Phrasikleia

This photograph on cardboard represents the 6th century BCE figure known as Phrasikleia, a marble kore discovered in 1972 in Merenda, Greece (a suburb of modern Athens). This kore functioned as a funerary monument commemorating the premature death of a woman name Phrasikleia. The inscription on the statue’s base, which had been reused as a column capital for a nearby Byzantine church, declares that it is the sema, marker, of Phrasikleia and that she died before marriage. The full inscription reads:

I am the marker of Phrasikleia. I shall always be called

‘kore,’ this name being given in place of marriage by the gods.

On the left side of the base, the artist signed his work: ᾽Αριστίον Πάρι[ός μ᾽ἐπ]ο[ίε]σε (“Aristion of Paros made me”).

[More coming soon…]