ABSTRACT
Epic heroes die painfully and find no solace after death. The fame they crave demands a kind of bravery that would be useless if death had no sting. Their deeds survive them, but only in the memory of the living; the heroes themselves go to a place without rewards, where almost everyone receives the same treatment. In epic, death is a social experience and heroes are mourned by the entire community. In the world of the polis, the picture is quite different. The corpse is a polluted object, graves and cemeteries cluster along the roads leading out of the built city, and the funeral processions that join the two spaces emphasize a division between the living and the dead (Sourvinou-Inwood 1983, 45-48; 1995, passim). Funeral legislation enacted in the archaic period to curtail public demonstrations of grief during funerals actually accelerated the construction of elaborate private tomb monuments that recorded a family’s loss. Death becomes a private affair. Mourning parents attempted to make heroes of dead adolescent children with epic hexameters (e.g., Friedlander 1948, no. 3),1 but their sentimentality only called attention to the depth of their own grief. The dead who are named on their tombstones ask to be recalled as individuals, but when it became possible to make anyone a hero the issue of status had to take other forms.
