A name on the base
Most Archaic statues of young men are anonymous. This one is not. On its base an epitaph in verse addresses whoever passes by: stand and grieve at the sema (the grave marker, literally the “sign”) of the dead Kroisos, whom raging Ares destroyed as he fought among the promachoi, the men in the front line. In a single couplet the epitaph told every passer-by who lay there and how he had died.
So the statue is a portrait of Kroisos? Not in our sense. A kouros (Greek for youth) is a type: a naked young man standing frontally, arms down at his sides, left foot slightly advanced. The sculptor gave Kroisos the ideal body of the type, and the inscription did the rest. Who exactly he was, we don’t know. His name is the same as that of the Lydian king Croesus, and some scholars have suggested he belonged to the Alkmaionidai, a leading Athenian family, which would explain the Lydian name; it remains a hypothesis.
A statue for the side of the road
Why put a marble youth on a grave? In Archaic Attica the families who could afford it marked the tombs of their dead with statues, kouroi for young men and korai for young women, mounted over the grave as a sema. The epitaph of Kroisos, addressed to whoever passed by, shows that the statue was meant to be seen. A few kouroi stood on bases carved with reliefs of sport and games, which may have marked the graves of athletes.
The same museum room tells the rest of the story. The kore of Phrasikleia, a funerary statue of a young woman, was found buried together with a kouros at Myrrhinous, today Merenda. The Kroisos, then, belongs to a whole series of marble grave statues made for the families of Archaic Attica.
Sixty years of kouroi, side by side
The best way to look at Kroisos is next to the others. The New York Kouros, made around 590-580 BCE, is one of the earliest marble statues of a human figure carved in Attica. Its rigid pose, left leg forward and arms down, comes from Egyptian statuary, and its forms are geometric, almost abstract, with the anatomy drawn in elegant, regular lines. About thirty years after Kroisos, around 500 BCE, Aristodikos, the latest kouros in the Athens collection, still keeps the same pose.
Put the three photographs in a row and judge the difference yourself: the type stays the same, while the way the sculptors carve a chest, a knee or a thigh changes from one generation to the next. That slow change, inside an unchanging pose, is the whole story of Archaic Greek sculpture. And like the others, Kroisos wears the Archaic smile, the faint upturn of the lips that kouroi and korai share.
Where to see it
The Kroisos stands in Room 13 of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, together with Aristodikos and the kouros from the sanctuary of Apollo on Mount Ptoon. Phrasikleia and the kouros of Myrrhinous are in Room 11, and the great Sounion kouros in Room 8, so you can walk the whole Archaic series in a single visit. Check opening times on the museum’s website before you go.
Sources
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, “Sculpture Collection” and “Archaic Period” (no. 3851).
- Inscriptiones Graecae I³ 1240, as cited and translated in a note on the Croesus epigrams, Classical Quarterly (Cambridge University Press).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 32.11.1, “Marble statue of a kouros (youth)”.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Aristodikos (National Archaeological Museum 3938); Phrasikleia (4889).
