Battlefields and Sacred Ways

The Spartans famously buried their dead on the battlefield (Low 2011; Kucewicz 2021) while the Athenians repatriated their dead as part of their patrios nomos (Low 2010, 2012; Arrington 2015; Pritchard 2022; Rees 2022). Of course, the entirety of the Greek experience was far more complicated than this simple contrast would suggest (Low 2003; Christesen 2018; Bérard 2020). This paper suggests a complementary third option: burials of the war dead could be spatially arranged to invoke the battlefield, either by literally pointing in the right direction or by lying along a prominent road to the battlefield.

The Spartans sometimes buried their dead on the edge of contested territory rather than on the battlefield itself, making the burials serve as a sort of boundary marker (e.g., Hdt. 5.63; Plut. Ages. 31.6; Paus. 2.38.5-6, for which see Low 2006; Bershadski 2012). Epigraphic evidence suggests that Athenians, even those who lived long after the battles in question, could be buried on the road to Marathon (e.g., IG ii² 7292; SEG XXXV 165) or on the island of Salamis (e.g., IG ii² 5542; IG ii² 13030), which indicates that these dead could serve to “frame the victory” much like the Propylaea did for Salamis, as demonstrated by Martin-McAuliffe and Papadopoulos (2012). Other states, like Thespiae, buried their war dead along roads leading to important battlefields and bitter rivals (see Schilardi 1977 for the Thespian polyandrion). No one has compared the siting of war burials to the better-known burial of the dead along sacred ways, such as that to Eleusis (for which, see Miles 2012). I argue that these burials suggest battlefields were themselves conceived of as sacred spaces.

This phenomenon had precedents in Geometric Greece. The two Late Geometric polyandria on Paros have attracted interest primarily because of the early hoplite iconography on their vases (Zafeiropoulou 2000; Schilardi 2002; Agelarakis 2017). While various conflicts have been proposed as the source of these war dead, no one has noticed that the two cist burials point in two distinct compass directions, aiming directly at central Euboea, the supposed site of the Lelantine War, in one case, and towards the earlier abandoned Parian settlement of Koukounaries in the other. Each polyandrion pointing the way to the respective place where its dead fell would explain the cists’ striking orientation. The West Gate Heroon at Eretria on Euboea is a more thoroughly studied example of the revered dead facing the scene of conflict, in this case perhaps also the Lelantine War, and the source of that conflict, namely Chalcis, which makes the West Gate a compelling contemporary parallel to Paros. Other Eretrian burials are found along the road leading to the Lelantine Plain and Chalcis (Bérard 1970; Blandin 2007; Crielaard 2007; Verdan 2012). These Geometric cases imply that the later burial practices of Sparta, Athens, and other Greeks had a long history, and that the spatial relationship between burials and battlefields merits further study.