With Alexander the Great, his father, Philip II, and Alexander’s Macedonian generals who divided up their empire, kingship becomes an important element in the Greek world — a development of interest for us, because rulers, as we have seen so often, make significant contributions to the artistic and architectural environments of cities. Late Classical and Hellenistic monarchs are no exception. Priene, in contrast, has little to contribute here, being democratically governed, and without spectacular conquests or other achievements that merited expensive public commemorative monuments. (Priene did, however, receive gifts from outsiders; as noted earlier, Alexander the Great financed the completion of the Temple of Athena.) We shall now turn elsewhere, to tombs at Vergina and Halikarnassos — indeed both outside the heartland of Greek culture — to find striking examples of royal initiatives in material culture in the fourth century BC.
The importance of burials as expressions of wealth and power has been another theme characterizing many cultures of the Ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Bronze Age Aegean. Greece has differed from this pattern. After the early Iron Age with the spectacular burial at Lefkandi and the great funerary vases at the Dipylon cemetery in Athens, burials become relatively modest. When pressure did increase for public display, reaction set in: at Athens in 317 BC anti-luxury laws were passed in order to curb lavish spending on burial monuments. Excavations at Priene, so informative about other aspects of its urban plan, report little about the disposal of the dead, which took place outside the city walls. With the renaissance of kingship, the Greek world once again saw important attention devoted to burials.
World History
