Death of Dexileos and Commemorative Stele

History sometimes resolves into one face. Dexileos, son of Lysanias, served in the Athenian cavalry during the hard fighting of 394. He fell—whether at Corinth, Nemea, or another clash in that violent year remains debated—but his family raised a stele that fixes him in time and in the city’s memory: year 394/3, a young man in motion [10][15].

At the Kerameikos cemetery outside the Dipylon Gate, amid the roads to Eleusis and the Academy, the marble stands nearly life-size. Dexileos rides down an opponent, cloak curling like a carved wave, horse lifted, the reins tight. The chisel preserved both aspiration and loss, the bronze-less silence of stone contrasting with the remembered metallic crash of battle [10].

Athens needed heroes as it rebuilt. In the same season, the city’s fleet found new purpose after Cnidus, and masons began to put the Long Walls back in place. The stele fits this mood: pride tempered by funerary sobriety. The azure sky over the Kerameikos witnessed processions of citizens who could count exactly how many riders their cavalry had lost that year—Dexileos among them [15].

For contemporaries, the name on the base mattered. For us, the artifact links war and society. The Corinthian War stretched from Corinth’s harbor to Thebes’ pastures and Asia’s bays; Dexileos’s stone compresses that expanse into a single rider and a single date. It complements Xenophon’s chronicle of battles with a domestic ledger of cost [1][15].

The Spartan hegemony touched even funerals. The very reason for Dexileos’s death lies upstream: a coalition funded by Persia, a restored Athenian fleet, Spartan enforcement of order by garrison, and a year—394—when land victory at Nemea and sea defeat at Cnidus pulled Greek cities between triumph and mourning [15][1].