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Hecuba's lament in Book XIV (vv. 289-301) offers a deeply moving and meaningful conclusion to Posthomerica. In this γόος, Quintus of Smyrna condenses key themes of Greek epic: grief, loss, and the breakdown of human order in the face of the violence of war. Through the use of similes, mythical references and a rhetorically elaborate structure, the poet not only gives voice to female suffering, historically marginalized in the heroic discourse, but also resignifies the epic's closure. The death of Polyxena, the only daughter who receives a ritual lament in a poem saturated with male deaths, becomes a symbol of useless sacrifice, ritualized violence and the irreversible end of the city of Troy. The figure of Hecuba, whose metamorphosis seals her fate, concentrates mourning, impotence and the final transformation of the human into something else: a petrified memory that survives the fall of the civilization that engendered her.

In Frogs 1028, Dionysus states that he rejoyced when Aeschylus in the Persians lamented for the death of Darius, and the chorus straightway clapped their hands and said, “Ee-ow!” (εἶπεν ‘ἰαυοῖ’). In doing so, Aristophanes highlights the interjection as a particular component of theatrical conventions. Embedded in a tradition where lógos corresponds to word in action, the use of this lexical structure in Greek tragedy thus appears as a fundamental element for the functioning of this poetic genre. It is a refined strategy of enunciation that serves the tragic purposes of producing emotional effects through oralized speech. Without a denotative or descriptive function, but with a rich variation of possible meanings, it is pure mimetic performance, marked by the spontaneous expression of ineffable feelings. In this paper, we propose a discussion of the mimetic character of the interjection in tragedy—its phonetic ability to imitate reality—by examining its use in Aeschylus's Persians, a work considered “a great lament.” The goal is to understand the fundamentally sounding nature of the tragic discourse arrangement and highlight a unique Greek practice of using language and producing speech.

El presente número ofrece una selección de investigaciones producidas en el marco del Proyecto Del Treno al Epitafio: Subjetividad, convención social y cruces “genéricos” en las formas poéticas del lamento en la Grecia Antigua. Inflexiones financiado por la ANPCYT (PICT 2020 Serie A 02425).

This paper focuses on recovering the material dimension of the voice in tragic performance, countering the primacy of content over sonority. Drawing on Cavarero's theory of voice politics (2005) and ethnopoetic studies (Hymes, 1981; Calame 2010, 2024), it is argued that in Seven Against Thebes, the initial and final choral odes function as a set designed by the playwright to show the normalization of lament. This musical sequence is key to understanding how the chorus, essential to the play, forces the audience to question and redefine which voice is considered as authoritative, since it is in choral singing that dramatic conflicts and twists reside.

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).

The theme of death is prevalent in classical Greek literature, generating various poetic and discursive forms ranging from lyrical lamentations to rigorously structured prose discourses with historical and political aims. This article analyzes the epitaph of the Argives in Euripides' The Suppliants and its resemblance to the epitaph of Gorgias in terms of motifs and imagery. The article shows the disruptive nature of both epitaphs: one due to the alteration of the topical order and myth, and the other due to the intensity of its adjectivalization and lexical selection.

The book under review presents a comprehensive set of problems and theoretical perspectives on self-knowledge and related issues, particularly self-deception. We will examine three closely interconnected questions here: the relationship between self-knowledge and self-deception, the role of rationality in self-knowledge, the extent to which beliefs about ourselves are susceptible to volitional influences, and, finally, the possibility that different explanatory models may coexist.

Although the literary trajectories of Ada María Elflein and Salvadora Medina Onrubia seem to be antagonistic in the context of Argentina’s centenary, the short stories that they published in those years share an unexpected link: they are fictions in which the notion of people and the characters of popular extraction play a fundamental role associated with the reflection on Argentine identity. The image of the melting pot of races, the patriotic past and the gender tensions that these processes trigger in the configuration of the national community constitute key aspects in these stories in the face of the emergence of the nationalist discourse and the conflicts derived from the modernizing process in the Argentina of the first decades of the 20th century. Thus, Elflein and Medina Onrubia establish a tacit alliance that discusses the virile view associated with the Creole world and exposes the fissures of that Argentina that thinks itself modern.