115-154

Beloved by Artemis

• Καράγιωργα-Σταθακοπούλου,  Θεοδώρα

The stele in the form of a naiskos, no. 2295 in the Tegea Archaeological Museum, was found during a rescue excavation of a building plot in 1965. It was built into a wall of Late Roman date about 200 m. to the south of the temple of Athena Alea. It is an unusual monument of its category, dating from the late 4th c. BC. Its architecture recalls equally the monumental Late Classical Attic funerary naiskoi and the heroa of southern Italy and is of great interest, particularly with regard to the impost blocks above the pilasters. These continue the local tradition of Archaic Lakonian-Tegean concave impost blocks with volutes (improperly known as sofa-capitals), thereby confirming the Peloponnesian origins, form and development of this specific type of impost block (see also the Epimetron). The composition of the palmette akroteria of the naiskos is also to some degree original.The group in this representation comprising Artemis and the young warrior is analysed and the following features are identified as hall-marks of the art of the relief in the last ten or fifteen years of the 4th c. BC: the formal and rhythmical, though in many respects stylised, unity of the group; the separation and inchoate isolation of the figures within it; their relationship with the developed, atmospheric, surrounding space; the painting dialect used in the forms; the “Lysippean" physique; the rhythm of the movement; and the tone of the psychological ekphrasis. The clear geometry and the deliberate decorative intent of the general form of the composition are interpreted as personal elements associated with the craftsman who produced the stele, their roots going back to the art of the reliefs in the Mausoleum frieze.The evident close psychological relationship linking the two figures is taken as the starting point and foundation for the interpretation of the content of the representation. The youth, who has the typical features associated with the prematurely deceased “heroised” figures on Attic grave stele of the 4th c. BC, was an ephebe serving in the army (“patrolman”), a chaste devotee of Artemis, who lost his life in a fatal patrol on the borders of his country; the patron goddess of young men offers him her support in this depiction of the culminating moment of his “departure” for the next world. In this way, the monument proclaims the outstanding virtue of the dead man and consoles his family and friends with the promise that he will now be forever under the protection of his beloved deity. The religious sentiment here dictates the idea of a “heroisation” of a different order from the secular (urban and political) “heroisation” of Attic grave reliefs. In the minds of his relatives, the dead man may perhaps have been assimilated to a specific local hero of myth (Pausanias VIII, 47, 6). In any event, he has been elevated to a level where he is honoured at his tomb in an image shared with the goddess. In this relief, with its many levels of meaning, the honorific-cult aspect of the representation in fact tends to obliterate the conventional borders between votive and grave relief. Without doubt, there lurk in it those same vague expectations and hopes, to be found throughout the entire Greek world in the late Classical period, that the pious and just will enjoy eternal life and happiness in the presence of the immortals; and, like similar monuments from other regions (Attica, Macedonia and South Italy), it foreshadows the eschatological beliefs that were to be expressed fully in the iconography of the grave reliefs of Roman imperial times.

• History and Archaeology

• Αρχαιολογία
• Archaeology and art
• Architecture, Ancient

Περιέχει σχέδια, παράρτημα και συντομογραφίες, Το άρθρο περιέχεται στο τεύχος: Μέρος Α'-Μελέτες