Funerary luxury and austerity in pre-classical Argos and Corinth: The making of citizen communities

International audienceIn Archaic Greece, each city had its own citizen habitus, defining a variety of idiosyncratic patterns of behaviours that allowed individuals to be identified as citizens in their own community. Here, I propose to apply this conception of Archaic citizenship to the burial customs of Argos and Corinth. Accordingly, pre-Classical Argive and Corinthian burial customs functioned as citizen habitus, as behavioural ways of including or excluding people from the community, with the approval of all its members. Their chronological variations therefore reflect the evolving habitus of these communities, if not their changing composition, with new groups of insiders trying to re-define burial customs to their own advantage. In this sense, the seventh-century break in the funerary record of both Corinth and Argos does not reflect any particular ethnic, social or economic crisis, nor any sumptuary legislation. After the lavish burials of the previous period and the probable social instability that they reflect, the funerary restrictions and austerity imply a more strictly stratified and closed society, which materially isolated citizen insiders in death from non-citizen outsiders. Conversely, the reappearance of some sort of funerary luxury in sixth-century Argive and Corinthian tombs reveals the changing behaviours of these citizen communities, and probably a more competitive and open conception of them