Spartan hero relief

On an elaborately decorated throne with legs resembling those of a lion, a couple are seated facing to the right. The man, in the foreground, holds a giant kantharos and stares directly at the viewer, his upper body turned. The woman, obscured in the background, is seen drawing a veil over her head with her left hand and holds a pomegranate in her right. A large, bearded snake rears up behind the throne. Two devotees are depicted, approaching from the right, in small scale: a man with a cockerel and an egg and a woman bearing a blossom and a pomegranate. Without an architectural context, the relief has the effect of being carved out of wood; the individual stepped pictorial planes appear like layered boards. The unsophisticated, archaic impression of the work stems from the inconsistent proportionality, particularly in the seated pair with their overly long arms, as well as the crudely carved folds of the robes and the man’s abrupt twisting out of an otherwise rigid profile view. The relief from Chrysapha is just one of an entire series of similar reliefs that date from the 6th century BCE into the Hellenistic period. Another Archaic relief fragment from Magula, depicting a youth feeding a snake, can also be found in the Collection of Classical Antiquities (Sk 732). A variation on the theme of the couple seated on a throne with worshippers below can be found in a later image of a man or woman alone on a throne. Interpretations of these monuments can be summarised in three theses: i) they depict heroised deceased or ancestors; ii) they are in fact votive reliefs to the gods of the underworld, Hades and Persephone (although Dionysus has also been considered as a possible alternative, largely due to the oversized kantharos); or iii) the reliefs are offerings to venerated heroes, at the time already established in Greek mythology but worshipped especially frequently in Sparta. The finds of votive deposits with similar motifs on decorated terracotta panels support this last interpretation. One of these deposits in Amykles may bear a connection with a sanctuary for Alexandra, described by Pausanias (books 3, 19, 6). In Sparta the heroine Alexandra was equated with Cassandra; she was worshipped in a cult together with Agamemnon. What we know of the situation of the find of the relief from Chrysapha, however, would support the first interpretation of the Laconian reliefs as funerary monuments to the heroised dead. The relief was apparently found erected in a tumulus of stones. Whether these piles of stones represent actual tombs remains unresolved despite further excavation at the site.