Metrical epitaphs are an interesting literary form, and not only for their use of the hexameter or elegiac distich – or the much less frequent use of some other meter. Whether socially and historically, or as an artistic form, their interest lies in how they manifest one of the main characteristics of Greek literature: its conscious incorporation into tradition. In the epitaphs we find inevitable echoes of Homer, of course, but also traces of elegiac poetry – of Tyrtaeus, Archilochus, Semonides, Solon, Mimnermus, Theognis or Simonides – and of tragedy, especially of Euripides.1 Metrical epitaphs, very appropriate for keeping alive the memory of the dead, coexist from the earliest times with prose epitaphs, which offer minimal information about the deceased: name, sometimes patronymic, occasionally the place of origin. In addition to emphasizing the literary nature of the private metrical epitaph, it will be valuable to identify how it differs from other similar genres such as the epitaphios logos and the public metrical epitaph in the demosion sema.
Many scholars have associated the era of the Peisistratids with the success of the elegiac distich as a vehicle for the funerary epigram, at least in Attica.2 Use of the elegiac distich as a literary form in funerary epigrams goes back to the mid-sixth century BC; prior to that, the hexameter was used, even in the Dorian cultural area where the elegiac threnos flourished.3 This contradicts the long-held theory that the threnodic origin of the elegy was precisely the motive for its use in funerary epigraphy. In effect, the accepted idea had long been that the elegy originated as a song of lament, and over time gradually adopted other types of content. However, the thematic variety that we find in the form of the elegiac distich is clear even from the earliest evidence: the same author (such as Archilochus or Simonides, to name two well-known examples) would use this meter in their poems without regard to the occasion.
Greek elegy relates to hexameter epic, but no evidence proves it to be a more recent genre. In terms of content, the earliest elegiac poets (Calinus, Archilochus, Mimnermus) composed short pieces of exhortation, personal comment and reflection. The fragments that have been preserved contain no definitive indications that a genre of lamentatory elegy existed, but there is no consensus on the matter. Although the metrical term ἐλεγεῖον (elegeion) appeared at the end of the fifth century BC, derived from ἔλεγος (elegos), Ewen Bowie has argued that elegos only began to be understood as a ‘sung lament’ in the decade or so before 415 BC, suggesting that this may have happened, in part, because by the end of the fifth century BC, the elegiac couplet was regularly used for sepulchral inscriptions. But the metrical unit characteristic of sung lament was the threnos, not elegiac compositions.4 Other scholars, such as Alberto Aloni, generally tend to see an earlier connection between mourning and elegy.5
With that in mind, I will attempt to sketch the tradition wherein metrical epitaphs take their place, although I am inclined to think that the purely terminological debate has little meaning for this study. Some authors, as we will see in the following section on Archilochus, set up uncrossable lines between lament and laudation, but in epitaphs these lines become blurred: some contain only mourning, others only praise, but many examples include both. In other words, it seems impossible to treat these as a homogeneous corpus, such as we find with the epitaphios logos.6 In my opinion, this difficulty is due to the somewhat discontinuous nature of the corpus: the first epitaphs I will address belong to the sixth century BC (c. 560–510), after which there will be a gap, and finally a resurgence of the private epitaph in the second half of the fifth century BC (c. 440–430) and throughout the fourth century BC.7 The years marked by an absence of the private metrical epitaph coincided with the rise of public metrical epitaphs, the famous polyandria, but also with the prose genre of the epitaphios logos; in both cases we are dealing with encomium of the war dead. Since we are speaking of related forms, the definitions of all these genres are largely based on how they contrast with each other. Nicole Loraux, referring to versified public epitaphs, the polyandria, states that family, social and economic distinctions that might divide the Athenians disappear in the demosion sema; the city promised a beautiful memorial and a metrical epitaph to its valiant citizens who died in war, a privilege heretofore reserved for the aristocracy.8
On the other hand, the prose discourse of the epitaphios logos has common elements with the public epitaph, but there are also important differences, in particular, that metrical public epitaphs continued to be linked to the prestige of the epic form.9 It is evident that the distinctions between these related literary forms (perhaps ‘genres’ is unwarranted) have more to do with politics than with literature: as Loraux again has noted, we find these discourses at a time when the city of Athens is breaking away from its past, abandoning aristocratic society for a democratic system.10
From the perspective of the epitaphs studied here, we might say that we are witnessing a transformation of the aristocratic city, not yet to the democratic city, but to a democratization of aristocratic values over the course of the sixth century BC.11 We will pass from the korai and kouroi of the Attic necropoleis – Merenda, Anavyssos, Vourva – to the famous stelai of the Classical age. In every case, when the epitaph is preserved, it accompanies the funerary monument in giving shape to a determined ideological construction, helping to create the image of the deceased that the family or city wishes to remain. The literary classifications – sometimes too rigid in their formal approach, separating threnody from encomium, lamentation from praise – would be useless for this corpus, where the opportunity to mourn the dead or praise this or that virtue has more to do with social and historical reasons than with conventions of the genre.
As I have stated, studies on the literary variants of the funerary lament enter into detailed distinctions between threnos (θρῆνος), goos (γόος) and epikedion (ἐπικήδιον). Already in Homeric passages that sing the funerals of heroes, a difference can be perceived between the threnos sung by aoidoi and the more heartrending goos of the women of the family; appearing later is the term epikedion, a conventional, ritual song, and sung by professionals like the threnody. But the term threnos was used among the Greeks themselves, even from the fifth century BC, to refer generally to the idea of ‘lament’, and the idea that funerary song can incorporate elements of encomium is also ancient.12
I have already mentioned the difficulties entailed in establishing the existence of a particular genre of elegy, the lamentatory elegy, and in determining when and why the poetry of funerary lament became associated with this metrical form, the elegiac couplet. There is one aspect of this complex discussion that I think is somewhat artificial, namely the attempt to decisively separate the lament from exhortation, praise or consolation. A major objection to the existence of a tradition of threnodic elegy, as we will see immediately, is that the oldest preserved fragments have more of a gnomic and consolatory content than what is strictly understood as threnody. This obstacle is overcome simply with a more relaxed conception of the term. Threnody may have been a vehicle for philosophical reflection on human life, giving rise in turn to the non-threnodic, purely philosophical elegy and to the elegiac epigram of funerary epitaphs.13 Obviously, this does not mean denying that there are differences between threnody and elegy, but rather attempting to see where the two poetic forms could at some point converge.
One well-known elegy by Archilochus, often cited when speaking of the origins of threnody, may serve to illustrate these lines of thought. The subject of these verses is the death at sea of some of the poet’s fellow citizens:
κήδεα μὲν στονόεντα Περίκλεες οὔτέ τις ἀστῶν
μεμφόμενος θαλίηις τέρψεται οὐδὲ πόλις·
τοίους γὰρ κατὰ κῦμα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης
ἔκλυσεν, οἰδαλέους δ᾿ ἀμφ’ ὀδύνηις ἔχομεν
πνεύμονας. ἀλλὰ θεοὶ γὰρ ἀνηκέστοισι κακοῖσιν
ὦ φίλ᾿ ἐπὶ κρατερὴν τλημοσύνην ἔθεσαν
φάρμακον. ἄλλοτε ἄλλος ἔχει τόδε· νῦν μὲν ἐς ἡμέας
ἐτράπεθ᾿, αἱματόεν δ’ ἕλκος ἀναστένομεν,
ἐξαῦτις δ᾿ ἑτέρους ἐπαμείψεται. ἀλλὰ τάχιστα
τλῆτε, γυναικεῖον πένθος ἀπωσάμενοι.
Pericles, lamentable sorrows no man or city can keep
Reproaching and still enjoy the pleasures of feasting.
Such men were submerged beneath waves of the sounding sea;
We the survivors have lungs swollen with pain.
The gods, however, my friend, have a remedy for incurable evils–
To bear up with strong endurance. These things
Happen to all men sooner or later. Now it has
Turned against us and we groan at our bloody wound.
Soon it will be others’ turn. So let us with all speed
Put away from us womanish grief and endure.14
The fact that, at the end of the poem, Archilochus invites us to put away grief (specifically, ‘womanish grief’ γυναικεῖον πένθος) is the argument offered by Gentili and others to not accept this poem as threnody, in a strict sense: when Plutarch includes some of the verses from this elegy in De audiendis poetis 23b,15 and introduces them with the term threnein (θρηνεῖν), he uses the term in a rhetorical and non-technical sense, according to this Italian scholar.16 However, if we understand ‘threnody’ in a more general sense, as a kind of philosophical and consolatory poem, this example from Archilochus would be a precedent.17 The truth is that this elegy is certainly similar to metrical epitaphs both in theme (death at sea, the loss to the city,18 the universality of death) and in lexicon (ὀδύνη, ‘bitter pain’; στένω, ‘mourning’; πένθος, ‘grief’).
We find more solid ground when approaching Simonides and Pindar, names that have traditionally been associated with the fame of the lyrical dirge. These two are our only source of remaining fragments passed on as threnody.19
Simonides (c. 556–468 BC), one of the nine lyrical poets of the Alexandrian canon, composed threnody, encomia, epigrams, paeans, and even tragedies, if we believe the Suda encyclopedia. There is also an established tradition whereby he was the inventor (the Greeks’ well-loved figure of the protos heuretes) of mnemonics, making him a key figure in the process of popularizing remembrance.20 A native of Ceos, one of the Cyclades, he soon moved to Athens, to the court of Hipparchus. It seems that he was the first to compose odes for the victors of sporting games celebrated by the Greeks – making men the object of song, not only their gods – and was also the first to be paid for it: his services were especially sought after by the powerful Scopadae families in Thessaly, and the courts of Hiero in Syracuse and Theron in Agrigento in Sicily, in addition to the Peisistratids. As the author of threnodies and funeral elegies, Simonides was highly celebrated – recall Catullus’s familiar words, maestius lacrimis Simonideis, ‘more sorrowful than the tears of Simonides’ (38.78) – with the drawback that a large number of non-authentic funerary epigrams were indiscriminately attributed to him.21
Simonides achieved great fame for his poems related to the Persian Wars. Especially well-known is his encomium – so called by his recorder Diodorus – for the fallen in Thermopylae:
τῶν ἐν Θερμοπύλαις θανόντων
εὐκλεὴς μὲν ἁ τύχα, καλὸς δ᾿ὁ πότμος,
βωμὸς δ᾿ὁ τάφος, πρὸ γόων δὲ μνᾶστις, ὁ δ᾿οἶκτος ἔπαινος·
ἐντάφιον δὲ τοιοῦτον οὔτ᾿εὐρὼς
οὔθ᾿ὁ πανδαμάτωρ ἀμαυρώσει χρόνος.ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ὅδε σηκὸς οἰκέταν εὐδοξίαν
Ἑλλάδος εἵλετο· μαρτυρεῖ δὲ καὶ Λεωνίδας,
Σπάρτας βασιλεύς, ἀρετᾶς μέγαν λελοιπὼς
κόσμον ἀέναόν τε κλέος.
Of those who died at Thermopylae glorious is the fortune and fair the doom. For tomb they have an altar, for lamentations they have remembrance, for pity praise. Such a funeral rite nor rust nor all-conquering time shall obliterate. This holy place of noble men has won the glory of Hellas as its household spirit. Leonidas, too, is witness, the king of Sparta, who has left a great ornament of valour and an everlasting fame.22
This poem by Simonides shows elements that would become distinctive of the epitaphios logos: the collective, not individual, audience, and the explicit preference for praise, in lieu of mourning. Simonides has his affinity with Homer, of course, but he already offers an idea of immortal fame approaching that of the Athenian epitaphios. As Eva Stehle has demonstrated in her study of the elegy for the fallen at Plataea, Simonides presents fame in a new way: the kleos of the soldiers fallen in battle has two anchors, one attached to tombs, cult and statue, the other to narrative. Fame becomes something more material and no longer depends entirely on the song of the poet.23 It has also been noted that the Plataea elegy offers a glimpse of a new type of poetry: encomiastic narrative elegy that celebrates contemporary historical events.24 Curiously, Simonides’ ninth epigram is also thought to refer to the Spartans who fell at Plataea, once again revealing the important role of this poet at a very attractive historical moment, when new ideas are coming to the surface. In this epigram, Simonides says this of the fallen soldiers: ‘they died but they are not dead: their valor bestows glory upon them here above / and leads them up from the house of Hades’. According to Sarah I. Johnston, the most significant aspect of this poem is the expression ἀνάγει δώματος ἐξ Ἀίδεω, ‘leads up from the House of Hades’, a phrase used in the invocation of souls in the classical period, making this epigram ‘one of our earliest literary attestations of the idea that the dead could be made to rise up from the Underworld’.25
Pindar (c. 518–438 BC), author of hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, partheneia, threnodies, etc., owes his fame to the preservation of four books where the Alexandrians collected and ordered their epinicia. Once again, as in the case of Simonides, we find that his patrons were the powerful families of all Hellas, from Sicily to Rhodes, from Thessaly to Cyrene.26As early as 498 BC he was commissioned to write an epinicion (Pythian 10) for the victor of the boys’ double foot race, a youth from the Aleuadae family of Thessaly. As has been noted, Athens scarcely appears in his odes, since the artist was at the service of the aristocrats, not the democrats: we can cite only Pythian 7, in honour of the Alcmaeonid Megacles, and Nemean 2, for Timodemus, from the Timodemids family, of the Attic deme of Acharnae.27 In his threnodic fragments he combines lament and praise, adapting his form to the ancient definition of threnody: ὀδυρμὸν γὰρ ἔχει σὺν ἐγκωμίῳ τοῦ τελευτήσαντος, ‘combining lament with encomium of the dead’.28
Fragments of Pindaric threnodies are quite rare, and attempts to attribute one of them to funerary lament for the tyrants of Sicily have been unfruitful. It is impossible to know whether the poet sang the death of Theron or of Gelo of Syracuse, but the powerful families of the era, the Alcmaeonid in Athens, the Aleuads in Thessaly and the Dinomenids and the Emmenids in Sicily, would celebrate not only victories but also funerals, for propaganda purposes.29
I understand that, beyond the specific tyrannical dynasties, members of the wealthy aristocratic families took care to offer beautiful memorials and quality epitaphs for their dead. Thus, a magnificent stele discovered in 1988 in Ialysos, Rhodes, dated c. 470–460 BC, and contemporaneous with Pindar’s Olympian 7, commissioned for Diagoras of Rhodes, celebrates a member of one of the powerful families of the island’s aristocracy.30
The importance of Pindar in this context resides in the fact that his threnoi show similarities with the Homeric lament and with the Archaic epigram, while at the same time presenting the key characteristic of self-assertion as a genre related to other performance genres but independent and self-contained.31
Pindar and Simonides were both quite aware of the value of their art. As Bruno Gentili indicates, their art was grounded in a direct relationship between patron and poet, and reached its era of splendour in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Gentili affirms that the same may be said of other arts such as painting and sculpture, because the aristocrat and the tyrant were able to consolidate their power by becoming patrons who granted gifts and honorariums to poets and artists, who in turn became ‘aulic’ professionals.32
Perhaps this is the moment to pause and consider the term ‘aristocracy’, having used it already on many occasions, and keeping in mind that aristocracy and aristocrats will be repeatedly mentioned as the beneficiaries and the subject of memorials, especially in the following chapter dealing with funerary monuments of the Archaic age.
I am well aware of the drawbacks of using a term that has been the subject of many studies, and of the risk of referring to a category that is not immutable. Nonetheless, after reading Gregory Nagy’s helpful discussion on this point, I believe it is justifiable to refer to an aristocratic group (I will avoid using the term ‘class’) as the clear focus of this funerary art.33 Nagy states that the elements that come together to define this category are ‘power’, ‘wealth’ and ‘prestige’, and of course, the criteria of noble birth must also be included. But both the power and the wealth that are assumed in this social group, and are the outward expression of prestige, are surrounded by a moral and almost divine aura, a superior lifestyle, dedicated to luxury. Nagy mentions some of the characteristics of ‘male aristocratic’ life:34 ‘wearing royal purple and using perfumes’, ‘wearing elaborate hairstyles’, ‘owning horses’, ‘hunting as a sport’, ‘participating in athletic competitions’, ‘professing homoerotic ideals’ and ‘having proper instruction’. Clearly, the epitaphs that I will examine here cannot incorporate all these activities in their distichs, but we will see that, when the funerary stele is preserved, many of these aristocratic practices are reflected iconographically.
As we progress from the funerary monuments of nobles throughout the sixth century BC to the Attic stelai of the late fifth and fourth centuries BC – retrospective funerary art that serves as a vehicle for certain social ideas – it seems fundamental that the Greek idea of ‘aristocracy’, of ‘nobility’, is not propagated top down, from the higher levels of society to the rest, but is a matter of shared values that permeate all social strata, as Gregory Nagy states. The ideal of nobility (excellence as expressed in the term arete) is shared and is by no means the property of a certain group. Therefore, Nagy concludes by establishing the widespread presence of so-called aristocratic ideals in democracy, or in other words, the full democratization of these ideals in the fourth century BC.35
Helpful in this regard is this author’s analysis of the literary encomium36 – Pindar singing the praise of Hiero, Bacchylides comparing the same Hiero to Lydian king Kroisos, Pindar once again painting tyranny black so he can sing of a Theban oligarchy – leading Nagy to the following conclusion: in all encomiastic poetry, the laudator composes his praise using the aristocratic ideal as his reference, regardless of whether the laudandus is an oligarch, a democrat or a tyrant.37 Unlike Theognis, who sings aristocratic values in his elegies with frequent contrasts of agathoi (ἀγαθοί) and kakoi (κακοί), the nobles versus those of low estate, Pindar simply overlooks the latter: he affirms the superiority of the agathoi, of the nobles as a group, without any consideration of the kakoi, the ignobles.38
Museums in the Western world are full of objects with which Greek nobles sought prestige and extravagance: tripods, weapons, bronze cauldrons, funerary stelai.39 The aristocrat attains his position in society by investing his wealth in obtaining prestige. Prestige is not attained by having wealth, but the wealth must be used to obtain the desired social recognition. In this regard, two pertinent passages from Pindar have been noted:40
εἰ δέ τις ἔνδον νέμει πλοῦτον κρυφαῖον,
ἄλλοισι δ᾿ἐμπίπτων γελᾴ, ψυχὰν Ἀΐδᾳ τελέων
οὐ φράζεται δόξας ἄνευθεν.
But, if any one broodeth at home over hoarded wealth, and rejoiceth in oppressing others, he little thinketh that he is giving up his soul to death – death without glory.41
οὐκ ἔραμαι πολὺν ἐν
μεγάρῳ πλοῦτον κατακρύψαις ἔχειν,
ἀλλ᾿ἐόντων εὖ τε παθεῖν καὶ ακοῦ-
σαι φίλοις ἐξαρκέων.
I love not to keep much wealth buried in my hall, but of my abundance to do good to myself and to win a good name by bestowing it on my friends.42
The following passage from Plutarch, regarding what Gorgias said of Cimon, must be understood in the same sense: τὸν Κίμωνα τὰ χρήματα κτᾶσθαι μὲν ὡς χρῷτο, χρᾶσθαι δ᾿ὡς τιμῷτο, ‘he acquired wealth to use wealth, and used wealth to gain honours’.43
There will be opportunity to see how the dedicants of some of these memorials commissioned famous sculptors, such as Aristion of Paros, Aristocles and Phaidimos the Clever, thus displaying willingness to pay for a work of art to perpetuate the fame of the deceased, and by doing so, often perpetuating their own.44 These were beautiful monuments, made to be seen, as some of them remind us in their verses.
So it is that the agathoi45 seek immortal fame for their dead, with beautiful memorials especially for youths like Kleoitos, who though noble, he died (καλὸς ὄν ἔθανε46), and they illustrate them with refined epitaphs that I will not label with any specific term, but that partake of the threnody and the encomium and do so in terms deeply rooted in an entire literary tradition. We can join in Gentili’s idea that the burial epigram was not in itself a lamentation for the deceased, engraved on the tomb, but rather an exhortation to a proper mourning for the dead: ‘un complemento necessario della tomba per serbare tra i vivi e, in taluni casi, per affidare ai posteri la memoria del defunto’.47 Aside from the literary reasons, there were very good practical reasons that made the elegiac distich the most suitable instrument for the epigram-inscription: it is a closed form, autonomous and expressive, a poetic form condensed into two verses, able to meet the restrictions imposed by the physical base, in this case, the base of the statue or stele.48
Memorials were made to be seen, epitaphs to be read. With this self-evident remark, I refer to the fact that, unlike the threnos or the goos, the two forms of lament already present in the Homeric epic, the funerary epigram is distant from the moment of death and from the funeral. It is sung neither at the funeral ceremony nor in the celebrations that might take place in the days following. It is planned and written for the future, and this distancing is reflected, for example, in the use of pote (πότε), ‘then, in former times’ in some of the inscriptions. This use, discussed later in relation to the epitaph of young Kroisos,49 reveals that the time of reference is not the young man’s death; instead, the future reader is in mind, in short, the one who would keep the kleos (κλέος) alive. There is no other way to understand the words of Hecuba in the lamentation (threnos, goos, encomion)50 sung by Astyanax, when the queen asks what the poet might write on the child’s tomb. She herself responds:
τὸν παῖδα τόνδ’ ἔκτειναν Ἀργεῖοί ποτε
δείσαντες; αἰσχρὸν τοὐπίγραμμά γ’ Ἑλλάδι.
This boy was killed in former times by the Argives because they feared him: A shameful epigram for Hellas.51
These words from Euripides clearly illustrate what an epitaph is: A brief but accurate funerary inscription, conceived in order to keep alive the memory of the deceased, reborn with each reading, relying on fame as a promise of immortality. Today’s insistence that there is no such thing as writing without a reader, or put differently, that reading is a part of the text itself, is clearly exemplified in the Greek epitaphs, especially in those of the Archaic age, at times composed in the first person, awaiting the passer-by who would stop and lend them his voice.52
These last considerations have to do with performance, and on this point it is essential to consider the work of Joseph W. Day. At the start of this chapter I insisted that we are dealing with literary texts, but this is certainly not a closed question. Day accurately summarizes: ‘If earlier Greeks did not often take epigrams seriously as poetic texts, however, they may still have conceived of them as poems, but in a functional rather than a literary or aesthetic sense’.53 The idea that the inscription formed an integral part of a monument’s design, and that the artist who created it sought to attract potential readers and guide their reading, is also applicable to funerary monuments such as those of Phrasikleia and Kroisos, which I will study in the next chapter. Engraved on the base of statues of great artistic quality, sometimes signed by the artists who wrought them, epigrams make use of formulas and expressions from the language of oral poetry and are thus steeped in its same values and authority; at the same time, the physical arrangement of the inscription steers the potential reader’s gaze towards the poem’s key idea, as in the case of Kroisos’ epitaph, where the expression thouros Ares (θοῦρος Ἄρης), which has evident Homeric echoes, appears in eye-catching isolation, occupying the entire last line.
In my estimation, the epitaphs to be analysed here constitute a homogeneous corpus, and studying them as a group is justified, despite the seemingly arbitrary division between the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic ages. My object of study is the Archaic and Classical funerary epigrams, and I believe that here we discover less standardized, less conventional emotions than in later periods,54 which also have been studied in more depth.55 In fact, the criticism is sometimes heard that the corpus of funerary epigraphy in general is repetitive, given to formulas. And yet, in quite a few texts that I study here, it may be said that there are new expressions (new in the absence of further archaeological discoveries), very elaborate literary allusions, evocative proper nouns, and so on. Therefore, we insist not only on their quality but also on their often exceptional nature.
Before closing this chapter, I wish to remind the reader that the corpus studied here contains only the metrical epitaphs, and I refer only to these when making such literary considerations. As for how representative these may be in relation to the totality of funerary epigraphy, the facts differ between the Archaic and Classical ages. In the Archaic age, metrical epitaphs make up nearly half the total, a very high proportion, and certainly much higher than that found in the Classical age, when the number of epitaphs in verse is ten times less.56 These statistics refer to Attica, where the most plentiful and most studied inscriptions are found; it is significant that, in the Archaic age, there is such a high percentage of epitaphs in verse, more than in any other era and in any other part of Greece. However, the global statistics hide the details, and we must pause a moment to examine how this developed over the Archaic era. The number of epitaphs in verse reaches its highest percentage in the early sixth century BC, and we may perhaps attribute this to the influence and prestige of epic, where the aristocratic group (the subject of these epitaphs) is reflected (recall that the first metrical epitaphs use the hexameter). The practice of inscribing grave markers becomes increasingly common in the second half of the century, and the proportion of those who choose to mark the grave monument with a prose epitaph, usually just a name, equals or becomes greater than the group that prefers verse.
By way of conclusion, epitaph evidence from the Archaic age (specifically, the sixth century BC) is splendid from the literary standpoint, and when the monument is preserved, also from the artistic standpoint. But these epitaphs are not exceptional in the sense of being uncommon; the metrical epitaph was the norm. However, when the practice of the private epitaph is recovered in the mid-fifth century BC, metrical funerary epigrams take on added value, being exceptional in a time when the prose epitaph had become usual.