ABSTRACT

The most extensive examination of laments in Greece remains Margaret Alexiou’s The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974). In her study of laments from Homer and the classical period to the present day, Alexiou established that there was a continuous tradition linking various popular and learned forms of the lament in Greece. The modern Greek word for lament, (moirolói), as she pointed out, was, despite some attempts to argue otherwise, almost certainly composed of the two ancient elements, moira (fate) and logos (speech, word).1 As it first appears in the Life of Alexander, attributed to Pseudo-Kallisthenes (c.300 BC), the word is used as a verb, moirologo, meaning just what one would imagine it to mean: I foretell my own fate or doom.2 The connection of foretelling one’s own fate to lament, Alexiou suggests, is familiar from tragedy, where, among others, Antigone, Cassandra, Oedipus, Jocasta, Medea and Phaedra all lament their own fate (moira or tyche). The notion of moira as man’s allotted fate is a common one in funeral inscriptions and most literary genres in ancient Greece. This sense of the word survived through the popular Greek literature of the Alexandrian, Roman and Byzantine periods. The modern Greek folk tradition of the moirolói as a ritual lament, especially one for the dead, is connected not to the personification of moira or tyche as the spinner or writer of one’s fate, but rather to the belief in the three weaving women or moirai who determine one’s fate at birth by ‘writing’ their marks on the face of children.3

There has probably always been some overlap in the two senses of the word moirolói. In any case it is useful to keep the etymology of the word in mind, because, as we will see, the women who lament the dead in the Greek folk tradition are frequently more concerned with lamenting their own fate than with that of the deceased.