Kouros and Kore

In 490 B.C., just before the Persians were successfully repulsed on the plain of Marathon by the heroic defenders of Athens, the threat of imminent attack spread terror across the Greek countryside. Panicky residents hastily buried their prize belongings to save them from the dreaded invaders. Then the people fled, some never to return. Now, almost 2,500 years later, archaeologists have recovered what may well be long-lost samples of that buried treasure: two remarkably beautiful and well-preserved statues of a young man (kouros in ancient Greek) and a maiden (kore), at least one of which is almost certainly a missing masterwork of the well-known 6th century B.C. sculptor Aristion.

The statues, still covered with some of the decorative paint used by the Greeks to embellish their marble carvings, were found only eleven inches below ground in a field 25 miles southeast of Athens by a team of diggers headed by Archaeologist Efthymios Mastrokostas. After discovering some ancient burial urns, they came upon the figures of two young people, lying side by side facing each other. Such treasures, Mastrokostas is convinced, could only have been placed in the earth for safekeeping in a hour of peril.

Apparently funeral statuary that once stood over the graves of a brother and sister, both pieces show the same slightly smiling, childlike look so typical of the kouros and the kore of the time. Although the feet are missing from the statue of the youth (as is the right hand), the figure stands more than six feet, somewhat larger than lifesize. His wavy hair, held in place by a headband, still bears traces of its original red color. The girl wears a diadem of lotus blossoms and other flowers on her shoulder-length curls and a chain of tiny pomegranate-shaped beads around her neck. Despite some slight damage to the nose and a missing left hand--which, Mastrokostas believes, also held a flower--it is the most complete statue of its period ever recovered.

Even more exciting to scholars, the female figure fits perfectly atop an ancient marble pedestal that was found earlier in the vicinity. It bears a girl's name, Phrasikleia ("Renowned for Eloquence"), and the sculptor's hallmark "Aristion made me." That, says Mastrokostas, director of antiquities for Attica, is "unchallengeable evidence" that the statue is Aristion's work, and he thinks that the statue of the youth may also be carved by him. Aristion was a master artisan, known from old writing to have lived on the Aegean island of Paros about the third quarter of the 6th century B.C. Until the new dig, it had been believed that the only remnants of his work were four statueless marble bases bearing his imprimatur. Now that Mastrokostas has been able to study Aristion's style, he believes he may be able to identify other works of his among the many still unidentified masterpieces of ancient Greece.

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