The funerary reliefs of Byzantium as a sign of Greek culture

The panorama - yet not deeply studied - of the Greek funerary reliefs from Asia Minor is a field from which we can get a lot of information about the life and the perception of themselves held by the purchasers of those monuments. Specifically, the investigation of th e witnesses coming from each single polis allows us to get information about the mentality spread in every single town, especially if compared with the other ones. This Microasiatic production has been studied under the po int of view of a specific iconography, the so called “ polites ”, adopted by those who choosed to depict themselves in “civilian” dress a nd not following, for instance, the very common iconography of the funerary banquet. We analyze here the case of Byzantium, the only Microasiatic polis where the iconography of the “ polites ” was adopted still in Roman times, evidence of a peculiarity of this town in respect of the rest of the same geographical area.