In the sixth century B.C.E., legislation is passed by Solon at Athens, then throughout Greece, restricting mourning and burial practices.
Homeric mourning features "extravagant, out of control behaviour, including loud wailing, tearing the hair, and lacerating one's face. This is a common initial response to death, especially by men but also by women."23 Note that excess mourning, later attributed
to women and cast as feminine from Solon to Pericles and beyond, is in fact a trait of both men's and women's mourning in Homer.
Given the privatization of the prothesis as well as its diminution (from nine days in Homer for Achilles to one day under Solon), we might expect to see forbidden practices of lamentation go underground, as it were, or take new forms. Solon in the early sixth century saw such practices as threatening to the new polis form. By the 440s, when Sophocles wrote Antigone, the threat had shifted but it was not diminished.
Also, Antigone's two recorded mourning speeches-one for Polynices (at the second burial) and one for herself are both clearly marked as Homeric, the first conventionally so, the other hyperbolically.
Later, as Antigone approaches the cave to which Creon has consigned her, she mourns again, this time for herself. When she describes her "future life immured in the cave as 'bereft"'39 and goes on to wail that she will never marry or have children, she is, in Nicole Loraux's words (said in the con ext of an argument about Euripides' play), "like a Homeric mourner [who]
weeps in advance over her future life."40
INTENTIONALLY CALLING ON DIFFERENT SOUNDSCAPES IN ORIGNAL SOURCE. THUS IS ONLY EXACERBATED IN HOME FIRE. SEEMS TO TRANSCEND THE NORMALITY OF THE MODERN SOUNDSCAPE, SO VISERALLY DESCRIBED PREVIOUSLY, THAT IT ECHOES INTO THE PAST AND DRAWS UPON THE SORROW ALREADY EVOKED IN ANTIGONE.
EXTRA-LINGUSTIC. TRANSCENDS NORMAL COMMUNICATION.
LET THE SUBALTERN SPEAK.
it took a literal noise which transcended its own soundscape and reverberated with grief everywhere to make people listen to her.
as soon as she actually starts talking, the effect vanishes.