Series Editor's Foreword

Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, this series concerns not just the archaic and classical periods of Greek tradition but the whole continuum—along with all the discontinuities—from the second millennium BCE to the present. The aim is to enhance perspectives by applying various disciplines to problems that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of a single given discipline. Besides the crossing-over of the older disciplines, as in the case of historical and literary studies, the series encourages the application of such newer ones as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and comparative literature. It also encourages encounters with current trends in methodology, especially in the realm of literary theory.

The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, by Margaret Alexiou, was originally published in 1974 by Cambridge University Press. For over a quarter of a century, this groundbreaking book has been consistently consulted and cited as the most authoritative work on the tradition of singing laments in the prehistory and history of the Greek-speaking peoples throughout the ages, from the second millennium BCE all the way to the present. This book was one of the first thorough studies in generic criticism of ancient Greek literature. The emphasis of the book—and of Greek culture itself—is on women's, rather than men's, songs of lament. Also emphasized is the fact that laments are songs, not just words. The Greek tradition of lament is not just a verbal expression of emotion—it is simultaneously a verbal art, a genre. Alexiou's book has been valued by generations of classicists and anthropologists as a model case study, through time, of a primal but heretofore generally neglected genre of self-expression.

This important book went out of print soon after publication and was never reprinted. Now a new and enhanced edition has been made available; drawing on their respective fields of expertise, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis Roilos have made judicious and insightful revisions and provided a most valuable up-to-date bibliography on ritual lament and death in Greek culture.