Master of Attic Black-Figure Painting: The Art and Legacy of Exekias 9780755693672, 9781780761411

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We are extremely grateful to the institutions and agencies which appear in this illustration list, and their staff who have kindly provided pictures and facilitated permission to use them. Frontispiece Athenian Type A black-figure amphora, H. 61.3, c.540 bc: side A, showing Ajax and Achilles playing a board game. Rome, Vatican Museums 344 (16757), photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München. Figure 1 A panel from a bronze votive shield band, found in the sanctuary at Olympia, c.600 bc. Olympia Museum 1911a, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950). Figure 2 Scenes from the outer curve of the handle of the François Vase, an Athenian black-figure volute krater signed by Kleitias and Ergotimos, c.570–560 bc. Florence, Museo Archaeologico 4209, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München. Figure 3 The now-lost Athenian black-figure neck-amphora, approximate H. 44.2, c.545 bc. Berlin, F 1718, photograph © bpk/Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius. Figure 4 Another drawing from a bronze shield band, c.575 bc. Olympia Museum B 1636 x, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950). Figure 5 Detail of Plate 3; Ajax’s face and posture are the primary foci. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer 558, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulogne-sur-Mer.

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The reverse side of the Athenian black-figure amphora by Exekias shown in the frontispiece. Rome, Vatican Museums 344 (16757), Side B, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München. A grave-marker of the then standard heroic statue type, roughly contemporary with Exekias’ vase. Athens, National Museum 3851, Kroisos (or the Anavyssos kouros), H. 1.94 m., c.530 bc, photograph by G. M. Young. Departure scene by Exekias, the other side of the lost neck-amphora seen in Figure 3. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1718, photograph © bpk/ Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Johannes Laurentius. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora from the Eye-Siren Group, H. 37.4, c.520 bc. London, British Museum B 243, 1843,1103.101, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian black-figure Type B amphora, H. 22.8, c.525 bc. London, British Museum B 187, 1836,0224.225, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora, attributed to the Painter of London B 76, H. 37.5, c.560 bc. London, British Museum 1922,0615.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian red-figure stamnos by the Kleophon Painter, H. 44, c.430 bc. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2415, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. The departure of the seer Amphiaraos, from a Corinthian krater by the Amphiaraos Painter; once Berlin Antikensammlungen F 1655, now lost; midsixth century bc. Drawing after A. Furtwängler and K. Reichhold et al., Griechische Vasenmalerei (Munich, 1904–32). Herakles feasting: detail of an Athenian bilingual amphora by the Andokides Painter, c.525 bc. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2301, © Staatliche

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Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. Textile production: an Athenian black-figure 48 lekythos by the Amasis Painter, H. 17.2, c.540 bc. New York, Metropolitan Museum 31.11.10, Fletcher Fund, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An Athenian black-figure hydria by the Antimenes 50 Painter, H. 44.2, c.525 bc. Leiden xv e 28, PC 63, photograph © Rijkmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, Netherlands. An Athenian black-figure horse-head amphora, 56 H. 30.8, c.580 bc. London, British Museum AN 1964,0415.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian Protogeometric neck-amphora from 58 the Kerameikos cemetery, H. 56, tenth century bc. Athens, Kerameikos PG 12, amphora 569: DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 3421A. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by the 60 Painter of Louvre F 51, H. 27.9, c.550–540 bc. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design RISD 13.1479, gift of Mrs Gustav Radeke, photograph by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. One side of the black-figure amphora in Figure 19, 61 showing a man and a boy with dog and cockerel. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design RISD 13.1479, gift of Mrs Gustav Radeke, photograph by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Side view of an Athenian black-figure amphora by 62 the Princeton Painter, H. 45.7, c.540 bc, showing the palmette design below the handles. London, British Museum B 212, 1143,1103.100x, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Side A of the amphora shown in Figure 21. London, 64 British Museum B 212, 1143,1103.100x, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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An Athenian neck-amphora from Group E, H. 65 36.5, c.550 bc. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum AN 1965.135, photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by the 67 Amasis Painter, H. 33, c.550 bc, showing Athena and Poseidon. Paris, Cabinet des Médailles, de Ridder 222, photograph © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Interior of an Athenian red-figure cup, the 68 Penthesileia Painter’s name vase, D. 43, c.470 bc. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8705 (2688), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora attributed 70 to the Manner of the Lysippides Painter, H. 26.8, c.520 bc – a Gigantomachy extending under the handles of the amphora. London, British Museum B 208, 1837.1109.3, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian black-figure amphora, c.525 bc, 71 showing a hoplite fight framed between hoplites, with a bird. London, British Museum B 187, 1836,0224.225, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian black-figure Tyrrhenian amphora 73 by the Timiades Painter, H. 39.4, c.560 bc, found at Vulci, in Etruria, one of the designed trading destinations. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 98.916, photograph © 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A detail of the amphora in Figure 28, showing 74 Herakles and the Amazon Andromache. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 98.916, photograph © 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A bronze relief shield-band panel from Olympia, 75 c.550 bc: Achilles and Penthesileia. Olympia Museum inv. 1911a, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950).

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Athenian Protogeometric belly-amphora from the Kerameikos cemetery, Athens, H. 47.2, tenth century bc. Athens, Kerameikos PG 18, DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 3421B. Part of a fragmentary Geometric krater with a mourner beside the handle, c.840 bc. Athens, Kerameikos grave 43, inv. 1254, DAI Athens, photograph by Emile Seraf, DAI neg. 4763. An Athenian Late Geometric belly-amphora attributed to the Dipylon Master, H. 155, c.750 bc. Athens NM 804, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5944. A detail of Athens 804, showing the prothesis scene. Athens NM 804, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5948. A second neck-amphora by the Dipylon Master, H. 175, c.750 bc. Athens NM 803, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5893. A fragmentary krater by the Dipylon Master, c.750 bc. Paris, Louvre 517, photograph © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Herve Landowski. A krater by the Hirschfeld Painter, H. 123, c.740 bc, from the Kerameikos cemetery. Athens NM 990, DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 2753. A krater by the Hirschfeld Painter, H. 120, c.740 bc. New York, Metropolitan Museum, Rogers Fund 14.130.14, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A detail of the krater in Figure 37. Athens NM 990. The fragments of Exekias’ plaque showing the prothesis. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1811 A and B, F 1826, H. of complete plaque, c.37. Photograph © bpk/Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Ingrid Geske. The group of mourners. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1813, 1826 k, H. of complete plaque, c.37. Photograph © bpk/Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius.

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Assembly with mule cart, the fragments showing 96 the mules and the mourners by their heads. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1814, H. of complete plaque, c.37. Photograph © bpk/AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Ingrid Geske. The male mourners at the right of the original 97 plaque. Berlin F 1818 A and F 1818 B, H. of complete plaque, c.37. Photograph © bpk/ Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Ingrid Geske. A fragmentary amphora by Exekias, c.535 bc, 99 showing a boy comforted by an elderly male. Orvieto, Museo Civico Collection Faina 2747 (77), photograph © DAI Rome/Koppermann, neg. no. D-DAI-ROM 61.1220. A Little Master Cup – an Athenian black-figure 102 band cup signed by the potter Glaukytes, H. 21.59, D. 34.29, c.550–530 bc. London, British Museum B 388, 1857,0805.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. A second Little Master Cup, a lip-cup by the 103 Centaur Painter, H. 8.8, D. 14.1, c.550 bc. London, British Museum B 408, 1890,0731.25, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian black-figure Type A cup, H. 12.7, 103 D. 30.4, c.535 bc. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. An Athenian black-figure komast cup attributed to 104 the KY Painter, H. 6.5, D. 19, c.580 bc. London, British Museum 1920,0216.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. An Athenian red-figure Type B cup with larger 105 florals and more vertically disposed figures, attributed to Douris, H. 10.7, D. 37.7, c.475 bc. London, British Museum E 54, 1843,1103.4, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Interior tondo of an Athenian black-figure cup 106 by the C Painter, c.570–560 bc. London, British

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Museum B 380, 1885,1213.12, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 51 Athenian black-figure cup tondo by Tleson, 106 c.535 bc. London, British Museum B 421, 1867,0508.946, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 52 Interior of an Athenian red-figure cup. Figures 107 on an internal groundline – Achilles and Patroklos – by the Sosias Painter, c.525 bc. Berlin, Antikensammlung 2278, photograph © bpk/ Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Johannes Laurentius. Figure 53 Interior of a Laconian cup by the Arkesilas Painter, 108 D. 29, c.550 bc. Paris, Cabinet des Médailles 189, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München. Figure 54 The interior of an Athenian white-ground 109 cup, D. 28.5, c.480 bc, by the Brygos Painter. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2645, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. Figure 55 A Laconian cup by the Hunt Painter, D. 19, 110 c.550 bc. The porthole arrangement: Herakles with Kerberos. Once London, Erskine Collection. Figure 56 Laconian cup, D. 15, c.550 bc, by the Hunt Painter, 110 showing warriors carrying a dead comrade, viewed as if through a porthole. Berlin, Antikensammlung 3404, photograph © bpk/AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius. Figure 57 Interior of a Samian cup, D. 23, c.550 bc, showing 111 man, trees and animal life. Paris, Louvre F 68, photograph © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Hervé Landowski. Figure 58 Athenian black-figure cup interior, signed by 112 Nikosthenes, attributed to Painter N, organised in concentric circles, D. 20, c.540 bc. Berlin, Antikensammlung 1805, drawing after J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black Figured Vases (Paris, 1924). Figure 59 The scene under one handle of the cup shown in 114 Plate 8, showing a fight over a warrior. Exterior

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of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. The scene under the other handle showing a 114 fight over a naked warrior. Exterior of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. The cup as the viewer may see it in use. Exterior 115 of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. An Athenian Eye-Cup, H. 9, D. 34.5, c.510 116 bc. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer 559, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulogne-sur-Mer. Drawing of a fragmentary Athenian black-figure 120 skyphos by the Theseus Painter, c.510 bc. Athens, Acropolis Museum 1281, after B. Graef and E. Langlotz, Die antiken Vasen von der Akropolis zu Athen (Berlin, 1925), pl. 74. Psykter by Oltos, H. 32, c.510 bc, with dolphin 121 riders. New York, Metropolitan Museum, 1989.281.69, gift of the Norbert Schimmel Trust, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fragments of a dinos by Exekias with ships inside 122 the rim, c.535 bc. Rome, Villa Giulia 50599, drawing after J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black Figured Vases (Paris, 1924), fig. 10.

Colour Plate Section Plate 1

Plate 2

A detail of the vase which appears in the frontispiece. Rome, Vatican Museums 344 (16757), photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München. An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora, H. 42.2, c.545 bc, from relatively early in Exekias’ career, showing a warrior carrying a dead comrade. Munich, Antikensammlungen

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1470, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling. An Athenian black-figure Type B amphora, H. 54, c.535 bc. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer 558, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulogne-sur-Mer. The famous Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by Exekias, H. 40.9, c.540–530 bc, showing the encounter between Achilles and the Amazon queen, Penthesileia. London, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Dionysos and Oinopion: the other side of Exekias’ Achilles and Penthesileia amphora. London, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Side A of the earlier Exekian black-figure neck-amphora, H. 42.2, c.545–540 bc, showing an encounter between a hoplite and an Amazon. London, British Museum B 209, 1849,0518.10, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. The other side of the amphora shown in Plate 6, showing Memnon and his squires. London, British Museum B 209, 1849,0518.10, side B, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum. Interior of the Athenian Type A cup in black-figure with coral-red enhancement in the inside, D. 30.4, c.535 bc. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

Acknowledgements

This book has a long history, at least as far back as the suggestion by the late lamented David West in personal correspondence in 1996 that a then projected series of conference papers might become the chapters of a monograph. He was responding to the original paper, which formed the basis of Chapter 1, and it and Chapter 5 were published in that early form in the Classical Association Newsletter in 1996 and 1997. Its then editor, Jenny March, expressed a hope that if these versions led to a later one, the Newsletter would receive acknowledgement, and I record my thanks here for that generosity, which sits at the roots of this book. I would also like to thank my colleagues and students in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the members of the Glasgow branch of the Scottish Hellenic Society and the Glasgow and Edinburgh branches of the Classical Association of Scotland, the School of Classics seminar in St Andrews, and audiences at two annual conferences of the Classical Association, among others, who provided lively responses and discussion for earlier versions of other sections of the book: I am grateful for their evident engagement with these moving works, and for some suggestions which it has been interesting to follow up. Brian Sparkes came in on some of these occasions as a warmly supportive specialist voice, which increased my confidence in what I was doing: that was kind. I also owe thanks to Jill Harries, who has, as always, been unfailingly encouraging and perceptive about this project. The late, much-missed Brian Shefton’s love of objects, especially pots, fired his own collecting habits, and he and Elizabeth Goring contributed significantly to my own sense of the nature of my fascination with them. Anne Mackay and I met in Oxford in 2000; she had long been working on her important monograph on Exekias, eventually published in 2010. She was extremely generous with the parts of my less weighty

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and differently directed project which then existed, and shared her thoughts on much that appears here. I delivered a lecture on Exekias to a schools’ study day in the British Museum in 2005: my thanks both to my colleagues in the British Museum’s Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and to the enthusiastic students who attended then, and to them and others who have written sensitive and perceptive responses to A-level and degreelevel questions I have set on some of these vases over the years. I owe a good deal to my fellow examiners at both levels for supporting and discussing the use of those questions. Louise Bourdua of the University of Warwick encouraged me to organise a panel on classical art at the Association of Art Historians’ 2011 conference, which I did with the explicit aim of sharing my thoughts on acceptable approaches to writing about ancient objects. Jonathan Clarkson, Chinatsu Kobayashi, Alexandra Massini, Adar Yarom and Yael Young contributed an encouragingly various group of papers with widely different methodologies and sensibilities; these and the subsequent round-table discussion confirmed my sense that my intended approach to Exekias was worth pursuing. I am grateful to all of them for that encouragement. And I should also thank John Boardman, who has extended his powerful and encouraging role as my doctoral supervisor for a long time since; Donna Kurtz, Thomas Mannack, and their electronic baby, the Beazley Archive Database; the staff, past and present of the Sackler (once the Ashmolean) Library in Oxford, and of Glasgow University Library, and raise a cheer for the broadening choice of resources, and access to them, which they provide and support. I also owe Irene Lemos, Michael Squire and Clare Willsdon thanks for their generous advice and help, Virginia Grant, in whose house much of this book was written in its early stages, and Alex Wright, my commissioning editor at I.B.Tauris for his support in a complex process. And last but not least, to my husband, Alec Yearling, for enormous patience and support, domestic and otherwise, over a long gestation period.

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Preface

This book began as a series of performance pieces, with (then) numerous 35mm slides, for academic conferences, study days and ‘work in progress’ seminars back at the local ranch. Chapter 2, ‘Homecomings and Departures’, first appeared as a departmental seminar for staff and both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the spring of 2001. My father, the sole surviving parent, had died in the small hours of Remembrance Sunday 2000; this was not only a sentimental loss, but an odd coincidence, as he was a francophone Channel Islander with an interesting wartime history (like his own father), to which he had only just, very selectively, made me a party. Writing and delivering this paper coincided with packing up a house in a much-loved landscape, full of family memories, including my long-deceased mother’s textile and photographic interests; I found it quite hard to deliver, and I suspect that my audience found it quite hard to watch at times, especially as I delivered its final paragraphs more or less as they appear here. Its most recent outing, as a PowerPoint presentation to an audience of fully wiredup and knowledgeable classical scholars gave me some further insights about some of the detail, and thoughts about its presentational strategy, but the things that made us cry were still there. This is really the point: this image speaks to me, in a very direct language, about a set of interests and values which moves me and others now. However rigorously I try to treat them, as the trained academic whose career my parents tried to nurture, despite its very different focus from theirs (they were a surgeon and a very sophisticated gas engineer), these images speak, and I think that it is worth saying something now about the way in which they do it. My mentors, students and hearers in other contexts have all found common ground in discussing these powerful images in terms of their immediate impact; perhaps the most exciting experiences of this kind

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have almost all taken place in front of, or (very occasionally) holding, the pot. And I have tried to take that intense form of the experience very seriously, because I have long felt that control by academic analytical systems provides one kind of understanding of what we are seeing, but it has too little to do with a moving and intense aesthetic and emotional experience: I have come to recognise over a long period that I am not alone in thinking this, so here is where I, at least, come clean. My audiences, as well as I, would defend an exploration of the emotional impact of a visual object as vigorously as a conventional intellectual analysis. Needless to say, the whole enterprise is necessarily more complicated and nuanced than that: what I have written above may explain where this started, but the book as it emerged had to take its academic origins into account too. So it is explicitly trying for an approachable interpretative idiom, without losing sight of the academic house I grew up in. The core chapters remain largely as they started, as tidied versions of the scripts for direct contact with an audience of varying levels of previous knowledge, in front of the images, or objects in corpore, to whose voice we were trying to respond. The introduction, conclusion and bibliographical notes try to give a context and background to the intellectual environment in which Exekias’ pots currently sit, and to provide readers with information on further reading which will aid a wider and deeper understanding of the objects themselves, their historical and visual context, and of the way in which scholars look at them and the content of their pictures. I should perhaps underline the aesthetic and visual bias of both discussion and the bibliographic notes; I have not ventured into thoughts about the use of chemical and other scientific analytical approaches to the study of archaeological ceramics. That is perhaps another story altogether. One other thing: at the point at which I set about constructing this book, it seemed a good idea to test the academic water to see whether other scholars now felt that a diversity of tactic and approach to ancient objects had become acceptable, or whether we still feel that there is really a right way and lots of wrong ways to do this. I am very grateful to the colleagues and students who have made it obvious that they do find my ways of tackling this kind of subject and object acceptable, and to the contributors to my Classical Art panel at the Association of Art Historians’ 2011 annual conference, duly acknowledged formally in my acknowledgements, who have all felt that there should not be a

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rigidly defined methodology, and that exploration, and an acceptance of an emotional attachment to the object of study, are as acceptable as a systematically tested one, indeed welcome. A commitment to trying to stay strictly within the bounds of a theoretically reconstructed sense of the original reception of these images by Exekias’ contemporaries was viewed as not only impossible, but worth abandoning. Thanks to all of you.

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Introduction

This book is a study of the Athenian potter-painter Exekias. He usually appears in synthetic discussions of his painting medium, black-figure, or his period, the latter half of the sixth century bc, as the figure who represents the acme of his craft, after whom there was no way but down, or at least to invent another technique, red-figure. Exekias’ remarkable images of Homeric heroes playing a board game, a floating god surrounded by dolphins, and a violently concentrated battlefield encounter between a male and a female warrior are all images which are used often wherever their imagery will tell, for many purposes; and their museum cases continue to attract densely crowded spectators. This book tries to understand some of the emotional sources of that attraction as much as to develop a more nuanced interpretation of the images which are such a magnet, and a sense of a unifying artistic personality which might link them. Exekias, as we shall see, signed his name with formulae to indicate his manufacturing presence both as maker and painter. And there begin the problems that modern study of ancient art has to address: those signatures, and the vessels on which they appear, are all we have. This study, like others which deal with Exekias or other similar makers as recognisable creative personalities, has to depend on reasonable conjecture, based on a body of evidence which is capable of other interpretations. Exekias’ accepted major pieces were found not in Athens, their traditional point of origin, but in Etruria in a context of excavation and collection which enhanced their recognition as sitting among the major examples of their genre. Scholars of Greek vases, perhaps culminating in Sir John Beazley and his formidable attribution framework, recognised and accepted their place in a perceived chronological and stylistic structure which gradually evolved and was used to understand and contextualise them. While the chronological and attributive assumptions are, rightly, not invulnerable

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to question and attack, they still underlie most interpretative work on these fascinating objects. And, of course, they also reinforce an understandable impetus to assume or create artistic personalities from the images on the pots. Visually, the five or six pieces by Exekias which we recognise as the peak of his achievement today, supported by some 40 others attributed to the same hand, are usually portrayed as occupying a special place among the many Athenian black-figure vases which we traditionally accept as other products of the same environment. In treating them as objets d’art, and worth study and display as such, we are in a position which is not unique, but has a serious central problem: virtually the only surviving evidence for most of what we believe we know or want to understand about Greek vase-painters is the vases themselves. We have archaeological remains which allow us to understand something about the workshop and manufacturing methods; find-sites and self-referential pictures on pots in use which support interpretation of their commercial and social context. Research into the physical and chemical aspects of their construction allows us to understand something of the demands on the potter and the painter made by the clay, the glaze and the firing process, and thus to understand the problems makers overcame and something about the level of invention and innovation involved in the development of local and individual styles. What we cannot do is to produce a biography of the artist; we can observe patterns in the subject matter, and individual repeated features of style which we can argue constitute a perceptible oeuvre and artistic personality, and perhaps suggest whether they came early or late in the maker’s working life, and we can try to situate this in a story which embeds the work in a picture of times and places derived from our other sources, historical, physical and literary. This is one of the drivers which lie behind the interpretative methodologies I have used in this book. The normally accepted dates for Exekias’ career are around 545–530 bc, and he is assumed to have been working in Athens, where he was one of a number of potters and painters producing figured ceramics for formal purposes in a social and civic environment in which both his colleagues and the potential and actual customers were part of a common culture operating in a relatively small physical area of a city dominated by its ancient Akropolis, fortress, sacred site, and the visual and architectural focus which remains today. They can be assumed to have been aware of much of the work emerging from the Athenian Potters’ Quarter (the Kerameikos), and to have had a common understanding of the images

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which the pots carry, whether they are related to myth and legend or to everyday life. We can assume that they shared both oral stories, Homer or not, and a traditional, if virtual, image bank which made innovation both creatively desirable and evident to the viewer. Attica in the sixth century bc was one of a number of Greek city states with, traditionally at least, a history of gradual emergence from a post-Mycenaean dark age, ruled by a local elite operating on family and clan loyalty, in an essentially agricultural economy, which was closely associated with the conditions imposed by the landscape within which it sat. It is probably significant that some central Athenian foundation and continuity stories centre on Theseus as the hero king who unified Attica, and gave Athens a central council to bring local lords together. Unification was actually gradual, but evolved into a very large territory focusing on the city. The characteristic governmental form in archaic Greece was essentially an oligarchy based on wealth and class. There is evidence, however, of increasing wealth from trade and overseas networking by men from other layers of society, and growth of solidarity based on the gradual military adoption of hoplite tactics, weapons, service and training, which led to a group ethic of comradeship and a growing sense of citizens’ power across the territory, not just in the city itself. This would eventually lead to the adoption of an early form of democracy at the end of the century. Over the late seventh and sixth centuries bc there are several instances of men emerging as leaders exploiting citizen discontent and military power to become tyrannoi, that is, non-constitutional sole rulers – not least Kylon and Drakon in Athens. By the beginning of the sixth century, according to the most accessible sources, Athens was dominated by an unacceptable land-tenure system, underwritten by slavery as a penalty for unreconciled debts. In 594/3 Solon was appointed as archon, or chief magistrate, and set out to alleviate the problem; he tried to set up a system of office based on wealth, not birth; he also set up the Boule or people’s council. He was not entirely successful and after his exile the squabbles continued – leading eventually to the emergence of Peisistratos, reported as a leader who used status as a military hero to gain power, for the first time in 556 bc; he was thrown out twice, and eventually returned in 546, managing to remain in power until his death in 528/7. The perceived highlights of his reign include the reorganisation of the city’s major festivals, the Dionysia and the Panathenaia, and an Athenian takeover of the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, and thereby one of the major cults devoted to the afterlife

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and the Underworld. Other developments on his watch include the domination of Athenian black-figure as export goods which made their way across the Mediterranean to a widely spread set of destinations, the rebuilding and extension of cult and governmental building stock, probably including the temple of Athena Polias on the Akropolis, and an enhanced cult of Apollo on Delos. He is credited with an improved city water supply, including the Enneakrounos fountain house in the Agora, and possibly the introduction of coinage. Archaeological evidence supports a view of the Agora, both market and civic focus, and the Akropolis as twin markers of a city centre distinguished and defined by an increasing number of formal buildings, many of them with narrative sculpture assemblages portraying heroes and stories which link to Athens’ evolving portrayal and presentation of its historical and current identity during Exekias’ lifetime. And many of the same stories appear on the ceramics which provided formal pottery for a cycle of occasions marking the lives of its citizens, among them birth, death and burial, weddings, and the symposium, or formal drinking party, which had a role as consolidator of military and political group-identity, but underlay other ceremonies and rituals in other forms. The pottery, not least that by Exekias himself, carries both mythological representation and scenes related to everyday life and to the occasions for which they were made; their images can be read as life-statements as much as storytelling for the symposia in which some of them were used. And this probably underwrites the success of an increasing overseas trade to other cultures, especially that of Etruria, to which they contributed. The interpretation of Exekias’ work pursued here therefore sits with a view of the Athens of his day as a city in which its sense of self and the security of its governance were at least mildly unstable, but an interest in promoting that sense of identity, and in the institutions and social habits which supported it, played a major part, not least in the construction of the city’s buildings and the practices they housed and supported, and in its arts and literary and religious interests. Performances of an ‘official’ version of the Homeric poems as part of the Panathenaic festival are reported as a feature of Peisistratos’ formalisation of Athens’ cultural life. Here it seems reasonable to suggest that a sense of what makes and unmakes heroes, Homeric or not, and however otherwise defined, is a thematic constant in the work of Exekias and his contemporaries. We now have the advantage of knowing Exekias’ name because he signed his work, as both maker and painter, and so he comes to us as a

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potentially credible individual rather than a modern conventional label for a group of related pieces. This could be seen as an advantage which supports the conventional tendency to place his work at the centre of a large body of scholarship on Greek, and particularly Attic, figured vases as an art-historical concern. The key control framework, Sir John Beazley’s attribution system, with its developmental and chronological approach to classification of Attic vases, naturally leads to an assumption of peaks and troughs of quality, or at least a slow rise to a climax in the work of the individual painters he envisaged, and an inevitable decline or degeneration afterwards. It is also a system which, because it presupposes individual painters, encourages treatment of them in these terms. Recent single-painter monographs, such as the Kerameus series, tend to establish an oeuvre, normally with Beazley’s corpus at their core, and discuss drawing style, the iconography of individual vases, shape and subsidiary ornament, and related artists, in exhaustive detail. Exekias was not one of the painters to whom Beazley himself dedicated a monograph, but he devoted some of his most eloquent continuous prose to the painter in Attic Black-Figure: A Sketch (1928) and The Development of Attic Black-Figure (1951). Other writers, especially Technau, Exekias (1926) and much more recently E. A. Mackay, Tradition and Originality: A Study of Exekias (2010) have written about Exekias’ style and subject matter on the basis of an assumption that he was a major contributor to the Attic black-figure tradition, or concentrated on single scenes and their meaning, or even individual motifs, such as his fine horses. He can be compared with his contemporary, the Amasis Painter, traced back stylistically to his roots in Beazley’s Group E, and discussed in terms of his assumed pupils and artistic descendants. Many bald statements have been made about him as an innovator of pot-shapes and of mythography alike. This study will try to explore the case for taking Exekias seriously as an artist by treating him seriously as a creator of objects which were designed to be handled, used and enjoyed, and are still able to command a passionate response now. The central chapters of the book will explore the impact of several of the painter’s most significant creations in that light, as a series of individual casestudies of objects bearing images which suggest an underlying thematic connection in their maker’s work. In tune with a number of well-worn conventions for books about aspects of ancient Greek culture, the frontispiece shows a famous and much-illustrated artefact – the amphora in the Vatican collection signed by Exekias and showing Ajax and Achilles playing a board

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game. In common with many of its fans, I first saw photographs of this pot, and this scene in particular, at a point when I was beginning to engage with the study of ancient Greece at school. I suspect that my experience of encountering it as a piece of eye-candy on the margins of the more serious study of ancient texts and historical narratives was not uncommon, and despite an educational shift since to a much broader approach to the study of ancient Greek civilisation, encounters with its visual culture remain peripheral for many students at any level. The serious study of visual objects, whatever their provenance and date, is itself a fissile specialist activity, not to say a mystery cult, with many shrines and practitioners from many intellectual backgrounds. The influential cultural anthropologist Daniel Miller has laid down several useful markers in the study of material cultures by pointing out that the ‘freedom from disciplinary foundations and boundaries’, which it can and should enjoy, is to its intellectual advantage. Artefact analysis is one of those supposedly legitimising disciplinary boundaries which has often been a straightjacket. Perception of the importance, identity and descriptive labelling of ancient visual objects and the intellectual context of their study remains a focus of argument. Students of the ancient classical world still have problems in deciding on the status of Greek vases as art, or archaeological evidence, or a cultural phenomenon which can be treated as both, or neither. As do students of contemporary ceramics in a context in which Grayson Perry, a potter with a penchant for challenging figurative decoration, won a recent Turner Prize, and curated a fascinating mixed show of his own work and ancient objects, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, at the British Museum, but practice-based art education in ceramics is in serious decline. A class of object which has long fulfilled everyday utilitarian and domestic needs, and, often at the same time, fuelled the passions of the collector and the academic as an aesthetic necessity, is in an awkward position, especially if it commonly manifests itself as a multiple, even when produced by an individual hand. Many archaeologists and anthropologists using pottery typologies primarily as dating tools or evidence of social differentiation have expressed increasing discomfort about the soundness of arguments based on shape-evolution, decorative styles or assumptions about manufacture, however well supported by archaeological evidence. Approaches via the methods of cultural anthropology raise questions about theoretical methodologies designed to work with associative description. The vases themselves have figured in museum displays which have supported at

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least one serious study of their evolution from the packed-case, shapeorientated display to contextual and thematic ones, with the vases as one of many components, and in some collections, back again. The death of Sir John Beazley, the key taxonomist of Attic vase painting, in 1970, led gradually over the subsequent couple of decades to a varied collection of reappraisals of the nature and impact of his methods and achievements, and some sharply contrasted attitudes to his legacy and the consequences of continued adherence to its implied values and assumptions. A widely expressed view that his attributionbased classification system was a one-man show, which few, if any, could match, dovetailed with increasing scepticism about the reality of the Athenian production culture which it framed, or possibly created. An underlying, if largely unexpressed, sense that Beazley’s methodology has a striking parallel in that of stamp-collecting was perhaps suppressed in favour of a discomfort with an intellectual construct based on material of which the only documentation is effectively itself. An important, if largely unintended, consequence of Beazley’s attribution system was a hierarchy of painter quality, and thus of valuation in the collecting market; some very expensive vase sales in the 1970s and 1980s played a major part in generating argument about the value placed on them at the time of manufacture. A recognition of the frequent cross-references of form and decoration between metal and ceramic vessels supported an argument that the real archaic and classical Greek vessel artist was working in precious metal for elite use, and largely in the symposium, and the ceramic worker was a copyist working for a cheaper market or an export trail, or both. Or alternatively that the vessels were produced principally for use in funerary and commemorative contexts, further complicated by the implications of their appearance in burials as the grave-goods of other cultures, and particularly in Etruscan tombs. Attempts to undermine Beazley’s chronological system attacked the other major strand of his working methods and their intended outcomes. The argument has died down, for the moment at least, and in the absence of substitute frameworks, Beazley’s scaffolding largely remains in place, and in use, even if few feel strong enough to add to its nuts and bolts. The recognition that the taxonomy lends itself to digital capture has given us the Beazley Archive Database as a searchable resource for a broad church of users; whatever their position on the background implications, it remains a constructive tool. The entry of the art historian into the world of classical studies has played a part in current approaches to ancient material, as has the

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assimilation of other branches of Classics to the practice of specialisms in other periods and languages. Lately, discursive monographs on Greek vases have tended to focus on aspects of their iconography or narrative techniques, often within a framework derived ultimately from the theoretical life of verbal disciplines. An intellectual hierarchy which places words higher in its food-chain than pictures or objects is still dominant to the point of unreflective or even unconscious acceptance by many of its inhabitant users in the world of classical studies, in which they are not alone. Would-be underminers of this position have, in common with workers on other aspects of antiquity, often adopted strategies and methodologies which relate their work to that of scholars of the equivalent media and genres of other cultures and periods. Sculpture, historically in as problematic a position in the aesthetic hierarchy as other three-dimensional media, is currently the stuff of choice for many historians of ancient art. A recent upsurge of interest in ekphrasis – the ancient art of rhetorical capture of a visual experience – has produced some attractive mediations of the word and image interface, largely with a focus on ancient sculpture and wall-painting, and especially where a contemporary demonstrative, or at least ancient reactive, inscription was part of the experience of viewing it. The parallel growth of reception studies and collection history and of anthropological interest in cultures of consumption and display supports an approach to ancient visual media which takes on board the past history of interest in them, and of methods of framing and controlling that interest. We are perhaps in a better position than we might have been earlier to reflect on where we stand in relation to those methods, and to understand and make choices about the use of them; or to express ongoing unhappiness with an expectation that we should use any of them to lend credibility to the view. All of which so far avoids, here as elsewhere, engagement with the work itself; recent engagement, especially in the field of ancient object studies, with ideas of viewing and viewing cultures, whether from the perspective background of psychology, cultural anthropology or aesthetic philosophy, tends to evolve a theoretical stance which has less connection than it should with the immediate experience of seeing and handling the pots themselves, something which is admittedly extremely difficult to objectify or crystallise for others. To try is to invite further discourse on the position of the modern viewer as opposed to the original intended audience. Many scholars feel and express profound scepticism about modern

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attempts at interpretation of ancient pictures and objects, which must inevitably be contaminated by modern cultural assumptions, and this has played an important part in pushing interpreters towards trying to find an acceptable theoretical framework which will preserve them from the infection of their own emotional reaction to the object. Pots are best used as evidence for another strand of investigation, rather than enjoyed on their own. This situation actually provides an opportunity to construct a view of Exekias’ work from more than one angle – iconographic themes and interests, interconnections with other work provided by those themes and subjects, shape-and-picture relationships among them. There are some obvious items in the painter’s repertoire which still speak to us with an eloquent voice: the Dionysos cup in Munich, the Vatican amphora with Ajax and Achilles, the Penthesileia vase in the British Museum. All of these are much photographed. They appear, often with a detailed descriptive commentary, in any publication about the art of Greek pottery; they are the stuff of coffee-table books and museum postcards; they are used as illustrations in books which have little or nothing to do with pots or Greek art at all. Their appeal is demonstrable: they are famous in their own right as individual and charismatic objects. There is ample evidence for continuing public and academic interest in them as vehicles for technical experiment, emotional expression, sophisticated narrative art, and often as successful and beautiful examples of ceramic craft. My experience of teaching university courses which include Exekias’ work in their syllabus prescription has been that his paintings are those, even more than the apparently more immediate red-figure vases, which hold students’ attention and command their emotional response. These pictures still mean something to us as viewers, whether informed or new to them, and there is every point, therefore, in a discussion of them in which their impact, and the ways in which it is achieved, are a primary focus. What this book tries to do, therefore, is to look at a group of this painter’s more famous individual pots and pictures in a way that also allows exploration of some of the wider issues they raise, and to relate them to the longer visual and cultural tradition in which they stand, and in the light of which we now view them. One important controversy, which is an old, diffuse one, often not a conscious issue in the mind of the academic critic, is whether these vessels should be treated as art or craft. They must, it is assumed, have a category label that will dictate how we treat them. Craft can still be a pejorative term, not least because it has far too wide a denotative scope,

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and can mean anything from wonderful manifestations of the goldsmith’s technique to dried flower arrangements. The tendency of some classicists to class Greek pots as art has given rise among other things to more than one concerted effort to knock them off that pedestal, not least the claim mentioned earlier that they are in some sense hack versions of primary work in precious metal. The idea was also to question general, or at least wholesale and unthinking, acceptance of the work of Beazley as the major taxonomist of these pots, and of course that of his followers. Beazley was working against the background of the great organisers and explainers in other fields, Darwin, Marx and Freud among them – there was great pressure to control by structural explanation. What he did was not facile – he began with the expectation that if a human hand produced the painted decoration on a particular vessel, that hand could be detected on others too. In this he was doing the same as the other great visual connoisseurs of his day, such as Bernard Berenson – he was attributing a body of work to an individual. And in the terms of today’s archaeological thinking that is not in itself wrong. When he had done that, he extended the initial premise to construct a picture of a craft organisation in which some makers taught others, or were colleagues in the same workshop, or collaborated as potter and painter on more than one item; or, of course, were rivals, as he suggested that Exekias and his near contemporary the Amasis Painter were. He could then postulate a situation in which the things which are demonstrable by other means – the use of specific shapes for specific purposes, for example – fed into his view of the circumstances of purchase and even commission, and eventually of the value of the pot itself. This last has been the major source of recent controversy; the contemporary art market values Greek pots, and Beazley’s structure is, indirectly, hierarchical – he distinguished between the good, indifferent and absolutely awful, aesthetically and practically. His good painters are, needless to say, the ones whose work now fetches high prices, and indirectly, of course, induce tomb-robbing and other non-archaeological and even illegal practices. I accept Beazley’s classification, not least because his critics have not found a workable alternative, but it seems to me that we may understand Athenian vases better in their socio-economic context if we treat them as a craft in the skilled trade sense, whose aim was to produce well turned out, functional, if specialised, vessels for purposes clearly defined for maker and customer alike. Their expectations are on the whole conservative, and few of the pots produced in these circumstances are going to aspire to the status of high art. On the other

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hand, much decorative art – another connotation of the term craft – is in itself the product of great technical, expressive and evidently creative skill. So in this book, as elsewhere, I argue implicitly or explicitly for a craft tradition of that sort, a consensus of expertise, in the Athenian pottery industry, which occasionally threw up great works of the imagination. Exekias has the advantage of being identifiable by name; he is also worth looking at as an individual craftsman working in a wellestablished tradition. This book therefore pays attention to the interpretation of a relatively small number of Exekias’ attributed vases and images, and uses a number of strategies to do so: we shall look at a collective portrait of a single hero, the use of a routine genre scene with non-routine personnel, a dramatic association of a vase shape with the figure composition, the reworking of a very ancient image bank for a generic but also intensely personal occasion, and a magic picture which overthrows conventional decorative formats. Underlying many of these images is the parallel set of cultural and moral assumptions that we can also find in verbal media that would have been accessible to Exekias and his patrons, working and surviving in the socially evolutionary and changing environment of Athens in the latter half of the sixth century bc. In the interests of accessibility, and avoidance of cluttering references, some of the underlying scholarly work will appear, selectively, in the bibliographical notes. A word or two about the medium itself: the studies which follow will discuss the advantages and limitations of black-figure painting in relation to some specific uses of the technique, but it is worth reminding ourselves about them in a more general way. The Red and the Black, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, Athenian Black-Figure Vases, Athenian White Lekythoi – all of these are titles of important reference books about archaic and classical Greek vases, all of them designating a class of painted pottery by its colour or colours. Black, red and white – the standard colours, contrasty, striking and immediately recognisable – the red clay with its black gloss and white accents or white slip which give the fabric its characteristic appearance: the product of a hot Mediterranean country with which we associate these strong, earthy colours, rather like the equally characteristic tastes of olives and wine and bread, which belong in the same dense and evocative sensory spectrum. These colours are so characteristic that we tend to pay them lipservice and forget about them. There is a standard commentary in scholarly writing on vases, in which the changeover from black-figure,

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the silhouette and engraving style of drawing, to red-figure, its graphic reverse, at the end of the sixth century bc in Athens is discussed in terms of optical effects, and changes in spatial relationships. The socalled bilingual vase, which uses both techniques, gets detailed analysis in terms of the likeness, or not, between its sides, and the already changed perception of the illusionistic possibilities of the technique. And there is a second topos in which the relationship between whiteground lekythoi and now-vanished wall paintings becomes a burst of informed fantasy in an otherwise sober textbook. Both red-figure and white-ground attract interest as ancestors of line drawing and painting techniques; they are less obviously stylised than black-figure, and apparently more subtle. In black-figure the major available colours are the iron-rich, orangered clay and the black gloss, and these, at any rate according to current conventional explanation, are rendered permanent by a complex double firing process which produces the dual colour contrast. There are, however, two frequent subsidiary colours, red and white, which, it is often argued, cannot be fired on and maintain their colour, and so have often been lost if the pot is very worn. When the Corinthians developed black-figure in the seventh century bc, largely, probably, for the purposes of rapid mass production of animal-patterned vases, they made very extensive use of both red and white and aimed at a variegated spread of colour. Their rarer vases involving human activity do the same, so that chariot teams, dogs, some of the human figures, bits of the furniture, are white. Gradually it becomes conventional that the white humans are female, and this is what translates itself to Athens by the early sixth century bc. Early Athenian black-figure hangs onto its Corinthianising tendencies, and happily combines animal friezes, figure scenes and florals. The overall effect is extremely decorative, and we should not lose sight of the fact that black-figure as a technique is decorative. But it can be more than merely that: at its best it is an expressive narrative medium to which, in my experience, people respond very readily, and often prefer to its apparently more subtle successors. There is an added technical achievement in the developed use of incision for linear and patterned detail: Exekias’ work is particularly noted for its sophisticated use of incised texture and expressive line. Beazley and others placed Exekias’ work at the chronological centre of a developmental curve: by the middle of the sixth century bc Athenian black-figure vases have shown us a distinctive move away from that layered animal frieze inheritance towards an emphasis on

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figure scenes; these are more often mythological in the earlier stages, but by the mid-century there is a recognisable parallel repertoire of scenes with selective references to everyday life and human activity. Both types of scene carry their own reference banks of interpretative clues and symbols: some painters labelled their figures, but more often the characters and the scene are identifiable by attributes – wellknown objects or clothing worn or carried – or by association, gestures and recognisable activity. We can observe an emerging sense of the successful relationship between the figures and the vessel on which they appear, often conditioned by the shape of the space in which they are painted, which may influence the choice of subject matter, for practical reasons as much as any other consideration. Exekias’ career overlaps, in the conventional framework, with that of Lydos, usually dated as working between about 560 and 540 bc, and the Amasis Painter, whose work also begins around 560 bc and continues later than either Lydos or Exekias, till around 525 bc, to the interface with the emerging red-figure and the decline of black-figure into a technique used largely for smaller pots and rapid production. Lydos is often characterised as a workmanlike traditionalist; the Amasis Painter is quirky, inventive and humorous. Exekias, absorbing and then growing beyond the routine work of his apprenticeship in the workshop conventionally labelled Group E, is the artist whose repertoire relates to that of other painters of his time, and builds on its traditions and assumptions, but develops a quality of technique and an immediacy of expression which puts his most recognisable work in a class by itself. Where some of the earlier pieces have inherited the crowded images and even the occasional animal frieze, the mature ones are notable for their concentration on a few figures which dominate their decorative schemes. His work has its visible followers, some of them, such as the Andokides Painter, the pioneers of the change to red-figure in around 530 bc. He is often credited with innovation as a potter: the Eye-Cup, the Type A amphora, and the calyx krater have all been ascribed to him as an inventor; the Munich Eye-Cup discussed in Chapter 5 is probably the earliest surviving example of the type; the refined contours and articulation of the Ajax and Achilles amphora provide a yardstick for the shape. The calyx krater, whether Exekias was responsible for a nowdisputed example from the Akropolis North Slope or not, is a clever and practical extension of a cup shape on a larger scale, to create a mixing bowl without some of the problems for the user caused by the in-turned rims of the other conventional forms.

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Exekias’ signature appears in one form or another on 12 vases: usually the inscription says Ε+ΣΕΚΙΑΣΕΠΟΙΕΣΕ with minor variants, meaning ‘Exekias made me’, but three of the attributed pieces, including the Ajax and Achilles amphora, carry a version which indicates that he was the painter as well: Ε+ΣΕΚΙΑΣΕΓΡΑΠΣΕΚΑΠΟ(Ι)ΕΣΕΜΕ: ‘Exekias painted and made me’. The potter signature appears on two amphorae and six cups which he probably did not paint. Inscriptions of other kinds include the kalos inscription which toasts a current celebrity: the Ajax and Achilles and Penthesileia amphorae, and the calyx krater whose authorship is now disputed, carry ΟΝΕΤΟΡΙΔΕΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ. Nine of the currently attributed vases or fragments have inscriptions which label the figures, including both sides of the Ajax and Achilles and Penthesileia amphorae. The Ajax and Achilles amphora also provides speech-inscriptions for the gaming heroes, and its other side names Kastor’s horse, Kyllaros. An inscribed dedication, probably on the purchaser’s direction, appears on a dinos fragment. And the pots on which his pictures appear: Exekias has a relatively small attributed oeuvre of fewer than 40 surviving vessels and tomb plaques. The majority are formal wine-vessels: amphorae of three types, a cup, the fragmentary dinos and the disputed krater. All of these vessels are usually thought of as formal crockery for the symposium or formal drinking party which played an essential social bonding and educational role in archaic and classical Greece, eventually particularly for male citizens of military age, who might well expect to perform a military function whether legally required to do so as a civic duty or not. The symposium was certainly an agency through which civic culture and public imagery were established and disseminated, not least through the imagery of its pottery. As we have already observed, much of the subject matter of Athenian black-figure, and particularly the drinking vessels, refers to myths rather than real life, however stylised. We might see it as a parallel to most of the surviving epic poems, as a largely formal and certainly performative expression of reference to the ethical and ideological world contained in the mythical story bank. For the symposiast, the imagery on these vessels was meaningful, and this book argues for a context for Exekias’ vases which also assumes familiarity with the Homeric poems, known to have been in oral circulation and performed on formal occasions, and an emotional connection with their world, in which heroism is a central concept. If we look up the term ‘hero’ in the Concise OED, it tells us that it denotes a person, generally a man, who is admired for his courage or

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outstanding achievements, and in mythology and folktale a person of superhuman qualities, in particular those whose exploits were the subject of ancient Greek legends. If we look up the term ἥρως in Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon, it tells us about some of the contexts of its use – to denote objects of worship, sometimes as local deities, or of historical persons to whom divine honours were paid. It does not try, perhaps wisely, to define heroism, except as something which, as a neardivine status, is commemorated. The entry does, however, as it should, cite both the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary sources, and quotes contexts in which heroes are many, indeed the default status. If these texts cannot tell us about heroism, which can? The Iliad essentially takes the form of a linear narrative in which the Trojan War is explored via the inclusive structure of the wrath of Achilles, which is all embracing in its effects on Greeks and Trojans alike; in that narrative we see heroic behaviour defined by a notional ethical code, against which Achilles’ behaviour and sense of self are tested and found wanting. A secondary thread focusing on the Trojan prince, Hector, is about the effects of war on the invaded country, and explores what we would now think of as protective heroism and domestic values, including his marriage and child, his relationship with his parents, and the effects of his death in defence of his country. The poem reflects on the war as experienced via the activities of individuals, and raises some interesting questions about the nature of heroism along the way. The Odyssey, usually accepted as a little later, is perhaps a more complex text, which can be read, among other things, as a commentary on Iliadic notions of heroism, which it does not discard, but subjects to very thorough quality assurance procedures. And among the areas it explores is heroism as a social construct; what do heroes do when they are not fighting? Is fighting what actually defines them, or are there other things which heroes do as a class? Do they share characteristics with human non-heroes? And where do gods come into the conceptual landscape? Defining the characteristics of a hero is not easy. We might add the further thought that our sense of heroism may not quite map onto the Greek one. Both poems foreground the major legendary characters we expect as figures for a competitive society to contemplate and perhaps emulate, but never avoid the drawbacks and weaknesses of heroism, or a hero’s mistakes.

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Portrait of a Loser

This chapter connects a much-reproduced and much-discussed image with two others of the same hero, Ajax, to suggest that Exekias pursued a thematic view of him in several pictures, which does not constitute illustration of contemporary textual treatment, but does suggest a concept of his character and relationships with others which can be seen to underlie his appearances in the Homeric poems, and to link with his later characterisation in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. The frontispiece follows a long tradition in showing one of the most-illustrated Greek vases of all time. Almost any book on Greek art will have a picture of it, many discuss or describe it in detail, and it figures as an incidental illustration or a dust-jacket picture for many books whose focus is elsewhere. Further, it has a substantial secondary literature in its own right, both about its appearance and place in art history, and about the meaning of the scene on this side of it. The vessel is an Athenian black-figure belly-amphora, now in the Vatican collection, conventionally dated at around 540 to 530 bc, and signed by Exekias as both potter and painter. The vase belongs to a shape class known as Type A: a two-handled jar, potted in a continuous curve from mouth to foot; the lip is usually slightly flared with sharp edges, and the foot normally has a step between its two parts. It has strap-handles with flanged edges which present the viewer of the pictured sides with a flat surface, often decorated with a band-pattern, such as the ivy which appears here. Scenes on this amphora shape appear on the upper half of the body of the vase, usually with another band-pattern as a partial or complete frame: here the scene has a lotus and palmette frieze above the picture. The vessel is otherwise black, apart from the band of rays at the base of the body where it joins the foot. This colour distribution has the effect

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of concentrating visual attention on the picture, which is positioned with precision to relate to the handles and the widest part of the body of the vase. The picture (detail, Plate 1) shows two armed men sitting on box stools, holding their spears at a slant, playing an unspecified board game on the top of a third box. As an aesthetic phenomenon, it is easy to see why it is much illustrated and discussed. Its red and black colour scheme is striking, and because of the colour contrast, it always reproduces and looks well, whether in colour or monochrome. Its details are very finely executed, especially the figures’ cloaks and hair, and it is brilliantly composed so that the curvature of the amphora wall is echoed by the figures bending over their game, and their heads and spears help to form a complex system of interlocking triangles which draw attention to the game and their focus on it and also relate to the handles of the vessel. The scale of the figures draws immediate attention: our two men fill and dominate the picture space, where most contemporary vase scenes, including that on the other side of this vase, are more densely populated, and often surround the principal actors with spectators. The two heads and the helmet at the right are placed on the shoulder curve, level with the handle roots, and the viewer’s attention is directed to the concentration of the players on the game. Elaborate texture and added colours, now worn, originally drew attention to the figures’ clothing and armour. Both men wear chlamydes, or short cloaks, densely decorated with complex star and dot-rosette patterns in incision and added white paint. The figure on the left has a small grazing deer over his buttock, which is not mirrored on the figure on the right. Both men wear elaborate corselets with incised and whitepainted band-patterns, which are divided into strips below the waist, to reveal the hem of a short red chiton, or woollen tunic, across the thighs. The posture of the right-hand figure allows us to see a panther head on the chest of his corselet. The figure on the left wears protective armour, a rerebrace, on his upper arm, with incised spirals, a pendant white lotus, and a frontal panther head at the top. He also has a guard on his nearer thigh, also decorated with incised spirals enhanced with white dots. The right leg is advanced, and the figure leans forward, with the left leg back and the heel pressed against his stool. He wears greaves on both legs, with incised and painted detail. He reaches forward to move a piece on the board with his right hand; his left grips two spears against his shoulder, point upwards, with their shafts passing behind the table. He wears his helmet pushed back on his head, so that it exposes his face

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and finely detailed hair and beard. He has a red headband with incised selvedges to contain his hair, looped up at the back. The helmet is black with a red crest and incised patterns on the crest-holder. The effect of the helmet position is to make it the apex of the scene and give the wearer a dominant position. His opponent faces him across the board, with his near leg pulled back, and his further one held in a right angle. He, too, wears thigh guards and greaves. He reaches for the gaming board with his further hand, and holds his spears with the nearer one against his shoulder, point up in front of the table. Like his opponent, his glance is focused on the board, and his back is bent forward to enhance the sense of concentration. He is not wearing his helmet, so we see that he has a curly fringe and a red headband keeping further curls, emphasised in relief, in place on the back of his neck. He has a longer and finer beard than his companion. The two warriors’ shields help to define the overall shape of the picture, and suggest the walls of the tent against which they lean, and perhaps substitute for the framing figures which we might normally expect to find there. The shield on the left is shown as a Boiotian shield in profile, with a red band round the side cut-out. The blazon is a satyr face, which appears in relief profile projecting in the centre of the shield. Above it is a snake with open mouth, and below a rampant spotted panther. The shield on the right is also Boiotian, with the red band edging the cut-out; the central device is an incised Gorgoneion with red forehead curls and tongue, surrounded by snakes. Propped on top of the shield is the helmet, its eyeholes facing out of the picture; it has a red edge to the crest and incised patterns on the crest-holder. Given the conventions of the painting style, and the far from helpful shape of a vase for figure drawing, it is difficult to see how any vase painter could possibly have done better, technically or aesthetically. This is why this particular vase is often used as an example of the high level of sophistication which black-figure could reach at its height. Its success in conveying the intensity of concentration via its composition and the size of its figures, and its exquisite detail make it an acknowledged star. The vase has some painted inscriptions other than the artist’s signature, and from the labels above their heads we discover that the players are Achilles, on the left, and Ajax, on the right. When, however, we try to explain what is happening here we start to find it hard to interpret. The labels are clearly there with a purpose and can reasonably be assumed to have provided a frame of reference for the knowledgeable

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contemporary viewer. The modern viewer needs to consider both textual and visual clues with some care. First, if we do the apparently obvious thing and go to the available verbal sources, we will find that although the two heroes are well-known figures from the Trojan epic cycle, with their own groups of attached stories, there is no surviving literary source which unquestionably gives us an occasion on which Ajax and Achilles played a game, though there is plenty to suggest a relationship might have supported their doing so. There are, however, a number of other versions of the scene on Attic vases of the late sixth century bc and the early fifth, some of which include a gesturing Athena, or armed warriors, and sometimes trees, which have led to considerable speculation and debate about the meaning of the scene and the painter’s intentions. We are probably not dealing here with an illustration of a verbally preserved incident, though a number of interpreters, including Beazley, have tried to hypothesise a once extant story, or a connection with one, which we no longer have. He accepted earlier suggestions that it represented an episode in a now-lost epic, Palamedeia, and proposed a story in which Ajax and Achilles had become so entranced by the game invented by Palamedes that they failed to notice a Trojan incursion into the Greek camp. Classical art historians have accepted for some time that even when there is a written version of a story which also has visual ones, there is no necessary direct connection between the two, not least because it is fairly obvious that both visual and verbal storytellers felt free to experiment with their core material all the time. This underlies yet another strand of interpretation of this and other late sixth-century vase paintings which suggests a motive for them with roots in political propaganda, or a conscious adoption by Exekias and his successors of Ajax as an Attic hero. Herodotus gives an account (1.62–3) of the incoming tyrant Peisistratos’ move towards Athens in 546 bc which led to his victory at Pallene, and describes his opponents’ loss of attention over a post-lunch nap or games of dice. One influential suggestion, noting the versions showing the gesturing Athena or warriors, knitted Exekias’ vase into a suggestive fabric in which the painter is commenting via a mythical parable, in which survival goes to those who remain awake and alert. Others have rejected this to suggest a basis in the resolution of a contemporary dispute between Athens and its neighbouring state Megara over Salamis, in which the contemporary tyrant Peisistratos had been a player (Herodotus 1.59), which generated an interest in foregrounding

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Ajax, the hero from Salamis, as an Attic hero of nearly equal status with Achilles. Exekias’ evident interest in Ajax is set in a context in which there is a notable insistence on showing the two heroes together, including Exekias’ multiple representations on other vases of Ajax carrying Achilles’ body off the battlefield (Plate 2). There is a further indicator of Athenian interest in the gaming heroes in the evidence for a statuary group on the Akropolis, destroyed by the Persians in their invasion of 480–479 bc, and important enough to be replaced, like the statues of the Tyrannicides in the Agora. These latter interpretations may be right, and perhaps not even mutually exclusive of each other, but the picture arguably has other things to say for itself, via its inscriptions, its composition, and by association with other pictures in Exekias’ surviving oeuvre. Firstly, without the labels we could not identify the two warriors at all. We might say that because of the monumentality of the figures, and their elaborate clothing and armour, and what we know about general trends in vase painting, we can guess that these men are figures from heroic myth, but we have only to look at the other side of the vase, which actually shows the Dioskouroi with their parents (Figure 6), to see that heroic myth can be represented in a rather domesticated idiom, and again, without the labels this could be a charming picture of a fairly ordinary, if admittedly prosperous human family. So the labels are very important here; there is no means of identifying Ajax and Achilles without them, as we would be able to identify Herakles by his club and lion skin. And we can probably assume that this would have been true when the vase was painted too; in other words, the painter meant the labels, and was not just using them because he could write elegant script. Labels are not obligatory on Athenian vases: they are actually much rarer than attributes like Herakles’ lion skin, but attributes do, of course, assume a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the viewer. In fact, later versions of our picture by other painters make the assumption, and do not label their figures. The identity of the figures on this particular vase, the earliest recorded occurrence of this picture, is important. There is, however, some other writing on the vase, which deserves discussion too. Besides Exekias’ signature, and the fairly common kalos name, toasting a contemporary beauty, in this case called Onetorides, and the identifying labels for our heroes, there are ‘speech balloons’ in front of their faces (Plate 1): Ajax’s is written retrograde. Achilles says ΤΕΣΑΡΑ (four), and Ajax says ΤΡΙΑ (three). Ajax has the lower score,

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and is sitting on the right, the traditional losing side in contests and battles on Greek vases, where the direction of victory moves from left to right. We should notice again the way in which the painter has ensured that Achilles is the dominant figure, by making him keep his helmet on, its crest emphasised in red. Ajax’s head is not really lowered in relation to Achilles’, but the helmet dominates him. There is a marked triangular relationship between the helmet eyeholes and the eyes of the two heroes, and another between their eyes and their slanting speech inscriptions. Speech balloons are not common on Greek vases generally; this is the only occurrence in Exekias’ surviving work. Why, then, did he use them here? Presumably because, for the purposes of this picture, it matters that we see who the loser is. Ajax is the loser, then, and, moreover, to Achilles. Our next question is going to be whether we can find out more about attitudes to Ajax, and to his relations with Achilles, both in pictures and in the literature which was, chronologically at least, available to Exekias, and is still available to us. The Homeric poems are the obvious place to look for a literary account; Ajax appears both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, as a living hero with a part to play in the progress of the siege of Troy, and as an embittered ghost who will not be reconciled with Odysseus in Hades. In the Iliad we meet him principally as one of the embassy in Book 9, who are sent to try to persuade Achilles back into battle, because he is assumed to be a friend, one of the people to whom Achilles might listen. The other members of the party are Odysseus, who is the brains, and Phoinix who is the father figure; Ajax is ostensibly the brawn. In the surviving version he does not, initially, speak to Achilles in this meeting. His speech (at lines 624ff.) is addressed to Odysseus for Achilles to hear, and is couched very directly in terms which leave us in no doubt of Ajax’s feelings in the matter. I do not think that we shall achieve our mission on this journey at least … Achilles has made his proud heart savage in his breast. He is cruel, he has no thought for the affection of his friends, and how we honoured him far beyond any other by the ships. He is pitiless – and yet a man will take the blood price from the slayer of his brother, or his own child, from the man who killed him.

Then he does turn directly to Achilles:

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But the gods have put in your breast a perverse heart which cannot be placated, all because of a single girl … make your spirit gracious, respect the welcome your house owes us: we are under your roof, we have come from the whole body of the Greeks, and we desire beyond all others to be the closest and dearest to you of all the Achaeans.

This speech is couched in quite different terms from those of Phoinix, the old quasi-parent figure, who talks about personal honour and the destructive effects of anger (434ff.), or Odysseus, who, perhaps predictably, talks about Achilles’ status, and the compensation Agamemnon is offering (225ff.). Ajax is appealing to the old-fashioned values of friendship and loyalty and honourable behaviour. He, like the others, has no real response to make to Achilles’ grievances, which by now go far beyond the terms of the original quarrel with Agamemnon. But he has made it clear that the loyalty Achilles owes his friends should come first. Elsewhere in the Iliad we see Ajax as a mighty fighter, the traditional hero ‘with a shield like a tower’ (7.203ff.). He engages in a single combat with Hector, which is inconclusive, and ends with an agreed truce, and a properly chivalrous exchange of gifts, including a sword (303–4). Oddly enough, though, he usually comes off worse in the encounters described, and has to be helped out of the situation. One of the most striking extended similes in the whole of the Iliad is the famous one in 11.543ff., where, after an initial comparison with a lion, he is likened to a donkey being driven out of a field by boys with sticks and stones, and we are suddenly presented with an image of great stubbornness, dogged persistence and a certain brute courage. This is supported by the rest of the text: at Patroklos’ funeral games, Ajax finally fails to win a wrestling match with Odysseus (23.707ff.), which foreshadows his eventual loss of the competition for Achilles’ armour, and also loses a single combat with Diomedes (811ff.) and a shot-putting match with Polypoites (836ff.). Here, then, he is a valued comrade, a stout fighter, but not a winner. He is consistently represented in the books between 11 and 18 as a warrior who needs, and gets, support and help, exactly as he has said that he expects them from Achilles. The Iliad was followed in the epic cycle by the Aithiopis, which we have only in an ancient summary sometimes attributed to Proclus. From this we learn that Achilles was eventually killed by Paris with the help of Apollo. It was Ajax who rescued his body, and carried it off the battlefield. The Aithiopis also recounted the lottery for the arms of Achilles, which Odysseus won, Ajax’s subsequent madness, and his suicide. The later

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part of Ajax’s story was, of course, picked up by Sophocles, and Euripides’ Helen (80ff.) has a moving dialogue between Teucer, Ajax’s brother, and Helen, in which he says that he has been exiled by their father for not protecting Ajax, which he had promised to do. Although this is later than our Exekian pot, it supports the notion of a traditional characterisation for Ajax, in which the need for help and protection is important, as is his highly developed sense of right behaviour and self-respect, and the related love and respect his comrades have for him. Eventually, Odysseus meets Ajax in Hades in the eleventh book of the Odyssey (541ff.). Ajax is part of the sequence in which Odysseus meets three important Greeks who had been his dearest comrades in the Trojan War. Agamemnon has given him a dire warning about the fate he has suffered, and Odysseus may yet suffer (405ff.). Achilles says that it is better to serve on earth than rule in Hades, but is cheered by news of his son’s prowess as a warrior (487ff.). But Ajax stands aloof and will not speak to Odysseus, even though Odysseus, unusually for him, expresses great regret for what happened: I wish I had never won a contest of this sort – the armour that brought Ajax to his death, the heroic Ajax, who in beauty and courage surpassed all the Greeks except the handsome son of Peleus … What a tower of strength we lost when you fell! We have mourned your death as constantly as we do Achilles, Peleus’ son.

Notice the insistence, even in this somewhat embarrassing context, that Ajax came second to Achilles. It is perhaps also important to notice that Odysseus is a hero who is managing, by very unheroic means, to survive in a post-heroic world. Ajax represents the most conservative values of the world Odysseus is beginning to do without. Let us go back to the visual tradition. What are the episodes involving Ajax which get pictorial treatment? As we would expect, they are the ones which will provide a striking image. The most popular is Ajax carrying the dead body of his friend off the battlefield (Plate 2). This motif appears earlier than any other, perhaps because the huge figure of our hero, with his frequently vaster burden slung over his shoulders, makes a memorable composition in itself, and one which fits well in a square panel format. As a motif, it is popular from the end of the eighth century bc to the end of the sixth, and appears on a wide variety of objects, including decorated bronze shield bands (Figure 1) and dozens of black-figure and a few early red-figure vases.

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Figure 1: A panel from a bronze votive shield band, found in the sanctuary at Olympia, c.600 bc. As on the Munich amphora, Plate 2, neither warrior is identified, but the image is similar. Olympia Museum 1911a, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950).

Not all of the early pictures necessarily represent Ajax and Achilles: it becomes specific to our heroes on early black-figure vases which identify them by inscriptions, including the François Vase (Figure 2). Exekias probably showed the death of Achilles or the subsequent carrying of the body by Ajax several times, though Beazley’s original identification has been disputed. A neck-amphora in Munich has the best-preserved version (Plate 2): the artist has characteristically concentrated attention on his subject by the central placing of the heavy corpse draped over Ajax’s shoulder, as our hero humps him off the field. Achilles’ still-armed body dominates the curve at the widest part of the vase. A second 25

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Figure 2: Scenes from the outer curve of the handle of the François Vase, an Athenian black-figure volute krater signed by Kleitias and Ergotimos, c.570–560 bc. The lower panel shows the same motif as Figure 1, but the warriors are named here as Aias (Ajax) and Achilles. Florence, Museo Archaeologico 4209, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München.

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Figure 3: The nowlost Athenian blackfigure neck-amphora, approximate H. 44.2, c.545 bc, another early piece by Exekias, showing a warrior carrying a dead comrade, received by a woman. Berlin, F 1718, photograph © bpk/AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius.

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Figure 4: Another drawing from a bronze shield band, c.575 bc, often interpreted as two warriors’ discovery of Ajax after he has fallen on his sword. Olympia Museum B 1636 x, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950).

amphora in Berlin, now lost, showed a similar central figure carrying the corpse, with a receiving female figure (Figure 3). A variant picture, on a fragmentary amphora in Philadelphia, has been identified as showing Ajax bending over the dead Achilles, still clad in the armour which is to be Ajax’s downfall, to lift him, while Menelaos defends Ajax’s rear. These vases show a concentration on that death: four representations are a high proportion of a surviving oeuvre of some 45 vases in all. The armour in all four is treated with the same attention to detail as in the board game picture: there Achilles’ shield shows an elaborate satyr mask, Ajax’s a Medusa mask. On the Munich and Philadelphia amphorae, the Medusa mask appears again as Ajax’s device; Achilles has a lion mask. Leg armour, the rare rerebraces and corselets all receive meticulous 28

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incised patterning. The armour is the dress of heroism, we might say its costume, and Exekias’ repeated emphasis on its role in his Ajax pictures draws attention to it as a key symbol of the hero’s decline. The competition for the armour and the subsequent madness and suicide become the stuff of dramatic tragedy later; although there are red-figure representations of the lot casting for the armour, or black-figure ones of the preceding quarrel, they are fairly rare, perhaps because they do not necessarily lend themselves to dramatic pictures quite as readily as the suicide itself. Here we find that the subject goes back at least as far as a proto-Corinthian aryballos of the early seventh century bc. Figure 4 shows another decorated shield band. What these and other pre-Exekian images show is Ajax’s body impaled on his sword, and the effect can have unfortunate serio-comic overtones, even when the disaster is observed by Ajax’s comrades. Exekias’ version, now in Boulogne (Plate 3), is unique: something quite deliberately removed from its obvious precursors. It appears in a panel on the side of an amphora of a shape we now call Type B, a shape and convention which Exekias used on several occasions. The viewer’s attention is directed immediately to the picture by the intense glossy black surface of the pot, on which the picture panel is highlighted, and by the virtual absence of subsidiary decoration apart from the rays at the bottom of the body, and the framing frieze at the top of the picture itself. It is a rare version of a rare subject – Ajax contemplating suicide, getting ready for it, rather than the aftermath; as an evocation of mood it goes much further than any other surviving black-figure painting we have. The silhouette technique, accented sparingly with colour, does a great deal of the work: a red edge to the helmet crest, and a red headband for Ajax, and they act as markers to draw attention to the elements which give us the emotional and narrative content of the scene. The shield at the right of the scene, of Boiotian shape again, faces us: it has a red dot on its top and bottom rims, and red finials projecting over the lateral cut-outs. Its central device is a Gorgoneion, drawn within a reserved space. Above it is a panther’s head. There were two lotus buds framing the head, and a now very faded rampant lion in white below. Ajax’s helmet is perched on top of the shield, this time facing inwards. It has a high crest with a red line at the outer edge and a holder with an incised dot band, once enhanced in white. The helmet supports two spears leaning against it. The scene is deliberately stark: as in the board game scene, there are far fewer figures or objects than is usual in a painting of this

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Figure 5: Detail of Plate 3; Ajax’s face and posture are the primary foci of this powerful and stark image. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulognesur-Mer 558, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulognesur-Mer.

date, so that Ajax’s hunched, crouching presence is an isolated one in the middle of the picture panel, and as in the board game scene, he is shown at a dominating scale. The mood is reinforced by a facial expression (Figure 5): his brow is furrowed in stress and distress, and he has a crease below the eye down the nose. This, too, is very rare, if not unique in black-figure, which of all techniques lends itself to the expression of emotion through body language rather than the face. His hair and beard are visibly those of the Ajax of the gaming picture. He concentrates here on planting the sword, acquired during that exchange with Hector, in a small mound of earth. The sword is painted with its blade presented frontally and its junction with the hilt shown clearly; the hilt was originally white. At the left of the picture is a palm tree, following the line of the panel-edge; it has broken and dead leaves up its trunk; the live ones are black on the top of the fronds and red underneath; like the armour, it replaces the common spectator framing figure, arguably to remind us that Ajax is dying alone in a foreign

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country, and will be buried there, and not by the family who should mourn him. He is naked, not wearing the elaborate armour of the other pictures of him; he has discarded a status symbol as well as a barrier to the suicidal sword. At the right, his shield, with its distinctive Medusa mask, is now looking out at us, topped by the blank stare of the helmet he will never need again, as sightless as he will shortly be, reminding us of the origins of his dispute with Odysseus and the reason for the madness, and the suicide to wipe out the loss of honour; and, of course, of his lost friend and competitor, whose body he preserved, unstripped of that armour as he carried it off the field. Ajax’s head, the sword and the armour, with their red accents, are the narrative keys to this extraordinary picture, and the links to Exekias’ other pictures of him. Exekias painted Ajax, not a common subject in Attic art, seven times, more often even than that great favourite Herakles. The Vatican amphora, with speech balloons, a rarity which is unique in this painter’s work, is the clue to the others: Ajax, that model of the old-fashioned warrior virtues, is losing, because he always did, in the end – his game, the friend to whom he lost it, the armour he rescued with that friend’s body, his honour and eventually his life. These powerful images, then, go together in Exekias’ work as a very rare thing, a collective portrait, through successive and linked representations, of a great hero as a loser.

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Homecomings and Departures

Chapter 1 interprets the scene on the more famous side of the Vatican amphora in the context of the painter’s other images of Ajax to suggest that they have a common view of him as a great hero who was actually a loser – the game he plays there, the best friend with whom he is competing, his sanity, amour propre and eventually his life. One of those images is one of the most heart-rending of all ancient Greek pictures, Ajax preparing for suicide, isolated, at war and in a foreign country. All the Exekian pictures of him set him in a context of war, the board game with Achilles among them. One of the factors which gives the game image its punch is that there is, as usual in a black-figure picture, no setting; our heroes are absorbed in their game, and such clues as there are are present in the props – the armour, the makeshift furniture and the fact that they are still holding their spears. All Exekias’ images of Ajax carry the resonances of displacement and exile. This chapter looks at the other side of the Vatican amphora, which is at least partly there because it is primarily about issues which could be read as the reverse of those of the board game picture. Not all amphorae like this are decorated to link their pictures thematically, but there is good reason to argue for that link here. The reverse side (Figure 6) shows another rare subject, or rather, a rare application of a common scenario to rare personnel. In the centre of the scene is one of Exekias’ vividly drawn horses, sturdy of body and sensitive of head, accompanied by his rider, who, like him, faces right, but looks back at the people behind him. Receiving them are an elderly man in a long black himation, who caresses the horse’s head, and a boy carrying a stool with a garment folded on the seat, and an aryballos on a cord looped over his arm – signs of hospitality and the wherewithal for a bath. At the horse’s rump is a woman wearing a complex plaid peplos, holding out a small bud, probably from the branch she has in

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Figure 6: The reverse side of the Athenian black-figure amphora by Exekias shown in the frontispiece. Kastor and Polydeukes with Leda and Tyndareus, the horse Kyllaros, the anonymous dog and a small boy carrying a stool, clothes and an aryballos. Rome, Vatican Museums 344 (16757), Side B, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München.

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her other hand, and a naked young man with a wreath of leaves and berries in his hair, greeting a dog who rears up to greet him in the way we would all recognise as the trusting and demanding habit of a family pet. Part of the immediacy of the picture for us lies in precisely the obviousness of some of its features – we all recognise the impulse to stroke the horse’s nose too. Who are this engaging family – we sense that they are one – and what is happening in this scene? This discussion will suggest here that the scene is one which is actually multivalent – it depends on more than one visual tradition, and it resonates both with those and with some aspects of early Greek literature as well. At first blush, it is a quiet, ostensibly undramatic scene, without some of the evident tensions of the board game on the other side, but one that has a set of associations that are quite as strong, and should be read as a companion piece to it. As in the Ajax and Achilles scene, the personnel have labels: on the left is Polydeukes, then his mother Leda; Kastor stands behind the horse, who is called Kyllaros, and at the right is Leda’s husband Tyndareus. The dog and the boy are not named. A family with attitude, but the labels allow the viewer to identify some not altogether domestic features about it: the twins are the sons of their mother, but not necessarily of her husband. They are not represented as twins; Polydeukes, the prizewinner, is at home in heroic and sporting guise: he is naked, a state often associated with heroism, or athletics, or both. Parallels can easily be drawn with contemporary kouroi (Figure 7) – these grave-marker statues are the heroised dead. Kastor the horse-tamer carries the spear which may imply hunting or war, and wears a red cloak which may just be a compositional highlight, or the uniform which will not show the blood, and is also a particularly Spartan garment, reminding the viewer of the associations of the twins with Sparta as heroes. And the fact that their twinship is not given any particular emphasis may just resonate against their different fates – Polydeukes was immortalised straightaway, Kastor only by his twin’s intervention, and then at the cost of alternating visits to Olympus and Hades. All of these implications are certainly there if the viewer, or a symposium, wants them, and they have been explored elsewhere. They dovetail with another set of images which will be explored here. What are the other, perhaps just as equivocal, implications of the features highlighted earlier? Familiar animals, clean clothes, hospitality, a bath and a family together. The other side of the pot works with the material of the Trojan epic cycle, and has all the more force for

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Figure 7: A gravemarker of the then standard heroic statue type, roughly contemporary with Exekias’ vase. Athens, National Museum 3851, Kroisos (or the Anavyssos kouros), H. 1.94 m., c.530 bc, photograph by G. M. Young.

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us because of what both the major surviving texts of that cycle tell us about its major players. This image deals with a legend which has no direct connection with that cycle but, I think, has resonances for us with an important aspect of a text which is, among other things, one of the most powerful explorations of the concept of home and family in Western literature, the Odyssey. One important tradition to which this scene belongs is one that arises from the tendency of the Athenian vase painting craft to develop genre scenes that can then be a point of reference for other, more nuanced pictures. One of these, which has a number of standardised formats, is the departure scene (Figures 8, 9). In this, typically, a soldier (very occasionally a pair of warriors) departs for a campaign, on foot or with his horse (Figure 10); usually he appears in the centre of the picture, and is flanked by figures who draw attention to him by the very act of framing him; often one is female and interpreted as wife or occasionally mother and the other male, often an elderly man who may be his father; the version in Figure 8 is the other side of the amphora by Exekias shown in Figure 3: together we might read them as the beginning and end of the story. Sometimes a libation is being poured, or a stirrup cup, perhaps Dutch courage, is being offered. Occasionally it is an arming scene in which some of the significant pieces have still to be put on, and the female figure is holding them and handing them to the wearer. Some scholars prefer to make a very sharp distinction between the arming and the departure. In blackfigure, at least, they are often not quite so clearly distinguished (Figure 9 shows a scene which probably mixes them), and formally they are organised in the same way, with the same personnel; the composition of one bleeds into the other. The norm is that they are explicitly departures – the picture of the Dioskouroi is ambivalent: we do not know whether Kastor is coming or going, and arguably that is intentional. It is important to notice where Leda and her husband are in the picture – they frame the horse and Kastor to form the focus, and this is what connects them with other departure scenes of a less charged and ambiguous kind. What does the woman who appears in departure scenes do? She stands at one side of the picture, sometimes holding part of the arming warrior’s equipment; if she is Thetis (Figure 11), she hands Achilles a significant item. In blackfigure her white flesh accentuates the gesture and points towards Achilles; Leda’s flower gesture works in the same way – it leads the eye towards the central figure. If Thetis has help from a group of Nereids, they may process as a series of pale verticals towards the dark Achilles, punctuated by the pieces of armour they carry. The single Nereid who appears on the

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Figure 8: Departure scene by Exekias, the other side of the lost neck-amphora seen in Figure 3. This scene includes the departing warrior, an older man, and two female framing figures, both gesturing towards the warrior. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1718, photograph © bpk/ AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius.

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Figure 9: An Athenian black-figure neckamphora from the EyeSiren Group, H. 37.4, c.520 bc. This shows the warrior putting on his greaves, his helmet on the ground, framed by an older man and a woman holding his shield, and two archers. London, British Museum B 243, 1843,1103.101, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 10: An Athenian black-figure Type B amphora, H. 22.8, c.525 bc. A cavalry departure, showing a warrior departing with his horse, framed by a young man and an older one. London, British Museum B 187, 1836,0224.225, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 11: An Athenian blackfigure neck-amphora, attributed to the Painter of London B 76, H. 37.5, c.560 bc. Achilles receives his armour from Thetis and a Nereid, with an older man to the left. London, British Museum 1922,0615.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 12: An Athenian red-figure stamnos by the Kleophon Painter, H. 44, c.430 bc. A departure with a libation: here the wife holds the wine jug as her husband lifts the phiale from which he will pour the offering. They are framed by an older couple, usually interpreted as the warrior’s parents. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2415, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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vase in Figure 11 will once have provided a pale accent, drawing attention to the greave she holds out. Occasionally a sacrifice is made, sometimes with a prophetic implication, or a libation is poured before departure; women may carry the jug – Figure 12 shows a later famous red-figure departure by the Kleophon Painter in which the compositional focus of the picture is the phiale, or libation dish, held by the husband. The wife’s veiling gesture points to it; this time they both form strong verticals on either side of the central symbol. The veiling gesture itself is one which indicates strong emotion and may foreshadow mourning in which the wife will have to play a major formal part, an element of the supportive role she must assume in the family structure as she does in the picture. These conventions can, of course, be turned upside down – the Corinthian Amphiaraos krater (Figure 13) shows a version of a cavalry departure scene, with the seer mounting his chariot, looking back at his betraying wife as he goes. She stands behind the other extras at the side of the picture, holding the necklace which was the price of his betrayal, and also gesturing with her veil just as the Kleophon Painter’s wife does, instead of waving goodbye as the other members of the household do. She plays a structural role in the drama, but she is the liminal figure at the very edge, standing beside the columns which form that unusually specific set, establishing the home from which Amphiaraos knowingly departs to his cost. The bud that Leda holds out here may be part of a greeting gesture, or it may be part of a ritual of departure, and echo the gesture of the wife or mother holding out a piece of equipment – again deliberately. There may, however, be other implications: the bud comes from the

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Figure 13: The departure of the seer Amphiaraos, from a Corinthian krater by the Amphiaraos Painter; once Berlin Antikensammlungen F 1655, now lost; mid-sixth century bc. His betraying wife, Eriphyle, stands to the left, holding the necklace which was the bribe. Drawing after A. Furtwängler and K. Reichhold et al., Griechische Vasenmalerei (Munich, 1904–32).

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Figure 14: Herakles feasting: detail of an Athenian bilingual amphora by the Andokides Painter, c.525 bc. Athena appears here as Herakles’ patron, welcoming him on arrival in Olympus. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2301, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

same plant, a myrtle, which provided the wreaths which are worn by both Kastor and Polydeukes, perhaps a shrub in the family garden. Like the other pieces of domestic equipment in the scene, it represents an extension of the family’s home and its possessions to the arriving or departing members, in this case by the mother, who makes the bud a part of the greeting or farewell ritual. We should also note that the same plant appears as a wreath for a corpse in other pictures by Exekias (see Figure 42). This aspect of the imagery of this picture can be reinforced by a comparison with another welcome. Another association of this kind of wreath is with the symposium, and a welcome to one. The scene shown in Figure 14 was painted by the Andokides Painter on another amphora of the same type; he is usually thought of as a pupil of Exekias, and one of the earliest red-figure painters. He produced this bilingual amphora, one side black-figure, the other red-figure, with a scene showing Herakles feasting, greeted by Athena; he has arrived on Olympus, has presumably

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apotheosed, and is being welcomed by his patron goddess. On the redfigure side she holds out a flower bud. If this flower gesture means anything, we should perhaps read it as indicator of maternal or quasimaternal approval at the very least. And there are funerary resonances as well, or at least evocations of an afterlife in which feasting is a norm, just as it is part of the welcome home, and a standard part of the hospitality sequence as we see it in the Odyssey: hosts feed people before they ask them questions, and they do it whether they know them or not. We should also remember the garden element in the Odyssey. The poem is unusually concerned with descriptions of the places visited on those journeys, but at a number of key points we are treated to a tour of the garden before we reach the front door. In Book 5 Hermes goes to see Calypso, and her cave was sheltered by a grove of alders, black poplar and fragrant cypress … spreading round the entry to the cavern was a flourishing vine, with great bunches of grapes; near it four neighbouring though separate springs running four glistening rivulets were channelled to run in different directions; and about them on either side iris and wild celery flourished in soft meadows. It was indeed a place where even a god visitor would surely pause and admire in wonder and delight. (5.63–74)

This is, of course, an early example of the locus amoenus topos, but it is also one of three important house and garden descriptions in the epic which make it clear that gardens are part of a home. The second is the famous passage in Book 7 in which Odysseus, about to receive a welcome into Alkinoos’ house, takes a look at the garden, which is also a sign of good order. Just outside the courtyard next to the doors, lies an orchard of four acres surrounded by a wall; in it his fruit trees flourish: pears and pomegranates, apple trees with glossy fruit, sweet fig-trees and rich olives. Their fruit is never spoiled nor runs short, either in winter or summer. It comes all year round, and the breath of the West Wind is constantly encouraging, here the bud, and there the ripening fruit; so that pear matures on pear, apple after apple, bunch after bunch of grapes, and fig upon fig are always ripening to perfection. There also there is a fruitful vineyard: part of it is a warm area of level ground, where some of the grapes are left drying in the sun, while others are being gathered, or trampled in the press, and in front of these hang

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rows of unripe grapes that have just dropped their bloom or show the first faint tinge of darkening. Beyond them, vegetable beds of all kinds are laid out tidily, lush and productive all the year round. The garden has two springs; one distributes the water in channels to all parts of it; the other spurts out beside the courtyard door and the tall house, providing water for the townsfolk. Such were the glorious gifts of the gods at Alkinoos’ home. Patient long-suffering Odysseus stood before the house and absorbed all of this. (7.113–34)

This garden is part of a very grand welcome indeed; interestingly, it bears a very strong resemblance to the traditional smallholding still visible in rural Greece today. The last garden belongs to Odysseus’ father, ‘which he had reclaimed from its natural state himself with a great deal of work long ago’ (24.206–7). Odysseus finds his father dressed for gardening, in a ‘patched and grubby tunic, a pair of stitched cowhide gaiters strapped round his legs to protect them from scratches, and gloves to protect his hands from thorns’ (227–30). Odysseus, still disguised, says, ‘You keep everything so expertly cared for here that I can see that there is little you don’t know about gardening. There is not a plant in the whole enclosure, not a fig-tree, olive, vine, pear or leek-bed that is not carefully tended’ (244–7). What follows is the recognition scene and the bath and a welcome feast. All three gardens have vines in them; Alkinoos’ produces wine grapes and currants. Herakles in the Andokides Painter’s picture is feasting under a vine, with big bunches of grapes: it goes with the flower gesture as a part of the imagery: properly functioning homes have these things, and they are part of the welcome. Another point of contact between these two vases is the sartorial resemblance between Leda and Athena. Leda wears a long, straight dress with a complicated grid pattern; Athena’s over-dress is very similar. Neither garment carries much sense of the standard female garment, normally understood as effectively a sheet-like piece of fabric, pinned or buttoned on the shoulders and belted on or above the waist. To the untutored eye, it looks more like a stiff, felted construction which gives the wearer a cylindrical, or even columnar format. There is little sense of the fluidity of a wool or linen drape. The patterned surface is important – its workmanship as a woven fabric, not the cut of the garment. In the Homeric poems there are two important themes which use weaving as an image. The more pervasive is perhaps the idea

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of weaving as the paramount female activity; in the Iliad it is the task which awaits Chryseis, quite as much as sharing his bed if Agamemnon gets her home (Iliad 1.29–31). Agamemnon paints a grim picture of Chryseis’ future at Mycenae: when not serving his bed she will be walking up and down in front of the loom, presumably adding to the fissile atmosphere of a household in which he envisages her helping his wife Clytemnestra to do it. Weaving is one of a number of activities which women may perform as a group on vases: the Amasis Painter’s lekythos from Vari (Figure 15) reinforces the notion of usefulness and propriety both by its picture, and the intentional ritual use of the lekythos itself as a grave offering. Andromache is weaving a purple cloak with integral figures (Iliad 22.440–1) when she is told the news of Hector’s death. It is one of the jobs with which he had asked her to occupy herself instead of worrying about him. Penelope is not the only woman in the Odyssey who is weaving as a major occupation – Calypso (5.62) and by implication, Circe and Arete, Nausikaa’s mother, weave too. Helen weaves, back at home in Sparta: the gift of a fabric made by her a very valuable present – remember how honoured Telemachos feels to be included in the magic circle of recipients (15.125–9). Athena provides the connection with the other weaving image: as Athena ergane she is an accomplished fabricator – she weaves complex plans too, and so, of course does Penelope in contriving to delay decisions by weaving and unpicking her father-in-law’s shroud. Weaving carries with it the image of cunning and psychic complication, but it also has a place as one of the attributes of a woman at home, presiding over a properly ordered household. Leda and Athena’s complicated plaids go with the maternal role as part of the imagery of home; fabrics have a high socio-economic status, especially if produced by a heroine, but are an integral part of female imagery. In the end the whole idea can go spectacularly sour: Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra uses the fabric which she has had all that time to weave in order to welcome and then ensnare her husband. In our picture (Figure 6) Tyndareus is also wearing a handsome draped himation, the formal dress of the older man, balancing his splendidly naked son at the opposite edge of the picture. Here the abundant fabric is part of the establishment of seniority of status in the household, but Tyndareus is also a version of that father figure in the more conventional departure scene, framing the picture to draw attention to the middle.

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Figure 15: Textile production: an Athenian black-figure lekythos by the Amasis Painter, H. 17.2, c.540 bc. This view shows a woman spinning the thread at the left, and two women at the loom. New York, Metropolitan Museum 31.11.10, Fletcher Fund, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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In the middle, with the horse Kyllaros, is Kastor. His red cloak is a product of his mother’s domestic industry, but unlike her chequerboard dress, it is a part of it which goes away from the household on the wearer; it has a military purpose, not a domestic one, and it can be part of the imagery of loss as well as a labour of love, particularly if we remember that Spartans wore their red cloaks in battle traditionally to conceal blood. And both fabrics resonate with the very beautiful and more complicated cloaks worn on the other side of the vase by Achilles and Ajax, neither of whom has an obvious maternal figure to perform that labour of love for them. There is a fourth significant piece of fabric in the picture, which is positioned to balance Leda in the composition. On the stool held by the boy is a folded garment; in his hand he carries an aryballos. A famous hydria by the Antimenes Painter (Figure 16) confirms our assumptions about how this should be read – they are the sign of an impending wash – the aryballos and its contents are soap on a rope, or moisturiser. The Odyssey’s many arrivals have the bath motif as part of the pattern; probably the most famous is the al fresco one which is provided by Nausikaa at that picnic in Book 6 (211–36). Nausikaa, with Athena’s help, has gone to a great deal of trouble to see that the picnic is equipped with the accessories for a bath, including a flask of oil. Odysseus takes a particular pleasure in bathing and in that elegant bottle of moisturiser – it has been a long time since his skin felt any, he says (6.220). And the newly laundered clothes which gave Nausikaa the pretext for the trip to the beach now contribute to the return of his sense of identity as they contemplate each other when he emerges. There is at least an implication in the text as we have it that females usually attend the bather, especially if related or long known to him; that idea is explicit later where his old nurse Eurycleia bathes Odysseus’ feet and recognises his scar (19.350ff.). Penelope is noticeably not involved in the cleaning up after the slaughter of the suitors which is part of the sequence leading up to the wonderful scene in Book 23 between Odysseus and Penelope in which she tests him with his knowledge of their marriage bed; the old house-servants attend him instead. She has been told who he is by Eurycleia, but sees him still filthy and bloodstained, and feels unable to recognise him. The bath is part of the induction back into his home, but without Penelope’s willing involvement, it is only a partial recognition. Clothing made by a mother or wife’s hand is another mode of recognition and entry into the domestic circle; Nausikaa’s mother

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Figure 16: An Athenian blackfigure hydria by the Antimenes Painter, H. 44.2, c.525 bc. Here a fountain house is being used as a post-athletic shower by athletes using the framing trees as clothes racks. An aryballos hangs beside the second figure from the right. Leiden xv e 28, PC 63, photograph © Rijkmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, Netherlands.

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starts to unpack the mystery of Odysseus’ sudden appearance in her house when she recognises the garments he is wearing, because she or Nausikaa made them, and she begins to put two and two together (7.233ff.). Penelope moves into the sequence of clues which will allow her to accept her husband’s return via a reported sighting of Odysseus (reported by Odysseus himself, in disguise) in clothes which she recognises from his description because she gave them to him (19.225ff.). Clothes attach domestic identity to their wearer. So the simple trappings of a bath in our picture, balancing their provider and framing the recipient, represent home, recognition as part of the family, and a welcome to all that they can provide. And the stool, allowing the visitor to sit down, potentially alters the dynamics of a situation in which personnel traditionally stand. Two animals are given prominence in this scene: both are frequent participants in the standard departure picture, and both are further elements of a domestic economy. The horse, named Kyllaros in the label inscription, is in the centre of this picture, with his rider, Kastor, standing beyond him. He has been working – his tail is sweaty and spiky on its underside and at the end. He faces Tyndareus, who strokes his nose, perhaps a little awkwardly. A closer look at his head shows that although he appears still, his ear is swivelled to face backwards – usually a sign of disturbance in real life. The cause of the disturbance is left a mystery, but we should read it as evidence of a close relationship between the humans and animals: potential movement, emotional conflict, disturbance of a normal occasion are all possible causes – this is a subtle indicator of potential disruption. There is one further powerful contributor to this complex image: the dog. Dogs often figure on black-figure vases – their obvious connotation is with hunting, but they occasionally accompany departing warriors too. There has been discussion, naturally, of the breed which appears on Athenian vases, usually this long-muzzled hound. We were meant to notice this dog: it has rubbed now, but it was originally white, a sort of visual balance to the folded garment and the stool, which was also white. In the standard departure scene the dog or dogs mill round the horse’s or humans’ feet. This dog rears up to meet Polydeukes’ hand. It had a very prominent black eye, painted over the white overlay to give it an added emphasis. It is not difficult to establish dogs as part of a properly run house; again, the Odyssey does it for us. Household dogs are a recurrent theme: the Phaeacian palace has gold and silver ones made by Hephaistos to watch over the

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palace of great-hearted Alkinoos, and serve him as immortal sentries not fated to age (7.91–4). One of the most telling monsters in the internal narrative is Scylla, who, as I have argued elsewhere, is really a transmogrified guard dog. Eumaeus has ferocious guard dogs from whom he has to rescue Odysseus when he arrives at Eumaeus’ hut (14.29ff.). When Telemachos arrives there too, the noisy dogs began tail-wagging but they did not bark. Odysseus noticed them wagging their tails, and heard the sound of footsteps. He turned to Eumaeus with winged words: ‘Eumaeus, someone is coming who must be friend of yours or someone well-known here, for the dogs are fawning and not barking. I can hear his footsteps coming towards us. (16.4ff.)

So we have both the dog in its professional role and as a familiar who welcomes a member of the family home. The most important dog in the authorial narrative is of course Odysseus’ own old hound, Argos, left behind when Odysseus went to Troy. He is part of the famous sequence of recognitions in the latter half of the poem which culminate in the test of the bed. Argos is the only creature who recognises Odysseus spontaneously: he is the symbol of the identity, still there under the disguise, often all but lost, to which Odysseus has clung with such tenacity through the most obliterating adventures, and Odysseus sheds a tear for his passing (17.290ff.). Our dog here is part of the family, and behaves to Polydeukes as a family dog does. Black-figure does not lend itself to experiments with perspective, and the figures in this scene all stand, as usual, on the same groundline. Throughout this discussion, however, attention has been drawn to the colour accents and details which articulate the composition of the scene. These are reinforced by the disposition and groupings of the figures. The white accents link the dog and Polydeukes, Leda, the stool; the red ones Leda’s clothing, Kastor’s cloak, the folded garment on the stool; Tyndareus’ himation is black, and this excludes him from the circle; he may be the cause of the horse’s disturbance; he is certainly at the edge of the family group. Kastor’s head is turned powerfully away from him to look back at his mother, as she holds out the bud. This relates them, and puts them on a joint level behind the horse. Tyndareus is foregrounded with the horse, and the small boy, whose stool overlaps Tyndareus’ other hand, is even nearer to us, as are the

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dog and Polydeukes. Three separate planes in the picture, each with at least two figures interacting in it. The scenes on this amphora, though they do not use material directly from the Iliad or the Odyssey, are talking the same language, and using the same imagery. Exekias paired these two scenes on another amphora, now fragmentary, at around the same time. The more famous side is, among other things about heroism and war, displacement, isolation from the family, and loss. This side is, among other things, about what can be lost, home, family and stability, parents, the familiar surroundings, the familiar possessions. Neither side keeps strictly to the sphere of war or peace, but each has reminders of the other; the side with the Dioskouroi, in particular, has some unsettling resonances – the spear, the semi-divine twins, their mother and their adoptive father, reinforced by the spatial relationships between the figures, and the ambivalence about whether this really is a homecoming, or a departure. What it does is to use a stock type of scene, and its frame of reference, creatively, so that its probable audience, a group of men at a symposium, might feel included in its heroic world as they drink, and would also recognise the ambivalent emotional context in which it works, and most of them had worked too. If there is a message, it may be at least partially that home is where the heart is, even though war is men’s work, and women’s too.

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The Eye of the Beholder

This chapter explores the iconography and stylistic configuration of a black-figure amphora of around 540­–530 bc which bears Exekias’ signature as the maker. It was found at Vulci in Etruria, and is now in the British Museum (Plate 4). Textbooks illustrate this vase frequently, because it is an example of a shape and decoration scheme which came to be standard in the last third of the sixth century bc, and because of its subject matter – the encounter between the Amazon Penthesileia and Achilles, both of whom are obligingly labelled for us in the painter’s impeccable script. This chapter will try to look at the amphora shape itself, especially in the light of the way in which its subsidiary decoration is organised, and at the picture and the way it relates to the shape. Painted amphorae in Athens, by the time this one was made, largely belonged to one of two major classes, the type potted, apparently in one piece, as a continuous curve, which began to emerge around 580 bc, represented in this book by the mature example of the Ajax and Achilles vase, and the neck-amphora, with its offset neck, of which the piece discussed here is a famous example. This is a little later than the onepiece type, at least in this form, though it has recognisable ancestors as far back as the tenth century bc, where something like it is found in use as a cremation urn, and, as so often, probably had domestic uses as well. Exekias decorated, and indeed potted, both types of amphora; surviving examples show us that the organisation of their decoration evolved rapidly along two different paths, requiring separate approaches. His famous picture of Ajax and Achilles playing a board game, discussed in Chapter 1, appears on a version of the continuous-curve shape, and the arrangement of the figures in the picture space demonstrates a heightened awareness of that space, and of its relationship with the pot itself, and the placement of its handles. We have only to look at a horsehead amphora of some 40 years earlier (Figure 17) to see how much had

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Figure 17: An Athenian black-figure horse-head amphora, H. 30.8, c.580 bc. This illustrates an early form of what becomes a standard decorative scheme for this amphora shape, with a picture panel aligned between the handle roots. London, British Museum AN 1964,0415.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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been learned in the workshops of Athens by the time Exekias came to experiment with the shape and its decor. Exekias’ predecessors in the tenth century bc had already developed the technical command of their material which allowed them to use an iron-rich version of their clay to produce the characteristic glossy black glaze which features so strongly in Athenian work; Protogeometric workshops evolved dark and light ground versions of their deceptively simple decorative schemes (Figure 18), involving no more than patterns of bands and concentric circles. But like their descendants, they related the bands and circles very carefully to the shape of the pot, to its construction, and to the balance of dark and light areas. This preoccupation with the overall effect resurges again in the sixth century bc, where we find a consensus about suiting the scheme to the shape; by the second half of the century continuous-curve amphorae are normally dark-ground, while neck-amphorae are light. Where the picture on a dark-ground vase is a picture in a frame, often literally, the figures on a light-ground one usually have to take their chance with the surrounding ornament. The amphora with an offset neck is not new to mid-sixth-century Athens, as we have just seen, but what is new is the discipline (or standardisation) we see evolving about its shape and decoration. By the second quarter of the sixth century, it is typically roughly egg-shaped, but with no distinct and defined shoulder area; it has an echinus mouth and foot, and single, round handles. It may have a panel picture, like the horse-head amphora (Figure 17), or it may be decorated in bands of small figures with a wide one in the handle area (Figure 28). If it belongs to the latter type, it probably mixes figure scenes with animals, monsters and florals, with no particular emphasis on narrative, though it may isolate a narrative scene in the widest band, which may be continuous beneath the lower handle root, and the handles themselves may be sitting in a black rectangle painted behind them on the neck and shoulder, which separates the neck and shoulder friezes into two. The earliest surviving examples of the form Exekias decorated begin to emerge around 550–540 bc. They still have an ovoid body, but the centre of gravity has been pushed upwards, and although they still have a sharp-edged, convex mouth, the foot tends to splay, with a rolled edge. Perhaps the most significant structural change is in the handles, which now normally have three cylindrical reeds; the width of the handle makes the placement of the lower handle root an important consideration – the way in which it relates to the body of the pot below

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Figure 18: An Athenian Protogeometric neck-amphora from the Kerameikos cemetery, H. 56, tenth century bc. Athens, Kerameikos PG 12, amphora 569: DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 3421A.

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it will affect the decorative scheme of the vase. Figures 19 and 20 show a very early example of this type, attributed to the Painter of Louvre F 51, now in Providence, Rhode Island. The shapes of Greek vases, and occasionally their decoration, often have a sense of unstable form, as if they could easily become something else; certainly they often refer to vessels made in other materials, and particularly metal. The handles of a metal vessel are often, especially in fine bronze work or precious metals, fixed with rivets, which are incorporated into the overall design of the pot by means of an elaborate handle plate, usually a floral, but occasionally figurative, like the handles of the famous Vix krater. Our Providence pot adapts this to ceramic by giving us a very elaborate arrangement of spirals and florals (Figure 19) – we can see how a metalsmith might produce a construction like this by casting, forging or combining the processes, with the rivets fixed through the centres of the spirals; when the user lifts the vessel, its weight will be very evenly distributed via that lower handle attachment. In paint, of course, it has no such value, and we shall see that the prominence given here to this element is not a constant feature of the series. It is noticeable, though, that this particular painter fantasised in another way at the same time: head on, the triple reeds form a column, so the painter has given it a base, or corbel, to sit on, and tied the spirals on with guy-ropes on either side of the handle. If we look at the figured aspect of the pot we can see that the picture is located squarely on its groundline, and is actually framed by the edges of the handle spirals. The body shape of this pot is wide enough to separate the figures from the decoration, but we can see that might be a variable. Amphorae usually pretend that they are flowers emerging from the sepals of their bud, formed by the rays at the bottom of the body; this example has a chain of opening lotus buds between the rays and the picture. The painter can, and often does, play with the size of the picture space by increasing the number of decorative bands below the groundline (for example, the vases shown in Figure 21 or Plate 4). And this may affect the relationship between the picture and the shape of the pot very materially. Notice where this one is, with the figures’ heads on the curve of the shoulder. Where a vase shape is articulated in sections, its painters usually reflect that in the way they organise the decoration. This one distinguishes the neck from the body with a necklace of tongues, a pattern equivalent to gadrooning on a metal vessel, and has a lotus and palmette interlace on the neck. A more elaborate example by the Princeton Painter (Figure 21)

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Figure 19: An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by the Painter of Louvre F 51, H. 27.9, c.550–540 bc. This view of the side of the vase shows the decoration under the handle, imitating a decorative metal bracket. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design RISD 13.1479, gift of Mrs Gustav Radeke, photograph by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

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Figure 20: One side of the black-figure amphora in Figure 19, showing a man and a boy with dog and cockerel; here there is a single picture band, and the figures are few and emphasised by the space they are given between the framing spirals. Providence, Rhode Island School of Design RISD 13.1479, gift of Mrs Gustav Radeke, photograph by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

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Figure 21: Side view of an Athenian blackfigure amphora by the Princeton Painter, H. 45.7, c.540 bc, showing the palmette design below the handles. London, British Museum B 212, 1143,1103.100x, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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introduces some other possibilities into the format, besides increasing the pattern element below the groundline, and playing with the handle. The neck interlace has now become a chain, with the lotuses and palmettes opposed vertically. The vase shape and many of the separate elements of the decoration can be traced back to earlier East Greek pottery. What is also clear is that the Athenian neck-amphora evolves quickly as a particularly Athenian canvas for its painter, with its own decorative grammar, to which Exekias had a distinctive contribution to make. The amphora by the Princeton Painter shows something else (Figure 22). The heads of the people in the pictures between the handle patterns still coincide with the point at which the widest part of the pot turns its corner into the shoulder. During the course of the sixth century most shapes grow taller and narrower with flatter shoulders; the hydria, a shape related to this one, and the lekythos, actually acquire a sharp corner separating the shoulder from the body. This often generates a secondary picture on the shoulder, with a second groundline separating it from the main vertical face of the pot. Despite the lack of a corner here, the Princeton Painter treated his neck-amphora in this way, and it has that extra frieze – we might see it as a look back at the multi-tiered schemes of the earlier ovoid shape. And there are a lot of people in its pictures. Most painters who move on to painting this type of amphora appear to experiment with its possibilities; many do not settle on a single formula at all. The amphora in Providence connects with the workshop christened Group E by Beazley, from which, he argued, the early work of Exekias began. They produced eight amphorae of this shape, on five of which the pictures are arranged on either side of a spiral complex. On the other three the handles sit in a black area which divides the shoulder into two picture panels, and the main frieze is continuous round the body – a very retardataire scheme (Figure 23). Exekias’ own neck-amphorae are not consistent either; the ones rooted most in Group E, which we can see as his earliest, are very like theirs: the amphora showing Ajax carrying Achilles’ body (Plate 2) has shoulder pictures, relatively small spirals and palmettes, and an animal frieze. Exekias signed his work as both painter and potter; the items of his work which he potted are often ones which represent a significant contribution to the shape, as well as to the iconography of the picture. He probably originated a cup shape and perhaps a type of krater (this is disputed), and sharpened up the continuous-curve amphora. The neck-amphorae he potted himself acquire a much more dramatic and concentrated form. Plate 5 shows the reverse of our Achilles and Penthesileia vase; it is still a

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Figure 22. Side A of the amphora shown in Figure 21. This neck-amphora has two figure friezes, the busy principal scenes on the body, framed by the palmette assemblages below the handles, and the smaller but equally populous ones on the shoulder, punctuated by the handle roots. London, British Museum B 212, 1143,1103.100x, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 23: An Athenian neckamphora from Group E, H. 36.5, c.550 bc. This is attributed to the workshop with which Exekias’ earliest work is associated. The body frieze is continuous, and avoids the roots of the handles altogether. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum AN 1965.135, photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

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broad ovoid, but the shoulder is virtually flat, and the proportions of the vase much more sharply related, its forms more defined. If we compare a contemporary work by the Amasis Painter, usually cited as Exekias’ major rival (Figure 24), showing Athena and Poseidon, with a very similar composition, we shall see what Exekias and his contemporaries do with a standard type of composition. Here the two central figures are two independent verticals; the deities are related by blood and in Athens by cult, and might be made to interact. Their toes meet, but Athena’s hand gesture is ambiguous. They are beautifully drawn silhouettes, posed in profile, and there is little sense that they might move. The framing spirals are substantial and have retained the palmettes which were a feature of earlier schemes. On Exekias’ amphora there are again two figures only on the body, Dionysos and his son Oinopion, potentially just as quiet. But instead of the profile silhouette, Oinopion offers a hand towards his father, and Dionysos turns his body slightly, holding out his kantharos; at once the stiffness is lost, and the figures relate to one another – they may be gods but they are also relatives. Oddly enough, the scene is reminiscent of the courting couple on the Providence amphora (Figure 20), where the dog and the cockerel make and suggest the visual and emotional link. The spirals themselves are very fine and tenuous – they have lost touch with a structure which had a practical role, and they have also lost the palmettes in their spandrels which the earlier examples had, to become insubstantial supports to the picture. The picture has moved into the foreground, pushed at us from the groundline above bands of buds and maeander. On the other side is our Achilles and Penthesileia encounter. This incident is not a common subject in Greek art; there is one other famous version, a cup interior by the Penthesileia Painter made about 60 or 70 years later (Figure 25), which is crammed into its space, as if condensed from a larger medium, and which tries to fit the encounter into a wider world of battle and death, with the dead Amazon and the passing Greek crowding the space. Ours is isolated and intense, but just as the other side of the vase uses an existing convention, this one relates to the battle iconography of its time as well as to depictions of Amazons as a genre. Battles are in themselves a popular genre – along with the symposium, they are part of the vase painter’s furniture of material which satisfied the tastes of a clientele which liked to associate itself with heroic or divine myth via the depiction of activities common to heroes, gods and themselves. It is worth noting that Exekias’ contemporaries particularly liked the battle between the gods and the giants; the peplos woven for

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Figure 24: An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by the Amasis Painter, H. 33, c.550 bc, showing Athena and Poseidon framed by the extended spirals under the handles. Paris, Cabinet des Médailles, de Ridder 222, photograph © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 25: Interior of an Athenian red-figure cup, the Penthesileia Painter’s name vase, D. 43, c.470 bc. Here the encounter is crammed into the interior of a cup, with a dead Amazon filling the space to the right, and a passing warrior to the left. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8705 (2688), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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Athena for presentation at the Panathenaic festival traditionally featured the Gigantomachy – probably already seen as the victory of the civilised gods over their chaotic and barbarous cousins. It is normally shown as a frieze of fighting warriors (for example, Figure 26); unless goddesses are present, all that may distinguish them from other kinds of battle is the occasional attribute of the individual god. Compositionally, they are useful boilerplate; a sculptor working on an official building has a readymade divine theme that will lend itself to a frieze round it. The Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, with sculptures often attributed to Athenian artists, is a famous example. A painter can make a similar frieze around a shape which demands a continuous strip. A metope and triglyph scheme for a Doric building can excerpt the battle into individual encounters (which echoes what Homeric battle scenes tend to do with what is often mass action, incidentally). For the vase painter, that possibility is a gift, and a battle can easily be suggested by an encounter between a pair of hoplites, often framed by two others, by subsidiary fights (Figure 27) or by mantle figures which rather resemble the framing figures in a departure scene (for example, Figure 10). Frieze battle scenes work well on black-figure pottery because they are not hard to read, despite massed figures, and a few uncomplicated gestures and postures with their accompanying weapons do the work of suggesting the thud and blunder of the battlefield. Facial expressions and fine detail are not essential, and that is also true of most single duels – the raised spear and the falling body are all we need, and even if the antagonists are heroes, they will operate in much the same way, but with identifying labels. Amazons, of course, are functionally warriors too, and that is how their collective iconography is treated: their modes of fighting parallel those of the heroes and humans they encounter – they can be cavalry, but just as often infantry, archers, hoplites. On some later black-figure vases they may be light-armed with the crescent-shaped shield called a pelta; the only strictly non-Greek or Amazon specific weapon they use, and this is very rare, is a battle-axe. Like the Gigantomachy, an Amazonomachy can form a useful frieze as a mythological version of the equally useful and space-filling battle. From about 570 bc there are a great many scenes in which they operate anonymously in battles with equally anonymous Greeks, and besides actually fighting, they arm, harness their horses and retrieve their dead from the field, exactly like their opponents. What distinguishes them is not their anatomy, but their colour.

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Figure 26: An Athenian blackfigure neck-amphora attributed to the Manner of the Lysippides Painter, H. 26.8, c.520 bc – a Gigantomachy extending under the handles of the amphora. This view concentrates on Athena, and Zeus stepping into a chariot, backed by Herakles. London, British Museum B 208, 1837.1109.3, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 27: An Athenian black-figure amphora, c.525 bc, showing a hoplite fight framed between hoplites, with a bird. This is the other side of the amphora with a cavalry departure shown in Figure 10. London, British Museum B 187, 1836,0224.225, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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In black-figure, as we have seen, the major available colours are the red clay, and the black glaze-paint, and these are rendered permanent by firing. There are, however, two frequent subsidiary colours, red and white, which cannot be fired on, and so have often been lost if the pot is very worn. Athenian black-figure follows Corinthian convention in painting female gods and humans white. In reminding ourselves that black-figure is a decorative medium, we might suggest that one reason for the popularity of Amazons on black-figure vases is that they can be used to provide an insistent white accent. Figure 28 shows one of a number of Tyrrhenian amphorae which feature Amazononomachies, and below sphinxes and harpies, who are, of course, female too. Amazons in specific mythological contexts are most commonly fighting Herakles. The amphora illustrated in Figure 28 is a very typical example, which incidentally also demonstrates the colour distribution – look at the sphinxes. Herakles advances from the left (Figure 29), the traditional winning side, on the Amazon Andromache, who runs away from him, looking back as he grabs her wrist to stop her spearing him. She and her fellow Amazons all wear a helmet type confusingly known as an Athenian one (Athena wears it too), with an open front and a tall crest, and they carry hoplite shields and wear greaves. The opposing Greeks wear the closed Corinthian helmet, various shields, and greaves. A glance at von Bothmer’s Amazons in Greek Art will show us that with minor variations this scheme is repeated over and over again. Amazons at Troy begin to creep into Athenian painting on these ovoid Tyrrhenian amphorae. The encounter between Achilles and Penthesileia is a motif which begins to appear in Greek art, with identificatory inscriptions, around 600 bc, and they fight on bronze shield-bands from the end of the seventh century through to the middle of the sixth. Figure 30 shows them in what seems a fairly well-matched encounter, going at it hammer and tongs. There is no attempt here to prefigure her death at Achilles’ hands. Without the label above the Amazon’s head it might almost be another hoplite encounter of a type we find in most media, vase painting included, though we should note the type of helmet worn by the Amazon. The encounter between Achilles and the Amazon Queen was part of the Aithiopis, one of the poems of the epic cycle, which now exists in tiny fragments, and Proclus’ summary. This is our major literary source for the story, and for its link with that of the Ethiopian prince Memnon, who was the second source of exotic aid to the Trojans; he arrived after Penthesileia’s death and was, in his turn, killed by Achilles.

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Figure 28: An Athenian black-figure Tyrrhenian amphora by the Timiades Painter, H. 39.4, c.560 bc, found at Vulci, in Etruria, one of the designed trading destinations. This shows Herakles and an Amazon (Andromache) on the shoulder; below, sphinxes, harpies and animals. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 98.916, photograph © 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Figure 29: A detail of the amphora in Figure 28, showing Herakles and the Amazon Andromache. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Lillie Pierce Fund, 98.916, photograph © 2015, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Proclus’ summary of the Penthesileia episode says that Achilles killed Penthesileia, and was taunted by Thersites for falling in love with her. Later tradition tends to suggest that the falling in love occurred at the point of death, and even that it was reciprocated. It is hard not to read this twist to the story into the red-figure versions of the meeting, especially the Penthesileia Painter’s name vase (Figure 25), and there is no reason not to accept that the idea, if not a textual version, was in circulation. Exekias painted an encounter between an Amazon and a male hoplite twice. The two pots are both in the British Museum, and at the time of writing are displayed next to each other. The less famous version (Plates 6 and 7) was once thought to be the later, perhaps because of the handle 74

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Figure 30: A bronze relief shield-band panel from Olympia, c.550 bc: Achilles and Penthesileia. The first three letters of her name are shown above her head. Olympia Museum inv. 1911a, drawing after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950).

pattern and the shape. The pattern is beginning to look like its successors in the last two decades of the sixth century bc, which have become less experimental and more standardised, with a return to the palmettes we saw earlier. But it is also close to the one on the early Group E-related vase with animal friezes cited earlier, and this and the quality of the figure drawing suggests that it is more likely to be earlier than the major work – a dry run, in fact. Beazley identified this scene unequivocally as our Penthesileia episode, although there are no labels on this side of the pot, and most other commentaries follow him. One reason apart from the artist’s tendency to make isolated compositions tell a powerful and specific story, must be the strong resemblance between the two Achilles 75

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figures; and the other is that the other side of this amphora shows Memnon, with his squires – Achilles’ next victim, whose loss is another step in the inexorable progress towards Achilles’ own death. It is important to notice here, though, that the Penthesileia figure is running, is still fighting back; the figures are further apart than on our original vase, with the opponents’ shields in the middle of the picture. It looks much more like some of the excerpted battle encounters of the Athenian painter’s standard repertoire, and it sprawls much more loosely over the picture space. It tells its story, but lacks emotional thrust; it would be interesting to know whether it really came before or after its partner, whether it was a trial run, or whether the painter was more interested in Memnon at this point. Now let us return to the more famous vase (Plate 4). We have seen that the apparently conventional two-figure scene on the other side gently relates the wine god and his son by the friendly and familial offer of a drink. This side moves our Achilles and Penthesileia away from the spirals and into the centre of focus. Penthesileia kneels rather than runs, so that Achilles towers over her, and thrusts his spear into her throat in a brutal diagonal which echoes the line of his leading leg. Just as other Amazons do, Penthesileia turns to look at Achilles, but has to look up at him, the black pupil of her eye rolling upwards and her mouth opening as she begins to lose consciousness. Achilles stares down at her along another diagonal which in its turn echoes the line of the spear. Again, the positioning of the figures in relation to one another and the picture space does much of this picture’s emotional work for it, but is worth suggesting that the creative use of the conventions discussed earlier makes the picture work and perhaps also supports our view about the relationship between this major piece and standard practice. The composition clearly does follow the one established for Herakles and a single Amazon, or for Greek-versus-Amazon encounters, but it pushes Penthesileia’s posture into a more submissive mode, though she is still holding her spear in a potentially damaging position. She wears a chiton and a leopard skin, no body armour and no greaves. The effect is to expose a good deal of her body, which is, of course, painted white as tradition would have us expect. Notice, though, that it is made to contrast strongly with the very dark figure of Achilles, who wears a corselet with spiral pectorals, greaves and a sunray-pleated chiton all enhanced in red – the colour also used for Penthesileia’s blood. Achilles is fully armoured, Penthesileia is not, and the colour contrast makes the point for us. Notice, too, that the figures are so

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disposed that the all-important colour distribution also leads our eye to notice the important postures and gestures. Penthesileia wears what is by now the standard Amazon helmet with its open front and tall crest. Achilles wears the equally standard Corinthian helmet, which shows just the eye. This stood Exekias in good stead, as he could use the convention to expose Penthesileia’s face to Achilles’ steely glare. When we see this pot, standing in a case which puts it at roughly the height at which we and its original viewers would see it on a table, we look directly at its shoulder, where important heads usually come; Achilles’ head is there, with the eye at exactly the most prominent point of the curve, and his glance follows that curve down towards Penthesileia, as does our eye towards her naked white face. In some ways, this is one of the most traditional of Exekias’ major pictures, but it is a remarkable demonstration of the power of that tradition if it is made to work properly in its natural partnership with the eye of the beholder.

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The Long Goodbye

Chapter 2, in discussing the Kastor and Polydeukes picture (Figure 6), situates it in the tradition of the departure scene (although it points out that its content is actually ambiguous) in a conceptual framework which argues for a tendency of the Athenian vase painting craft to develop genre scenes which can then be a point of reference for other, more nuanced pictures with specific personnel. This chapter, which does not primarily deal with mythological figures, discusses a particular kind of genre scene and its tradition, and then tries to foreground Exekias’ contribution to the genre. The chapter about the Kastor and Polydeukes picture suggested that it, and its companion picture of Ajax and Achilles (Frontispiece), though they do not use material directly from the Iliad or the Odyssey, talk the same language, and use the same imagery about home and its crucial signifiers. The Ajax side is about heroism and war, displacement, separation from one’s family, and loss. The departure side is about the things which can be lost, home, family and stability, parents, environment, possessions. The important indicators are the individual family members, the textiles and weapons on both sides, the horse, the dog, the upcoming bath indicated by the aryballos and the clothing carried by the boy on the right, and Leda’s flower, which is the same as that used for Ajax’s wreath on the other side of the pot, as a symbol of inclusion for both family and visitors. What this side does, as we saw, is to adapt a stock type of scene to show legendary characters, so that its intended audience, primarily a group of men at a symposium, will feel included in its heroic world as they drink, and will also recognise the emotional context in which it and they operate. The Vatican amphora itself was found in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci, where it was fulfilling a similar end function to the one it might well have performed if it had stayed in Athens – part of the grave goods

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of a well-equipped burial. Both societies believed in an afterlife which was like this one only more so, and so equipped their dead with the wherewithal to live that afterlife. The iconography of many of the Greek vase pictures which come from grave contexts can be read as an expression of hopes for that afterlife, or as a commentary on the mortal condition via illustration of well-understood myths or real-life custom and practice. And the burial ceremony itself was usually a form of valedictory for an individual who was going on a journey; we should remember the concept of the Underworld as a place at the end of a road on which Hermes guided the travelling dead. So a view of a funeral as a form of departure was conceptually inherent in the way it was formalised and indeed illustrated. Funerals are the earliest subject of figure painting on post-Bronze Age Athenian pottery (after a gap of a century or so in which there are no figures at all), and we look here at what the key components of these paintings are. The earliest such figure appears on a tenthcentury amphora used as the urn for a cremation burial: (Figure 31) a Protogeometric amphora from a tomb in the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens. The vase is otherwise patterned with a simple multiple wave, which may or may not stand for the sea or a river; the horse itself is stylised in what is already quite a sophisticated way. We can certainly interpret both these features as, among other things, a means of transport or the medium of a journey. One of the earliest human figures in this run appears more than a century later, on a fragmentary krater (Figure 32), also from the Kerameikos cemetery; in everyday life kraters were mixing bowls for the wine and water central to the symposium. In the Athens of the eighth and early seventh centuries bc giant kraters were sometimes used as the grave-marker for an elite male burial. Beside the handle of this one was a single stylised figure with both hands to its head in a symbolic hairtearing or head-beating gesture which reappears as an indicator of the female mourner for centuries to follow. Before long, in Athens at any rate, funerals were represented much more comprehensively on these big grave-markers, and they marked both male and female burials. Female ones were distinguished by a giant amphora rather than a krater (for example, Figure 33) – we might want to view this as a symbol of the traditional domestic role – a big storage jar. And we might also associate its shape with that of the female body, and the container function with the womb; we should not forget that the Greeks, like us, used body terminology for the shape features of their

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Figure 31: Athenian Protogeometric bellyamphora from the Kerameikos cemetery, Athens, H. 47.2, tenth century bc. Note the stylised horse at the left of the central band. Athens, Kerameikos PG 18, DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 3421B.

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Figure 32: Part of a fragmentary Geometric krater with a mourner beside the handle, c.840 bc. Athens, Kerameikos grave 43, inv. 1254, DAI Athens, photograph by Emile Seraf, DAI neg. 4763.

pots – shoulder, belly, foot and so on. The amphora in Figure 33, known familiarly by its museum number as Athens 804, is the iconic example of the genre it represents: it stood on a prominent grave in the Dipylon cemetery, made more evident by this spectacular marker. So let us look at the more extended funeral scene, or prothesis, on Athens 804 (Figure 34), and pick up on what the components of this scene are: in the centre we have the body, on its bier. The bier is already shown in the same way as will appear in later pictures of it: the allpurpose piece of furniture which plays a domestic role for the living as a bed and as a kline for symposia (we might meaningfully compare the reclining Herakles on the amphora by the Andokides Painter shown in Figure 14). On it lies the body of the dead woman, legs together, outlined by a chequerboard-patterned object with a cutaway to show the 82

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Figure 33: An Athenian Late Geometric bellyamphora attributed to the Dipylon Master, H. 155, c.750 bc. Athens NM 804, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5944.

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Figure 34: A detail of Athens 804, showing the prothesis scene – bier, lifted shroud, corpse and mourners, including those with weapons at the left and the seated ones in the centre. Athens NM 804, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5948.

body, and evidently also lifted by the innermost figures in the procession at either end of the bier. This, or a differently patterned but similarly handled object appears in virtually all funeral scenes of this period, and is read as the shroud, lifted by two of the principal mourners to show its occupant – a convention of the funeral scene for the benefit of its readers. All the figures, including the mourners, are stylised as sophisticated matchstick figures, without any obvious attempt at gender differentiation, mainly with two hands to the head. At the left of the scene, however, there are two figures with one hand to the head, and the other touching two diagonals, one with a crossbar, across the waist. Here is the gender differentiation – the sword and single-hand gesture for the men, and the

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two-hand gesture for the women. Beneath the bier – perhaps to be read as in front of it – are two figures seated or kneeling with their legs to one side, both hands to head, and therefore presumably female; a further two sit on stools, one with one hand to head and one out, the other with both hands up. And at the head of the bier stands a half-size figure, one hand to head. The same painter, known as the Dipylon Master, produced two other funeral scenes which duplicate or add to these visual tools: Athens 803 (Figure 35), another female grave-marker from the same burial area in the Dipylon cemetery shows the ekphora, or procession to the cremation and grave site, centring on the bier, now on a long flatbed truck for transport. It is fragmentary, but we can see the same mourner figures, including three kneelers beside the bier legs, the half-size figure at the foot of the bier, and the lifted shroud. This time there are birds beside the low loader, and the two horses who draw it. Lower on the body of the pot there is another band of mourners forming a procession. Louvre 517 (Figure 36), by the same painter, is a krater which acted as a marker for a male burial, again probably in the same plot, and showing the prothesis. This time the corpse is shown with legs apart, but many of the other components are there, including a rank of seated mourners above and, in addition, we have a procession of chariots ridden by a charioteer and a fully-armed warrior, accompanied by armed men on foot, helmeted and not making the single-hand gesture. A lower frieze probably repeated the chariot group components to form a second figured band. All three pictures show stacked M-shapes between the figures, together with stroke rosettes, double triangles and dotted lozenge chains. Before we take stock of what we are being shown here, let us just look at two other kraters: Figure 37 shows a more complete example by the Hirschfeld Painter, which probably came from the same part of the cemetery, though not the same plot, and is marginally later in date. This shows the ekphora, or transportation of the dead to the cemetery, with the male corpse, legs apart on the bier, the lifted shroud, larger and smaller mourners, birds, stacked Ms and rosettes, and this time swastikas and wheels. The female mourners have rudimentary breasts, the male ones have the weapons at waist and hands down. Below, in a separate band, is the chariot procession, this time with warriors driving their own transport. A second example (Figure 38), by the same painter, shows the prothesis, and has corpse, legs apart, cutaway shroud, female mourners hands to

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Figure 35: A second neck-amphora by the Dipylon Master, H. 175, c.750 bc. This one is damaged, but we can still see the horsedrawn hearse, the bier and the mourners. A secondary line of mourners appears as one of the bandpatterns on the lower half of the vessel. Athens NM 803, DAI Athens, photograph by Gösta Hellner, DAI neg. 5893.

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head, stacked Ms and the drive-past below, accompanied this time by warriors on foot. In the main picture there are not only birds, but a pair of goats, a seated female figure at the foot of the bier, with a much smaller one on its knee, and a half-size female figure at the head. What we want to argue here is that although not all these elements are repeated every time, there is a set of components from which the painter chooses and permutes, with an outcome dictated by the gender of the dead, and probably by the message the commissioning family wanted to give. The kraters, in particular, are only some of many with this kind of subject matter, and therefore can be taken to represent a kind of consensus (at any rate as far as the consumers were concerned) about the right sort of iconography for this type of pot. Discussion about those with two friezes centres on whether they are really to be read together – 87

Figure 36: A fragmentary krater by the Dipylon Master, c.750 bc. This shows a male burial (the corpse’s legs are apart), with a chariot procession. Paris, Louvre 517, photograph © RMNGrand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Herve Landowski.

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Figure 37: A krater by the Hirschfeld Painter, H. 123, c.740 bc, from the Kerameikos cemetery. This shows many of the same elements as the krater in Figure 36, and also separates the chariot procession as a second frieze. Athens NM 990, DAI Athens, photograph by Hermann Wagner, DAI neg. 2753.

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Figure 38: A krater by the Hirschfeld Painter, H. 120, c.740 bc. In effect, this is a more detailed and elaborate version of the krater in Figure 37. New York, Metropolitan Museum, Rogers Fund 14.130.14, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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are the chariots a sort of honorific drive-past? – and whether we interpret the scene literally. Was the funeral of which these pots are a relic like this at all; was there even a horse-drawn hearse? Horses were far from common in the Greece of 750 bc, and indeed later. Chariot warfare is already arguably misunderstood and misrepresented in the Homeric poems, which describe the chariot as a battlefield taxi from which the heroes step down and engage in hand-to-hand combat, rather than the tank it actually was at a much earlier period. Heroes do use horses and chariots in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but there is a significant moment in the latter (Odyssey 4.594ff.), when Odysseus’ son Telemachos, visiting Menelaos in his very grand palace, is offered a chariot team as a parting present, and has to break protocol by refusing, because, he says, Ithaca cannot provide grazing for the horses. A reality of a very telling kind breaks in here: we are in a post-heroic world. And probably our kraters are too. We have a commemorative vessel, decorated with the status symbols of a past, half imaginary era, which links the human dead of the family who commissioned it with the iconography of heroism, battle and high status on a vessel of types which usually form the centrepieces of the other major activity of heroic life – the feast or symposium. The amphorae do not have the heroic symposium imagery, but they share the horse transport, the procession of mourners of both sexes and different sizes, gender-differentiated gestures, the patterned shroud, stools for some mourners, birds, stacked Ms. The Ms and rosettes are often, I think correctly, interpreted as floral wreaths and trailers – part of the rituals of feasting and formal religious rites. The birds and goats are both food, may be the outcome of a hunt, or part of a domestic economy and sacrificial animals in real life, and their images appear not only in the funerary context of the time, but as three-dimensional bronze votives in sanctuaries – again, part of the standard imagery of commemoration and sacrifice. The stool: some of the mourners get to sit down. Elsewhere on Athenian pottery, stools are usually seats for elderly men, gods of both sexes but particularly Dionysos, women with jobs to do, especially holding children, and a temporary resting place for fabrics, or part of a welcome, as on the Dioskouroi side of the Vatican amphora. On the early vases we sometimes see what is pretty clearly a woman seated on such a stool with a small child, and a footstool, and, on Athens 804 (Figure 34), perhaps a male and female mourner of senior status. Here, too, as elsewhere, there is a half-size mourner close to the bier, male, to judge by the gesture. The Hirschfeld krater (Figure 39) has a half-size

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figure held by an adult hand, close to the foot of the bier. So there are related sets of images which have to do with domestic furniture and family members of various ages. The shroud: this is surely to be read as a complex woven fabric; it is a feature of most of these representations, and in reality is another product of domestic activity by the female members of the household, and another part of their formal contribution to the funerary ritual. The arguments and examples pursued in discussing the Kastor and Polydeukes picture are equally important here: weaving images are distributed through the Homeric poems. It is a shroud, that of her fatherin-law, which Penelope is weaving and unpicking to stave off the suitors, and Andromache is weaving a cloak with integral figures when she hears of Hector’s death. Rich textiles are part of the ransom taken by Priam to Achilles for Hector (Iliad 24.228–31), and some of them are used to wrap his body to take it home for burial. Textiles feature on both sides of the Vatican amphora; something made in the home which goes out of it in the context of departure and travel.

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Figure 39: A detail of the krater in Figure 37. Athens NM 990.

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Most of the features which I have indicated are the common currency of the Geometric funeral vases I have used as establishing shots are there on the Vatican amphora too – family, horse, weapons, textiles, furniture, flowers as wreath and welcome home or departure indicator. One later feature is the aryballos carried by the small boy who bears the stool; in life this is usually quasi-soap or post-bath moisturiser, but it can carry scented oil which is used to anoint the dead, and leave as a grave offering. All these components of this very multivalent scene are arguably part of a well-established imagery of mourning and domestic loss, as well as of departures and homecomings of the living. At the centre is the oikos, its people and its activities. Burying the dead with the indicators of home provides a context in which this vase, having perhaps served one purpose as symposium pottery with heroic overtones for the living, provides a marker for the dead in the hereafter. Some at least of the Geometric pots with which we began may, as far as we can tell, still have been visible in the Kerameikos by the time Exekias was painting in the mid-sixth century; whether or not they were, many of the same messages were evidently paramount. Exekias painted a series of plaques now (or once) in Berlin and Athens, to be hung around or set into built tombs, two of a number in the Kerameikos cemetery, with a series of funeral scenes, painted by a number of identifiable painters from roughly the last third of the seventh century to the end of the sixth. The Exekian series are fragmentary, but not so fragmentary that we cannot reconstruct the Berlin series, at least, to show us that the major scenes revealed the prothesis, the ekphora chariots and the mourning procession, probably arranged to start with the prothesis in the courtyard of the house, on the most conspicuous side of the tomb, and the ekphora procession moving round it to make the last and grandest mourners fetch up next to the prothesis again. The procession thus does a double duty as both domestic mourners and the preparation for the ekphora, and you can follow a sequence in both directions round the tomb. The prothesis (Figure 40) scene sets the bier, that very same kline, between the columns of the house. The dead, a woman, lies on it wreathed and clad in a rich textile. The wreath, probably myrtle, is the same as that worn by Ajax and Achilles and the Dioskouroi on the Vatican amphora – a plant with a rich significance for and use in many rites of passage in ancient Athens; Harmodius and Aristogeiton, celebrated later as the heroes of incipient democracy, were traditionally celebrated in song for carrying their swords hidden in branches of myrtle too. At the head of the corpse, on a footstool, stands a female

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mourner, accompanied by a second one, single hand to head. There was a second adult female at the centre of the bier, facing the dead, and a girl, one hand on the bier, the other to her head. At the foot of the bier stood a male mourner, hair shorn, hand to head, clearly vocalising, as is the woman standing behind him, tearing cheek as well as hair. All are dressed in complex fabrics, all of them making gestures we recognise, though they may now have lost their one- or two-hand gender specificity, and there are adults and a child present.

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Figure 40: The fragments of Exekias’ plaque showing the prothesis. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1811 A and B, F 1826, H. of complete plaque, c. 37. Photograph © bpk/AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Ingrid Geske.

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Figure 41: The group of mourners. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1813, 1826 k, H. of complete plaque, c. 37. Photograph © bpk/ AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius.

On the adjacent (Figure 41) slab to the right was a group of eight mourners, seven female, one male. Notice that the front line are all seated, two on chairs with low backs, three on stools, one of which is like the one in the Dioskouroi picture. The central standing woman is reclaiming a little boy from the arms of her companion on the right. The standing woman on the left is holding up part of her shawl, perhaps eventually to receive him. The central seated woman is veiled, the others, and the man, bareheaded. This seems in some ways an extremely intimate portrait of a family group observing a wake, but it contains some of the important signifiers we should now be looking for.

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To the right (Figure 42) again was the mule-drawn flatbed truck, with a seated female driver, a groom, another officiating woman, and branches of myrtle in the background, which were probably a tree rather than fronds being carried by a now-lost mourner. We might notice here that a number of the plaques, including this one, carry inscriptions identifying the dead, the attendants and mourners, and some of the animals; a label beside the mules says ‘Phalios’, which means ‘white flash’: the one at the rear of the team has one on his forehead. Are we looking at something individual and personal here? We may be, though scholarly discussion has tended to suggest, however the fragmentary inscriptions are read, that they are generic, rather than specific commissions; there are, though, traces of postfiring incised lettering which may have personalised the plaques for the particular burial. Eight slabs followed, five with a chariot and male driver, each with a woman beside the horses’ heads, and others in attendance on foot. Here we might remember the departure of Priam in Iliad 24 to do a deal with Achilles for the body of Hector. Hecuba makes a libation (and a last appeal to his sense of self-preservation) standing in front of the horses (24.281–331). A sixth chariot, which probably came just after the corner junction with the back long side, was shown head on, as if turning the corner. Next to it was a slab which showed horsemen rather than a chariot. On the second short side, turning the corner to come up to the prothesis again, is a series of slabs with mourners on foot, and it is here that we pick up some more striking images of individual figures: on the slab just before the corner is turned again is a group of very grand male mourners (Figure 43), moving in pairs, led by a senior figure with his face turned towards us, looking out to engage with us in his grief – a very rare appearance in a painted context, and more usually associated with the grotesque than the serious human. Let us remember, though, that a figure who is regularly represented frontally is Dionysos (see Figure 62), and he is, as we shall see in Chapter 5, part of the imagery of the afterlife. Beside our man is a small boy carrying a stool, echoing the boy with the stool in the Kastor and Polydeukes scene on the Vatican pot. On the next slab was a group which included two boys: the nearer one was lifting his hand in the farewell gesture which echoes that of the seated figure on Athens 804, all those years previously. It is a gesture which can be found on other archaic funeral plaques, and in scenes by other painters, and clearly is an established indicator of a consensus

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Figure 42: Assembly with mule cart, the fragments showing the mules and the mourners by their heads. Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1814, H. of complete plaque, c. 37. Photograph © bpk/ AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Ingrid Geske.

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Figure 43: The male mourners at the right of the original plaque. Berlin F 1818 A and F 1818 B, H. of complete plaque, c. 37. Photograph © bpk/ AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Ingrid Geske.

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about the journey iconography of the whole cycle of funerary pictures. And next in our sequence, before we reach the prothesis again, was a group which included two small girls once more making the by now standard female hair-tearing gesture, and wearing the complex textiles. It is worth emphasising here that we are looking at what was in all probability a family commission, just as the Geometric grave-markers were, for a memorial in the same cemetery as they; it uses the same image bank to vibrate the same emotional strings. It plays with the language of home, departure, family, journeys, cross-generation involvement and traditional roles in the oikos and outside it, a language which can be used for heroic myth as well as human commemoration. We might finish with another Exekian image (Figure 44) which very evidently does resonate with the funeral plaques, and perhaps with the Hirschfeld krater, once again on an amphora which would wind up in an Etruscan tomb. It is fragmentary, and it clearly does show a departure scene with a horse-drawn vehicle. Its central section, showing who was in the vehicle, is lost apart from a recumbent head. Beside the horses’ heads stands the woman of the house saying goodbye, which is, as we have seen, entirely characteristic of departures of the living for a war or a hunt. This scene arguably goes rather further, with implications for the missing piece: in front of the horses is a bewildered small boy, that familiar hand to his head, and there, this time bending to make contact with him, dressed in those exotic textiles, is one of Exekias’ striking old men. Arguably, the vehicle was a hearse carrying the body of a warrior who rates the status accorded to him by the presence of the traditional indicators, including the old man and his rich clothing. The added touch, which individualises and focuses the mood of an otherwise relatively conventional scene, is his attention to the boy: it is difficult not to read this as a grandfather trying to comfort his grandson for the loss, in whatever sense, of his father.

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Figure 44: A fragmentary amphora by Exekias, c.535 bc, showing a boy comforted by an elderly male. Orvieto, Museo Civico Collection Faina 2747 (77), photograph © DAI Rome/ Koppermann, neg. no. D-DAI-ROM 61.1220.

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Plate 8 illustrates a famous ancient Greek painting which is a favourite for many – probably for all the wrong reasons. It appeals to an essentially modern taste for the striking image, crisply deployed – in fact typical of the vases attributed to its painter and, as we have seen, quite unlike much of the work of his contemporaries, which tends to pictures crowded with detail, rather than isolated figures. It is often illustrated shorn of its handles, simply as a picture, divorced from its context as the interior of a cup. If it is a colour illustration, we see that its red and black colour contrast is particularly intense – a gorgeous, glowing scene, easily exploited as a souvenir or a postcard. We see illustrations of the whole cup, and particularly of its outside, much less often, and much of the literature it has generated fails to discuss the outside as related to the inside, or indeed move much beyond merely describing it. If we do that rather discursively now, we shall begin to see that there is more to discuss than the buzz it gives its commentators. It is a black-figure cup, signed by Exekias on its foot as the maker, usually dated to around 540–535 bc, and regarded as a mature work in the later phase of his career. Technically, it belongs to a shape class which may have been invented by Exekias, or at least one of which he was an early exponent, called Type A cups; these have an offset, hemispherical bowl, and a short stem with a sharp, vertical edge to the foot. The vertical edge here is reserved, and the signature on it shows clearly. There is a small torus moulding at the join between the bowl and the stem; the bowl has a ring of rays surrounding the join, and they are framed by a multiple band-pattern which forms the groundline for the exterior pictures. The handles curve upwards with the bowl. This type of cup represents a departure from the slightly earlier shape known as a Little Master Cup (Figure 45); Exekias signed some of these as potter, but did not, we think, decorate them. They are smaller in diameter, and have

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a tall stem and handles with a more horizontal tendency. Further, they have a rather different approach to the organisation of their decoration. Outsides first: Little Masters have a greater proportion of vertical surface to the outer face than Type A cups do, and also have an offset lip. The usual ways of dealing with this either isolate the section of the body between the handles as a reserved band on which there may or may not be a small picture or an inscription and handle palmettes (Figure 45), or leave both bowl and lip in the red clay, usually divided by a line at the base of the lip, with the picture, if there is one, in the upper deck (Figure 46). The result is generally small-scale, and often extremely pretty. In so far as they constitute a problem for the painter, it is largely one of scale. Type A cups operate differently. As we can see (Figure 47), apart from globular, closed shapes, they must be the most awkward on which

Figure 45: A Little Master Cup – an Athenian black-figure band cup signed by the potter Glaukytes, H. 21.59, D. 34.29, c.550–530 bc. This, as its secondary shape title implies, locates its battle scene as a highlighted frieze between its handles. London, British Museum B 388, 1857,0805.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 46: A second Little Master Cup, a lip-cup by the Centaur Painter, H. 8.8, D. 14.1, c.550 bc, with the figure of the centaur on the lip, and the band between the handles left blank in the reserved red clay. London, British Museum B 408, 1890,0731.25, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 47: An Athenian black-figure Type A cup, H. 12.7, D. 30.4, c.535 bc: the profile, showing the eyes, and Exekias’ signature on the foot. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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Figure 48: An Athenian blackfigure komast cup attributed to the KY Painter, H. 6.5, D. 19, c.580 bc. Here the painter has used two dancing figures, or komasts, between the handle florals and has managed to keep them relatively vertical to the eye of the viewer. London, British Museum 1920,0216.1, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

to paint figures, especially in narrative scenes. The surface is curved in both directions, and the available area for figures between the handles is effectively fan-shaped. Much of the visible outer surface tends towards the horizontal, when we view the cup from the side, so that we tend to lose the lower half of the figures underneath the bowl. This was not a new problem, of course, with the Type A cup: some of the earliest Attic black-figure drinking vessels, known as komast cups (Figure 48), faced nearly the same difficulties, and the later continuous-curve Type B cup exaggerates it (Figure 49). A second compositional problem is posed by the fact that the handles of any Greek cup occupy a large proportion of the circumference of the bowl. They generally interrupt any frieze running round the bowl; most painters accept that and treat the two sides as separate fields. The handles often have florals round the roots (see Figures 46, 48 and 49), sometimes obviously imitating the decorative rivet plate which would appear on a metal version of the shape. These are not problems which red-figure solves conclusively either, though there are some examples which extend

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Figure 49: An Athenian red-figure Type B cup with larger florals and more vertically disposed figures, attributed to Douris, H. 10.7, D. 37.7, c.475 bc. London, British Museum E 54, 1843,1103.4, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

or enlarge the floral decoration around the handles to occupy more of the fan-shaped field, thereby partially avoiding funnelling the figures into a triangle (Figure 49). Insides: the major problem is to decide what to do with figures in the, naturally, circular format. A selection of solutions inside a variety of cup shapes will demonstrate the problem most graphically: most cup painters used a tondo or framed circle in the centre of the floor. You can dispose a single figure whirligig fashion, with or without hand props (Figure 50) or you can make that figure, or two figures or more, stand on the frame of the tondo (Figure 51). You can draw an artificial groundline across a segment of the circle, and make your figures stand or sit on it (Figure 52). You then have a problem about what to do with the exergue below the groundline: do you continue your upper scene, strip picture fashion, or comment on it, as the Laconian painter of Figure 53 did, or avoid the problem by filling the space with a floral (Figure 52)? You can treat the tondo as a porthole, across which your figures pass through your line of vision (Figure 56). You can confine your figures within the picture space, or even cramp them. You can make them conscious of the frame (Figure 52). You can also make 105

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Figure 50: Interior tondo of an Athenian black-figure cup by the C Painter, c.570–560 bc. This detail shows the whirligig tondo arrangement, using an armed warrior. London, British Museum B 380, 1885,1213.12, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 51: Athenian black-figure cup tondo by Tleson, c.535 bc. Grouped figures standing on the frame. London, British Museum B 421, 1867,0508.946, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 52: Interior of an Athenian red-figure cup. Figures on an internal groundline – Achilles and Patroklos – by the Sosias Painter, c.525 bc. Notice the use of the tondo frame as a vertical prop or wall for the wounded warrior’s foot. Berlin, Antikensammlung 2278, photograph © bpk/Antikensammlung-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/ Johannes Laurentius.

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Figure 53: Interior of a Laconian cup, D. 29, c.550 bc; this is the name vase of the Arkesilas Painter, showing the king of Cyrene overseeing the weighing and stacking of a cargo, probably wool; the work continues in the exergue under his feet. Paris, Cabinet des Médailles 189, photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München.

creative use of these limitations, as with the magnificently wild and woolly maenad of Figure 54, a development of the whirligig disposition, or the snide Laconian Herakles with Kerberos (Figure 55), in which Herakles is being taken for a walk and not the other way round. Something to notice about all of these, though, is that seen from above, they are normally disposed with the figures at a right angle to the axis across the handles, so that when you pick the cup up, there is a notional top and bottom to the picture, and a right way up. And in fact cup interiors which do not do this are so rare as to excite comment on their own account: an East Greek cup with a man enjoying his orchard (Figure 57), painted not long before our Exekian cup, is one of them, where we are given a fish-eye view of the man and his trees and the charming fauna which inhabit them. The interior shown in Figure 58, with concentrically disposed figures and animals, is another. 108

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Figure 54: The interior of an Athenian white-ground cup, D. 28.5, c.480 bc, by the Brygos Painter. The maenad uses the frame of the interior tondo as the groundline. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2645, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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Figure 55: A Laconian cup by the Hunt Painter, D. 19, c.550 bc. The porthole arrangement: Herakles with Kerberos. Herakles’ club and leg appear at the extreme right. Once London, Erskine Collection.

Figure 56: Laconian cup, D. 15, c.550 bc, by the Hunt Painter, showing warriors carrying a dead comrade, viewed as if through a porthole. Berlin, Antikensammlung 3404, photograph © bpk/ AntikensammlungStaatliche Museen zu Berlin/Johannes Laurentius.

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Figure 57: Interior of a Samian cup, D. 23, c.550 bc, showing man, trees and animal life. Notice the perspective arrangement of the trees, and the placing of the handles in relation to the picture. Paris, Louvre F 68, photograph © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Hervé Landowski.

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Figure 58: Athenian black-figure cup interior, signed by Nikosthenes, attributed to Painter N, organised in concentric circles, D. 20, c.540 bc. Berlin, Antikensammlung 1805, drawing after J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black Figured Vases (Paris, 1924).

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Our cup is a wild card. The outside (Figures 59, 60) has scenes, not in the centre of the side, between the handles, but under the handles. Here we find, under each handle, a dead warrior; both lie across the space beneath the handle roots, head to the left, fought over by comrades and enemies advancing on either side, weapons raised. One casualty (Figure 59) is still clothed and helmeted, his corselet painted white, which makes his state the more obvious to the viewer. He has collapsed onto his front, his further arm stretched out towards his comrades. The eye which shows in the eyehole of his helmet is closed. Under the other handle (Figure 60) the warrior is on his back, naked and bleeding, the blood indicated in red on his stomach and in his hairline. Both corpses are framed by the advancing groups of warriors, three on each side, moving in step. The clothed corpse lies between groups who advance on each other, shields at the ready and spears raised, shown with the slight overlap which suggests a perspective view along an advancing rank. Added colour is used to highlight and differentiate each figure and clarify the details of their armour. They are all helmeted, but their body armour varies. The body of the nearest figure on the left is naked apart from greaves and his tunic tied round his neck by the sleeves. His mirror figure on the right wears a corselet over the padding garment, greaves, a thigh-guard with a spiral pattern, and a chequered cloak. The furthest warrior in his rank is drawing his sword, his elbow pointing sharply towards the handle root. The scene is otherwise relatively symmetrical. The scene with the naked corpse is perhaps less so. The nearest warrior on the left is weaponless, and bends over to grasp the arm of the dead man to drag him to the left. His colleagues have fanned out to defend the action. All three wear breastplates, though the left defender has a garment tied by the sleeves over the breastplate as well as a striped short chiton underneath it. The rank on the right are showing thigh guards again, with spiral decoration; the spirals appear again on the nearest breastplate. The second warrior has a scale-patterned chiton; the third raises his shield horizontally, which echoes the sword-drawing elbow of the corresponding group under the other handle. The differentiation of the clothing and armour between the two images might argue against a sequential depiction of the same episode, or perhaps, and I lean to this view, we might interpret the scene with the naked corpse as a second phase of an extended battle over the same body by several different members of the opposing sides. Notice, though, that the figures are not identified by inscriptions, which suggests, despite various ingenious attempts to connect the scene with a specific episode

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Figure 59: The scene under one handle of the cup shown in Plate 8, showing a fight over a warrior. Exterior of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

Figure 60: The scene under the other handle showing a fight over a naked warrior. Exterior of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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and identifiable heroes, that this is not a reference to a specific death in battle. On the evidence of other examples, including the Achilles and Ajax amphora, we might expect labels if that were the painter’s intention. Instead, the only inscription is the signature on the foot of the cup (Figure 47) , which we might note is so placed that if it faces the user, the interior picture is the right way up too, so that even if it is obscured by the wine, there is a pointer to its effective discovery. The two areas of the exterior normally occupied by figures each have a large pair of eyes, with a nose between them (Figure 61). This is, of course, what gives this type of cup its other conventional name, the Eye-Cup. This particular example is often claimed to be the first in the Attic series, and is certainly an early one; the eyes are a motif which connects it with slightly earlier East Greek cups and with later Attic ones, down into red-figure, where the eyes often have a figure rather than a nose between them (as on the late black-figure example shown at

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Figure 61: The cup as the viewer may see it in use. Exterior of Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

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Figure 62: An Athenian Eye-Cup, H. 9, D. 34.5, c.510 bc: Dionysos as the ‘nose’ between the eyes. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer 559, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulogne-surMer.

Figure 62), and have lost the notion that they are part of a face. Here the eyes are large and commanding, drawn in outline with black circular pupils surrounded by red, white and black rings. There is a pin-prick in the centre of each, which demonstrates that they were drawn with a compass. The eyes have elegant sweeping brows, with a bud at the centre between them and a dot on either side and below. The interior (Plate 8) is a large, shallow space, which is wholly dedicated to the picture. There is no horizon or groundline, but in the middle floats a square-rigged ship with vines growing up its sharply defined mast, bearing seven bunches of grapes spreading out towards the rim of the cup, and following the dark edge which contains and defines the view. Around the ship there are seven dolphins, some beneath it, some beside it. All of them are articulated with incised detail, and four of them have a suggestion of a white underbelly. Reclining in the ship is a garlanded male figure with a drinking horn in his hand: the garland

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is a wreath of ivy leaves, alternating black and red, showing against his finely incised hair. The figure is out of scale with the ship, so that he fills it, and dominates the centre of the scene, and his lower half is wrapped in a dark cloth patterned with scattered red dots and incised dotted crosses. His drinking horn, which is a shape often used by the presiding symposiast in real life, was red. The black ship is set at an angle to the axis across the handles. Its sail (now restored) was white, with the black mast and yard; the rope and brace system which attaches and controls the sail is represented in considerable detail – damage to the central area of the cup has probably removed some of it. The mast itself runs in front of the reclining figure, and originally in front of the sail, with the vines rising from behind him and the sail. The body of the ship is depicted with the same attention to its structure as the rigging system: it has a pointed snout and an eye at the prow; above, and further back, is the bow screen, decorated with a chequerboard pattern with dotted crosses in the squares. The keel curves back to a final sharp curved lift to the stern, which finishes in a swan’s head, crested in red, to echo the continuous gunwhale, also defined by a red line, with a railing above it, supported on short posts. The stern is crossed by a boarding ladder and sited between a pair of steering oars. The hull is decorated with two small incised dolphins, one at the front and one at the back, both leaping in the direction of the prow, and the movement of the ship. And the entire background surface is enhanced with a coral red glaze, painted around and after the figures; it glows with an intensity of colour which is rare even in Athenian black-figure. So much for the descriptions and the art-historical context then; none of this really explains the presence of these elements together – the images of violent death and degradation under the handles, the face connotation of the eyes, and the locationless, glowing interior. This chapter suggests that there is a connection; that this is not a meaningless assemblage of images without a central purpose. The eyes feature in discussions of the evolution of the cup type and the arrangement of its decoration. They also generate enquiry into the significance of the Eye-Cup as a mask, or as an apotropaic or ritual presence. They underpin discussion of eyes as a feature of the decoration of ships, real or illustrated, and thus make a link with another imagery network of ships, the sea and wine. This cup is a wine vessel, designed for drinking on a formal occasion, and eventually buried, albeit in Etruria rather than Greece, in a context in which social drinking was also a sign of a civilised society, and the dead might expect to continue to drink with their fellows after death.

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Like many other Greek wine vessels it is decorated appropriately for its context, with a picture of the god of wine. There has been controversy about the correct interpretation of the interior scene, but there is no real reason not to accept that this is a version of the aftermath of the episode recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos in which pirates attacked the ship in which the god was travelling; he made vines grow up the mast and took on the form of a panther, at which the pirates leaped overboard in terror and became dolphins, and the god sailed on triumphant. How does this connect with the outside? What sort of imagery is this intended to give the drinker? What kind of context contains both triumphant drinking and the battle in which people fight and are killed – not an obviously desirable thing to have on symposium or burial crockery, unless you have a context in which violent death in battle is both a symbol of status and is transcended? The most obvious connection is in the world of the Homeric hero, in which the hero’s raison d’être is to fight and often to die in battle, however heroically, and thereby gain a sort of immortality in the memories of men. But the other thing that Homeric heroes do as a class is to feast; Agamemnon in Iliad 4 explicitly connects the two sides of heroic life: ‘Idomeneus, of all the Greeks with their fast horses I hold you in the highest honour, whether in battle or in any other action, and in the feast, when the gleaming wine of princes is mixed in the krater by the leaders of the Argives’ (257ff.). In the Odyssey, particularly, feasting is the diagnostic sign of a civilised society. Abuse of its proper protocol is the signal that something is wrong. The true Homeric hero accepts that he will die when his time comes, but he also feasts, and so do the gods; indeed, feasting, for Homeric gods, is the worthwhile thing they do, occasionally, irritatingly, interrupted by the need to interfere in the affairs of men. Hephaistos stops Hera and Zeus quarrelling at the end of the first book of the Iliad, on the grounds that argument about mere mortals will spoil the ‘stately feast, since unworthy things will be uppermost’ (573ff.). Gods can also feast without a formal reason, where the Odyssey makes it clear that men should not. Feasting, with the sharing of drink, whether it is nectar or wine, is the thing that both gods and men do. Alkinoos, the father of the princess Odysseus meets on the beach, is described by her as sitting in his palace, ‘drinking his wine like an immortal’ (6.309). And when men drink in this context, they shed the trappings of mortality for a while and share a sort of godhead. What is more, some of the people Odysseus meets expect

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to have gods as guests at their parties. The Phaeacians are among them, and Odysseus begins his own adventure narrative in Odyssey 9 by telling them that he feels that there is nothing more pleasant than when festivity holds sway in the hearts of all the people and the feasters listen to a singer from their seats in the hall, while the tables beside them are loaded with bread and meat, and a steward carries round the wine he has drawn from the krater and fills their cups. This, in my view, is perfection. (9.5ff.)

Wine is the great healer, especially when consumed while heroic deeds are celebrated and memorialised in the performance of an epic poem by the minstrel. What is contained in our cup is the complementary aspect of the heroism represented by the deaths of the outside. And by extension, the drinker and his friends are all heroes, at least while they are drinking. The drinker does not see the outside of the cup; his companions do, when he picks it up. Our cup is of a size and shape which makes sliding the hands under the bowl with the thumbs through the handle loops the natural way to lift it up. The drinker’s hands, then, cover the scenes under the handles, so that what his companions see is the eyes and the bottom of the stand, forming a mouth-like opening, so that the cup becomes a face, or mask (Figure 61), disguising the drinker, and turning him briefly into someone else. Frontal faces are extremely rare on Greek pottery before about 450 bc, but there is one personality who is regularly represented in this way, looking out at us, sometimes even sitting between a pair of eyes like these, and that is Dionysos himself (Figure 62), usually shown with the same large, commanding eyes. Sometimes he is explicitly a mask, hung on a pole, or part of a herm or portrait bust. Inside the bowl, we have the god in his ship; he is not steering it, but lying in it, as if at a banquet – the victorious god, drinking horn in hand, under the vine which has made the ship alive. If we look at the ship itself, it is not quite ship-shaped: its ram and stern echo the dolphins round it. And it is also a ship which sails by itself, not steered by the god. It has taken on a life of its own – ceased to be an inanimate object. The association of Dionysos with ships is established by the myth illustrated here, and for the Athenian viewer there is a further connotation – that of Dionysos’ ship-car, a carnival float drawn in procession through the streets during Dionysiac festivals, with the

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Figure 63: Drawing of a fragmentary Athenian blackfigure skyphos by the Theseus Painter, c.510 bc. Dionysos in his ship-car: the ‘float’ resembles the dolphin/ boat in Exekias’ painting. Athens, Acropolis Museum 1281, after B. Graef and E. Langlotz, Die antiken Vasen von der Akropolis zu Athen (Berlin, 1925), pl. 74.

god reclining inside (Figure 63). All the same, we should notice in passing that another important feature of the story illustrated is the transformation of the ship, the god and the pirates into alternative forms. One of the things that this picture and, indeed, the whole cup is about is unstable form, or transformations. We have been looking at Dionysos as a wine god; we should not forget that he is also the god of theatre, and the connection seems to be that he is a god who is inherent in transformations, of appearance, of personality, whether voluntarily by acting or semi-voluntarily by drinking, and that this feeds into his other function as a god who can confer both fertility and an afterlife, by transformation of the mundane into the immortal: most notions of immortality involve being changed in the twinkling of an eye, whether at the last trumpet or not, into something else. Dionysos, of all deities, makes that possible. Inside our cup is what the drinker sees: but not clearly until he has finished his drink. Quite a number of Greek wine vessels are designed to interact with the liquid they contain: the red-figure psykter by Oltos in Figure 64 is designed to float in the liquid it cools, and the riders sing a song as they leap on their dolphins over its surface, which should be at the plimsoll line marked on the side. Exekias himself painted ships inside the rim of a large dinos, or rocking krater, so that they would float

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Figure 64: Psykter by Oltos, H. 32, c.510 bc, with dolphin riders. This vessel was probably designed to float inside a krater, with the fluid it contains forming the sea on which the dolphins are leaping. New York, Metropolitan Museum, 1989.281.69, gift of the Norbert Schimmel Trust, photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Figure 65: Fragments of a dinos by Exekias with ships inside the rim, c.535 bc; the ships float on and are reflected in the liquid inside the vessel. Rome, Villa Giulia 50599, drawing after J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black Figured Vases (Paris, 1924), fig. 10.

on, and be reflected in, the wine within (Figure 65) – on the wine-dark sea, in fact. We are very familiar with this Homeric image, οι̑ ̉ νοψ, the sea that looks like wine, but we should also remember that wine looks like the sea, too. Odysseus connects them in a telling speech to Calypso in Odyssey 5.215ff.: he is having a last drink with that highly possessive nymph before she lets him go, and she has taunted him with his desire to get home to his wife. He replies, I am well aware that my wise Penelope’s beauty and stature can never compare with yours. For she is mortal, while you are immortal and have eternal youth. All the same, I long to reach my house and see the day of my homecoming. What if one of the gods does batter me, out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is steeled for suffering, and I shall steel it to endure that too. I have already had many painful experiences in war and on the stormy sea. So let this new adventure come. It only makes one more.

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Odysseus rejects the immortal, and makes for mortality across the winedark sea, the means of getting home, but also a possible way to meet his end. The sea is ambiguous in appearance and by nature. Inside our cup, then, the drinker sees the wine-dark sea, which is not transparent, but not wholly opaque, so that there is the hint of something at the bottom. As he drinks, the vines and the dolphins emerge, and the ship begins to as well. But it is not straight on, so he shifts the cup by those skewed handles, and the wine ripples over the picture as he views the god sailing through the wine: he sees through the wine darkly, and then face to face when he has drunk it. When the cup is empty, the god is still there, with his red horn, under his vine, and his white sail, in his ship, surrounded by the dolphins in a horizonless seascape. Drinking brings revelations with it. Furthermore, the position of the prow of the ship is such that it is pointing into the drinker’s mouth – he is metaphorically swallowing the god when he drinks: another way of becoming filled with the god’s presence. This cup, then, contains the god, but is also a portrait of him and his worshippers: wine and its effects are the gift of Dionysos and are the god himself: release from death, transformations, drama, magic, immortality and the victory feast. The inside, quite properly, is greater than the outside, but is consequent upon it; this is a magic picture, intensified by its colour and its lack of naturalism. Here, in the piece which is perhaps Exekias’ most appealing work, we can see that the very conventions of black-figure, and indeed its colour conventions most of all, can be made to work for it as an emotionally expressive form of picture making, every bit as powerful, in the hands of an experienced practitioner, as a more conventional picture in a more conventional medium. This chapter makes some suggestions about the emotions and narrative implications which the artist was trying to evoke, to many of which we obviously respond now too. The cup is something special even by those standards – its colour is so intense that it sucks you in as you hold it – you have the whole of this particular world in your hands.

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Epilogue

The five central chapters of this book deliberately use a variety of relatively conventional approaches to looking at some of Exekias’ bestknown and most published pieces. The chosen work has been read and described here in the context of some parallels in the artist’s own attributed oeuvre, bounced off the work of others, set in the context of a developmental framework, attached to a virtual common image bank assumed to have been used and understood by maker and viewer, and aligned alongside a body of oral and eventually written literature which can be viewed as reflecting many aspects of the culture which generated it and the visual material. An important strand of classical visual scholarship in recent decades has worked over the possibility of a more or less direct connection with political events in Exekias’ Athens; if some of these images are not quite equivalent to political cartoons, or politician-commissioned propaganda, they may be a visual commentary or position statement for a public which was small enough to be aware of the output of a relatively contained potters’ quarter. The Kerameikos district centred, as we have seen, on a major thoroughfare which linked the civic and commercial centre of the city with its walls and thereafter a principal intercity road. The boundary was marked by two gates with defensive and sacred associations, and the major cemetery with both public and private memorials. The area also housed the red light district, as well as conventional town housing. The pottery industry supplied both bog-standard domestic crockery and formal ceramics for formal use, including the symposium and grave offerings, and as high-status containers for ritual and sacred usage, often in public contexts. Its customers were likely to have been in a position to see its products very frequently, and workshops to be aware of each other’s work. The pots were in some senses, therefore, a visual commonplace, but the

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images on them had a high circulation, and could convey a message, whether or not it was an explicit comment on a current real-life event or viewpoint. Equally, since they were also traded (and most of the major items discussed here were found in Etruscan tombs rather than in Athens), there is another strand of thought about Athenian pottery as a mechanism for conveying Athenian identity and sense of self, and cultural and ideological priorities, abroad. Historically, Exekias’ conventional production dates of around 545–530 bc coincide with a period of Athenian history dominated by an evolving political structure and considerable exterior pressure. As I suggested in the introduction, a key factor may well be the career of Peisistratos, who seized power for the first time in about 560 bc after military success as a general in an interstate war. Over the subsequent 30 years and two expulsions and returns, he made a mark on Athens as a city-state which did much to establish and confirm the perceived capacity for success which underlies its later development. He is reported as a popular ruler who united Athens politically with its surrounding territory, reduced taxes, promoted trade, helped the poor, improved Athens’ public buildings, and overhauled the water supply. He is often credited with establishing early public performance and possibly written circulation of the Homeric poems, and of dramatic festivals at which performances of heroic myth-based tragedies emerged as the core event. Ancient authors are divided as reporters of his activities as a tyrant, and as supporters of a major figure in the establishment of a national and cultural personality, though not of the democracy and concepts of civic responsibility which later authors celebrate as the key to Athens’ golden age. Herodotus’ account of his career and activities (1.59–64) is particularly suggestive of a personality and a set of events which might lend themselves to public commentary, and it has been noted that contemporary imagery, especially on vases, shows some innovations in popular representations, not least of the Herakles stories, which appear during Peisistratos’ tyranny, and disappear in favour of more established versions after the demise of his regime. That these are in any sense political cartoons is debatable and impossible to prove either way, but a softer argument for an interface between the cultural ethos of Exekias’ audience and the imagery which it interested him to use may be at least as convincing, if not more so. His particular subject choice, and some of the repeated individual motifs and figures, support that suggestion, and powerfully convey a personality with a traceable interest in both some of the specifics, such as horses and ships, and an overall

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conceptual sense of heroism as a theme to be explored in terms of its responsibilities, failures, glories, disasters, rewards, commemoration and its embedded presence in the ancient Athenian psyche. It is, I would argue, no accident that the most striking objects in Exekias’ attributed work can be seen as an exploration of the heroic career which parallels its appearance in the Homeric poems. The Iliad and the Odyssey are as striking in their presentation of the problems of being a hero as they are in celebrating its success; they show us the everyday life, the aftermath of glory, the competitive tension, and the domestic effect as much as they show us the characteristics and achievements which are celebrated. It is noticeable that the Exekian images discussed here think, among other things, about a hero who is not at the top of his ladder, the effects of war and competition on home and the family and the effects of losing them, violence as a career and a purpose, death and responsibility to the dead, and thoughts about identity and the afterlife. They were made to be seen and used by a public which was as deeply engaged with these themes as today’s viewer, most of them, formally at least, in the circumstances of a symposium which was often as competitive, intellectually or physically, as it was educational or entertaining. That they use a largely mythical frame of reference to do it is a part of a visible practice, both verbal and visual, in the Athens of Exekias’ day and later: the Parthenon was to show the same use of mythological themes to think publicly about Athenian achievement; the great tragedies of the classical period predominantly use well-known mythical stories to address live social and ethical issues. It would not be unreasonable to view Exekias’ work as another such expression of a collective personality, and it is usually interpreted, at least by implication, in that light. It is, however, true to say that most strands of interpretation, including those used here, depend on prior knowledge of the subject matter of the images, and an assumption that the viewer is not only equipped with that knowledge, but in a position to look at the object’s details, to understand their part in the whole, and to reflect on the implications and message of the subject. Time for contemplation, and the physical circumstances in which the viewer sees the pot and its pictures have as great an effect on its reception as recognition of the painter’s subject matter and the implications of the choices of detail and characters he made in depicting it. If what the viewer sees is partial or selective, that, too, has implications for the reception of the image; the painter may have taken this into account. Many of the images discussed here have a history of rich and varied interpretation; equally, many of them can

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profitably be viewed as deliberately multivalent, which adds to their continued attractions. The modern viewer, seeing these objects virtually, or in corpore in a museum case, is not necessarily equipped with the detailed and scholarly background knowledge. The recognisable modern impact, fame and accessibility of the vases and images which sit at the core of Exekias’ attributed work arise, therefore, at least as much from their immediate visual effect as they do from an understanding of their place in intellectual and interpretative tradition. What makes them stand out from their fellows, not only in the traditional wallpaper display of half a century ago, but even in the often contextualised displays of today? What makes them such attractive images and objects, and not only when used as part of the study of their original context of production and use? Academic study of them tends, inevitably, to prioritise detailed analysis, necessarily using the prior knowledge of the story, and often art-historical, archaeological or technical knowledge as part of the strategy of explanation. The scholarly perception of Exekias’ work as the peak of the Athenian black-figure tradition, and as a great original artist, emerges from the use of these tactics in a comparative approach to his and others’ work. Modern viewers, however, are often doing something rather different. They may, officially, be viewing ancient Greek pottery as an illustration of a cultural or technical achievement, and some, at least, of the images on the pots as evidence of the everyday life and ethical preoccupations of an iconic past society. The initial reaction to the contents of the museum case, or the website or illustrated book, will often be a selective response to a single item. Exekias’ work has the constant power to be that single item, whether or not the viewer already knows about it; its drawing power is extraordinary. First, the obvious quality of the work is a key to its continued appeal. Most descriptions and commentaries attached to these pieces naturally discuss the technical details of painting and incision, the use of added colour and thickened paint, and the outstandingly successful compositions of the scenes. Exekias’ signature as a maker prompts exploration of his probable innovations as well as his development of established shapes alongside study of his adaptations of existing themes and invention of new ones. The outstandingly satisfying shapes of his pots, and the pleasures afforded by attention to the details of his graphic skills, however stylised, are evident in isolation, and emphasised by comparison with the work of other makers. And because of their clean

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contours and sharp contrasts they reproduce well, digitally or otherwise, as flat or three-dimensional images, which gives them a modern advantage, possibly an underestimated one. This is probably how most viewers now encounter them first, and their impact on the printed page or busy website should not be underestimated. That viewers then take the next step, and try to see some, at least, in reality, is a genuine indicator of the power the image has. The Achilles and Penthesileia amphora (Plates 4, 5), discussed in Chapter 3, is, as we saw, currently displayed beside a second Exekian amphora (Plates 6, 7) with a related scene in a single case in the British Museum. They are surrounded by numerous other striking vessels, but the death of Penthesileia catches the eye, precisely because of the positioning of the dark figures, engaged in a violent rectilinear clash, sprawled over the satisfying curve of a markedly elegant vessel with a wonderful orange-red background colour which creates a desire in the viewer to touch it as well as look. The figures are deliberately foregrounded by position and colour, and that is also true of the divine father and son, Dionysos and Oinopion, on the other side. A longer look at the detail, and not least the exquisite subsidiary patterns, will add to the pleasure, but the primary impact is instant, and dependant on the disposal, composition and colour of the figures on the contrasting surface of the vessel. The viewer’s capacity to read the figures’ postures and weapons as instant indicators of the primary content of the scene is an obvious and natural expectation. The Ajax and Achilles vase (Frontispiece) is probably one of the most frequently illustrated items of ancient Greek art, in wildly various contexts. As we saw in Chapter 1, its inscriptions, like those on the Achilles and Penthesileia vase, are the identifiers of the participants in the action, which gives them a set of meanings pursued there. If we know little or nothing of those meanings, though, the vase and its images on both sides still speak. Black-figure vase painting is often characterised, in this book as elsewhere, as one of the least supportive techniques conceivable for its primary purpose of representing humans and animals in their own right and as the participating actors in a scene with narrative or representational intentions. Black-figure has often, therefore, played its part in a notional developmental structure, paralleled by a rather similar way of thinking about contemporary sculpture, which has realism, anatomical and otherwise, as its goal, or at least its acme. Recent scholarship has tended to abandon that framework; there is a powerful experiential case for a view of the

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technique as one which was actively used to make its visual mark with the tools actually at its disposal. The Ajax and Achilles scene, as we saw, has a structural force which works by using only two figures in a composition which draws attention to their central activity, and employs a number of significant depicted objects to reinforce both narrative and impact. The outcome is a scene which gains from the extreme black and red colour contrast which draws the viewer in, and spotlights the tension inherent in a game which is also presented as a confrontation with a dominant participant. The careful relationship of the scene and its component parts to the shape of the vessel, and the position of the picture on the primary curve of the vase create a sense of aesthetic satisfaction at least as important to the experience as any knowledge of a story. The hook is there, well before the viewer takes time to look at the details which increase the pleasure. Even if the viewer never sees the other side of the amphora, with its further implications for the content of both pictures, the experience of this one has all the hallmarks of a memorably appealing visual experience. A visit to the other side of the vase (Figure 6), whether we see it in reality or virtually, presents us with a scene so different in population and composition that the contrast is an important attraction in itself; if we view this side first, we will still respond to that contrast as part of the effect we experience. If we could handle the amphora, we would relate the pictures to each other naturally, by turning it as we appreciate its qualities of surface and contour. Exekias can be seen convincingly as a maker who was deliberately, and successfully, exploiting the routine handling and viewing of a common object, by making the most of its opportunities for serial visual experiences to the handler and the viewer. The Munich cup (Plate 8), another extraordinary piece, works in a parallel fashion. Chapter 5 dissociates, explores and then reassembles its separate images in conjunction with the shape of the cup, but the impetus to do that derives from the experience of handling it. Here, much of its appeal is the association of the user’s hands with the curves of the bowl and its handles; as we saw, the obvious way to lift the cup to drink from it naturally manipulates the visibility of its pictures, and plays with the user and any other viewer, from more than one angle. The notional or real drinker’s interaction with the cup is in itself a transformational experience, triggered by the colour of the inside surface, and the deliberate unreality of its image, unlocated except in the wine or the world of the interior. Mood, here, as with the other examples

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discussed, is as important a component as a detailed understanding of the content of the images. The lasting appeal of Exekias’ work, arguably, has its basis in the breadth and variety of response to it. It has intellectual appeal as visual and material evidence of the technical and ethical interests and commitments of a society which is still viewed as being the historical root of the cultures which now own and view the work in their public spaces. The reception and study of that culture and its artefacts, and their use and users, over a long period, provide a distinctive and important context for the intellectual appeal which underwrites much of the specialist scholarly reaction they command. That they also have the distinction attached to age gives them another attraction, often, though not exclusively, expressed with wonderment by a young audience. A group of objects which provide an outstanding aesthetic experience in addition to their other attractions deserves the quality and continuation of attention which these remarkable vases extract from us. These are, after all, the normal indicators of great art: acknowledged quality, wide dissemination, public appreciation, critical and scholarly attention, and the indefinable mix of these and other, often more individual reactions which underwrite our pleasure in a beautiful and speaking object.

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Abbreviations

The abbreviations listed below are largely those in common usage; otherwise the system used by L’Année Philologique has been used for periodicals; the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, eds S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), for references to ancient authors. AA ABL ABV Add²

Archäologische Anzeiger C. H. E. Haspels, Attic Black-Figured Lekythoi (Paris, 1936) J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1956) T. H. Carpenter, Beazley Addenda: Additional References to ABV, ARV² & Paralipomena (London, 1989) AJA American Journal of Archaeology AK Antike Kunst ARV² J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1963) BAD Beazley Archive Database, searchable online at www. beazley.ox.ac.uk BSA Annual of the British School at Athens Development J. D. Beazley, The Development of Attic Black-Figure (2nd edn, Berkeley, CA, 1986) JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies LIMC Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae Paralipomena J. D. Beazley, Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1971) RA Revue Archéologique

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Bibliographical Notes

Introduction As the introduction suggests, Exekias’ individual works have often been discussed, individually, thematically and as significant material contributions to the social, political and artistic history of Athens. There are, however, very few comprehensive works on his surviving oeuvre. Exekias’ work is presented as an attribution list by J. D. Beazley in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1956), 143–7 (hereafter ABV ), and Paralipomena (Oxford, 1971), 59–61. Beazley expanded on the work which was most significant for him in Attic Black-Figure: A Sketch (London, 1928), 17–21, 29–31, and more comprehensively in The Development of Attic Black-Figure (2nd edn, Berkeley, CA, 1986), 58–68, 102–4 (hereafter Development). In both essays he discusses the major works as groundbreaking and intensely personal artistic products of a discernible Athenian visual tradition on which Exekias drew to produce some major works of art. Werner Technau’s Exekias (Leipzig, 1936) remained the only comprehensive monograph on the then attributed body of work for many years; it is referred to by Beazley as by others. Volume 11 of the Kerameus series, eds J. Boardman, H. A. Cahn, D. C. Kurtz and E. Simon, Kerameus, Vols 1–11 (Mainz/Rhein, 1975ff.) is a monograph on Exekias’ funeral plaques: H. Mommsen, Exekias I Die Grabtafeln (Mainz/Rhein, 1997), which underpins much of Chapter 4 here. E. A. Mackay’s Tradition and Originality: A Study of Exekias (Oxford, 2010), hereafter Mackay (2010), emerges after many years in the writing, as, surprisingly, the only monograph which covers the entire attributed oeuvre, including some proposals for disattribution. This weighty book analyses each of the works in turn, both by description and discussion of proposed interpretations, and is likely to remain as a flagship of what

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has become the traditional methodology for single-painter monographs in the study of Greek vases. P. Arias, M. Hirmer and B. B. Shefton, A History of Greek Vase Painting (London, 1962) and E. Simon and M. and A. Hirmer, Die Griechischen Vasen (Munich, 1976) publish high-quality photographs, many in colour, of most of the major items, with scholarly commentaries to accompany them. John Boardman’s handbook Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974) illustrates many of the major players, and his commentary contextualises them among their competitors, predecessors and descendants. His article ‘Exekias’, AJA 82 (1978), 11ff. makes a case for the status of some of Exekias’ paintings as political commentary. Accounts of the emergence of the Greek city-states, and of Athens in particular, are many, and their angles of approach and interpretations of their evidence continue to evolve. Jonathan Hall’s History of the Archaic Greek World (London, 2007, 2014) is a notable recent example. For a recent take on state formation, including the sixth- and early fifth-century evolution of Athens from nuanced oligarchy to emerging democracy, see Peter Rose’s Class in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2012). Robin Osborne’s Greece in the Making (London, 1996, 2009) is particularly useful in its approach to setting political development in Athens and elsewhere in a social and physical context, including the traceable built environment, and trade. His Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998) provides, in Chapter 6, ‘Marketing an Image’, an excellent example of extended discussion of two of Exekias’ scenes as major elements in a broader context. Their visual impact was clearly one of the major reasons for his choice. Jeffrey Hurwit’s exploration of the buildings and sculpture of the Akropolis, The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Area to the Present (Cambridge, 1999), looks at its buildings and sculptures as developing public expressions of Athens’ sense of identity. Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures (London, 1998), 3ff., ‘Why some things matter’, is a useful introduction to a discussion on the value of objects, decorative or otherwise, which was beginning to open up then and is still expanding. The quotation is taken from page 4. He is continuing to view this intellectual world as an accessible oyster, as in his more recent publications The Comfort of Things (Cambridge, 2008) and Stuff (Cambridge, 2010). His early book Artefacts as Categories (Cambridge, 1985) provides a sobering reflection on common archaeological approaches to artefacts as chronological and other evidence. Grayson Perry also generated a catalogue which embeds his work alongside ancient artefacts from the British Museum collections as the

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exhibition did: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (London, 2011). His practice and influence are among those discussed by Zosia Archibald in her contribution, ‘Reconsidering the meanings of Athenian vases’, to the volume edited by Viccy Coltman, Making Sense of Greek Art (Exeter, 2012); she argues for a recognition of Beazley’s understated sense of the knowledge networks which underpinned communities of practice and making, and argues for an archaeological approach to figured ceramics which puts them in a context of everyday use. Another intellectual hierarchy, which assigns rather different rungs of the ladder to technology and art, raises its head in Serafina Cuomo’s Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, 2007). The Greek term τέχνη can be seen as lying behind an ancient, but also very current, controversy about the relative values of art (broadly defined) as against craft or skill, especially in the use and understanding of materials. This book includes some important studies of ancient technicians’ own sense of status as seen through their funerary imagery, and perceptions of that of both artists and architects. The book presents a strong argument for the central role played by τέχνη in the values of the world which used that term. A. A. Donohue, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description (Cambridge, 2005), provides a sharp commentary on the history of approaches to ancient visual objects. She demonstrates with some clarity that nowtraditional methods adopted by scholars past and present build on concepts and beliefs which dictate interpretations of the material. The very separation of art history as a discipline from archaeology, and their relative places in the academic hierarchy in this context, illustrates a telling political history. Underlying it is the assumption that verbal and literary disciplines are more objective than visual and material ones, and therefore rate a higher position in that hierarchy; the closer the practice of archaeological object analysis comes to expression via a language of objective description, the closer it is to philological analysis, and the more respectable it is. This intellectual framework leads very directly to the familiar typological analysis linked to chronological development and loses sight of the artefact as a speaking object. For the study of ancient Greek artefacts in general this has an ironic twist, as many had inscriptions which give statues, painted figures or objects which show them a voice to address the viewer, and the viewer’s standpoint is often part of the design. V. Norskov, Greek Vases in New Contexts (Aarhus, 2002), gives us a fascinating history of the collection, display, museum status and

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marketing of Greek vases as decorative objects, generators of intellectual discourse and as ancient and modern commodities. M. Vickers and D. Gill, Artful Crafts (Oxford, 1994), enjoyed a status as a primary focus for a major discussion on rethinking the status of Greek vases, and criticism of Beazley’s taxonomy and its implications, for some time. The principal counter-arguers were C. M. Robertson in D. C. Kurtz (ed.), Beazley and Oxford (Oxford, 1985), 19ff.; J. Boardman, JHS 104 (1984), 161ff.; R. M. Cook, JHS 107 (1987), 169ff. Dyfri Williams, ‘Refiguring Attic red-figure’, RA (1996), 227ff., summed up the position after reviews of the book had appeared, largely also arguing against its major assumptions; he also notes that M. Shanks, Classical Archaeology of Greece (London, 1996), 59ff. and 111ff., accepted the Vickers and Gill position wholesale. Williams also discusses, in the same article, the origins of Beazley’s disputed attribution methodology; he draws attention to the early article ‘Kleophrades’, JHS 30 (1910), 38ff., in which the acknowledgements are not to Morelli, Berenson’s inspiration, but to Paul Hartwig, Die griechischen Meisterschale (Stuttgart, 1893). Hartwig himself refers to Friedrich Hauser; Williams expresses the view that although Hartwig, Hauser and Adolf Furtwängler, all pioneer scholars of their material, were aware of Morelli, their real impetus came from much earlier beginnings in the desire to fill out and add to the lists of signed vases discovered in the Vulci cemeteries (Exekias’ among them); this in itself goes back to Winckelmann’s recognition of the possibility of attribution of vases to a master. See also Ian Jenkins in Vases and Volcanoes (London, 1996), 153, and papers by Ian Jenkins and K. Sloan in Sir William Hamilton Collector and Connoisseur: Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 9, no. 2 (1997), ed. L. M. Burn. Jenkins, ‘Seeking the bubble reputation’, 191ff., pays particular attention to interweaving the flowering and decay cycle of a painter’s career which was so much a part of D’Hancarville’s ethos in publishing Hamilton’s vases with the Enlightenment interest in a linear visual aesthetic. Beazley, it should be noted, also discussed his own methodology in Attic Red-Figured Vases in American Museums (Cambridge, MA, 1918), v–vi. J. H. Oakley, ‘Greek vase painting’, AJA (2009), 599ff., gives a more recent and comprehensive overview of current trends in the study of Greek vases, with an extensive bibliography. He defends Williams’s sense of Beazley’s practice, which is largely assumed by most current studies of vases in terms of authorship and iconography. He also draws attention to T. L.

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Shear Jr, ‘The Persian destruction of Athens: evidence from Agora deposits’, in Hesperia 62 (1993), 383ff., which, in his view, successfully refutes Vickers’s and Gill’s chronological reshuffle, and verifies the standard assumption on archaeological evidence from the Persian invasion of 480–479 bc. H. Hoffmann, Sotades (Oxford, 1997), pursues the idea that vases of this sort were essentially and usually specifically grave goods, and their imagery principally death-related. Robin Osborne has vigorously supported the sense that Athenian figured pottery, both black- and red-figure, was produced, with intent, for the Athenian symposium, whatever its later fate; Chapters 6 and 7 of his Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998) make the case, as does his ‘Workshops and the iconography and distribution of Athenian red-figure pottery: a case study’ in S. Keay and S. Moser (eds), Greek Art in View, Studies in Honour of Brian Sparkes (Oxford, 2004), 78ff. For the symposium as a basis for the construction of social identity, and the reflection of the process on its figured pottery, see his ‘Projecting identities in the Greek symposium’ in J. R. Sofaer (ed.), Material Identities (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2007), 31ff. The Beazley Archive Database (www.beazley.ox.ac.uk) is readily accessible online, and provides an outstanding searchable resource for images and information on Greek vases, and particularly the Athenian black- and red-figure which formed the basis of Beazley’s own paper archive. It was begun in 1979 and went online in 1998. The Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Munich, Zurich and Dusseldorf, 1981–99), hereafter LIMC, is an equally outstanding source of information on visual presentations of ancient mythological subjects. Ann Steiner, Reading Greek Vases (Cambridge, 2007), provides a striking example of an approach driven by methodologies essentially attached to verbal disciplines in trying to attach repetition theory to vases. M. D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art (Cambridge, 1999), and Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting (Cambridge, 2002), construct more visually based theoretical structures around some of the same issues. A. Snodgrass’s Homer and the Artists (Cambridge, 1998) is a clear discussion of the image versus text issue as related to the Homeric poems, and the problem of illustration as against a parallel and independent visual tradition, with plenty of examples. James Hall, The World as Sculpture (London, 1999), argues forcefully for a change in the perceived status of sculpture in the aesthetic hierarchy. Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

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(Cambridge, 2009), attempts to build the bridge between text and image as seen together in the ancient world. I. Jenkins’s and K. Sloan’s catalogue for the British Museum exhibition on Sir William Hamilton, Vases and Volcanoes (London, 1996), was an important contributor to the establishment of collection and reception studies as an angle of approach to looking at Greek vases; Stephanie Walker (ed.), Vasemania (New York, New Haven and London, 2004) is the catalogue of a more recent exhibition which explored cultures of acquisition, collection and display of vases, particularly in the context of neoclassical reception of them. S. Woodford, An Introduction to Greek Art (London, 1986), provides discussion of the changeover from black- to red-figure, discusses two of Exekias’ vases in some detail, and provides a shape chart as her Figure 11. Further detail can be found in M. G. Kanowski, Containers of Classical Greece (St Lucia, London and New York, 1984). B. A. Sparkes, The Red and the Black (London, 1996), J. D. Beazley, Athenian Red Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1963), hereafter ARV², D. C. Kurtz, Athenian White Lekythoi (Oxford, 1975), are all important works on aspects and techniques of Greek vase painting. The standard work on the technicalities is arguably J. V. Noble, The Techniques of Attic Painted Pottery (New York and London, 1988), though current practitioners such as Toni Schreiber, Athenian Vase Construction: A Potter’s Analysis (Los Angeles, 1999) have had their say on potting methods too. Beth Cohen (ed.), The Colours of Clay (Los Angeles, 2006) is the substantial catalogue of a substantial exhibition centred on a broad spectrum of ancient Greek pottery techniques, both the standard and the rare. See also K. D. S. Lapatin (ed.), Papers on Special Techniques in Athenian Vases (Los Angeles, 2008). Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian VasePainting (Cambridge, 2002), 32ff., discusses the relationships between the images and sides of vessels, and particularly those on bilingual vases. John Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting (London, 1998), is a convenient source of pictures and information on the development of earlier archaic pottery towards black-figure. P. Arias, M. Hirmer and B. B. Shefton, A History of Greek Vase Painting (London, 1962), and E. Simon and M. and A. Hirmer, Die Griechischen Vasen (Munich, 1976), have colour photographs of many of the important early vases. The recent second edition of Brian Sparkes’s Greek Art (Cambridge, 2011), 95ff., provides an extremely digestible critical survey of the recent scholarly trends in pottery studies outlined in this chapter, with

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recent bibliography and information on the current state of knowledge, understanding and consensus. In particular, he has a very useful section on workshops and working practices, as derived from archaeological evidence, and another on the clients. Perhaps the most immediate and accessible introduction to the symposium and its visual representation is F. Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual (Princeton, 1990). Oswyn Murray (ed.), Sympotica (Oxford, 1990) is a collection of papers from a symposium on the symposium, and covers its nature very comprehensively. In his own essay, ‘Sympotic history’, he says (p. 6), ‘the mental world of the Greeks of the Archaic age is revealed to us most clearly in the decoration of the objects made for the ritual of the symposium, Greek painted pottery, and in the poetry composed for performance there’. Richard Neer explores the world of the symposium and its pottery further in Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting (Cambridge, 2002); he focuses on its connections with the evolving Athenian democracy and the rise of redfigure as the style of choice, but much of his analysis of the symposium as an event is relevant to earlier manifestations of both event and crockery. F. Hobden, The Symposium in Ancient Greek Society and Thought (Cambridge, 2013), and M. Wecowski, The Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet (Oxford, 2014), provide further exploration of both custom and context. R. Osborne and A. Pappas, ‘Writing on Archaic Greek pottery’, in Z. Newby and R. Leader-Newby (eds), Art and Inscription in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2007), 131ff., explore the varieties and purposes of inscriptions on surviving archaic material, including labels and speechballoons. They refer usefully to A. Snodgrass, ‘The uses of writing on early Greek painted pottery’, in N. K. Rutter and B. A. Sparkes (eds), Word and Image in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 2000), 22ff. A note on the images which illustrate and are discussed in the following chapters: they are intended as visual comparanda chosen as exemplars of compositional tendencies or content, and are not intended always to bear an exact chronological relationship to that of Exekias’ work. The vases cited below, whether they also appear as illustrations or not, are normally further identified, as appropriate, by museum number and their listing in Beazley’s catalogues, T. H. Carpenter’s Beazley Addenda² (1989), and their Beazley Archive Database number (BAD) to aid further investigation. The vases attributed to Exekias also carry LIMC references.

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Chapter 1: Portrait of a Loser This chapter concentrates on three images of Ajax, which appear on three separate vases: A: Vatican Museum 344 (16757) (Frontispiece), ABV 145.13, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 310395; LIMC, Achilleus 397, Aias I 67, Silenoi (S) 187: this has the board game. B: Munich, Antikensammlungen 1470 (Plate 2), ABV 144.6; Add² 39; BAD 310388; LIMC, Achilleus 876, Gorgo, Gorgones 166, shows a figure usually identified as Ajax carrying Achilles’ body on both sides. C: Boulogne, Château Musée 558 (Plate 3), ABV 145.18; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 310400; LIMC, Aias I, 104; Gorgo, Gorgones, 166, has the suicide preparation. A second, now-fragmentary vase, Cambridge, Museum of Classical Archaeology 114 and Leipzig, Antikenmuseum der Universität inv. T355 a-c and T391 (lost), ABV 145.15, 714.18 bis; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 306982 and 310397; LIMC, Achilleus ad 397, probably duplicated both the board game and the Dioskouroi scene on the other side. This chapter and Chapter 2 also discuss Berlin F 1718 (Figure 3), once Staatliche Museen (lost), ABV 144.5; Add² 39; BAD 310387; LIMC, Achilleus 871 shows the same subject on one side, with a departure scene on the other (Figure 8). Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, University Museum MS 3442, ABV 145.14; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 310396; LIMC, Achilleus 881, Aithiopes 1, Antilochos 1 30, has been thought in the past to show Ajax lifting the body: see Mackay (2010), 291ff. for a discussion of the possibilities. Susan Woodford, The Trojan War in Ancient Art (London, 1993), has sensitive and well-illustrated commentaries on the board game (59ff.), and the suicide (99ff.). The scenes of Ajax carrying Achilles’ body discussed at 94ff. do not include the Exekian versions, though much of the discussion is relevant to them. Pictorial analyses of the board game scene are numerous and popular. E. A. Mackay’s section on this vessel, Mackay (2010), 327ff., gives both an exhaustive and minutely observed description, and references to numerous other commentaries. 142

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J. D. Beazley hypothesised an underlying Palamedeia in Development, 60. John Boardman’s Peisistratean interpretation appears in ‘Exekias’, AJA 82 (1978), 11ff. Other contributors to political interpretation of the vase include: Heide Mommsen, ‘Achill un Aias pflichtvergessen?’, in H. A. Cahn and E. Simon (eds), Tainia, Roland Hampe zum 70 (Mainz/Rhein, 1980), 139ff. ‘Zur Deutung der Exekias-amphora im Vatikan’, in J. Christiansen and T. Melander (eds), Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Ancient Greek and Related Pottery, Copenhagen, August 31– September 4 1987 (Copenhagen, 1988), 446ff. ‘Beobachten zu den Exekias-signaturen’, Metis 13 (1998), 39ff. M. A. Moore, ‘Exekias and Telamonian Ajax’, AJA 86.4, 417–34 (1980). Robin Osborne, ‘The myth of propaganda and the propaganda of myth’, Hephaistos 5–6 (1983–4), 61ff. H. A. Shapiro, ‘Exekias, Ajax and Salamis, a further note’, AJA 85 (1981), 173ff. Dyfri Williams, ‘Ajax, Odysseus, and the arms of Achilles’, AK 23 (1980), 137ff. S. Woodford, ‘Ajax and Achilles playing a game on an olpe in Oxford’, JHS 102 (1982), 173ff. (she prefers domestic to political connotations). D. L. Thompson discusses the Akropolis statuary group in ‘Exekias and the brettspieler’, Archeologia Classica 28 (1976), 30ff. Other versions of the scene include: Boston 01.8037, ABV 254.2 and ARV² 4.7, 1617; Add² 65; BAD 200007 (a black-figure and a red-figure version on either side of an amphora by the Lysippides/Andokides Painter(s) – usually thought of as Exekias’ pupil(s), variously identified as a single painter or two different ones). Richmond, Virginia 60.10, illustrated in T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London, 1991), fig. 300, shows an intervening Athena. Beazley’s subject indices for both ABV and ARV² show continuing popularity of the subject, with or without extra warriors or Athena, well down into late archaic red-figure. T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London, 1991), fig. 329, illustrates the drawing of a bronze shield band from Olympia of around 600 bc, Olympia 1911a (after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin,

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1950), xiv.24a, pl. 38), with a warrior carrying a much larger armed corpse (here Figure 1). See also K. Schefold, Myth and Legend in Early Greek Art (London, 1966), pl. 32, for other early representations of this motif, and of those relating to Ajax’s suicide. A red-figure cup by the Brygos Painter, British Museum E 69, 1843,1103.11 ARV² 369.2, Paralipomena 367, Add² 224, BAD 203901, T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London, 1991), fig. 330, shows the lot casting and a quarrel. A rather similar, but more dramatic quarrel, with unidentified heroes, appears on the hydria, British Museum B 327, 1843,1103.2, ABV 363.38, Add² 96, BAD 302033, discussed and illustrated by Beazley in Development 75, 105, and pl. 84.1. This hydria, a member of the cross-over Leagros Group, shows a shouting, weaponwaving fight very successfully. The proto-Corinthian aryballos by the Ajax Painter, Berlin 3319, is cited by D. A. Amyx, Corinthian Vase Painting of the Archaic Period (Oakland, CA, 1988), 367, as the earliest extant representation of the suicide, and illustrated as pl. 5, 1b. T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London, 1991), fig. 331, shows the drawing of one of several surviving shield bands, Olympia B 1636x (after E. Kunze, Archaische Schildbänder (Berlin, 1950), xxxvi.41, pl. 55, here Figure 4), which shows the impaled body discovered by two comrades. Chapter 3 of Guy Hedreen’s analysis of landscape features in early Greek art, Capturing Troy (Ann Arbor, 2001), 91ff., focuses on the Ajax story, and particularly on the game and the suicide, and the presence of the tree in representations of both. He illustrates Louvre MBN 911, ARV² 301.1, Add² 211, BAD 203099, a white-ground lekythos by the Diosphos Painter, which has the board game sited in front of a palm tree in his fig. 24 a–b. John Boardman’s article ‘Exekias’, AJA 82 (1978), 11ff. provides a subject table for the painter, which suggests a bias towards Ajax and other less popular heroes and legends, and away from the illustrations of Herakles which are much more frequent in black-figure in general.

Chapter 2: Homecomings and Departures This chapter focuses on the other side of the board game amphora, Vatican Museums 344 (16757) (Figure 6), ABV 145.13, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 310395; LIMC, Dioskouroi 181, Tyndareos 9.

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As earlier, E. A. Mackay’s comprehensive section on this image, Mackay (2010), 327ff., includes intense analysis of many others’ interpretations of the scene, as well as her own. Discussions, and there have been many, tend to centre on whether the scene is a departure or an arrival, or both; Polydeukes’ nakedness and Kastor’s clothing, horse and spear are all deployed as clues, as are the meaning of the stool, garment and the aryballos carried by the boy. Her own interpretation zigzags beyond these immediate indicators to suggest that Exekias was establishing an iconography for the Dioskouroi, using existing concepts of them: Polydeukes as a boxer, supported by the après-sport indicators of the bath materials, and Kastor as a horse-tamer, among other things. The parentage of the Dioskouroi varies in archaic literary sources: Odyssey 11.298–300 makes them both sons of Tyndareus; Pindar, Nemean 10.80–2 makes Kastor Tyndareus’ son, while Zeus fathered Polydeukes; an ancient commentator on Pindar (ad Nem 10.80, Schol. 150a) says that Hesiod made both the twins sons of Zeus, though this does not survive in his extant texts. M. B. Moore, ‘Horses by Exekias’, AJA 72 (1968), 357ff., is an influential and authoritative discussion of the painter’s observation and representation of equine habits and relationships with humans. She and Mackay elaborate extensively on Exekias’ horse types and the compositions which use them. Mackay links the dominant Kyllaros to Exekias’ other departure scenes, in particular those with chariots (342ff.). Dominic Berry drew attention, from his experience of horses, to the position of Kyllaros’ ear and its implications, in discussion after delivery of this chapter as a paper in Edinburgh, September 2010. This discussion uses a profile of the Anavyssos kouros, aka Kroisos, an Attic grave-marker of roughly comparable date with the vase, and a strikingly similar body form to that of Polydeukes. John Boardman suggests in passing (Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), 57, that Exekias could have been a sculptor too – perhaps he made this one? N. J. Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture (London, 1996), chap. 5, 105ff., is a detailed exposition of the concept of heroic nudity in narrative and commemorative art. H. A. Shapiro, Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens (Mainz/Rhein, 1989), 149ff., discusses the cult of the Dioskouroi in Athens, sited in the Anakeion sanctuary, its possible Spartan implications and this scene and its many interpretations, with further citations. Odyssey 11.299–304, Pindar, Nemean 10.55–90 and Mackay (2010), 340, n. 94, provide sources and further material on the

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twins’ afterlife. Ancient sources for the Phoinikis, or red cloak, as Spartan military wear, include Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, 1140. The departure scenes illustrated are a few among a large number of generic examples which permutate the various elements of the typical scene mentioned here, and others: Figure 8: Berlin, Antikensammlung F 1718; ABV 144.5; Add² 39; BAD 310387; Figure 9: London, British Museum B 243, 1843,1103.101; ABV 286.7; BAD 320294; Figure 10: London, British Museum B 187, 1836,0224.225; BAD 11905; Figure 11: London, British Museum 1922,0615.1; ABV 86.9; Paralipomena 32; BAD 300798; Figure 12: Munich, Antikensammlungen 2415, ARV² 1143.2; Paralipomena 455; Add² 334; BAD 215142. For an exploraton of the veil in ancient Greece, and the veiling gesture, and its implications, see Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece (Swansea, 2003). Amphiaraos was the seer who knew that the expedition of the Seven against Thebes would fail, and argued against it until Eriphyle, his wife, was bribed by Polyneices to intervene with the necklace made by Hephaistos for Harmonia, the wife of Thebes’ founder, Kadmos. Odyssey 11.326–7 features Eriphyle as one of the famous women seen in the Underworld by Odysseus, and Amphiaraos appears at 15.246–7 as the man who dies at Thebes ‘because of gifts to a woman’. For a detailed discussion of the framing figures of Athenian black-figure scenes, and a theoretical construction of their role as viewers, see M. D. Stansbury O’Donnell, Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens (Cambridge, 2006). E. Kunze-Götte, Myrte (Kilchberg, 2006), explores the significance of myrtle, particularly as a funerary symbol. She discusses (15ff.) Exekias’ use of it on this vase, as the wreaths worn by the Dioskouroi, as a wreath encircling the dead warrior’s helmet on the Berlin amphora F 1718, ABV 144.5, Add² 39, BAD 310387 (Figure 3), and the head of the corpse on one of the funeral plaques, Berlin F 1811 A, ABV 146.22, BAD 350041 (Figure 40). Modern Greek Orthodox funerary practice includes the use of myrtle in its rituals still, as it does pomegranates. The vase by the Andokides Painter, Munich, Antikensammlungen 2301, ARV² 4.9, 1617, Paralipomena 113, 320, Add² 149, BAD 200009 (Figure 14) showing Herakles, Athena (and on the black-figure side, Hermes), has connotations of both apotheosis and funeral: the kline on which Herakles is resting is also the standard bier in funeral scenes; Hermes is the god who escorts the dead to the Underworld, and oversees Herakles’ abduction of Kerberos.

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Some of the observations on female textile production were originally noted in E. Moignard, ‘Towers, pillars, or frames’, in D. C. Kurtz (ed.), Essays in Classical Archaeology for Eleni Hatzivassiliou (Oxford, 2008), 95ff. For ancient Greek breeds of dog see R. H. A. Merlen, De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity (London, 1971), and D. Brewer, T. Clark and A. Phillips, Dogs in Antiquity. Anubis to Cerberus: the Origins of the Domestic Dog (Warminster, 2001). Xenophon, Cynegeticus 3.1, attributes the name of the Kastorian breed to the interest Kastor showed in them. Mackay (2010), 346, n. 143, draws attention to other appearances of the dog with the Dioskouroi. The fragmentary neck-amphora by Exekias, Narbonne 01.1.1.1–8, ABV 144.2, BAD 310384, shows a deer, presumably Artemis’ pet, rearing against her in the same way as the white dog does here. Some of the observations on the dogs of the Odyssey were also noted in E. Moignard, ‘How to make a monster’, in M. Austin, J. D. Harries and C. Smith (eds), Modus Operandi: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Rickman (London, 1998), 209ff. The implications of the spatial relationships have received much attention too; Mackay (2010), 340ff., explores them in detail, as she did earlier in ‘The return of the Dioskouroi’, AJA 83 (1979), 474ff. Mackay (2010), 395ff., is an appendix of ‘planar maps’ of Exekias’ compositions.

Chapter 3: The Eye of the Beholder This chapter discusses the Achilles and Penthesileia amphora, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127 (Plates 4, 5), ABV 144.7, 672.2, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 39; BAD 310389, LIMC, Achilleus, 732, Amazones, 175 and ad 260, Penthesileia, 17 in its design context. Others which feature in the comparison are two further amphorae attributed to Exekias: a second with the same subject, British Museum B 209, 1849,0518.10 (Plates 6, 7); ABV 144.8, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 39; BAD 310390; LIMC, Achilleus 724, Amazones 260, Penthesileia 18; a third early one, Munich, Antikensammlungen 1470 (Plate 2), ABV 144.6; Add² 39; BAD 310388; LIMC, Achilleus 876, Gorgo, Gorgones 166, discussed in Chapter 1, is mentioned here in terms of its overall composition. The other featured black-figure pots are: an amphora attributed to the Painter of Louvre F 51 (Figures 19, 20), Providence RISD 13.1479, ABV 314.6, Paralipomena 136, Add² 85, BAD 301624; another attributed to the Princeton Painter (Figures 21, 22), British Museum B 212, ABV 297.1, Paralipomena 129, Add² 78, BAD 320400. The Group E amphorae are

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listed at ABV 137.59­­–63 and Paralipomena 57, 61 bis–63 ter: the illustrated example (Figure 23) appears as ABV 137.59, Paralipomena 55, Add² 37: it is now Oxford 1965.135, BAD 310319. D. A. Jackson used some of these and other examples in his East Greek Influence on Attic Vases, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies supplementary paper XIII (London, 1976), 13ff. The amphora by the Amasis Painter, showing Athena and Poseidon, Paris, Cabinet de Médailles, de Ridder 222 (Figure 24), appears as ABV 152.25, 687, Paralipomena 63, Add² 43, BAD 310452. The Vix krater, a large bronze volute-krater, probably of Spartan origin, usually dated to the late sixth century bc, is illustrated by Claude Rolley, in Greek Bronzes (Fribourg and London, 1986), figs 128, 129, and by most handbooks on Greek art and archaeology. The image of Achilles and Penthesileia is discussed by Robin Osborne in Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998), 105ff., and by Susan Woodford in The Trojan War in Ancient Art (London, 1993), 89. The Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, and its Gigantomachy frieze, are discussed and illustrated by, among others, John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (London, 1978), 158ff. and figs 210–12. For further exploration of the Panathenaic festival and its iconography, see Jennifer Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens (Princeton, 1992). D. von Bothmer, Amazons in Greek Art (Oxford, 1957), remains the key survey of the phenomenon. His plates 14, 15 and 38 give ample illustration of Amazon battles treated as a frieze and as single combats, and of their armour; plate 10 shows the two British Museum Exekias vases side by side. His discussion of the two Exekian vases appears on pages 72–3. Mackay (2010), 365, places the less famous amphora considerably earlier than the other, a judgement which she supports by further comparative references to the details of the figure drawing. Tyrrhenian amphorae (Figures 28, 29), a specialist Athenian shape produced about 565–550 bc, apparently destined specifically for the Etruscan market, are a version of the ovoid neck-amphora, usually decorated in bands, with the main figure scene on the shoulder, and two or three friezes of animals. Scenes with Herakles and Amazons are among their more popular mythological themes. This example appears as ABV 98.46, 684, Paralipomena 37, Add² 26, BAD 310045. See J. Boardman, Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), 36 and figs 56­–63. The Penthesileia Painter’s name vase (Figure 25), Munich, Antikensammlungen 8705 (formerly 2688), appears at ARV² 879.1, 1673, Paralipomena 428, Add² 300, BAD 211565.

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Chapter 4: The Long Goodbye This chapter, on funeral pictures, uses some of the clay plaques, many very fragmentary, painted by Exekias for a built tomb in the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens, the city’s primary civic burial ground, which has evidence of burials from at least 1200 bc. It takes its name from the Greek word keramos, ceramics, pottery clay, and the area also included the potters’ quarter in which most of their workshops were situated, and in which many of the pots buried as grave goods or used as offering containers or grave-markers originated. Many of the Geometric vessels discussed here were found in the Dipylon cemetery, an area of the city cemetery nearby in the vicinity of the Dipylon Gate. For a powerful discussion of ancient Greek death imagery in a heroic context see E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley, CA and London, 1979). For an important study of, among other things, the construction of identity, whether social, political, gender or age, via a material culture which includes the Geometric imagery discussed here, see S. Langdon, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100–700 B.C.E (Cambridge, 2008). For a look at war and battle tactics, especially horses and chariots, see P. Greenhalgh, Early Greek Warfare (Cambridge, 1973). For armour and weapons, see the two key works by A. M. Snodgrass, Early Greek Armour and Weapons from the End of the Bronze Age to 600 B.C. (Edinburgh, 1964) and Arms and Armor of the Greeks (2nd edn, Baltimore, 1998). Protogeometric burial pottery, including the amphora with a horse (Figure 31), is extensively discussed and illustrated in V. R. d’A. Desborough, Protogeometric Pottery (Oxford, 1952) and I. S. Lemos, The Protogeometric Aegean (Oxford, 2002). The fragmentary standed krater with a sole mourner (Kerameikos grave 43, Figure 32) is published in K. Kubler, Kerameikos, vol. 5 (Berlin, 1954) and discussed by J. N. Coldstream in Geometric Greece (London, 1977; 2nd edn, 2003), 61ff. and fig. 17 g–h. Athens 804 (Figure 33) is probably the iconic Geometric amphora, and is frequently illustrated. It came from grave 2 or 4 in the Dipylon cemetery. For full references, see J. N. Coldstream, Greek Geometric Pottery (2nd edn, Exeter, 2008), 29.1 and pl. 6. For Athens 803 (Figure 35), found in Dipylon Grave 1, see Coldstream, ibid., 30.2; Louvre 517 (Figure 36), Coldstream, ibid., 30.4 and pl. 7a. Louvre 517 appears as Coldstream, ibid., 30.4. For a detailed discussion of it see also 149

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B. Bohen, ‘The Dipylon amphora: its role in the development of Greek art’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 25.2 (Summer 1991), 59. For the Hirschfeld Painter examples (Figures 37, 38), see Coldstream, ibid., 41.1 (Athens 990) and 42.13 (New York 14.30.14). The latter is illustrated by B. Schweitzer, Greek Geometric Art (London, 1971), fig. 41. The lekythos with the weaving scene by the Amasis Painter, New York, Metropolitan Museum, 31.11.10 (Figure 15), appears at ABV 154.57, 688; Paralipomena 64, Add² 45, BAD 310485. E. W. Barber, Women’s Work (New York and London, 1994), is a valuable exploration of the role of women as producers of textiles in antiquity, both in reality and in legend. Sian Lewis, The Athenian Woman (London, 2002), deals with the specifically Athenian iconography of their role, not least in weaving. Bronze animal votives can be found conveniently illustrated in B. Schweitzer, Greek Geometric Art (London, 1971), figs 188–90, and R. Hampe and E. Simon, The Birth of Greek Art (London, 1981), figs 385–91. John Boardman discusses both Exekias’ and other plaques and funeral iconography in ‘Painted funerary plaques and some remarks on prothesis’, BSA 50 (1955), 51ff. He drew extensively on earlier publications, including reconstructive drawings and personal observation, to make some important critical deductions about both the arrangement and interpretation of the fragments, and about what the plaques show, not least that what we are seeing is not the ekphora itself, but the pre-procession assembly in the house and its immediate environment. The plaques appear as ABV 146.22–3, 687, Berlin 1811–26 and Athens 2414–17 (now CC 848–51), Paralipomena 60, Add² 41. Beazley discussed some of the significant survivors in Development, 65ff., and they are illustrated, as fragments, at plates 74–6. They, and particularly the set in Berlin, have received full publication and reconstructive drawing in H. Mommsen, Exekias I Die Grabtafeln (Kerameus, vol. 11, Mainz/Rhein, 1997). The discussion in this chapter accepts and uses both the reconstructions and the proposal for the arrangement order of the plaques around the tomb which appears as her Beilage D. The plaques discussed in detail are, in the order in which they appear, fragments numbered left to right as they are inserted in the drawings: Mommsen (1997) pl. I (equivalent to our Figure 40), reconstructed from the Berlin fragments F 1811 B, F 1826, F 1811 A (BAD 350041); pl. XV (our Figure 41), F 1813 and F 1826 k, (BAD 350506); pl. XIV (our Figure 42) F 1823 (BAD 350493) and F 1814; pl. VII, F 1819, (BAD 350094); pl X, F 1826 l, h, and F 1825 (BAD 350297); pl. IX,

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F 1822 a, F 1824, F 1822 e (BAD 350291); pl. XI (F 1826 i, f and F 1822 b, c, d; pl. IV (our Figure 43) F 1818 A and B; pl. III, F 1826 g, F 1815, F 1826 o and c (BAD 350082); pl. II, F 1812 b, c, a, (BAD 350046) and F 1817 b. (Mommsen’s colour plates 1–4 show F 1811 B, F 1812 b, F 1815, F 1814, and F 1813). For a digest of discussion of the inscriptions, see the entry in the Beazley Archive Database for BAD 350009. The male gesture with the single hand to head appears also on the Athens fragment NM 2415 BAD 310404 (Mommsen, 1997, Beilage A lower.) The amphora showing a departure which may be a funeral, discussed at the end of the chapter (Figure 44), is Orvieto, Museo Civico, Collection Faina 2747 (77), ABV 144.10, Paralipomena 60, BAD 310392. Mackay (2010) discusses the vase at 173ff. Its other side has a relatively conventional departure scene with a chariot; this one, as she notes, has some features which link with the funerary use of some of the same indicators. C. Bérard et al., A City of Images (Princeton, 1989), 102ff., has a short discussion, by Bérard, of black- and red-figure funeral scenes and iconography and illustrates a non-Exekian plaque with many of the same mourner characteristics at fig. 142. J. Boardman, op. cit. (1955) both discusses and illustrates further examples.

Chapter 5: Masks The famous cup which forms the centrepiece of this chapter (Plate 8) is now in Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044) ABV 146.21, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 41, BAD 310403, LIMC, Dionysos 788. Beazley discussed it in Development, 61–2; Mackay (2010) has an extended chapter on it at 221ff. with extensive references to the numerous other discussions of parts or the totality of this remarkable, indeed unique, piece. It appears several times in K. Vierneisel and B. Kaeser (eds), Kunst der Schale, Kultur des Trinkens (Munich, 1990), in its discussions of symposium culture and its vessels to accompany an exhibition of symposium crockery. The other Athenian cups which are illustrated as evolutionary examples here are: Figure 45: British Museum B 388, 1857.0805.1, BAD 310551; Figure 46: British Museum B 408, 1890.0731.25, ABV 189.3, Add² 52,

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BAD 302484; Figure 48: British Museum 1920,0216.1, ABV 32.11, BAD 300358; Figure 49: British Museum E 54, 1843,1103.4, ARV² 436.96, 426, Add² 238, BAD 205142; Figure 50: British Museum B 380, 1885.12-13.12, ABV 55.91, Add² 15, BAD 300468; Figure 51: British Museum B 421, 1867.0508.946, ABV 181.1, Paralipomena 75, Add² 50, BAD 301203; Figure 52: Berlin, Antikensammlung 2278, ARV² 21.1, 1620, Paralipomena 323, Add² 154, BAD 200108; Figure 54: Munich, Antikensammlungen 2645, ARV² 371.15, 1649, Paralipomena 365, Add² 225, BAD 203914; Figure 58: Berlin Antikensammlung 1805, ABV 223.65, Paralipomena 104, Add² 58, BAD 302815. There are several other representations by Exekias of Dionysos in more conventional fashion: London, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127, ABV 144.7, 672.2, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 39; BAD 310389; LIMC, Dionysos 785, Oinopion 3: the scene on the back of the Achilles and Penthesileia amphora showing him with Oinopion (Plate 5) discussed in Chapter 3. Orvieto, Museo Civico, Collection Faina 2748 (78), ABV 144.9; Paralipomena 60; Add² 39; BAD 310391; LIMC, Amphitrite 55 (A), Aphrodite 1294 (A) 1508 (A), Apollon 828 (A), Dionysos 498 (A), Hades 139 (B), Herakles 3607 (B), 3386 (A), Persephone 263 (B), has him sitting in an assembly of the gods with Herakles. Orvieto, Museo Civico, collection Faina 2745 (187), ABV 145.11, 686; Paralipomena 60; Add² 40; BAD 310393; LIMC, Herakles, ad 2902 also places him with a group of other gods and Herakles seeing Athena into a chariot. Budapest, Musée Hongrois des Beaux Arts 50.189, Paralipomena 61, BAD 350456, shows him with nymphs and satyrs. Reggio, Calabria Museo Nazionale 12886, Paralipomena 61, BAD 350454, a fragmentary amphora, shows him with a woman holding a child. Mackay (2010), 11, no. 9 attributes to Exekias the fragments of a second amphora in the Giry Collection, Musée de l’Eglise SaintSaturnin, Nissan-lez-Ensérune, BAD 2538 which also shows Dionysos with woman, children, satyrs and a nymph. She has long disattributed the krater Athens, Agora Museum AP 1044 ABV 145.19, Paralipomena 60, Add² 40, BAD 310401: this has a divine chariot scene, including Dionysos. See ‘Exekias’ calyx-krater revisited. Reconsidering the attribution of

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Agora AP 1044’, in R. F. Docter and E. M. Moormann (eds), Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Amsterdam July 12–17 1998 (Amsterdam, 1999), 247–51; Mackay (2010), 13.X4 and 354ff. For extended discussion of the imagery of this cup in the wider context of Dionysiac iconography, see C. Isler-Kerenyi, Dionysos in Archaic Greece (Leiden and Boston, 2007), 171ff. T. H. Carpenter, Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art (Oxford, 1986), discusses many of the other Exekian contributions to the Dionysiac image bank, but noticeably not this cup. The major thrust of the book is to argue for establishment of that image canon by the Heidelberg Painter and the Amasis Painter. H. Bloesch, Formen attischer Schalen von Exekias bis zum Ende des strengen Stils (Bern, 1940), remains the classic technical discussion of the evolution of Attic cup shapes after Exekias; J. Boardman, Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), is an accessible compendium with illustrations of most of the major forms, including Eye-Cups by other painters. J. A. Jordan, Attic Black-Figured Eye Cups (Ann Arbor, 1989), is a specialised work on EyeCups, their forms and the development of their decoration, including the Exekian example. For further discussion of the iconography and style of Laconian pottery see C. M. Stibbe, Lakonische Vasenmaler des sechsten Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Amsterdam and London, 1972), M. Pipili, Laconian Iconography of the Sixth Century (Oxford, 1987) and John Boardman, Early Greek Vase Painting (London, 1998). The coral red interior is, rightly, widely noted in discussions of this cup; the other additional colour areas perhaps less so, though there is a consensus about their strategic and effective use. Mackay (2010) provides a detailed discussion of their presence and significance in her entry on this work; Beth Cohen focused on the coral-red gloss here and elsewhere in ‘Observations on coral-red’, Marsyas 15 (1970–1), 1–2 and in The Colours of Clay (Los Angeles, 2006), 44ff. The ship is drawn with some fidelity to its real-life equivalents, as J. S. Morrison and R. T. Williams, Greek Oared Ships 900–322 B.C. (Cambridge, 1968), 96, demonstrate; Mackay (2010), 223 and the description here have benefitted from their analysis. Mackay reads the prow of the ship as a boar’s-head ram: I see, as I suggest later in the chapter, an echo of the dolphins. Discussions on the subject matter of the vase often make distinct approaches via one or more features or details, before trying to make links between them, or suggesting that this is a modern strategy rather than a reflection of Exekias’ and other vase painters’ practice.

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The warriors under the handles (Figures 59, 60), and their possible identity, are discussed at length by Mackay (2010), 236ff., with references to many other attempts to give them a specific story, including Beazley, Development 67ff. Many of them wish to link the scenes with the epic cycle, especially the Iliad and the Aithiopis. The deaths of Patroklos and of Achilles are favourite suggestions, supported by comparison with Exekias’ other treatments of heroic deaths in battle with fights over the bodies, cf. the Philadelphia vase, ABV 145.14, cited here under Chapter 1. Essentially, as Jordan (1989) observed, there is a gradual change in the last 30 years of the sixth century bc in the conventional layout of the exterior which moves the scenes originally placed under the handles, as here, to a position between the eyes, with an increase in Dionysiac imagery (as in our Figure 62). D. A. Jackson, East Greek Influence on Attic Vases (London, 1976), 53ff., devotes a chapter of the monograph to a discussion of the East Greek origins of Eye-Cups. A further observation by Jordan that a Gorgoneion with, of course, the usual staring eyes, is a common interior subject resonates both with the mask theme discussed here, and the element of surprise at what may be revealed by drinking the wine. For those cups on which the eyes have a nose between them, the view of the exterior as a mask is an attractive concept: John Boardman may have stimulated the case for the viewer at a symposium watching the drinker as the key to the mask effect in Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), 288, and elaborated on it in ‘A curious eye cup’, AA (1976), 281ff.; he illustrates the effect in A History of Greek Vases (London, 2001), 277, fig. 307. J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black-Figured Vases (Paris, 1924), 99, gives a reconstructive drawing of our cup which, like our Figure 61, suggests the mask effect for the viewer and Mackay (2010), pl. 57b, also demonstrates it with the same shot of our cup held at the appropriate angle. Her notes 225.29 and 30 cite further pursuers of this idea, and the possibility of a ritual context as much as one in other types of symposium. The papers in T. H. Carpenter and C. A. Faraone (eds), Masks of Dionysos (Cornell, 1993) explore connected concepts of Dionysiac ritual. See also Y. Korshak, Frontal Faces in Attic Vase Painting of the Archaic Period (Chicago, 1987); N. Kunisch, ‘Die Auge der Augenschale’, AK 33 (1990), 20ff. and F. Lissarrague, Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (Princeton, 1990), 141ff. The possibility that Exekias’ cup was known to a circle of contemporary users and artists is perhaps supported by a cup by the Amasis Painter, often, as a painter, the root of compare-and-contrast

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exercises, as in the chapter on the Achilles and Penthesileia vase. This cup, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 10.651, ABV 157.86; Paralipomena 65, Add² 46, BAD 310515, with masturbating satyrs, a siren with a single eye as her body, and defecating dogs under the handles, was discussed coyly by Beazley as a conscious parody in Development 56, and pl. 59 1–2 (the original 1951 edition shows the siren side only as pl. 26.4) and more explicitly by Boardman in Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), 55 and fig. 82, where he illustrates the offending side. For further references and brief discussion, see Mackay (2010), 241 and n. 125. Equally important, and not necessarily mutually exclusive, imagery discussed here links the mask also with Dionysos as the god of theatre, and perhaps specifically the emergent Athenian theatre. For further detailed exploration of this see G. Ferrari, ‘Eye Cup’, RA (1986), 5ff., and C. Isler-Kerenyi, Dionysos in Archaic Greece (Leiden and Boston, 2007), 181. The fragmentary dinos, Rome, Villa Giulia 505599, ABV 146.20, 686; Add² 41; BAD 310402; Mackay (2010), 12.19 and 215ff., appears in a reconstruction drawing at J. C. Hoppin, A Handbook of Greek Black-Figured Vases (Paris, 1924), 105. It is one of a number of roughly contemporary dinoi decorated with ships around the inner mouth of an otherwise blackglazed vessel. This one carries Exekias’ signature, and a dedication by the probable purchaser, Epainetos, for the recipient, Charopos. The inscription is partially in Sikyonian script rather than Athenian, and the inscriptions are incised rather than painted, but before firing. See Mackay (2010), 215ff. for a discussion of the implications for its status as a commission, among other things. The psykter, or wine-cooler, by Oltos, New York, Metropolitan Museum 1989.281.69, ARV²1622.7 bis, Paralipomena 326, Add² 163, BAD 275024, is a prize example of a piece decorated to use the decoration to interface with the wine as a sea. The inscription beside each figure ‘ΕΠΙΔΕΛΦΙΝΟΣ’ – ‘on a dolphin’ – suggests a song sung by the riders; the scene itself is often interpreted as a representation of a dramatic chorus. The association of sea imagery with wine is attractively explored by M. I. Davies, ‘Sailing, rowing and sporting in one’s cups on the wine dark sea’, in W. P. Childs (ed.), Athens Comes of Age: From Solon to Salamis (Princeton, 1978), 72ff.; a more specific link between a symposium and a ship and its crew is made by W. J. Slater, ‘Symposium at sea’, HSPh 80 (1976), 161ff. Davies also discusses dolphins, not least as musical and dramatic creatures, among other things because they have blowholes and can be associated with playing a flute; they are also reported as responding to the flute used to set the rowing stroke aboard a ship.

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E. Simon and M. and A. Hirmer, Die Griechischen Vasen (Munich, 1976), pl. 61, illustrate an unattributed cup in the Villa Giulia, no. 64608, showing three dolphins: the leader is playing a double flute. For discussions of the probable resonances with Dionysos’ ship-car and Athenian public festivals, see G. M. Hedreen, Silens in Attic Black-figure Vase-Painting (Ann Arbor, 1992), and Mackay (2010), 232ff., with further references. J. S. Morrison and R. T. Williams, Greek Oared Ships 900–322 B.C. (Cambridge, 1968), 116, cite five black-figure representations of the car, including the fragmentary skyphos by the Theseus Painter (Figure 63), Athens, National Museum, Akropolis Collection 1.281; C. H. E. Haspels, Attic Black-Figured Lekythoi (Paris, 1936), 250.29; J. Boardman, Athenian Black Figure Vases (London, 1974), fig. 247; BAD 465. See also now J. Boardman, The Triumph of Dionysos (Oxford, 2014), 3–9 and fig. 2. This cup is probably the first time that Dionysos is shown reclining as if at symposium. H. Mommsen, ‘Dionysos und sein Kreis im Werk des Exekias’, Trierer Winckelmannsprogramme 2002/03 19/20 (2005), 21ff., and Mackay (2010), 231, discuss this, and Mackay links this 235f. and n. 99 via the vine with some slightly later representations by the probable pupils of Exekias of Dionysos sitting or reclining under a vine as a symposiast. I owe the observation that the ship is so placed that it metaphorically sails into the drinker’s mouth to David Wiles in the discussion following the original delivery of this chapter as a conference paper to the Classical Association annual conference in Nottingham in 1996. Much else that appears here originates in the experience of actually having the privilege of handling the cup in Munich in the summer of 1976. It is hardly surprising that Mackay’s summary of the cup at (2010), 237f. covers much of the same ground, no doubt on the basis of a very similar experience.

Epilogue Much of this section is supported by citations already made in the context of specific images or the scene-setting in the introduction. I cite some additional material here. The status of the images as visual commentary, and particularly on the career of Peisistratos is a thread of scholarly argument which can be traced via the following publications, among others:

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John Boardman, ‘Herakles, Peisistratos and Sons’, RA (1972), 57ff. ——— , ‘Herakles, Peisistratos and Eleusis’, JHS 95 (1975), 1ff. ——— , ‘Herakles, Peisistratos and the unconvinced’, JHS 109 (1989), 158f. ——— , ‘Exekias’, AJA 82.1 (1978), 11ff. LIMC V. 1 (Zurich and Munich, 1990), ‘Herakles’, VIII. B, 126ff., nos 2877–908. R. M. Cook, ‘Pots and Pisistratan propaganda’, JHS 107 (1987), 167ff. H. A. Shapiro, ‘Exekias, Ajax, and Salamis: a further note’, AJA 85 (1981), 173ff., with further bibliography. C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Three related Cerberi’, AK 17 (1975), 30ff. This discussion centres on interpretation of an observed visual phenomenon (the use of new or manipulated views of Herakles and his adventures on Athenian black-figure vases of the latter part of the sixth century, and their frequent disappearance at the end of it) in the light of audience reception and contemporary events at the time. M. Vickers and D. Gill, Artful Crafts (Oxford, 1994), were also among the sceptics, logically enough, since they were attempting, among other things, to undermine both the assumption that the pots were produced as primary work by any painter, and that they were viewed and valued in their own right by the clientele presumed by the supporters. See also Mackay (2010), 383ff., with references for a thorough synopsis of the debate and its contributing elements and, most recently, E. Stafford, Herakles (Abingdon, 2012), 163ff., for an overview of the Peisistratean interpretation and its problems. The debate’s assumption of an informed and receptive audience is at least partially based implicitly or explicitly on the topography of Athens and its known features, as described. For an accessible overview of the physical development of Athens, and its topography at the relevant date see J. M. Camp, The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven and London, 2001). The outcomes of extensive excavations which accompanied the installation of the Athens underground system reached public attention in an exhibition in 2000–1, with a substantial catalogue: N. C. Stampolidis, L. Parlama (eds), Athens: The City Beneath the City (Athens and New York, 2000). For evidence of prostitution in the Kerameikos area see A. Glazebrook and M. M. Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 bce–200 ce (Wisconsin, 2011), 34ff., with further references, including deductions on the use and purpose of the excavated building Z in the Kerameikos. Explorations of the career of Peisistratos and the implications of the ancient sources are numerous; Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making

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(London, 1996; 2nd edn, 2009), 243ff., usefully embeds a commentary on him in the context of a discussion of the emerging city-state and its visual presentation on the eve of democracy. For an engaging, and in many ways parallel, reflection on the likely circumstances of use, and the practicalities of viewing symposium pottery and its pictures, see R. Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (Oxford, 1998), 87ff., where he also discusses the accessibility of the images to the contemporary viewer. The complete chapter, ‘Marketing an Image’, reflects not only on the pull of the images in their own right, but also on their implications as a considered reflection of local identity for a foreign market. The relationship between the potter and the painter is an important underlying factor. An assumption of inter-workshop and common painter knowledge is supported by the widespread visual evidence of common iconographic themes and pot shapes; there are some famous cases of inscriptions which refer to other painters, not least Euthymides’ picture of a party, Munich, Antikensammlungen J378 (2307) ARV² 26.1, 1620, Paralipomena 323, Add² 156; BAD 200160, which carries a reference to his probably slightly older contemporary Euphronios; both of them are among the members of a group envisaged by Beazley as an interactive workshop, the Pioneers, ARV², 13ff.; see also J. Boardman, Athenian Red-Figure Vases: The Archaic Period (London, 1975), 29ff. and figs 22ff. For further discussion of self-referential pictures on early red-figure pottery, see J. Frel, ‘Euphronios and his fellows’, in W. G. Moon (ed.), Ancient Greek Art and Iconography (Madison, 1983), 147ff., and R. Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting (Cambridge, 2002), 87ff. The possible parody of the Dionysos cup by the Amasis Painter, mentioned earlier, fits the general assumption of cross-observation by Athenian makers well. And we should note that the reverse side of the earlier British Museum Achilles and Penthesileia amphora (Plate 7), showing Memnon with his Aithiopian squires, labels one of them as Amasis. John Boardman, in his paper ‘Amasis, the implications of his name’, in Papers on the Amasis Painter and His World (Los Angeles, 1987), suggested that this is a deliberate revenge by Exekias for the cup parody. For discussion of museum displays, ancient and modern, see V. Norskov, Greek Vases in New Contexts (Aarhus, 2002), 113ff., and E. A. Moignard, Greek Vases: An Introduction (London, 2006), 97ff. The classic developmental structure, assuming aspirational progress towards realism, often still unconsciously or deliberately underlying much writing on ancient Greek art, is profitably discussed by A. A.

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Donohue, Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description (Cambridge, 2005). John Boardman, among others, queried its reality as a feature of ancient practice in Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (London, 1978), 64ff.; its conceptual origins are clearly articulated by E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960), who is often credited as the source of the theory, pursued in many other publications. It is probably one of the contributing factors underlying Beazley’s chronological structures, though not the only one. M. Stansbury-O’Donnell constructs a more liberal developmental perspective in Looking at Greek Art (Cambridge, 2011), 36ff. Richard Neer’s chap. 2, ‘The Evolution of Naturalism’, in Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting (Cambridge, 2002), 27ff., provides an excellent critical summary of Gombrich’s position and a counterargument on the basis of creative innovation and competitive skill in the context of supplying the symposiast with ever more challenging imagery. M. Squire, The Art of the Body (London and New York, 2011), 32ff., discusses and critiques concepts of naturalism, and modern perceptions, in a lively and accessible chapter, ‘Figuring What Comes Naturally?’ Observation of viewing and reaction contributed to this chapter, not least at the British Museum study day mentioned in the acknowledgements, and over a long period in which I have read and listened to many subtle and informed analyses of Exekias’ work, from academics, students at several levels and impressed viewers alike, and noted the enthusiasm in their voices and faces with intense pleasure.

159

Bibliography

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Glossary

agora

alabastron

amphora apotropaic

aryballos Attic bilingual black-figure

Boiotian

calyx krater

169

literally the ‘gathering place’ of an ancient Greek city; often the market place, or central city square, with political, religious, commercial and civic functions and buildings. a scent bottle, usually used by women, shaped like an elongated teardrop or pear, originating in Egypt, where it often was made of alabaster. a two-handled jar of varying shapes. literally something which turns a potential threat away; often a frightening image used to protect its wearer or a building displaying it – Medusa the gorgon is a frequently used example. a scented-oil bottle, often used by men, normally spherical, occasionally pointed in shape. from Athens or its surrounding territory, or a style originating there. indicating a vase painted in both black-figure and redfigure. the vase-painting technique which uses silhouette figures in black glaze with incised details on the red background of the vessel. from Boiotia (Boeotia), the state to the north-west of Athens in central Greece. A Boeotian shield is oval with lateral cut-outs to allow the use of a spear at torso level when the fighter is part of a ranked formation. a form of the krater (see below), with a wide, splayed upper body.

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chiton

a version of the tunic worn by both genders, short for men, long for women; the female version is normally fastened along the shoulder and arm with a series of buttons or pins. chlamys, plural a short, rectangular cloak, often draped and pinned chlamydes on one shoulder, usually worn by men. Corinthian from Corinth or its surrounding territory, or a style originating there. Corinthianising imitating, or influenced by the painting styles originating in Corinth. dinos a krater (see below) with a round bottom, usually with a stand. echinus a convex moulding, often used in architecture, as well as a mouth or foot form in Greek pottery. ekphora the formal procession, literally ‘the carrying-out’, taking a corpse to the cemetery for burial or cremation. Eye-Cup the cup form of which the cup discussed in Chapter 5 is an early example, usually decorated with a pair of eyes on the exterior, as here. gadrooning a repoussé pattern of tongue shapes, often used around the mouth of a vessel. Geometric an early Iron Age style of pottery which uses geometric patterns and related stylised figures; occasionally the term is extended to mean the period in which it was made. Gorgoneion/ a representation of the face and snaky hair of the Medusa mask Gorgon Medusa, whose glance turned viewers to stone; she was often used as an apotropaic (see above) device on shields and religious buildings. himation a cloak worn by both sexes, but often by men without a chiton (see above) underneath. kalos inscription kalos means ‘beautiful’ physically and psychologically. Vases with inscriptions sometimes have one which identifies X as kalos; the name is normally one which can be associated with a real individual, who may have been present at or connected with the symposium or other occasion for which the vessel was commissioned.

170

g lo s sa ry

kantharos

a tall cup with high-swung handles, often carried by Dionysos or Herakles. kline a piece of furniture which could be used as a sofa, a bed or a bier. krater the central mixing bowl used at the symposium – the bell krater, column krater, volute krater and calyx krater are variants on the basic shape, distinguished by the shape of the body or the handles. Laconian made in, or originating from, Laconia (Sparta) and its surrounding territory. lekythos an oil bottle, larger than the aryballos or the alabastron, often used in burial ceremonies. libation the ritual pouring of a liquid, often wine, as an offering to a god or as a memorial to the dead. locus amoenus Latin for ‘a pleasant place’ – a literary term for a type of description, common in ancient literature, which implies the safety and peace of the place. metope the square panel, usually with sculptured figures, repeated between the blocks with three grooves known as triglyphs, which are the components of the frieze of a Doric temple; by extension, a square picture space. oikos literally ‘the house’, but by extension, the household and its occupants as a formal and quasi-political unit. pelta a light-weight, crescent-shaped shield, often carried by Amazons or light infantry. peplos the alternative to a chiton (see above), normally a long tunic worn by women, with a single fastening on each shoulder. phiale a dish, sometimes fluted, made of ceramic or metal, often used for pouring libations (see above). prothesis the formal laying-out of the dead for mourning, prior to the ekphora (see above). Proto-Corinthian the earliest post-Geometric style (see above) of Corinthian pottery decoration. Protogeometric a pre-Geometric style of pottery decoration, usually using bands and concentric circles. 171

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psykter red-figure

Samian satyr Sikyonian symposium, symposiasts topos triglyph Tyrannicides

tyrant Tyrrhenian amphora white-ground

a mushroom-shaped cooler vase which should sit inside a krater (see above). the decoration technique which reverses the effect of black-figure (see above) to show figures with painted linear detail on a black background. from the island of Samos. a hybrid man-horse or man-goat, usually part of Dionysos’ entourage. from Sikyon, a city in the northern Peloponnese, not far from Corinth. the drinking party, usually formal, and usually male, which was central to Athenian and other Greek societies, and its attenders. a repeated theme or motif or literary convention. (see under metope above). the Tyrant Slayers, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who were credited in antiquity as the founders of Athenian democracy by killing the tyrant Hipparchus. an unconstitutional sole ruler. a specialised type of amphora, produced in Athens between about 565 and 550 bc, probably largely for the Etruscan market. a style of vase painting involving the coating of part or all of the vessel surface with white slip, and adding coloured decoration on top of it. It does not hold its colour if fired, so was used for vases which would not attract much wear, especially funerary goods.

172

Index

academic approaches xx–xxi, 1ff., 21, 128ff., 158f. Aeschylus 47 Amazons 69ff., 148 archaeology and vases 2, 6ff. Aristophanes 146 armour and weapons 18f., 23ff., 75ff., 149 art versus craft 9ff., 136ff. Athenian archaic vase shapes amphorae neck-amphorae 55ff. Type A 17f., 55 Type B 29, 55 Tyrrhenian amphorae 72, 148 cups Eye-Cups 115ff. komast cups 104 Little Master Cups 102 Type A 101ff. Type B 104 dinos 14, 120, 155 hydria 49, 63 krater 14, 63, 80ff., 118f. lekythos 47, 63, 150 psykter 120, 155 Athens Agora 4 Akropolis 2ff. 173

Dionysia 3, 119ff. Dipylon/Kerameikos cemetery 4, 80ff., 149 Enneakrounos fountain 4 Kerameikos 2, 125, 149, 157 Panathenaia 3, 69, 148 Parthenon 127 Athens, physical development 4, 157f. Attica emergence as city-state 3f., 136, 157 state ideology and imagery 3f., 126f., 149, 157f. trade 3f. attributes (visual labels) 21 attribution studies 2, 5, 10 battle scenes 66ff., 113ff., 149, 154 Beazley, J. D. 1, 5, 12, 75, 133 attribution system 7, 9ff., 138f. Beazley Archive Database xviii, 133, 139 Berenson, B. 10, 138 black-figure 2, 11f. added colour 11f., 72ff., 117, 153 Athenian stylistic development 12

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chronology 1, 12f. cockerel 66 collecting and reception 7f., 140 contemporary viewing 127ff. Corinthian vases 12, 43, 144 Amphiaraos Painter 43, Figure 13 cross-references to other materials (skeuomorphism) 7, 59ff., 104 Darwin, C. 10 Delos, cult of Apollo 4 departure scenes 33ff., 146, 151 dogs 35, 51f., 66, 147, 155 Argos 52 dolphins 116, 123, 155f. East Greek pottery 63, 108, 115, Figure 57 Eleusis, sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone 3 emotional impact of images xx, 9, 123 epic cycle 20, 23, 35, 72, 154 Etruria, Etruscan 1, 7, 55, 79, 98, 117, 126 Euripides 17, 24 Exekias passim attributed oeuvre 13f. ‘career’ 13f. image composition 17f., 25ff., 52–3, 66ff., 113ff. inscriptions see separate entry Plates 1–8, Frontispiece, Figures 3, 5, 6, 8, 40–4, 47, 59, 60, 61, 65 publications on Exekias 5, 135f. shape innovation 13 signature 4, 14, 55, 74, 115 technical characteristics 13, 17ff., 29ff., 52, 76f., 101ff., 128ff.

François Vase 25, Figure 2 Freud, S. 10 funerary imagery 44f., 79ff., 146, 149f. funerary monuments 35, 79ff. Fürtwangler, A. 138 gardens 44ff. Geometric pottery 80ff., Figures 32–9, and see under painters and potters Hades 35, 80 Hamilton, Sir W. with D’Hancarville, P. V. Hugues and Tischbein 138 Hartwig, P. 138 Hauser, F. 138 Herodotus 20, 126 heroism 15ff., 33, 90, 118f., 127, 149 holding the vessel xx, 8, 119, 123, 130f., 156 Homeric poems 15, 17, 22, 118, 122, 127 performances at the Panathenaia 4, 14 horses 80ff., 118, 145 Kyllaros 14, 33, 35, 49, 51, 145 hospitality imagery 33ff. household imagery 33ff., 79ff., 92 Iliad 15, 23, 47, 53, 79, 90, 91, 95, 118, 127 inscriptions 8, 155 kalos names 21 labels 19ff., 25, 35, 95 speech-balloons 21, 155

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kouroi 35 Anavyssos kouros 35, 145, Figure 7 Laconian Painters Arkesilas Painter 105, Figure 53 Hunt Painter 105, 108, Figures 55, 56 Laconian (Spartan) pottery 105, 108, 153 Marx, K. 10 masks 117, 119, 154 Megara 20f. Miller, Daniel 6, 136 Morelli, G. 138 mules 95 Phalios 95 museum display styles 6f., 127f., 137f., 158 Mycenae 47 mythological personalities Achilles 5, 9, 13f., 15ff., 33ff., 37, 55, 63, 66ff., 79, 91f., 129f., 142, 147f., 154, 158 Agamemnon 23f., 47, 118 Ajax 5, 9, 13f., 17ff., 33ff., 55, 63, 79, 92, 129f., 142ff. Alkinoos 45ff., 52, 118 Amphiaraos 43, 146 Andromache (Amazon) 72 Andromache (Hector’s wife) 47, 91 Apollo 4, 23 Arete 47, 49f. Artemis 147 Athena 20, 44f., 47, 66, 146, 148, 152 Calypso 45, 47, 122 Chryseis 47

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Circe 47 Clytemnestra 47 Demeter 3 Diomedes 23 Dionysos 9, 66, 90, 95, 116ff., 152ff. Dioskouroi (Kastor and Polydeukes) 21, 33ff., 79, 90ff., 94, 144ff. Eriphyle (Amphiaros’ wife) 43, 146 Eumaeus 52 Eurycleia 49 Gigantomachy 69, 148 Gorgoneion 19, 29, 31, 154 Hector 15, 23, 30, 47, 91, 95 Hecuba 95 Helen 47 Hephaistos 51, 118 Hera 118 Herakles 21, 31, 44, 46, 72, 76, 82, 108, 146, 148, 152, 157 Hermes 45, 80, 146 Idomeneus 118 Kerberos 108, 146 Laertes (Odysseus’ father) 46 Leda 33ff., 79 Maenads 108 Memnon 72, 76, 158 Menelaos 29, 90 Nausikaa 47, 49f. Nereids 37 Odysseus 22ff., 31, 45f., 118ff., 146 Oinopion 66, 152 Paris 23 Patroklos 23, 154 Peleus 24 Penelope 47, 49, 91, 122 Penthesileia 9, 14, 55, 63ff., 129, 147f., 158

m a st e r o f at t i c b l ac k - f i g u r e pa i n t i n g

Persephone 3 Phaeacians 119 Phoinix 22 Polypoites 23 Poseidon 66, 148 Priam 91, 95 satyrs 152, 155 Scylla 52 siren 155 Telemachos 47, 52, 90 Thersites 74 Theseus as Athenian hero 3 Thetis 37 Tyndareus 35ff., 145 Zeus 118, 145 Odyssey 15, 22ff., 37ff., 79, 90, 118f., 122, 127, 146 Olympus 35, 44 painters and potters (Athenian), and selected illustrated work Amasis Painter 5, 10, 13, 47, 66, 148, 150, 153, 154f., 158, Figures 15, 24 Andokides Painter 13, 44f., 46, 82, 146, Figure 14 Antimenes Painter 49, Figure 16 Brygos Painter 108, 144, Figure 54 C Painter 105, Figure 50 Centaur Painter 102, Figure 46 Dipylon Master 82ff., 149f., Figures 33, 34, 35, 36 Douris 104, Figure 49 Euphronios 158 Euthymides 158 Eye-Siren Group 37, Figure 9 Exekias see separate entry

Glaukytes 101, Figure 45 Group E 5, 13, 63, 75, 147f., Figure 23 Hirschfeld Painter 85f., 150, Figures 37, 38, 39 Kleitias and Ergotimos 25, Figure 2 Kleophon Painter 43, Figure 12 KY Painter 104, Figure 48 Louvre F 51, Painter of 59, 147, Figures 19, 20 London B 76, Painter of 37, Figure 11 Lydos 13f. Lysippides Painter, manner 69, Figure 26 Nikosthenes 108, Figure 58 Oltos 120, 155, Figure 64 Painter N 108, Figure 58 Penthesileia Painter 66, 74, 148, Figure 25 Princeton Painter 59ff., 147, Figures 21, 22 Sosias Painter 105, Figure 52 Theseus Painter 120, Figure 63 Timiades Painter 72, Figures 28, 29 Tleson 105, Figure 51 painting techniques 11ff., 140 pattern-work on vases 12, 55ff. pattern and image relationships 55ff., 101ff. Peisistratos 3f., 20, 126ff., 156f. Perry, Grayson 6, 137 Pindar 145 potters and fabrication 2 potter and painter interrelationships 154f., 158 Protogeometric pottery 57, 80, 149

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red-figure 1, 9, 13 and see under painters and potters Salamis 21 ships 116ff., 153, 155f. Siphnian Treasury 69, 148 Solon 3 Sophocles 17, 24 Sparta 35, 49, 145 Spartan painters, see under Laconian speaking objects, vases as xix, 6, 127ff. statuary groups Ajax and Achilles’ board game 21, 143 Tyrannicides 21 subjects of imagery and occasions of use 4, 7, 14, 125ff., 139 symposium and its imagery 4, 7, 14, 44, 53, 82, 90, 92, 101ff., 125ff., 139, 141, 151, 155f., 158

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techne 137 textiles and clothing including weaving imagery 18ff., 33ff., 46ff., 79ff., 146, 150 Trojan War 20ff., 144, and see under epic cycle; Homeric poems; Iliad; mythological personalities; Odyssey Tyrannicides 92 tyrants see under Peisistratos Drakon 3 Kylon 3 vases as propaganda 20f., 66f., 156f. veiling 43, 146 vines 46, 116, 156 visual and verbal stories, interaction or separation 20, 139 Vix krater 59, 148 wreaths 35, 44, 92, 117, 146

Plate 1: A detail of the vase which appears in the frontispiece, showing the ‘speech balloons’ and the fine detail of the warriors themselves and their dress and armour. Rome, Vatican Museums 344 (16757), photograph © Hirmer Fotoarchiv, München.

Plate 2: An Athenian black-figure neck-amphora, H. 42.2, c.545 bc, from relatively early in Exekias’ career, showing a warrior carrying a dead comrade, still fully armed, usually identified as Ajax carrying the body of Achilles off the battlefield. Munich, Antikensammlungen 1470, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.

Plate 3: An Athenian black-figure type B amphora, H. 54, c.535 bc. Ajax prepares for suicide: Exekias’ version, which provides a powerful mood-statement rather than showing us the outcome. Boulogne, Collection of the Museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer 558, photograph © Service Communication de la ville de Boulogne-sur-Mer.

Plate 4: The famous Athenian black-figure neck-amphora by Exekias, H. 40.9, c.540–530 bc, showing the encounter between Achilles and the Amazon queen, Penthesileia. London, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 5: Dionysos and Oinopion: the other side of Exekias’ Achilles and Penthesileia amphora. London, British Museum B 210, 1836,0224.127, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 6: Side A of the earlier Exekian black-figure neck-amphora, H. 42.2, c.545–540 bc, showing an encounter between a hoplite and an Amazon. London, British Museum B 209, 1849,0518.10, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 7: The other side of the amphora shown in Plate 6, showing Memnon and his squires. London, British Museum B 209, 1849,0518.10, side B, photograph © Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 8: Interior of the Athenian Type A cup in black-figure with coral-red enhancement in the inside, D. 30.4, c.535 bc. The famous view of Exekias’ Dionysos cup. Notice the orientation of the handles vis-á-vis the interior scene, and the absence of a locating horizon. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729 (2044), © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypthotek, München, photograph by Renate Kühling.