Funerary Monuments and Family Memory: the Lekythos of Lysis from Aixone and the Agonistic Exploits of his Ancestors (SEG 57, 270)

As more recent studies have highlighted, in the Greek world collective memories are transmitted at different levels of the society (the polis and its many subgroups) and through different media (historical accounts, public inscriptions, poetry, tragedy, comedy, rhetoric, figurative arts etc.). In particular, it is widely believed that family memory was entrusted to poets and genealogists. In this respect, however, a recent discovery in the suburbs of Athens casts new light on the funerary monuments. In 2008 a big grave lekythos was found in a rescue excavation in Moschato. The vase is anonymous, but a previous find in the same area allows to attribute it to the monument of the family of Lysis of Aixone, the eponymous of the famous Platonic dialogue. On the base of the marble vase a list of victories obtained by chariot and by courser in several Greek festivals is engraved on four lines. Significantly, this list finds precise matches in Plato’s pages, where Panhellenic victories are between the many honours boasted by the ancestors of Lysis. From Plato we also learn that this illustrious Athenian family claimed a direct descent from the founder hero of the demos of origin and a kinship with Heracles. In Platos’s words these facts were the subject matter of a poem composed for his beloved by Hippotales, the erastes of young Lysis, but they are also the topic of some tales told by old women and spread in the polis. It cannot be ruled out that the saga actually goes back to a victory ode commissioned by Lisys' father or grandfather to a contemporary poet. It’s the association of the two themes, the praise for agonistic victory and the family’s descent from a hero, to point to a specific genre of encomiastic poetry, the epinikion. In this case, the funerary monument would not just keep a generic memory of the deceased and his family, but would be a sort of ‘sounding board’ for specific events in the family’s history, placed at the precise intersection between orality and literacy. This is an aspect neglected by scholars so far, which this essay intends to consider in detail.