When adornments became symbols of love and loss

Also associated with the prenuptial stage of life are the astragals, or knucklebones, which evoke a game of erotic divination once played with the knucklebones of sheep or goats. Papageorgiou explains that astragalus-shaped ornaments imitate the tarsal bone of mammals, believed in antiquity to possess protective and healing powers. Their frequent appearance in the graves of young women and children suggests they served as amulets, safeguarding their owners through life's most vulnerable transitions.

The spinning top, also found in the burials of Hellenistic women, similarly united play with symbolism. Its ceaseless whirl may have metaphorically expressed a bride's transformation while foreshadowing the course of her future life.

Perhaps the most emotionally evocative objects in the exhibition are the gold wreaths, like the one worn by the young woman depicted on the fourth-century BC Attic vase.

Accompanying their owners through life's defining moments — marriage, coming of age, religious initiation, and, ultimately, death — these exquisitely crafted crowns of myrtle, oak, laurel, and ivy adorned aristocrats, priests, victors, and initiates in sacred mysteries, signifying an individual's place within the social and spiritual order of the Hellenistic world. Yet it was in the funerary sphere that they acquired their deepest significance.

"Relatives gave the deceased, among others, a wreath as to those who had competed in life, reflecting a concept that assimilated the deceased to an athlete. Since the athletic ideal in antiquity was closely associated with the concept of virtue, this idea carries profound moral content," says the curator, referring to an ancient commentary on the works of the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (c. 446-386 BC).

Plutarch, in his Moralia, states that the deceased deserved to be rewarded, having competed like athletes, and to receive the honors due to them. In other words, placing a wreath upon the dead was, perhaps, to proclaim that life itself had been a contest worthy of honor. Like victorious athletes, the departed were believed to have completed their earthly struggle and earned the final reward: vindication, remembrance, and the hope of eternal life among the virtuous.