In Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Andromache Karanika, inspired by extensive research on lament as a genre shaped by women’s speech, sets out “to uncover the poetics of nuptial performances and how they shaped ancient Greek literature” (1). The book admirably accomplishes this goal, complicating and diversifying our understanding of the experiences and social functions of a Greek wedding through a wide-ranging study of (ancient and modern) Greek literature alongside studies of specific examples of nuptial iconography. The book succeeds in demonstrating that ‘nuptial discourse’—a term Karanika uses to embrace the many ways that nuptial themes are conveyed through the spoken and written word and visual art—not only appears across genres and time periods, but also expresses a complex range of emotional reactions to the wedding from the perspective of the bridal couple, childhood friends, parents, and community members at large. As such, the book extends beyond the scope of much scholarship on the Greek wedding that attempts to identify and categorize the wedding by stages or ritual type. Over the course of an introduction and four body chapters, Karanika unearths elements of wedding songs and other nuptial poetics in both expected—Sappho’s wedding songs—and unexpected—the Homeric Hymn to Hermes—works of epic, lyric, drama, fable, and the novel.
The first chapter is dedicated to nuptial discourse in archaic poetry, namely Homer, the Homeric Hymns to Demeter and Aphrodite, Praxilla, and Sappho. Karanika unites a diverse array of nuptial elements across poetic works by structuring the chapter around the five senses. While each section generally focuses on one or two scenes from a particular work, the throughline of the senses allows Karanika to draw unexpected comparisons between works, such as her analysis of Persephone’s catalogue of companions in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter alongside the catalogues of Homeric epic. In each segment Karanika focuses on the way that a particular sense is implemented in the wedding as a ritual, e.g. how the fragrances of myrrh, cassia, and frankincense were associated with temples and sacrifice as well as wedding preparations and processions.
These fragrances, which are present at Hector and Andromache’s wedding procession in Sappho fr. 44V, operate on a number of levels for the poem. First, they evoke a sense memory in the hearers of the song, as scents are strongly linked to site-specific memories. This memory reminds the hearers of other wedding processions but also other religious rituals or funerals, strengthening existing associations between weddings and death. Finally, Karanika argues that scent’s ephemeral quality resonates with the concept of Hector and Andromache as a paradigmatic bridal couple. As Karanika explains, “scent becomes an agent that can diffuse the elements of a story in its entirety from beginning to end and refocus the attention on the present.” (p. 66, emphasis mine) Essentially, Hector and Andromache’s wedding day serves as an exemplum of the wedding because it was so blessed and beautiful in the moment it occurred. As scents are pleasant while they are in the air and are linked to a particular moment in time, so too is Hector and Andromache’s wedding idealized and abstracted away from the overall mythology of the couple. Readers may find that Karanika’s reading of Sappho fr. 44V could be put into productive dialogue with the disparate reading recently developed by Melissa Mueller in Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading (Cambridge, 2025), 132–53.
Chapter two, titled “The Poetics of Childhood: Wedding, Song, and Performance”, is the longest of the four and covers material from sources as diverse as Sappho, Aeschylus, fifth century vase painting, Theocritus, and Longus. The chapter first establishes essential components of Karanika’s “nuptial discourse”: it illustrates how specific greetings, verbal acts, and images are identified with the wedding ritual through particular authors and vase paintings. These elements, while deployed in the first chapter, here receive systematic analysis so that the reader may recognize them as markers of nuptial discourse regardless of genre or visual context. After establishing some widely acknowledged elements of nuptial discourse such as the eikasia and the makarismos, Karanika explores how childhood games and songs, as well as markers of childhood such as playmates and toys, contribute to the language of nuptial discourse, specifically weddings songs. Here Karanika builds on her previous work in Karanika 2012 and 2014 to argue that song types such as the hymenaios and paean borrow from children’s singing games and lullabies in order to convey sorrow and nostalgia for lost childhood at the moment of bridal transfer. This chapter performs an important service in recovering the voices of children within the landscape of ancient poetry. Moreover, its emphasis on childhood reminds us of the stark and abrupt transition that a wedding marked, especially for girls. In reminding us that some singers of wedding songs were former playmates of the bride, Karanika emphasizes the extreme youth of these girls and the bride while contributing persuasively to the argument that childhood was in fact a socially recognized stage of life in antiquity. Particular highlights in this chapter include Karanika’s analysis of the ending of Daphnis and Chloe (pp. 120-122) and of Theocritus Idyll 18 (and epithalamia more generally) as a type of children’s song (pp. 132-139).
In the third chapter of the book, Karanika weaves the concept of nostos into her analysis of nuptial discourse. Unlike lament and funerals, which Rehm 1994 convincingly linked to wedding songs and the wedding procession, the concept of nostos on its surface has little to contribute to our understanding of the work of a wedding, which launches a couple into an entirely new phase rather than a return. However, in this chapter, Karanika uncovers a recurring and persistent concern with nostos throughout numerous wedding scenes or poetry. The chapter is delves into paradigmatic brides who variously undo their weddings or marriages (Iphigenia, Thetis, Medea, and Helen), the corruption of nuptial and nostos narratives to describe the rape of Creusa in Ion, the ambiguous marriages and returns typified by Chryseis (in the Iliad), Antigone, and Persephone, and the return of the bride in modern Greek folk songs. This chapter develops familiar comparisons between the maturation rites for girls and boys, e.g. the wedding and war. In weaving the concepts of nostos and katabasis into her analysis of nuptial discourse, Karanika continues to build upon her evidence that the figure of the bride and the Greek hero are often comparable figures in Greek poetry.
“Decoding Nuptial Poetics,” as the fourth chapter is titled, in many ways recapitulates the themes and work of the book overall. Each section of this chapter responds to or develops ideas from prior chapters through readings of new sources. “Multiple Codes in a Spin” is an especially strong example of the work of the book, as it investigates depictions of spinning and weaving imagery from Homer, Sappho, Erinna, vase painting, and early Christian authors to argue that spinning—as a concept or image as portrayed by a distaff—is tied to feminine authority, motherhood, and the accomplishment of the wedding rite (pp. 185-207). A section on materiality ties back to Chapter 1 nicely while stressing that nuptial objects—such as perfume, veils, and loutrophoroi—contribute to nuptial discourse as much as if not more than our literary evidence. A section on addressing the groom returns us to the arguments made about childhood songs and jokes in Chapter 2 and finally, the last two sections return to the evocation of the senses in Greek poetry as a characteristic trait of nuptial poetics. The chapter ends with a study of the Dios apate in Iliad 14, which brings Karanika to the final observation that wedding preparation scenes contain a didactic element for their audiences.
Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece invites its readers to see the profound importance of the wedding ritual within Greek culture and literature, not only in the archaic and classical periods, but even in modern Greek folk songs. Karanika is at her best when showing how particular texts manipulate nuptial discourse. There are other places where the book might have benefited from greater engagement with secondary literature, for example on modern Greek folklore or Euripides’ Ion; on the other hand, undoubtedly Karanika’s analysis of this play was well advanced before the appearance of new commentaries on Ion by Gunther Martin and John Gibert. These are minor concerns. On the whole, Karanika proposes a new perspective on the Greek wedding—a formalized ritual with an essential social function that at the same time preserves and expresses the complex emotional experiences of some of antiquity’s most difficult to recover voices.