Gardner, Percy: Sculptured tombs of Hellas (London, 1896)

CHAPTER VIII

athens : periods and forms of monuments

In regard to the laws which regulated the erection of
monuments of the dead, and the forms which those monu-
ments assumed in successive ages, under the influence of
custom and belief, our information does not reach far beyond
Athens. At Athens alone have we been so fortunate as to
find, beneath the soil, a considerable part of an ancient
burying-ground, where not the graves only, but also the
monuments erected over them, are untouched by the spoiler,
and almost as fresh as they were when Athens was a powerful
city. It will therefore be well worth our while to consider
the history of the Athenian monumental customs, which
have been carefully studied on the spot by several able
archaeologists.

Graves of the Mycenaean age have been discovered
in Attica, at Spata, and at Menidi. Of such graves we
have already spoken. At an uncertain period, probably
about the eighth century, there succeeded, in place of these,
the graves found in such numbers just outside the Dipylon
gate of Athens, and so called Dipylon graves. The pottery
found in these burying-places is very interesting, although the
devices are rude, because there are painted upon it repre-
sentations from the contemporary life of Greece, the pre-
historic Greece of the age of Homer and of Hesiod. The
most ordinary pictures are sea-fights, or else the burial of