Making Kleos mortal: Archaic Attic funerary monuments and the construction of social memory

Greek funerary monuments have traditionally been analyzed from an art historical perspective or for any evidence that they may provide of belief in an afterlife. These approaches have made valuable contributions, but have tended to approach funerary commemoration piecemeal and not as fully integrated into the lived experiences of community members. When the constituent elements are instead viewed as invocations of various social matrices, the complete funerary assemblage becomes clear as a means of locating the deceased within a gendered social hierarchy and providing a model for the living taking over his or her vacated social roles. Through the study of literary, material and epigraphic evidence structured by the theory of social memory, the Archaic Attic gravestone emerges as a focal point in the landscape of the living community through which individual identity was ritually defined and family relationships displayed. More than just a means of dealing with grief at the loss of a family member, the funerary rites and monuments gave the dead a presence in close proximity to the living and were instrumental in the re-allocation of social roles among surviving community members that was necessitated by the loss of one of their own.