Emotion through Sculpture and Epigram in Classical Attic Funerary Monuments (20 min)

Presenters

Seth Estrin, Harvard University

Abstract

In a period of just over a century, beginning around 430 B.C.E., Athenians erected thousands of marble funerary stelae carved with human figures and inscribed with the names of the dead. On these monuments, the deceased is always depicted as a living person who reaches out to the world they left behind, whether by clutching objects they once held in life or by clasping the hands of those who buried them. While these monuments have often been studied for what they can tell us about the individuals whose graves they marked, this talk locates them instead in the emotional world of the bereaved persons who erected them, examining how sculpture was enlisted to make visible the effects of grief by probing the boundaries between the living and the dead.

To recover the emotional effects of these sculptures in historical terms, I turn to the evidence of accompanying epigrams. The content of these epigrams has often proved difficult to correlate with the sculptures alongside which they appear. My own approach emphasizes the structural rather than biographical relationship between them, examining how epigrams introduce emotional vantage points similar to those that are made visible through carved stone. To exemplify this approach, I focus on one particular stela: that inscribed for a woman named Polyxene (Athens, National Archaeological Museum 723). While the epigram describes the emotional impact of Polyxene’s death on her husband and parents, the relief below depicts the deceased in the company of a small child and an enslaved attendant—figures often assumed to represent actual individuals in Polyxene’s household. By taking the grief expressed in the epigram as a starting point, I reinterpret the relief as offering two perspectives from which to look at Polyxene, demonstrating how sculpture itself can sustain longing for the dead.

  AIA-3B