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

After the classic works by Eugen Reiner (1938) and Margaret Alexiou (1974, 20022), this book is the first attempt to provide a thorough investigation of the Greek lament as a ritual and as a literary form of poetry from the Homeric times to the Graeco-roman period. The fundamental questions which this work deals with are: which is the cultural meaning of the lament as a ritual expression? How does lament work? Which is the ritual strategy which rules the practice of lament? Which are the relationships between the traditional-anonymous lament and the poetic one? Can we notice historical developments and geographical differences in the ideas about death and, consequentely, in the form the lament assumed? In order to answer these questions, the researches about lament made on the field by eminent scholars of the Italian school of folk studies have been fully exploited. This excellent tradition of studies is widely underestimated (not to say unknown) in the scholarship about lament out of the boundaries of Italy. A regrettable phenomenon which excluded from the critical debate the very interesting ideas produced by the Italian scholars on this subject matter in the second half of the last century. To reference only the Italian works which the author is more indebted with, mention must be made of Alberto M. Cirese (1951), the first attempt to give a systematic reconstruction of the common practice to hire mourners to take part of funerals. Later, in 1958, appeared Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico by Ernesto De Martino, one of the best essays about lament ever published. After De Martino's book, Luigi M. Lombardi-Satriani and Marcello Meligrana (1989) and Alfonso M. Di Nola (1995 and 20032), enriched and revised De Martino's ideas about lament. The decisive results of these studies, together with other fundamental works about death, funerary cults, believes in afterlife (see above Introduzione), supplied the hermeneutic tools employed to analize the laments considered in this book, which is entirely devoted to the study of the Greek laments in classical antiquity. Thanks to the results of the folk and anthropological studies, it has been possible to tackle with relative ease the specific difficulties which the study of the Greek lament presents. First of all the ambiguous character of the documentation we must deal with. As a matter of fact, lament has been practiced for many centuries as a traditional and anonymous poetic expression devoted to fulfil ritual purposes during the funerals. Of this huge production (see ch. 2, also for a panoramic view on mythical tales connected with lament) we do not possess anything but indirect informations, preserved inside literary works which are not mainly concearned with lament. The only documents of the poetic lament are the scanty fragments of the threnoi by Simonides and Pindar (see ch. 4), which all belong to a very circumscribed period (from the middle of the 6th to the middle of the 5th century BCE) and which are all devoted to members of the aristocratic class. It would be very hard to understand Greek lament as a general cultural phenomenon by considering only the few fragments of the literary threnos. Luckily, to enlarge so a narrow point of view, we can exploit a considerable amount of texts which preserve sections or single expressions which can derive from the repertoire of lament. Among these texts the little corpus of laments witnessed by the Homeric poems (see ch. 1) and the larger corpus of laments inside Attic tragedies of the 5th century BCE (see ch. 5) occupy a distinguished place. To these two main corpora we must add the many poetic texts somehow connected with the death of someone (see ch. 3 and 6) and the large production of funerary epigrams of different periods (see