The Exaltation of the Flower (L'Exaltation de la Fleur) is the modern title given to an early Classical Greek marble fragment of a funerary stele from the 5th century BCE.

[2][3] Carved in bas-relief in the severe style, the extant upper fragment of the marble relief stele depicts two women holding what appear to be flowers or other objects.

[6] Heuzey and the architect Honoré Daumet were involved in an official mission to collect objects related to Caesar's campaigns; they also were interested in other artifacts unrelated to their work.

[7] British Greek art scholar Martin Robertson notes that both women can be seen wearing the tubular peplos garment common to the Classical period.

According to the descriptive text found in the Atlas database of the exhibited works of art at the Louvre, the women also are wearing a kekryphalos, a hairnet in the Greco-Roman hairstyle, and appear to hold a type of flower, perhaps poppy or pomegranate.

French archaeologist and art historian Maxime Collignon explained, "Heuzey believes that this monument refers to the cultus of Core, daughter of Demeter, a divinity suggesting in Greek legend the ephemeral but incessantly recurring bloom of nature.

On the right, let it not be readily forgotten that all the pleats turn strongly forward, so that they pass the centerline of the stele, marked by the high, triumphant flower and the mingled group of hands.

[13] In 1911, Greek scholar and archaeologist Rufus B. Richardson, formerly of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, observed that what was being described as flowers in the relief, looked similar to mushrooms.

[16] English classicist Robert Graves and Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini both have referred to the fragment as evidence for the entheogen hypothesis, speculating that the significant items depicted in the work are a type of psychoactive mushroom that was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries.