd, who attacks the newly arrived and disguised Odysseus (Od. 18.321), a figure that does not fare well in the story. Epithets like this are packed with hidden meanings and illuminate the context in which they appear. While it is erotic as a locus of the female body and as a marker of beauty, it is also projected as a site of grief, as the primary depository of tears. It is an epithet that can be elusive, as it might seem to extol youth and beauty while also alluding to grief.

Bridal Landscape in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 6 This short Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6), comprising only twenty-one lines, hails the goddess and her entrance to Mt. Olympus. It is a hymnic rendering in dactylic hexameters of what a wedding song would look like; we have the full preparation of the goddess about to leave the sea and join the other gods and goddesses. Faraone has recently argued that within the broader category of wedding songs as a traditional speech genre, there was wedding hexameter poetry.⁶⁴ Following up

⁶³ See Karanika 2016. ⁶⁴ See Faraone 2020: 336 and passim. Denys Page 1955: 121–2 has already suggested that Sappho’s hexametrical poems were markedly different from the rest of her corpus and Lardinois 2001: 75–6 argues that in her wedding poems Sappho does not invent new genres, but rather she is using much older and traditional “speech genres.” See also Levaniouk 2008: 224 who discusses the “hexameter of small occasional genres” such as prayers and wedding songs, among others and makes the excellent suggestion that the “occasionality of this poetry may in fact be the reason why so little of it survives.”

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, ,    

on his arguments, which consider Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus, I suggest that this shorter Homeric hymn could be part of the wedding repertoire. The hymn presents a scene that reads like a bridal preparation scene; it could, thus, be read as a literary representation of such bridal scenes on late archaic and classical vases. The Horae first receive the goddess and dress her as she is about to be led to the immortals. Let us consider this poem in its entirety: αἰδοίην, χρυσοστέφανον, καλὴν Ἀφροδίτην ᾄσομαι, ἣ πάσης Κύπρου κρήδεμνα λέλογχεν εἰναλίης, ὅθι μιν Ζεφύρου μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντος ἤνεικεν κατὰ κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης ἀφρῷ ἔνι μαλακῷ· τὴν δὲ χρυσάμπυκες Ὧραι δέξαντ᾽ ἀσπασίως, περὶ δ᾽ ἄμβροτα εἵματα ἕσσαν, κρατὶ δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀθανάτῳ στεφάνην εὔτυκτον ἔθηκαν καλήν, χρυσείην, ἐν δὲ τρητοῖσι λοβοῖσιν ἄνθεμ᾽ ὀρειχάλκου χρυσοῖό τε τιμήεντος· δειρῇ δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ ἁπαλῇ καὶ στήθεσιν ἀργυφέοισιν ὅρμοισι χρυσέοισιν ἐκόσμεον, οἷσί περ αὐταὶ Ὧραι κοσμείσθην χρυσάμπυκες, ὁππότ᾽ ἴοιεν ἐς χορὸν ἱμερόεντα θεῶν καὶ δώματα πατρός. αὐτὰρ ἐπειδὴ πάντα περὶ χροῒ κόσμον ἔθηκαν, ἦγον ἐς ἀθανάτους· οἳ δ᾽ ἠσπάζοντο ἰδόντες χερσί τ᾽ ἐδεξιόωντο καὶ ἠρήσαντο ἕκαστος εἶναι κουριδίην ἄλοχον καὶ οἴκαδ᾽ ἄγεσθαι, εἶδος θαυμάζοντες ἰοστεφάνου Κυθερείης. χαῖρ᾽ ἑλικοβλέφαρε, γλυκυμείλιχε· δὸς δ᾽ ἐν ἀγῶνι νίκην τῷδε φέρεσθαι, ἐμὴν δ᾽ ἔντυνον ἀοιδήν. αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ᾽ ἀοιδῆς. I will sing of revered, gold-crowned, and beautiful Aphrodite, whose territory is the walled cities of Cyprus surrounded by the sea. It was there that the wet force of the western wind brought her over the crushing waves in soft foam, and there the goldfilleted Hours received her with delight. They put divine clothes on her: on her head, they put a beautiful, well-crafted golden crown, and in her pierced ears they placed earrings made of brass and precious gold; they put golden necklaces on her soft neck and snow-white breasts: the same jewelry which the gold-filleted Hours wear themselves whenever they go to the palace of their father to join the lovely dances of the gods. And when they finished adorning her, they brought her to the gods, who then received her with delight when they saw her, giving her their hands. Each one of them prayed that he might lead her home to be his wedded wife, so much they marveled at the beauty of violet-crowned Cythereia. Farewell, my sweet and quick-glancing

   

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goddess! Grant that I may gain the victory in this contest and guide my song. I will have you in my mind as also another song. (VI Hymn. Hom. Ven.)

The preparations described in this poem are stunningly similar to the preparation one expects from a bride: The Horae themselves are described as wearing headbands of gold; they put an elaborate diadem on Aphrodite’s head, and dress her with attention to the precious jewelry she needs to wear: earrings and a golden necklace.⁶⁵ The text gives some marvelous details: the necklace the goddess is to wear corresponds to the one that the Horae themselves wear when they go to their father’s palace. They then lead her to the immortals. The use of the verb agō again here alludes to nuptial movement. In this presentation, a female group of divine attendants leads the goddess to the immortals, just as a groom leads his bride to his home. The text is so highly suggestive of nuptial imagery that the first reaction registered upon her entrance is precisely that of a marriage: each god greeted her by taking her hand, and each of them wished to take her as their wedded wife and lead her home, with the verb lead being repeated one more time. As the text makes clear, this wish came as they looked at her beauty in admiration and wonder. The last three lines turn to saluting the goddess, with the poet praying to the goddess for victory in the song competition, so that the poet will continue to “sing” for the goddess (where we have the charged term aoidē). Aphrodite’s entrance to the gods is like a bride’s entrance to her new home and the prescribed emotion of the viewers looking at her is that of desire to marry her as they marvel looking at her. The body landscape is elaborately detailed, with specific types of jewelry in particular parts of the body, especially the neck and breasts; in a way that focalizes the viewers’ desire, while Aphrodite’s autonomous movement is restricted as others lead her to the place. This double entendre on the notion of leading creates a bridge between the ritual movement of a divine figure (or its representation, like a statue in procession) and an actual human figure (bride) who is being led to her new home in a ritually circumscribed way. When the Horae take her to the gods, the gods receive her. The phrase χερσί τ᾽ ἐδεξιόωντο (l. 16) further points to ritualized nuptial gesture, as if the gods are the “groom” to receive her. Aphrodite is the paradigmatic bride, a point reinforced by the comment that each one wished to have her as his wife and take her home (καὶ ἠρήσαντο ἕκαστος/ εἶναι κουριδίην ἄλοχον καὶ οἴκαδ᾽ ἄγεσθαι, 16–17). This line subtly alludes to a nuanced tradition of suitors for famous brides. While we do not have any reference to a suitors’ competition, the collective viewing creates an ensemble, as if we have a chorus of potential suitors or grooms. There is no single reference to the identity of the groom in this intensely nuptial context. All the ⁶⁵ See also commentary by Olson 2012.

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, ,    

focus is on the bride alone. This is not dissimilar to later classical vase paintings that dwell on the bridal figure. Like a tableau, the hymn presents bridal preparations leading up to Mount Olympus and the council of the gods. It is almost as if we have two sides of one vase, one with the preparation of the bride, the other presenting how she is led to a new home. This poem is the closest archaic Greek lyric comes to visual narratives. As has been noted, the hymn begins with a surprising word, αἰδοίην.⁶⁶ This word is used in the Odyssey, where Aphrodite appears to be married to Hephaestus. The sentiment of desire to have her as a wife also appears in the Odyssey (8.339–42), so these lines in this Homeric hymn echo a formulaic way of referring to Aphrodite as a bridal figure. The difference is that there is no groom here. In the longer Homeric hymn, she is coerced into marriage with a mortal man, Anchises, but in none of these texts do we have anything risqué, unless the word αἰδοίη can be seen as some form of a generically displaced joke on Uranus’s αἰδοῖα.⁶⁷ The hymn throughout reads as consistently solemn, but the nuptial context on its own could allow subtle references to sexualized elements and especially male genitalia. If this were true, we may have a ludic subversion of the solemn genre as it allows for a double entendre than can enrich and subvert the main narrative. The alliteration between the two words (αἰδοίην/αἰδοῖα), as well as the word ἀοιδή, becomes a humorous connecting thread. The poem’s final lines refer to a victory in an agon, possibly a poetic agon. The nuptial context is brought into the agonistic context of poetic agons. This raises further questions about the easy recognizability of nuptial elements and their popularity. This hymn can be read in parallel with Odysseus’s address to Nausicaa in Odyssey 6, showcasing again not only that epic and hymnic poetry are replete with nuptial elements but that their performance may also point to wedding performances with the appropriate attire, gestures, scents, and voicing. From this perspective, the wedding context becomes a frame that carries not only nuptial themes but also performative elements that color certain poetic performances in ways that would appeal to ancient audiences.

Deceiving Zeus, Staging Desire: An Early Greek Ars Amatoria Dios Apatē and the Didactic: Art of Love The “divine burlesque” permeates epic poetry at crucial moments. In Iliad 14, when Hera wants to turn the outcome of the battles outside Troy in favor of the ⁶⁶ See Graziosi 2017, who argues convincingly that this shorter Homeric hymn negotiates a consensus from otherwise conflicting accounts from the Homeric and also Hesiodic tradition. ⁶⁷ See Graziosi 2017. There is nothing that may read as controversial and there is no reference to Aphrodite’s origin in this short hymnic composition.

   

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Achaeans, she decides to seduce Zeus to distract his attention. This episode has come to be known as Dios Apatē, the deception of Zeus, and has been read as part of a tradition with roots in the Near Eastern poetic tradition.⁶⁸ When examining how the characters appear, we see that the plot has absorbed nuptial elements, revealing the possible existence of a certain didactic genre that could circulate among ancient audiences, and perhaps even more with an all-female audience in mind. This episode is not without counterparts in the broader ancient tradition. Its narrative structure can easily be reduced to a series of patterns: a sexual encounter between divinities in which one solicits the help of another goddess to achieve a goal, employs trickery, and engages in magical practices. Hera strategizes to have her side win the battle and diligently devises a plan in which she seeks the help of critical participants, each of whom will do their part to make it work: Her movements begin with her anointing her own body with fragrant oil of ambrosia.⁶⁹ The word ambrosia is used as an epithet several times to denote the divine essence of her body, the scented oil she puts on (ll. 170, 172), creating a scent that reaches the sky (l. 174), the hair (l. 177), then the clothes (l. 179). The poet describes her preparation in a painstakingly detailed manner. ἔνθ’ ἥ γ’ εἰσελθοῦσα θύρας ἐπέθηκε φαεινάς. ἀμβροσίῃ μὲν πρῶτον ἀπὸ χροὸς ἱμερόεντος λύματα πάντα κάθηρεν, ἀλείψατο δὲ λίπ’ ἐλαίῳ ἀμβροσίῳ ἑδανῷ, τό ῥά οἱ τεθυωμένον ἦεν· τοῦ καὶ κινυμένοιο Διὸς κατὰ χαλκοβατὲς δῶ ἔμπης ἐς γαῖάν τε καὶ οὐρανὸν ἵκετ’ ἀϋτμή. τῷ ῥ’ ἥ γε χρόα καλὸν ἀλειψαμένη ἰδὲ χαίτας πεξαμένη χερσὶ πλοκάμους ἔπλεξε φαεινοὺς καλοὺς ἀμβροσίους ἐκ κράατος ἀθανάτοιο. ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄρ’ ἀμβρόσιον ἑανὸν ἕσαθ’, ὅν οἱ Ἀθήνη ἔξυσ’ ἀσκήσασα, τίθει δ’ ἐνὶ δαίδαλα πολλά· χρυσείῃς δ’ ἐνετῇσι κατὰ στῆθος περονᾶτο. There, she came in and closed the shiny doors. With ambrosia, she washed off all the dirt from her desired body and anointed herself liberally with exquisite oil, which was enriched with fragrance; its scent reached the earth and sky, as if it was mixed in the palace of Zeus, with the bronze steps. With this she anointed her beautiful body and combed her hair, and with her hands she plaited the shining tresses, beautiful and ⁶⁸ See most recently Pirenne-Delforges and Pironti 2022: 30–3. ⁶⁹ As Pache 2010: 82 notes, “Bathing, anointing, and putting on fresh and beautiful clothes in Greek epic are often the prelude to seduction, divine or otherwise: Hera, for example, grooms herself in a similar manner in the Iliad before seducing her own husband (14.162–86). Bathing and anointing are also typical human activities associated with love and marriage.” For the similarities of this scene with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and a comparison of scenes with seductive goddesses with scenes that feature Helen, see Worman 1997.

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, ,    

divine, coming down from her divine head. Then she put on a divine dress, which Athena had made for her, and placed many embroideries on it. And she set at her breast a golden pin. (Il. 14.169–80)

Hera, like Pandora in the Theogony and Aphrodite in the Homeric hymn of the previous section, is adorned by others, and then prepares her plan to seduce Zeus in a scene that vividly recalls the visual narratives of bridal preparations. She finally wears a veil, the krēdemnon, an item associated with scenes of sexuality, wedding, or lament. The veil is an amphisemous detail, as she appears covered and shining at the same time. The simile that the headdress shines like the sun, λευκὸν δ’ ἦν ἠέλιος ὥς (l. 190), is one we can see through the lens of the eikasia. It comes after all her preparations as she is about to go after Zeus. As such, it captures a lyric moment and what one expects in a scene of bridal preparation: a simile expressing a bride’s beauty. The entire episode includes details about eliciting desire through specific activities that involve a special kind of body care and dressing. Beyond contributing to an entertaining episode, the detail of the specific body care can also be read as an element of didactic poetry intended for the future bride. Hera’s preparation as she is about to trick Zeus could reflect broader narratives in the context of didactic poetry that we may otherwise be missing. In Roman literature, Ovid has expanded on the didactic element by presenting his Ars Amatoria as also the Medicamina Faciei Femineae.⁷⁰ This episode in the Iliad includes an element of an Ars Amatoria embedded in the greater epic narrative. As such, it could circulate among diverse audiences, with variations more exclusively for female audiences. This Homeric Ars Amatoria is focused on materiality: what the goddess/bride should do to her body, what she will wear. It is not a text intended as emotional support but a hands-on paradigmatic bridal preparation that provides the blueprint for such preparations. The most important encounter and help that Hera wants to enlist can come only from Aphrodite, to whom she explains her intention for Zeus as she asks for her help. At that moment (Il. 14.215) Aphrodite loosens the strap from her bosom in which she was keeping all the thelktēria.⁷¹ Τὴν δ’ αὖτε προσέειπε φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη· “οὐκ ἔστ’ οὐδὲ ἔοικε τεὸν ἔπος ἀρνήσασθαι· Ζηνὸς γὰρ τοῦ ἀρίστου ἐν ἀγκοίνῃσιν ἰαύεις.” Ἦ, καὶ ἀπὸ στήθεσφιν ἐλύσατο κεστὸν ἱμάντα ⁷⁰ Zeus is present in Ovid’s Ars amatoria 1.633–6 as one of the different mythological exempla used to discuss false oaths and make the connection with lovers’ oaths. See Watson 1983: 121–2. ⁷¹ For a discussion of thelktēria, see Nooter 2019: 41–2.

   

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ποικίλον, ἔνθα τέ οἱ θελκτήρια πάντα τέτυκτο· ἔνθ’ ἔνι μὲν φιλότης, ἐν δ’ ἵμερος, ἐν δ’ ὀαριστὺς πάρφασις, ἥ τ’ ἔκλεψε νόον πύκα περ φρονεόντων. τόν ῥά οἱ ἔμβαλε χερσὶν ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε· “τῆ νῦν τοῦτον ἱμάντα τεῷ ἐγκάτθεο κόλπῳ ποικίλον, ᾧ ἔνι πάντα τετεύχαται· Laughter-loving Aphrodite responded to her again: “It is not possible, nor is it appropriate for me to refuse your request; for you lie in the embrace of supreme Zeus.” Thus she spoke, and unfastened from her breast the carefully made strap, which was embroidered, where all her charms were fashioned. In it there is love, desire, and sweet words, the kind of persuasion that steals the mind from even the wise ones. She placed this in her hands, spoke, and addressed her with the following: “Take and place this embroidered strap in your bosom, in which everything you need is fashioned . . .” (Il. 14.211–20)

This passage presents a remarkable fusion of materiality, as expected in a ritual setting, with references to the intended outcome or effect: love (philotēs), desire (himeros), lovers’ words or dalliance (oaristys), and persuasion (parfasis). These four elements are only here put together to show an ancient ideology about initiating pleasurable sexual activity. They range from an emotional reaction (love) to the means of achieving it (persuasion). In later Greek iconography, many of these elements are present visually in references to Eros or Himeros, and Peitho (Persuasion) as personified deities. One can read this scene as an Urscene for classical conceptions of marital love, which demand the presence of desire and persuasion and depict those as distinct figures on vase iconography. In the Iliad scene, Aphrodite provides Hera with the thelktēria inlaid in an elaborate strap that she should wear to accomplish what she desires. It is not clear what the thelktēria are: herbs or other substances that could fit within a strap? The word itself does not always refer to something tangible. It is used only once in the Iliad, here, and twice in the Odyssey: the first time by Penelope in her address to Phemius to stop his song that celebrates “charming” deeds (1.337) and the second time as an adjective for the word agalma referring to the wooden horse that made the capture of Troy possible: a statue meant to deceive. The strap, as the locus itself of Aphrodite’s thelktēria, has a highly symbolic meaning, as it seeks to “bind” someone. The allusions to magical practices are evident throughout. The word is present in Aeschylus’s Suppliants, with possible allusions to epic meanings (Aesch. Sup. 1004) in the context of erotic enchantment, and in the Eumenides (l. 886) to denote speech. In Euripides’s Hippolytus, the nurse says to Phaedra that she has at home thelktēria philtra erōtos: ἔστιν κατ’ οἴκους φίλτρα μοι θελκτήρια/ ἔρωτος (ll. 509–10). Apollonius Rhodius, who has modeled his Book 3 on this scene as he associates it with Hera, uses the word as an epithet with φάρμακα, evoking

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, ,    

magical arts (Arg. 3.737, 3.766, 3.820–1, 4.442, 4.1080–1). The connotation is that this refers to some form of powder, herbs, or other element that could lie almost invisible inside a worn strap. This scene brings more nuptial associations as Hera leaves Aphrodite and bribes Hypnos to make Zeus fall asleep as soon as she lies with him. She offers Hypnos a golden throne with a stool for his feet, made by Hephaestus. The act of gift giving in this context and her reference to gold as a material for the throne can be seen as a reference to royalty in Homer. But when Hypnos refuses to help her out of fear of Zeus’s reaction, she offers him the wife he longs for: Pasithea, one of the Graces. The wedding context is clear as also is the imitation of an agreement between the groom and the person who arranges the wedding. Hypnos, though, makes Hera take an oath that she will honor her word. This oath further reveals discourse about making wedding arrangements and possible speech acts around matchmaking.

Hera’s Oath (Il. 14.270–9) Hypnos demands an oath by the water of the Styx. He tells Hera to touch with one hand the “bountiful earth” and with the other the “shimmering sea” so that all gods below, along with Cronus, can be witnesses for them that she will genuinely give him one of the Graces, Pasithea, for whom he has been longing “all his life.” The oath demanded here not only gives specific wording but also provides a particular choreography of movement: The oath taker should use both her hands, one to touch the earth and the other to touch the sea. Hypnos is direct in his request: he uses the imperative hele (“grasp”). The alliteration between this imperative and the word for sea (hele/hala) complicates this soundscape. From a performance point of view, this affinity in sound and words must be powerful phonetically, as it is supposed to utter one of the most forceful speech acts in epic, a god’s oath.⁷² One would deem it impossible to touch both the earth and the sea, unless one is situated on a coast. The poem recounted earlier how Hera went to find Hypnos after a sweeping journey from Mt. Olympus via Emathia, Thrace, and Athos to Lemnos, making it clear that she went from the mountains to the sea (14.225–9). Homer uses space throughout the Iliad, as in Book 2, in ways that can ⁷² For Hera’s oath see Kelly 2008, who brings the example of an oath to Ouranos and Styx (repeated verbatim in the Odyssey, 5.184–6 and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 85–6). As Kelly notes, “unless we propose a stemmatic relationship, or that they are all drawing on the same Near Eastern exemplar, then the concatenation of these three figures in this context is a traditional Greek one. Secondly, Gaia and Ouranos are also coupled in another oath from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (334–6) . . . the motif is thoroughly embedded in its Hellenic epic context, though again this need not imply some hermetically sealed culture. Indeed, Burkert et al. make it clear that these sorts of oaths are found in a large number of separate Near Eastern traditions, including the Aramaic, Hebrew and Sumerian, stretching from the late Bronze Age to the Archaic period and later.”

   

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map a sense of movement or force.⁷³ The island of Lemnos as the broader space of this encounter is also appropriate, as the gift that Hera brings to Hypnos was crafted by Hephaestus, a divinity associated not only with Hera but also with the island of Lemnos specifically. There is a documented cult for Hephaestus that quite possibly stems from the early archaic times.⁷⁴ Hypnos’s request for an oath concludes with a declaration of his feelings for Pasithea, as he states that he has been longing for her, proclaiming his desire. One would not think that the speech act he requests with solemnity as a seal for his negotiation with Hera would end with a proclamation of his desire for the Grace Pasithea; yet the two are not incompatible. To an extent, he makes his desire the reason why he demands an oath as binding as this one. This episode, I submit, captures discourse around oral marriage negotiations and “contracts,” for which an oath is the most appropriate speech act. Hera responds accordingly and takes the oath by the name of the chthonic gods, the Titans, naming them individually. The text is being reductive here, only giving us the group of the gods she took the oath by, and that she named them (but the names are not given to us). Hera’s oath is only presented to us in an abbreviated form. There is a dissonance between the request and Hera’s oath. Hypnos requested the solemn oath by the waters of the Styx, but when Hera’s oath is presented, we have a reference to the chthonic divinities, the Titans. It is as if there is no one-to-one correspondence between the request and Hera’s agreement. Let us consider the exchange: Ὣς φάτο, χήρατο δ’ Ὕπνος, ἀμειβόμενος δὲ προσηύδα· “ἄγρει νῦν μοι ὄμοσσον ἀάατον Στυγὸς ὕδωρ, χειρὶ δὲ τῇ ἑτέρῃ μὲν ἕλε χθόνα πουλυβότειραν, τῇ δ’ ἑτέρῃ ἅλα μαρμαρέην, ἵνα νῶϊν ἅπαντες μάρτυροι ὦσ’ οἳ ἔνερθε θεοὶ Κρόνον ἀμφὶς ἐόντες, ἦ μὲν ἐμοὶ δώσειν Χαρίτων μίαν ὁπλοτεράων Πασιθέην, ἧς τ’ αὐτὸς ἐέλδομαι ἤματα πάντα.” Ὣς ἔφατ’, οὐδ’ ἀπίθησε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη, ὄμνυε δ’ ὡς ἐκέλευε, θεοὺς δ’ ὀνόμηνεν ἅπαντας τοὺς ὑποταρταρίους οἳ Τιτῆνες καλέονται. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ὄμοσέν τε τελεύτησέν τε τὸν ὅρκον, τὼ βήτην Λήμνου τε καὶ Ἴμβρου ἄστυ λιπόντε . . . Thus she spoke, and Hypnos was delighted and said in response: “Come now, make an oath, swear by the inviolable water of the Styx, and with one hand grasp the bountiful earth, whereas with the other the shimmering sea, so that all ⁷³ See Jasnow, Evans, and Clay 2018 for the connections between spatial mnemonics and oral poetics in Homer. ⁷⁴ See McInerney 2019.

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, ,    

gods who are below, along with Cronus, are witnesses for the two of us that you will truly give me one of the youthful Graces, Pasithea, for whom I have been longing all my life.” So he spoke and goddess white-armed Hera did not disobey, she took the oath as he had asked, and invoked by name all the gods below Tartarus, who are called Titans. But when she had taken and completed the oath, they both left the cities of Lemnos and Imbros . . . (Il. 14.270–81)

If this is a reflection on wedding discourse, that some oath would take place between individuals during an arrangement of this sort, then we see that the divine oath requested by one party is not necessarily met word for word by the other party. The text is cryptic here, and not to be read at face value. Still, it is highly suggestive of the kind of contractual language used orally to seal a nuptial arrangement.⁷⁵ One final detail that underscores the nuptial tone of this episode throughout is how Hypnos approaches Zeus and Hera after Hera goes to Mt. Olympus to execute her plan. Hypnos appears like a bird (ll. 290–1). The description of Hypnos being like a bird is consistent with visual representations in early classical art that show him as a creature with wings.⁷⁶ Yet the eikasia created here makes it come closer to nuptial poetics. After all, Hypnos is a groom to be, and the likening to a bird is only fitting, as brides and grooms are often described as beloved birds.

More Nuptial Poetics: Zeus and His Lovers When Hera meets Zeus, Zeus is struck with desire for her and utters his erotic confession, expressing his intense desire for his wife. After their brief conversation discussing the topography of where they are and Hera again choreographing her intended cosmic movements, which involve reaching the “limits of the allnurturing earth, and Oceanus . . . and mother Tethys” (14.303), Zeus responds in a way that can seem puzzling to contemporary aesthetics (14.315–28). He declares his sexual desire as unique, the kind that he has never experienced before, and then moves to give a catalogue of some of his famous lovers and the offspring of his union with them: οὐ γάρ πώ ποτέ μ᾽ ὧδε θεᾶς ἔρος οὐδὲ γυναικὸς θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσι περιπροχυθεὶς ἐδάμασσεν, οὐδ᾽ ὁπότ᾽ ἠρασάμην Ἰξιονίης ἀλόχοιο,

⁷⁵ For a discussion of the transfer of the woman and the words used by her guarantor, see Redfield 2003: 40–8. As Redfield notes, using the evidence from Menander’s Dyscolus 842, “I entrust her to you for the cultivation of legitimate children” was a wedding formula which reveals the conditional nature of the bride’s transfer to her new home, for the purposes of producing offspring. ⁷⁶ As with the Euphronios krater.

   

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ἣ τέκε Πειρίθοον θεόφιν μήστωρ᾽ ἀτάλαντον· οὐδ᾽ ὅτε περ Δανάης καλλισφύρου Ἀκρισιώνης, ἣ τέκε Περσῆα πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν· οὐδ᾽ ὅτε Φοίνικος κούρης τηλεκλειτοῖο, ἣ τέκε μοι Μίνων τε καὶ ἀντίθεον Ῥαδάμανθυν· οὐδ᾽ ὅτε περ Σεμέλης οὐδ᾽ Ἀλκμήνης ἐνὶ Θήβῃ, ἥ ῥ᾽ Ἡρακλῆα κρατερόφρονα γείνατο παῖδα· ἣ δὲ Διώνυσον Σεμέλη τέκε χάρμα βροτοῖσιν· οὐδ᾽ ὅτε Δήμητρος καλλιπλοκάμοιο ἀνάσσης, οὐδ᾽ ὁπότε Λητοῦς ἐρικυδέος, οὐδὲ σεῦ αὐτῆς, ὡς σέο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ. For never has desire for a goddess or a mortal woman tamed me in such a way and taken control of my heart in my breast. Certainly not when I fell in love with Ixion’s wife, who gave birth to Peirithous, a man with godlike mind; nor with Danae, with her fair ankles, Acrisius’s daughter, who gave birth to Perseus, the most outstanding of all men. Nor when I fell in love with the daughter of illustrious Phoenix, the one who gave birth for me to Minos and godlike Rhadamanthys; nor Semele, nor Alcmene in Thebes, who gave birth to a son, the strong-hearted Heracles, while Semele gave birth to Dionysus, the joy for mortals, not even Demeter, the fair-tressed queen, not even when I fell in love with glorious Leto; not even you yourself, as I am in love with you now, and sweet desire seizes me. (Il. 14.315–29)

Some women are named explicitly, but not all. Except for one who is mentioned as the wife of Ixion and mother of Peirithous, and the daughter of Phoenix (Europa), who bore Minos and Rhadamanthys, he names Danae the mother of Perseus, Semele the mother of Dionysus, Alcmene the mother of Heracles, and the two goddesses Demeter and Leto, with no reference to their offspring. The act of naming and not naming is significant and archaic epic poetry is aware of it. But what may seem strange from a psychological perspective is why this type of micro-catalogue should be placed here as a proclamation of desire to a wife noted as being jealous. It is an odd moment. The catalogue motif is not unknown, of course, and this mini-catalogic reference to the women of Zeus alludes to the catalogue of women genre. The Hesiodic Theogony includes a list of Zeus’s unions with divine lovers (ll. 886–923). Moreover, such a brief cataloging of lovers can also be found in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (207–13) where some of Apollo’s love affairs are presented briefly in the genre of a hymn. However, the placement here in the narrative context of the Iliad seems strange. What is the logic of the poet to have the character of Zeus enumerate some of his lovers to accentuate his desire? Aristarchus deleted these lines and wrote that

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, ,    

such an enumeration would “repel” Hera rather than attract her.⁷⁷ The divine “burlesque” is reaching a climax here that can only be understood from a nuptial poetics perspective. Zeus is a “groom” about to meet his “bride” Hera. The emphasis by Hera on the topography of their encounter gives this episode a semi-contractual flavor in a comic frame. The character of Zeus also appears comical, entirely overwhelmed by desire and unable to think clearly. Such a catalogue, while out of place as part of persuasive rhetoric, as Hera is not someone to be equated with mortal women—and the reference to the two goddesses is also problematic—can be explained differently from the perspective of a wedding performance tradition. These are all references to myths focusing on male sexuality that would be at home in a more “burlesque” version of presenting male sexuality. As discussed earlier, Sappho’s explicit reference to the groom’s genitalia can have an epic counterpart in an enumeration of lovers. In other words, this rather twisted catalogue here can be regarded as a remnant of poetics of male bravado combining a tradition of catalogues not unknown in the nuptial context. Epic poetry encompasses different genres of performance, and here, in this awkward stitching together of different speech acts, Zeus’s catalogue is a vestige of a different kind of poetic tradition, one with comic undertones, which has been appropriated by the epic fabric.

The Bride and the Song: Comparative Approaches The section on the deception of Zeus has long been considered from a Near Eastern perspective. In the following, I offer a brief parallel reading which can be further illuminating, namely with the Song of Songs. In the first song, we have a striking similarity with how Hera is portrayed in her preparations to meet Zeus: the emphasis on oil and the fragrant locus around her can be read in parallel with references highlighting the woman’s presence in the Song of Songs.⁷⁸ Suppose Hera is staged as a bridal figure, similarly to the woman in Solomon’s poem; in that case, the references to the scents and the element of fragrance showcases the versatility of nuptial poetics to explore senses and permeate ancient traditions, characteristic of what one would expect from an ancient wedding poem. In the Song of Songs, we have multiple references to the aromatic background and the perfumes.

⁷⁷ See also D’ Alessio 2005 for ancient and modern sensibilities and readings of this scene. For this catalogue as a paradigmatic catalogue, see Sammons 2010: 63–73. Sammons 2010: 66–7 and 71 raises an important point: whereas the Iliadic Zeus is always in control, the Zeus of the Dios Apatē seems different, more impulsive, and prone to deception, which has implications for the way the poem is structured and how episodes can hold the progress of the main narrative, as a poetic technique. ⁷⁸ For comparative approaches, see Mirelman and Sallaberger 2010 and Sparks 2008.

   

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In the early Christian tradition, Origen presented the Song of Songs as a sublime epithalamion. Theodoret of Cyrus praises Solomon for composing a wedding song, not a triumph song. Such a juxtaposition already indicates the late antique readings of early genres. Early Christian writers read it in an allegorical light, with Christ as the groom figure and the Church as the bridal figure. While this kind of reading has permeated theological writings, I read this in more literal terms as a love/wedding poem from the perspective of early literary traditions. The multifaceted presence of the element of eikasia, as the bride is compared to a bird (trygōn) and the groom to a deer (8.14), seems familiar territory. But it is the choreography of space and scent that is most remarkable in this dialogue between “bride” and “groom.” What does scent do in this literary context? Scents can be seen as both material stemming from a specific context and also ethereal and immaterial, dissolving into air. Scent can create a sense of reality and, in the context of erotic scenes, it can evoke a sense of divinity (as with incense), exoticism, and complexity. As Bradley puts it: “smell is . . . far from straightforward,” and, as such, “a sophisticated command of this sense is both sublime and animalistic.”⁷⁹ Just as scent is evoked in visual depictions portraying bridal preparations through the vases portrayed on them (a meta-level, vases depicted on vases, to mobilize all the senses), it permeates poetry and song. With current scholarly work emphasizing materiality, this meta-level of depicting vases on vases can be read differently. Vases are liquid carriers, and scent is an important aspect of such carriers (e.g., wine, oil). When used in ritual or offered as a gift, the sense of smell matters even more. One expects the vessel to carry the scent of the item it contains. But depicting smaller vases on those vases—especially on the aryballoi, used par excellence as perfume containers—creates a synesthetic effect: viewing a vase on a vase subtly evokes cognitively the different scents associated with those vases. If the larger vase present in its full physicality alludes to the utile, meaning the valuable and necessary items in a Greek household (from water to olive oil), then the two-dimensional depiction of a smaller vase on a nuptial scene further alludes to the dulce, meaning the sweet or aromatic ambiance expected from a bride during bridal preparations. Just as many women are presented together in bridal scenes in both art and literature, exuding the sense of a network, when we have a vessel on a vessel in classical iconography, this sense of a chorus of vases is multiplied. Vases could be wedding gifts. Different types of vessels were vital in nuptial preparations, ritual offerings, and practical use at larger gatherings and festivities, so their portrayal on other vases acquires more meaning. Cognitively this merging of the different senses can occupy one’s mental space when viewing such scenes, even if this is not done consciously. The vase in Figure 4.4 exemplifies an ensemble of people ⁷⁹ Bradley 2014: 5.

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, ,    

Figure 4.4 Attic terracotta hydria: kalpis (water jar) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a bride with attendants and Eros, c.430–420 , H. 12 1/4 in. (31.1 cm), D. 9 1/8 in. (23.2 cm). Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1922, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/251203.

   

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and different types of vases. The winged Eros in front of the seated woman makes it apparent that she is a bride. She has an attendant with a fan in front of her, while behind her another female figure holds a container of perfume or perfumed oil. Moreover, this figure in an akimbo posture also rests one foot on another vase depicted here, a hydria. Her posture brings attention to the vases in the scene: her hands on the small perfume container, her foot on the larger water jar. This enigmatic figure has more to tell us about the dichotomy between types of vases, small or large, some associated with beauty, others with household chores. At the same time, the aromas alluded to can remain distinct with their aesthetic associations that, in turn, can further recall different facets of a woman’s life, from ritual and daily work to beauty and sexual activity. Moreover, the olfactory element is dominant. It can guide and charm, but also become part of a different traditional repertoire, not of songs or works of art, but of scents that are passed on from generation to generation. The chorus of vases becomes a vehicle for a chorus of scents that can be contained but that can also spill over and take over physical and mental space. While scent can be an evocative detail in poetry, in an oral poem it explores diverse registers for the memory of poet and audience while also creating a stronger connection in the characters described, but also between poet and audience, as their shared space. The “sweet and useful,” an eternal ideal in Graeco-Roman philosophy, makes its presence felt in visual representations, just as poetry oscillates from one to the other. The Hera episode analyzed above offers an odd combination of the two, as Hera uses the “sweet” to reach her “useful” goal in a manipulative move that brings together a hidden ideology between the two. The language of aromas employed by the poet does not only refract nuptial poetics but further emphasizes underlying ideologies. Notions of profit or usefulness are openly the focus of Hesiodic language, and one would expect them to be more at home in wisdom or didactic oral literature. Yet, even in narratives such as these, profit or a manipulative use of a situation towards one’s goal emerge as ideals. That these are presented from the perspective of the “wily” female divine character is even more intriguing. After all, female figures, especially married female figures with Penelope as the exemplary character, consistently use “wily” means to navigate or make the best out of a situation. In the image of the seated, harp-playing bride, the harp or other musical instrument adds to the “technical” elements that fuse pleasure with expertise. In a lebes gamikos from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Figure 4.5), which presents a nuptial setting, possibly the presentation of gifts to the bride or the transportation of the bride’s things, we see one woman behind the central seated figure carrying a loutrophoros. What makes this even more interesting for our purposes is that music is evoked, as the bride plays a musical instrument. The bride at the center seems to be a scripted image for bridal scenes. The scene alludes to voice. As the bride plays her instrument, she seems to be not only the

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, ,    

Figure 4.5 Attic terracotta lebes gamikos (round-bottomed bowl with handles and stand used in weddings) attributed to the Washing Painter depicting a seated bride playing music with attendants, c.430–420 , H. 20 1/8 in. (51.1 cm), D. 8 3/4 in. (22.2 cm). Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/247915.

focus of the scene but also the entertainer. She is an active performer, not appearing in a seated, statue-like, posture, but actively participating, entertaining her audience, not looking at them but being focused on her music as she plucks the chords. Scenes that depict a seated bride playing a musical instrument seem to be a formulaic visual aspect of nuptial preparations. They subtly underscore the importance of technical knowledge necessary before the bride is led to her new phase (see Figure 4.6).

   

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Figure 4.6 Attic terracotta loutrophoros (ceremonial vase for water) depicting a bride and groom scene, c.400 . Public domain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/244821.

In all the above texts and visual sources, the bride appears with technical knowhow, one that is enacted through a network of people around her. Hera enlists Aphrodite’s expert help, which involves technical knowledge to help her achieve her goal, while she, on her own, has previously applied the ointments and scents that she knew. Scent, music, and the ability to give and take pleasure seem to be part of the agency associated with female sexuality and life. In no case do we have a solitary presence, but instead the scenes highlighted above put the bridal figure in the center of other people and activities around her that help her

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achieve her goal. Hera acts like a bride and, like a bride, she seeks further technical expertise that makes her a puella docta, to put it in Latin terms. Matters of marriage are complex and, as such, getting into conjugal living requires sophistication. Hera’s divine world, as well as the multiple references in the paradigmatic bridal figure that she represents, suggest that pleasure, knowledge, and agency go hand in hand.

Conclusions Nuptial imagery and language are ubiquitous and have shaped Greek literature in profound ways. Despite the formalization of nuptial performance and the wellexpected adherence to generic norms, performances around weddings are more revealing than we have accounted them to be. The narrative forces mask under their stylized elements a rich tapestry of emotion and personal and collective experience that have evolved over centuries. We can trace elements that prove tradition to be a rigid stamp on expressive power. You can easily tell what constitutes a wedding performance. Generic conventions that use praise, similes, and even contractual language at times are hard to miss. Not only that, but the wedding plot has lurked in various texts. But beyond the easily discernible facet of formulaic language, wedding songs and nuptial discourse have given nuance to more extensive narratives in different genres (from epic and tragedy to the novel). Moreover, there are also hidden and coded references which show that the genre went far beyond its expectations. Catullus, in his wedding songs (poems 61 and 62), brings to the fore the violence embedded in the wedding ritual, encapsulated in the Latin word raptio. The marriage god Hymenaeus grabs and takes the “tender virgin” to her husband (the verb describing Hymenaeus’s action is “rapis,” 61.3). Like Hymenaeus, another man, Hesperus, removes the girl from her chorus of friends (“abstulit,” 62.32). In both cases, the supernatural deified force acts violently, and the girls show a sustained resistance to marriage as they are being forced into a new role. Catullus very sensitively registers female anxiety. In analyzing Catullus’s epithalamian poetry and its ritual content and context, Vassiliki Panoussi notes that one thing that resonates among the poems’ readers is how Catullus delineates what she calls the “inability of social institutions to allow expressions to the gamut of human experience.”¹ Indeed, the human experience is almost made to fit in procrustean terms within social institutions and is even “celebrated” through change-resistant repertoires of song, activity, ritual, utterance, and bodily behavior. But the human experience can be voiced and traced in the subtlest ways. Weddings constituted only a fraction of the continuum of lives. Despite the intense stylization of language and ritual surrounding them, the nuptial repertoire of performance registers caution, distress, and even disregard for what is projected ¹ Panoussi 2019: 38. For Roman wedding, see Hersch 2010. For an overview of Greek and Roman sources, see Larsson Lovén 2010.

Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece. Andromache Karanika, Oxford University Press. © Andromache Karanika 2024. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198884576.003.0006

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as the ideal for families and cities. So much so that there is an inherent disjunction between what the genre is supposed to be doing and what it is actually doing. If one expects wedding songs and rituals to be the perfect accompaniments to a transition to a new life or to usher the initiation into a new phase, then one stumbles on a big block: narratives that present different ideals for young girls of marriageable age, namely death or return home. The female nostos, in its own complexity, is a recurrent theme along with the negation of marriage through death or return to the natal world. Similarly, the figure of the bride becomes an iconic image capturing the imagination of literary narratives that feature many of the protagonists of the nuptial repertoire. Alcaeus captures Thetis’s moment as a bride and records her post-wedding moment, choosing to disregard the tradition around her maternal self. Helen is a triple bride to two different husbands, one for whom many suitors competed, an iconic figure of ancient storytelling and wedding song tradition that has inspired self-multiplicity, but also authority-making mythical presence for the half-mortal diva. Antigone never becomes a bride of a mortal groom but eternalizes herself as a bride of Hades, a very frequent motif in ancient poetry, epigraphy, and imagination, which has its counterparts in Christian narratives. This book has traced a genre that we know less in its autonomous form, and more from the traces it has left in the hyper-genres, focusing more closely on epic. At the same time, it has also considered some of the more authentic lyrical moments, primarily from Sappho. It has made the case that the wedding song genre has definitively carried portions of ancient Greek poetry. At the same time, its most distinctive features, such as similes, are ever-present as flag bearers of the diversity of the oral repertoire that has gone into shaping poetry as we know it. I am careful not to propose a model that looks at those nuptial performances echoed in epic or tragic verses as mere vestiges of a past tradition. We would run the danger of treating similes like ossified ruins, mere remnants of a missing whole. Instead, we have parallel living traditions that can be seen like smaller springs and bigger rivers, each with its own beauty and mystic views. Different currents shape those flows, and like ever-running water, they may seem eternallooking but are inherently different every single moment, in pursuit of constant renewal just as they appear to resist change. Such words, when performed, were uttered, recited, or sung by people who had their own currents of thoughts, emotions, and reactions to their individual circumstances. Yet they used the genre’s conventional tunes while marking the transition into a new life. But the wedding song repertoire, like the work song or lament repertoire, does not always need to have a one-to-one match with the occasion at hand. Multiple intersections can bring occasion and occasional poetry together. One does not need a wedding to sing a wedding song, but the latter can inform one’s daily life, like a woman’s humming or singing can accompany her weaving or other daily work. Conversely, references to spinning or weaving

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activities among many others can also be embedded in wedding songs, enriching them and giving them more nuanced undertones. A cobbler’s work is attested in one of Sappho’s most uncontroversially labeled wedding songs, just as the distaff can refer to a wedding gift, poem, or song. These are not mere patterns of the multiple crossovers between the working life of people and how this gets celebrated in unexpected places, but they become potent metaphors of their own. Those micro-motifs, the “bride of Hades,” the “spinning woman,” the little animals or plants present in the adorned bridal world of imagery and metaphors, come to being with their own baggage of associations: a tree has roots but a branch does not, just as a loom takes many threads for an ensemble to be created whereas a distaff takes the mass of wool to make the one thread to be followed. The lives of objects or nature around us have their own micro-stories, and they shape the complex artistry involved in nuptial performance. Wedding songs can be playful, funny, rude, or crude, just as they can be solemn and heavily ritualized. The tradition itself is multiform, and it is this multiformity that has made nuptial performances such pervasive agents in shaping our poetic tradition at large. I have tried in this book to uncover some of those tendencies, from the ludic to the sorrowful element, informing a tradition that needs to be seen beyond its external façade. There is so much more that needs to be done. I have hardly looked at the more prosaic aspects of wedding discourse, possible speeches, prayers, wishes addressed to the couple or families, magical practices or spoken elements that adorn, accompany, or even destroy the ancient wedding experience. And there is much more beyond the formalized discourse, from expressions of camaraderie and admiration to even insults, gossip, and more. I have sought the subjective within the objective and this is not an easy task. And one knows too well that the experience I am looking for was not always uttered but felt. Many emotions were not expressed verbally but through other means. Some of the most silent gift giving can bring the loudest messages to those who know, just like some of the scents or tastes of food consumed can be the best or worst memories for those who lived them. We are doomed to get into unrecoverable territory. If, though, as I hope, this book has made us more astute readers of the multiply sensual but also inherently elusive poetic tradition, then we can initiate a better understanding of the complexity of human presence and interaction with others in times past and places hidden or far away that still inspire, inform, and transform us profoundly.

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Index Locorum General references to extended passages in drama and epic (e.g., Book 18 of the Iliad) or to poems not quoted in their entirety (e.g., Idyll 18 of Theocritus or Catullus 62) do not appear in this index but can be easily located through consultation of the general index to this volume. Aeschylus Agamemnon 231–47: 131 238: 130 950–5: 148 1035–46: 148 1039: 148 1056–9: 148 1070–1: 148 1092–3: 128 1178–9: 128 1184–5: 128 1296–8: 148 1309: 128 1310: 148 1441: 151 Choephori 340–4: 127 342: 127 343: 127 Eumenides 886: 239 Prometheus Bound 555–60: 151 Suppliants 70–7: 230 71: 231 73: 230 1004: 239 fr. 284a (Mette): 157 fr. 350 (Radt): 156n38 fr. 355.16–30 (Mette): 108–9 Alcaeus fr. 42: 153 fr. 42.2: 153n26 fr. 42.9: 154 fr. 42.15: 153n26 fr. 283: 154 Alcman Partheneia fr. 1: 15, 216

Apollodorus Bibliotheca 1.9.28: 160n44 Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica 3.737: 240 3.766: 240 3.820–1: 240 4.442: 240 4.1080–1: 240 fr. 13.1: 121 Archilochus 196a.7–9: 97n60 Aristophanes Birds 1729–43: 114–15 Lysistrata 641–7: 146n6 1314–15: 137n137 Peace 1339–40: 118 1351–2: 119 Thesmophoriazusae 1030–8: 125–6 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1122b35–1123a5: 110 Athenaeus Deipnosophists (= The Learned Banqueters) 1.21c (1.38 Kaibel): 95n55 12.554b (12.79 Kaibel): 99n66 15.694a (15.49 Kaibel = FHG IV 342): 28n36 Callimachus Aetia 1.5: 201n36 Carmina Popularia PMG 851: 224n53

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Catullus 61.3: 251 61.128–34: 117 62.32: 251 64.50–268: 133n126 Claudian Rape of Proserpina 2: 48n75 Colse, Peter Penelope’s Complaint: or A Mirrour for wanton Minions B3: 184 Cypria fr. 9: 19n20 Demetrius On Style 167: 226 Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca historica 4.56.1: 160n44 Ephippus fr. 7: 121n100 Erinna Distaff 1–54: 203–4 15–16: 204n41 19: 204n41 26–7: 204n41 51: 202 53: 202 1b.19: 121 Euripides Electra 1311–13: 161 1314–15: 161 Hecuba 410: 231 416: 231 Helen 522: 162 1315: 48n75 1465–70: 137n137 Hippolytus 509–10: 239 1148: 162 Ion 8–11: 163 15–18: 163 89: 67 483: 162 941: 164 1175: 67 1472–6: 164

1486–1500: 165–6 1498: 165 Iphigeneia in Aulis 51–71: 23n26 1035–8: 108 Iphigeneia in Tauris 222: 127 718: 147 Medea 652–3: 162 Orestes 1673–81: 228–9 1676–7: 229 Phaethon fr. 781.35: 109 Rhesus 932: 162 Suppliant Women 1006–8: 104n77 1022: 104n77 1029–30: 104n77 Trojan Women 162: 162 308–37: 104–5 311–12: 105 322–3: 105 327: 105 353–7: 105 701–11: 106n79 857: 162 1062: 67 1063–5: 67 fr. 122 (Nauck): 125n110 Eustathius Commentaries on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey Iliad 24.29: 2n6, 210 Festus Paulus-Festus 179.8–9L: 117 Galen De Urinis 19.587: 130n120 Hephaestion Enchiridion 7.8: 28 Herodotus Histories 1.32: 72n7 4.32–5: 2n4 4.162.3–5: 194 Hesiod Catalogue of Women frs. 196–204 (M–W): 24n30 fr. 197.3–5 (M–W): 23

  fr. 211 (M–W): 63, 65, 73 fr. 211.6 (M–W): 64, 74 Theogony 70: 15n5 243–62: 45 886–923: 243 947–9: 86 1001: 160n44 Himerius Orationes 9.16: 79, 139n141 Homer Iliad 1.143: 232 1.162: 168n61 1.184: 232 1.276: 168n61 1.306–17: 168 1.310: 232 1.323: 232 1.339: 72n9 1.346: 232 1.369: 168n61, 232 1.392: 168n61 1.406: 72n9 1.449: 169 1.599: 72n9 3.35: 231 3.88: 77 3.146–8: 20 3.154: 20 3.154–8: 20 3.156: 19 3.156–8: 20, 78n22 3.166–70: 21 3.170: 21 3.172: 19 3.172–80: 19 3.178–80: 78n22 3.181–90: 76 3.182: 73n10 3.182–90: 76 3.193–4: 21 3.197: 22 3.200–2: 78n22 3.204–24: 26 3.220: 26 3.221–2: 26 3.225–31: 22 3.237–8: 23 3.238: 24 3.239: 24 3.242: 24 4.127: 73n10 5.340: 72n9

5.819: 72n9 6.141: 72n9 6.298: 232 6.302: 232 6.344–58: 19 6.350: 19n18 6.390–8: 208 6.394: 207 6.405–6: 208 9.115–19: 19n17 9.665: 232 11.68: 73n10 11.777: 17 14.72: 72n9 14.143: 72n9 14.162–86: 237n69 14.169–80: 237–8 14.170: 237 14.172: 237 14.174: 237 14.177: 237 14.179: 237 14.190: 238 14.211–20: 238–9 14.215: 238 14.225–9: 240 14.270–81: 241–2 14.290–1: 242 14.303: 242 14.315–28: 242 14.315–29: 242–3 15.38: 72n9 15.87: 233 16.6–11: 91 16.7–11: 91–2 16.56: 168n61 16.179–86: 49 18.35–51: 46 18.38–49: 40, 45 18.84: 65 18.369: 215 18.381: 215 18.444: 168n61 18.492–3: 15 18.493: 107 18.495–6: 15 19.98–106: 19n17 20.54: 72n9 22.84–9: 208–9 22.104: 19n17 22.440–1: 81 22.470–3: 213 22.491: 231 24.7–8: 194 24.23: 72n9

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Homer (cont.) 24.99: 72n9 24.377: 73n10 24.607: 233 Odyssey 1.114: 18n13 1.170: 219 1.238: 194 1.337: 239 4.10–18: 228 4.17: 227 4.20–2: 15 4.42–8: 222 4.121–8: 186 4.130–7: 186 4.245: 58 4.250: 58 5.184–6: 240n72 5.333: 216 6.51: 191 6.53: 191 6.63–5: 32 6.102–8: 160 6.115–26: 33 6.117: 32 6.118: 33 6.122: 32 6.122–4: 33 6.140: 35 6.141–7: 35 6.145: 35 6.148: 35 6.149: 55 6.149–52: 52 6.149–59: 74–5 6.152: 21 6.153–4: 36 6.154–8: 74 6.158–9: 36 6.162–4: 52 6.162–7: 137n135 6.163: 36 6.175: 52 6.175–9: 52–3 6.178: 52 6.180: 36 6.181: 36 6.231: 143 6.261: 37 6.275–85: 32 6.276–81: 37 6.276–84: 37 6.285: 37 6.286: 38 6.292: 39

6.310–15: 39 7.4: 17 7.69–72: 190 7.81–7: 222–3 7.238: 219 8.257–65: 16 8.265: 16 8.266–367: 16 8.304: 17n11 8.324–7: 16 8.325: 17n11 8.339–42: 236 9.28: 161n49 9.34: 161n49 11.154–5: 74 11.225–330: 40 11.483: 74, 78 14.368: 194 15.123: 233 15.125–6: 186 15.125–30: 188–9 15.126: 188, 233 15.171–81: 187–8 15.424–9: 40 17.96: 191 17.96–7: 189 18.10: 17 18.101: 17 18.276–9: 23 18.321: 233 18.386: 17 20.307–8: 129 20.353: 231 21.352–3: 192 21.406–9: 192n14 24.292–6: 209 Homeric Hymns Aphrodite (Hymn 5) 92–106: 53–4 93: 57 103–6: 54 112–13: 58 131: 54 131–42: 54–5 136–41: 54 144: 57 155: 59 164: 59 174: 231 183: 59 250–90: 150 Aphrodite (Hymn 6) 1–21: 234–5 16: 235 16–17: 235

  Apollo (Hymn 3) 85–6: 240n72 207–13: 243 334–6: 240n72 Demeter (Hymn 2) 2: 216 16: 100 47–50: 43 350: 49 393–4: 43 406–33: 41–2 410: 49 412: 43 413: 43 417: 44 418–24: 41 425: 48 432: 48 Hermes (Hymn 4) 23: 101n69 31: 101 34: 101n69 35: 101 39: 101n69 40: 101n69 Hyginus Fabulae 26–7: 160n44 120: 167 Inscription SEG 1.1923, 247: 57n94 Isocrates Helen 39–41: 23n26 James Protoevangelium 10.1–11.2: 196n22 John Chrysostom Homilies on First Corinthians 7.2: 59n100 Longus Daphnis and Chloe 4.40: 120 Lucian Symposium 41: 97n60

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Menander Dyscolus 842: 242n75 Modern Greek Folk Ballads and Songs Παραλογή Η Νύφη που κακοτύχησε (“The Bride who Fell into Misfortune”) 38–44: 174 Παραλογή Του νεκρού αδερφού (“The Dead Brother”) 1–52: 179–80, 180–1 73–82: 180, 182 Τραγούδι Της λυγερής το φόρεμα (song, “The Slender Girl’s Dress”): 176 Τραγούδι του γάμου (wedding song): 220 Moschus Europa 50–61: 133n126 Origen Homilies on the Gospel of Luke 6.37: 196n24 Orphic Lamella B3 (Bernabé 478): 219–20 Ovid Ars amatoria 1.633–6: 238n70 Heroides 5.23–4: 137n134 Palatine Anthology 6.133: 92 6.280.1–4: 93 7.527: 129 7.712: 205 9.190: 206 Pausanias 1.43.4: 2n4 3.15.3: 137 3.19.9–10: 137 Pindar Pythian Odes 3.16–19: 109 3.88–95: 155n33 fr. 29.1–6: 88 fr. 128c.6–10: 102–3 fr. 128c.7–9: 102

Luke Gospel (Evangelium) 1.26–8: 196 15.11–32: 149n20

Plato Phaedrus 238c: 34n49, 56

Lycophron Alexandra 187: 168n60

Plutarch Alexandrian Proverbs 16: 115

280

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Plutarch (cont.) Dialogue on Love 751d: 94n54 Love Stories 772b: 2n3 Pollux Onomasticon 3.38: 2n3 3.40: 116 9.125: 98 Posidippus Epigrams 49: 90 49.3: 90 49.3–4: 90 49.5–6: 90 55: 90, 90n46 Praxilla fr. 8 (PMG 754): 28 Romanus Melodus Hymns 9.6.9–10: 197n25 Sappho Poems fr. 1: 101 fr. 1.19–24: 99 fr. 16: 79n26 fr. 16.9: 58 fr. 17: 79n26 fr. 31: 30 fr. 44: 11, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 65n110, 65n111, 94, 103, 123, 125, 214 fr. 44.5–34: 62–3 fr. 44.31: 122 fr. 44.31–3: 107–8 fr. 49: 94 fr. 57: 94–5 fr. 71: 102n71 fr. 95: 102n71 fr. 96: 79n26 fr. 96.6–9: 79 fr. 102: 11, 89, 90, 91, 92, 99, 101 fr. 103.4–13: 214–15 fr. 103.10: 95n56 fr. 103.13: 215 fr. 104a: 95, 95n56, 142 fr. 105a: 78, 140, 142 fr. 105b: 79, 142 fr. 105c: 79, 142–3 fr. 107: 97, 229 fr. 110a: 96, 225 fr. 111: 79, 96, 103, 224

fr. 114: 97, 229 fr. 115: 79, 95–6 fr. 116: 71 fr. 117: 71 fr. 117a: 79 fr. 122: 99–100 fr. 123: 95n56 fr. 130.2: 50 fr. 140: 229 fr. 140b: 103n75 fr. 141: 216–17 fr. 157: 95n56 Scholia (Anonymous) Aristophanes, Lysistrata 645 Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 529–30: 28 Hesiod, Works and Days 1: 106 Pindar, Pythian Odes 4.313: 106 Seneca Medea 110: 106 Servius Scholia to the Aeneid 4.99: 106 4.127: 106 Scholia to the Eclogues 8.29: 117 Solomon Song of Songs 1.13–14: 79 8.14: 245 Solon fr. 4c: 72n7 Sophocles Antigone 781–6: 231 804–5: 172 806: 162 815: 169 816: 172 891–4: 172 1204–5: 172 1237–41: 170n68 1240–1: 170 Laocoön 370–1: 67 Trachiniae 913: 170n68 920: 170n68 930–1: 170n68 Stesichorus fr. 190 (Davies): 23n26

  Suda entry on Θάμυρις: 106 Theocritus Idylls 18.7–8: 133 18.9–11: 219 18.9–25: 218–19 18.9–21: 137n136 18.13–16: 134 18.22–48: 137n136 18.25: 221 18.26–8: 216 18.27–38: 221 18.29–32: 135 18.33–5: 134 18.39–49: 136 18.49: 71

18.49–58: 137n136 18.58: 138 Valerius Flaccus Argonautica 1.5.343–9: 160n44 Varro Menippean Satires 10 (Cèbe): 117 On the Latin Language 7.34: 117 Vergil Eclogues 2.2.2: 137n134 Xenophon Symposium 9.2–5: 87

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ” following the page numbers. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. abduction of bride 24–6, 32, 39–51, 55–9, 100–1, 169 See also Persephone Acosta-Hughes, B. 136 Aeschylus 127–32, 150–1, 156–7, 239–40 lament in 127, 229–31 nostos in 148, 150–1 wedding processions in 128 wedding songs in 108, 125 Alcaeus 152–9, 252 Alcman 49–50, 135, 215–16 anakalyptēria 59–60, 93, 210, 212n.42 Anchises 51–60, 150, 236 Andromache 81–2, 124–5, 128n.114, 207–10, 213–14 in Sappho 60–8, 94, 122 Andromeda 125–7, 160–1 Annunciation scenes 185, 196–9 Antigone 126–7, 144–5, 160–1, 169–73, 229–30, 252 Aphrodite 28, 59, 68, 144, 203, 213, 227–8 affair with Ares 16, 17n.11 in Dios Apatē 238–40, 249–50 and Helen 20, 26–7, 138–9, 152 in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 5) 51–60, 150, 230–1 in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6) 233–6, 238 in Sappho 58, 90–1, 99, 101, 140–1 Apollonius Rhodius 120–1, 159, 239–40 apples 43–4, 78–82, 139–43 Apuleius 196–7 Archilochus 97n.60 Arete (in Modern Greek Αρετή, “The Dead Brother”) 178–82 Arete (in Greek Ἀρήτη, Odyssey) 185, 189–91, 195–7, 219, 222 Arft, J. 189–90 Ariadne 85–8 Aristophanes 28, 103, 114–15, 118–21, 125–7 Aristotle 110 arkteia 146–8, 150

Artemis 1–2, 48–9, 93, 146–8, 186, 221, 230 as comparison for Nausicaa 21, 35–6, 52–3, 55–6, 74, 160 in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 53–6 in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 41, 47–8 in story of Iphigeneia 130–1, 147–8 Aston, E. 154–5 Atalanta 139–41 Athenaeus 99–100, 216 Bach, K. 70–1 balladry, Modern Greek. See Modern Greek traditions baths, nuptial 1–2, 60, 93, 110, 150–1 betrothal (engyēsis) 1–2, 157–8, 173, 228–9 Bickerman, E. J. 59 Blondell, R. 152 Bradley, M. 245 Brauron 146–8 bride of Hades 169–73, 206–7, 252–3 See also Persephone “The Bride who Fell into Misfortune,” 101, 149–50, 173–5, 178–82 Briggs, R. S. 77 Briseis 166–7, 205–6, 232 Bundrick, S. D. 195 Calame, C. 85n.39, 118–19 Callimachus 120–1 Cameron, A. 28 Cassandra 103–6, 108, 126–9, 148, 151, 167, 229–30 catabasis 39–51, 172–3 See also Persephone catalogues 10–11, 22–5, 41–2, 44–7, 49–50, 55, 65, 242–4 and memory 39–41, 46–7 See also naming Catullus 79–80, 117, 133, 226n.57, 233–4, 251–2 Cavallini, E. 28 Cazzato, V. 27–9 cheeks, women’s 12–13, 203, 230–3

 children assisting in wedding rituals 115–18, 210–12 children’s songs and games 93, 95, 97–9, 118, 184, 202–5, 226–7 and embedded trauma 68–9, 95, 219 and Sappho 97–9, 141–3 See also lullabies; tortoise game Christensen, J. 76–7 Chryseis 166–9, 232 Cixous, H. 50 Creusa 156, 163–7 Cypria 19, 216 Danaids 162, 229–30 dancing 4, 41, 48–9, 86–7, 93, 133, 212, 215, 234 in drama 103–5, 119–20, 125–6, 164–5 in Odyssey 15–16, 32, 74, 228 on shield of Achilles 14–15 death imagery 5, 11–12, 39, 44–7, 68–9, 204–5 in children’s songs 68–9 connected with wedding imagery in drama 4–5, 105–6, 128, 130–2, 144–8, 169–73, 229–30 connected with wedding imagery in early Greek poetry 39–40, 65, 103, 128–9, 134–5, 202, 205–7, 213–14 and weaving 89–91 Digenes Akritas 91 Dionysus 85–9, 106–7, 242–3 Dios Apatē 12–13, 236–44, 249–50 distaff 184, 191–5, 197–200, 206, 252–3 in Annunciation scenes 197–9, 198f in Erinna 185, 201–7 in Homer 185–7, 189–92, 195, 207 in Theocritus 201 See also spinning doorposts 14–17 dowries 1–2, 38–9, 55, 65, 81–2, 174, 221 See also gift giving eikasia 78–84, 88, 160, 196–7, 211 in Homer 20–3, 34–6, 39, 52–3, 77–9, 227, 238, 242 in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 52–4, 57–9, 78–9, 230–1 inverted in Xenophon 87–8 in Sappho 63, 78–80, 96–7 in Song of Songs 245 See also similes Electra, CP207 161, 205–6 Elmer, D. F. 78 engyēsis. See betrothal (engyēsis) entextualization 8–10, 79n.24, 108 Eos 56, 59–60, 63–4, 95, 142, 214–16, 221

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epaulia 1–2, 115–16, 210–12, 211f epigrams 90–1, 134–5 nuptial imagery in 11–12, 92–3, 126–7, 129, 172–3, 204–7 epithalamia 79–81, 229–30, 245, 251–2 and Sappho 28–9, 61–3, 72n.6, 142 and Theocritus 11–12, 28–9, 80–1, 132–9, 215–16, 220–1 See also wedding songs Erinna 121–2 distaff in 185, 201–7 and female nostos 12 overlap of wedding and death imagery in 202, 205–7 spinning and weaving in 185, 202 Eros 30–1, 82–4, 113–15, 199, 211–12, 239, 245–7 Euripides 86n.42, 91, 102, 125, 160–6, 228–30, 239–40 and lament 126–7 nostos in 145–6, 148–50 overlap of marriage and death imagery in 4–5, 130, 144–8, 163 wedding songs in 103–9, 126–7, 229–30 Eustathius 210 Faraone, C. A. 133, 140–1, 147, 233–4 Faulkner, A. 56 feasts, wedding 1–2, 5–6, 54–5, 81–2, 93, 100–1, 155, 212 in drama 119, 157 in Odyssey 14–16, 227–8 in Pindar 109 Feeney, D. 79–80 Ferrari, G. 60–1, 173 François Vase 84–5 Gamos 102 gamos 1–2, 43, 145–6, 164, 188 Garcia, L. 75 gift giving 12–13, 38–9, 185–8, 192, 201–2, 223 in nuptial contexts 1–2, 12–13, 38–9, 54, 61–5, 115–16, 185–9, 199, 202, 207–14, 223, 245–8 See also dowries; epaulia; offerings, ritual Gorgias 120–1 Griffith, M. 169–70 Grimes, R. 5–8 Haemon 144–5, 169–70, 229–30 Hague, R. 96–7 Harnish, R. 70–1 Hauser, E. 100–1 hearing. See senses

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Hector 19, 63–5, 213 marriage to Andromache 60–6, 94, 122, 124–5, 207 Hecuba 91, 105–6, 208–9, 230–3 Helen 39–40, 56, 85–6, 100, 137–8, 151–2, 161, 176n.79, 187–91, 196–7, 223, 232–3, 252 in Alcaeus 152–5 in Iliad 3 10–11, 18–27, 58, 76–8, 89, 144 in Odyssey 4 15–18, 58, 185–7, 222, 228 in Sappho 58, 63–6, 152 and spinning 185–9, 201, 207 in Theocritus 28–9, 132–9, 201, 207, 215–16, 218, 220–1 Hephaestion 28, 225–6 Hera 92, 108, 114, 160–1, 187, 232 in Dios Apatē 13, 236–50 Hermione 15–18, 189, 227–8 Herodotus 72–3, 194 Hesiod 15n.5, 23, 45–6, 51, 58–9, 63–5, 84–6, 143, 238, 247 Catalogue of Women 39–40, 73–4, 76, 243 Himeros 239 historiolas 11–12, 67–8, 103, 106–7, 129, 141, 155–6 Homer 39–40, 45–7, 58, 91–2, 123, 129, 207–10, 214, 216, 223, 230–3 Chryseis in 166–9, 232 Demodocus’s song in Odyssey 8 16–17 Dios Apatē 12–13, 236–44, 249–50 doorposts in 15–17 eikasia in 20–3, 34–6, 39, 52–3, 77–9, 227, 238, 242 nuptial elements in Odyssey 6–7 10–11, 17, 21, 32–9, 52, 55–6, 74–5, 80–1, 137, 139, 144, 222, 236 spinning in 184–92, 194–5, 199–200 suitors of Helen in 23–7 suitors of Penelope in 15–16, 23–4, 129, 167–9, 187, 189, 192 Teichoskopia 18–27, 72–3, 76–8, 144 weaving in 18–19, 23, 81–2, 89, 192, 195–7 wedding scene in Odyssey 4 15–18, 144, 222, 227–8 wedding scene on the shield of Achilles 10–11, 14–18, 25–7, 84, 107 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 5) 150 eikasia in 52–4, 57–9, 78–9, 230–1 nuptial poetics in 51–60 touch in 10–11, 56–7, 59 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6) 233–6, 238 Homeric Hymn to Demeter 58, 91, 134–5, 149–50, 173–4, 178–82, 216 and Persephone’s negotiation of trauma 10–11, 39–51, 100–1, 149–50, 204–7 taste in 10–11, 41–4, 50

Homeric Hymn to Hermes 128–9 Hunter, R. 134n.129 Hymenaios 102–3, 106–9, 113, 229–30, 251–2 invoked in song 103–7, 112, 114, 118–19, 202–3, 205 hymenaios 11–12, 102–13 in drama 11–12, 102–9, 114–15, 118–19, 229–30 in Pindar 109 in Sappho 103, 223–5 on shield of Achilles 15 in Theocritus 133 unsung in Longus 120 hypermnesia 10–11, 48–50 Hypnos 107, 113, 240–2 Ialemos 102–3, 106–7 iconography, wedding 1–2, 85–6, 88, 110 and images of death 4–5, 173 in vase painting 13, 81–6, 110–13, 155–6, 212–13, 239 inversion of gender roles 29, 48–9, 169–70 in Odyssey 6 32–4, 38–9 Ion 163–6 Iphigeneia 126–7, 130–2, 145–50, 167–9, 172, 205–6 Jakobson, R. 70–1 Jamison, S. W. 24–5 Jendza, C. 11–12 Johnston, S. I. 85n.39, 116 Jones, R. 192–4 Kakridis, J. T. 24 Kristeva, J. 156 Lakoff, G. 81 lament 4–5, 7, 11–12, 89, 122–4, 129, 178–82, 200–1, 252–3 in drama 126–8, 169–70, 229–31 in Erinna 202–3 in Homer 19, 24, 45–6, 129, 152 and overlap with wedding performance 12, 19, 93, 105–7, 144–5, 229–30 and Sappho 94, 97–8, 102, 229–30 See also ululation Lardinois, A. 94 Levaniouk, O. A. 202 Linos 102–3, 106–7, 129 lists. See catalogues Longus 120–1 Lowe, N. 161 Lucian 97n.60

 ludic elements 93, 253 in Sappho 11–12, 94–102, 141–3, 219, 229–30 in Theocritus 217–19 lullabies 95, 107–8, 138, 142 Mahabharata 24–5 makarismos 72–8, 80–1, 196–7 in Aristophanes 114 in Euripides 105–6, 228–9 in Hesiod 64, 73–4 in Homer 22–3, 27, 35–6, 72–8 Malinowski, B. 70–1 Maneros 103 Martin, R. 15, 19, 152, 190 Medea 159–62 Meister, F. J. 110 memory 11–12, 48–50, 75, 81, 100, 188, 191, 202, 213–14 and catalogues 39–41, 46–7 and senses 10–11, 26–7, 57, 66–7, 197–9, 233, 247 Menelaus 15–16, 23–6, 132–3, 135–6, 151–2, 217–18, 222–3, 227–9 Miller, P. 169–70 Minchin, E. 46–7 Mitchell-Boyask, R. 128 Modern Greek traditions 90–1, 107, 140–1, 214, 220–1, 226–7 balladry 12, 101, 149–50, 173–83 Montiglio, S. 159 Morales, H. 44n.73 mourning. See lament Mueller, M. 111–12, 185–7 Murnaghan, S. 160 naming collective 39–41, 44–50, 100–2, 243 individual 65, 75, 99–102, 107, 241 Nausicaa 10–11 compared to Artemis 21, 35–6, 52–3, 55–6, 74, 160 nuptial imagery surrounding 17, 32–40, 47, 52–3, 55–6, 58–9, 75, 78, 80–1, 100, 137, 139, 143–4, 168–9, 190–1, 236 networking, social 217–18, 245–7, 249–50 communication connected with 38, 113, 124, 200–1, 212 and gift giving 187–8, 210–11 mobilized through spinning 12–13, 185–6, 191, 197–9, 202 Nooter, S. 97 nostos 12, 144, 148–50, 160–1, 166–9 in drama 145–6, 148–51 in Erinna’s poetry 12

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female 12, 145–6, 148–51, 159, 166–9, 172–5, 178–83, 189, 251–2 of Odysseus 15–17, 167–9, 187, 189–91 within Sappho’s poetry 12 Nüshu 200–1 nympholepsy 34, 56–9 Oakley, J. 1–2, 212–13 oaths 57, 178–82, 229, 240–2 offerings, ritual 1–2, 93, 112, 117, 123, 210, 245 at Brauron 146–8 See also gift giving; proteleia oral performance 27, 63, 79, 110, 152, 155, 247 and catalogues 44, 46–7 and children’s songs 95 and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 51 and lamentation 4–5 preserved in literary frame 1, 8–12, 16, 22–3, 40–1 and Sappho 94, 214, 226 and wedding songs 1, 4–5, 11–12, 112–13, 155, 174–5, 214, 217, 252 Orestes 127–8, 167–8, 228–9 Orphic lamellae 39, 219–20 Ovid 137, 238 Pache, C. 56, 108 paean 11–12, 61, 113, 118–19, 122, 125–7, 130–2, 156–7 Palatine Anthology 92, 204–7 Panoussi, V. 251–2 Paris 24–7, 112–13, 151–2 marriage to Helen 19n.18, 63–4, 85–6, 151–4 Pausanias 137, 210–13 Peleus 17, 73, 75–6 marriage to Thetis 12, 18, 63–5, 67–8, 74, 84–6, 88, 110–11, 125, 144, 151–4, 156, 215–16 Penelope 17–18, 39–40, 80–1, 100, 166–7, 207, 209–10, 213, 223, 239–40, 247 spinning and weaving by 89–91, 101, 174–5, 178, 184–5, 188–91, 195–7 suitors of 15–16, 23–4, 129, 167–9, 187, 189, 192 Peponi, A.-E. 28–9 Persephone 55–6, 99–101, 144, 160, 172–3, 174n.77, 206–7 abduction of 39–44, 46–50, 100, 130, 150, 169, 216 and management of trauma 10–11, 39–51, 100–1, 149–50, 204–7 in vase painting 44–5, 45f Pindar 88–9, 102–3, 214 hymenaioi in 109–10

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Plato 56–7, 120–1 Plutarch 78, 115, 140 Podbielski, H. 55 Pollux 98, 115–18, 143, 212–13, 226n.56 Posidippus 90–1 Postlethwaite, N. 24 praise of the bride 5–6, 10–12 in Homer 11–12, 20–1, 25–6, 52–3 in Sappho 11–12, 94 in Theocritus 134–7 See also eikasia praise of the groom 5–6, 11–12 in Homer 11–12, 20–3 in Sappho 11–12 Praxilla 10–11, 27–31 proaulia 1–2 processions, wedding 1–2, 5–6, 84, 93, 107–8, 210–12, 232 depicted in vase painting 1–2, 3f, 84–5, 112–13, 211–12 in drama 114, 118–19, 128, 144–5 in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6) 235–6 in Odyssey 6 38–9 in Sappho 61–2, 64–6, 94, 122–3 on shield of Achilles 14–15, 17–18, 84 in Xenophon 86–8 proteleia 1–2, 147–8 Psyche 196–7 Ready, J. 79n.24 Redfield, J. 5 Rehm, R. 4–5, 148 rites of passage 1–2, 5–8, 12, 116–17, 224 Romanus Melodus 196–7 rustic poetics 11–12, 114–22, 223–7 Rutherford, I. 125 Sabetai, V. 212 salutations 7, 11–12, 58–9, 70–2, 80–1, 196–7 in Homer 11–12, 35–6 in Sappho 11–12, 71–2 in Theocritus 71–2, 138 Sappho 49–51, 56, 58, 86, 107–8, 133–5, 139, 202, 206–7, 230, 243–4, 252 Andromache and Hector’s wedding in 60–8, 94, 122–5 and female nostos 12 Helen in 58, 63–6, 152 and lament 94, 97–8, 102, 229–30 ludic elements in 11–12, 94–102, 141–3, 219, 229–30 and rustic poetics 223–7 and scent 10–11, 61–4, 66–7

and taste 50, 63–4 and touching 63, 92, 99–100 weaving in 11–12, 89–92, 101 and wedding songs 28–9, 60–8, 72n.6, 78–80, 90–2, 94–8, 103, 122n.101, 139–43, 214–18, 223–7, 233–4, 252–3 scent. See senses Scheer, T. 167 Scodel, R. 155–6 Seaford, R. 86, 128 Searle, J. 71 senses 31, 43–4, 48–50, 57, 60, 63, 65–9, 92, 174, 235, 245 hearing in Odyssey 6 10–11, 32–9 and memory 10–11, 57, 66–7, 247 seeing in Homer 10–11, 14–32, 48–9 seeing in Praxilla 10–11, 27–31 smell and Sappho 10–11, 61–4, 66–7 smell in nuptial contexts 60, 244–7, 249–50 smell in Song of Songs 244–5 smell in tragedy 67 taste in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 10–11, 41–4, 50 taste in Sappho 50, 63–4 touch in Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 10–11, 56–7, 59 touch in Sappho 63, 92, 99–100 sight. See senses similes 78–84, 92, 182–3, 251–2, in Catullus 79–80 in Homer 20–3, 25–6, 33–6, 47, 72–3, 80–1, 91–2, 160, 192, 222–3, 227, 230–1, 237–8 in Sappho 79–81, 142–3 in Theocritus 135–7, 220–1 in Valerius Flaccus 160 See also eikasia Sinos, R. 1–2, 212–13 smell. See senses Song of Songs 79–80, 244–5 Sophocles 67, 162, 167, 230–1, 252 overlap of marriage and death imagery in 4–5, 144–5, 169–73 speech act theory 70–1, 77, 105–6 speech genres, traditional 20, 51, 74, 76, 78, 94, 233–4 spinning 12–13, 184–200, 252–3 in Annunciation scenes 185, 196–9 in Erinna 185 in Herodotus 194 in Homer 184–92, 194–5, 199–200 in vase painting 191–2, 193f See also distaff; weaving Stallybrass, P. 192–4 Stehle, E. M. 79, 122n.101

 Sugarman, J. 101–2 suitors 190–1, 218, 235–6 of Helen 23–7, 76–8, 252 of Penelope 15–16, 23–4, 129, 167–9, 187, 189, 192 Suter, A. 43 Taplin, O. 19 taste. See senses Taylor, C. G. 197 Telemachus 129, 148–9, 185–8, 190–2, 219, 233 in Odyssey 4 15–18, 144, 222–3, 227 Theocritus 201, 233–4 Idyll 18 11–12, 28–9, 71–2, 80–1, 132–9, 141, 215–21 Theodoridas 129 Thetis 68, 215 in Alcaeus 152–9 marriage to Peleus 12, 18, 63–5, 67–8, 74, 84–6, 88, 110–11, 125, 144, 151–9, 215–16, 252 as mother 18, 45–6, 63–4, 67–8, 154–9, 252 tortoise game 68–9, 97–9, 143, 202–3 touch. See senses toys 1–2, 92–3, 100–1, 121–2, 146, 204–6, 219 trauma 48–9, 143, 145–6, 163–6 connected with marriage 4–7, 29, 100–1, 105–6 embedded in children’s songs and games 68–9, 95, 219 in Homeric Hymn to Demeter 10–11, 39–51, 100–1 managed by Persephone 10–11, 39–51, 100–1, 149–50, 204–7 theory 6–7, 10–11, 39–40, 44–5, 48, 50 Tsagalis, C. 23 Turner, V. 7–8 ululation 11–12, 61, 107–8, 122–32 See also lament Urban, G. 8–9 Van Gennep, A. 6, 159 vase painting 13, 82–4, 111–13, 151–2, 155–6, 212–13, 235–6, 239 gifts and offerings in 112, 210, 213, 245, 247–8 Persephone in 44–5, 45f ritual preparation of bride in 30–1, 82–3, 110, 112, 155–6, 177–8, 212–13, 234–6, 245–7, 249–50 spinning and weaving shown in 191–2, 193f, 195 wedding feasts in 212

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wedding processions in 1–2, 3f, 84–5, 112–13, 211–12 wedding songs depicted in 112–13, 212 Vergil 137 Virgin Mary 157–8, 196–9 Walker, A. 170–1 weaving 89, 178, 190–1, 195, 212–13, 252–3 in children’s songs 95 and death imagery 89–91 in drama 164–6 in Erinna 202 in Homer 18–19, 23, 81–2, 89, 192, 195–7 in Modern Greek tradition 81–2, 173–5 in Sappho 11–12, 89–92, 101 See also spinning wedding ceremony 1–2, 4–5, 29, 100–1 See also epaulia; gamos; makarismos; proteleia; salutations wedding songs 5–6, 63, 97n.60, 101–2, 110–12, 120, 151–2, 160, 174–8, 182, 199–200, 212–13, 251–3 and Catullus 79–80, 133, 233–4, 251–2 depicted in vase painting 112–13, 212 in drama 1, 11–12, 102–9, 114–15, 118–19, 125–9, 150–1, 229–30 in epic 1, 15, 107, 129, 227–8 and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn 6) 233–6 and oral performance 1, 4–5, 11–12, 112–13, 155, 174–5, 214, 217, 252 and overlap with lament 12, 19, 93, 105–7, 144–5, 229–30 and Pindar 88–9, 109 in Praxilla 27–31 and Sappho 28–9, 60–8, 72n.6, 78–80, 90–2, 94–8, 103, 122n.101, 139–43, 214–18, 223–7, 233–4, 252–3 and Song of Songs 245 and Theocritus 28–9, 132–9, 217–21, 233–4 See also epithalamion; hymenaios Weiss, N. 104, 109 wooing. See suitors Worman, N. 19 Xenophon 86–8 Zeus 41, 51, 59–60, 67, 73, 114, 152–3, 158–9, 214, 218, 222, 228 in Dios Apatē 12–13, 236–44 in prayers and supplications 52, 54–5, 74, 138–9, 187 Zissos, A. 160