Reader-reception of funerary inscriptions in Classical Attica

In the recent debate over literacy in Classical Athens, the funerary inscriptions seem not to have particularly attracted the attention of scholars. For example, Chr. Pébarthe (2006) does not include them among the cases of “écritures quotidiennes” taken into consideration (e. g. the security horoi). Otherwise, the reader-reception has long been the focus of specialists in a minority type of funerary inscription, the epigram, with opposite views on the subject (cf. e. g. Bing 2002 and Day 2010, 26 et seq.). Recent discoveries in Attica have shown that the funerary family enclosures, the so called periboloi, were a key component of the rural landscape in classical period (Marchiandi 2011). The attention of art historians focused on stele, the largest corpus of original sculptures preserved. On closer inspection, however, the written word is not only complementary to the images on the semata, but is quantitatively predominant, if one considers that most of the stele are only inscribed and not figured. The impact of the funerary inscriptions on the ancient landscape and the daily life of those who moved along the roads of Classical Attica is the subject of this paper.