Lamentations

Lamentation is the ritual mourning of the dead through the collective rather than individual voicing and physical display of grief, usually over the corpse, prior to inhumation or cremation. The word lamentation is derived from Latin lamenta, which describes a wailing, weeping, or moaning. Synonyms include dirge, threnody, and elegy, but each term has its own oral and literary tradition. Mourning rituals, within the prescribed time between death and burial, vary according to religion. In the West, the evolution of ancient rites continues to impact contemporary expressions of lamentation.

The ritual of grieving over a corpse is of great antiquity and appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when the hero mourns for his companion Enkidu. In ancient Greece, the ritual expression and display of grief were both private and public acts. On the second day after death, the corpse was laid out (prothesis) for private mourning prior to the public ceremony accompanying the transportation of the corpse (ekphora) for burial or cremation at which lamentation dirges were sung. Lamentation is attested in Homeric epic: During the funerals of Patroklos and Hektor in the Iliad, both men and women engage in public lamentation that involves the ritual voicing of grief through dirges, the striking of breasts, the scratching of cheeks, and rolling in the dirt.

Later in Greek culture, however, only women and professional female mourners participated in public lamentation. The earliest depictions of lamentation (8th century B.C.E.) are found on large vases (amphorae or kraters) of the archaic geometric period that served as grave markers in the Dipylon Cemetery in Athens. Stylized representations of mourning scenes include the prothesis of the deceased surrounded by female mourners who lift their hands to their heads as a gesture of lamentation. The Choruses of Greek tragedy often incorporate threnodies in their odes.

The Old Testament book of Lamentations contains lamentations in verse that focus primarily on the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon's Temple in 586 B.C.E. Although not a part of funerary ritual, the laments still hold religious relevance and are read aloud: Orthodox Jews mark the anniversary of the destructions of both Solomon's Temple and Herod's Temple by reading the verses on the 9th day of Ab. The verses are also read aloud at the Western Wall in the city of Jerusalem. As part of the Catholic liturgy, the verses are read aloud in the final 3 days of Holy Week.

In ancient Rome, funerary ritual was a blend of Greek and Etruscan practices. Early legislation forbade excessive expenditures or prolonged grieving through repeat burial ceremonies to curb aristocratic competition and to avoid extensive contact with corpses. Professional undertakers served as funeral directors who organized public expressions and displays of lamentation at wakes and funerals that were performed by female family members and professional female mourners. Since the middle Republican period (3rd to 2nd centuries [Page 632]B.C.E.), dirges of lamentation and praise (nenia) were sung by a professional mourner to the sound of a flute. Gestures accompanied public lamentation and varied little from the archaic Greek period (8th to 6th centuries B.C.E.), attesting to the universality of a shared physical vocabulary of raised hands, the beating of breasts, and a disheveled and dirty appearance. Spontaneous expressions of grief and lamentation (sometimes accompanied by violent behavior such as the destruction or burning of public buildings and monuments) were often voiced by the urban mob in Rome to show sympathy for the death of a political figure such as Julius Caesar. The literary genre of epicede both elevated the expression of grief and consolation to survivors and extended the period of bereavement into a more private and meditative period of grieving.

...