A Curse in a Chytridion: A Contribution to the Study of Athenian Pyres

Abstract

In the earliest years of their work in the Athenian Agora, American excavators came upon a number of deposits of an unusual type: a shallow depression or irregular pit, with marked evidence of burning on its floor, containing multiple vessels of a limited range of standard forms.1 Most of the pots were miniatures-commonly, small plates and saucers, lekanides, and cooking pots-but alabastra, larger plates, and a full-size drinking cup or lamp were sometimes included. Occasionally a few tiny and calcined fragments of bone were recovered. These deposits never appeared within the Agora square itself, but they were common among the houses and workshops that surrounded it. They were particularly numerous in the socalled Industrial District southwest of the Agora, which Rodney Young excavated in the late 1930s and the 1940s. Taking the bone fragments to be human, Young published the contents of fourteen such deposits from that part of the city in his article "Sepulturae intra urbem,"2 interpreting them as the cremation graves of infants and christening them "pyre burials." This conclusion has long been viewed with skepticism. Homer Thompson expressed his doubts in the early 1970s, citing the shallowness of the deposits and the absence of markers.3 A decade later, Ursula Knigge and Wilfried Kovacsovics rejected this interpretation of similar deposits under Bau Z in the Kerameikos, pointing out that infant cremation is otherwise virtually unknown.4 Finally, study of better-preserved bones from similar deposits more recently unearthed in the Agora has shown that the bones are animal rather than human.5 These deposits seem, then, to bear witness to some kind of sacrificial ritual rather than human burial, and the name has been adjusted to "ritual pyre," "saucer pyre," or simply "pyre."l Recent speculation has connected them with rites attending the construction or remodeling of a building, the memorializing of the dead, or the propitiation of the spirits of the deceased.6 Full investigation of the phenomenon lies outside the scope of this paper. As a contribution toward that investigation, however, we would like to present a unique conjunction-a lead curse tablet found inside a typical pyre vessel, a chytridionthat has previously received only brief mention in the literature.7 Because of its importance for the understanding of Athenian pyres, we offer here the full documentation of context, chytridion, and curse. 1. For initial permission to publish the pot and the curse tablet discussed below we are indebted to T. Leslie Shear Jr., and for their drawings of Figures 1 and 3, to Richard Anderson and Anne Hooton, respectively. The wizardry of Craig Mauzy is responsible for the digitally enhanced image in Figure 2, created from a contact print for which the negative had been destroyed. Thanks are due as well to Jan Jordan, who arranged access to the objects. We are also pleased to acknowledge here the suggestions made by Hesperia's anonymous referees. All ancient dates in this article are B.C. 2. Young 1951, pp. 110-130. References to more recently discovered pyres are listed in Agora XXIX, p. 212, note 48. 3.AgoraXIV,p. 16. 4. Knigge and Kovacsovics 1981, p. 388. Nonetheless, the pyres have occasionally been cited in general handbooks as possible evidence for infant cremation in Hellenistic Athens, e.g., in Garland 1985, pp. 82, 161, and Kurtz and Boardman 1971, p. 99. 5. Shear 1973, p. 151, note 68; see also below, p. 148, with note 10. 6. See Agora XXIX, pp. 212-217 for recent discussion of the pyres and speculation about the nature of the pyre ritual. 7. Agora XXIX, p. 212.