Funeral urn

The town of Canosa in southern Italy is famous for its brightly painted, early Hellenistic funeral urns. They are decorated in relief with figures bearing some relation to life and death. The Eros figures and the winged Aphrodite allude to love and the eternal delights of the afterlife. The pomegranates are symbols both of fertility and of death. Greek mythology relates that Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Since she nibbled at a pomegranate there, Persephone was subsequently obliged to spend months of every year in the underworld.