4 How to Deprive the Year of Its Spring

To deprive the city of its youth would be to deprive the year of its spring. According to some sources, this is the comparison that Pericles makes in his famous speech for the fallen, in the first year of the Peloponnesian War.1

Weeping for the young, regardless of their sex or cause of death, mourning for the city’s loss of its spring, is certainly present in Greek epitaphs. In the funerary monuments that we examine in this chapter, indications of death before its time, mors inmatura, can be found in the epitaph itself, in direct or veiled fashion, or inferred from some iconographic element in the stele, usually a loutrophoros.2 This type of lustral vase appears in the funerary monument to indicate that the deceased was never married, in other words, he or she was overtaken by death in early youth.³ Maiden Phrasikleia is perhaps the clearest and best-known image of a memorial dedicated to a young woman who died before being wed; however, as indicated earlier, the stereotype of a pro gamou death was not established until the Hellenistic age. In the funerary epigraphy of the fifth century BC, reference to such a death before marriage is practically absent and only in the fourth century BC do we find it again, for both maidens and young boys.⁴

In this chapter, focused on funerary monuments from the Classical period, especially the fourth century BC, and dedicated to young people, the Pausimache memorial deserves special attention, and is our starting point. Moreover, the stele where the epitaph is found leads me to an interpretive hypothesis on the iconographic value of the mirror on Attic stelai, a topic of some controversy.

I shall also examine a striking absence in Attica prior to the fourth century BC, that of the expression ‘you/they lost your/their youth’ (ὤλεσαν / ὠλέσατ(ε) ἥβην) in epitaphs for young women. I will suggest that the non-use of this expression in Attic epitaphs for young women over the course of this century is related to the association between hebe (ἥβη) and andreia (ἀνδρεία), youth and virility, and the frequent presence of both terms in epitaphs for young men who died in combat, whether private or public (recall the rules the city imposed in the fifth century BC regarding praise of the war dead).

The final section is devoted to a general examination of the subject of mors inmatura. As we saw in the Archaic epitaphs analysed in the previous chapter, young women and men who died before their time were mourned by their mothers, fathers and the entire city. We shall now see how the text of the epitaph or the image on the stele, with the depiction of a loutrophoros, often provides the information necessary to determine whether the death occurred prematurely. In general, these epigrams are more extensive than the Archaic ones, are inscribed on the stelai rather than on the base blocks of korai and kouroi, and employ very emotive images to express grief.

Pausimache through the mirror

The funerary monument that I will address in this section is well known and well preserved; from an iconographic point of view, it is the only Attic stele from the Classical period whose image includes a mirror and whose epigram is also available. This is the memorial to Pausimache, where the epitaph makes no explicit reference to a frustrated marriage, nor is a loutrophoros represented in the stele. We are able to infer that we are dealing with a maiden who died before marriage from the fact that there are references to the mother’s and father’s grief (a husband is not mentioned) and, perhaps, from the relief that shows a young woman looking at herself in a mirror, an element that can be attributed to unmarried maidens. This is the inscription on the bottom of the stele:

πᾶσι θανεῖν ‹ε›ἵμαρτα‹ι› ὅσοι ζῶσιν, σὺ δὲ πένθος

οἰ |κτρὸν ‹ἔ›χ‹ειν› ἔλιπες, Παυσιμάχη, προγόνοις

μητρ‹ί› | τ‹ε Φ›αινί‹π›πηι καὶ πατρὶ Παυσανίαι,

σῆ‹ς› δ ᾿ἀρετῆ‹ς μ›νη |μ‹ε›ῖον ὁρᾶν τό‹δ›ε τοῖς παρι ô σιν

σωφροσύνη‹ς› τ‹ε›5

It has been fated that all who live must die, but you,

Pausimache, have left your parents an intense pain,

to your mother Phaenippe and your father Pausanias.

Of your excellence and good judgment, this is the monument

so that all who pass by may see it.⁶

In his classic study on stelai and epigrams, Clairmont recalls the Kerameikos images that recreate wedding preparations, and he attributes the same symbolic value both to the mirror and to loutrophoroi: an allusion to marriage. However, the depiction of a mirror on funerary stelai has been interpreted in different ways. As the general thesis of his study, Clairmont himself argues that there is no special link between the epigram and the stele, but that the two reinforce each other. He suggests that this very high-quality relief would have been available in a sculptor’s workshop, and the parents considered it suitable for Pausimache’s memorial.7

Over the last two decades, numerous studies have examined how inscriptions and images on funerary memorials complement each other, especially at the level of reception or viewer/reader response.⁸ Traditionally, however, the tendency has been to study the images and texts separately, the stelai on one hand and their inscribed epigrams on the other, mentioning at the most a very generic, stereotype-ridden relationship between the two. Even so, there have also been those who find disparities between these two components of the funerary monument. In this particular case, it has been noted that, while the epitaph underscores the arete and sophrosyne of Pausimache, the stele has nothing to do with these ideals, focusing instead on the mirror, on adornment, on the woman as a basis of economic power among the Athenian elite.9 But there are several clarifications to be made regarding this comment: first, recall once more that arete and sophrosyne are also the adornment of men; and in this case we have not only a woman, but more specifically a maiden, and this is the context in which I believe we are to understand the mirror. Besides, it is not clear that there is any contradiction between the desired traits of arete and sophrosyne, and the iconographic motif of the mirror, as the adornment/virtue conflict is more Christian than Greek.

A series of interesting studies is dedicated to the specific motif of the mirror in Greek funerary art¹⁰ and in a broader sense to the language of gestures in these monuments.¹¹ Bectarte’s study is especially helpful since it presents a catalogue of funerary images that have a mirror, including images that do not appear in the reference catalogue by Clairmont, who limits his evidence to Attica and to the Classical age.¹² According to Bectarte, the appearance of a mirror in funerary stelai must have some meaning beyond a mere reference to personal toilette – an assertion that we can accept regardless of whether we agree with the value Bectarte ultimately attributes to it. Where I do not concur is with the author’s initial reasoning, formulated as follows: there must be consistency between what the epitaph says and what the image says, and the epitaphs never consider attention to one’s personal toilette to be a subject of praise, ergo … However, this formulation should be qualified: the fact that the toilette is not expressly praised does not mean that it is rejected, not to mention the polysemic nature of these images, and the variation in meanings that are added or lost over time. The mirror, with no negative connotation whatsoever, is the quintessential attribute of the woman in Greek art, and defines a female space in any context.13

Therefore, based on what I consider to be an excessively restrictive interpretation regarding the meaning of this important iconographic element, Bectarte rejects any connection to the toilette¹⁴ or to adornment, shall we say, to any frivolous context (since this is what seems to be assumed),¹⁵ and her conclusion is that the mirror symbolizes the change that a person experiences when overtaken by death. Such symbolism, she assures us, falls in line with the content of the epitaphs, the baseline premise for her entire analysis: the mirror in funerary reliefs is a symbol of the psyche abandoning the body, which it outlives indefinitely, ‘as the epitaphs say’.16

Nonetheless, it seems somewhat risky to make general assertions about the concept and representation of the flight of souls in epitaphs and stelai from such a wide time spectrum as that covered by this study’s catalogue (from the fifth to the first centuries BC, as noted above). Whether or not this interpretation of the mirror as an iconographic motif is valid for the post-Classical era, can we affirm that epitaphs from the fifth and fourth centuries BC say anything about the psyche? I will try to answer this immediately, but first I remind the reader that the idea of the soul being separated at the moment of death is already found, of course, in Homer (cf. Il. 16. 856), and that vase painters occasionally represent this parting with a small bird, the eidolon of the deceased, which could even display a human face.17 Hence, it is not a matter of denying belief in the flight of souls, but to test whether this was a subject of Classical epitaphs and stelai in Attica, art that has always been identified as retrospective and not forward looking.

So then, what do Greek funerary epigrams say about this separation, about this moment when the psyche abandons the body?

1.The first epitaph that may document an allusion to the psyche/soma duality, and their different paths after death, is from 432 BC, a public monument for those fallen in the battle of Potidaea in that year: αἰθὲρ μὲμ φσυχὰς ὑπεδέχσατο, σό[ατα δὲ χθὸν]| τνδε.18 Of the Athenians fallen in Potidaea, the air received their souls, the earth their bodies.

2.Following this, the remaining evidence is already from the mid-fourth century BC: Εὐρυμάχου ψυχὴν | καὶ ὑπερφιάλος διαν |οίας / αἰθὴρ ὑγρὸς ἔχ |ει, σῶμα δὲ τύνβος ὅδε,¹⁹ The soul of Eurymachus and his powerful thoughts / are held by the moist air; his body, by this grave; ὀστέα μὲν καὶ σάρκας | ἔ{ι}χει χθὼν παῖδα τὸν ἡ |δύν, / ψυχὴ δὲ εὐσεβέων | οἴχεται εἰς θάλαμον,20 The ground holds the bones and flesh, the sweet child, / and his soul has parted to the chamber of the pious; [ἧς μὲν σῶμ’ ἐνὶ] γ[ῆι κ]εῖται, ψυχὴ δ’ ἐν Ὀλύμπ[ωι],²¹ the reconstruction of this woman’s epitaph is not clear, but in regard to the expression that concerns us, it would be something like this: her body lies in the earth, her soul in Olympus.

3.Finally, ψυχὴ μὲν προλιποῦσα τὸ σόν, [Δημήτριε, σῶμα]| οἴχεται εἰς Ἔρεβος.²² Once again the epigram is only partially preserved, and if we accept the reconstruction of the first two verses, it would read as follows: After your soul abandoned your body, Demetrius, it departs for the Erebus.

The evidence is thus extremely limited and depends to a large measure on reconstructions; moreover, it leads into the difficult debate around the ancient Greeks’ concept of soul and immortal soul, a topic I will return to in the final chapter.

The expressions are varied: the soul can pass to the domain of the air, it can go to the Erebus, even to Olympus. But in summary, I was unable to find more than just a few examples with any allusion to that moment in which the soul abandons the body.²³ And this would confirm the commonly recognized trait we have just mentioned, that stele art is more retrospective than forward-looking. While it is possible to find elements in Archaic memorials that allude to an afterlife (such as the lotus of Phrasikleia), the iconography of Attic stelai refers to earthly life, and this is where the mirror as a feminine attribute fits perfectly, just as the strigil clearly indicates a masculine context.

Furthermore, when these stelai do show any forward-looking concern, they are more inclined to allude to immortal fame, to kleos, and not to a new life of the soul:

[σ]ῶμα μὲν ἐν κόλποισι κατὰ χθὼν ἥδε καλ[ύπτει] |

[Τι]οκλείας, τὴν σὴν δὲ ἀρετὴν οὐθεὶς [φθ]ίσι [ἰών]· |

[ἀθά]νατος μνήμη σωφρ[ο]σύνης ἕνε[κ]α.24

This earth encloses in its bowels the body

of Timocleia, but no eternity can consume your excellence:

immortal remembrance because of your good judgement.

Here there is no mention of the soul, but of immortal remembrance, in contrast to the body. It would seem that there is a well-established idea, from antiquity, of the body–kleos dichotomy. In short, if the mirror says anything about the separation of the soul and the body, something that I would rule out, it is not in support of what the epitaphs say, as they seem to show little interest in the matter. In fact, the psyche does not seem to have received any special attention in Greek thought of the Archaic age. Mario Vegetti remarked that the soul as a central figure in religious and moral thought was a novelty, introduced into Greece around the sixth century BC by Dionysiac, Orphic and Pythagorean movements, remaining outside of mainstream thought for a long time;25 for example, at the end of this chapter we will discuss the stele of young Dionysius (c. 346/338 BC), which speaks of the immortal soul.²⁶ At any rate, in classical Greece, the iconographic representation of that liminal moment of separation of body and soul is to be found not in the stelai, but in another type of corpus such as ceramics, especially the lekythoi.

The mirror in Attic stelai

I will attempt to draw a conclusion as to the meaning of the mirror, based on a number of examples limited in space and time to the Attic stelai of the Classical period. I feel this restriction is appropriate, and brings coherence to this study, since most of the evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries BC is found in Attica:²⁷ of the eleven stelai with a mirror from the fifth century BC, six are from Attica, as are all eleven catalogued examples from the fourth century BC. Although this motif persists and becomes even more common in later centuries, especially in the second century BC, it disappears from Attic art in the post-classical age.²⁸

Apart from a few exceptions that I will address later, no study seems to observe that the different stelai that show a woman with a mirror can easily be grouped into two iconographic types:²⁹ (1) a maiden holds a mirror in her hand – presented in three quarters – and she is looking at herself in it;³⁰ or (2) a woman holds a mirror – which faces us straight on – between herself and one or more other figures.³¹

Before continuing, let us address certain stelai from the fourth century BC which do not seem, at first glance, to completely fit in the categories I have proposed. To begin, there is the stele of a girl who holds a mirror in her hand and presents it straight on; in this case the dating is uncertain, and I concur with Clairmont’s idea that it is a Roman creation.³² In addition, we have a stele where the companion is the one who holds a mirror and a little box in her hands;³³ another where we see a young woman holding a mirror in her lap;³⁴ and finally, an image of a young woman arranging her hair while looking at herself in a mirror, and she in turn is being observed by an elderly man; this scene is portrayed on a loutrophoros, which in turn is depicted on the stele.35 Regarding this last example, we can mention a scene that must have been quite similar, represented on a fragment of a funerary stele in the Calvet Museum of Avignon,³⁶ where a maiden is arranging her hair with her right hand, while in her left hand she holds a mirror that is not preserved. This stele is not taken into account in the Bectarte repertory, but it is important in relation to the cited loutrophoros image, and would confirm that it is customary for the images to form a series, and that gestures belong to very specific repertories.

These variants can be included without hesitation in the two types that I have indicated above:³⁷

1.Maiden looking at herself in the mirror. She can be alone³⁸ or accompanied by another female figure who usually offers her a box, and who, apparently, has given a mirror to her³⁹ or is about to do so.⁴⁰ In the latter case, logically the maiden is not yet looking at herself in it. There is another variation, where the maiden has already received the mirror, but it is in her lap, and she gazes into the distance.⁴¹ A similar case is the scene of a young woman looking at herself in the mirror and arranging her hair with her other hand.⁴²

2.Woman showing a mirror. These are scenes with two or more characters: the woman, seated, raises a mirror; she is not looking at herself in it, but presents it straight on. The mirror occupies the centre of the scene.⁴³

This division between two general types of stelai with a mirror seems to be relevant, and I believe we may suggest a hypothesis that explains the difference between looking at oneself in the mirror and showing the mirror. The gestures in funerary scenes, as in the other spheres of iconography, are usually clearly codified. Like the objects represented in these scenes, they comprise a rather limited inventory. In Attic stelai there are certain elements, frankly few in number, that are unmistakable indications of age, sex and status: children’s toys, the young athlete’s strigil, the woman’s spinning wheel, the citizen’s walking stick, etc. Where does the mirror fit in? It naturally refers to the female gender, but depending on how it is presented, it might also indicate whether the represented female is a maiden or a married woman. In other words, it has a two-fold value: indicating gender (on its own) and age/status (according to its position). This interpretation would also fit with the idea that other authors have mentioned, that age classification of Greek women is closely linked to rites of passage and to sexuality.⁴⁴

The clear distinction between these two types seems too striking to be overlooked; but of course, this idea need not be incompatible with other meanings that have been attributed to the use of the mirror in this context. Again, I would emphasize that my considerations of the iconographic value of the mirror are limited to Attic funerary stelai from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and it is advantageous to clearly mark out a corpus of study. Something so fundamental as the mirror appearing only in the hands of females and in stelai dedicated to women does not hold true for funerary representations from Apulia, also a well-studied corpus, where the mirror is widely present and with no gender distinction.45 For these Apulian vessels, one of the meanings suggested is that of an appeal to the deceased: in some representations, a figure other than the deceased has a mirror in hand and places it in front of the image of the deceased, as if inquiring, wanting to communicate with him or her, an unknown scenario in the Attic repertory. This sense of revealing (‘rite magique de révélation’)⁴⁶ has also been attributed to scenes in Attic stelai where the mirror is being offered. In this case, however, it is the deceased woman (in the Attic context, always female) who is holding it; in other words, this meaning would be assigned to the stelai that I defined as the second type. But again, it is worth mentioning that very little concern about the hereafter is seen in the iconography of Classical Attic stelai or in the epitaphs, when preserved.

When the woman holds a mirror that is presented straight on to the viewer, apparently not looking into it at all, might this be an indication that from now on she can no longer be seen directly? We receive a different impression from the scenes where a maiden is looking into a mirror, such as the Pausimache stele that we started with. Here the young girl is focused on herself – is this possibly a metaphor of her closed body, like the lotus in the hands of the kore Phrasikleia? Moreover, in almost all the stelai where a young woman gazes into a mirror, she is represented alone, holding in her hands that element so clearly marked as part of a wedding trousseau, a frozen image that again reminds us, as in Phrasikleia, of a bride carried off by Hades just before the wedding nuptials. By contrast, in the scenes of a woman who presents a mirror straight on (a mirror that she even seems to be giving back, as symbolizing the end of a marriage), there are always family groups, some of them with children and others with a man who is in all likelihood the husband of the deceased, whose status as a married woman (ΓΥΝΗ) is revealed in one case in the inscription itself.

In short, the mirror is a polysemic iconographic element, but its possible meanings are defined in part by the context in which it appears. It does not mean the same thing in each era, in all locations or on every type of physical support. Even within the funerary context, we can distinguish between the stelai representations that are the focus of this study, and use of the mirror as part of grave-goods; curiously, in the latter case, the mirror is not found in the hand of the deceased (as is the strigil when buried with males), but it is placed over the pelvis or uterus.47

In a well-defined corpus such as Attic stelai from the Classical period, gestures are highly codified and iconographic elements usually have a precise, easily identifiable value, even though a few gestures such as dexiosis have been interpreted in different ways. In this context, the double value that I have assigned to the mirror is quite pertinent: in an exclusively female context, it may indicate the status of maiden or of married woman, depending on the way it is represented. The generally accepted idea of Attic funerary stelai art as retrospective commemoration, not looking toward the future with allusions to a promise of life after death, but articulating social ideals and representing a certain ideology, would also fit with the meaning that I have proposed for the mirror.48 Any possible association with transit of the soul would be secondary.

How to mourn for a maiden

Returning to the long-held assumption that the stele and epitaph of Pausimache refer to the death of an unwedded maiden, I hope to have added a convincing argument that the mirror in her hand reinforces that idea. And to this I would add another piece of evidence. While Pausimache, among the Attica stelai, is the only woman-with-mirror image where epitaph and image can be studied together, there is another funerary monument with a mirror (though the image is far from clear). This memorial comes from Sinope and refers even more explicitly to a maiden who died in the flower of youth:

(A)

(B)

παρι |ὼν στῆ |θί τε κἀ |ποίκτιρον· |

στήλη καὶ τό |δε σῆμα θυ |γατρός,

ἣ προ |λιπ ô σ’ ἥβης ἄν |θος

πατρόθε |ν ὤλετο μονο |γενής.

(C)

παριὼν | [σ]τῆθί τε κ |ἀποίκτιρο |ν·

στήλη κ |αὶ τόδε σῆμ |α Παρθενικῆ |ς,

ἣ προλιπ ô σ’ ἥβ |ης ἄνθος

πατρόθ |εν ὤλετο μονογεν |ής.49

I am the tomb of the daughter of Nadys, the Carian.

Passer-by, stop and mourn:

This is the stele and tomb of a daughter

who, having left behind the flower of youth,

died, her father’s only offspring.

Passer-by, stop and mourn:

This is the stele and tomb of Parthenica50

who, having left behind the flower of youth,

died, her father’s only offspring.

This memorial is a small marble pyramid; on side A it has a relief with two figures, a seated woman, and a girl standing across from her. We can accept Clairmont’s assumption that the girl, probably holding a mirror in her hands, is the dead maiden, and the seated figure is her mother. The inscription is distributed among the three sides of the pyramid.

The epigram is special for many reasons, including its particular meter,⁵¹ and, of more interest to this study, its lexicon; for example, the term monogenes (μονογενής), ‘only daughter’, makes its single appearance here, among all the Archaic and Classical epigrams. Also interesting is the expression hebes anthos (ἥβης ἄνθος), ‘flower of youth’, which we find in reference to a young woman only here, and in one other epitaph from the fifth century BC, from Thessaly:

νεπία ἐσ’ ἔθανον καὶ οὐ λάβον ἄνθος ἔτ’ ἕβας, |

ἀλλ’ ἱκόμαν πρόστεν πολυδάκρυον εἰς Ἀχέροντα· |

μνᾶμα δὲ τεῖδε πατὲρ Ὑπεράνορος παῖς Κλεόδαμος |

στᾶσέ με Θεσαλίαι καὶ μάτερ θυγατρὶ Κορόνα.52

I died as a child and did not reach the flower of youth,

but came earlier to tearful Acheron.

As a memorial, her father Kleodamos son of Hyperanor raised me here,

for his daughter Thessalia, along with her mother, Korona.

In Athens, no funerary monument from this period laments a female’s youthfulness, or hebe (ἥβη). The expression ‘ruined youth’ (ἥβην ὄλεσθαι), was customary on public monuments 53 or monuments for the war dead, such as the famous epitaph for Tetichos that I have already discussed. Also exceptional in the Sinope stele is the verb oleto (ὤλετο) applied to a woman, in contrast to the more usual thanein (θανεῖν).⁵⁴ It reappears with a small variation [ὤλεσας ἡλικίαν] in a stele from Histria, from the fourth century BC, also for a maiden dead before marriage:

(i) Ἡδίστη | Εὐαγόρο | θυγάτηρ.

(ii) τίς θν[ητῶν ?κραδίας οὕτως ἐκύ] | ρησεν ἀνοίκ

ὅστις [ν] | οὐκ ἐπὶ σοί, παρθένε, δάκρυ [χέοι], |

ἣ κάλλει κόζμωι τε μολοῦσα εἰ[ς ἐλ] |πίδα δόξης

Ἡδίστη πρὸ γάμω[ν] | ὤλεσας ἡλικίαν.55

Hediste daughter of Evagoras. What mortal has such a pitiless heart

that he would not shed tears for you, maiden,

you who could have hoped for fame for your beauty and propriety,

Hediste, and have lost your youth before marriage?

These mourned maidens all share a common difference from Pausimache: none of them is Athenian. These funerary monuments come from Sinope, Thessaly and Histria. As a work of art, the Attic stele of Pausimache is incomparable, but the verbal expression of sorrow seems to be more restrained. A bit later in the fourth century BC, the Attic stelai would also mourn the youth of dead women, whether maidens or not:

[εἰ θέμις ἦν] νητὴν ἐναρίθμιο[ν ¯ ˘ ˘ ο]υσαν

ἀθανάταις | νο[μίσαι, σοὶ] τὸ γέρας τόδ’ ἂν | ἦν,

Ἡράκλ[ει]α· σὺ γὰρ προλι |ποῦσ’ ἥβν [π]ολυανθῆ

ὤιχ |ου ἀποφθιμ[έ]η μητρὸς π |ρολιποῦσα μέ[λ]αθρον

Σίμ |ου ἀνοικτίστω[ς] Φερσεφό |νης θαλάμου‹ς›.56

If it were permitted that a mortal be counted […]

among the immortals, this would be your lot,

Herakleia; because you, abandoning the blossom of youth,

dead, abandoning the abode of your mother

Simon, you left without pity to the chamber of Persephone.

Given that this epigram mentions the mother, we understand that it speaks of an unmarried maiden; in the following epigram, it is the husband who mourns the lost youth of his wife:

οὐχὶ πέπλους, οὐ χρυσὸν ἐθαύμασεν ἐμ βίωι ἥδε,

ἀλλὰ πόσιν τε αὑτῆς σωφροσύ[νην τ(ε) ˘ ˘ ¯ ]. |

ἀντὶ δὲ σῆς ἥβης, Διονυσία, ἡ‹λ›ικίας τε

τόνδε τάφον κοσμεῖ σὸς πόσις Ἀντίφ[ιλος].57

In life she admired neither peploi nor gold,

but her husband and her own good judgement […]

Instead of attending to your youth, Dionysia, and to your vitality,

Your husband Antiphilos attends to the adornment of this grave.

We may wonder whether, in the Athenian fifth century, hebe (ἥβη) and andreia (ἀνδρεία), youth and virility, were inseparable, that is, as an object of praise. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the fourth century BC, but not earlier, the ἥβη of women is mentioned in Athens. Nicole Loraux, in her study of the specific formula for lament over youth ruined [(ἀγλαὸν) ὤλεσαν / ὠλέσατ(ε) ἥβην], indicates that starting with the sixth century BC, this term was reserved for eulogizing the warrior fallen in battle,58 but the city takes it up again in the fifth century BC for eulogizing its dead.⁵⁹ According to Loraux, this continuity suggests a certain persistence in representing the dead warrior as a youth, in addition to confirming that ‘ἥβη est d’abord une qualité’.⁶⁰ Two shifts are perceived in this reuse of an aristocratic formula: democratization of praise and the continuation of certain profoundly aristocratic values.⁶¹

If, as Loraux says, hebe represents both the strength and fertility of the city, inasmuch as it is rooted in the nurturing soil of the homeland, of which it is ‘la plus noble floration’,⁶² can this term then be used in this sense when mourning a maiden dead before marriage, or a young wife? It would seem so, but in Attica, only as of the fourth century BC.⁶³

Untimely death

At this time I wish to review the rest of the epigrams from the Classical period that mourn the death of maidens or boys, selecting as always those that are most significant and well preserved. It would be inexcusable to begin without mentioning the well-known work by Anne-Marie Vérilhac – mentioned in my introduction – that is dedicated to the epitaphs of boys who died before achieving ephebe status.⁶⁴ Because of the focus of this study, which does not include girls, and because of the period covered, from the fifth century BC to the sixth century AD, including the literary epigrams of the Palatine Anthology, very few of the texts discussed by Vérilhac interest us directly. However, I do wish to make note of our agreement on selection criteria. Just as I have been doing until now, she makes use of a number of indicators that, in isolation or in combination, ensure that a given text constitutes an epitaph dedicated to a boy who died before achieving ephebe status, namely: explicit mention of this or a reference to some other fact that precedes ephebeia, an express indication of age, use of terms that unmistakably denote children (nepios, νήπιος, or pais, παῖς), representation of a child in the funerary relief. The motif of death before marriage, our priority in this chapter, appears only seven times in the corpus established by Vérilhac, always in the Roman period. As the author indicates, there is a rival motif in the epitaphs of boys: death ‘before the first beard’.

As we approach the study of this type of epitaph, I would first like to quote the following distich, engraved on a marble stone, where we find one of the first appearances of the term aoros (ἄωρος), ‘untimely’:65

ἐσλὸς ἐὼν Πολ‹ύ›ιδος Ἐχεκρατίδεω φίλος ὑιὸς |

οἶκον ἀμαυρώσας ὤλετ’ ἄωρος ἐών.⁶⁶

The dear son of Echecratides, noble Poluidos, died before his time,

leaving his home in darkness.

This epitaph can be contrasted to another found on a marble ogival stele, whose distich offers us the first significant example⁶⁷ of the opposite term, horaion (ὡραῖον). It is dedicated to elderly Littias, dead at one hundred years of age, leaving his children a lament at its proper time:

(i) Λιττίας. Χοιρίνη. Λυσιστράτη.

(ii) εὐδαίμων ἔθανον δεκάδας δέκ’ ἐτῶν διαμείψας, |

ὡραῖον πένθος παισὶν ἐμοῖσι λιπών.68

Littias. Choirine. Lysistrate.

I have died happy after passing through ten decades

leaving my children a lament at its proper time.

But let us return to the epitaphs dedicated to the young. The following example, which we will look at more closely, is composed of a marble stele with loutrophoros, and the following inscription in elegiac distichs:

πότνια Σωφροσύνη θύγατερ μεγαλόφρονος Αἰδ ô ς, |

πλεῖστά σε τιμήσας εὐπόλεμόν τε Ἀρετὴν |

Κλείδημος Μελιτεὺς Κλειδημίδο ἐνθάδε κεῖται, |

ζῆλος πατρί ποτ’ , μη[ρὶ δὲ νῦν ὀ][νη].69

Lady Sophrosyne, daughter of great-minded Aidos,

one who has given much honour to you and to Arete, good in war,

Kleidemos of Melite, son of Kleidemides, lies here,

once the source of his father’s pride, now of his mother’s pain.

In the praise of Kleidemos, the terms sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) and arete (ἀρετή) are used; in this case I have chosen to simply transcribe and capitalize them, instead of applying my usual translation of ‘good judgement’ and ‘excellence’, respectively. While both of these are very common in epitaphs of men and women, this example is especially interesting because both nouns are developed and taken to the ‘masculine’ sphere, at least in the case of Excellence, described as good in war.

In the very stylistically refined final verse, the father and mother are mentioned, but not their shared pain, as in other epitaphs; instead, this epigram stresses the pride (ζῆλος) that the father once (πότε) felt, and the mother’s intense pain (ὀδύνη) now (νῦν). The term odyne (ὀδύνη) – making its one appearance here, out of the entire corpus – is used in very precise fashion: a generic name for physical pain, it becomes specialized as typically female, especially in reference to the pain of childbirth, the mother’s pain.70

Thanks to preservation of the marble stele where a loutrophoros is represented, we have the information that the boy perished before marriage, while the epigram does not make this explicit. This epitaph from the heart of the Classical age, between the fifth and fourth centuries BC, thus confirms the usefulness of studying text and image together, of not separating the physical support, intended to be seen and to remain, from verses that obviously were not shared in any other oral or written context. The loutrophoros provides complementary information to the epigram, and at least partly contradicts a rather widespread idea that the topic of death before marriage, ‘being suitable for deceased females, is restricted, in the archaic and classical periods, to young unmarried girls’.71 The truth is that marble loutrophoroi indicate the graves of those dead before marriage, of either sex, but they are more frequent on the graves of men than of women, who married much earlier.⁷² Another funerary monument from the fourth century BC represents a similar case to that of Kleidemos’s memorial. There are two fragments of a marble stele, where we see a man seated and a youth standing, in addition to a loutrophoros. The inscription is as follows:

[σ]ῆς δ᾿ἀρετῆς καὶ σωφροσύν[η]ς μνημεῖον ἅπασιν |

[λείπ]ις οἰκ‹τ›ρὰ παθὼν Μοίρας ὕπο, δαίμονος ἐχθροῦ.⁷³

You have left to everyone a remembrance of your excellence and good judgement

After suffering the piteous lot of Moira, hateful divinity.

The presence of the loutrophoros can help us better understand these two verses and infer that the terrible destiny spoken of here is precisely that cruel death that snatches away youths in the prime of life.74

The following example, from the mid-fourth century BC, is a very explicit epitaph about the pain caused by an untimely death, specifically, death before marriage. It is written in elegiac distichs:

(i) Πλαγγὼν | Προμάχου | Λακεδαιμονίο‹υ›.

(ii) οὔ σε γάμων πρόπολος, Πλαγγών, ῾Υμέναιος ἐν οἴκοις |

ὤλβισεν, ἀλλ’ ἐδάκρυσε ἐκτὸς ἀποφθιμένην· |

σῶι δὲ πάθει μήτηρ καταλείβεται, οὐδέ ποτ’ αὐτὴν |

λείπουσι θρήνων πενθίδιοι στεναχαί.⁷⁵

Plangon, daughter of Promachos, of Lacedaemonia.

Plangon, the servant of weddings, Hymenaios,

gave you no happiness at home, but, outside, he wept for you, dead:

because of your misfortune your mother sheds constant tears and

the mournful complaints of the threnodies never leave her.

This epitaph develops the topic ‘death before marriage’ in a very elaborate fashion. Hymenaios himself, the servant of weddings, intervenes in an image that contrasts happiness and mourning (ὤλβισεν / ἐδάκρυσε): the young girl will not receive Hymenaios’ blessing at home, but will be mourned outside the home (ἐν οἴκοις / ἐκτός). The meaning of this opposition is not clear at first glance. The mother’s importance in the epitaph, her prominence in the mourning, leads one to think that the girl still lives in her parents’ home. In that case, perhaps through the expression en oikois (ἐν οἴκοις), in the first line, it alludes to the girl’s future home, once married. If this is so, both en oikois (ἐν οἴκοις) and ektos (ἐκτός) would refer to Hymenaios. There is no need to think that the girl has died ektos, outside the home, for whatever reason, but that Hymenaios was not able to accompany her and give her happiness in her new life; instead he mourns her premature death, outside the new home.76

In this epitaph, dedicated by a mother to her daughter, the verb kataleíbo (καταλείβεται) attracts my attention. Meaning ‘distil, drip’, in the funerary epigrams it appears on this occasion only. In general, the poets used this verb on few occasions, and in passages referring specifically to honey, wine, sweat or tears. I have translated it as ‘sheds constant tears’ because I understand this to be the image intended by the author. Moreover, it may be possible to relate this expression to the language of contemporary tragedy; in particular, I recall two passages from Euripides that express pain similar to that described here. Namely, in The Trojan Women, Hecuba weeps for her children, δάκρυά τ᾿ἐκ δακρύων καταλείβεται ἁμετέροισι δόμοις, ‘tears born from tears are poured out all through our house’;77 in The Suppliants, the chorus of mothers asks what pain can be greater than that of seeing one’s children dead, … λάβετ᾿, ἀμφίπολοι, / γραίας ἀμενοῦς (οὐ γὰρ ἔνεστιν / ῥώμη παίδων ὑπὸ πένθους) / πολλοῦ τε χρόνου ζώσης μέτρα δὴ / καταλειβομένης τ᾿ ἄλγεσι πολλοῖς, ‘servants, take this old woman void of strength (there is no vigour left in her, due to the sorrow for her children), she has lived too long and is exhausted from much pain’.78 This second example would be the most similar to our epigram, although I have translated the participle καταλειβομένης with a concise ‘exhausted’.

In reality, the verb is not easily translated, it requires an explanation. Benveniste offers some interesting comments on the matter: leibo (like the Latin libo) has become specialized in religious language to mean ‘making libations’, but in the Greek language, the existence of another term that apparently means the same thing, cheo (χέω), calls for a finer distinction. To be precise, cheo indicates that a liquid pours abundantly, while leibo is ‘to distil, to drip’. The semantic specialization that takes leibo into the worship sphere coexists with a generic value already present in Homer, in expressions like, precisely, dakrya leibein (δάκρυα λείβειν), ‘shed tears’.⁷⁹ In the epitaph that we presently consider, no object is mentioned: the tears are not named, it merely states, meter kataleibetai (μήτηρ καταλείβεται): the mother disintegrates, is spent, she melts, drop by drop … The indication of weeping in a funerary context goes without saying.

Also from the mid-fourth century BC is the following epigram, composed of twelve verses arranged in groups of four. The first eight are poorly preserved, but the last part can be read perfectly:

(iii) ὦ μελέα μῆτερ καὶ ὁμαίμονες ὅς τέ σ’ ἔφυσεν |

Μειδοτέλης αὑτῶι πῆμα, Κλεοπτολέμη, |

οἳ γόον, οὐ θάλαμον τὸν σὸν προσορῶσι θανούσης |

θρῆνόν τε ἀντ’ ἀνδρὸς καὶ τάφον ἀντὶ γάμου.⁸⁰

Oh wretched mother, relatives and your father

Meidoteles, what misfortune for him, Kleoptoleme,

with you dead, they contemplate not the marriage bed but the lament,

the threnody instead of a husband, the grave instead of a wedding.

Despite the poorly preserved state of the first part of the epitaph, we can clearly read in the second verse dodeketis (δωδεκέτις), whereby we have an indication of the girl’s age, twelve years old. In the following verses only the beginning is well preserved, but what we read is quite significant: in the fifth verse, ὦ πολύκλαυθ’ Ἅιδη, Oh, Hades, cause of great weeping!, and in the sixth verse, the verb herpasas (ἥρπασας), you snatched away, denoting violent abduction, whereby we have the image of abduction by Hades, very appropriate for the epitaph of young Kleoptoleme.

This time in hexameters, another interesting epitaph comes to us from Attica:

ἥδε χθν άλυψε Κλεὼ τὴν σώφρονα πάντα |

δύσμορον ἡλικίας· ὀλοφύρεται ἥ σε τεκοῦσα, |

σούς τε κασιγνήτους λ‹υ›ποῦσα ἔθανες, ‹δ›ή‹μ›ου φῶς, |

σὴν αὔξουσ’ ἀρετὴν καὶ σωφροσύνην ἐρατεινήν.81

This soil has covered Kleo, sensible in all things,

ill-fated in her youth. Your mother mourns you

And with your death you have saddened your brothers, o light of the town,

you whose excellence and sweet good judgement you made to shine.

Worthy of note in this epitaph is the mention of the city. The death of the maiden Kleo has saddened her mother and brothers, but the girl is also commemorated as δήμου φῶς, the town joins in the mourning. The death of Kleo is mourned by a community that laments the loss of a girl, probably from the aristocracy, who has gone, taking with her the hopes of her family and of her possible suitors.⁸²

As we pass from the fourth to the third century BC, I wish to focus our attention on the following epitaph from Thessaly, in elegiac distichs, full of elements alluding to immortal fame:

Ἀλκινόας κούραν λεῦσσε, ξένε, καὶ Μενεκόρρου |

Τιμάνδραν, ἥβας τὰν στέρισε αἶσα λυγρά· |

τᾶς ἀρετὰν αὔξοντες ἀείμναστον συνόμαιμοι |

οὐκ ἀκλεῶς φθιμέναν τῶιδε τάφωι κτέρισαν.83

Look, stranger, upon the maiden daughter of Alkinoa and Menekorros,

upon Timandra, her youth snatched away by a sad destiny,

her siblings glorifying her memorable excellence,

dead not without fame, they honoured her with this tomb.

In this poem the use of leusse (λεῦσσε) in the first verse deserves particular comment. In Bruno Snell’s careful examination of the different verbs used in Homeric poems to allude to sight, he verified that all of them emphasize a specific manner of looking. It’s something beyond the function of sight, something that has to do more with the object that is being observed and the feelings that accompany the act of seeing.⁸⁴ The verb that interests us here, leussein (λεύσσειν) is related etymologically to leukos (λευκός), ‘brilliant’, and had a very specific meaning: to look upon something luminous. It also implied a kind of looking with pride, happily, and therefore, was never used in reference to a worried or fearful look.85 This use disappeared from later Greek prose, but not from poetry, and we find it again in the epitaph for Timandra. Another epitaph, one of those attributed to Simonides in the Palatine Anthology, is very illustrative of the meaning of the verb λεύσσειν: Ἄνθρωπ’ οὐ Κροίσου λεύσσεις τάφον, ἀλλὰ γὰρ ἀνδρὸς / χερνήτεω μικρὸς τύμβος, ἐμοὶ δ’ ἱκανός (‘Man, you are not looking on the tomb of Kroisos, but a poor man needs only a little mound, and for me it is enough’).86 It seems clear that the use of leusso is motivated by the allusion to Kroisos of Lydia: οὐ Κροίσου λεύσσεις τάφον, we might paraphrase, ‘you are not standing before the brilliant tomb of Kroisos’.

Returning to the epitaph in question, the object of the verb leussein is kouran (κούραν), a maiden who is noted for her arete and who has died not without fame, ouk akleos (οὐκ ἀκλεῶς). As we have seen in the Phrasikleia epitaph, the alliteration of κ- in the first verse emphasizes the value of the term akleos in the last verse; in short, it draws our attention to kleos, the ultimate purpose of the epitaph. If my suggestion about the value of λεύσσειν in this epigram is correct, the first verse would say something like, ‘Look with admiration, stranger, upon the maiden daughter …’

Another marble stele, with a relief representing a loutrophoros, bears the following epitaph in elegiac distichs.

(i) [Εὐθ]ύκριτος ?[[]]αῖος

(ii) ἐνθάδε τὸν πάσης ἀρετῆς ἐπὶ τ |έρμα μολόντα |

[Ε]ὐθύκριτον πατρία χθὼν | ἐκάλυψε τάφωι, |

μητρὶ φίλον καὶ πατρὶ κασι |νήταις τε ποθεινὸν |

πᾶσ τε ἑταίροισιν σύντροφο[ν] | ἡλικίας.87

Euthykritos of Eiteai

Here, having reached the end of all excellence,

Euthykritos is covered by his native soil with a mound,

loved by his mother and his father and longed for by his sisters

and by all his hetairoi who grew up with him.

On the loutrophoros, which indicates that the youth has died before marriage, we find a man and a nude youth both standing, each of them accompanied by a dog. Might the youth’s nudity, together with the presence of dogs, be an allusion to hunting as one of his pastimes? The aristocratic scenario is evoked both by the nude (in this case heroic, not only erotic) and by the mention of companions, the hetairoi, noblemen united through strong ties of loyalty. The figure of pistos hetairos (πιστὸς ἑταῖρος), ‘faithful friend’, will be analysed in the next chapter.

Finally, we turn to another epitaph of a young man, probably dead prior to marriage and received by the chamber of Persephone. This is an unusual epigram, one of the longest of the period, preserved on a marble stele and composed of elegiac distichs. Between the first two couplets and the next three, we can read part of the name Dionysius, identified as a cousin of the orator Hypereides.88

(i) ὀθεὶς μόχθος ἔπαινον ἐπ’ ἀνδράσι τοῖς ἀγαθοῖσιν |

ζητεῖν, ηὕρηται δὲ ἄφθονος εὐλογία· |

ἧς σὺ τυχὼν ἔθανες, Διονύσιε, καὶ τὸν ἀνάνκης |

κοινὸν Φερσεφόνης πᾶσιν ἔχεις θάλαμον.

(ii) [Vestigia incerta nominis] Διονύσιος λφίνο.

(iii) σῶμα μὲν ἐνθάδε σόν, Διονύσιε, γαῖα, καλύπτει, |

ψυχὴν δὲ ἀθάνατον κοινὸς ἔχει ταμίας· |

σοῖς δὲ φίλοις καὶ μητρὶ κασιγνήταις τε λέλοιπας |

πένθος ἀείμνηστον σῆς φιλίας φθίμενος· |

δισσαὶ δ’ αὖ πατρίδες σ’ ἡ μὲν φύσει, ἡ δὲ νόμοισιν |

ἔστερξαν πολλῆς εἵνεκα σωφροσύνης.⁸⁹

There is no weariness in finding praise for noble men

and plentiful tribute can be found.

You have died after gaining this tribute, Dionysius, and from Ananke,

from Persephone, you have the chamber common to all.

[…] Dionysius son of Alphinos.

Here the soil hides your body, Dionysius,

but the immortal soul is held by the common lord.

You have left to your friends and your mother and your sisters,

by dying, a pain that will always recall your love:

and two homelands, one by nature and the other by law,

loved you for your plentiful good judgment.

Dionysius was an Athenian, a cleruch sent to Samos. The penultimate line refers to this double status: δισσαὶ δ’ αὖ πατρίδες σ’ ἡ μὲν φύσει, ἡ δὲ νόμοισιν, ‘two homelands, one by nature and the other by law’. As for the eschatological allusions that may be inferred from both the epitaph and the decoration of the memorial, no claims can be made with certainty, but I will point out the most striking facts.

The epigram mentions the chamber of a Persephone who is considered as Ananke;90 this chamber is spoken of as common (κοινός), in an expression that we return to in our final chapter, possibly alluding to a community of initiates. The second part of the epitaph also includes a mention of the separation of body and soul, and the latter is described as immortal, a very unusual affirmation for this era (mid-fourth century BC), according to what we have seen supra when studying the Pausimache memorial. A final eschatological reference is found in referring to a koinos tamias (κοινὸς ταμίας), literally: ‘common distributor’, namely, of souls, who can be no other than Hermes.91 This divine being, better known as psychopompos, conductor of souls, is also psychotamias, charged with leaving each soul in its corresponding place in the Underworld.92

This monument, which was found in Kerameikos, consists of a marble stele with pediment and base. It is not decorated with a relief but with a painting showing a man or a woman standing on the left and a man, probably Dionysius, sitting on the right. Above the monument there is a pillar superimposed with a bull (Dionysiac symbol). Two lions are placed on the right and the left. All these characteristics of the funerary epigram and monument lead us to think that young Dionysius had been initiated into mystery rites of some kind, possibly Eleusinian, or perhaps more likely, Bacchic.

This peribolos of Dionysius, son of Alphinos, was one of the most ostentatious of the Kerameikos. The appearance and development of periboloi (groups of graves surrounded by an enclosure wall) is a characteristic of funerary art from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Since the memorials studied here are no longer exclusive to the wealthier classes in the Classical period (in contrast to the Archaic), costly constructions like this one clearly stand out from the rest.93

Dated mostly to the fourth century BC, the epitaphs analysed in this chapter illustrate a shift in conventions regarding use of the formula ‘X set me/this marker (sema or mnema) up for Y’. Earlier, women only employed this formula (in other words, they only appeared as dedicants) on memorials dedicated to sons who had died in their youth. In contrast, in the epigrams discussed in this chapter, mothers – sometimes alone and sometimes mentioned together with the father – lament the loss not only of sons, but also of daughters who died before marrying.⁹⁴ However, what has not been documented to date in the fourth century BC is the existence of verse epitaphs dedicated by women to female friends. The epitaph from the late fifth century BC that a woman, Euthylla, dedicated to her friend Biote, an exceptional text with which I shall commence the next chapter (analysing funerary epigrams in which the bonds between dedicant and deceased are those of friendship rather than family ties), did not apparently enjoy any continuity in the Classical period.