Oh Let Me Weep: Ritual Functions of Weeping & Funerary Lament in Ancient Greece

This is a 90-minute foundational level lecture.

This talk explores the ritual functions of weeping and lamentation in ancient Greece, focusing on their role within funerary, religious, and social contexts. Far from being mere spontaneous expressions of grief, tears and ritualized lament operated as culturally codified practices that mediated relationships between the living and the dead, humans and gods, private emotion and public order. By examining literary, epigraphic, and ritual sources, the paper analyses how weeping functioned as a performative act capable of activating transitions, managing loss, and negotiating social boundaries, particularly in relation to gender and communal identity. The study argues that ritualized lamentation constituted a powerful liminal practice, through which pain was transformed into shared meaning and social cohesion.

About the Presenter:

Emiliano Russo is a cultural anthropologist and a PhD candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, where he is deepening his research on Contemporary Witchcraft. He is…