Grave Stele of Hegeso
The main shows a mature Athenian woman (Hegeso) wearing a chiton (costume) and himation, seated on a chair with her feet resting on an elaborate footstool.
In general, stelae can be seen as a retrospective funerary art, that typically articulate a society's ideals of social living through their depiction of a domestic sphere.
During the early fifth century BCE, Athenians adopted a simpler style of tomb markers and there was a sharp decline in the amount of difference in wealth between individuals or families, reflected by grave goods.
Closterman has analyzed the iconography from classical Athenian tombstones within the peribolos plots, and found that these stelae most often do not focus on representing dead individuals, but rather display "the ideal roles of the family in the context of the civic world.
The ambiguity in the inscription and depiction could also have been purposeful, so that Hegeso could memorialize not just one woman, but instead represent the qualities of all the unnamed wives of male descendants from the Koroibos stele.
Rather than simply celebrating the individual lives of certain women, the presence of stelae similar to that of Hegeso serve to define the female within a recognized social framework.
While Pericles' citizenship law did not exactly change anything in terms of women's roles or freedoms, it codified their place in the hierarchy of the entire polis, which could be the underlying motive for Athenians during this time to represent such private, family virtues on publicly viewed stelae.
[6] While the seated position of Hegeso was most likely intended to be a naturalistic depiction of a domestic setting, it actually refers to the widespread custom of ancestor worship, where a mortal who has died transforms into a lower-world god to his descendants.
In other, similar reliefs, the heir is a servant of the past and could be worshipped in a variety of ways, whether with a pathetic procession, a crouching dog, or by a votive bird.
According to Barker,[9] though, Hegeso's maidservant appears to be wearing two chitons together, one of which has a longer sleeve of finer texture and passes through the arm-size of the outer garment.
[2] In this way, the stele would demonstrate Hegeso's ability to contribute economically to her future oikos due to the nature of her attachment to her own family and its estate.
[6] Therefore, an adornment scene would not only reflect a household's wealth and status, but would commemorate its ability to continue to help maintain the polis at large, in spite of individual death(s).
However, Buitron-Oliver[7] notes that the highly idealized figures on the Parthenon frieze gave way to more realistic drapery around 400 BCE, as seen in the Hegeso relief.
