If we compare Andromache's speech to Hektor in Iliad 6 with the lament of Briseis for Patroklos in Iliad 19, we find many traditional features that are typical of laments for the dead:

Maragert Alexiou (The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition) has described the three-part structure of traditional Greek laments, and notes that the laments of Iliad 24 all conform to this three-part pattern. It consists of a direct address, a narrative of the past or future, and then a renewed address accompanied by reproach and lamentation. Andromache's speech to Hektor in Iliad 6, though it is not termed goos or threnos (which are the usual Greek words for lament), nevertheless exhibits this same structure. She first addresses Hektor in the second person directly, then narrates the deaths of her family members in the sack of her city, and then concludes by addressing Hektor once again.

Upon Hektor's departure, moreover, Andromache returns home and initiates an antiphonal refrain of lamentation among her serving women:

So he spoke and brilliant Hektor took up his helmet
of horse hair. And his dear wife went home,
though frequently she turned back, shedding abundant tears.
And when she quickly reached the well-inhabited house
of man-slaying Hektor, and found inside her many
attendants, she initiated lamentation in all of them.
They lamented Hektor in his own home, although he was still alive. (Iliad 6.494-500)

They brought in singers, leaders of the dirges, who sang laments
in mournful tune, while the women wailed in chorus.
White-armed Andromache led their keening.

Finally, Hecuba's lament at Iliad 24.760 concludes with a similar instigation of antiphonal weeping: "so she spoke, weeping, and she initiated unabating lamentation." Thus both the form of Andromache's speech and the antiphonal response evoke traditional laments for the dead. Andromache is shown to mourn, as the text at Iliad 6.500 comments, for Hektor while he is still alive.

The content of Andromache's speech in Iliad 6 likewise resonates with other traditional laments in the Iliad. The reproach that has been noted as characteristic of laments often takes the form of an accusation of abandonment. Andromache does not reproach Hektor directly in this speech, but she does warn him not to leave her a widow and their son an orphan. Hektor admits he'd rather die than see Andromache led off into captivity (6.464-465). Andromache herself expresses a wish to die if she loses Hektor (6.410-411), and this wish too is a common feature of laments. The accusation of abandonment in both ancient and modern Greek laments is typically accompanied by a description of the lamenting woman's endangered position in the community. Andromache relates how she has lost the protection of all of her family members, and sets up Hektor as her last resource.

We may compare here the way that Briseis too relates the deaths of her husband and brothers:

The husband to whom my father and mistress mother gave me
I saw pierced by the sharp bronze before the city,
and my three brothers, whom one mother bore together with me,
beloved ones, all of whom met their day of destruction. (19.291-294)

Andromache's and Briseis' laments are representative of the way that wives and females in general comment on their status in the community once that the man whom they are mourning is dead. Michael Herzfeld has shown in his study of a modern Cretan funeral how women may actually manipulate their status by evoking the sympathy of their audience and warding off potential reproach ("In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral." American Ethnologist 20.2 (1993): 241-255.). Mary Ebbott, following up on the work of Herzfeld, has analyzed Helen's language of self-blame in the Iliad in order to show how Helen uses the language of lament in even non-lament contexts to voice a view of herself that other characters in the Iliad never express ("The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad." Nine Essays on Homer (Lanham, 1999), 3-20.). We can see in Andromache's speech a similar kind of positioning through lament language even before Hektor's death.

Many of the traditional lament themes that are featured in Andromache's speech recur when she learns of the death of Hektor in Iliad 22 and in her lament at Hektor's funeral in Iliad 24. She relates how Hektor has left her a widow and their son an orphan ("Husband, you have departed your young life, and a widow/ you leave me in the palace. And your child is still an infant, whom you and I bore together, ill-fated" 24.726-727 ~ "you will destroy your life force, nor do you pity / your infant son nor me, ill-fated, I who will soon be / your widow" 6.407-409). She describes the life of servitude that will be hers, and speculates that Astyanax will likewise be a slave or else hurled to his death from the walls (24.727-728, 732-735). Andromache addresses both Hektor and Astyanax directly, in essence lamenting both of them. In Iliad 6 Andromache argues that life will not be worth living if Hektor dies; in her lament in 24 Andromache makes a traditional comment on the grievous life that Hektor has left behind for her:

For there will no longer be any comfort once you have met your fate,
but grief. (6.411-413)
But for me especially you have left behind grievous pain.
For when you died you did not stretch out your arms to me from our marriage bed,

nor did you speak to me an intimate phrase, which I could always

remember when I weep for you day and night. (24.742-745)

In her lament Andromache incorporates the traditional accusation of abandonment within a song that mournfully contrasts past, present, and what might have been. The themes of lament present in Andromache's speech in Iliad 6, because they are traditional, do not merely foreshadow but actually evoke the inevitable death of Hektor and funeral laments of Iliad 24.

Briseis' lament for Patroklos likewise allows Briseis to lament Achilles before death. The traditional phraseology that describes Briseis' actions after she sees the body of Patroklos evokes the death of her own warrior husband. That this phraseology is particularly associated with laments triggered by the death of husbands in battle is suggested by the simile of the unnamed lamenting woman of Odyssey 8. The initial comparison of Briseis to "golden Aphrodite" in 19.282 seems to be fundamentally connected with Briseis' evokation of the role of a wife in this passage. Penelope, the quintessential epic wife, is twice compared to Aphrodite. Likewise Andromache is metonymically connected to Aphrodite as she begins her lament for Hektor in Iliad 22.470: when she realizes that Hektor is dead she throws down from her head the adornments that "golden Aphrodite" had given her on her wedding day. These associations are borne out just a few lines later when Briseis recalls how Achilles killed her husband in the sack of Lyrnessos:

Nor did you allow me, when swift Achilles killed my husband,
and sacked the city of god-like Mynes,
to weep… (Iliad 19.295-297)

The imperfect tense of the verb connotes frequency; Patroklos repeatedly put an end to Briseis' lamentation for her former husband by promising to marry her to Achilles, her husband's killer.

In this way Achilles becomes substituted for her former husband and Briseis becomes a bride a second time. This will be the fate of Andromache as well, who is awarded to Achilles' son Neoptolemus after the fall of Troy. Briseis' song in fact laments her substitute husband Achilles as much as it does Patroklos or her former husband. Two late authors, Quintus of Smyrna and Propertius, present us with a Briseis who laments Achilles after death, but in archaic epic tradition our only glimpse of such a lament is contained in Briseis' lamentation for Patroklos.

That Briseis laments Achilles when she laments Patroklos is in perfect accordance with Patroklos' relationship with Achilles in the Iliad. Patroklos is Achilles' therapon, a word which has been shown to convey a relationship of ritual substitution (See Nagy, Best of the Achaeans, p. 33). This relationship becomes fulfilled when Patroklos leads the Myrmidons into battle in place of Achilles, wearing Achilles' armor. Patroklos' subsequent death previews in exact detail the way that Achilles will die. Achilles' death does not take place within the narrative confines of the Iliad itself, but it is nonetheless enacted in the sacrificial death of Patroklos.

Just as the ritual sacrifice of Patroklos substitutes for the death of Achilles in the Iliad, so the funeral rites for Patroklos substitute for and actually enact the funeral rites for Achilles. As Nagy notes: "the Iliadic tradition requires Achilles to prefigure his dead self by staying alive, and the real ritual of a real funeral is reserved by the narrative for his surrogate Patroklos" (Best of the Achaeans, p. 113). Nagy goes on to argue that only retrospectively can we witness the actual wake of Achilles, in the form of a flashback in the Odyssey. But we do get a preview of that wake in the form of Briseis' lament for Patroklos, Achilles' ritual substitute.

Briseis' lament for Patroklos deals more with defining her relationship to Achilles than it does with Patroklos. Like Andromache, Briseis uses the medium of lament to narrate the pains of her life and manipulate her status within her community. Like Andromache, Briseis sets up first Patroklos and then Achilles as her primary resource after the deaths of her brothers and husband. She uses the kindness of Patroklos (19.300) to comment on her own vulnerability. When she notes that Patroklos always promised to make her Achilles' wedded wife she seeks to legitimize her position through lament. She creates a status for herself that might protect her in some way when Achilles himself dies.

Of all the song and speech traditions that are incorporated into Homeric poetry, lament is perhaps the most pervasive. Alexiou points out that to lament Hektor before his death is unlucky. In fact not just Hektor but also Achilles is lamented repeatedly throughout the Iliad. Thetis and her sister Nereids lament Achilles as soon as Achilles becomes aware of Patroklos' death, when Thetis knows that Achilles will return to battle:

And all the Nereids together beat their breasts, and Thetis led off the lament:
"Hear me, sister Nereids, in order that you all
know well, hearing how many cares I have in my heart.
Alas how I am wretched, alas how unluckily I was the best child bearer
since I bore a child that was faultless and strong,
outstanding of heroes. And he shot up like a sapling.
After nourishing him like plant on the hill of an orchard
I sent him forth in the hollow ships to Ilion
to fight with the Trojans. But I will not receive him again
returning home to the house of Peleus. (Iliad 18.50-60)

Throughout the Iliad we are constantly prepared for the death of Achilles. Thetis tells Achilles that his death is guaranteed upon the death of Hektor, to which he responds: "then may I die straightaway." In Iliad 23 the Achaeans build a funeral mound for both Achilles and Patroklos: "They threw [the wood] down in rows upon the beach, where Achilles had indicated a great mound was to be built for Patroklos, and for himself" 23.125-126).

That Patroklos and Achilles will be buried together is established earlier in Iliad 23, when the psuchê of Patroklos visits Achilles in a dream (23.65-107). Patroklos entreats Achilles to bury him in the golden amphora that Thetis gave to Achilles in anticipation of Achilles' death:

Do not bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles,
but together, as we were raised in your house…
so may the same vessel contain both our bones,
the golden amphora, which your lady mother gave you. (Iliad 23.83-84,91-92)

This golden amphora is one of the only concrete symbols of Achilles' immortality after death in the Iliad. Elsewhere in the poem only his short life and his grief while alive are emphasized. The anticipation of the finality of his death is so great that the mourning for Achilles begins while he is still alive. The Iliad is for that very reason open-ended. It does not end with the death of Achilles, but with the death of Hektor, whose own death seals that of Achilles (18.96).

With the laments of 24 comes an awareness that Andromache, Hecuba, and every Trojan wife will soon be captive women. And just as Achilles' death is constantly foreshadowed, but does not occur, so the capture of Andromache by Greek soldiers, an event that is foretold in 6, 18, and 24, does not take place within the confines of the Iliad itself. Her capture is instead realized in the figure of Briseis, the "wife" of Achilles. Just as Patroklos and then Hektor are substitutes in death for Achilles within the poem, so Briseis can be a substitute for Andromache. And as the funeral of Hektor foreshadows that of Achilles, Andromache's fears for herself in turn reverberate back to Briseis, whose story, upon the death of Achilles, will come full circle, and she will be a widow and a captive once more.

Odysseus and Telemachus are lamented repeatedly throughout the Odyssey by Penelope. The Iliad and Odyssey are incongruous in that the Odyssey is about the successful homecoming of both father and son, while in the Iliad Achilles must choose either nostos or kleos (9.410-413). But here again the religious dimension of Homeric poetry aids our interpretation. As Nagy has argued, the funeral rituals and lamentation of the Iliad and Odyssey are a reflection of actual cult practice in the worship of heroes like Achilles and Odysseus as religious figures (Best of the Achaeans, pp. 94-117). The songs of lament for Achilles and Odysseus within the epic are important part of ritual lamentation for the hero on the part of the community for whom the epics are performed.

Briseis' lament in Iliad 19 expresses private grief that becomes transformed into a collective sorrow for her audience both within the epic and beyond it:

So she spoke lamenting, and the women wailed in response,
with Patroklos as their pretext, but each woman for her own cares. (19.301-302)

The ability to turn the personal into the paradigmatic is a fundamental feature of lament, as Herzfeld has shown:

More formally, we can say that performance creates meaning by playing on the complex links between three kinds of time. The longest is the longue durée of textual evolution, in which the grand events commemorated in the song texts are scarcely more than generic markers for repetitive experience. This kind of time undergoes transmutation into biographical time: the imagery of the fall of cities or of death personified informs the public view of personal disaster. The effectiveness of such imagery, finally depends on the interactional or performative time, which corresponds closely to Bourdieu's (1977:7) tempo. It is the management of this interactional time that allows actors to recast biographical time metonymically as the longue durée… Such linkage contributes to a lamenter's effectiveness: if she can evoke a sufficiently rich image of collective suffering, she will move others to tears because she has recast individual as common experience, her personal pain as shared past and present. (Herzfeld 1993.244)

Briseis, in the role of the lamenting wife, exemplifies this process by which the personal is transformed into the collective. Briseis' song extends not only to the collective experience of the women around her who lament their fallen husbands, but to the audience of the epic as well. Briseis' lamentation for Patroklos, because it is also a lament for Achilles, becomes on the level of cult a communal expression of lamentation for the hero Achilles. It is not insignificant then that the final lament of the Iliad, sung by Helen (who is the cause of the war), ends not with the antiphonal wailing of the women (as at 6.499, 19.301, 22.515, and 24.746), but of the people, the demos: "So she spoke lamenting, and the people wailed in response" 24.776).

© 2001 Casey Dué