| This is a dissertation about death-related grief and its power to wrest something everlasting and artful out of unbearable loss. In the Greek religious imagination, grief is a constructive and life-sustaining emotion. From ancient through modern times, the imperative to honor one's grief is responsible for the longest surviving of all Greek traditions, the ritual lament for the dead. For millennia, the performance of lamentation rites, believed to be demanded by the dead themselves, have ushered them into new categories of existence while simultaneously grounding them permanently in this worldly realm, the one that as a result they never totally leave. As for the living, ritually expressed grief is not an emotion that pulls them down; it is an emotion that, in fact, lifts them toward, and binds them to, their dead, hence imbuing their bereavement with existential and aesthetic meaning.; I write as a bereaved mother, so this dissertation is particularly sensitive to how the Greeks, throughout history, have responded to the pain, rage, and loneliness of grief that I myself have endured for fourteen years. The Greeks use their grief as a partial solution to the problems of death by creating community and beautiful works of art. This dissertation examines a variety of Greek funerary art, but focuses on classical Athenian white-ground lekythoi, small oil vessels that were the favored private offerings to the Athenian dead. Funerary lekythoi were deposited below and above the ground at graves between 460--410 B.C.E., a historical period when private performances of ritual lament and other forms of mourning were restricted by the state.; These oil vessels are inscribed with realistic renderings of Greek lamentation practices. The iconography on white-ground lekythoi translated lamentation rites into a visual language, one that permanently instantiated what was otherwise necessarily temporary and curtailed, the full work of mourning. During the fifth century, these vessels became the silent, subversive exponents of private grief in urban Attica by performing proscribed ritual practices, insofar as their iconography displayed traditional mourning gestures and represented age-old funerary traditions. White-ground lekythoi thus "did" for the dead what the living were not fully allowed to. |
