Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: Decorum and Grief in Ancient and Medieval Latin Epic

Abstract

Epic texts have long been recognized as demonstrating a profoundly sympathetic interest in human suffering, as well as an abiding concern with proper behavior. In this dissertation, I argue that representations of grief in epic texts from the Iliad to Joseph of Exeter’s De bello Troiano in the twelfth century CE are shaped by powerful but hitherto unstudied frameworks of appropriateness. By setting late and rarely read poems alongside canonical ones over a broad diachronic span, the dissertation shows that anxieties about excessive mourning, especially that of female characters, are a constitutive feature of epic poetry throughout the tradition, forming a literary analogue to the restrictions on public displays of grief by women attested in ancient legislation. On a larger level, this work sheds new light on Greco-Roman approaches to loss—arguably the most timeless human experience of all—to reveal emotional resonances between antiquity and the present.

Drawing on evidence from ancient philosophy, grammar and rhetoric, and the visual arts, I demonstrate in the introduction that the Greeks and Romans viewed decorum as not an absolute moral doctrine, but a relative property of proportionality and coherence. In the chapters that follow, I apply this understanding to scenes of mourning in a range of epic texts to show how flexible codes of propriety enabled poets to depict grief in ways at once deeply traditional and fiercely innovative. Throughout, the analysis is informed not only by ancient theories of propriety, but also by modern work on human bereavement from the fields of psychology and anthropology, which offer terminology for various experiences of loss. Chapter 1 approaches extreme grief in the Iliad and Odyssey through the lens of appropriateness and shows that male and female mourners handle their losses in different but equally unproductive ways. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate that Apollonius’s Argonautica in some ways upends the Homeric framework by characterizing male mourners as helpless and making a woman the most active—and dangerous—lamenter. Turning from there to the Latin tradition, Chapter 3 examines how Virgil portrays the hero’s emotional control and sets excessive female grief in opposition to the epic mission of the Aeneid, while Chapter 4 argues that Ovid’s Metamorphoses transforms the decorum of epic grief by developing a new system that exposes the contradictions between different models of appropriateness. In Chapter 5, on Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Silius Italicus’s Punica, I show how earlier tensions surrounding obstructive grief and excessive emotional suppression contribute to the poets’ handling of teleology and heroic characterization. The final two chapters, Chapters 6 and 7, address selected late-antique and medieval texts that demonstrate the enduring relevance and adaptability of the frameworks of decorum and grief seen earlier in the study. As a whole, this project reveals how poets in the Greek and Latin epic tradition grappled with the place of grief in society and creatively represented reactions to loss despite constraints that dictated what was considered appropriate to the genre. Through original readings of individual poems, the dissertation develops the first in-depth treatment of decorum and grief in epic and calls attention to the persistence of anxieties about excessive mourning across texts from antiquity to the Middle Ages.