| Summary: | <p>After a brief introduction establishing the area and the period surveyed, the paper will proceed to present some basic 'objective' data concerning figured tombstones with the theme of the banqueter, such as provenance (geographical distribution within Macedonia), quantity (the corpus of the material at hand consisting of a little less than thirty tombstones), and chronology: during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, tombstones with the theme of the banqueter, as an iconographic phenomenon, appear to be pertinent to middle and late Hellenistic Macedonia.</p><p>Based primarily on the evidence provided by the imagery (main components of the theme, supplementary iconographic elements and motifs) and the inscriptions of the tombstones with banqueters, seen in the light of the funerary iconographic and epigraphic habits in Hellenistic Macedonia as a whole, discussion will seek to sketch the social profiles that the deceased and/or their families wished to appropriate for themselves through them. The modern idea that scenes of or including banqueters could function on more than one level of meaning being a basic premise of this paper, the specific question of the commonly termed 'heroisation of the ordinary dead', with which the iconography and the inscriptional formulas of this genre of Macedonian figured tombstones confront us, will also be addressed.</p>
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