ATHENS DIALOGUES :

Athenian Identity and the Eastern Other from Kroisos to Xerxes

Visual evidence indicates that Greek identity formed before the Persian Wars.

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Athenian Identity and the Eastern Other from Kroisos to Xerxes


1.1 
In the spring of 479 BC, the vast Persian army of Xerxes remained in Central Greece, even after his navy’s resounding defeat at Salamis, and still threatened to overwhelm the Greek cities.[1] Herodotos imagines a three-way debate among a Macedonian, Alexander son of Amyntas, bringing a request for surrender from the Persian commander Mardonios; an anonymous representative of the Athenians; and a Spartan envoy, worried that if Athens should capitulate, a Persian invasion of the Peloponnese would be inevitable (8.144.2–3). The major difference between the Athenian and Spartan experiences up to this point is that, while Spartan territory has remained unscathed, the Athenians had evacuated their city in the previous year at the behest of Themistokles, leaving it to be burned and almost entirely destroyed by the Persians (Herodotos 8.52–53; 9.13).

1.2 
The Athenian speaker begins by proclaiming that the Persians’ destruction of statues and shrines of the gods ( theon ta agalmaton kai ta oikemata ) has to be avenged. He then goes on to define Greek identity in terms of four criteria: kinship of blood ( homaimon ); a common language ( homoglossan ); the holy structures and shared sacrifices to the gods ( theon hidrumata te koina kai thysia ); and a common way of life ( ethea homotropa ). Many commentators have rightly seized on this famous passage as our earliest concise and comprehensive statement of what it meant to be a Greek in the Classical period.[2] In recent scholarship, it has sometimes been argued that this concept of Greek identity was first forged in the crucible of the Persian Wars, that is, that Greek identity was first constructed in deliberate opposition to the Persian enemy, the “barbarian Other.” [3] In this paper, I suggest that by looking at some visual evidence from the generation before the Persian Wars, we will find that the concept of Greek identity outlined in Herodotos pre-dates the invasions of 490 and 480 and may well have originated in an earlier stage of the interaction between Greece and the Persian Empire.

Ilioupersis and Ionian Revolt


2.1 
In 1998, The J. Paul Getty Museum returned to the Republic of Italy an Attic red-figure cup that had been illegally excavated at Cerveteri in Etruria, smuggled out of Italy, and acquired by the Getty in fragments between 1983 and 1985.[4] The cup is extraordinarily large (diameter 46.5 cm.), placing it in a small category of cups of the late sixth and early fifth century often known as “parade cups” because they were clearly made for display rather than for ordinary use.[5] It carries the signature of Euphronios as potter and has been attributed to Onesimos. According to Dyfri Williams, it is “the masterpiece of the painter’s early middle phase, which he dates 500–490.[6]

2.2 
The imagery of the cup comprises one of the most detailed and elaborate depictions of the Trojan War that has survived on a Greek vase. The interior is devoted to a panoramic scene of the Sack of Troy (Figure 1), while the pictures on both sides of the exterior take us back to earlier phases of the war: Achilles giving up his war booty, the girl Briseis, to Agamemnon (as told in Book 2 of the Iliad ; Figure 2) and an episode that is too poorly preserved to reconstruct with certainty but may have shown a duel of Ajax and Hektor (as told in Iliad Book 8), in the presence of gods including Athena and Apollo.[7] Here I focus on the Sack of Troy, as an early paradigm of Greek identity, one that the Athenian speaker in Herodotos would recognize, and expressed in powerful visual terms.

2.3 
The various episodes that comprise the Sack of Troy on Onesimos’s cup have been carefully described by Williams in his exemplary publication and analyzed by several other scholars in the context of other versions of the story in same period, including the Vivenzio Hydria in Naples, the masterpiece of the Kleophrades Painter, and a well-known cup by the Brygos Painter.[8] In particular, Michael Anderson has observed many aspects of the vase’s design and architecture and how certain themes line up along horizontal and vertical axes.[9] While agreeing in principle with earlier scholars, I believe we can usefully frame the entire program of the cup in terms of Herodotos’ criteria of Greek identity and read the vase as a meditation on two opposing models: Greeks behaving like true Greeks versus Greeks violating their codes of behavior, in effect acting like barbarians.

2.4     
The eye of the viewer immediately falls on the two most egregious examples of Greeks behaving like barbarians. In the central medallion (Figure 3), Neoptolemos, the son of Achilles, murders both Priam and his grandson Astyanax, whose small, naked body he swings by one foot. The woman in the background, with both hands raised to her head in a gesture of distraught mourning, is labelled as Polyxena. Since she herself is fated soon to be sacrificed to appease the ghost of Achilles, yet another act of barbarity is alluded to in her presence. Directly above, in the outer zone, the Lesser Ajax prepares to rape the nearly naked and defenseless Trojan princess Kassandra as she clings to the statue of Athena (Figure 4).[10] The barbarism of these two brutal acts derives not simply from the violence itself—in wartime, old men and young children are always vulnerable, and women are always the victims of rape—but from the fact that they take place in sacred space, in sanctuaries of the gods. Athena’s statue marks the goddess’s domain, and the large bronze tripod alongside the statue is a generalized symbol of dedications made in sanctuaries. Priam’s death takes place at an altar, and, just to drive home the point with bitter irony, this altar is labelled as that of [Zeus] Herkeios, that is, Zeus as the god who protects suppliants.[11]

2.5   
As we heard in the Athenian’s speech in Herodotos, what most bothered his people about the Persian invasion of their city was the disrespect for the sacred places, the statues and shrines of the gods. This had to be avenged. Indeed, once the Persians had been conclusively been defeated, the Greeks swore an oath, at the very site of the final victory in mainland Greece, Plataia, not to rebuild the shrines destroyed by the Persians, but to let them stand as monuments to the impiety of the Barbarian and as reminders never to trust such an enemy.[12] In the event, this high-minded principle was overtaken by more practical concerns some three decades later, when Perikles decided it was time to rebuild the temples on the Akropolis in order better to reflect Athens’ new status as an imperial capital.[13] But the memory of that Persian impiety never left the collective memory of the Athenians. Rather, it continued to be discussed and debated in terms of a mythological analogue, the Greeks’ destruction of Troy and defilement of its holy places in the final moments of the war.

2.6   
In 458, Aischylos staged his Oresteia trilogy, taking up a story that formed part of the epic Nostoi, the returns home of the Greek heroes at Troy. Underneath the major plot of the first play, Agamemnon , Klytaimnestra’s treacherous murder her husband, lurks a meditation on the deeper issue of flouting the gods and its consequences. In her triumphant report of the final Greek victory in Troy (lines 338–347), Klytemnestra warns darkly that all will be well if only the Greeks have shown respect for the holy places ( theon hidrumata ) and have not let their desire for destruction get out of hand. As if in direct answer to her fears, the messenger in the next scene, having himself escaped a storm that destroyed much of the Greek fleet, proudly proclaims that the destruction of Troy has been absolute: the altars gone, the theon idrumata uprooted (527). Aeschylus was acutely aware of the parallel between the actions of the Greeks at Troy and those of the Persians in Athens. Fourteen years earlier, in his play on the events of 480, Persians , he had used similar language to describe the Persians’ destruction of the sacred altars in Athens.[14]

2.7   
The epic tradition already knew of the punishment for impiety, for the two chief perpetrators on the cup by Onesimos both came to a bad end: Neoptolemos struck down on the altar of Apollo at Delphi, [15] and Ajax condemned by the Greeks themselves for his rape of Kassandra and drowning in a storm sent by Athena.[16] But their deeds are juxtaposed on the cup with those of other heroes who display the positive side of what it meant to be a Greek. At nine o’clock in the outer zone, a white-haired old woman reaches out her arms to two young warriors: Aithra, the mother of Theseus, rescued by her grandsons, Akamas and Demophon (cf. Figure 1). Through an unlikely sequence of events, Aithra had ended up in Troy as a captive and handmaiden of Helen ( Iliad 3.144). Her son, Theseus, did not come to Troy, because he belonged to an older generation of heroes, but his two sons (who do not figure in the Iliad ) arrived in time for the last days of the war.[17] Their rescue of their grandmother is first depicted on vases on the 490’s, [18] a period when the Athenians were trying to compensate for the absence of a significant role for Athenian heroes in the Homeric poems by promoting some minor episodes featuring the family of their new national hero, Theseus.[19] In the larger context of Onesimos’ cup, this family reunion embodies the first criterion of Greek identity, blood and kinship ( homaimon ), and enunciates the principle of family loyalty and pietas.

2.8 
On the opposite side of the interior, at three o’clock, a woman performs a similar gesture of reaching out her hands in supplication of a warrior (cf. Figure 1). She is Theano, priestess of Athena at Troy and husband of Antenor, who was also shown.[20] This little-known episode from the Sack of Troy, which is not included on other vases of this period, illustrates one of the most fundamental principles of the Greek way of life, that of xenia , or hospitality to strangers. Years earlier, Odysseus had come to Troy, along with Menelaos, whose wife Helen had been carried off by Paris, to try to negotiate Helen’s safe return and thus head off a war.[21] That embassy is depicted on a single surviving Greek vase, a Corinthian krater of the early sixth century, where Theano plays the key role in receiving the Greek envoys (Figure 5).[22]

2.9 
The mission itself was a failure, of course, but the hospitality of Theano and Antenor was not forgotten, and here it is Odysseus, dressed in a curious dappled animal skin, to whom Theano turns for protection amid the tumult of the sack of her city. He will oblige, ensuring that both Antenor and his wife are spared. Perhaps it was in part this noble deed that ensured that Odysseus, unlike the Lesser Ajax and Neoptolemos, would enjoy a successful (if very belated) homecoming to Ithaka.

2.10   
Thus far we have seen that two of the criteria for Greek identity, blood and shared customs ( homaima, ethea homotropa ) are illustrated by Onesimos, juxtaposed with negative exempla of respect for the gods. What of the other episodes on this sadly fragmentary masterpiece? Just behind Aithra, a Trojan woman uses a long pestle to try to defend herself against a Greek soldier, Sthenelos, armed with a machaira , or long curved sword (cf. Figure 1). We can hardly suppose that the painter or his audience condoned an attack by an armed male warrior on an unarmed woman who in desperation wields a household implement. What the scene illustrates is that a woman of noble character is capable of acts of heroism that transcend the limitations of her sex.On the Brygos Painter’s cup and the Vivenzio hydria, the woman wielding the pestle is Andromache, the wife of Hektor, [23] who, ever since Homer’s Iliad had served as the model of the loyal, loving, and devoted wife and mother. She is also the same Andromache was would witness the brutal murder of her son Astyanax while facing a life of servitude for herself, as her own husband had foreseen ( Iliad 6. 454–459) before his death at the hands of Achilles. The nobility of Andromache was remembered in later times, most notably in Euripides’ play named for her, in which she is indeed a foreign captive, yet her dignity far outshines the petulance and pettiness of the Greek Hermione (daughter of Helen) against whom she is pitted in the drama.[24] This is Euripides’ way of exploding the myth of the enslaved Trojan barbarian versus the ‘noble’ Greek and of showing that personal integrity wins out in the end.

2.11 
At the bottom of the cup (six o’clock), we find depicted for the first time in Greek art an episode that will have great resonance later in the Classical period and beyond: Menelaos threatening to kill his wayward wife Helen, but dropping his sword at the last moment, overcome by her beauty (Figure 6).[25] There was a romanticized version, popular in later times, that Menelaos lost his nerve at the sight of Helen’s beautiful bared breast, [26] but Onesimos has a very different perspective. Neither Menelaos nor Helen has any real agency, rather they are playthings in the hands of the goddess Aphrodite. The goddess herself may have appeared behind Helen, tugging at her garment, which would account for the awkward pose as she reaches out her hands in supplication.[27] Just to make sure, Eros, as Aphrodite’s deputy, hovers between Helen and Menelaos. He may even have been pouring a love-potion to bewitch the enraged husband, as we see on a later vase.[28] The vases of the Classical period also make clear that this encounter took place at a sanctuary as well, namely, that of Athena, to which Helen had fled for protection.[29] But unlike Kassandra and Priam, she does find the protection she seeks, and Menelaos—whether of his own accord or not —does in the end respect the sanctity of the goddess’s shrine. In return, like Odysseus (and unlike the impious Neoptolemos and Ajax son of Oileus) he will be rewarded with a successful homecoming, to Sparta. The domestic bliss that he and Helen enjoy in Odyssey Book 3 implies that his momentary rage has long since been forgotten. The dropped sword is a vivid reminder that, for all the carnage going on elsewhere on Onesimos’ cup, the gods reserve for themsleves the right to intervene when and where they wish. This is part of Greek identity as well, the recognition that, in the end, everything is in the hands of the Olympian gods.

2.12   
A reading of Onesimos’ cup within the framework of Greek identity as outlined in Herodotos 8.144 implies that the Trojans are not seen as foreigners or barbarians, but rather as sharing all the criteria of identity with the Greeks.[30] This is fully in keeping with the world of the Iliad , in which Trojans and Greeks speak the same language, worship the same gods with the same rituals and practises (e.g. the garments that the Trojan women offer to Athena in Iliad 6, or the tripod dedicated in the goddess’s sanctuary on Onesimos’ cup), and observe the same customs, such as xenia .[31] It was only in the wake of the Persian Wars that the identification of the Trojans as foreigners, with fundamentally different values, took hold in the Greek imagination.[32] As an early instance of this, one might think of Klytemnestra’s “carpet speech” in the Agamemnon of Aischylos (935–936), invoking an image of Priam as an oriental despot in the mold of Darius or Xerxes.

2.13 
The only criterion of identity that does not seems at first to play a role on the Onesimos cup is that of language, though here too the vase has a surprise in store. One might observe that the painted inscriptions naming most of the figures and even an object (the altar of Zeus Herkeios) indicate that a basic level of literacy must have been shared by most Greek speakers even in this early period. But what of the non-Greek speakers into whose hands exported Attic pottery often came? Here is the cup’s surprise, for the Etruscan owner scratched on the under side of the foot a dedication in his own language before offering it at a shrine of Herkle (the Etruscan Herakles) at ancient Caere (cf. Figure 2).[33]

2.14 
Since the cup by Onesimos, on the standard chronology of red-figure, pre-dates Darius’s invasion of Greece in 490 by several years, it cannot have been inspired by that campaign. And in any case, that invasion ended abruptly at Marathon and did not occasion any widespread destruction, such as the sack of Athens in 480, that would have evoked the memory of the Sack of Troy.[34] But the events of 490 were the culmination of a process that had begun almost a decade earlier, with the outbreak of the Ionian Revolt against Persian rule in Asia Minor in 499.[35] In the chronicle of these years that we have preserved in Books 5 and 6 of Herodotos, two decisive events stand out: the Greeks’ attack on Sardis, the capital of the Persian satrapy that encompassed this region, in 499/8, and the Persians’ retaliation in the destruction of Miletos, most prosperous of the Greek cities of Ionia, in 494. The former attack was notable for the burning of the Temple of Kybele at Sardis (Herodotos 5.102), a flagrant example of just the kind of sacrilege the Greeks would later experience at the hands of the Persians, only here perpetrated by Greeks.[36]

2.15 
When Miletos was sacked a few years later, it must have seemed to some that the Greeks had brought this punishment on themselves by offending the goddess Kybele at Sardis. This may also help explain the reaction in Athens two years later, when the playwright Phrynichos staged a dramatization of The Sack of Miletos and was fined 1,000 drachmas for his trouble (Herodotos 6.21). The usual interpretation of this episode is that the play had aroused powerful feelings of guilt in the Athenian audience that they had not done more to help their Ionian kinsmen (though Athens did, in fact, send twenty ships to support the Ionian Revolt).[37] Might the extreme response to the play also be connected to its portrayal of the fate of Miletos as a warning of the consequences of offending the gods?[38] This is, of course, precisely the message of the Ilioupersis vases, such as the cup by Onesimos, which suddenly experience a spike in popularity and emotional force during the decade of the Ionian Revolt. Thus, even though these vases pre-date the Persian invasions of Greece and the burning of Athens, there was a powerful association between the destruction of Troy and the havoc wrought on Sardis and Miletos that will have conditioned the Athenian painters and their clients to think in terms of such analogies even as they awaited the inevitable arrival of the armies of Darius.

Kroisos of Lydia and the Greeks


3.1 
Another masterpiece of Athenian vase-painting that has sometimes been associated with the Ionian Revolt is the great amphora in the Louvre showing Kroisos on the pyre (Figure 7).[39] Although the Lydian king had died approximately fifty years earlier, in 547/6, it was his defeat at the hands of Cyrus of Persia and the capture of his capital at Sardis that set in motion the events that would culminate in the Ionian Revolt.[40] The Lydian Empire had already swallowed up all the Greek cities along the coast of Asia Minor (though not the islands), so that Cyrus’s conquest of Lydia meant that his empire now stretched from its Iranian homeland all the way to the Aegean.

3.2 
The figure of Kroisos, however, raises interesting questions about Greek identity in the Archaic period, for it is not easy to know where to place him along the spectrum from the Greek to Barbarian. On the one hand, Kroisos demonstrated his respect for the gods of the Greeks by making lavish dedications at Delphi and in other panhellenic sanctuaries (Herodotos 1.92), and he enjoyed relations of xenia with Greek nobles, such as the Athenian Alkmeonidai (Herodotos 6.125). Herodotos (1.7) sums up the paradox: Kroisos was the first of the “ barbaroi ” who both subjected some of the Greeks (in Asia Minor) and befriended others (notably the Spartans). For the historian writing ca. 430, Kroisos’s downfall may be attributed to excessive pride in his wealth and his reckless misinterpretation of oracles (1.55; 1.71). But for the Greeks of the 490’s Kroisos, as a victim of Persian aggression, would rather have aroused feelings of kinship and compassion, as is evident on Myson’s amphora.[41] The fabled wealth of Kroisos, so vividly depicted by Herodotos in his encounters with two different Athenians, Solon and Alkmaion (1.30–33; 6.125), clearly placed him in the category of a foreign despot.[42] At the same time, Herodotos portrays Kroisos as being rather ignorant about the Greeks of the mainland, in a famous scene in which he inquires about the two leading peoples, the Spartans and the Athenians, giving the historian a chance to insert a sketchy account of both poleis (1.56).

3.3 
By the time Myson painted his great amphora, a half-century after Kroisos’ death, the last king of Lydia had become a quasi-legendary figure in the Greek imagination, which partly explains why this vase is a rare exception to the general avoidance of showing historical figures and events in Greek art of this period.[43] But if Kroisos is here more as a legend and a symbol than a historical character, then what does he represent?

3.4 
Chronologically, the amphora falls between the subject’s lifetime and the period in the mid-fifth century when a revisionist version of his death is first attested in the poet Bacchylides and the historian Herodotos.[44] In this version, Kroisos does not die on the pyre, but is spared, either by the intervention of the gods or the clemency of Cyrus. Did Myson already have this version in mind? It was been rightly pointed out that the scene makes no explicit reference to Kroisos being spared: there are no rain clouds on the horizon to put out the fire, and the slave has already set the flaming torches to the wooden pyre.[45] Kroisos is, to be sure, depicted with tremendous dignity, but is it the heroic dignity of the ruler who goes to his death with noble calm, or are we meant to infer that his dignity, his faith in the gods, and his generous gifts to their sanctuaries will not go unrewarded?

3.5 
I believe there is a hint in the vessel he holds out, the phiale with which he pours a last libation. The phiale , a shallow bowl without handles or foot, is a shape that originated in the Near East and was imitated in Greece from early in the Archaic period.[46]

3.6 
On Attic black- and early red-figure vases of the sixth century, it is most often shown in the hands of heroes, such as Herakles (Figure 8), [47] and of the Olympian gods, both as a drinking vessel and in its proper function, the pouring of libations.[48] A well-known cup made just a few years before Myson’s amphora, for example, the masterpiece of the Sosias Painter (Figure 9), depicts a gathering of the gods on Mt. Olympos, each of them holding a large phiale to be filled with ambrosia by Hebe, daughter of Hera.[49]

3.7 
The phiale in Kroisos’ hand thus, I suggest, carries a four-fold message. It alludes to the eastern origins of the vessel that had now been fully assimilated by the Greeks in an act of cultural appropriation. The intricate design of Kroisosphiale suggests that it is a metal one, probably gold, hence a reference to his legendary wealth. At the same time, the gesture of libation as he tips the phiale , no doubt accompanied by a prayer (cf. Herodotos 1.87 for Kroisos’ prayer to Apollo), marks him as a pious individual who—despite his great wealth and power—could humble himself before the gods. And finally, the phiale hints at Kroisos’ heroization, not only spared the fiery death threatened here, but, as in the legend as it was elaborated by Bacchylides, granted a kind of superhuman status in the land of the Hyperboreans.[50]

The Phiale Between East and West


4.1 
It is against this background of the multivalent significance of the phiale as an intermediary between East and West, between mortals and gods, that I would like to conclude with a brief look at a small and extraordinary group of Attic vases. From the years ca. 500–480 we have preserved five phialai made in clay, but on a very large scale (ranging from 33 to 42 cm. in diameter), suggesting that they were made as display pieces or as dedications. Remarkably, all have come to light in recent decades and have added a new dimension to the contemporary phenomenon of the “parade cups,” of which the one by Onesimos discussed earlier is one of the best examples.[51] One of these five phiale , signed by the painter Douris, has, like the Onesimos cup, been returned from the Getty Museum to Italy, where it is now on view in the Villa Giulia (Figure 10), near the cup by Onesimos.[52]

4.2 
Two others, without figural decoration but employing the unusual technique known as coral red, are still in the Getty.[53] The fourth was found in an Etruscan sanctuary at Pyrgi (Figs. 11–12), where it had been placed as a dedication, just as Onesimos’s cup was dedicated at Cerveteri.[54] In addition, the phiale , after an initial attribution to the Brygos Painter, has now been convincingly attributed by Dyfri Williams to none other than Onesimos himself.[55]

4.3 
We have seen how Onesimos filled his huge parade cup with a meditation on Hellenic identity and codes of behavior placed in the setting of the Greek sack of Troy and against the backdrop of hostilities between the Persian Empire and the Greeks of Ionia in the 490’s. I believe he did something similar on the phiale from Pyrgi., which may be dated slightly later than the cup, ca. 490. Though the surface of this vessel has been sadly ruined by its exposure to the soil of Pyrgi, the excavator, Paola Baglione, was able to identify the subject of the exterior scene as Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitor in the twenty-second book of Homer’s Odyssey (Figure 12, nine o’clock). The decapitated head of the singer Leiodes (22.328–329), here seen rolling under a couch, clinches the interpretation. The interior scene shows a conventional symposium of men reclining on the ground in an outdoor setting (Figure 11), a popular motif on black-figure drinking-cups of the late sixth century, though starting to lose popularity in the early years of the fifth, when the phiale was made.[56]

4.4 
On his Ilioupersis cup, as we have seen, Onesimos had singled out xenia as a basic feature of Greek customs ( ta ethea homotropa , in Herodotos’s terms) by showing both positive and negative exempla of hospitality to foreigners and guests. On the phiale , the symposium, another key element of Greek society, is the subject of a similar reflection. The proper symposium is the one on the interior, while the suitors’ banquet in the palace of Penelope is a corrupted version, in which the notion of xenia is turned on its head as the suitors overstep the bounds and threaten to eat the family of Odysseus out of house and home. Odysseus’s brutal and merciless treatment of his victims is treated in Homer as fully justified, because they have violated one of the most fundamental codes of Greek behavior.

4.5 
If we may make one last imaginative leap, is it possible that the story of the unwanted suitors taking up residence in the home of Odysseus, and of their barbaric behavior once there, was seen an mythical analogy for the steady encroachment of the Persians into the homeland of the Greeks? This was surely the message of a wall-painting by Polygnotos, showing Odysseus after he has killed the suitors, which was commissioned for the Temple of Athena Areia at Plataia (Pausanias 9.4.1–2).[57] That temple was said to be a victory monument for the Battle of Marathon, and it stood, of course, at the site of the last great land victory over the Persians, in 479. The phiale from Pyrgi invites us to consider the possibility that, several decades before Polygnotos, the story of the suitors was already understood in this light.Since the subject is not attested in Greek art before the phiale , and will not appear again on an Attic vase for about half a century, [58] we cannot know just when it re-entered the imagination of visual artists. But it is tempting to think that, just as Onesimos drew on that part of the Epic Cycle that dealt with the fate of Troy to decorate his parade cup (Figure 1), so he turned slightly later to one of its sequels, the homecoming of Odysseus. With both he proved that the collective wisdom about what it means to be a Greek and to behave like a Greek that is contained in the Homeric epics continued to form the basis of the Greeks’ understanding of themsleves throughout the rest of Antiquity.

Abbreviations:


5.1 
ARV 2 : Beazley, J. D. 1963. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. 2nd ed. Oxford.

5.2 
LIMC : Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae . Zurich and Stuttgart: 1981–1997.


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Footnotes


Note 1
For the historical context see Burn 1984:488–496.


Note 2
Zacharias 2008; Saïd 2001:275; Thomas 2001:213–214; Pelling 2006:112–114.


Note 3
E. Hall 1989:1-2 and passim; J. Hall 2002:172–189; cf. Harrison 2000:21; 41–44; Hornblower 2008:38.


Note 4
Villa Giulia 121110 (formerly Getty 83. AE. 362); Moretti Sgubine 1999; first fully published by Williams 1991.


Note 5
Haspels 1930; Tsingarida 2009a.


Note 6
Williams 1991:47.


Note 7
For Briseis: Williams 1991:56–59; Shapiro 1994:11–16; LIMC III 158–160, s.v. Briseis [A. Kossatz-Deissmann] . For the other side of the exterior see Williams 1991:59–60.


Note 8
Williams 1991:50–56; Mangold 2000:123–125; Hedreen 2002: Giuliani 2003: 211–216; Muth 2007:580–592. Vivenzio Hydria: Naples 2422; ARV2 189, 74; Boardman 1976:10, Fig. 3. Cup by the Brygos Painter: Louvre G 152; ARV2 369, 1.


Note 9
Anderson 1995; Anderson 1997:234–245.


Note 10
On the iconography of this episode see Connelly 1993; Cohen 1993.


Note 11
Cf. Euripides, Trojan Women 17 for Priam’s death at the altar of Zeus Herkeios, and Anderson 1997:195, who points out the importance of altars of Zeus Herkeios in Athenian homes. A second, now lost Ilioupersis cup by Onesimos labels the altar as that of Zeus: Sparkes 1985:25, Fig. 2.


Note 12
On the Oath of Plataea see Meiggs 1972:504–507.


Note 13
Hurwit 1999:157–159.


Note 14
Persians 811. Some commentators have suspected that Agamemnon 527 is an interpolation based on the similar wording at Persians 811, e.g. Fraenkel 1950:175; 266, but see Denniston and Page 1950:120–121 for a defense of the line’s authenticity. Cf. Rosenbloom 1993:93 on the many parallels between the Agamemnon of Aischylos’s play and prominent Persian including Xerxes and Mardonios.


Note 15
For the different versions of the death of Neoptolemos see LIMC VI 774–775, s.v. Neoptolemos [O. Touchefeu-Meynier] . Pindar, Paian 6. 100–120, describes his death as Apollo’s punishment for the murder of Priam.


Note 16
Redfield 2003:135–148 (145 on the death of Ajax). Polygnotos’ famous painting of the Sack of Troy in the Stoa Poikile at Athens, of ca. 460, featured a scene of the Greek heroes deliberating Ajax’s fate (Pausanias 1.15.2). In Polygnotos’ other version of the story, at Delphi, Ajax was shown “before the altar taking the oath concerning his crime against Kassandra” (Pausanias 10.26.3)—presumably protesting his innocence. See also Ducrey 1987:206; 210.


Note 17
For the sources see Cingano 2007.


Note 18
LIMC I 426–427, s.v. Aithra I [U. Kron].


Note 19
I discuss this process in Shapiro, forthcoming.


Note 20
Williams 1991:55–56.


Note 21
Davies 1977.


Note 22
Vatican 35525; Beazley 1958; Kaltsas and Shapiro 2008:196–197 [M. Sannibale] .


Note 23
Williams 1991:52. The Brygos Painter labels her as Andromache, while the Kleophrades Painter does not.


Note 24
Conacher 1967:166–180; Allan 2000:93–95. On the gradual shift during the fifth century away from Athenian stereotypes of the Eastern barbarian and toward the stigmatizing of the Spartans with the same defects, see Millender 1996.


Note 25
LIMC IV 522–524, s.v. Helene [L. Kahil]; Hedreen 1996.


Note 26
It is not clear whether this detail was already part of the epic tradition or was invented later:see LIMC IV 499–500, s.v. Helene [L. Kahil].


Note 27
Williams 1991:56.


Note 28
E.g. the pyxis in Brauron; ARV2 631, 42; LIMC IV 544, s.v. Helene no. 279.


Note 29
E.g. the oinochoe Vatican 16535; ARV 2 1173; LIMC IV 543, s.v. Helene, no. 272bis. Other sources report that Helen fled to the sanctuary of Apollo:Williams 1991:56.


Note 30
There are even Greeks and Trojans who share common descent (i.e. blood):Konstan 2001:31.


Note 31
Konstan 2001:31–33.


Note 32
Erskine 2001:61–76.


Note 33
Martelli 1991. On the export of Attic vases to Etruria see Reusser 2002.


Note 34
One exception is Eretria, where the Persians did sack the city and burn the Temple of Apollo on their way to Attika: Herodotos 6.101.


Note 35
For a full account of the Ionian Revolt see Tozzi 1978; Balcer 1984:227–281.


Note 36
On Kybele and her worship in Lydia, Phrygia and elsewhere see Roller 1999:esp. 45–46; 128–132 on Sardis.


Note 37
Rosenbloom 1993.


Note 38
See also Georges 1994:71–72; 279n20, who stresses that if the play is dated to 493/2 (the archonship of Themistokles), it is quite possible that the Persian armies were already marshalled on Greek soil and that fear was running especially high in Athens.


Note 39
Louvre G 197; ARV 2 ; Simon and Hirmer 1976. For the association with the Ionian Revolt see Hölscher 1973:233n63; Boardman 1982:15–16.


Note 40
Burn 1984:38–47; Balcer 1984:95–122.


Note 41
On the question of whether there was any sense of collective Greek identity among the residents of Asia Minor under Persian rule see Hegyi 1966:285–286 (arguing there was not), and, on the related question of the origins of panhellenism, see Mitchell 2007:xxi (suggesting that panhellenism does pre-date the Persian Wars and finding evidence going back to the mid-sixth century).


Note 42
It is, therefore, difficult to believe, with J. Hall 2007:261, that when Sappho refers to Sardis, Ionia, and her own island of Lesbos in the same poem (fr. 98), she sees no ethnic distinction between Lydians and Greeks. Cf. Hornblower 2008, who concludes, “the Greek/Barbarian distinction turns out to be extremely fluid” (40).


Note 43
Hölscher 1973:30–31.


Note 44
Bacchylides 3.23–62 (dated 468); Herodotos 1.86–88.


Note 45
Burkert 1985, who reviews the various traditions about the death of Kroisos, including Near Eastern sources.


Note 46
Luschey 1939:31–37; Miller 1997:136–139; Bothmer 1962; Tsingarida 2009b.


Note 50
See the commentary of Jebb 1905:261, on line 59, who notes that the Land of the Hyperboreans is for Bacckylides equalivalent to earlier notions of the Elysian Fields in Homer or the Isles of the Blest in Hesiod and Pindar, places to which a pious mortal may be transported at the end of his life.


Note 51
See Tsingarida 2009a:for the red-figure phialai and for the big phialai and the parade cups as part of a single phenomenon.


Note 52
Villa Giulia (no inv. no.); formerly Getty 81.AE.213; Nostoi 2007:110–111, no. 24; first published by Robertson 1991.


Note 56
See Topper 2009 for the motif.


Note 57
Touchefeu-Meynier 1968:263; 287, who notes that in both cases Athena acts as protectress, of Odysseus and of the Athenians who fought the Persians.


Note 58
Shapiro 1994–60–63; Halm-Tisserant 1995.






Figure 1. Villa Giulia 121110. Cup attributed to Onesimos. Interior: Sack of Troy. 500-490 BCE. Photo author.


Figure 2. Villa Giulia 121110. Exterior of the cup in Figure 1: Return of Briseis to Agamemnon. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.


Figure 3. Villa Giulia 121110. Detail of the interior of the cup in Figure 1: Death of Priam and Astyanax. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.


Figure 4. Villa Giulia 121o110. Detail of the interior of the cup in Figure 1: Rape of Kassandra. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.


Figure 5. Vatican 35525. Corinthian column-krater: Request for the Return of Helen. Ca. 560 BCE. After Kaltsas and Shapiro 2008


Figure 6. Villa Giulia 121110. Detail of the Interior of the cup in Figure 1: Helen and Menelaos. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.


Figure 7. Louvre G 197. Red-figure amphora attributed to Myson. Kroisos on the Pyre.


Figure 8. Basel, Cahn Collection. Black-figure fragment, ca. 560 BCE. Herakles banqueting, attended by Athena. After Boardman 1985.


Figure 9. Berlin 2278. Red-figure cup attributed to the Sosias Painter. Gods on Olympos. After Euphronios der Maler 1991.


Figure 10. Red-figure phiale signed by Douris. Rome, Villa Giulia. Ca. 480 BCE. Photo author.


Figure 11. Villa Giulia Red-figure phiale attributed to Onesimos. Interior: symposium. Ca. 490 BCE. Photo author.


Figure 12. Villa Giulia Reconstruction drawing of the exterior of the phiale in Figure 10. Photo author.