By Lisa Hau
This summer I went to Greece with my family. There is nothing in itself unusual in that; as a classicist who works on ancient Greek literature and history, I take my family there almost every year. This year, however, we didn’t go to Athens or the Peloponnese like we normally do, but to rural Thessaly, on the coast of the Pagasetic Gulf, where we had rented a house with my husband’s sister and her family. The house was lovely, with a swimming pool and a gorgeous view out across the gulf. However, after a few days of enjoying the house, pool, and view, a classicist(or at least this classicist)gets restless and wants to go and see some ancient ruins, or at least a museum. So I looked in a couple of guidebooks we had brought and then, on the encouragement of my children who thought I was being ridiculously old-fashioned, online, to see what was nearby. Nothing was really nearby, but an hour or so away was the city of Volos, which, I read, is on the site of ancient Iolkos, from which legend has it that the Argonauts under the leadership of Jason sailed out in search of the Golden Fleece. There were two Neolithic sites nearby, and also a museum in the city itself. We set off to see both, promising the children elaborate ice cream from the city when we got there.
In the end, we didn’t see the Neolithic sites. This was partly because it was a very hot day and we decided to go to the museum first, and partly because I ended up spending much longer in the museum than I had anticipated and was so excited about what I had seen there that I didn’t feel the need to do any more sightseeing afterwards.
So what’s in the museum of Volos? Well, there are artefacts, skeletons, and recreated graves from the Neolithic sites, all of which are fascinating. But what really got me excited was a collection of grave stelae from the Hellenistic period, which is the time when the literature I currently work on was composed. These stelae were not carved in relief like the ones we usually see from Athens and elsewhere, but were painted. Painting a stone was cheaper than carving it, and presumable many people across the Greek world chose this option for a medium-priced grave marker rather than a high-end carved one; but the vast majority of paintings from ancient Greece, on any material, have disappeared, paint not taking kindly to being buried in the ground for two thousand years. The reason the paintings on these stelae have been preserved is that they have spent most of that time protected by forming part of a defensive wall, built when Pagasae, the city in which they were set up, was conquered by Demetrios the Besieger during the Wars of the Successors (294 BCE).What the inhabitants of Pagasae thought about the stelae commemorating their dead being used in the conqueror’s new defence works has not been documented, but it had the unintended result of preserving the paintings –and least partially– for future generations to see. The paintings are faded and fragmented, but what is left of them is remarkable. First of all, by showing us people in colour, wearing coloured garments and using coloured furniture and utensils, they give us a glimpse of ancient Greece in colour, which is very different from the marble-white images we get from reliefs and sculptures (which, of course, used to be painted as well, but from which the paint has generally completely disappeared). Looking at them feels a bit like switching to watching a movie in colour after having seen the first half in black-and-white. Secondly, the paintings are detailed, and facial expressions in particular are captured in a way that monochrome can’t.
Some of the paintings show the deceased doing what they would have done in life, reclining for a meal or doing household chores.
One particularly striking stele, however, shows a woman in the moments after her death, in childbirth. Her face is peaceful, her eyes closed; but sitting at the foot of herbed we can see her husband (the stone is broken in half, and only his head, not his body is preserved), looking at her with an expression of fatigued sadness. Behind the bed, we see another woman holding a bundle, which presumably is the baby.
That the baby is also dead is made clear by the inscription underneath the painting, inverse:
A painful thread for Hediste from their spindles did the Fates
spin when, a young wife, she met the throes of childbirth.
Unhappy girl! For she was not fated to enfold the infant in her arms,
nor wet the lips of her new-born child at her breast.
One light looks upon the two, and they have been led away to a single
tomb, unjudged, when upon them came Fate.
I had read about this stele –the Hediste Stele– but had not realised that it was in this particular museum. It was a thrill to see it in person, and it somehow made me feel a connection with Hediste and her husband across the millennia, making me appreciate the advances in medicine which means that childbirth no longer, in our part of the world, carries a significant risk of death. This unexpected experience goes to show that it is always worth checking out local museums when travelling, and that exciting artefacts can be stumbled upon quite unexpectedly(even if it means the children have to wait a little longer for their ice cream).