ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the chorus’ collective lamentation with Oedipus in the kommos, a performance that revisits trauma, enacts the crucial work of integrating Oedipus into a new community. The setting of the grove at Colonus is of crucial import to Oedipus at Colonus, and nightingales play a programmatic role in this setting. The lament in Oedipus at Colonus integrates Oedipus into the community of Colonus, a function that lament—and more specifically, male lament—has the potential to serve in tragedy. The dirge at the end of Persians permits Xerxes to rejoin the chorus of elders who suggest that daimones have caused the disaster. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’ antiphonal lamentation with the chorus serves to create a new narrative concerning Oedipus. The fashioning of a distinct cultural memory is a function that laments serves in other texts as in the Iliad, where lamenters solidify heroic memory.
