Lament in Verse Epitaphs from Hellenistic Itanos

Itanos on Crete produced a striking dossier of inscribed Hellenistic elegiac epitaphs. The three longest echo the motifs and dialogic or antiphonal structure of sung lament or literary representations of it, and they recall the circumstances of lament performance. Readers thus created a simulacrum of lament. Each section of Exákon’s epitaph (I. Cret. III.iv.37) exhibits a lament motif, the last spoken by the deceased; the text is thus dialogic, but themes echoing across sections generate antiphony. Léon’s companion epitaphs on two surfaces (I. Cret. III.iv.39) reinforce the dialogue between an anonymous mourner in A and the deceased in B, and the echoing of A’s lament motifs in B creates antiphony. Those epitaphs allude to lament contexts, but the three brothers’ epitaph (I. Cret. III.iv.38) focuses on their hero cult. These epigrams’ separation from actual lament and verbal evocation of it can be compared to literary epigram’s evocation of absent material reality (Peter Bing’s Ergänzungsspiel).