Fragment of a Grave Stele, 4th century B.C.

Appearances do violence even to the truth.

Simonides 598 PMG

Simonides, a fifth-century BCE poet from Ceos, especially famous for his odes celebrating athletic victors and for funerary epigrams, claims that truth or reality (the same word is used or both in Greek) is fundamentally at odds with, and is even threatened by, appearances or what seems to be.

This Attic grave stele also calls our attention in several different ways to the problematic relationship between appearances and "the truth." First, most obviously, this is not a real boy we see, his head slightly upturned, grasping something in his left hand; as Plato says about all representational art, the stele offers us merely an imitation of an imitation, at several levels removed from the true essence of the boy. Second, the iconographical conventions of grave monuments represent the dead person as if he were actually alive, still engaged in his favorite activity. And to the extent to which the viewer is persuaded by the likeness, the animated representation of life has indeed (if only temporarily) conquered the somber truth of death.

Finally, and perhaps most interesting, is the illusion produced by the fragmentary state of this grave stele. As the stele remains, our eye is led to focus on the boy - his carefully combed hair, half-closed eyelids, clenched left fist - as if her were the real subject of our attention. Only when we survey other objects of this type do we learn that the central figure of the frieze lies out of our reach, at the other end of the hand that caresses the boy's head. Art historians show that this fragment appears to belong to a type of grave stele, very common in Attica in the fourth century BCE, which represents an athlete with his hand upon a young slave boy's hard; the boy usually holds in his hand athletic implements or perhaps a bird.

Reality and imitation, life and death, presence and absence - all are at play in this fragment of a grave stele. Of the dead athlete only a hand remains, a mere token of his existence 2500 years ago. The image on the stele, even in this partial state, captures for us a moment of life, as do the funerary epigrams that also stand as a testament to the dead. The following couplet attributed to Simonides, for example, memorializes the dead Theognis in a continuing relationship with his life-long friend Glaucus:

I am the tomb of Theognis of Sinope; Glaucus placed me over him in return for their companionship of many years. (Palatine Anthology 7.509)

Séma, the Greek word for tomb and the first word of the couplet, is also the word for sign or symbol. Just as Theognis's tomb calls out to engage the passerby in a dialogue about his life, the fragmentary grave stele and Simonides's funeral epigram suggest that the semiology of commemorating the past entails not only the ability to see what is there, but also the interpretive skill to use what is present to imagine, as if in silhouette, its corresponding and defining absence.

Thus the fragment of an Attic grave stele offers us a metaphor for our larger relationship with the past. It is a tiny marker, a mere hint of the more complicated world that is now dead to us - the stele's fragmentary condition emblematic of the partial state of our knowledge about the past. However, we should not become too nostalgic about what is lost, too desirous of the complete picture. As Simonides suggests, the truth is constrained by appearances - what is "real" lies at the break of a line of hexameter, at the edges of a pottery shard, at the other end of a hard resting upon a young boy's head.

Essay by Professor Carol Dougherty