A.'s book asks the question of how the newly established Athenian democracy attempted to honour the dead, a question worth asking as the relatively young United States learned with the building of the Vietnam War Memorial. A. examines the material, literary and epigraphical evidence while moving his focus over the public and the private, the monumental and the miniature, all to explore how the polis co-opted from Athenian families the rights and responsibilities of burying, mourning and memorialising the dead. The material culture interrogated here includes the expected funerary reliefs and casualty lists but also embraces architectural sculpture, wall painting, votive reliefs, portrait statues and white-ground lekythoi. This fine and ambitious book is made more valuable by its footnotes and bibliography, a treasure trove for students and scholars alike both to check A.'s sources and to explore more deeply the many media and questions he tackles. A.'s elegant prose is a pleasure to read and his thought-provoking examination lingers in the mind long after the book has been finished.
A. sets out to demonstrate that the daily landscape of the democratic polis of Athens was crafted by both its living and its dead, the former creating the monuments and the latter inspiring them. This seeming collaboration between those surviving in the city and those who fell striving to protect it was fraught with difficulties, including the heavy burden of earlier, aristocratic commemoration and the differing socio-economic standing of many of the fallen. Tensions existed, too, between the public dedications and the private ambitions of families who may have secretly longed for times past when those with the financial means could erect memorials that served the goals of promoting the living families as much as they honoured the dead individual.
A.'s examination begins before the creation of the democracy with the ancestral customs of the Athenians. The focus was on the family, not the polis, not surprisingly given that the former paid for the funerals and monuments of commemoration. All this changed when the polis co-opted both the practical matter of arranging the rites and, more significantly, the identity of the deceased as Athenian. A. Shapiro (AJA 95 [1991], 629–56) has previously explored this moment in the Athenian practice of mourning as it is represented in vase painting and A. broadens the scope to the funerary events in the Agora, especially at the Prytaneum. There the hearth of the polis replaced that of the oikos near which earlier protheses would have been conducted. This engaging discussion is marred only by A.'s readiness (p. 43) to embrace letter forms as a diagnostic to date the monument of the Marathonomachoi.
In Chapter 2, A. leads his reader to the public cemetery. Five million inhabitants of the modern city have made the exploration of the ancient city difficult and the identification of the public burial place is an example of the challenges of understanding the landscape of the ancient polis. While the precise location of many of the spots known from textual sources is still being located and explored, the lack of a barrier between the living and the dead is notable. The concept of autochthony does not arise in the book, but it might have played a role in motivating the democracy's desire to return the Athenian dead to the earth.
In Chapter 3 A. examines the casualty lists in which he sees the rhetoric of struggle and sacrifice for the common good. While A. notes that the language of aristocratic epitaphs stands behind the casualty lists, I wished for mention of the epinician odes, agon of another kind and perhaps also background to the glorification of the striving men who died for Athens. A. (p. 114) challenges Sourvinou-Inwood ‘Reading’ Greek Death (1995) on whether the war dead could be considered heroes and is largely successful in arguing that they were not.
In Chapter 4 A. shifts focus to heroes and the dead depicted on public monuments. His discussion of the difficulty of viewing the Parthenon's Ionic frieze is now challenged by B. Wescoat's demonstration (https://wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=RauBAZYLJ2A) that the frieze and its details were visible to those standing outside the great temple. A.'s consideration of the monuments would have been aided by larger images, although the illustrations in general are of high quality. The many unknowns resulting from the now-vanished wall paintings in the Stoa Poikile and other public buildings are acutely felt here and the reader suspects that much of A.'s exposition of the ‘beautiful dead’ (p. 125) would be supported by them.
Wall paintings, as well as portrait images and votive reliefs, occupy A. in the latter chapters, where he returns to monuments of private commemoration. A.'s discussion in Chapter 5 is intriguing but highly speculative, in part because while we know of commemorative monuments and portrait sculptures from literary testimonia, none of the originals is extant; the lack of posthumous portraits which conveyed the ethos of the deceased as well as his ‘beautiful death’ (p. 183) represent well this problem. One serious loss is the votive painting of Themistocles in the Parthenon, an image that begs for more extensive treatment. A.'s treatment of Cimon's Eion herms would be strengthened by reference to J. Winkler's proposal (Differences 2 [1990], 29–45) that the semi-iconic images were manifestations of the body politic.
Chapter 6 returns the reader to the cemetery, albeit amongst the private commemorations. As a cenotaph to a man who was buried in the demosion sema, the monument to Dexileos correctly attracts A. who argues that the private monuments were the prototypes for the public, rather than vice versa. A. also wrestles with the identity of the Albani relief and prefers to see it a private rather than a public marker as many have argued. In the end, the ‘intentional ambiguity’ (p. 235) that A. highlights may have hidden the truth of the reliefs’ identification.
In Chapter 7 A. narrows his focus to the white-ground lekythoi. The portability of these oil jars meant that they moved from the space of private commemoration (the oikos) to the public setting of the cemetery. In this way the humblest of objects was the most widely seen. While none of the lekythoi was found in a public burial, A. recognises in them a vehicle which allowed the living to participate in the civic commemoration. Some of the jars bear images of armed men but many depict scenes of domestic intimacy which transport the mourning from behind closed doors to the public realm. While A.'s idea of portability is appealing, it contains the weakness that not many of the findspots are known for the best illustrated lekythoi. If A. is correct, the jars bring the practice of memorialising the dead back full circle to the home and the family, visualised in their minds rather than in the large scale monuments of the Archaic period.
The book concludes with a short chapter in which A. more than sums up what he has stated before. The accumulation of memorials creates a civic status for the dead (p. 276), a desideratum for the democratic polis. While the family possessed the men in life, Athens received them in death, in the public burial place where that ownership took on a sacred identity. Memory played a strong role in the microcosm of the family which could recall the moments of the deceased's life but memory was also a factor in the macrocosm of the city in which the history of commemoration led to the forms of the public grave.
A.'s study of the ways in which the war dead of classical Athens remained amongst the living challenges the easy assumptions made in the past about war memorials and sets the stage for further considerations of public monuments and private remembrance and their intersections. Scholars and students of classical literature, history, art and epigraphy will find much to ponder and to agree with in this book.
