ABSTRACT
Hanging was a woman's death. As practised by women, it could lead to endless variations, because women and young girls contrived to substitute for the customary rope those adornments with which they decked themselves and which were also the emblems of their sex, as Antigone strangled herself with her knotted veil. The time has come to bring out what tragedy's treatment of the death of women borrows from socially accepted norms in classical Athens, and what separates it from them. Like the virtuous Helen of Stesichorus in her Egyptian exile she swears that, if Menelaus dies, she will kill herself with the same sword and rest at her husband's side. Silence of Deianira under the accusations of Hyllos; heavy silence of Eurydice, in which the chorus correctly divines a hidden threat; half-silence of Jocasta, with ambiguous words and a voice that finally dies away.
