Dialogues with the Dead:
Examining the Hellenistic Population of Demetrias

Christina A. Salowey (Hollins University), Sarah N. Chandlee (Hollins University)
and Stephanie M. Woods (Hollins University)

Between 1908 and 1920, A.S. Arvantinopoulos excavated 346 grave stelai from the Hellenistic walls of the city of Demetrias, in Thessaly. These grave stelai, currently housed in the archaeological museum in Volos, are renowned for the remarkably well-preserved painted scenes of dexiosis, prothesis, and funerary banqueting. This unusual and oddly ignored corpus of examples of ancient Greek painting has elicited scholarly investigations into the method of the painters and the materials of the pigments, and one stele, Volos #1, the so-called Hediste stele, has received treatment in the basic handbooks of Hellenistic art for its use of perspective and its theme of a woman dying in childbirth. Our investigations had as their focus the personal information expressed on each stele: ethnicity, chosen funerary iconography, and individualized poetic expression. Our research group, comprised of faculty and students in the Classics, Art History, and International Studies departments at Hollins University, spent a month in Thessaly and Macedonia in the summer 2006 studying the stelai on display and looking for comparanda in sites nearby. This paper will present some of our preliminary observations and conclusions, including documentation of the foreign populations represented on the stelai and reasons for their migration to the city, an analysis of the funerary iconography and its influences, and finally a look at the funerary monuments with surviving poetic epitaphs.

The stelai offer evidence for foreign populations; this paper will discuss possible reasons why individuals included their homelands and suggest motives for a foreigner to relocate to the polis of Demetrias. For example, the stele of Ouaphris, at a glance, supplies that he was a priest of Isis from Bousiris, Egypt, and thus indicates the complex identities among citizens, families, and individuals in Demetrias. The funerary iconography in the Demetrias stelai is both derivative, i.e. the totenmahl and the dexiosis, and original, such as the chthonic herms. However, the standard iconographies have variations and individualized expressions particular to this corpus. Of the four surviving longer poetic epitaphs, two preserve the memory of women, Hediste and Archidike. The language in these poems not only explains the accompanying painted scenes but also resound with Homeric words and phraseology, giving an individual voice to the deceased.

The presentation of these three topics will not only illuminate the character of the population in Demetrias in the Hellenistic period, but also will provide a template for future study of this tremendous corpus of funerary monuments.