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NENIA

Volume 14 · 81 words · 1815 Edition

or NENA, 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 Preface. 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.