The Politics of Public Burial in Roman Greece (C

CONTEsTED BONEs: THE POLITIcs OF PUbLIc bURIaL IN ROMaN GREEcE (C. 200 BC – 200 AD)* Abstract: Intra-urban burial had always been a rare honour in Greek culture. Nonetheless by the high point of the Roman Empire tombs could be seen in public spaces in most Greek cities. Some were of heroes believed to have died long ago. Others belonged to recently deceased benefactors. This article explores the role that both types of monument played in defining and shaping relations of power within the Roman period polis. Much can be gained from looking at the two in conjunction. It is argued that increasing evidence for both types of monument under the Empire means that both types of monument did indeed become more numerous at this time. The case is made that many supposedly heroic graves were ‘invented’ not many generations before they were described by our best source for them, Pausanias, and that local elites were a driving force behind this phenomenon as they tried to draw political capital from familial connections, real or fictive, to the illustrious dead. The parallel increase in public tombs for recent benefactors suggests an attempt on the part of the same class to appropriate the heroic associations of these purportedly ancient burials. INTRODUCTiON A remarkable feature of the cities of Greece under the Roman Empire is the extent to which the world of the dead encroached on that of the liv- ing. While the graves of ordinary citizens were typically clustered in cemetery areas outside the city limits, tomb monuments and cenotaphs for more illustrious individuals could be seen in prominent locations in public spaces, such as agoras, streets and gymnasia — spaces that would have been alive with the hustle and bustle of daily life. Some of these * The research that led to this article has been supported by a Marie Curie Intra- European Fellowship for Career Development. Bert Smith, Jaś Elsner, Peter Thonemann, Ewen Bowie and Tony Spawforth were kind enough to read earlier versions and provided many useful comments that helped to strengthen the argument. I am pleased to be able to thank them here. I am also grateful to Peter Stewart and Jean-Sebastien Balzat for stimu- lating discussions about aspects of the work. Thanks are finally due to the reviewers for Ancient Society both for challenging me to think harder about certain key aspects of the subject and for suggesting ways to improve the text. Responsibility for any flaws in inter- pretation and for errors, of course, lies completely with the author. Ancient Society 46, 95-163. doi: 10.2143/AS.46.0.3167453 © 2016 by Ancient Society. All rights reserved. 96 c. DIcKENsON tombs were, or were at least believed to be, of great antiquity, the resting places of heroes from the distant historical or mythological past. Others were tombs of benefactors who had died more recently and had been awarded the rare distinction of a public grave in recognition of their service to the community. Some of these monuments were very grand indeed. While the phenomenon of intra-urban burial in the Greek world has been the subject of scholarly attention there has been little specific focus on the Roman period and no consideration of the ways in which these two types of grave monument related to one another. This article will make the case that looking at burials for long dead heroes and recent benefactors in conjunction has much to tell us about the meaning of public tombs and about power and identity in the Roman period polis. The evidence for both types of monuments increased in Imperial times and although we must treat the lack of evidence for earlier periods with caution, there are good reasons to think that both types of tomb did become more numerous under the Empire. I make the case that many supposedly ancient tombs were in fact nothing of the sort but were recent inventions and had sprung up at precisely the same time that it became more common for Greek cities to bestow prominent public tombs on their most celebrated benefactors. Both invented heroic graves and tombs of benefactors served as focal points for local pride and commu- nal identity in response to the new realities of Empire. Furthermore, there are good indications that local elite families in particular drew prestige from connections with illustrious ancestors and thus stood most to gain from cultivating stories to do with public tombs of long dead heroes; individuals from this class were, of course, the ones who stood a chance of receiving an honorific public tomb and thereby stood to gain from the connotations of heroic status that burial alongside the mythical dead conferred. Both types of public tomb were thus implicated in, and contributed to, defining relations of power both at a provincial level between the poleis of Roman Greece and within the polis at a local level. The first section of the article examines the way that Roman period literary evidence for heroic graves has been approached in modern scholarship and questions the prevailing assumption that such late testimony provides reliable evidence for Archaic and Classical monuments. The second section considers the contemporaneous evidence for public burials in these early periods and argues that there is a sufficient discrepancy between the small numbers of tombs reliably attested and the abundance of Roman period evidence to suggest these monuments must have been THE POLITIcs OF PUbLIc bURIaL IN ROMaN gREEcE 97 invented at some point in time. The third section makes the case that the early Empire provides the most likely historical context for the invention of such monuments, considers how such tombs might have come into existence and begins to examine who stood most to gain from inventing them. Sections four and five look at the political capital that could be derived from claiming possession of heroic tombs. The argument in section four connects to recent work on the importance of the past for defining community identity in Greece under the Empire: cities competed with each other for possession of heroic remains in order to stake a claim to cultural prestige that might give them the edge in inter-state competi- tion for real political benefits, arbitrated by Philhellenic emperors such as Hadrian. Going a step further, in section five I argue that such tombs played a significant role in defining relations of power within the polis, largely to the advantage of members of local elite families, who seem to have been the driving force behind their invention. This leads to the final section in which I address the issue of the increased number of public tombs for benefactors in the Greek east under the Empire, a phenomenon that is perhaps more familiar but which has received surprisingly little explicit attention. I argue that it is no coincidence that such tombs began to appear more frequently at precisely the moment that supposedly ancient heroic tombs were also pro- liferating. This suggests that tombs for benefactors, typically interpreted in modern scholarship as purely political honours, carried some of the connotations of these mythical grave monuments and had a religious dimension that has up to now been largely overlooked. The focus throughout the discussion is primarily on the province of Achaea. This is the area for which the phenomenon of inventing heroic tombs is best documented. By far our best source for the phenomenon is Pausanias though useful testimony can also be found in other sources. In exploring what the periegete says about ancient public burials in the cities of Greece I will be positioning myself against a widespread tendency to take his work as an unproblematic source for the history and urban topography of earlier periods. In this, the approach here, and much of the argument, connects to recent work on Pausanias that has focussed on how his writing must be situated in the culture and time in which he lived, the high point of the Roman Empire.1 Looking at this geographic 1 A provocative call to stop using Pausanias anachronistically but to consider him in his Roman context was made twenty years ago by Alcock (1995). Recent work that has 98 c. DIcKENsON area affords the happy coincidence that there has also been less attention in modern scholarship for new Roman period public graves than there has for those in Asia Minor. Comparanda from that part of the Empire will also be drawn upon to put the material from Greece in its broader context. 1. ANCiENT TOMB MONUMENTS iN ROMaN GREECE — EViDENCE aND SCHOLaRLY aTTiTUDES Throughout Pausanias’ discussion of the cities and sanctuaries of second- century Achaea there are many references to public tombs, heroa and cenotaphs. In total Pausanias mentions around 125 such monuments that can be located with a high degree of certainty in an intra-urban setting (see Appendix).2 Perhaps unsurprisingly considering Pausanias’ predi- lections nearly all of these were believed to belong to figures of great antiquity.3 Some were for figures that we would associate with the mythical or legendary past such as Prometheus (at Argos) or Orestes (at Sparta), others to great historical figures from Archaic, Classical or Hel- lenistic times, such as Themistokles (at Piraeus) or Leonidas (at Sparta), though of course in antiquity the distinction between history and myth taken up this call includes William Hutton’s (2005) study of the Periegesis as a work of literature and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge’s (2008) exploration of the work as a source for Roman period religious cult in Greece. I have also made a case against anachronistic readings of Pausanias in Dickenson 2015.

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