Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

180 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Plan of the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens. From D. Kurtz and J. Boardman,
Greek Burial Customs (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). Courtesy
of University of Oxford.
city of the dead that is separate from the living. Those who dwelled
in the country tended to bury their dead in a field on their estates,
while city dwellers buried the dead beside a main road. The highways
leading out of Athens were lined on either side with tombs, in
much the same way that advertising billboards clutter the sides of
our highways today. The most frequented roads provided the most
favored burial spots for wealthy families, as indicated by the number
of tombs located on the west side of the city in the area known as
the Kerameikos or Potters’ Quarter. The Kerameikos lay outside the
Dipylon Gate and the Sacred Gate. The roads that passed through
these gates led to the port of Piraeus and the deme of Eleusis, home
of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The practice of roadside burial may have arisen in response
to a ban on burials within the city that that seems to have been
imposed in the sixth century b.c.e. The ban may have been due
partly to fear of the polluting effect of the dead and partly to
the need to conserve as much space as possible for housing at a