DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9187#0123
94
HEROIZINC RELIEFS
indications, those offered by the relief itself are usually
ambiguous.
That some of the banqueting reliefs were set up in honour
of persons recently dead may be proved1. Indeed, in later
times, such scenes not unfrequently decorate actual tombstones.
This being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the great
majority of them belong to tribal and family worship. They
were set up, not usually at the tomb, but in shrines and heroa
in the neighbourhood of the cemetery, or in the chapels of
deities or heroes; sometimes, perhaps, in private houses, to be
a constant reminder to the survivors.
In an early and interesting sepulchral relief in the British
Museum 2 we have an unusual group. On a couch there recline
an old man and a young, doubtless father and son, while
a second son leads in a horse. This relief may serve as
a transition to another class of oblong cultus-reliefs. The cult
of heroized ancestors does not find its only memorials in Greece
in the reliefs in which they are represented as seated or
reclining. There is another group of monuments in which
they appear as horsemen, or as leading horses.
The connexion of the horse with the heroic dead, whence-
soever the notion may have arisen, was certainly in some
districts of Greece very close. Milchhoefer has shown :i how
the sculptural evidence indicates that this connexion was closest
in Thrace and Northern Greece. And this is but natural. The
aristocracies of Thessaly, of Boeotia, and other northern parts
of Greece were essentially equestrian ; whereas in Peloponnesus
the horse, being unsuited to the rugged mountain paths, was
comparatively rare. The strength of a Thcssalian army lay
in its cavalry; the strength of a Spartan army in its array
of spearmen. To a horse-loving race it was natural to think of
the mighty dead as horsemen. Even at Sparta the national
1 Joum. Hell. Stud. v. p. 116. s Ibid. v. p. 106.
' Alien MiUhdL 1879, p. 165.
HEROIZINC RELIEFS
indications, those offered by the relief itself are usually
ambiguous.
That some of the banqueting reliefs were set up in honour
of persons recently dead may be proved1. Indeed, in later
times, such scenes not unfrequently decorate actual tombstones.
This being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the great
majority of them belong to tribal and family worship. They
were set up, not usually at the tomb, but in shrines and heroa
in the neighbourhood of the cemetery, or in the chapels of
deities or heroes; sometimes, perhaps, in private houses, to be
a constant reminder to the survivors.
In an early and interesting sepulchral relief in the British
Museum 2 we have an unusual group. On a couch there recline
an old man and a young, doubtless father and son, while
a second son leads in a horse. This relief may serve as
a transition to another class of oblong cultus-reliefs. The cult
of heroized ancestors does not find its only memorials in Greece
in the reliefs in which they are represented as seated or
reclining. There is another group of monuments in which
they appear as horsemen, or as leading horses.
The connexion of the horse with the heroic dead, whence-
soever the notion may have arisen, was certainly in some
districts of Greece very close. Milchhoefer has shown :i how
the sculptural evidence indicates that this connexion was closest
in Thrace and Northern Greece. And this is but natural. The
aristocracies of Thessaly, of Boeotia, and other northern parts
of Greece were essentially equestrian ; whereas in Peloponnesus
the horse, being unsuited to the rugged mountain paths, was
comparatively rare. The strength of a Thcssalian army lay
in its cavalry; the strength of a Spartan army in its array
of spearmen. To a horse-loving race it was natural to think of
the mighty dead as horsemen. Even at Sparta the national
1 Joum. Hell. Stud. v. p. 116. s Ibid. v. p. 106.
' Alien MiUhdL 1879, p. 165.