The deceased as hero

In this high relief framed by two pillars and an architrave, a young man holds a horse by the reins. He wears only a chlamys draped over his left shoulder and twisted around his arm. The horse pulls against the reins, turning his head back toward the youth and raising his front left foot. Two panther skins are tied at his neck and lie across his back like a saddle; the panther heads once protruded in front of the chest but have broken off. At left, a boy wearing a short chiton also holds the reins. The crested helmet on his head is much too large for him, apparently the helmet of the man at right. Despite his “heroic nudity,” the man is characterized as a soldier by another boy holding a spear at the righthand edge of the relief. He pets a dog who leaps up at him while another dog sniffs the ground. A tree looming in the background bears leaves and fruits on one long branch with a snake wound around it. A hare presumably caught in a hunt hangs on the tree trunk.
This work belongs to a group of funerary reliefs found in Smyrna and its environs. They were made in the middle and late second century BC by a leading workshop probably located in Kyzikos. At the center of each relief from this group, the “hero” holding his horse is depicted as a warrior or in the robes of a citizen. The motif of the unknown hero from a hallowed past was transposed from votive reliefs to grave reliefs as early as the Classical period – making it difficult to determine which of the two functions a given relief may have fulfilled. Nor does the imagery help in the distinction: the tree with a snake marks the place as a holy precinct for the hero, and the servants could demarcate the deceased’s high social rank and standard of living or again mark him as a hero. Since this relief lacks worshippers, however, it most likely served a funerary function.