Mourning Friends and Sacred Marriages: The Lamentations of Gilgameš and Akhilleus between Poetry, Religion and Linguistics

This paper focuses on the epic scene of the lamentation of the hero over his dead friend, namely Gilgameš over Enkidu and Akhilleus over Patroklos. Some linguistic and poetic items reveal how those friendships exhibited characteristics of marriage, even tracing them back to the hieros gamos ritual. The love between heroes is explained within a frame of social anthropology and psychology. Finally, the paper delineates how those epics traveled from Mesopotamia to the Aegean, where the oral composition of verses inescapably blends with the written transmission.