Classical Athenian Funerary Sculpture

Seth Estrin joins me in the Lesche to discuss Classical Athenian funerary sculpture -- the largest single corpus of classical sculpture -- and his emotion-based readings of it. Seth is the author of Grief Made Marble: Funerary Sculpture in Classical Athens (Yale University Press 2024).

A couple of images that accompany this episode are on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leschepodcast/

If you're interested in hearing more about Athenian funerary practice, check out this Lesche episode on The Athenian Funeral Oration.

Ancient texts

• Aristotle (see esp. Parts of Animals 640b35-641a8 on homonymy)
• Athenian funerary epigrams, as in Tsagalis (see below)
• Athenian tragedy, including Euripides' Alcestis

Also mentioned

• Shear, T. Leslie (2016) Trophies of Victory: Public Building in Periklean Athens. Princeton.
• Tsagalis, Christos (2008) Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-Century Attic Funerary Epigrams. De Gruyter. 

Also recommended

• Arrington, Nathan (2018) Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens. Princeton.
• Hunter, Richard (2022) Greek Epitaphic Poetry: A Selection (a "Green and Yellow"). Cambridge.

About our guest

Seth Estrin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, where he specializes in the art, archaeology, and visual culture of ancient Greece. His scholarship and teaching explore the lived experience of art objects—their sensuous properties, their entanglement with felt experiences, and their place in shaping intersubjective encounters and personal histories. His work foregrounds interconnections across subfields of Classics, including those between archaeological, literary, and epigraphical sources.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

Instagram: @leschepodcast
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