Funeral Relief of a Playwright and His Family

105 Funerary Relief The stele is complete. There is some surface abrasion and incrustations. The inscription of four lines has been nearly defaced. The upper half of the actor and his right arm/hand/mask may have been recut. The naiskos or aedicula façade has a mask from the theater in the center of the pediment (where usually a round shield is shown). On the left, a seated woman, a pillow on her chair and her feet on a footstool, is raising her veil, the edge of her hooded cloak, with her left hand, and has her right hand across her lap. In the center, a child stands in orator's pose. On the right, a man faces a tragic mask that he holds up in his right hand; a scroll is in his lowered left hand. This appears to be an Attic, or, more likely, a Greek island grave stele of the Roman Imperial period, perhaps the monument of an actor and his family. An example found in Piraeus and preserved in the museum there, only the lower half surviving, shows a mother with children in the same taste and complexity as this scene (Conze, 1911-1922, p. 97, no. 2110, pl. CCCCLXII; also pl. CCCXCII, no. 1868, pl. CCCCI, no. 1882). Funerary stelai with playwrights or actors holding masks can begin with the famous Attic example of an elderly poet of the Middle Comedy, perhaps Aristophanes about 380 B.C., seated with one mask in hand, one above in the background (Bieber, 1961, p. 48, fig. 201). Cornelius Vermeule and Amy Brauer