In a year probably not long after 550 BCE, one of Athens' leading families lost a daughter and buried her in a rural cemetery at Myrrhinous (Merenda) in eastern Attica. The girl was named Phrasikleia, and her family commissioned Aristion (a sculptor who came from the marble-rich island of Paros but who made his reputation in Attica) to carve a statue in Parian marble to mark her grave (see Figure 30). To judge from its nearly perfect state of preservation, the statue did not mark the grave for very long: rather, it was apparently removed for its own protection and was buried (together with a statue of a nude youth) in a pit, where it was discovered in 1972 CE. The image is over life size - if we assume most women in the middle of the sixth century stood less than 1.79 m (or about 5'10'') tall. It shows a girl standing upright and frontally, wearing a long-sleeved dress, belted at the waist, with a zigzag hem that flares gently over close-set, sandaled feet. The dress is incised with ornaments (rosettes, stars, swastikas, meanders) and was originally painted in deep red, yellow, and other bright colors (the skin may have been painted white or cream): the effect would strike the modern eye as garish, but the Greeks were in many ways different from us, and the practice of vividly painting marble sculpture was the ancient Greek norm.