In
2016, archaeologists found over 80 shackled skeletons in a mass grave
dug in a corner of a necropolis which was unearthed during the
construction of a library and national opera house between Athens and
the port of Piraeus.
The burial site dates back
to between the 8th and 5th century BCE, and, unlike the downtown
Kerameikos cemetery where the majority of the occupants were either
nobles or rich, it contains the regular people, like children resting in
clay pots, soldiers still wearing parts of their armor, adults buried
in stone coffins or burned and interred in an urn.
Most showed the signs of a hard and short life, except for the eighty shackled men who were all young and fit.
Who
were they? Since most had their wrist tied in iron shackles, and they
were all buried at the same time, the assumption is that they were the
victims of a mass execution, though their orderly burial and health
status suggests they were more than slaves or common criminals, possibly
citizens belonging to the middle-class.
Who
they were, why they were executed, and why they appear to have been
buried with a measure of respect remains a mystery, but the leading
theory is that they were the supporters of an Athenian noble and Olympic
champion called Cylon, who staged an attempted coup in 632BCE with the
help of his father-in-law, the tyrant of Megara, another polis 50Km to
the west of Athens.
The coup failed and Cylon
hid with his men in a temple of the Acropolis, from where he eventually
escaped, but his men were were not so lucky. Lured out of the temple
with promises of leniency, they were all killed.
The
event fits more or less with the date of the mass burial, but is just
an hypothesis. DNA testing may confirm it, or reveal some other
possibility. For now, all we know is that something horrible happened in
Athens sometimes in the mid-7th century BCE.
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