Threnoi to Moirologia : Female voices of solitude, resistance, and solidarity

I shall focus specifically on the function of female lament as an expression of individual and collective pain (ponos; plural ponoi) and as a vehicle for uniting Greek women mourners through social bonding and solidarity in a community--what Caraveli-Chaves has termed a "sisterhood of pain"--by interweaving the threads of tragic descriptions of female mourning in Euripides' Suppliants with analogous examples of documented female lament (moirologia) from modern rural Epiros, Crete, and Inner Mani.3 Female lamentation for the dead, both ancient and modern, is an emotive and expressive genre that voices an individual's personal ponoi in her role as mourner--a voice of solitude; it also expresses a communal voice of collective grief, one of solidarity. Moreover, in the contexts of both ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary rural Greek society, female mourners use lamentation for the dead as a catalyst--more precisely, the "enabling event" (to borrow a term from John Miles Foley)--for expressing their essentially painful and sorrowful experiences in the world among the living and for protesting the power of the dominant patriarchal society (J. Foley 1995:64-65).Not