Reddit reviews Greece in the Making 1200-479 BC (The Routledge History of the Ancient World)

(con't)

Ok, so we can make some kind of a connection between the epics and this burial. In the epics, this burial behavior is clearly reserved for men of importance. Not every dead schmuck on the fields of Troy got this burial. It was reserved for the elite. You specifically ask why prestige objects (iron; ivory; horses, for example) are put into the graves, essentially destroying them. When these objects are deposited, it is at the funeral, in front of the community. The value of those goods is converted into prestige. "See this horse? None of you could afford to have this horse. I'm deliberately destroying it, and three others. That's how important this guy was." But there is more to it. The relatives or associates of the deceased also benefit from the deposition. When they honor the dead man by destroying these objects, they also honor themselves. They reinforce their own social position by association with the deceased. In the decades after the big man burial at Lefkandi, other burials began to cluster around the slopes. These burials too contained some nice objects, suggesting the deceased persons were of some importance. It seems like those burying wished to associate the dead with the big man's mound, in essence to leech off the prestige of that event by burying near it.

The burial at Lefkandi is the oldest and probably the largest, but it is not unique in form. We find "warrior graves" all over Greece in the early Iron Age. They contain much the same kind of objects, though no more horses (to my knowledge). "Killed" iron sword blades are common (the blade is intentionally bent before being placed in the grave, often curved around the burial urn). This practice of placing expensive, exotic items in graves carries on down to about 700 BCE, when it suddenly stops. It is clear that being buried in a distinctive, expensive, and archaeologically-visible way was no longer fashionable, acceptable, or desirable. But why? The simple answer seems to be that the elites of this period had begun to figure out a better way to "spend" their material wealth in the conversion from wealth to social prestige. At around the same time as expensive objects disappear from graves, they begin to appear in quantity at Panhellenic shrines like Olympia and Delphi. The display of costly dedications there had distinct advantages over elaborate funeral display. First, the Panhellenic offering broadcasted the prestige of the dedicator and his/her clan to a much broader audience than an elaborate burial at home -- the latter was a celebration of the deceased, meant to be observed by a broad swath the local society, involving ritual dining and drinking and intended to monumentalise the achievements and aristocratic status of the deceased. The destruction or deposition of objects commensurate with the status of the deceased (weapons or exotica, e.g.) was fundamental. The scale of the burial of the "big man" at Lefkandi ensured that the memory of his status persisted for a time after the event, as is suggested by the series of smaller but still elite burials which clustered around the tomb in the ensuing period.

Yet Lefkandi is an extraordinary example. Most of the elite burials of the Iron Age, despite their expensive grave depositions and the extravagance of the funeral day, left little physical reminder behind save for the krater or amphora marking them above the surface. Even the most elaborate would have made little impact on the topography of the site and were probably seldom seen by the community at large. The Iron Age elite funeral was inherently temporal, and the physical reminder left behind in the months and years following the funeral itself did little to advertise the expense and the prestige of the event itself. Those digging in the Geometric Agora at Athens frequently encroached upon or inadvertently destroyed the rich graves of previous generations, suggesting that the physical location of burials was not always meticulously observed, even for rich graves. The horses sacrificed at Lefkandi were invisible to those coming later. In that way, the elaborate and expensive funerals were powerful advertisements of prestige for a limited time only and had a limited scope: they were local in the extreme.

By contrast, an expensive dedicatory bronze tripod at Delphi had the potential to be viewed by many Greeks of varied social status over the course of successive years and even successive generations, should the dedication be sufficiently grand. The PanHellenic sanctuaries, situated in the "interstices of the polis world," provided a place where wealth display could find a new audience, perhaps precisely when local social pressures had begun to problematize wealth display which was not perceived to be beneficial to the community at large. The dedicatory behaviors of the late 8th century at these shrines would reinforce existing or create new extra-polis ties between the aristocrats of far-flung Greek communities which were inherently, necessarily separate from the demos back home. As Neer writes, "investing in ostentatious, self-aggrandizing behavior at an interstate shrine could be a way of asserting solidarity with one's fellow aristocrats in other poleis: to claim that wealth, or birth, or a special relationship with the gods was of greater significance than membership in a particular citizen community." The funeral practices of the previous period had served to reinforce (or establish) social status in the local sphere; by the 7th century, the method of wealth display for such local reinforcement was no longer required or desired.

A good place to read more about Lefkandi, Greek Iron Age burials, and the transition to sanctuaries is Robin Osborne's excellent Greece in the Making. He manages to be rigorous in his work but also readable. Highly recommended.

It depends how 'academic' you want to go.

For a great 'pop' history of the entire Classical world, a good bet might be Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World, which is very readable and includes both Greece and Rome.

For something more recent, Edith Hall's Introducing the Ancient Greeks is really excellent, and (since it was only released a couple of years ago) is very up-to-date with the latest scholarship. (There is plenty of new evidence on what was happening in Greece between c.1200-700 BCE, for example).

If you want something more 'academic', Robin Osborne's Greece in the Making, 1200-479 BC and Simon Hornblower's The Greek World, 479-323 BC will take you from the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation to the death of Alexander. Both of these are pretty in-depth accounts written by serious historians, and are also a little bit older.