Unresolved questions surround Simonides fr. 531, which eulogizes the Greeks who fell at Thermopylae. To what genre do these lines belong, what were the original conditions of their performance, and does Diodorus Siculus, who preserves the fragment, transmit just an extract or the complete piece? Commentators even differ as to where Simonides’ lines began: for some the words τŵυ ༐υ Θερμοπλαιζ θαυóυτωυ form part of the original composition, for others they conclude Diodorus' prose introduction. In my reading of the fragment, (...) I aim to address some of these puzzles by focusing chiefly on issues that allow for greater certainty: the structure and sentiments of the lines, and the cohesion between the song's contents and the conventions found in near contemporary commemorations of men fallen in battle on their country or polis’ behalf. As the comparative material will suggest, Diodorus’ designation of the lines as an encomion, something ‘properly’ delivered in praise of living men, should perhaps not be dismissed out of hand. Simonides‘ words may have been embedded within a composition as much designed for the purpose of praising, exhorting and inspiring the living as for memorializing the dead. (shrink)

‘Death is bad for those who die, but good for the undertakers and the grave-diggers’. And for archaeologists and for epigraphers as well, even though epitaphs, and especially simple or formulaic ones, are probably the most understudied and unloved area of ancient epigraphy. Yet the mere fact of an inscribed epitaph indicates deliberate and intentionally enduring commemoration, and therefore embodies a social attitude; epitaphs thus constitute a matter of historical importance that can be studied for the very reason that so (...) many—in Athens over 10,000—survive. Most Athenian epitaphs which have been found have been dated, and for approximately two-thirds of them a general find-spot has been recorded. Temporal and spatial variations within the distribution of Athenian epitaphs prompt not only the question of why aspects of this habit should change over time, but why the habit of epitaphs should exist at all; the answer suggested here links the function and distribution of Athenian epitaphs to changing concepts of Athenian citizenship. For epitaphs function as more than testimonials to grief: they represent what survivors saw as defining the deceased, and the significantly greater number of epitaphs in fourth-century Athens derives from Athenians' emphatic definition of themselves as citizens at that time. Finally, the Athenians's use of tombstones has no parallel in the classical Greek world, for the Athenians' developing perceptions of their own city and of their own special relationship, as citizens, to it, were also unparalleled. (shrink)

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has traditionally been regarded as the poet's primary tragedy involving hero cult; this essay explores the more subtle but no less ritually explicit hero cult of the Aias first outlined by Burian. The passage, as Burian saw, occurs when the young Eurysakes kneels at his father's body and Teukros conducts an unusual combination of rites: supplication, curse, offering of hair, and magic . One crucial direction to the child, kai phulasse , however, is here not understood (...) to be a paradox of the suppliant who "protects" what he seizes but rather his physical attachment to the locus where he abides as well as his ritual dependence on the source of protection . By saying a curse and obtaining protection, Teukros and Eurysakes indicate how the still-warm body of the dead hero has already acquired special powers after death: specifically, the power to bestow both blessings and curses on mortals. The argument turns from the body to the tomb, the physical and lasting monument of hero cult, which the Sophoclean audience would know. The preceding scene ends with a pivotal choral passage where the hero's burial and cult are prescribed in highly Homeric terms . This passage forms an important link between the opposing views of the fate of the corpse and also between the hero's death and burial. This choral celebration of the hero's future status is cast in traditional Homeric language, but with some revealing inversions. One is the reversal of the verb whereby the earth "holds" or possesses heroes in Homer, while Aias occupies and possesses his tomb . The evolution of Homeric views of death is traced . In Sophocles' Aias the chorus performs the burial as a ritual act establishing a cult, long before it happens at the end of the play. The article concludes with a discussion of the historical cults of Aias known to the Athenians and of the more significant way that Aias becomes a hero: not self-consciously, as Oedipus did, but through rituals performed by his family and community. In the Aias, the poet's sense of hero cult lies closer to Homer and the epic tradition than it does, for instance, to Aeschylus. (shrink)

According to many recent interpretations of Catullus 101, the ritual performance it describes serves primarily as a foil, highlighting the greater expressiveness and communicative power of the poem itself. I argue instead for using the complexities of Roman funerary ritual as a model for understanding the poem's ambiguities. As funerary offerings at once establish a bond between family members and the dead and affirm a distinction between them that allows the survivors to rejoin the society of the living, so the (...) poem articulates a tension between assertions of the brother's absence and intimations of his presence as addressee, even as speaker. Similarly, the split between the poem's fictional context as a one-time-only farewell to the brother and its existence as a repeatable literary artifact further accentuates the double allegiance of the poet. In the second section I consider how the poem, without being an epitaph itself, fulfills the functions of an epitaph, by allowing for the re-performance of the ritual, constructing the opposition between permanence and temporality present in the epitaph/monument complex, "inscribing" the brother's death at the prominent literary "crossroads" of the beginning of the Odyssey, and finally making the commemoration of the brother performed through each reading of the poem a sacrum that builds its audience into a community. (shrink)

Focusing on a single funerary monument of the late archaic period, this paper shows how such a monument could be used by a bereaved individual to externalize and communalize the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional effects of loss. Through a close examination of the monument’s sculpted relief and inscribed epigram, I identify a structural framework underlying both that is built around a disjunction between perception and cognition embedded in the self-identified function of the monument as a mnema or memory-object. Through the (...) analysis of other epigrams and literary passages, this disjunctive framework is shown to be derived, in turn, from broader conceptualizations in archaic Greece about how both mental images, including memories, and works of art allowed continued visual, but not cognitive-affective, access to the deceased. From this perspective, the monument’s relief opens up to us the experience of the bereaved individual who is only able to connect with the deceased through a remembered mental image. (shrink)