ABSTRACT
In Christian Greece it has been the Orthodox Church, rather than the state, which has attempted to control lament, but there are parallels to the classical suppression of women’s mourning in the rhetoric of condemnation as well as in the appropriation of the forms of lament by another literary tradition. Women mourners were hired by the church in the early Christian period, but their professional practice of tearing their hair and clothes and dancing in the funeral procession was seen as a pagan, specifically Bacchic, impiety.1 John Chrysostom, for example, called the lament ‘self-centred and self-indulgent’ and referred to hired mourners as ‘this disease of females’.2 As Alexiou rightly comments, ‘the frequency and vehemence of these condemnations in the Byzantine period are proof of the persistence of ritual lamentation.’3
