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Macedonian Funerary Stele with a Family Group from Aiane
Unknown · c. 325-300 BC
Five people gather on a slab a metre wide, in the quiet manner of a Greek grave relief. At the centre a bearded man sits on a chair with a cushion, his feet on a stool, wrapped in a cloak, a broad travelling hat pushed back on his head. He clasps the hand of a woman standing before him, her cloak drawn up as a veil. Behind him stands a younger man in tunic and cloak; beside the woman a girl with her hair in a net and a necklace at her throat; and at the edge a servant holds a box. The handshake, the dexiosis, is the moment of parting between the living and the dead. The top and bottom of the stele are lost, and several heads are damaged.
The stele was found at Aiane in Upper Macedonia, a mountain region whose nobility adopted the Greek grave relief in the late fourth century BC, just after Alexander's death; the style suggests a sculptor trained in neighbouring Thessaly. It reached the Louvre in 1861 with the finds of the French mission to Macedonia, a portrait of a family from the kingdom that conquered the Persian empire.
Did You Know? The handshake at the centre, the dexiosis, is the farewell between the dead and the living, though Greeks never tell us which is which.
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