UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the visual reception of military casualties in fifth-century Athens: the place of the war dead in the city's physical, artistic, and cognitive landscapes; the construction of a public visual rhetoric of struggle and sacrifice; and the refraction of this ideal in private art. To put it simply: Where were the fallen, how were they presented, and how were they viewed? To answer these questions, I examine the public cemetery ("demosion sema"), the monuments therein, the images of death and defeat on the Akropolis, and the relationship of this imagery to that found on private symposium vessels.

I use the concept of "framing" to analyze and explicate the material culture surrounding the war dead in ancient Athens. By "frames" I refer to the physical settings of both objects (including ashes or bodies) and of images related to the fallen, together with other aspects of material culture that inhabit those settings and surround the objects and images under study. At the same time, I am interested in how these physical frames create referential frames: the mental structures that we use to understand the activity around us. Physical frame, referential frame, form, and content work together to produce meaning. In different places at different times, the fallen warrior could be viewed as belonging to a victory, to a defeat, or to the conceptual space between the two: the moments of intense struggle and effort when individuals strove to secure victory and avoid defeat.

Following an introductory chapter, the second chapter presents the first comprehensive archaeological study of the "demosion sema," the public cemetery. Compiling and analyzing the findings from over three hundred urban rescue excavations, I demonstrate that the cemetery was established ca. 500 BC along the so-called Academy Road, and spread a short distance eastward. I trace the use of this space through time and show that the cemetery was not a delimited, organized, or controlled area. The war dead were removed from the center of the city into a setting with few visitors and interspersed among private graves, shrines, and workshops. By integrating the war dead into the landscape, the polis mitigated their potentially disruptive presence. I juxtapose the spatial arrangement at Athens with the layout of the Yasukuni shrine for Japanese war dead and suggest a model for understanding the organization of the "demosion sema."

The third chapter addresses the artwork within the "demosion sema." The cemetery was not a place of lavish display in the early fifth century, and often the state burials dissociated themselves from the aristocratic monuments of the past. Moreover, they did not provide models for late fifth-century private funerary sculpture. The casualty lists, the defining visual aspect of the state burials, were potential monuments to defeat. The format and appearance of the lists, together with their epigrams and crowning figural reliefs, show how the Athenians mourned their losses while simultaneously creating defiant monuments of power and collective resilience. They historicized more than heroized the war dead, locating them in an extended narrative that blurred distinctions between victory and defeat. The casualty lists, particularly their friezes, did not passively honor the dead but created a viewer-oriented rhetoric focused on "agon."

The fourth chapter turns to intra-mural sacred space. The Akropolis was not a stage for victory dedications alone but a place in which the Athenians repeatedly confronted the fallen warrior. Victory monuments and references to the fallen shared a concern to articulate, explain, and strengthen the relationship between mortals and immortals. Elaborating on C. Marconi's work on "kosmos" and T. Hölscher's study of "decor," and drawing on A. Gell's analysis of agency in art, I show that the representations of the fallen belonged to an imagery that actively invoked the gods through pleasing and appropriate depictions and that simultaneously confronted viewers and compelled them to contemplate the dead. They internalized death and the civic ideology of sacrifice for the city.

Chapter five discusses the framing of the fallen on symposium vessels through a close study of the mythical Kaineus. This defeated Lapith could be framed to display heroic resistance, a victory in the face of death. However, a complete study of the images that accompany Kaineus on black-figure and red-figure pottery shows that in the fifth century artists sometimes framed Kaineus' defeat with scenes designed to elicit connotations to his earlier female gender. In the setting of the symposium, pervaded by sporting and play, the defeated Greek was not sacred. No sooner were martial ideals presented than they were subverted. The potential for Kaineus to be comic, either because of his posture or because of the surprise elicited through the framing devices, facilitated the viewer's gaze on death and defeat.

This dissertation reaches the following five conclusions: 1) at Athens the war dead often were forgotten; 2) public intra-mural spaces could be used to portray the leadership and sacrifice of prominent individuals; 3) expanding the referential frame minimized the impact of defeat; 4) death on public monuments was not presented in the guise of victory, but embedded in a narrative of "agon"; and 5) images of the fallen on the Akropolis and in the symposium worked upon the viewer to internalize and accept death.