Male Lament in Greek Tragedy

Abstract Much work has been done recently on the dramatic use of ritual lament in tragedy. A pervasive assumption of this work is that, because ritual lament was a female responsibility in real life, it was a female activity in tragedy. McClure even calls it the ‘‘normative’’ speech genre for women in tragedy; it has come to be seen as the female genre par excellence both in real life and onstage. In this essay I question that assumption and attempt to redress the imbalance in the focus of current scholarship by marshaling new material from tragedy. It will be seen that, if we had only the evidence of tragedy to inform us, we might not see lament as a particularly gendered genre. At the same time, it seems clear that ritual lament was a female activity in real life in fifth-century b.c.e. Athens, and it is argued that lamentation was perhaps discouraged, even scorned, in men in real life.