In this part of our series on marriage in ancient Greek texts (following part 1: Music, and part 2: Wedding), we look at the courtship phase. How are suitors or prospective bridegrooms portrayed, what agency does the bride-to-be have, and how are marriages arranged? Émile Benveniste, in Indo-European Language and Society[1], discusses how “there is, properly speaking, no Indo-European term for “marriage.”” He explains that the words are different for… Read more
A wedding ceremony is a celebratory marker for the bride and groom as well as for their two families. Further, this joyful event, rich with rituals, extends to the community that the bride and groom are part of. In ancient Greece, weddings were celebrated with many customs and rituals attached. The roles were assigned and expected to be performed according to traditions. Kirk Ormand in his book titled Exchange and… Read more
In this post we are going to examine some aspects of marriage, and its music which come traditionally with singing and dancing. In today’s marriages music, singing and dancing play an essential role in rituals and traditions. Music is played at the beginning of the ceremony, carefully chosen songs are sung during the ceremony, and people dance and sing during the feast. Were rituals and traditions related to music in… Read more
In part 1, we looked at dreams as represented in Homeric epic. In part 2, we continue our exploration with some passages from other texts. Starting with tragedy, we learn from Jean Alaux Lectures Tragiques d’Homère that “According to Jacques Jouanna, there are two types of dreams: the vision-dream which offers the sleeper a symbol to decipher … and the visitation–dream where a god or a messenger or a ghost… Read more
Recent Book Club discussion prompted me to think about how human emotions were depicted in some of the readings from Greek antiquity. In the Trojan Women, Andromache’s reaction to her son’s fate—death by being thrown out of the battlements—is not physical, a loud, wailing lament, but a subdued, courageous reaction. To get a proper burial for her son, she does not fight back vehemently when the child is taken. The… Read more