INTRODUCTION

FROM THE THIRD QUARTER of the fifth to the last decades of the fourth century Athens produced some of the finest sculpted grave monuments to be found anywhere in the ancient world. These monuments, which were produced in thousands, adorned cemeteries and roadsides throughout the polis. The majority of them were decorated with sculpted or painted images of the deceased, often amongst his or her family, and were identified by the addition of an inscribed or painted name or epigram. This juxtaposition of word and image makes a study of them especially suitable for a volume devoted to an exploration of the two media. As we shall see, however, the relationship of word and image on classical Attic monuments is not merely a matter of comparing the one with the other; in fact this has proved to be a particularly frustrating approach. This chapter thus investigates other aspects of the concepts ‘text’ and ‘art’ and indeed of ‘reading’ and ‘viewing’ within the Athenian funerary context. In so doing, it argues that monuments should be studied in a ‘holistic’ manner, intellectually a simple notion, but actually hindered by the publication traditions and demands of our discipline, in which artistic images are often dissociated from their accompanying inscriptions and, where known, their archaeological contexts. Section II of the chapter focuses on the classical era during which, for well over a hundred years, a thriving sculpture industry supplied a market eager for gravestones ranging in quality from the mediocre to some of the finest examples of Attic workmanship in any sculptural form. From the fourth century we have (to date) about 1800 sculpted funerary monuments, a figure which suggests that a sizeable proportion of the population was commemorating graves in this fashion. This memorial tradition was brought to a sudden end, however, by a piece of legislation enacted by Demetrios of Phaleron, in his period of rule as epimelêtês at Athens between 317/6 and 307/6: a law which forbade the erection on graves of any monument which bore figurative decoration and restricted the tomb-marker to a number of simple forms bearing only a brief inscription (Section III).