Athens 263
represent the rebuilding under Konon in the 390s b.c. and Athenian preparations for war
with the Macedonians late in the fourth century b.c.
Two important gates of the city have also been excavated here (see fig. 137). The larger,
to the northeast, is the Dipylon, the main gate of Athens, which opens out onto a broad
street leading to the Academy, about a kilometer and a half outside the city wall. To the
southwest is the so-called Sacred Gate, which carried the road followed by the great proces-
sion which made its way to Eleusis at the time of the celebration of the mysteries. The Eri-
danos River also exits the city through the Sacred Gate. Squeezed in between the two gates,
just inside the walls, is the Pompeion (see fig. 132), used as the starting point of the Pana-
thenaic procession (pompe), which made its way up to the Acropolis.
Long before the wall or gates were built, the banks of the Eridanos were used by the
early Athenians as a burial ground, and hundreds of graves dating from around 1200 to
600 b.c. have been carefully excavated in the area. Burial continued after the wall was built
but only outside the circuit, along the lines of the roads. Hundreds more graves, now
marked with stelai, reliefs, sculpted animals, or marble vases, were built in the Classical pe-
riod, followed by much simpler grave markers in the Hellenistic period (see figs. 133, 158–
161). The burials continue into Roman times. Despite the area’s name, there is little evi-
dence of potteries, though the lamp-making industry was well-established in the area in the
late Roman period.
Somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the Kerameikos, perhaps just to the north-
west, was the most important burial ground of ancient Athens, the Demosion Sema. This
was where individuals of note and those who had died in battle were buried at state ex-
pense, a great honor in antiquity. Thucydides (2.34) describes the ritual, in which the cre-
mated remains of the fallen were buried by tribe, and a huge crowd assembled to hear a fu-
neral oration delivered over the grave by a leading citizen. He also records the most famous
oration preserved from antiquity, the funeral oration of Perikles in the first year of the Pelo-
ponnesian War (431/30). Casualty lists were inscribed over the graves and several dozen of
these have been recovered; sculpted reliefs were also erected.
Ironically, the one polyandreion (multiple grave) we have for fallen war dead in Athens
is the grave of the Lakedaimonians who died in 403, which is set up along the south side of
the street leading from the Dipylon (see figs. 129, 130).
EXCAVATIONS
A huge deposit of alluvium, up to 8 meters deep, covered the area of the Kerameikos
excavations in the nineteenth century. Chance digging for sand exposed the first grave ste-