Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

182 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Family plot in the Kerameikos cemetery. From D. Kurtz and J. Boardman,
Greek Burial Customs (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). Courtesy of
University of Oxford.
Sepulchral epigrams frequently took the form of an address to the wayfarer, notably
in the case of the celebrated epigram by Simonides, which was inscribed on
the tomb of the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylai in 480 b.c.e.:
Tell them in Lakedaimon, passerby,
That here obedient to their word we lie.
In Classical Athens, there seems to have been a belief that the
family would be able to reunite in the hereafter if its members were
buried in the same place. This may explain the popularity of the
family plot, a large rectangular space walled on the front and at the
sides, to which access could be gained only from the rear. Family
plots, which had become popular by the end of the fifth century
b.c.e. , contained grave monuments commemorating all the family
dead, including, in some cases, household slaves.
Expenditure on the dead came very high on the list of a rich citizen’s
financial priorities. We hear, for instance, of one family tomb
erected in the final decade of the fifth century b.c.e. that cost at least
2,500 drachmas, although the defendant actually claims that the true
figure was twice that amount (Lysias , Against Diogeiton 21). This was
at a time when a rower in Athens’s navy earned merely one drachma
per day. Grave monuments increased in elaboration as the fourth
century progressed and remained in vogue until 317 b.c.e., when
Demetrios of Phaleron introduced legislation severely limiting their
costliness, evidently to curb unnecessary expenditure in a period of
economic decline. Henceforth, the commonest form of grave marker