Wedding Poetics in Early Greek Literature

Andromache Karanika joins me in the Lesche to discuss how we can detect traces of wedding poetics in early Greek literature, especially poetry (hexamter and lyric). Andromache is the author of Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greek Poetry (OUP 2024).

Primary texts

• Iliad, esp. the Teikhoskopeia (Book 3) and the Deception of Zeus (Book 14)
• Odyssey, esp. the start of Book 6
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter
• Sappho 21 (virginity poem), 44 (Wedding of Hector and Andromache)
• Pollux 9, on the "tortoise game"
• The ballad of the 'bride who suffered misfortune' (της νύφης που κακοτύχησε/κακοπάθησε, Modern Greek folk song)

Also mentioned

• M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (2nd ed. Rowman and Littlefield 2002 [1st ed. 1975]).
• A. Lardinois and L. McClure, eds., Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society (Princeton 2001).
• J.H. Oakley and R. Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens (Ann Arbor 1993).  
• R. Seaford, 1987. 'The tragic wedding', JHS 107: 106-30. 

About our guest
Andromache Karanika is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) and Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions (2020). She served as editor of TAPA (2018-2021) and President of CAMWS (2023-2024).

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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