When faced with a moment of anguish do you find that you beat on your breasts or tear out your hair? If you're female chances are you go for the chest beating, and if you're male you're more likely to sacrifice your mane. There are many examples in The Iliad where women and men alike express their anguish through these methods. For instance, in reference to Priam's agony at seeing his son Hector stand up against Achilles, he "groaned and seizing his gray hair tore it out by the roots" (544) Briseis gives us a breast slashing when she finds Patroclus dead in Achilles tents, "she flung herself on his body, gave a piercing cry and with both hands clawing deep at her breasts" (497) Why do you think a womans pain is linked to her breasts? Why is mens pain linked to their nogin?
References
1) Homer, The Iliad, Trans. Robert Fagles, Page 544, Lines 90-91
2) Homer, The Iliad, Trans. Robert Fagles, Page 497, Lines 335-336
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You bring up and excellent point and I believe that a woman's pain is linked to her breasts because women are considered the heart in a relationship, their breats are also a large part of what makes them a woman its part of their curves. Men's pain is linked to their nogin because they are considered the brain in the reltionship,and they are often referred to as the head of the house.
ReplyDeleteNice one, Heather. I never gave this a serious thought, but now that you bring it up, I can see how deeply these expressions of giref are related to gender archetypes.
ReplyDeleteI think you made a really good call-out here. Katrina above cited how women have historically been seen as emotional and men as logical.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I wonder how those kinds of behaviors would have been understood by the Greeks. In the nearby Arabic Culture, for example...by the time of Muhammad it would have been recognized as unseemly, since the death of a person would be by the will of Allah. In turn, surely we learn by reading the Iliad that it was destined by the Gods that Achilles would die in battle. Such an emotional response as hair pulling and beating on the breasts implies shock, and I always took a sense of fatalism from the Greeks. I'm just sorta curious about that.
I was thinking about what you wrote William and I was thinking that even when we know someone is going to die a lot of times it doesn't really hit us until they're actually gone. I do agree that hair pulling and beating on the breasts can imply shock, but I think it can also imply an extreme sense of anguish. Possibly it was just a normal action that the Greeks displayed in times of grief.
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