Hymen Will Light Up Our Torches: The Significance and Transformation of the Wedding Song in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Abstract

The dissertation “Hymen Will Light up our Torches: The Significance and Transformation of the Wedding song in Greco-Roman antiquity” offers a literary history of the ancient wedding song (epithalamium), analyzing how it depicts the wedding, a life-changing rite of passage concerned with traditional gender roles, idealized happiness, the creation of lineages, and profit. These songs utilize recurring features to memorialize a celebration while concealing yet soothing the trauma that the bride experiences on the edge of adulthood. I analyze this collection in a way to explore an anthropology of ancient women and a social history of antiquity through the bride’s eyes. By considering the centrality of ancient receptions as a creative force for both generic production and hybridization, I argue that the epithalamium is a genre in transit, which molds itself to both occasion of performance and literary tradition. Hence, I supplement philological analysis with insights from performance, gender, and emotion studies, which allow me to identify the genre’s central characteristics, its relationship to ritual, historical, and legal contexts, and its development throughout antiquity. I begin by examining Sappho’s nuptial production, frr. 104-117V, and the embodied learning that their performance prompted. As these fragments violate long-standing understandings of Sappho as a solo performer, refined author, queer figure, and promiscuous woman, I attempt to harmonize this production with the remainder of her oeuvre (chapter 1). I then put Theocritus’ Idyll 18 alongside Catullus’ poems 61 and 62 to analyze the wedding ceremony they suggest together, as well as the emotional range of the characters they depict. Both authors utilize the epic register to frame this transition as a battle for the bride, which reminds their audiences that as “real” as their poems appear, they are still literary artifacts (chapter 2). Finally, I utilize Seneca’s Medea, and Statius’ Silvae I,2, to describe the dynamics of second weddings in Imperial Rome, from the damaging aspects of divorce to the imposition of remarriage after the death of a spouse. These works interact with theater and elegy to express broken unions that need to be rebuilt. Moreover, both engage deeply with the Roman legal system and its interest in legislating over marriage (chapter 3). Taken together, these chapters reveal the tensions ancient authors face when employing conventional forms to depict changing traditions. As the epithalamium explores female anxieties and the prospect of gain (financial, political, and otherwise) that marriage offers, it is a porous genre: it is adopted by others (particularly epic, elegy and drama), and alters its own circumstances to reflect this process of hybridization. As such, each song becomes an amalgam, preserving glimpses of its own performance and performers, the “real-life” patrons that commissioned them, the literary tradition that prompted them, and the emotions that are encapsulated in these memories. Each song resembles a wedding picture album, with series of episodes marked by hyperbole, simile, movement, anxiety about current changes, fear of sexual imposition, and hope for future love, blessedness, and offspring. While these characteristics have led to the songs being read as documental evidence for weddings, my analysis demonstrates that their careful architecture pushes us away from reality, and towards idealization. As such, the epithalamium can be understood as the result of a literary marriage, one grounded in the importance of ancient receptions for the creation of the poetic genre.