Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Speaking for the dead : funeral rhetoric and women's lament in ancient Athens

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/kw52jb930

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  • Recently, feminist scholars have begun to question the traditional telling of the history of rhetoric. Dissatisfied with a history which is told in terms of privileged, white males to the exclusion of all other voices, these scholars have worked to recover "lost" female rhetoricians and have begun critically rereading the traditional narrative of the history of rhetoric in terms of the gender and power structures which helped create it. This project takes as its goal the recovery of women's lament in ancient Greece. Through close readings of classical texts, analyzing ancient legislation, and using anthropological work on modern Greek laments, I demonstrate that lament offered women in ancient Greece a unique opportunity for public performance and a powerful position to speak from. I then show how the city-state of Athens took great pains to contain this genre first by legislating against it and later by creating a rhetorical institution, the epitaphios logos (funeral oration), which worked to contain lamentation and tell a history of Athens without women. Lastly, I attempt to locate lament inside the rhetorical tradition as a form of pre-rhetoric. I show that not only was this form of speech stylistically powerful, but that it also had an underlying epistemology, one which is similar to the poetically-based rhetoric of the sophists.
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