NENIA, or NENIA, in the ancient poetry, a kind of funeral song sung to the music of flutes at the obsequies of the dead. Authors represent them as sorry compositions, sung by hired women-mourners called Præficiæ. The first rise of these Nenia is ascribed to the physicians. In the heathen antiquity, the goddess of tears and funerals was called Nenia; whom some suppose to have given that name to the funeral song, and others to have taken her name from it.