The Farewell Dance to the Dead: The Dancers on the Portal of Trysa’s Heroon and the Xanthos “Dancers Sarcophagus”

Abstract

This article presents new perspectives concerning the dancers featured on the interior of the portal of Trysa’s Heroon and on Xanthos’s “Dancers Sarcophagus,” which became famous at the end of the 19th century. It also focuses on interpreting the visuals that are today widely accepted as having been wrongly identified as “Kalathiskos Dancers” in the literature, in contradiction to Isabella Benda’s collective analyses concerning a variety of dance compositions reflected on tomb reliefs. The visuals of dancers discussed in this article are approached with the view that they are replications of a dance template portraying cultic practices related to the god Apollo and portrayed on vases, coins, sculptures, etc. throughout the Aegean world. The attempt is also made to cast some light upon the meaning of this dance template in Lycian necropolises, as this dance template is seemingly unrelated to any necropolis or death cult outside of Lycia. The death cult and the cult of Apollo, together with contemporary and past archaeological, epigraphic and philological data have been brought together to interpret these Lycian artifacts. And in this context, the cultural elites of Trysa and Xanthos are interpreted as heroes, themselves predisposed to the trans-Aegean worship of Apollo.