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Volume 102 No. 3
July 1998
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A Funerary Base from Kallithea: New Light on Fifth-Century Eschatology
Angeliki Kosmopoulou
This paper is a study of the reliefs on a late fifth-century base for a funerary vase from Kallithea, which apparently belongs to one of the earliest-known Classical Attic gravestones. The principal face shows a couple picking apples in an idyllic setting, taken to be the Elysian Fields or an equivalent superterrestrial paradise; the sides depict Hermes Psychopompos and an elderly priest. It is proposed that the imagery, which deviates considerably from the traditional repertoire of contemporary Attic gravestones, illustrates the hope to escape the fate of the underworld and to experience, instead, a blissful existence in a heavenly paradise. The base may be one of the few monuments that document the existence at the end of the fifth century of an alternative, little-known system of funerary beliefs, known to us primarily through literary sources.
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