Lament in Verse Epitaphs from Hellenistic Itanos

El lamento en los epitafios en verso de la Itanos helenística

Joseph W. Day dayj@wabash.edu

Wabash College, Estados Unidos de América

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional.

The relationship between ancient Greek inscribed sepulchral epigram and lament in its various forms (inarticulate groans and wails, spontaneous góos, formal thrênos) is fascinating, but complicated.¹ For one thing, epitaphic language, motifs, and structures that seem to preserve actual sung lament for the deceased perhaps rather suggested themselves to epigrammatopoioi from familiarity with poetic representations such as the laments for Patroklos, Hector, and Achilles in epic, those of Admetus, Andromache, Helen, and others in tragedy including self-laments of those who are about to die like Alcestis and Antigone, and the Hellenistic laments for Adonis, Bion, and Daphnis. Such epitaphs give us an evocation, not a record, of lament. Furthermore, while continuity runs through the long epitaphic tradition, that tradition also changed over time. Broadly speaking, epitaphs of the Archaic and Classical periods derived their emotive efficacy from close interaction between text and inscribed object, monument, and context. Short elegiac epitaphs worked in tandem with kore or kouros statues or figured reliefs, for example, to generate in viewers and readers a sadness something like that elicited by performances of lament (E.g., Day, 1989, 2023; Estrin, 2016, 2023). To be sure, the interplay between text and object remained important through the Hellenistic and Imperial periods.² Beginning in the fourth century and especially later, however, longer and more literarily ambitious verse epitaphs appeared (Garulli, 2008; Hunter, 2019; 2022, pp. 27-28), and they depended less on a monument for their impact on readers. The inscribed poem as poem carried more of the communicative burden, as does, for example, a dialogic, multi-stanza epitaph from Knidos (II-I BCE), in which the widower Theios and his deceased wife Atthis address each other with echoes of Admetus’ and Alcestis’ laments in Euripides’ tragedy.³

The polis of Itanos in northeastern Crete illustrates the change in epitaphic tradition with its striking dossier of second- and first-century sepulchral epigrams, a short-lived epigraphical habit originally inspired by the Ptolemaic presence there in the third and second centuries.⁴ The recently excavated and partially restored Hellenistic portion of the Northern Necropolis has been published only preliminarily.⁵ None of the long-known verse epitaphs was found in the area of that cemetery, as far as we know, but all of them probably originated there. Although the more impressive monuments were constructed out of large limestone blocks surmounted by stelai and other elements, I know of no physical evidence of figured art.⁶Verbal artistry is a different matter. Among the better preserved Itanian epitaphs, the three longest exhibit considerable poetic ambition, indeed a tendency toward literariness, if one that is not always successfully realized. These texts echo the motifs and structure of sung lament or literary representations of it; they also remind readers of the ritual circumstances in which lament might have been performed. A person reading such an epitaph evoked lament and its performance context. I should say readers created a simulacrum of lament.

The epitaph of Exákon, one of the longest Greek sepulchral epigrams at fifteen elegiac couplets, opens with a request for a dirge that refers directly to poetic representations of lament (vv. 1-4):⁷

[πό]ντου κυμαίνοντος ἐνοικήτ̣ιραι ἀθαμ[βε]ῖ̣̣ς̣

[Ν]ηρῇδες ξανθοὺς λυσάμεναι πλοκάμους̣⁸

δεῦτε πρὸς ἠιθέου νέον ἠρίον ὄφρα τάχιστα

με[ίζο]ν̣’⁹ Ἀχιλλείης θρῆνον ἀεισόμεναι.

Fearless inhabitants of the swelling sea, Nereids, loose your red-gold locks // (and) come quickly here to the new tomb of an unmarried youth to sing a dirge [greater] than that of Achilles’ (mother Thetis).

The Nereids had joined Thetis in lamenting Patroklos and Achilles himself, and they are asked here to perform an even greater dirge for Exákon, although it is not entirely clear how to construe Ἀχιλλείης,¹⁰ and the idea of a “greater” dirge for the Itanian youth seems eccentric. Lament begins already in the request for it: the Nereids’ dirge for Exákon is justified by the following lines, which, while also not perfectly straightforward, clearly introduce the first of several lament motifs in the epitaph, viz., the special sadness of death before marriage¹¹ (vv. 5-7):

…ὃν Κύ̣πρις ο̣ὐ̣ λεχέεσσι γαμοκλόπος ἐμνήστευσεν

οὐδὲ καλῶι θαλάμωι συνκατέλεξε κόρηι

ἀλλ᾿ αὔτως ὑπὸ γαῖαν ἔβη{ν}…

… (a youth) whom adulteress Kypris did not woo with beds or make to lie down with a girl in a beautiful chamber, // but even so [Exákon] went under the earth…

The epitaph goes on to expand greatly the lament requested and begun in the opening, and it does so in an orderly fashion: a different lament motif is highlighted in each of the three clearly articulated parts of the poem that follow. A change of addressee marks the first break at vv. 9-10:

Ἑρμῆ Μαιάδος υἱέ, ἄγ’ εὐσεβέων ἐπὶ χῶρον…

ἄνδρα τὸν…

Hermes, son of Maia, lead to the land of the pious (this) man…

The common epitaphic prayer that the deceased be taken to the “land of the pious” reflects a more optimistic eschatology than that portrayed in Homer, something perhaps closer to the gold lamellae,¹² a sentiment more consoling to mourners who might express it in their lament. Here, the prayer flows into a reminder of the whole city’s lamentation for Exákon, the kind of circumstance where the prayer would be appropriate (vv. 11-12):

…ὃν πατρὶς θρέψασα πόλις γ̣’ [εὔδοξο]ς̣ Ἴτανος

κλα̣ῦσεν ἐπ’ οὐχ ὁσίωι σώ[ματι μυρο]μ̣ένη.

…whom the fatherland city that reared (him), [famous] Itanos, lamented, [weeping] over his impious (i.e., dead so young) body.

Although another change of addressee, to personified Crete, marks the start of the third part, the idea of public mourning continues from the second, but more emotionally. Whatever speaking voice is imagined, it associates itself with the most likely readers of the Itanian epitaph: any Cretan, uttering the request to “my mother Crete” to stop lamenting, joins the versified lament in propria persona (vv. 13-14):

ἀλλὰ σύ, δῖα μάκαιρα Διὸς θ[ρέπτειρ’, ἀπόλ]ηγε

Κρήτη, σ’ ἀγκόπασον, μῆτ[ερ ἐμή, στοναχ]ῶν·

But you, divine blessed [rearer] of Zeus, Crete, [leave off], restrain yourself from [groans, my] mother…

This variation on a conventional request to the bereaved is justified by a common lamentatory and epitaphic consolation motif,¹³ i.e., all must die, even heroes (vv. 15-17):

οὐ γὰρ μόρσιμόν ἐστι φυγ[εῖν] τ̣[ὸν δαίμον᾿ ἀπη]ν̣ῆ

εἴ γε θεοὶ τ[α]ύ̣την ἀτραπὸν ἡρω̣[ικούς]

… [ἄγον ἄνδρας].

For it is not fated to escape [the harsh daîmon], if the gods [lead] even heroic … [men] along this path.

There follow (19-22) three exempla of heroes who had to die: Minos, Herakles, and the Dioskouroi, the last having “gone to the gods thanks to their piety” (22, εἰς δὲ θεοὺς ᾤχ̣̣[ο]ν̣τ’ εὐσεβίας γε χάριν). Herakles is the exemplum Achilles himself cites to Thetis as he prepares to re-enter battle and soon die (Iliad 18.115-19).

A final transition, to Exákon’s own voice, marks the beginning of the fourth section, while picking up the theme of eusébeia from the preceding one (vv. 23-24):

τοιγάρτοι καὐτός [γ’] ἀ̣[ρ]ετᾶς ἕνεκεν κατὰ πάτραν

εἰς τόπον εὐσεβ̣έων χῶρον ἀπῳκισάμην.

So then I myself as well, because of my areté with respect to my fatherland, changed my abode to the place of the pious.

What follows is Exákon’s self-lament, which features a complaint developed from a clever riff on the idea of his being named. His mother gave him his name… (vv. 27-30)

ὅππως κεκλοίμην Ἐξάκων ἐν πατρίδ’ Ἰ̣τάνωι

ζῶν,¹⁴ θνήσκω δ<ὲ μόνον>¹⁵ οὔνομ’ ἔχων σὺν ἐμοί,

οὐ τελέσας ἀρχὴν πόλεως ἧς ἔκγονός εἰμι,

θνήσκω…

…so that I would be called Exákon in my fatherland Itanos when I was alive, but I die having the name with me, // not having held a magistracy of the city I was born from, I die…

Exákon bemoans having died with “<only> his name,” that is, before fulfilling his potential and accomplishing something notable in public life that would cause him to be remembered in the masculine sphere for anything but the name his mother gave him in the domestic sphere.¹⁶ The utterance harks back to the first section’s statement that he died before marriage, but this novel variation on the motif of premature death, placed as it is in Exákon’s mouth, raises the emotional tone to a climactic high at the poem’s end.¹⁷

Valentina Garulli rightly notes that Exákon’s epitaph illustrates how lament could function as a form of poetic expressiveness by means of which composers with literary ambition expanded traditionally brief epitaphs into epigrammata longa (2008, pp. 648-652). Dirge (θρῆνος) is requested in the opening sequence (vv. 3-4), and the city’s lamentation is described in the second section (11-12) and the whole island is mentioned in the third (13-14). The entire poem, however, is one long poetic lament, a θρῆνος featuring motifs of mourning in each section: death before marriage (5-7), a prayer to conduct the deceased to the land of the pious (9-10), a command to stop grieving because even heroes die (13-22), and death before expected public accomplishment (27-29). Furthermore, the model of lament extends beyond motifs to the epitaph’s structure.

Speaking voices are not explicitly identified except for Exákon’s in his self-lament in the last section (Alexiou, 2002, pp. 131-160). His utterance makes the poem technically dialogic, but are we intended to imagine it as polyphonic, with more than one voice speaking in the three earlier sections? A different addressee is marked at the beginning of each part, and the third, addressing “my mother Crete,” is spoken by someone who can identify as Cretan. Might we imagine the second and perhaps even the third sections spoken by the Nereids, answering the request to sing a dirge made in the first part and being answered by the deceased in the last? I leave this matter of voices largely unresolved, but subsequent sections often circle back to ideas appearing earlier. This phenomenon results in antiphony of a sort, one in which responses to prior comments are not always assigned to clearly differentiated voices. Regular antiphony, call and response, was a recognized characteristic of lament (Alexiou, 2002, pp. 131-160), as in Agamemnon’s description of Achilles’ funeral at Odyssey 24.60-61: Μοῦσαι δ’ ἐννέα πᾶσαι ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ/ θρήνεον (“All nine Muses sang a dirgeanswering with beautiful voice”), apparently alternating with Thetis and the other Nereids οἴκτρ᾿ ὀλοφυρόμεναι (“lamenting piteously,” 59),¹⁸ but perhaps also answering each other’s song. In Exákon’s epitaph, the request to Crete in the third section to stop her lamentation picks up from the description of the city’s mourning in the last couplet of the preceding section. There is even an acoustic echo if the restoration is accepted: πατρὶς θρέψασα πόλις (“the fatherland city that reared,” 11) echoed by

μάκαιρα Διὸς θ[ρέπτειρ(α)…]/ Κρήτη (“blessed [rearer] of Zeus, Crete,” 13-14). At the beginning of his self-lament, Exákon asserts his own merited transition to the “land of the pious” (εὐσεβέων, 23-24), which takes off from the preceding deification of the Dioskouroi because of their piety (εὐσεβίας, 22) and harks back to the prayer to Hermes (εὐσεβέων ἐπὶ χῶρον, “to the land of the pious,” 9). The final part also contains an acoustic echo of the third: the anaphora θνήσκει/ θνήσκει applied to the first two mythical exempla (19-20) is reflected in the self-lament’s θνήσκω/ θνήσκω (28, 30). Finally, as noted above, Exákon’s complaint about his youthful death before making a political name for himself (28-30) resumes, but varies, the theme of youthful death before marriage in the opening section (“unmarried youth” in 3, followed by 5-6).

As vocal readers work through Exákon’s epitaph, the text shapes their speech as a dialogic lament, if not a polyphonic one; and the repeated themes and sounds produce a sense of antiphony with echoes bouncing back and forth. The Nereids are invoked to perform a sung lament, and readers do precisely that, repeating old lament motifs and creating a kind of antiphony.

We can compare the marker of another young Itanian, Léon. The stone base carries two elegiac epitaphs on adjacent faces, conventionally labeled A and B.¹⁹ They are companion epigrams, each necessary for the full understanding and appreciation of the other.²⁰ Numerous lament motifs appear, but I highlight two structural features comparable to those in Exákon’s epitaph: dialogue and a feeling of antiphony.

First, dialogue between two voices. Poem A is uttered in the voice of an unspecified mourner, a role any reader assumes although the perspective is that of Léon’s family: his parents are named (A.2-3), and the depth of their grief is expressed (A.4-6). In the last couplet, this voice addresses Léon who loved to hunt with his dogs in the mountains (A.7-8):

Νύμφαι δ’ Ὑδριάδες καὶ ὁμέστιος οὔρεσιν Ἀχώ,

τοξότα, δίζηνται σὰν σκυλάκων τε βοάν.

The Hydriad Nymphs and Echo, their companion in the mountains, O bowman, seek your shouts and those of your dogs.

Nature deities missing a beloved departed human pursuing customary activities in their realm comprise a bucolic lament motif that made its way into literary epigram.²¹ The motif is central to the lament for Bion([Moschus] 3), where Echo herself appears (30-31): Ἀχὼ δ’ ἐν πέτραισι ὀδύρεται ὅττι σιωπῇ/ κοὐκέτι μιμεῖται τά σὰ χείλεα (“Echo among the rocks laments, for she is silent and no longer mimics your lips”).²² After their sad address to Léon at the end of A, however, when readers take a step to the left and begin epitaph B, they immediately begin to ventriloquize the dead man himself as he responds to the apostrophe that closes A. Verse B.1 starts, οὐ δορί με δμαθ̣έντα̣… (“me, not done in by a spear…”), and Léon continues to speak with first person forms and agreeing participles through v. 10. These lines constitute a self-lament in the manner of the last section of Exákon’s epitaph, although in B.11-12 the anonymous voice reasserts itself with a prayer to Hades to “rank Léon among the homes of the pious” (οἴκων τάξον ἐπ’ εὐσεβέων).

Second, antiphony. The dialogue between the voice of A and Léon in B creates a kind of antiphonal lament, one that is more tightly organized than that in Exákon’s epitaph. The figure of Echo at A.7 signals the relationship between A and B (Christian, 2015, pp. 128-130): poem A establishes three themes that are echoed, in the same order, in B and thereby constitute a clear point-by-point antiphony, as opposed to both the looser echoing in Exákon’s epitaph and a literal alternation of voices in call and response. I merely mention the first two themes: Léon’s actual and potential roles in public life (A.1-2, B.1-2) and the grief of the family deprived of their young son, brother, and father²³ (A.5-6, B. 4, 7-10). The third theme is the end of Léon’s hunting, begun in the address to him at A.7-8 (above) and echoed at B.5-6, where it is introduced by “no longer,” a pathetic term found in the lament for Bion (above) and commonly in epitaphs:²⁴

κοὐκέτι τοξοσύναισι χαρεὶς διὰ λισσάδα πέτραν

θωΰξω σκυλάκων τερπνὸν ἀγαλλόμενος.

And no longer rejoicing in my bowmanship over the rock cliffs shall I shout glorying in my dogs’ joy.

This is the noisy scene missed by the Hydriads and Echo at the end of A, complete with acoustic echoes (τοξο-/ τοξο-, σκυλάκων repeated), but also with emotionally heightened and poetically striking variations. Léon will no longer hunt with his dogs in a locale called λισσὰς πέτρα, the kind of flat surface recognized in antiquity as a generator of echoes;²⁵ and he will not shout aloud, θωΰξω, a poetic word that can describe a dog’s barking.²⁶Léon, then, cleverly varies poem A’s ideas of “Echo in the mountains” and “your shouts and those of your dogs,” and he adds explicitly emotional language: “rejoicing” and “glorying in my dog’s joy,” as well as the pathetic “no longer.”

Léon’s companion epitaphs, inscribed on two faces of his monument, make physically concrete the division of spoken roles and the antiphony of echoes between poems A and B. By going through these texts, readers are co-opted into performing a simulacrum of a two-part, antiphonal lament for Léon, complete with physical motion of at least a step or two.

The third of the longer Itanian epitaphs commemorates three brothers.²⁷ I mention it, not for its lament motifs²⁸ or any dialogic²⁹ or antiphonal structure, but for the ways it calls to mind ritual events at which laments might be performed. The brothers speak their entire mostly elegiac epitaph, identifying themselves in a hexametric heading (vv. 1-2) as ἥρωες ἁγνοί (“pure heroes,” repeated at v. 11)³⁰ and referring twice to the rites associated with that postmortem heroic status.³¹ They mention first a place of cult and its sanctioning by the city (vv. 9-11):

νῦν δὲ ναὸν καὶ ἄλσος ἀφηρωϊσμένον ἁγνὸν

τὰς παρὰ τῆς πατρίδος λαμβάνομεν χάριτας·

δόγμασι δημοσίοις γεγενήμε⟨θ⟩α ἥρ⟨ω⟩ες ἁγνοί.

And now a temple and pure grove, offered to us as heroes,³² we take as chárites from the fatherland. // By decrees of the people we have become pure heroes.

It is difficult to relate this temple and grove to the crowded conditions of the Hellenistic Northern Necropolis at Itanos, although the southernmost enclosure features a somewhat earlier sepulchral altar or offering table (Schnapp-Gourbeillon et al., 2009, p. 209), a likely site of post-burial cult. In any case, we might compare the city’s role in the brothers’ heroization to the city’ s and island’s lamentation in Exákon’s epitaph (vv. 11-14); these deaths in prominent families are said to have inspired public ritual responses involving cult and lament.

Ritual appears a second time in the epitaph’s final section, where the brothers console their mother with a request to maintain their hero cult (vv. 13-16):

καὶ λύπης παῦσαι μῆτερ· λαμπρὰ μετὰ λαμπρῶν

τὰς θυσίας ποίει κηρία καὶ λίβανον.

καὶ γὰρ τῷ Μίνωι καὶ τοῖς μετὰ Μίνοα πᾶσι

ἥρωσιν φέρεται ταῦτα ἀπὸ τῆς πατρίδος.

Make an end of your pain, mother; you, illustrious, with illustrious (relatives),³³ make offerings of honeycombs and incense. // For also to Minos and all the heroes after Minos these are offered by the fatherland.

The three brothers seem to have received a formal hero cult more elaborate than was normal. Still, their imagined status may not have been entirely different from that of Exákon and Léon, for whom a postmortem dwelling “among the pious” is requested (Exákon vv. 9-10, Léon B.11-12) or asserted (Exákon vv. 23-24).³⁴

The Itanian epitaphs shed interesting light on the relationship between lament and verse epitaph. By prompting readers to vocalize motifs and structures of sung lament and reminding them of ritual contexts in which laments could be performed, these inscribed poems kept alive something of the idea and emotional impact of an original sepulchral ritual that belonged to the past, if it ever truly existed in such forms. We can relate this simultaneous separation from actual lament and verbal activation of a simulacrum of one to a different Hellenistic trend in epigram, namely, its dissociation from a physical object to assume a new existence as a literary genre. The words alone on papyrus enabled readers to imagine a physical or social context in what Peter Bing (1995) calls Ergänzungsspiel, that is, literary epigram’s clever and playful game of inducing readers to supplement the texts with ideas and images drawn from their own experiences and speculations. The monuments of Exákon, Léon, and the three brothers visually generated some of the impact on those encountering them, but the inscribed texts carried more of the communicative burden than the generally shorter epigrams of earlier periods did. These and many other Hellenistic (and later) epitaphs are in some ways closer to contemporary literary epigrams than to older inscribed ones that were more essentially bound up with their physical monuments.³⁵

1. AP = Anthologia Palatina.

2. CEG = Hansen, P. A. (1983, 1989). Carmina epigraphica greaca, 2 vols., Texte und Kommentare 12 and 15. De Gruyter.

3. EHC = Martínez Fernández, Á. (2006). Epigramas helenísticos de Creta. Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, Instituto de filología.

4. GG = Peek, W. (1960). Griechische Grabgedichte, Schriften und Quellen der alten Welt 7. Akademie.

5. GP = Gow, A. S. F., and Page, D. L. (1968). The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press.

6. GVI = Peek, W. (1955). Griechische Vers-Inschriften, vol. I Grab-Epigramme. Akademie.

7. HE = Gow, A. S. F., and Page, D. L. (1965). The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press.

8. I. Cret. = Guarducci, M. (1935-1950). Inscriptiones Creticae, 4 vols. Libreria dello stato.

9. I. Égypte métriques = Bernand, É. (1969). Inscriptions métriques de l’Égypte gréco-romaine, Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon 98. Les Belles Lettres.

10. IG = Inscriptiones graecae. Berlin. (1873-).

11. SEG = Supplementum epigraphicum graecum. (1923-). Brill.

12. SGO = Merkelbach, R., and Stauber, J. (1998-2004). Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, 5 vols. Teubner, Saur.

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