The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art

The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian ArtAuthor(s): H. A. ShapiroSource: American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 629-656Published by: Archaeological Institute of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/505896Accessed: 04/05/2010 16:10

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The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art

H. A. SHAPIRO

Abstract The lamentation and the commemoration of the dead

as a central theme of Attic iconography is traced through the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. In the High Archaic period (ca. 540-490), a major motif in the public commemoration of the male dead, whether in marble stelai and kouroi or on black-figure funerary vases, is the liken- ing of the deceased to epic heroes, e.g., in nostalgic allusions to Homeric funeral games. The Classical period, from ca. 460, represented especially by white-ground lekythoi, focuses instead on the private aspects of the mourning and tending of the dead, which fell primarily to Athenian women. The turning point from Archaic to Classical is attributed to the Persian Wars and the subsequent institution of state burials of the war dead, resulting in a much sharper demarcation between public and private commemoration.*

The lamentation for the dead is the only subject that occurs on Athenian vases in an unbroken series from Late Geometric of the mid-eighth century to late red-figure of the Peloponnesian War years. De-

spite many ceramic and artistic changes-from monumental Geometric amphoras as big as a man to white

lekythoi a few inches high, from silhouette stick figures to true black-figure and then from red-figure to

polychrome on white-ground-the essential conser- vatism of funerary iconography is remarkable.' The earliest figured Geometric vases show the prothesis, or

lying in state of the deceased, surrounded by mourners,2 and this subject recurs-in many variations, to be sure-in every subsequent period down to the white lekythoi of the later fifth century.3 Funerary monuments in stone do not offer such a complete sequence, since they do not begin before about 600 in Attika, and there is a crucial gap for much of the fifth century, but for the periods in which we do have them, they form an essential complement to the fu-

nerary vases. It is precisely this fundamental conser- vatism that enables us to look for evidence of social and religious change, by studying how each generation of artists represented the same subject in keeping with the spirit and practices of its age.

This paper will consider the development of Athen- ian funerary iconography from about the middle of

* This paper originated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the Family in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, led by Sarah B. Pomeroy at the City University of New York in 1989. Earlier versions were also presented at the Universities of Thessaloniki and Athens and to the American Philological Association in 1989. For invitations to present the paper I thank T. and M. Tiverios (Salonika), A.A. Lemos (Athens), and H.P. Foley (New York). I also wish to thank the many Greek students and colleagues who made helpful comments in discussion, especially M. Voutiras (Salonika) and E. Bournias (Athens). I also thank Charles Segal for reading the penultimate draft and for sending me two papers of his own in advance of publication (infra n. 142). For help in obtaining photographs and permission to publish them I wish to thank S. R6gge and U. Knigge (Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Athens), O. Al- exandri (Athens National Museum), D. Williams (British Museum), F.W. Hamdorf (Munich), and M. Sguaitamati (Zu- rich).

The following abbreviations are used below: Boardman J. Boardman, "Painted Funerary

Plaques and Some Remarks on Pro- thesis," BSA 50 (1955) 51-66.

Brooklyn J.P. Brooklyn, Attic Black-Figure Funer-

ary Plaques (Diss. Univ. of Iowa 1981). Clairmont, G&E C.W. Clairmont, Gravestone and Epi-

gram (Mainz 1970). Clairmont, PN C.W. Clairmont, Patrios Nomos (Oxford

1983). Garland R. Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ith-

aca 1985).

Himmelmann N. Himmelmann-Wildschiitz, Studien zum Ilissos-Relief (Munich 1956).

Humphreys S.C. Humphreys, "Family Tombs and Tomb Cult in Ancient Athens," JHS 100 (1980) 96-126.

Karydi E. Karydi, "Schwarzfigurige Loutro- phoren im Kerameikos," AM 87 (1962) 90-103.

Kurtz D.C. Kurtz, Athenian White Lekythoi (Ox- ford 1975).

Kurtz and D.C. Kurtz and J. Boardman, Greek Bur- Boardman ial Customs (London 1971).

Loraux N. Loraux, L'invention d'Athines (Paris 1981).

Richter G.M.A. Richter, The Archaic Gravestones

of Attica (London 1961). Stupperich R. Stupperich, Staatsbegriibnis und Pri-

vatdenkmal in Athen (Muinster 1977). Vermeule E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early

Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley 1979). Zschietzsch- W. Zschietzschmann, "Die Darstellung-

mann en der Prothesis in der griechischen Kunst," AM 53 (1928) 17-47.

An excellent overview of funerary iconography is presented by D.C. Kurtz, "Vases for the Dead: An Attic Selec- tion, 750-400 B.C.," in H.A.G. Brijder ed., Ancient Greek and Related Pottery (Amsterdam 1985) 314-28.

2 G. Ahlberg, Prothesis and Ekphora in Greek Geometric Art (G6teborg 1971) 25-219.

3 See Vermeule 12.

American Journal of Archaeology 95 (1991) 629

630 H. A. SHAPIRO [AJA 95

iJR

ilio

Fig. 1. Prothesis. Black-figure plaque, Louvre MNB 905 (L4). (Photo Reunion des Musdes Nationaux)

the sixth century to the end of the fifth. I will argue that the Persian Wars and the subsequent institution of public funerals for the war dead about 470 mark a decisive change in the ideology of death as it is presented in both sculpture and vase-painting. Before

turning to the monuments, however, it is necessary to look briefly at the one external influence upon mourn-

ing and burial practices attested in the ancient sources.

FUNERARY LEGISLATION: TEXTS AND

MONUMENTS

The best-attested funerary legislation, that of So-

lon,4 falls about midway in the full ceramic sequence, at the beginning of the sixth century, or, in ceramic terms, near the beginning of the true black-figure style. The laws ascribed to Solon are not, strictly speaking, "sumptuary," since they say nothing about the size or cost of tomb monuments and only inciden-

tally limit the cost of the funeral (e.g., one could not sacrifice an ox at the grave). Rather, they are con-

cerned with conduct: lamentation, both in the home and in public, should be restrained, dignified, and limited to close relatives of the deceased.5 Most of the strictures are aimed at women who, we may infer, were given to extravagant displays of grief (e.g., lac- eration of the flesh), hired themselves out as paid mourners, and were apt to flock to the funerals and

graves of people outside their own family.6 In Plu- tarch's account, women's conduct at funerals is linked to their conduct at festivals, since these were the only two occasions when a respectable woman might ven- ture out in public.

There may at most be one indication in the visual record of the effect of the Solonian legislation on ritual mourning for the deceased. Geometric vases show the prothesis as a grand affair, with large crowds of mourners. The subsequent ekphora, or procession to the tomb, could include up to five or six chariots and many mourners on foot.7 In the sixth century, after Solon's legislation, the prothesis is typically shown

4 Among the principal ancient sources for Solon's legislation are Plut. Vit. Sol. 21.4-5 and [Dem.] 43.62. Cf. E. Ruschenbusch, IOASQNOT NOMOI (Wiesbaden 1966) 95-97; E. Reiner, Die rituelle Totenklage der Griechen (Til- bingen 1938) 35-46, 54-57 and, for recent bibliography, Garland 21-22, 137; R. Garland, "The Well-Ordered Corpse: An Investigation into the Motives behind Greek Funerary Legislation," BICS 36 (1989) 1-15, esp. 3-7 on the Solonian legislation.

5 On the meaning and purpose of funerary legislation

see, in addition to Garland (supra n. 4), Humphreys 100; and C. Sourvinou-Inwood, "A Trauma in Flux: Death in the Eighth Century and After," in R. Higg ed., The Greek Re- naissance (Stockholm 1983) 47-48.

6 Cf. [Dem.] 43.62: no woman under 60 could enter the house where the deceased lay on his bier except family members (children of cousins or nearer).

7 Good illustrations in Ahlberg (supra n. 2) figs. 53-54 and passim.

1991] THE ICONOGRAPHY OF MOURNING IN ATHENIAN ART 631

either on a rectangular pinax, probably affixed to the outside of the tomb,8 or on a loutrophoros used to

carry water for bathing the dead and then to mark the tomb (see below, figs. 12-13).9 The number of mourners is clearly fewer now, though this may have

something to do with the available picture surface. In one instance, the inscriptions prove that the mourners conformed to the definition of near relatives established by Solon (fig. 1).10 The ekphora, which was to take place in the pre-dawn darkness, to avoid calling attention to itself, is now virtually never represented.'"

Whether Solon's laws had any effect on individual behavior is difficult to infer from the vases. Two of the banned rituals, lacerating the flesh and singing of the threnos, are commonly depicted on sixth-century vases. But the context in Plutarch implies that these

practices were forbidden in public, that is, during the

ekphora or at the grave, while the vase scenes depicting these activities are all set in the privacy of the home, where presumably such prohibitions did not apply.'2

A subsequent funerary law is recorded only by Cicero (Leg. 2.23.59-60), and its date is much dis-

puted. According to Cicero, it was "some time" post aliquanto) after Solon's laws. The main purpose of this new legislation seems to have been to curb the extrav- agance of the wealthiest tombs in the Kerameikos, an issue not addressed by Solon. In the 1940s and 1950s, Gisela Richter and John Boardman argued for a date for this law in the Peisistratid period, probably in the

530s.'3 More recently, a dating in the time of Kleis- thenes or later has found favor." Boardman pointed out that Cicero's phrase opus tectorium (as one of the

things proscribed) could be a reference to the series of pinakes used to decorate a built-mound tomb, which do in fact cease to be made with the Exekian series in the 530s.'5 Hereafter only individual plaques were made, and this in turn suggests that the large built tombs covered with a revetment of plaques could

have fallen victim to a sumptuary law.16 Nonetheless,

changes in the form of tombs and tomb monuments

happened regularly throughout Greece without being legislated." Without endorsing the Richter/Board- man theory, I would only add that everything we know of the Tyrant's policies would be consistent with such

legislation: his need to keep a tight rein on political rivals among the aristocratic clans; his promotion of

impressive public monuments while maintaining a modest personal style; and his adherence to the laws of Solon. Thus, whether or not Cicero's law refers to the Peisistratid period (which I think unlikely), it is reasonable to suppose that the Tyrants did try to limit the ostentation of wealthy tombs and that such phe- nomena as the discontinuation of series of pinakes could have been the result of public policy.'1

But even where there are laws, there are always ways of getting around them, especially in Greece. If, for example, it is true that a certain type of ostentatious tomb was outlawed in the 530s, there were still families who continued to put up equally or more expensive marble kouroi and carved stelai as tomb markers. In the end, the interpretation of these problematical sumptuary laws may prove less fruitful than a consideration of the internal development of funer-

ary iconography and of the social and cultural factors that determined attitudes to death and burial in the absence of regulation by law.

ARCHAIC ATHENS: THE HEROIZATION OF THE DEAD

By gathering and examining the evidence of various kinds of funerary art-pinakes, black- and early red-figure loutrophoroi and other specialized vase

shapes, along with carved grave stelai and funerary statues-we gain a vivid picture of Athenian attitudes toward death in the High Archaic period, that is, from the time of Peisistratos in the 540s until shortly before

8 On the question of how the pinakes were displayed (still unresolved) see Brooklyn 76, 83-84.

9 For the loutrophoros see Karydi; M.B. Moore and M.Z.P. Philippides, Agora XXIII: Attic Black-Figured Pottery (Princeton 1986) 18-20; R. Ginouves, Balaneutike (Paris 1962) 254-64.

10 Infra pp. 638-39. " See infra pp. 633-34. 12 On the setting of prothesis scenes, which sometimes

include elements of architecture, see Boardman 55 and F. Cordano, "'Morte e pianto rituale' nell'Atene del VI sec. a.C.," ArchCl 32 (1980) 194.

1' Richter 38-39; G.M.A. Richter, "Peisistratos' Law Re- garding Tombs," AJA 49 (1945) 162; Boardman 53.

14 E.g., Clairmont, PN 75; cf. the discussion infra pp. 646- 47.

15 Boardman 53. For Exekias's series of pinakes see W. Technau, Exekias (Leipzig 1936) pls. 14-19. Against this view cf. Brooklyn 48-49 who, however, does not offer an alternative explanation of Cicero's phrase.

16 On the distinction in the preserved funerary laws between the form of the tomb and the decoration of it, see F. Eckstein, review of C. Karouzos, Aristodikos, in GGA 216 (1964) 168-69.

17 For a survey of the development of tombs in the Archaic and Classical periods see Kurtz and Boardman 68-84, 91- 121.

18 On the character of Peisistratos's rule see Arist. Ath.Pol. 16; A. Andrewes, in CAH2 III (1982) 393-415; H.A. Sha- piro, Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens (Mainz 1989) 2-5.


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Fig. 2. Grave stele. Athens, Kerameikos. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

the Persian Wars. I would suggest that the principal impulse behind most of these representations-spe- cifically those associated with the tombs of men-is the heroization of the dead. By "heroization" I do not mean that the dead are turned into objects of cult or chthonic demi-gods, as in some parts of Greece,1' but rather that they are likened to the heroes whose arete was celebrated in the Homeric poems. In sculpture, an obvious example would be a kouros like the Kroisos from Anavysos, of the 530s: youthful, powerful, idealized, heroically nude, his death in battle described in an elegiac couplet carved on the base. Even the diction is self-consciously Homeric: "Stand and mourn at the monument of dead Kroisos, whom furious Ares de- stroyed one day as he fought in the front ranks."20 The information that Kroisos died in battle is significant, among other reasons, because there is no hint of this in the nude figure, no armor or attribute of war. It recalls the Homeric heroes of early red-figure who often, against all logic, fight entirely nude.21

Other wealthy graves of the period were marked by stelai whose reliefs invariably depict either youths in athletic/heroic nudity (fig. 2) or men in military garb.22 I know of none in the sixth century commemorating a woman, except the remarkable fragment in Athens with a mother cradling her child23 and the

19 Cf. Himmelmann 41-42, who shows how the "her- oischer Totenkult" alluded to on gravestones from many other parts of Greece is absent from the Attic series.

20 Athens NM 3851; G.M.A. Richter, Kouroi3 (London 1970) no. 136; on the epigram see P.A. Hansen, Carmina epigraphica graeca (Berlin 1983) no. 27. On the Homeric diction and vocabulary of Archaic Attic grave epigrams see P. Friedlander and H.B. Hoffleit, Epigrammata (Berkeley 1948) 32-35. On the correlation of the epigram with the monument see U. Ecker, Grabmal und Epigram. Studien zur

friihgriechischen Sepulkraldichtung (Stuttgart 1989) and J.W. Day, "Rituals in Stone: Early Greek Grave Epigrams and Monuments," JHS 109 (1989) 16-28, esp. 19 on Kroisos. On the particular connotations of promachoi ("those who fight in the front ranks") see I. Morris, Burial and Ancient Society (Cambridge 1987) 199. On the social aspects of funerary kouroi see now A.M. D'Onofrio, "Korai e kouroi funerari attici," AnnNap 4 (1982) 135-70.

21 A good example is the duel of Achilles and Hektor on an early volute-krater by the Berlin Painter, London E468; ARV2 206, 132; K. Friis Johansen, The Iliad in Early Greek Art (Copenhagen 1967) 215, fig. 91. Cf. N. Himmelmann, "Ideale Nacktheit," ZfK 48 (1985) 1-3.

22 Tokens of the athlete include the aryballos on a leather thong: e.g., the stele Boston 08.288 (Richter no. 28, second quarter of the sixth century). The best-known figure in armor is also one of the latest in the series, Aristion: Athens NM 29 (Richter no. 67, ca. 500).

23 Athens NM 4472 (Richter no. 59, ca. 530). The stele was more likely for the child (or for mother and child, if she died in childbirth).


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Fig. 3. Prothesis. Etruscan black-figure kantharos. London 1899.7-21.1. (Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum)

Brother-and-Sister Stele in New York, where a little

girl has been added alongside her brother, evidently because both died young, while their parents were alive.24 Women did, of course, occasionally receive

grave statues. Phrasikleia tells us in her epigram that she died unmarried, and this must account in large part for the exceptional monument she received.25 In addition she is exceptional in that she was evidently commemorated along with a male relative, perhaps her brother.26

More modest graves of both men and women in the Archaic period were marked by a clay plaque or a loutrophoros, and these provide the clearest picture of how the Athenians mourned their dead. The vast

majority of scenes depict the prothesis: the deceased

on his bier surrounded by mourners (fig. 1). Only very rarely is the ekphora depicted. Since the

elaborate Geometric style ekphora had probably now been banned, the emphasis in art shifts to the private lamentation at home. The Exekian plaques, which are

unique among extant monuments in presenting vir-

tually a continuous narrative of funeral rites, may have shown up to four chariots being readied for the

ekphora.27 Otherwise, the two finest examples in black-

figure of the ekphora-and virtually the only two-are both on kantharoi of a type that copies an Etruscan

shape and was made exclusively for export to Etruria,

suggesting that the subject matter was a special com- mission from an Etruscan client.28 An Etruscan kantharos of the same shape (fig. 3) shows a prothesis

24 Clairmont, G&E no. 1. 25 On Phrasikleia: J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Ar-

chaic Period (London 1978) 73 and fig. 108a; on her epigram, L.H. Jeffery, "The Inscribed Gravestones of Archaic Attica," BSA 57 (1962) 138, no. 46. Cf. also the funerary statue of Phile, of which only the feet and part of the epigram survive: G.M.A. Richter, Korai (London 1968) no. 91. This statue was set up by Phile's father or mother, so it is reasonable to suppose that she too died unmarried. For a catalogue of funerary korai see D'Onofrio (supra n. 20) 142, 144-45. On the correlation of lavish funeral monuments for those who died before their time see C. Karouzos, Aristodikos (Stuttgart 1961) 28-29, who also points out, however, that some large monuments were put up for mature men and women.

26 See E. Mastrokostas, "Myrrhinous: la kore Phrasikleia,

oeuvre d'Aristion de Paros et un kouros en marbre," AAA 5 (1972) 298-324, esp. 300 and 309, fig. 12.

27 Technau (supra n. 15) pl. 14.16-17. Brooklyn 175-80; H. Mommsen, "Der Grabpinax des Exekias mit den trauern- den Frauen," in Brijder (supra n. 1) 329-33.

28 Cabinet des M6dailles 353 and 355; ABV 346.7-8; Zschietzschmann pl. 15; BCH 92 (1968) 561-62, figs. 7 and 9. A further indication that the Attic kantharoi reflect Etrus- can rather than Athenian practice is the presence of a musician (flute-player) and armed dancers (pyrrhics) in the cortege. At Athens, pyrrhic dances were performed at the Panathenaic Games, but not, as far as we know, at funerals (perhaps due to legal prohibition, to keep the funeral a subdued affair), whereas this was characteristic in Etruria. See J.-C. Poursat, "Les representations de danse arm6e dans


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Fig. 4. Funeral. Black-figure bail-handle olpe. Bowdoin Col- lege Museum of Art 1984.23. (Photo Museum)

closely dependent on Athenian models.29 Two modest vases by the Sappho Painter, evidently a specialist in

funerary iconography, preserve precious documen- tation of several moments in the funerary ritual that are otherwise unknown in visual sources: the placing of the body in the coffin and preparation for the

ekphora (fig. 4);30 and the lowering of the coffin into the grave.31

Thematically, black-figure vases with prothesis scenes are the direct descendants of the big Geometric kraters and amphoras of the time of Homer, which in turn, albeit in a highly schematic and unembel- lished style, reflect the central event of a Homeric hero's funeral, the lamentation over the corpse. In Hektor's case this went on for nine days (II. 24.785-

89), for Achilles, 17 days (Od. 24.63-65), but in sixth-

century Athens it was limited to a single day.32 The

largely separate roles of men and women at the prothesis are consistently depicted on the vases and match Homer's account rather closely. Women mourn

openly and emotionally, tearing their hair and cheeks with both hands.33 They regularly stand closest to the

body, particularly to the head, which one of them

occasionally cradles.34 As Christine Havelock and others have pointed out,

the role of women in caring for the corpse comple- ments their role in the care of babies and small chil-

dren.35 But whereas the latter seems natural and

virtually universal (since it is women who give birth), the association of women with the corpse is not so obvious (today's undertaker is very seldom a woman). Rather, the link is in the fact that in Greek thought there were two sources of natural pollution (miasma),

la ceramique attique," BCH 92 (1968) 550-615, esp. 559- 62 on the one-handled kantharoi. Recently F. Brommer, "Antike Tinze," AA 1989, 489, associated the appearance of the pyrrhike on the two kantharoi in the Cabinet des Me'dailles with an obscure tradition that this dance was first performed at the funeral of Patroklos. On pyrrhics in Etruscan art, see G. Camporeale, "La danza armata in Etruria," MEFRA 99 (1987) 1-42. On music at Etruscan funerals see also J.-R. Jannot, "Musique et musiciens 6trusques," CRAI 1988, 311- 34, esp. 323, fig. 5, showing a flute-player in a prothesis scene on a relief from Chiusi. On the so-called cippi from Chiusi, which show funerary scenes heavily indebted to Attic iconography, see E. Paribeni, "I rilievi chiusini arcaici," StEtr 12 (1938) 58-138, esp. pls. 21-25. I am aware of only one depiction of a musician in a funerary context on an Attic

vase, the unusual black-figure egg in Berlin, published by M.P. Nilsson, "Das Ei im Totenkult," ArchRW 11 (1908) 534-35, fig. 1. It shows a seated flute-player and five standing, mourning women, but there is no corpse. The setting is more likely private than public.

29 London 1899.7-21-1; Zschietzschmann 43, no. 89 and Beilage 15.

30 Bail olpe, Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1984.23 (fig. 5); Kurtz and Boardman, pls. 37-38. A unique scene of the preparation of the corpse for the prothesis seems to be depicted on a Boiotian black-figure pyxis, Athens NM 437; AM 15 (1890) pl. 8; cf. S.R. Roberts, The Attic Pyxis (Chicago 1978) 88-89.

31 Loutrophoros, Athens NM 450; Kurtz and Boardman, pl. 36.

32 This was laid down in the Solonian law, [Dem.] 43.62. 3 Cf. e.g., II. 24.710-11. 34 An example in vase-painting is the Sappho Painter's

pinax Louvre L4 (fig. 1). On the gesture see G. Neumann, Gesten und Gebdirden in der griechischen Kunst (Berlin 1965) 89 and 196, n. 369 for more examples.

35 C.M. Havelock, "Mourners on Greek Vases: Remarks on the Social History of Women," in S.L. Hyatt ed., The Greek Vase (Latham, N.Y. 1981) 112.


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birth and death.36 Since women could not escape the

pollution of giving birth, as men could, they were

presumably better suited to deal with the pollution of death. Of course the entire house in which a death had occurred, and everyone who came to pay his

respects to the deceased, experienced some pollution and had to be ritually purified, but the touching of a

corpse "put the thing in its most concrete form.""37

Men usually come no closer than the feet of the deceased and often approach from the reverse side of the vase (especially on loutrophoroi),38 to be

greeted by the master of the house (figs. 5-6).39 Their

gesture is a single upraised hand, with palm facing out, conventionally labeled "valediction."40 This gesture and the fact that they are often arranged in neat

pairs suggest that the men form a kind of chorus,

36 R. Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford 1983) 33.

37 Parker (supra n. 36) 39. The symbolic purification usually consisted in placing a vessel of water at the entrance to the house of the deceased. Cf. infra n. 121.

38 A good example of the adaptation of the vase shape to the segregation by gender is the loutrophoros New York 27.228; G.M.A. Richter, "A Newly Acquired Loutrophoros," BMMA 23 (1928) 54-57. Seven women and a girl crowd the bier of a youth, while an equal number of men fill the panel

on the reverse. Both sides of the neck are populated exclusively by mourning women.

39 Cup by Lydos, Kerameikos 1687; ABV 113.81; Para- lipomena 45; Beazley Addenda2 32.

40 Cf. Neumann (supra n. 34) 86; E. Brandt, Gruss und Gebet (Waldsassen 1965) 113. Cf. Aeschylus, Choephoroi 8- 9, where Orestes addresses the tomb of his father: "I was not by, my father, to mourn your death, nor stretched my hand out when they took your corpse away" (trans. R. Lat- timore).


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Fig. 7. Mourners. Black-figure phormiskos. Athens, Kera- meikos 691. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

performing a threnos, or formal dirge, in contrast to the spontaneous wailing of the women.41 In the Iliad, when Hektor's body is finally returned to his halls,

They laid him out on a ... bed, and they set beside him singers [aoidous, presumably male], leaders of the threnoi, who led the song of lamentation, they sang the dirge, and at this the women wailed. And among them

S iii! . .. . .

..... .

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oi; :: :

:i?

Fig. 8. Prothesis and mourners. Black-figure phormiskos shown in figure 7. (Photo Deutsches ArchHologisches Insti- tut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

white-armed Andromache led the lament, holding the head of man-slaying Hektor in her arms .. .42

The separation of roles by gender, as well as the whole ethos of the prothesis in the later sixth century, is perhaps most vividly rendered on a remarkable vase found in the German excavations of the Kera- meikos (figs. 7-9).43 The shape, with bulbous body

41 For men in pairs cf. also the pinax Brussels A6; V. Verhoogen, "Plaques fundraires attiques," BMusArt 3.9 (1937) 66-68 and fig. 28. For pairs of men performing as a tragic chorus, their arms outstretched in the same gesture, cf. the red-figure column-krater Basel BS 415; E. Simon, Festivals of Attica (Madison 1983) pl. 32.3. On the male mourners as a kind of chorus see also M.A. Tiverios, O Ludos kai to ergo tou (Athens 1976) 54-55, on the cup by Lydos (figs. 6-7).

42 II. 24.719-24, trans. author. On this scene see now M.W. Edwards, "The Conventions of a Homeric Funeral," in Studies in Honour of T.B.L. Webster 1 (Bristol 1986) 84- 92. On the meanings of different words for lamentation- threnos, gods, et al.-see Reiner (supra n. 4) 2-9; Vermeule 15-16.

43 Kerameikos 691; ABV 678; R. Lullies, "Attisch-schwarzfigurige Keramik aus dem Kerameikos," JdI 61-62 (1946- 1947) 65, no. 44 and pl. 13.


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Fig. 9. Prothesis and mourners. Black-figure phormiskos shown in figure 7. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Insti- tut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

and tall narrow neck, must have been a container for

perfumed oil for the dead and is conventionally called a phormiskos.44 Both the function and the graceful form suggest an association with women, and indeed on both this example and a second from the Kera- meikos (fig. 10) showing a prothesis, the deceased is female.45 On the more elaborate example (fig. 9), even her name is given, Myrrhine, and the woman who leans over her is called Myrte. Both she and a second

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Fig. 10. Prothesis. Black-figure phormiskos. Athens, Kera- meikos. (Photo Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

mourner behind the bier have long straggly locks of hair streaming over their cheeks, the dishevelment of

grief. The deceased, in contrast, has a neat and ele-

gant coiffure. Women who were unmarried or re-

cently married at death would be decked out on the bier as brides, often wearing a crown.46 Three more women stood near the foot of the bier, also inscribed, but only traces of the names survive.

Myrrhine is a common enough name in Attika, and it is surely only coincidence that a marble lekythos a

century later commemorates a woman of the same name.47 Even more intriguing is a funerary clay ball inscribed with the name of Myrrhine, roughly con-

44 On the shape see Moore and Philippides (supra n. 9) 48; O. Touchefeu-Meynier, "Un nouveau 'phormiskos' 'a figures noires," RA 1972, 93-102. The shape is apparently exclusively funerary.

45 Kerameikos; Lullies (supra n. 43) 65 and pl. 14.45. 46 Garland 23. On the crown as a symbol of purity (when

all the others are polluted) see Parker (supra n. 36) 35.

47 C.W. Clairmont, "The Lekythos of Myrrhine," in Stud- ies in Classical Art and Archaeology: A Tribute to Peter Hein- rich von Blanckenhagen (Locust Valley, N.Y. 1979) 103-10, who identifies her with a known Myrrhine, priestess of Athena Nike. Cf. F. Bechtel, Die attischen Frauennamen (Got- tingen 1902) 103 and R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford 1969) no. 44.


SA#4

'i• •'•? •

ii i :::ii

-__1-:-I J

Fig. 11. Prothesis. Black-figure plaque. Metropolitan Museum of Art 54.11.15. (Photo Museum, Rogers Fund, 1954)

temporary with the phormiskos.48 A Doric column to the left of Myrrhine's bier marks the threshold of the

house, approached by a group of six men led by her father. From his mouth spill the first words of his lament: OIMOIO EYFA[THP]. The white-haired man behind him could be a grandfather. Even the house itself seems to mourn: on the whitewashed surface of the column are the letters OIMIEK.

Inscriptions on funerary vases are, as in all of black-

figure, sporadic at best, and this modest vase is among the most profligate in its use of them. The father's

words, though part of a hexameter verse, sound like an authentic threnos rather than an epigram carved in stone. The only example of the latter found on clay is a pinax in Athens that preserves part of an epigram running above a chorus of men: XEMATOA EXTI

APEIO.49 The naming of Myrrhine and her relatives

is equally unusual. The dead woman on the Exekian

plaques in Berlin was almost certainly named,50 as we

might have expected on such an elaborate series that was surely made to order. What is significant about these examples is that, although few in number, they conform to an Archaic practice of giving the names of respectable (i.e., non-hetaira, non-slave) women, whether as dedicators of votive objects or as recipients of grave gifts.51

The pinax in the Louvre (fig. 1) is also unusually generous with inscriptions, but of a different sort. Instead of proper names, they designate each mourner with kinship terms. For the most part these confirm what we would have surmised in their absence: that the mother stands nearest to and embraces the dead youth;52 that the little girl at the foot of the bier and the even smaller one beside the mother are

48 Boston 63.119; H. Hoffmann, "A Clay Ball of Myr- rhine," BMFA 61 (1963) 20-22.

49 Athens 2410, from a series of three or four (Brooklyn 184); ABV 687; Boardman 60, no. 11; ArchEph 1888, pl. 11. It is unclear whether Areios is part of the man's name or an adjective ("of warlike . . ."). For the word sema in a grave epigram, cf. that of Phrasikleia (supra n. 25) and, for the meaning of the word in this context, see Brooklyn 75-76; J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia (Paris 1988).

50 See Boardman 65-66 on the names. He suggests that her name is Phainocharis and that it appeared twice, once on a white column and again near the bier.

5~ On dedications by women see B.S. Ridgway, "Ancient Greek Women and Art: The Material Evidence," AJA 91 (1987) 401-404; M.L. Lazzarini, "Le formule delle dediche votivi nella Grecia arcaica," MemLinc ser. 8, vol. 19.2 (1976) 63-64; 68 and passim.

52 A fragmentary pinax probably by the same hand also


his younger sisters;53 and that the father is the bearded man who faces and greets the arriving procession of male mourners. Other kin include a

grandmother, three aunts (one specified as paternal), and a brother. The inscriptions also confirm, if only inadvertently, that Solon's laws were still in effect, since everyone present is a relative within the pre- scribed degree of proximity.54

The youth so extravagantly mourned (but, inter-

estingly, not named) presumably died before mar-

riage, since no wife or children are present. Although more elaborate and densely populated than most, the scene is basically similar to those on pinakes for

women, which outnumber those for men by two to one.55

It is this very crowding of the figures and the chaotic

atmosphere, which are not necessitated by the plaque itself and occur on some loutrophoroi as well,56 that lend these scenes a feeling of immediacy and authen-

ticity not found in any other period of Athenian

funerary art. A Greek funeral was surely not a quiet and stately affair, at least not that part of it conducted in the privacy of the home, beyond the reach of legal sanctions.57 Although the basic scheme of the prothesis is the same whether the deceased is male or female,

this does not mean that the iconography of mourning is oblivious of gender.

On a significant group of loutrophoroi and pinakes commemorating men, a heroizing intent is made ex-

plicit in the subsidiary friezes that depict (or at least allude to) the kind of elaborate funeral games accorded Patroklos in Iliad 23.58 On a pinax in New York of about 500, for example, two men, four women, and a girl mourn the dead youth in the

principal scene (fig. 11).59 Below, in a predella--the only one on a funerary plaque-three quadrigas driven by charioteers in characteristic white chitons race to the right. The same motif also occurs on one

contemporary black-figure loutrophoros (figs. 12- 13)60 and one several decades later in red-figure, where the racing chariots occupy a frieze above the

prothesis.61 The motif is very different from that of the cavalcade of young horsemen that appears on several loutrophoroi and other funerary vases, as a kind of "honor guard" for the deceased.62 The chariot race at a heroic funeral was an ancient tradition al-

ready when Homer sang, for it is depicted on a My- cenaean larnax of the 13th century B.C.63

A pair of fine, although fragmentary loutrophoroi from the Kerameikos, of about 540, depict other fu-

labels the mother: Athens, Serpieri-Vlasto Collection MVB 55; Boardman pl. 3; for the attribution see Brooklyn 205.

53 For a little girl beside the bier, cf. the extraordinary pinax fragment, Athens, Serpieri-Vlasto Collection; Board- man pl. 7a. She is nude to the waist, as if she had pulled down her garment with one hand in her frenzied grief and tears at her hair with the other. There are a few large letters beside her, but they do not yield any sense (see Brooklyn 207).

54 See supra n. 4. The only person present who may be a non-relative is the nurse of the deceased, labeled as trophos. Such figures are regularly shown in prothesis scenes (although nowhere else labeled) and must have been considered as members of the family. Cf. S. Pfisterer-Haas, Darstellungen alter Frauen in der griechischen Kunst (Frank- furt 1989) 27-28.

55 This figure is based on the catalogue of pinakes in Brooklyn 162-219. Of 35 that show a prothesis (or fragments of a scene that almost certainly included a prothesis), 15 preserve enough of the deceased to determine the gender. Ten are female, five male.

56 E.g., Tfibingen S/10 1481; CVA (Tiibingen 3) pl. 13. 57 This feature of Late Archaic vase-painting, as a partic-

ularly uninhibited portrayal of real life, has been observed in other areas of genre, such as erotic representations. See O.J. Brendel, "The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World," in T. Bowie and C.V. Chris- tiansen eds., Studies in Erotic Art (New York 1970) 3-69.

58 For recent discussions see G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore 1979) 111-12; A. Schnapp-Gorbeillon,

"Les fundrailles de Patrocle," in G. Gnoli and J.-P. Vernant

, eds., La mort, les morts dans les socidtis anciennes (Paris 1982) 77-78. For the archaeological evidence pertaining to Ho- meric funerals see M. Andronikos, Totenkult (ArchHom 3W, G6ttingen 1968) 43-51.

59 New York 54.11.15; Boardman pl. 4; Brooklyn no. 18. 60 Athens 450; Kurtz and Boardman, pl. 36. Cf. supra

n. 3 and n. 9 for another scene on this same vase. 61 Louvre CA 2955; ARV2 507.33 (Aegisthus Painter);

A. Merlin, "Fragment de loutrophore au Musee du Louvre," ArchEph 1937, 185-87.

62 Kurtz (supra n. 1) 326. Perhaps the earliest example of this motif is on the loutrophoros Kerameikos 1681; Karydi pls. 47-48 (attributed to the Amasis Painter), ca. 550-540. On at least one red-figure loutrophoros that includes this frieze of horsemen, the deceased is a woman: Athens 1170; ARV2 512.13; CVA (Athens 2) pl. 22. Clearly the horsemen have lost any specific association with the dead individual (i.e., that he was a member of such a cavalry regiment) and their presence is simply a way of adding dignity to the occasion. It seems to me unlikely, in fact, that the horsemen ever had such a direct link with the deceased (as Kurtz [supra n. 1] 326, for example, supposes), for they appear too on a fragmentary phormiskos, a shape that seems to be associated especially with women (supra n. 44): D. von Bothmer, An- cient Art from New York Private Collections (New York 1961) no. 218.

63 Thebes, Archaeological Museum 1; Mind and Body. Athletic Contests in Ancient Greece (exhibition catalogue, Ath- ens 1989) no. 13.


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INA .: .

Fig. 12. Prothesis and chariot race. Black-figure loutrophoros. Athens NM 450. (Photo National Archaeological Mu- seum, Athens)

neral games and the prizes awarded in them, again in

subsidiary friezes below the prothesis (figs. 14-15).64 On one the dead youth on his bier, surrounded by four women and a girl, is preserved. Below (fig. 14), two boxers square off between bearded spectators (one perhaps a referee). The prize, which sits on the

ground between them, is a bronze lebes.65 On the

other, the deceased is a bearded man,66 and two rows of figures from the belly (fig. 15) are partially preserved. The upper shows victors in the contests to-

gether with men carrying their prizes, bronze tripods with large ring handles and long slender legs.67 Such

tripods occur often in black-figure of this period,

Al. ell

..

Fig. 13. Prothesis and chariot race. Black-figure loutrophoros shown in figure 12. (Photo National Archaeological Mu- seum, Athens)

sometimes carried by victors in the Panathenaic Games or by Herakles, as prototype of the victorious

athlete.6" In the context of the loutrophoros, however, the reference to funeral games is unmistakable. Ho- mer's "eared tripod" (otoenta; the ears referring to the ring handles) is offered as a prize at the games for Patroklos, in both the chariot race (II. 23.264) and the wrestling match (23.702), and Hesiod won such an eared tripod at the funeral games for Amphidamas at Chalkis, which he later dedicated to the Muses on Mt. Helikon (Op. 658).69 A lebes is offered by Achilles as third prize in the chariot race (II. 23.267) and as second prize in the javelin contest (23.885). Such epic

64 Kerameikos 1680; ABV 140.7; Karydi pls. 44-46; and Kerameikos 1682; ABV 137.66 and 139.13-14; Karydi pls. 42-43.

65 Kerameikos 1680 (supra n. 64). Karydi refers to the prize as a dinos, the usual name for the ceramic shape, but it must represent the vessel that Homer calls a lebes: see infra n. 95 and the black-figure dinos Akropolis 15147/ 15466; Mind and Body (supra n. 63) no. 26, showing the funeral games for Pelias, on which the prize lebes is labeled as such.

66 This fragment (now lost) is illustrated in AA 1935, 490, fig. 65.

67 Kerameikos 1682 (supra n. 64). 68 Cf. I. Scheibler, "DreifuBtrdiger," in KANON. Festschrift

Ernst Berger (AntK-BH 15, 1988) 310-16, esp. 312 for the Kerameikos vase.

69 For tripods of this type from the Late Geometric period (i.e., contemporary with Homer) see M. Maass, Die geome- trischen Dreifiifje von Olympia (Berlin 1978).


traditions were evidently well remembered. They were faithfully depicted in the art of the sixth century, as on the Frangois Vase (fig. 16),70 and when public funeral games for the war dead were instituted in Athens after the Persian Wars, bronze lebetes were awarded as prizes.71

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: _;i-I-_I

.... ...

..,, -II-? ;

:; :- _- 1::i: iiii=: iiiiiiii

'l-iiiiiiiii:iiii; :

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Fig. 14. Wrestlers at funeral games. Black-figure loutrophoros. Athens, Kerameikos 1680. (Photo Deutsches Archiolo- gisches Institut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

...••• i:-::---::--:-ii~liiliiiii,-ii•ii•i-i'ii-ii• ii-i~i iii

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Fig. 15. Victors in funeral games. Black-figure loutrophoros. Athens, Kerameikos 1682. (Photo Deutsches Archiolo- gisches Institut, Athens, Kerameikos Excavations)

Surely such games were forbidden in the sixth cen-

tury by the Solonian or later legislation aimed at

curtailing the ostentation of aristocratic funerals.72 At least there is no evidence at all that they took place, although the institution of such athletic contests at the Panathenaic festival carried a similar heroic allusion in a public context.73 I take the depiction of funeral

games rather as a nostalgic reminiscence of epic prac-

70 The funeral games for Patroklos, on the FranCois Vase, Florence 4209; ABV 76.1. Both lebes and "eared tripod" are depicted as prizes.

71 E. Vanderpool, "Three Prize Vases," ArchDelt 24 A' (1969) 1-5. For bronze lebetes of the seventh and sixth centuries from various other parts of Greece that may have been prizes in funeral games, see L.E. Roller, Funeral Games in Greek Literature, Art, and Life (Diss. Univ. of Pennsylvania 1977) 10-12.

72 Clairmont, PN 25-26, seems to consider it likely that funeral games took place at private funerals in the sixth century, but without offering any evidence. Roller (supra n. 71) 13-16 adduces possible evidence, including inscribed marble diskoi (figs. 11-12), but does not believe these are conclusive; see L.E. Roller, "Funeral Games for Historical Persons," Stadion 7 (1981) 1-18, esp. 5 on Attika.

73 See K. Rhomaiopoulou, "The Panathenaic Festival," in Mind and Body (supra n. 63) 44.


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Fig. 16. Funeral games for Patroklos. Black-figure volute-krater (Frangois Vase). Florence, Museo Archeologico 4209. (Photo Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana)

tice.74 When the gender of the deceased on these vases and plaques can be determined, it is always male. In other words, the choice of subsidiary scenes is not

capricious or the result of mass production, but spe- cifically associates men with the heroic tradition of funeral games and coveted metal vessels. Not only are the prizes represented on the vases among those offered by Achilles, but the contests, wrestling and the chariot race, were on the program at the games for

Patroklos. Knowledge of the epic tradition of funeral

games for epic heroes was preserved through the Archaic period not only in oral poetry, but in the visual arts as well. In addition to the funeral games for Patroklos (fig. 16), those at the funeral of Pelias are an especially popular subject on black-figure vases around the time of the Kerameikos loutrophoroi.75

Indeed, the intermingling of iconographies between generic funerary vases and those depicting myth, especially the deaths of epic heroes, is a further indicator of the powerful influence of Homeric no- tions of death on the average Athenian of the sixth

century. Apart from the funeral games, this is most

striking in the representation of women mourners. About 575 a Corinthian painter represented the prothesis of Achilles, mourned by the Nereids, in a version that could have served as a model for Athenian fu-

nerary vases of the mid- and later sixth century.76 But,

curiously, the subject was not in fact taken up by Attic

vase-painters." Instead, in the mythological repertoire of black-figure, it is the Sack of Troy that presents the viewer with the most comprehensive and

vividly imagined confrontation with death and lamen-

74 A spectacular example of the "heroizing" of the burial of a sixth-century Athenian is Kimon Koalemos, who had won three victories in the chariot race at Olympia (Hdt. 6.103.3). His winning horses were buried near him (Plut., Vit.Cat.Mai. 5.4), a practice well known from the "heroic" burials of the Geometric period, e.g., at Salamis on Cyprus.

75 See L.E. Roller, "Funeral Games in Greek Art," AJA 85 (1981) 107-19. These vases regularly show tripods and cauldrons as prizes. Cf. the dinos supra n. 65.

76 Louvre E 643; D.A. Amyx, Corinthian Vase-Painting of the Archaic Period (Berkeley 1988) 264-65, 1 (Damon

Painter); K. Schefold, Friihgriechische Sagenbilder (Munich 1964) pl. 79.

77 A related subject, the prothesis of Patroklos, with the Nereids bringing new armor to the mourning Achilles, occurs near the end of the fifth century, notably on the bi lekythos by the Eretria Painter, New York 31.11.13 (ARV 1248.9; A. Lezzi-Hafter, Der Eretria Maler [Mainz 1988] no. 239 and pl. 152). The Mourning of Patroklos may be shown on the Corinthian olpe Brussels A4 (Amyx [supra n. 76] 581.81).


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Fig. 17. Sack of Troy. Black-figure hydria. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen 1700. (Photo Museum)

tation.78 Often several episodes are combined-the

dragging of Hektor's body, the Rape of Kassandra, the killing of Priam and of little Astyanax-to heighten the impact of utter destruction. In such

scenes, the women of Troy, wild with grief, especially for the dead and now outraged Hektor, perform the same gestures as the mourners in prothesis scenes.

On a fine hydria in Boston, for example, Achilles'

chariot, dragging the body of Hektor, drives past the tomb of Patroklos, whose fully armed eidolon springs from the tall mound.79 As Achilles mounts the car, he

glares ferociously at Priam and Hekabe, who stand within the columned porch of the palace. Both of Hektor's parents make gestures reminiscent of those of mourners, she holding one hand to her head, he with his right hand outstretched, at the same time

entreating Achilles to stop the humiliation. As Iris rushes in to bring Achilles the divine order to cease and desist, she too looks somewhat like a female

mourner, with both hands raised to her head. A sec-

ond hydria, quite possibly by the same hand, has an even more startling combination of scenes and gestures (fig. 17).8o While the destruction of Troy pro- ceeds on the body of the vase (the identification of the subject is disputed, either the death of Troilos or of Astyanax),s8 the shoulder renders the battlements of Troy, the architecture of the vase thus transformed into that of the city. Two women mourn with traditional gestures the death of the young prince, while a third reaches out (and down) to Achilles in entreaty.

In a related scene, the ill-fated Polyxena, witnessing the murder of Priam, tears at her hair like a mourner, her mad grief perhaps driven by intimations of her own impending death.82 Other mythological motifs in black- and early red-figure that must have called to the viewer's mind elements of funerary iconography are the ransoming of Hektor, his corpse stretched out beneath Achilles' couch,83 and the removal of Sarpe- don's body by Sleep and Death.84 Particularly evoca- tive is the scene of a woman mourning over the body

78 On the iconography see M.I. Wiencke, "An Epic Theme in Greek Art," AJA 58 (1954) 285-306; K. Schefold, Gitter- und Heldensagen der Griechen in der spiitarchaischen Kunst (Munich 1978) 254-60.

79 Boston 63.473; Paralipomena 164, 31bis; CVA (Boston 2) pl. 82; and, for full discussion of the scene, E.T. Vermeule, "The Vengeance of Achilles " BMFA 63 (1965) 34-52.

80 Munich 1700 (ABV 362.27 and 695); Wiencke (supra n.78) pl. 59.19. Beazley described the vase as "Antiope Group or very close," and Vermeule attributed the Boston hydria to the Antiope Group (supra n. 79) 48.

81 On the interpretation see Wiencke (supra n. 78) 299; LIMC II 934, s.v. Astyanax I no. 29 (0. Touchefeu).

82 E.g., the red-figure column-krater Villa Giulia 3578 (ARV2 290.9; CVA [Villa Giulia 3] pl. 18). Cf. also a superb example on a cup by Onesimos in the Getty Museum, 83.AE.362; a detail, in which Polyxena's hair-tearing gesture

is barely visible, in GettyMusJ 12 (1984) 246. For information on this scene I thank Dyfri Williams, whose publication is forthcoming.

83 A. Danale-Giole, Th ~a'XtQcT to "Ex'ETxoQog' ELg T~V TXVrIv to0 6. xact 5. aLO)vog nt.X. (Athens 1981). Interest- ingly, one of the finest versions of this scene, by the Kleo- phrades Painter, was found in the Kerameikos excavations: U. Knigge, "Neue Scherben von Gefdissen des Kleophrades- Malers," AM 85 (1970) 4-11 and pls. 2-4. One wonders if the myth was seen as particularly appropriate for a tomb offering.

84 M. Robertson, "Euphronios at the Getty," GettyMusJ 9 (1981) 23-25; Robertson, "Sarpedon Brought Home," in Studies in Honour of T.B.L. Webster 2 (Bristol 1988) 109-20; D. von Bothmer, "The Death of Sarpedon," in Hyatt (supra n. 35) 63-80; cf. Stupperich 65.


of a dead hero, on the enigmatic name-vase of the Painter of the Vatican Mourner.85

We may sum up the argument thus far and make some general observations. Athenian aristocratic so-

ciety of the second half of the sixth century was per- meated by the ethos of the Homeric epic. The texts of the Iliad and Odyssey were canonized in Athens under the Peisistratids and performed at the Panath- enaic festival.86 Wealthy families, apparently unaf- fected or undeterred by sumptuary legislation, set up beautiful and expensive monuments to their dead in

family grave plots, especially when these were men who, like most epic heroes, died prematurely and/or in battle.8' Women from such families might receive a monument if they had died under particularly tragic circumstances, i.e., young and unmarried or in childbirth. As a rule, the less time the deceased had been allotted on earth to make his mark in the world and leave a legacy of offspring, the greater was the need to commemorate him (or her) in a permanent monument.88 Parents set up monuments to their dead children to help fill the void and assuage their grief.89 Epitaphs carved on such monuments use epic diction to exalt the dead, but at the same time their language evokes pity and sympathy, as if to undercut the

phthonos that a lavish tomb might arouse.90 On more modest tomb markers and grave goods in clay, the

imagery of heroization is extended, for men, to allusions to funeral games with splendid prizes. As in Homer-as well as in real life-women are more in-

timately associated with the rites of mourning than men, and they give vent to their grief up to the limits of the law, while men maintain a kind of grim deco- rum. The division of roles by gender echoes that in

Homer, but probably reflects behavior far older than that and by no means limited to Greece.

THE PERSIAN WARS AND THE PATRIOS NOMOS

In the years between 490 and about 465 a whole constellation of interrelated events brought about a profound change in Athenian burial practices and in attitudes toward death and mourning. This paper cannot attempt to reconstruct the exact sequence of events and their relative importance in the chain of cause and effect-one of the thorniest problems in fifth-century Athenian history-but can only enumer- ate the key elements.91 In 490, 192 Athenians who fell at Marathon to save their city from the Persian threat were buried in a communal grave, the so-called soros, at the site where they died. This was actually not the first time Athenian casualties were buried in a communal grave, for in 506 those who died near the Euripos River on Euboea, in a glorious victory over the Boiotians and Chalkidians, were buried there in a polyandrion at the expense of the Athenian state.92 And at some time in the 490s, a contingent of Athenians with Miltiades who died fighting the Pelas- gians on the island of Lemnos was buried there, with a stele listing those who had fallen according to mem- bership in the recently established Kleisthenic tribes.93 There was even a mythical precedent, in the form of a story known to Plutarch (Vit. Thes. 27), that the Athenians who died in the defense of their city against the Amazons were buried together at the Peiraic Gate. But what made the Marathonomachoi different was not only the fact that theirs was the first polyandrion on Attic soil (apart from those who fell against the Amazons), but something more important.

85 Vatican 16589 (ABV 140.1); cf. E. Zahn, "Oinone," AA 1983, 590-91 and fig. 5, who suggests Oinone with the body of Paris, rather than the more usual interpretation as Eos and Memnon.

86 J.A. Davison, "Peisistratus and Homer," TAPA 86 (1955) 1-21 (who is skeptical of a "Peisistratid recension" but presents all the relevant evidence); cf. Johansen (supra n. 21) 234-43. Cf. most recently J. Herington, Poetry into Drama (Berkeley 1985) 84-87 and W. Burkert, "The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century B.C.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichoros," in Papers on the Amasis Painter and His World (Malibu 1987) 43-62.

87 Some stelai add a subsidiary Homeric motif, painted or carved in low relief below the figure of the deceased, e.g., the stele New York 36.11.13 (Richter, figs. 126-27 and p. 33). The predella shows a warrior mounting a chariot in which the charioteer stands. The grave stele itself, as a funerary marker, carries a reminiscence of the Homeric world, where it is part of the honor due a hero (geras thanonton): cf. K. Friis Johansen, The Attic Grave Reliefs (Copenhagen 1951) 68.

88 Phile's funerary statue (supra n. 25) describes itself as "beautiful to look at." I think this is not just self-advertise- ment of the sculptor (who signed his name, Phaidimos), but

that to some extent the dead girl becomes her monument (thus it addresses the viewer in the epigram), so that its beauty is equated with her own.

89 In modern times the monument may be even more public: one thinks of Leland Stanford, Jr., University and Sophie Newcomb College (Tulane University), both monuments of parents to a child who died in adolescence.

90 See R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana 1942) 184-99. This and other aspects of the rela- tionship between monument and epitaph were addressed in an unpublished paper by Ruth Scodel, "Inscription, Ab- sence, and Memory: Epic and Early Epitaph," presented at the International Federation of the Societies of Classical Studies Congress, Pisa, 24 August 1989. I thank the author for discussing several points with me.

91 For recent synthetic discussions see Clairmont, PN 7- 28, with complete testimonia, and Stupperich; also Stupper- ich's review of Clairmont, PN in Gnomon 56 (1984) 637-47.

92 This is known from the epigram preserved in the Greek anthology and attributed to Simonides: D.L. Page, Epigram- mata graeca (Oxford 1975) 9, line 86.

93 IG XII, 8 (Suppl.) 337; Clairmont, PN 88; for the occasion of the battle see Hdt. 6.140.


Burial in a common grave would seem at first to violate an important prerogative of aristocratic fami-

lies, to erect an elaborate monument to a dead son, a monument that portrayed him as he was in life and called attention to his identity in an epigram, in contrast to the anonymity of the soros.94 But, as if by way of compensation, the Marathonomachoi were soon elevated to the status of heroes, their communal tomb at Marathon serving as the focal point of veneration, as was always the case with the cults of heroes.95 In 480 and 479, the same practice of common burial on the field of battle was accorded the Spartan dead at

Thermopylae and the Athenians on Salamis and at

Plataea.96 The tradition of heroization begun for the Marathonomachoi was presumably extended to this second wave of defenders of Greek freedom against the Persian threat.97

Like the practice of communal burial at a battle site, the notion of heroization of Athenian citizens for

outstanding service to the state, especially in wartime, was not created ex nihilo for the Marathonomachoi. An early example is Tellos, invoked by Solon in his encounter with Croesus of Lydia as the happiest of all men (Hdt. 1.30). After leading a victory over the

enemy (probably Megarians) at Eleusis, he was cut

down, then buried at public expense on the spot where he fell.98 He was also "accorded great honors,"

according to Herodotos, but of what did these consist? It seems unlikely that there was an actual cult, for we never hear of one in other sources. Perhaps the honor was in the form of certain privileges for his descen-

dants, the sons and grandsons of whom he was especially proud, like those honors later accorded the descendants of the Tyrannicides.99

According to a tradition preserved in Aelian (VH 7.16), Solon was buried at public expense (again the word is 6rq[ooLn) just inside the gates to the city, i.e., in the Kerameikos. Not long ago Karl Kiibler believed he could identify the actual tomb, along with the stele that would have marked it (cf. fig. 2), but this has been doubted.'00 There is, in any event, the alternate tradition (Plut. Vit. Sol. 32.4) that Solon was not buried in Athens at all, but cremated and his ashes scat- tered over Salamis. The version in Aelian, like so

many of the laws ascribed to Solon, could be an invention of the late fifth or fourth century, designed to project back onto Solon himself practices of the Classical period, in this case the public burial of dis-

tinguished statesmen in the Kerameikos.'o' Finally there are the Tyrannicides, Harmodios and

Aristogeiton, whose death was a service to their city (as it was later interpreted) to liberate it from internal rather than external despotism. That they were elevated to the status of heroes is clear, but whether this

happened before or after (or between) the Persian invasions could be argued.'"2 What is certain is that

by 480/79 the precedent for the heroizing of Athenian war dead had been set, and more than once.

In 475, Kimon claimed to have found the bones of Theseus on Skyros and brought them back to Ath-

ens,'03 giving new impetus to the city's principal hero cult and giving rise to a major festival, the Theseia,

94 Not strictly anonymous, since according to Pausanias (1.32.5) there were stelai listing the dead by tribe (as already at Lemnos, supra n. 93). But there is no evidence for other monuments at the site, and even the existence of an epigram to identify the occasion of their death is uncertain; cf. Clair- mont, PN 97-98.

95 See A.D. Nock, "The Cult of Heroes," HThR 37 (1944) 141-66. At Marathon, the cult was probably from the start associated with that of Herakles, in whose sanctuary they had encamped (Hdt. 6.115). Cf. the prize lebes awarded at funeral games at Marathon, published by Vanderpool (supra n. 71) and the discussion of P. Amandry, "Collection Paul Canellopoulos: l6bes de bronze," BCH 95 (1971) 622-23. Cf. also S. Koumanoudes, "MAPA8QNI," AAA 11 (1978) 232-44.

96 For the testimonia see Clairmont, PN 99. 97 Similar to the association of the Marathon heroes with

the tutelary hero of the area, Herakles, must have been that on Salamis, between the local hero (and Attic eponymous hero) Ajax atnd the Athenians buried there. See G.R. Culley, "The Restoration of Sanctuaries in Attica, II," Hesperia 46 (1977) 291-98.

98 Herodotos's use of the word 8ittoomnr to describe the burial seems to me problematical. It recalls 6rjtoolat in the epigram for the Athenians who fell at the Euripos in 506 (supra n. 92) where, however, the term expresses the pride

of the new Athenian democracy, whose first victory this was. A hundred years earlier or so, when Tellos died, it is hard to imagine what form the "public" initiative took and who determined that he should be buried on the spot, especially since Tellos was from a prosperous family that presumably had its own burial precinct elsewhere.

99 See M.W. Taylor, The Tyrant-Slayers (New York 1981) 10-18.

100 K. Kiubler, "Eine archaische Grabanlage vor dem Hei- ligen Tor und ihre Deutung," AA 1973, 190-93; for the stele, 184-85. The objections to the hypothesis are summa- rized by U. Knigge, Kerameikos IX: Der Siidhiigel (Berlin 1976) 10-11, n. 26.

101 E.g., Perikles, Thrasyboulos, Chabrias, and Phormio: Paus. 1.29.4. On the problem of the authenticity of Solon's laws see Ruschenbusch (supra n. 4) 53-58.

102 See Taylor (supra n. 99) 18-27 for the evidence for the hero cult of the Tyrannicides. The dating problem is in part linked to that of the first statue group, which has been placed anywhere from soon after 510 to the 480s; cf. Taylor 34- 37, who favors the early date.

103 Plut. Vit.Thes. 36.1-4; Vit.Cim. 8.57. The date was low- ered by a few years by A.J. Podlecki, "Cimon, Theseus, and the Bones," JHS 91 (1971) 141-43, but the date of 475 is defended by J.P. Barron, "New Light on Old Walls," JHS 92 (1972) 20-21.


whose games rewarded above all military excellence.'04 The location of the tomb and of the shrine built around it has unfortunately not been determined, but it was surely in a conspicuous part of the

city.'05 Theseus was of course well established by this

point as Athens's national hero par excellence and had a sanctuary on the slope of the Akropolis probably reaching well back into the sixth century.'06 His phys- ical presence in Athens, in the form of the bones, however, added a new dimension to the cult. His return to Athens had been foreshadowed 15 years earlier, when at the Battle of Marathon some Athen- ians thought they saw him rise from beneath the earth to lend them encouragement (Plut. Vit. Thes. 36.5). Perhaps he was also trying to tell them something else-like the dead Elpenor's plea to Odysseus (Od. 11.72-78)-that they should give him the proper burial of which he had been deprived. Both from his association with Marathon and as the prototype of the Athenian who dies far from home and must be

brought back to Athens for burial, it is easy to see how Theseus played a key role in the establishment of public burial for the Athenian war dead.'07

By the early 460s, if not somewhat earlier, an area between the Dipylon Gate and the Academy was set aside as a public burial ground, the Demosion Sema, and in a yearly ceremony, described first by Thucyd- ides (2.34) for the year 430 (but surely much older), the war dead were laid to rest there and celebrated in an epitaphios logos.'08 Public funeral games, the epita- phioi agones, were almost certainly instituted at the same time or soon after.'09

DEATH IN CLASSICAL ATHENS: PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE

The social, political, and psychological implications of the Patrios Nomos and all it entailed have been considered by Nicole Loraux and others.11"0 The public funeral takes away from individual families the responsibility, but also the privilege of commemorating their dead. The relatives of the fallen warrior were kept at arm's length, psychologically speaking, from their loved one, for in the new ideology he belonged in death to the state he had served valiantly in life. The impact of this distancing must have fallen most heavily on women, who traditionally had played the central role in mourning the dead."'I In the public funeral their role was much more circumscribed than before, for the prothesis took place not at home but in a public space, perhaps the Agora.112 Wives, mothers, or sisters who in the Archaic period would have looked forward to being reunited in death with their menfolk were now often deprived of that hope, since, in Loraux's words, the Demosion Sema was an exclusive men's club.113

What, then, are the implications of these develop- ments for Athenian funerary iconography in the fifth century? As the most radical change, we may note first that monumental stone grave markers, both carved stelai and funerary kouroi, cease being made altogether about 490-480,"4 the latter never to return, the former only 60 years later, in the early days of the Peloponnesian War.15 The disappearance of the grave stelai has been hotly debated, attributed to

104 This is best attested in a later inscription, SIG 667, giving lists of the agones; cf. H.W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London 1977) 82, giving a summary of the events. One is reminded of the association of the games for Herakles at Marathon and the nearby tomb of the Athenian dead (supra n. 71).

105 H.A. Thompson and R.E. Wycherley, Agora XIV: The Agora of Athens (Princeton 1972) 124-26; S. Koumanoudes, "Eo)aowg oplx6g," ArchEph 1976, 194-216, evaluates all the evidence and suggests a location near the Panathenaic Way. But cf. most recently J.McK. Camp, The Athenian Agora (London 1986) 66, who places it east of the Classical Agora.

106 The earliest reference to the Theseion, Aristotle, Ath.Pol. 15.4, attesting to its presence in the time of Peisis- tratos, is probably reliable, but cf. Thompson and Wycherley (supra n. 105) 124, n. 40.

107 Cf. Clairmont, PN 2, who particularly stresses the connection of the bones of Theseus and the Patrios Nomos.

108 The problem of the date at which public funerals were introduced is now thoroughly restudied by Clairmont, PN 13, who argues vigorously for a date in the late 470s. The date of the introduction of the epitaphios logos is likewise uncertain, but most writers have associated it with the Persian Wars. See, e.g., W. Kierdorf, Erlebnis und Darstellung der Perserkriege (Gbttingen 1966) 84-95, who places it ca. 478, and Loraux 56-60, favoring a date in the 460s.

109 Clairmont, PN 24. A Hellenistic inscription cited by L. Deubner, Attische Feste (Berlin 1936) 226, n. 2, indicates that these games shared some features with those at the Theseia. Cf. also Loraux 363, n. 89.

110 Loraux esp. 15-29. Earlier studies of Loraux that deal with these issues include "Le lit, la guerre," L'homme 21.1 (1981) 37-67; "Mourir devant Troie, tomber pour Ath nes: de la gloire du heros a l'idee de la cite," in La mort, les morts (supra n. 59) 27-43; "Hebe et Andreia: deux versions de la mort du combattant athenien," Ancient Society 6 (1976) 1- 31.

111 See M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge 1974) 21.

112 See Clairmont, PN 35ff. and infra n. 165. 113 This does not mean that from now on every war casualty

or man of importance was buried in the Demosion Sema. Aristeides the Just, for example, who probably died in the mid-460s, was buried on his own property at Phaleron (Plut., Aristeides 1.2; 24.1), although at public expense. Probably as time went on, however, burial in the Demosion Sema became more and more common.

114 The date of the latest funerary kouroi can now be extended considerably past 500, with the recent discovery near the Sacred Gate: U. Knigge, "Ein Jtinglingskopf vom Heiligen Tor in Athen," AM 108 (1983) 45-56.

115 On the reintroduction of gravestones and the problem


presumed legislation under Kleisthenes or Themis- tokles."6 If the author were Kleisthenes, we would have to assume that it took quite a while to achieve full compliance, since the latest kouroi and stelai extend into the first decade of the fifth century, if not the second."' The case for an association with Them-

istokles, as a further blow against the prerogatives of the aristocracy, is more appealing. If, however, as I have suggested, the majority of Archaic gravestones carried an association as mnemata for men killed in

battle, then it was the advent of communal graves in the Persian Wars and, later, of public burial in Athens that obviated the use of figured stelai.s18 Under the

democracy, the war dead were now the only official

"heroes," so designated by the state, and their stately but modest tombs were not to be outshone by ostentatious memorials to wealthy aristocrats."9 The tombs in the Demosion Sema were marked by simple stone slabs giving only the names of the dead, arranged by tribe, the so-called casualty lists.120

And what of private tombs, for surely in the fifth

century Athenians of both sexes continued to die in

places other than on the battlefield, and their families continued to feel obligated to commemorate them, as

they always had. The funerary plaque, or pinax, ceased to be made by 480 and never made the transition to the red-figure technique. This implies that its use was looked on as an old-fashioned custom, an archaism that by the beginning of the Classical period simply disappeared. Loutrophoroi did continue to be

made, in black-figure and later in red-figure, although after about 470 they are relatively uncommon.'21 Or

rather, they are uncommon as funerary vases, because the shape was increasingly associated with weddings (it held water for the bridal bath), and nuptial icon-

ography gradually usurps the place of funerary scenes. To avoid confusion, the loutrophoros as a tomb marker may now have been used only for young people who died unmarried, the vase serving two

purposes at once.'22 Otherwise, the iconography of

funerary loutrophoroi in the fifth century is remark-

ably consistent with that of a century earlier:'23 prothesis scenes, the bier surrounded by mourning women and occasionally an old man (no doubt the father of the deceased), the other men performing a

dirge elsewhere on the vase (fig. 18).124 Only now the

heroizing allusions to funeral games are omitted, for the only recognized "heroes" are the war dead.

of the date see C.W. Clairmont, "Some Reflections on the Earliest Classical Attic Gravestones," Boreas 9 (1986) 27-50.

116 Cf. supra n. 4; Clairmont, PN 74-78 (favoring the Kleisthenic date); V. Zinserling, "Das attische Grabluxus- gesetz des fruihen 5. Jahrhunderts," Wissenschaftliche Zeit-

schrift der Universitit Jena 14 (1965) 29-34, for the association with Themistokles.

117 On the kouroi see supra n. 114. On the question of the latest carved stelai see T. HIolscher, "Eine fruihe zweifigurige Grabstele," in Festschrift Berger (supra n. 68) 168; E. Berger, Das Basler Artztrelief (Basel 1970) 117.

118 Cf. Richter (supra n. 13), who, in part because she had dated Cicero's sumptuary law to the time of Peisistratos, regarded the end of the grave stelai as a response to social pressure under the new democracy (without legislation). It seems unlikely, however, that not one aristocratic family would have defied convention, or that stelai and funerary kouroi would have stopped simultaneously if not for legal sanctions. Still, the form and lavishness of gravestones were certainly subject to change quite independently of sumptuary laws. See the remarks of E.B. Harrison, "Archaic Grave- stones from the Athenian Agora," Hesperia 25 (1956) 43- 45.

119 Cf. Humphreys 123: "It was the state funerals for the war dead which first brought the honors of heroic burial within the range of every Athenian citizen."

120 Clairmont, PN 68 believes that some of the stelai may have been crowned by sculptured relief, but the evidence for this is very slight. For the casualty lists see D.W. Bradeen, "Athenian Casualty Lists," Hesperia 33 (1964) 16-62.

121 On red-figure loutrophoroi see most recently B. Van den Driessche, "Proth6sis et cortege de porteurs de 166bs sur des fragments de loutrophores attiques a figures rouges du Musee de Louvain-la-Neuve," RALouvain 18 (1985) 34-47, with complete catalogue of red-figure funerary loutropho-

roi, 43-47. One of the vases published there (41, fig. 2), in Louvain and Tiibingen, shows a unique scene associated with the funeral, a procession of youths carrying lebetes that must contain water for the purification of the mourners; on this practice see supra n. 37. On the correlation between the shape of loutrophoros and the gender of the deceased, and the preponderance of male deceased on loutrophoroi in general, see J. Boardman, "Sex Differentiation in Grave Vases," AnnNap 10 (1988) 175, 179.

122 Although it is often supposed that loutrophoroi were from the beginning reserved for the tombs of the unmarried, this is clearly not so in the Archaic period, when many loutrophoroi, both black-figure and early red-figure, show the deceased as a bearded man, e.g., Athens NM 1452 (red- figure) (ARV2 233.2; M. Collignon and L. Couve, Catalogue des vases peints du Musee National d'Athines [Paris 1902- 1904] pl. 42); Athens, Benaki Museum 7676 (black-figure) (Benaki Museum: A Short Guide [Athens 1965] 43). But from about 470-460, the distinction does seem to be consistently observed. See also Boardman (supra n. 121) 177-78.

123 This is not to say that every loutrophoros still depicts a prothesis, although most do. One exception is an unusual white-ground loutrophoros that borrows its scene from contemporary white lekythoi: Louvre CA 4194 (L.-G. Kahil, "Loutrophore a fond blanc au Musee du Louvre," in Gestalt und Geschichte. Festschrift Karl Schefold [AntK-BH 4, 1967] 146-51). An exception in red-figure is a loutrophoros in the Canellopoulos Museum, Athens, 495 (M. Brouskari, The Paul and Alexandra Canellopoulos Museum [Athens 1985] 71, unillustrated). It shows a procession of female mourners and a stele on a three-stepped base.

124 One detail of the Athenian funeral becomes evident only in red-figure, the black clothes of the mourners. On black-figure vases, where almost everyone's clothes are black, this could not be convincingly rendered.


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Fig. 18. Prothesis. Red-figure loutrophoros. Munich, Staat- liche Antikensammlungen, von Schoen Collection 66. (Photo Museum)

As the loutrophoros gradually lost its status as the

funerary vase shape par excellence, another came

along to take its place, the white-ground lekythos.'25 Both the shape and the technique were commonplace in the potters' quarter by the late sixth century, without any funerary connotations."26 The restriction of white lekythoi to this one purpose begins in the decade 470 to 460,127 that is, in the wake of the institution of

public funerals. This is not to suggest a strict causal

-- i

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!iii~iiii~ii iiii!i iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!iii!ii

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41M'i•'ii•'iii• i •

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.ii

iii iii --: i.

: : : ; 1 = ;ii=

Fig. 19. Prothesis. White-ground lekythos. Vienna, Kunst- historisches Museum IV 3748. (Photo Museum)

connection-and certainly not that white lekythoi were made for public funerals. The Demosion Sema itself has not been excavated,28s but elsewhere in the

125 On the varied uses of the lekythos in funerary ritual see E. Buschor, "Attische Lekythen der Parthenonzeit," MiiJb 2 (1925) 2-3.

126 On the early white-ground lekythos and the origins of the technique see I. Wehgartner, Attisch weissgrundige Ker- amik (Mainz 1983) 3-10; Kurtz 9-20. There must, however, have been some sense already in the Archaic period that white-ground was appropriate for a funerary scene. See, e.g., the pair of black-figure hydriai by the Antimenes Painter in Dresden, ZV 1779 and ZV 1780 (ABV 268.21-22; E. Diehl, Die Hydria [Mainz 1964] pl. 34). The neck of each

vase shows mourners on a white ground. Perhaps there was even a recollection of older funerary objects, such as the whitewashed larnakes of the Late Bronze Age (supra n. 63).

127 Kurtz 133-36. The earliest important painter to pro- duce funerary white lekythoi is probably the Timokrates Painter, ARV2 743-44. Cf. Kurtz 133, who points out that the Beldam Painter produced some funerary white lekythoi even a few years before 470.

128 See U. Knigge, Der Kerameikos von Athen (Athens 1988) 12.


. ... ...... ...

,iiiiii~i44 -

Fig. 20. Prothesis. White-ground lekythos. Athens, Keramei- kos 3145. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Ath- ens, Kerameikos Excavations)

Kerameikos surprisingly few white lekythoi have been found."29 On the contrary, the white lekythoi may to some extent represent a further "privatization" of private burials, in reaction to the institution of the

public funeral. Certainly there is a marked contrast between the monumental and public commemoration of the war dead and the private realm of mourning and the tending of family tombs, in which women predominate, that is reflected on these humble vases.

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF WHITE LEKYTHOI

Among the many hundreds of preserved white lekythoi between the 460s and the end of the fifth century, four principal subjects may be distinguished.'30 A small number depict the prothesis (figs. 19-20), and they are the only tenuous link with the past, for the subjects of white lekythoi are otherwise utterly different from anything in Archaic funerary art. Whether because of the constraints of the narrow cylindrical shape or, as I rather think, because of the preference of Classical art for scenes of quiet intimacy, the mourners in these prothesis scenes are limited to three or four, instead of the larger groups that still occur on some loutrophoroi. There is no room for the chorus of male mourners, but often a single man or youth (most likely the father or husband of the deceased) appears closer to the bier than in black-figure.13'1 The strict separation of the sexes is thus violated. The scene is abbreviated and therefore limited to the closest family members.'32 On the earlier

A........l

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.........................r:i~i- ~ a ilil ii ii- -i ~~i-i ~ ?- -

------fill,

• ,•........ ... .

AM ::::: :1-- --:; '~il:I~~1i:!: ?L::riii::: :~._- :got-:~

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Fig. 21. Hermes leads a woman to Charon's boat. White-ground lekythos. Athens NM 1926. (Photo Museum)

129 F. Felten, "Weissgrundige Lekythen aus dem Athener Keramaikos," AM 91 (1976) 77.

130 A full study of the iconography of white lekythoi has yet to be published. Kurtz (p. vii) promises such a study, which was the subject of her (unpublished) Oxford D.Phil. thesis. In the meantime, there is a brief discussion in J.D. Beazley, Attic White Lekythoi (Oxford 1938) 7-11 and a fuller one in A. Fairbanks, Athenian Lekythoi 2 (London 1914)

216-41. 13 E.g., on two lekythoi by the Sabouroff Painter, illus-

trated by Kurtz, pl. 29.1-2. 132 On prothesis scenes on white lekythoi see the recent

discussion of O. Tzachou-Alexandri, "'Arlvatxi Tvxh I

•ilxv0og i~t6 zbav gXat-o QQo3T6," in PIAIAI EIIH. Fest- schrift George E. Mylonas 3 (Athens 1989) 83-107.


white lekythoi with prothesis, about the middle of the

century and a little before, women mourn with emo-

tion, if not as violently and authentically as in Archaic art. Often their hair is cut short, a token of mourning that is usually not observable on black-figure pinakes and loutrophoroi, and they no longer tear at it or lacerate their flesh.133 The conventional gesture of both hands raised to the head still occurs (fig. 19), but is no longer mandatory. It may be modified to a single raised hand.134 Figures and their gestures are perhaps more stylized, yet their grief is effectively conveyed by a means that could be realized fully only in the

white-ground technique, by facial expressions.'35 On later prothesis scenes grief recedes and is replaced by a mood of detachment, introspection, and quiet dignity (fig. 20).136 One has the sense that the women have taken to heart Perikles' advice to the widows and mothers in his funeral oration, to bear their grief stoically, remembering the good times rather than the

bad, and upholding a certain standard of conduct

(Thuc. 2.44-45). A second, also relatively small, group of white lek-

ythoi attempts to blunt the pain of grief by mythol- ogizing death. Women are led away to Hades by Hermes Psychopompos or enter Charon's boat, to be ferried across the River Styx (fig. 21).'~7 The corpse is carried off by the twins Hypnos and Thanatos.138 In the late sixth century Euphronios had introduced these figures at the Death of Sarpedon,'39 but by the mid-fifth century they have lost any connotation of heroization they may once have had. Sleep and Death have shed their armor and may transport women as well as men.140 All that remains is the memory of their Homeric assignment, gently and carefully carrying the corpse of Sarpedon after Apollo has equally lov-

ingly washed and annointed it (II. 16.667-75). At one level these scenes are interesting as forerun-

ners of the allegorizing trend that informs Athenian

.... ... --

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,iiiiiiiiiiiii~iiiiiiiii~i!!iiiiiiiiii~iii!i:i

iii~i!i~i•ii~•!iiii i

Fig. 22. Visit to the tomb. White-ground lekythos. Athens, Vlasto Collection. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Insti- tut, Athens)

133 The difference between the ethos of white lekythoi and the concept of death as presented in Archaic art and thought is well characterized in the classic essay of E. Buschor, Grab eines attischen Miidchen2 (Munich 1941) esp. 69-72.

134 E.g., the lekythos New York 07.286.40; ARV2 846.190; Kurtz, pl. 29.1.

135 On the range of expressions found on white lekythoi see Neumann (supra n. 34) 115-16, 138-40.

136 See also Tzachou-Alexandri (supra n. 132) 94-98. 137 On Hermes Psychopompos see P. Zanker, Wandel der

Hermesgestalt in der attischen Vasenmalerei (Bonn 1965) 104- 11. On Charon: C. Sourvinou-Inwood, in LIMC III, 210- 15; Sourvinou-Inwood, "Images grecs de la mort: representations, imaginaire, histoire," AnnNap 9 (1987) 145-58; H. Hoffmann, "From Charos to Charon: Some Notes on the Human Encounter with Death in Attic Red-figured Vase- Painting," Visible Religion 4-5 (1985-1986) 173-204.

138 The finest example, the lekythos in London, name vase of the Thanatos Painter: ARV2 1228.12; Kurtz, pl. 32.4.

139 Supra n. 84. On Euphronios's calyx-krater, New York 1972.11.10 see D. von Bothmer, "Der Euphronioskrater in New York," AA 1976, 485-512. For Euphronios's other version of the Death of Sarpedon (in which Hypnos and Thanatos are not winged) see Robertson 1981 (supra n. 84) 23-25.

140 E.g., Athens NM 1009 (G. Nicole, Catalogue des vases

peints du Musee National d'Athines. Supplement [Paris 1911] pl. 16).


. . . . . . . . . .

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Fig. 23. Visit to the tomb. White-ground lekythos shown in figure 22. (Photo Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens)

art and rhetoric in the last decades of the fifth cen-

tury.1'4 At another, they illustrate superstitions and folk beliefs that must have been widespread but op- erated at a subliterary level, with occasional exceptions like the Alcestis of Euripides.'42 It is characteristic of the white lekythoi, made for strictly private use as

offerings to the dead from their nearest relatives, that

they should carry such subjects that never recur on

publicly displayed monuments.'43 The great majority of white lekythoi, however, re-

volve around two subjects that are really variations on a single theme. Either they show family members

visiting the tomb of a loved one (figs. 22-23),144 or a

woman at home preparing for such a visit (fig. 24).'145

Beazley called the latter scene simply "Mistress and Maid" (there are almost never any men present), but it is clear from the offerings they hold-boxes of

ribbons, lekythoi, alabastra, and the like-that they are on their way to the cemetery.'46 This aspect of the care of the dead, the tending of their tombs, which

began only when all the rituals of burial were over and could continue indefinitely, was a serious responsibility that fell mostly to the women of the family (as it does in Greece to this day).'47

In tragedy of the same period as our lekythoi, the custom is perhaps best reflected in the figure of Elek-

tra, in the Choephoroi of Aeschylus and the two later

plays named for her. A significant difference, how-

ever, is that the vases give no evidence for groups of unrelated women mourning at a tomb, like the tragic chorus that accompanies Elektra. Rather, the visitors to the tomb on lekythoi never number more than two

141 Cf. A. Shapiro, "The Origins of Allegory in Greek Art," Boreas 9 (1986) 4-23.

142 E.g., 257, when Alkestis hears Charon calling her; and the motif of Herakles wrestling with Death. I am grateful to Charles Segal for sending me drafts of his papers, "Eurip- ides' Alcestis: Models of Domestic Dying" and "Female Death and Male Tears: Grief and Gender in Euripides' Alcestis," both forthcoming.

143 Cf. Humphreys 113. It is also interesting that these mythological figures, Charon and Thanatos and Hypnos, seem intended to reassure the deceased, not to frighten him

(or, more often, her). We may contrast the few representations of death daimones in Archaic art that induce sheer terror, e.g., the rapacious sphinx: Vermeule 171-73.

144 Athens, Vlasto (ARV2 847.201). 145 Athens 1929 (ARV2 743.5). 146 See Kurtz 206, on pl. 25.2. This interpretation has

recently been challenged byJ. Reilly, "Many Brides: Mistress and Maid on Athenian Lekythoi," Hesperia 58 (1989) 411- 44. She argues instead that these vases show a bride preparing for her wedding. It is true that the over 100 preserved "Mistress and Maid" scenes include a variety of types (well defined by Reilly), some less easy to associate with a visit to the tomb than others. One recently published example even substitutes a young man for the "mistress": D.C. Kurtz, "Two Athenian White-Ground Lekythoi," in Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum 4 (1989) 124, fig. 5 and, on the iconography, p. 128. But the overwhelming prevalence of this subject on white lekythoi still makes a funerary connotation inescapable. I have not been able to consult a recent paper on these scenes by D.C. Kurtz, in AnnNap 10 (1988).

147 In some modern Greek villages, it is customary for a mother or widow to visit the tomb every day for five years, at which time the bones are dug up. See L.M. Danforth, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton 1982) 13-15.


jgii~ii~iiiji iiiiiiiiiiii

~8i~~~i~i •!i i~i:~_i-;i~ij`i:-i !ii:iiiii

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ii• •i -Ii ::)i:-.i

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Fig. 24. "Mistress and Maid." White-ground lekythos. Athens NM 1929. (Photo Museum)

or three. Typically, a young woman, wife or sister or

daughter of the deceased, is accompanied either by a female slave or a male relative, sometimes a baby as well.'48 Not infrequently the visitor or visitors encounter a kind of epiphany of the deceased sitting at his or her tomb (fig. 23; cf. fig. 26).'14 These scenes become increasingly frequent during the Peloponne- sian War years, while the mistress and maid scenes so

popular in the workshop of the Achilles Painter in the 440s and 430s are much less often seen after the outbreak of the war. As Humphreys points out, the

mixing of the dead and the living in a single scene does not generally pose problems of identification, as it does on Classical grave stelai.'50

Most often the visitors to the tomb stand quietly, pensive but not grieving or even noticeably sad. This, too, reflects an ideal expressed in Perikles' funeral

oration, dignity in the face of death. A figure may pull his garment over his face to conceal the tears, like Odysseus at the banquet of the Phaeacians (Od. 8.521-34, where he is likened to a woman lamenting her dead husband).'15 There are, however, occasional

figures, both female and male, whose emotions are

expressed in striking gestures, such as falling to one knee with hands outstretched (fig. 25).152 One cannot

help but suspect the influence of tragic drama here.'53 These theatrical poses and gestures are utterly different from the ritualized mourning gestures of Archaic art. They betray a less immediate experience of death and grief, one filtered through the medium of art,

performance, and ideology. The deceased themselves, when we see them sitting

on their tombs, sometimes brood and look rather

melancholy, more so than their survivors.154 They make us think of Achilles' surprising and outspoken discontent with being dead, which even the Elysian Fields could not compensate (Od. 11.488-91). On

148 Rarely both visitors to the tomb are male, e.g., Athens 13701 (Kurtz, pl. 39.2). On the lekythos Boston 01.8080 (Kurtz, pl. 31.1), a man and youth visit a fantastical tomb, with statues of nude young athletes as akroteria and more athletes as silhouette stick figures in the pediment. Both the tomb and the visitors clearly belong to the all-male world of the palaestra.

149 Cf. also the often reproduced lekythos Athens 1816 (ARV2 1383.12; Kurtz, pl. 49.1).

150 Humphreys 113. A figure seated at or near the tombstone, for example, may always be assumed to be the deceased. Unlike their modern counterparts in Greece, ancient mourners did not sit at the tomb they were visiting. On the gravestones, cf. Kurtz and Boardman 141, who question (without good reason, I believe) that the living and the dead ever appear together. On the significance of juxtaposing the two, see J. Balant, "Entre la croyance et l'experience: la mort sur les l&cythes A fond blanc," in Iconographie classique et

identitis rigionales (BCH Suppl. 14, 1986) 37-44. 151 E.g., the lekythos Akropolis 6473 (M. Brouskari, The

Akropolis Museum [Athens 1974] fig. 221). 152 ARV2 845.172; see K. Athusaki, "Drei weissgrundige

Lekythen," AM 85 (1970) 50-51, who argues convincingly that the youth standing quietly at the right is not another mourner, but the deceased. She notes that it is only women who assume these "dramatic" poses (but cf. the bearded man on the Boston lekythos [supra n. 148]; or the woman on the lekythos New York 22.139.10 [Kurtz, pl. 41.2a]).

153 Kurtz 210 cites Soph. El. 1374 for the gesture of pros- kynesis, but the context here is not funerary, rather the greeting of the household gods on entering the palace. A better parallel might be Elektra's advice to her sister Chry- sothemis to leave a lock of hair at the tomb of Agamemnon, then "falling upon your knees entreat him ..." (Soph. El. 453).

154 E.g., the lekythos Athens 1816 (supra n. 149).


. ....

. .. . ...

Fig. 25. Mourner at the tomb. White-ground lekythos. Present location unknown. (Photo Deutsches Archiologisches Institut, Athens)

these vases the entire mood represents an inversion of what we might have considered "natural" behavior. The mourners do not mourn, and the deceased, who should be beyond mourning, does. As Buschor observed, the effect is utterly unheroic, but is instead a

refreshingly honest portrayal of human nature.'55 Classical gravestones, in contrast, regularly show the more "official" conception of death and mourning: the deceased calm, idealized, abstracted, the survivors

haggard and melancholy.'56 This is the public face of death, while the white lekythoi present a set of popular beliefs less shaped by official ideology.

The iconography of white lekythoi thus has its own

internal development from the mid- to late fifth cen-

tury that would repay closer examination. But what matters for us most is that all of them, from the 460s to the end of the century, are markedly private in character. They are a form of personal communica- tion and communion between the surviving family and the loved one into whose tomb they were placed. The visit to the tomb that they so often show was not a concern of Archaic art and never occurs on pinakes or loutrophoroi. Many white lekythoi anticipate themes and motifs of the marble gravestones that resumed production about the time of the start of the

Peloponnesian War.157 One is immediately struck by

155 Buschor (supra n. 125) 11. 156 C.H. Young, "Emotional Expression in Attic Grave Ste-

lai," in Classical Studies Presented to Edward Capps (Princeton 1936) 364-68. This interpretation is challenged by Him- melmann 17.

157 The exact date and motivation for the resumption of

marble grave stelai are uncertain and much discussed. See Clairmont (supra n. 115); Humphreys 112. J.D. Mikalson, "Religion and the Plague in Athens," in Studies Presented to Sterling Dow (Durham 1984) 223-24, suggests that gravestones started up about 425/4 in response to the neglect of the dead during the plague of the previous several years.


the preponderance of women on the gravestones, both as mourners and as the deceased, in contrast to their virtual absence from Archaic stelai.'58

There is, furthermore, no question that Attic gravestones of the Peloponnesian War years share many motifs with white lekythoi and that the former are much indebted to the iconography that had evolved on lekythoi during the decades when no carved stelai were made.159 But the range of subjects and motifs found on white lekythoi is much broader than the limited selection considered appropriate to a stone stele. Or, to put it another way, for any scene depicted on a gravestone, one can find a good parallel on a white lekythos, but not the other way around. So, for

example, it is sometimes alleged that the motif of

dexiosis, the handshake between the living and the

dead, so popular on the gravestones, does not occur on white lekythoi.'60 On a lekythos in Munich, how-

ever, a bearded man and a youth reach out to one another to shake hands,'•' and on another in Zurich, on which a young hunter is visited at his grave by his father and his wife who carries their baby, the married

couple are joined in a handshake (fig. 26).162 Many other motifs, such as a seated woman (the deceased) who receives her baby from a standing slave girl, are rendered with striking similarity in both media.'63

Yet not every motif on white lekythoi is translated into stone-far from it. There are no Charons on the

stelai, no Hypnos and Thanatos, and-understand-

ably-only rarely does a tomb appear on a tombstone.'64 Where differences in the iconographical repertoire occur, they are explained by the fundamental difference between monuments set up in public (in family burial plots, it is true, but nevertheless in an open cemetery) and private offerings meant to

go directly into the tomb. The white lekythoi, modest vases that they are, thus

help to document the subtle transition in the role of women in funerary ritual after about 470, when the

public burial of the war dead removed from the private sphere one of their traditional prerogatives. Of course women participated in the public lamentation over the bodies of these heroes,'65 but this is not a

.. .........

.............. " ma n.........

Fig. 26. Visit to the tomb. White-ground lekythos. Zurich, Archaologisches Institut der Universitat L545. (Photo Museum)

subject for Athenian art. Furthermore, the communal ritual for scores of men robbed the mourners of the

intimacy between loved ones that characterized private funerals. Nor, in the first four decades of public

158 A rough tabulation of the stelai in A. Conze, Die attischen Grabreliefs (Berlin 1890-1922) dated before 317 suggests a ratio of about three to two (about 420 for women, 265 for men).

159 See the discussion in Clairmont, G&E 41-45. See also Himmelmann 12-14 on the ethos shared by gravestones and white lekythoi.

160 Kurtz and Boardman 105; S. Papaspyridi-Karouzou, "Bemalte attische Stele," AM 71 (1956) 134. On the motif on gravestones see G. Davies, "The Significance of the Hand- shake Motif in Classical Funerary Art," AJA 89 (1985) 627-

40; E.G. Pemberton, "The Dexiosis on Attic Gravestones," MeditArch 2 (1989) 45-50.

161 Munich, von Schoen Collection (R. Lullies, Eine Samm-

lung griechischer Kleinkunst [Munich 1955] pl. 36, no. 78). 162 Zurich L545 (ARV2 1243.2; H. Bloesch, Antike Klein-

kunst in Winterthur [Winterthur 1964] no. 28). 163 E.g., stele: Conze (supra n. 158) no. 280; lekythos:

Kurtz, pl. 35.1. 164 The few examples are listed by Clairmont, G&E 75,

ns. 16-17. 165 We do not know much about the actual details of the


funerals, could a family put up a carved stele to commemorate a member who was not among the war dead. White lekythoi became virtually the only outlet for expressing more personal feelings and for reas-

suring the dead that their tombs would be well looked after.

We must, however, guard against reading the scenes on these vases too literally, as factual depictions of real events, places, and monuments. The large group showing what I have called the epiphany of the deceased at his tomb should already have warned against a literal interpretation. Even many of the more "realistic" looking visits to the tomb cannot be entirely realistic, for the tomb monuments are improbably elaborate and sometimes of fantastic shapes.166 For the period ca. 470-430 we may assume the vase-

painters used their imaginations in inventing tomb-

stones,167 but even after 430 the stelai painted on white lekythoi bear little resemblance to contemporary marble ones. 68 As in weddings and many other

genre scenes in Classical red-figure, the lekythoi mir- ror a society that has internalized certain values and behavioral norms, to the point where we can no longer hope to distinguish the real from the ideal.

CONCLUSIONS

The systematic study of genre scenes in Greek vase-

painting is still in its early stages, compared with the exhaustive treatment of mythological iconography that has proceeded uninterrupted over the past cen-

tury or more.169 In looking at scenes of lamentation and mourning from the mid-sixth century to the late

fifth, I have tried to keep one important premise in mind. The events themselves that comprised an Athenian funeral probably changed very little during the period under consideration. Even the influence of funerary legislation on the conduct of rituals associated with death appears to have been minor.

Therefore, the choice of which particular aspects of the unchanging ritual to represent in the visual arts

at any given period should in itself be significant, as is the manner in which these events are depicted.

Archaic vase-painting devotes itself almost exclu-

sively to the prothesis. This is a private affair, taking place in the home of the deceased and attended only by close relatives. The iconography does not vary between those objects, pinakes and loutrophoroi (figs. 1, 11, 12-15), meant to stand as markers on the tomb and those placed inside it as offerings, like the phor- miskoi (figs. 7-10). Nor does it vary with the gender or age of the deceased, insofar as the prothesis itself is concerned. Only in the use of subsidiary figured scenes showing funeral games, victors and prizes, are men singled out for special treatment.

The social status of the individuals commemorated on these objects is not easy to infer. An elaborate series of plaques, like that of Exekias, we can assume to have decorated the tomb of a wealthy woman, but such series ceased to be made after about 530. It would be too simple to assume that henceforth all

wealthy tombs were marked by marble stelai or stat-

ues, while loutrophoroi and pinakes were only for those who could not afford a more expensive monu-

ment.170 Whatever the chronological problems, the

very fact that sumptuary legislation is a recurrent motif in our sources shows that at least some people frowned on ostentatious displays of wealth for the dead. The prothesis is in keeping with a belief in

simplicity, for it offers no means of visual elaboration. The ekphora, which would have lent itself to elements of display (especially in view of the aristocratic connotations of horses), is virtually unknown in art after the Exekian plaques.

The Persian Wars brought many changes to Athen- ian society, accelerating the move toward democracy initiated a generation earlier by Kleisthenes. Even death can be a political issue, as in democratic Athens, when it was used to reward with heroic honors those who had died serving the state, irrespective of their social or economic status in life. The prohibition of stone stelai after 490/80 illustrates the determination

public funeral or where the various stages took place. Thu- cydides' summary is very brief (2.34). Loraux 20 suggests that the prothesis took place in the Agora, near the Epony- mous Heroes Monument. The ekphora would then have followed the same route as the Panathenaic procession, only in reverse. Loraux 24 further postulates that women were not allowed to participate in the ekphora.

166 See N. Nakayama, Untersuchungen der auf weissgrund- igen Lekythen dargestellten Grabmiiler (Freiburg 1982) for the

complete typology. A few eliminate the stele altogether and substitute an altar or sarcophagus: D.M. Rupp, "Altars as Funerary Monuments on Attic White Lekythoi," AJA 84 (1980) 524-27; D.U. Schilardi, "Representations of Free-

Standing Sarcophagi on Attic White-Ground Lekythoi," in Brijder ed. (supra n. 1) 264-70.

167 The possibility that some stelai on white lekythoi reflect monuments in the Demosion Sema is fully explored by Clair- mont, PN 62-66. Humphreys 102 raises the possibility that the stelai depicted on white lekythoi were of wood.

168 Clairmont, G&E 41. 169 On this disparity cf. the comments of M. Meyer, "Man-

ner mit Geld,"JdI 103 (1988) 87-88. 170 See Morris (supra n. 20) 152-54, who argues that

through most of the sixth century virtually all archaeologi- cally detectable graves in Attika are for individuals of high socioeconomic status.

656 H. A. SHAPIRO

of the demos that nothing should overshadow the

simple yet dignified monuments of the war dead. In Classical Athens we have for the first time clear

evidence of family burial plots extending over several

generations.''7 This is impossible to document for the

period before the reintroduction of gravestones in the late fifth century, but the practice could have started well before then. The purpose of such family plots was clearly to consolidate the oikos and give it a fixed point of reference. The sense of continuity between living members of the household and their dead ancestors was expressed in regular visits to the tomb and the bringing of offerings. This then became the principal subject of Classical white lekythoi. As the yearly burial of the war dead in the Demosion Sema continued to separate many men from their families in death, the union between these men and their survivors is increasingly stressed on lekythoi that may have gone into the tomb of yet another family mem-

ber, or into a cenotaph.'72 By the end of the fifth century, white lekythoi had

virtually ceased to be made, and already in its last decade or two they had lost originality as well as artistic quality, perhaps due to the requirements of mass production during the Peloponnesian War. For

the fourth century we can no longer trace the icon-

ography of funerary ritual on Athenian vases. This is not fully explained by the general decline of Attic

vase-painting, for in one form or another, figured vases continued to be made until past the middle of the century. The marble stelai, however, flourished and became increasingly ostentatious, until Demetrios of Phaleron put an end to them in 317. With the demise of the ceramic lekythos and loutrophoros, both shapes enjoyed a revival as monumental stone

grave markers.'73 Of the hundreds of preserved names on these monuments, most are otherwise un-

known, members of undistinguished middle-class families of the sort often encountered in the pages of Isaios and the private orations of Demosthenes. There is no way to tell the graves of wealthy aristocrats from those of the bourgeoisie. In its last stage of autonomy as a polis, before falling under the Macedonian yoke, democratic Athens came closer to a classless society than at any time in her history.

DEPARTMENT OF THE HUMANITIES

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY 07030

"71 See the detailed analysis in Humphreys 111-21; R. Garland, "A First Catalogue of Attic Peribolos Tombs," BSA 77 (1982) 125-76; W.K. Kovacsovics, Kerameikos XIV: Die Eckterrasse an der Griiberstrasse des Kerameikos (Berlin 1990) 73-87.

172 The clearest example of a cenotaph set up in a family grave plot for a man who fell in battle is the well-known

tombstone of Dexileos (394 B.C.) in the Kerameikos. See S. Ensoli, "L'Heroon di Dexileos nel Ceramico di Atene," MemLinc ser. 8, 29.2 (1987) 155-329.

173 B. Schmalz, Untersuchungen zu den attischen Marmor-

lekythen (Berlin 1970); G. Kokula, Marmorloutrophoren (AM- BH 11, 1984).

The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art

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