Focusing on a single funerary monument of the late archaic period, this paper shows how such a monument could be used by a bereaved individual to externalize and communalize the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional effects of loss. Through a close examination of the monument’s sculpted relief and inscribed epigram, I identify a structural framework underlying both that is built around a disjunction between perception and cognition embedded in the self-identified function of the monument as a mnema or memory-object. Through the analysis of other epigrams and literary passages, this disjunctive framework is shown to be derived, in turn, from broader conceptualizations in archaic Greece about how both mental images, including memories, and works of art allowed continued visual, but not cognitive-affective, access to the deceased. From this perspective, the monument’s relief opens up to us the experience of the bereaved individual who is only able to connect with the deceased through a remembered mental image.

This article considers Catullus’ reaction to his brother’s death and argues that the poet, having found the masculine vocabulary of grief inadequate, turns to the more expansive emotions and prolonged dedication offered by mythological examples of feminine mourning. I begin by showing how Catullus complicates his graveside speech to his brother in poem 101 by invoking poems 65, 68a, and 68b. In these compositions, Catullus likens himself to figures such as Procne and Laodamia, and their feminine modes of grief become associated with the poet. While these women’s grief brings them to a dreadful end, in my second reading of poem 101 I show how Catullus incorporates their emotional intensity and devoted attention into a masculine performance of mourning. Connecting his voyage to his brother’s grave with Odysseus’ journey, Catullus valorizes his single-minded remembrance of his sibling, even as he acknowledges that he will never overcome the distance between them.

Beginning ca. 500 bc , the Athenians annually buried their war dead in a public cemetery and marked their graves with casualty lists. This article explores the formal and expressive content of the lists, focusing in particular on their relationship to defeat. The lists created a monumental, visual rhetoric of collective resilience and strength that capitalized on Athenian notions of manhood and exploited conceptions of shame. For most of the fifth century, the casualty lists were undecorated, austere monuments testifying to the endurance of the community. When decoration began anew, the public reliefs, in contrast to private funerary reliefs, represented, through imagery and setting, struggle rather than victory. The selective remembrance and, paradoxically, frequent forgetting both enacted and enabled by the lists helped the Athenians elide internal political strife and facilitated their repeated return to the fields of war.