Glencairn Museum News | Number 7, 2021
Video interview with Dr. Wendy Closterman, Associate Curator at Glencairn Museum, about an Athenian funerary lekythos in the Glencairn collection (09.SP.1513).
The Glencairn Greek collection includes a tombstone from ancient Athens, produced in the 4th century BCE, about 375–350 (Figure 2). The piece is made of marble and is sizable—just under a meter tall. Carved on it is a figural scene, above which is a Greek inscription naming the woman this tombstone commemorates: Nikoboule, the daughter of Semiades (Figure 1). Nikoboule is most likely the adult woman seated on the left. She faces a standing couple, presumably her parents, who return her gaze. The woman in the center (her mother) looks Nikoboule in the eye and rests a hand tenderly on her shoulder, while the man (her father, Semiades) clasps his right hand to hers.
Figure 1: The carved scene on this funerary lekythos shows a seated woman, likely the deceased Nikoboule named in the inscription, gazing at a standing woman and man, probably her parents (Glencairn Museum 09.SP.1513).
Figure 2: Funerary monument in the shape of a lekythos (Glencairn Museum 09.SP.1513). Raymond Pitcairn purchased this object in 1927. To view a “zoomable” version of this object on Google Arts & Culture, click here.
Scenes like this one—groups of family members engaged in gestures of connection—were common on tombstones from Athens in the late 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Compare, for example, a 4th century BCE Athenian tombstone of similar shape in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Figure 3). It also shows a gathering of three people. Here a seated man in the center of the image clasps hands with a standing youth on the left while a mourning woman stands behind on the right.
Figure 3: Funerary lekythos showing a seated man with a standing youth on the left and a mourning woman on the right (Metropolitan Museum of Art 47.11.2). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Group scenes like this are also found on tombstones of other shapes, such as an Athenian stele in the Penn Museum, in which a sitting woman holds the hand of a standing man while another standing man completes the scene (Figure 4). The inscription indicates that this, too, is a family group of a son with his parents.
Figure 4: Funerary stele showing a seated woman with two standing men (Penn Museum MS5470). Courtesy of the Penn Museum, Philadelphia.
In contrast to these multi-figured tombstones from the Classical period (c. 479–323 BCE), Athenian grave markers from earlier centuries predominantly portray single individuals, usually a young man or, less often, a young woman. Because the image on the Glencairn tombstone is typical of funerary art from Classical Athens, we can understand it as an expression of societal values from the time—a heightened interest in family and household relations.
The setting of multi-figured funerary scenes has been debated by scholars. Certainly, the scene takes place indoors. On the Glencairn funerary lekythos, Nikoboule sits on a chair and rests her feet on a footstool (Figure 1). The ancient Greeks associated the indoors with the private, family sphere of life, and the outdoors with public life. Many pots from Classical Athens are painted with indoor scenes, particularly showing women in the household engaged in various activities (Figure 5).
Figure 5: An Athenian hydria from the 5th century BCE showing a seated woman juggling, with two female servants to the right and the left. A wool basket, representing an ideal female activity in the household, appears behind the seated woman (Glencairn Museum 01.VS.438). To view a “zoomable” version of this object on Google Arts & Culture, click here.
Apart from the household location, further details about the setting elude us. Are we to understand the scene as taking place in this world or in the afterlife? Does the image portray a time before Nikoboule’s death, when she might be saying goodbye to her parents? Or does it occur after her death, and she is being greeted by her parents in the afterlife? We don’t know, and the sculptors of Athenian funerary imagery do not seem to be very interested in specifying the timing. Perhaps it was well understood; or perhaps it simply wasn’t central to the message.
Because the inscription on the Glencairn piece includes just one name (Nikoboule, daughter of Semiades) and because the seated woman seems to be the focus of the two standing individuals, we conclude that she is Nikoboule. It is important to note, though, that seated figures are not always the deceased. In the monument from the Metropolitan Museum of Art discussed above, an inscription naming Kallisthenes runs before and after the head of the standing youth on the left, identifying this figure as the deceased, not the seated man (Figure 3). When multiple names are inscribed on a tombstone from Classical Athens, the challenge we face in identifying the deceased is increased. All three figures on the stele in the Penn Museum are named in the inscription on the architrave, the architectural frame above the heads of the figures (Figure 4). Did this tombstone commemorate the death of all three individuals, or just one or two of the people?
While gestures of grieving may sometimes provide clues by indicating which figures are mourning the deceased, these gestures are not pervasive nor used consistently to differentiate the living from the deceased; sometimes it is the dead themselves who make them. The depictions on many Classical tombstones are stock scenes, like the ones discussed above. It is likely that family members selecting a tombstone to commemorate a loved one who died would often choose an existing piece or select imagery from a pre-existing set of scenes, and then personalize the object with an inscription or inscriptions naming family members. It seems that clearly and unambiguously identifying the deceased for viewers outside of the circle of family and friends was not a vital concern.
Instead, what these scenes emphasize are familial bonds. The gesture of the hand clasp or handshake, called a dexiosis, is widespread in funerary art from Classical Athens. This gesture has a long life in Greek art and it was used in a variety of other contexts as well, such as scenes of marriage or political alliance, but always to emphasize a close association. On Classical Athenian tombstones, it was popular to commemorate the dead as loved members of their family, using the dexiosis gesture to portray their connection with other close relatives. In the face of the loss of a family member, Athenians from the Classical period used their tombstones to emphasize family unity.
The shape of Glencairn’s tombstone also evokes family, though in a different way than the carved scene, by alluding to the funerary ritual conducted by family members. This tombstone takes the form of a Greek ceramic vessel called a lekythos (plural: lekythoi). Lekythoi were very common types of Greek pottery, and the Glencairn collection has several examples, such as the two from the first half of the 5th century BCE (Figures 6–7).
Figure 6: An Athenian lekythos from the 5th century BCE (Glencairn Museum 01.VS.95).
Figure 7: An Athenian lekythos from the 5th century BCE (Glencairn Museum 01.VS.96).
Pottery in the shape of a lekythos was used to hold oil and perfume. The narrow neck constricted the flow, providing control when pouring out the liquid, and the wide lip at the mouth helped to prevent drips. Lekythoi and their contents were used particularly in funerary ritual.
Women played a significant role in ancient Athenian funerary rites. Close female relatives took the lead in preparing the body of family members for burial, washing, anointing, and dressing the corpse before laying it out on a couch at home for visiting by mourners, a stage of the funeral called the prothesis. Women also engaged in vivid ritualized expressions of mourning, crying out and tearing at their hair and face both during the prothesis and in the procession that transported the corpse from the home to the burial site. Lekythoi were common grave gifts for both men and women, deposited in burials at the time of the funeral. The vessels buried with the deceased may have been used in the preceding funerary ritual.
After the funeral was complete, women also had the responsibility to continue to regularly visit the graves of family members to perform commemorative rites such as decorating the tombstone with ribbons and wreaths, pouring oil over it, and leaving offerings of clay vessels, including lekythoi. Scenes of tomb visits appear painted on numerous white-ground lekythoi, so called from the technique of drawing the scene on a painted white background, such as an example from the British Museum (Figure 8).
Figure 8: White ground lekythos showing a woman beside a tombstone performing commemorated rituals for the dead (British Museum 1884,0223.1). © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Here the woman on the left is leaving vessels at a tomb, and a lekythos is among those visible on the stepped base. White-ground lekythoi not only portray rituals at tombs, but they were themselves commonly left at tombs as funerary offerings.
The ancient Greeks had varied and sometimes conflicting views about what happened to a person after death. In addition to the common belief that the dead went to Hades, a dull place in which the dead were shadows of their former, living selves (as portrayed in Homer, for example), the Greeks also thought that the dead might be present at their gravesites. Women tended the graves of departed family members to keep their connection with their deceased relatives alive, as well as to commemorate their memory.
The emphasis on family is also apparent in one common choice for where to bury the deceased in the Classical period. A popular mode for burial in the late 5th and 4th century Athens was in a family plot constructed in a style known as a peribolos tomb. Like the graves from earlier periods, these peribolos tombs lined the major roadways going in and out of Athens and other villages in the Athenian countryside (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Peribolos tombs line a roadway in the Kerameikos cemetery of Athens. This road leads to one of the major gates of the city. (Photo: Wendy Closterman)
Peribolos tombs had an imposing front wall along which a family’s grave monuments were lined up. The burials themselves were placed in the space behind the tombstones. While these graves were visited by family members for ritual purposes, the tombstones were also visible to many passers-by who traversed this road going in and out of Athens. Lekythos-shaped tombstones, like the Glencairn piece, were often placed on either end of the front wall of this style of tomb, and were accompanied by other tombstones in various styles commemorating members of the family. Taken together, the tombstones in these plots put a family on display through a combination of inscriptions and carved family scenes. People walking along the road would see a united family persisting across generations, and well-tended gravestones would convey that these family members remained connected and loved despite death.
The funerary lekythos in the Glencairn collection is not only a poignant monument to a woman who died in the 4th century BCE. It is also an expression of the value that Classical Athenians placed on family ties, ties that they hoped would remain strong even across the divide between the living and the dead.
Wendy Closterman, PhD
Associate Curator, Glencairn Museum
Professor of History and Greek at Bryn Athyn College
Further Reading
Brendle, Ross. 2018. “Athenian Use of Black-figure Lekythoi in Fifth-century Burials.” Archäologischer Anzeiger 1: 121–138.
Clairmont, Christoph. 1993. Classical Attic Tombstones. Kilchberg: Akanthus. 3.355.
Closterman, Wendy E. 2007. “Family Ideology and Family History: The Function of Funerary Markers in Classical Attic Peribolos Tombs.” American Journal of Archaeology 111.4: 633–652.
Garland, Robert. 2001. The Greek Way of Death. 2nd edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Margariti, Katia. 2019. “Gesturing Emotions: Mourning and Affection on Classical Attic Funerary Reliefs.” BABESCH 94: 65–86.
Nováková, Lucia, and Monika Pagáčová. 2016. “Dexiosis: A Meaningful Gesture of the Classical Antiquity.” ILIRIA International Review 6.1: 207–222.
Oakley, John H. 2004. Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Proukakis, Avgi Maria. 1971. “The Evolution of the Attic Marble Lekythoi and Their Relation to the Problem of Identifying the Dead among the Figures Shown on the Funerary Reliefs.” Ph.D. diss., University of London.
Romano, David Gilman and Irene Bald Romano. 1999. Catalogue of the Classical Collections of the Glencairn Museum. Bryn Athyn, PA: Academy of the New Church.
Shapiro, H. A. 1991. “The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 95, 629–656.
Stears, Karen. 1998. “Death Becomes Her: Gender and Athenian Death Ritual.” In The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, edited by Sue Blundell and Margaret Williamson, 113–127. London: Routledge.
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