Resumen de The Burial of Herodes Atticus: élite identity, urban society, and public memory in Roman Greece
This paper discusses the burial of Herodes Atticus as a well-attested case of elite identification through mortuary practices. It gives a close reading of Philostratus� account of Herodes� end in c. 179 (VS 2.1.15) alongside the evidence of architecture, inscriptions, sculpture, and topography at Marathon, Cephisia and Athens. The intended burial of Herodes and the actual burials of his family on theAttic estates expressed wealth and territorial control, while his preference for Marathon fused personal history with civic history. The Athenian intervention in Herodes� private funeral, which led to his magnificent interment at the Panathenaic Stadium, served as a public reception for a leading citizen and benefactor. Herodes� tomb should be identified with a long foundation on the stadium�s east hill that might have formed an eccentric altar-tomb, while an elegant klinê sarcophagus found nearby might have been his coffin. His epitaph was a traditional distich that stressed through language and poetic allusion his deep ties toMarathon and Rhamnous, his euergetism and his celebrity. Also found here was an altar dedicated to Herodes �the Marathonian hero�with archaizing features (IG II2 6791). The first and last lines of the text were erased in a deliberate effort to remove his name and probably the name of a relative. A cemetery of ordinary graves developed around Herodes� burial site, but by the 250s these had been disturbed, along with the altar and the sarcophagus. This new synthesis of textual and material sources for the burial of Herodes contributes to a richer understanding of status and antiquarianism in Greek urban society under the Empire. It also examines how the public memory of elites was composite and mutable, shifting through separate phases of activity � funeral, hero-cult, defacement, biography � to generate different images of the dead.
