This stele has rich decoration divided into four zones. Artemis occupies the center of the pediment, flanked by a dog, a doe(?), and two eagles in the corners. The upper relief depicts the deceased, lulia, as the goddess Hekate. She appears in a frontal view, holding blazing torches turned down- ward. Two female attendants to the right hold a mirror and a basket of wool. In the lower relief, lulia, again holding two torches, rides in a two-wheeled chariot drawn by two horses. A man with a spear strides behind, and another one leads the horses by the reins. A hunting scene with two dogs chasing a hare appears beneath. Between the reliefs there is a Greek inscription:
Ἐνθάδε ἐγὼ κεῖμε Εκάτη
θεὸς ὡς ἐσορᾷς. ἤμην τὸ
πάλαι βροτὸς νῦν δὲ ἀθάνα-
τος καὶ ἀγήρως· Ἰουλία Νεικίου
θυγάτηρ μεγαλήτορος ἀνδρός.
Μεσεμβρία δέ μυ πατρὶς, ἀπὸ
[Μέ]λσα καὶ βρία· ζήσασα ἔτη ὅσα
μοι στήλη κατέχει· τρὶς πέντε,
δὶς [ε]ἴκοσι καὶ δέκα πέντε.
εὐτυχεῖτε παροδῖται.
Here I lie, deified as Hekate, as you can see. Once I was mortal but now I am immortal and ageless. I, Iulia, the daughter of the great-hearted man Nikias. And my native city is Mesembria- from Melsa and bria. I lived as many years as my stele tells you, three times five, two times twenty, and fifteen. Be happy, passersby.
The stele belongs to the type with two or more separate relief fields, a design that was adopted from Greco-Persian art and
continued by workshops along the shores of Asia Minor and Thrace in Hellenistic and Roman times. The monuments of this type were quite imposing. The figural composition follows established iconographic models typical of Greek funerary art before the Roman Imperial period, conveying the idea of lulia's deification by means of images and text. She is depicted as Hekate and explicitly referred to as the goddess in the inscription. This is the only unambiguous example of a deification of a deceased person from Thrace. Although depicted as Hekate in the upper field, lulia is presented in a composition that is characteristic of Greek funerary relief, with two attendants carrying attributes of female beauty and virtue. The lower field offers an allusion to her journey to the afterlife, where she achieves immortality.
The additional reliefs on the pediment and the bottom frieze are related to the goddess Artemis and may suggest lulia's status as unmarried, for which reason she is identified by her father's name in the inscription. She may have belonged to a religious community devoted to the cult of Hekate that required celibacy. The irregular metrical epitaph reveals Homeric influences. In addition to personal information, it also offers an intriguing etymology of Mesembria's name from the name of the mythical Thracian founder Melsas and the Thracian word bria, "town."" Two centuries earlier, Strabo recorded this local legend, which was probably a Hellenistic invention. It is notable that lulia claimed such a distinctive Thracian identity.
-Margarit Damyanov in Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece
