Twice in the archaic and classical periods the Greek funeral became a matter for legislation, which is the strongest evidence there is that funerals had become a way of competing. Solon's laws at Athens, and comparable measures elsewhere, are reported to have limited what a family could do: the number of garments, the size of the offerings, the hiring of mourners from outside the household, the tearing of cheeks by women, and public lamentation for anyone other than the person being buried. The point of the restrictions was not piety but politics. A great funeral procession was a display of a family's following, and the cities that limited them were limiting that.
The result for us is that Greek funerary practice is unusually well documented in images. Because display was constrained in life it went into the grave and onto the monument. Two vessel shapes carry most of the evidence: the loutrophoros, which held the water for the bridal bath and was set on the graves of those who died unmarried, and the white-ground lekythos, a slender oil flask made specifically as a grave offering and painted with scenes of the tomb, of the laying out, and of the dead attended by the living.
These are a record with a bias in them. They show the funerals of families who could afford painted pottery and carved stelai. What the poorest Athenians did at a death is largely invisible, and the archaeology of simple burials cannot supply the words that went with them.