Mellan aiai och aei : Tystnad i Aischylos Niobe

The mythic story of Niobe, who loses her children due to hubris and is eventually transformed into a crying rock on Mount Sipylos, is well known and rearticulated throughout classical Greek literature. In this master’s thesis I aim to examine fragment 154a of Aeschylus’ lost tragedy Niobe in order to show the significance of the tragic re-enactment of silence and grief. Furthermore, I argue that the fragment of Aeschylus manifests political and aesthetic aspects that enable an immersed and widened understanding of the genre. Loraux (1997/2002) and Montiglio (2000) indicate that there might be a female correlate to the epic tradition of safeguarding honour after death. As I point out in this thesis, there is a potential gap in the study of how ancient Greek literature reenacts such alternative themes and experiences of memory and oblivion. A decisive consequence of the analysis is the new understanding of a tragic hero(ine) inverting the ancient epic tradition of remembrance, glory, and immortality typically accompanying male heroes. By means of classical perspectives on grief, as well as more recent studies of acoustic aesthetics in ancient Greek culture (Nooter 2017), the thesis demonstrates how Niobe can be viewed as a prime symbol of the tragic female, whose resistance to forget resonates throughout the tragic corpus