Weeping Woman

Funeral urns marked the graves of notable warriors like Agamemnon. Mourners could offer wine to a departed shade, wine passing through soil to refresh a distinctive voice which, for a moment, can engage the suppliant.

Foreseeing the death of her husband, the Trojan prince Hector, Andromache rushes to the walls to stop his exit from Troy back into battle, to stop him from confrontation with the Greek, Achilles, to stay his fate. Hector understands, however, that Andromache’s love depends precisely on his willingness to face Achilles, to confront his fate, to attempt the defense of her, their child, and Troy, all the more telling for its eventual failure.

Here lies Timokritos: soldier: valiant in battle.
Ares spares not the brave man, but the coward.

               – Anakreon, The Greek Anthology

Death in battle, of course, offers fame. Our funeral urn depicts a fallen warrior, with shroud lifted, dogs below, wife and child at feet, and women mourners tearing hair in timeless gestures of grief. Below the bier, a procession of warriors recall the conditions and activities meriting fame. Their warrior will enter the land of shades, where only memories of his deeds in life can momentarily restore his features and actions. The more particular the recollections, the more that shade will, for a time, come back to life. Greek stories, including the Iliad, take place in the theatre of the mind. Those who carried offerings of wine would pour their offering through the urn, open at the bottom. Seeping into the soil, down to the shades below, the wine might raise from the shadowy dead, the sound of their warrior’s voice. The Iliad, recited aloud, recalls the voices as well as the activities of the glorious dead.

Wife and child appear at the feet of their fallen lord. Consider Hector’s telling prediction of their fate: public death with disgrace to Astyonax, “Lord of the City,” a potential magnet for dissident captives not to be saved through sentimentality. Bondage to a noble killer of Trojan royalty for his wife, Andromache. The distance between notions of justice, of divine love, and the stages of grief common to monotheistic religions including Christianity,  are less than apparent in this scene. Considering, among other scenes, widows of fallen soldiers, perhaps from the Spanish civil war as well as the Trojan War, Wallace Stevens calls attention to the powers of imagination to endure, not through transcendence of the ego, but in accordance with harsh fate:
 

Wallace Stevens

Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world

Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death.

Picasso's Weeping Women