Memory Incarnate: Material Objects and Private Visions in Classical Athens, from Euripides’ Ion to the Gravesite (original) (raw)

Euripides’ Ion is set in a world where material objects shape human relationships, reuniting, at the play’s climax, a mother and son. Although conditioned by the dramatic sensibilities of a tragic performance, Euripides’ use of objects would have been familiar to ancient audiences who approached objects in similar ways in their own lives. In this paper, I trace points of convergence between objects in the Ion and in the funerary context in Classical Athens, demonstrating how such objects could lead to intersubjective recognition within similar narratives of loss and remembrance. Examining moments from the play together with sculpted and inscribed funerary monuments, I explore how objects in both contexts could attain an affective significance that complicated the relationship between depiction and memory. Onstage and at the gravesite, it was the very material permanence of objects—a distinctly non-human quality—that made them compelling conveyors of subjectivity and instruments of recognition.