Athenian Identity and the Eastern Other from Kroisos to Xerxes

Alan Shapiro (Johns Hopkins University)

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).

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

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

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

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

2008:38.

2

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

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

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

Williams 1991.

5 Haspels 1930; Tsingarida 2009a.

3

500–490.6

Figure 1. Villa Giulia 121110. Cup attributed to Onesimos. Interior: Sack of Troy. 500–490

BCE. Photo author.

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

6 Williams 1991:47.

4

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.

Figure 2. Villa Giulia 121110. Exterior of the cup in Figure 1: Return of Briseis to

Agamemnon. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.

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

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.

5

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.

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.

9 Anderson 1995; Anderson 1997:234–245.

6

Figure 3. Villa Giulia 121110. Detail of the interior of the cup in Figure 1: Death of Priam

and Astyanax. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.

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]

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

7

Herkeios, that is, Zeus as the god who protects suppliants.11

Figure 4. Villa Giulia 121o110. Detail of the interior of the cup in Figure 1: Rape of

Kassandra. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.

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

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.

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

8

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.

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

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

13 Hurwit 1999:157–159.

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.

9

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.

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.

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.

17 For the sources see Cingano 2007.

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

19 I discuss this process in Shapiro, forthcoming.

10

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

20 Williams 1991:55–56.

21 Davies 1977.

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

11

Figure 5. Vatican 35525. Corinthian column-krater: Request for the Return of Helen. Ca.

560 BCE. After Kaltsas and Shapiro 2008.

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.

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

23 Williams 1991:52. The Brygos Painter labels her as Andromache, while the Kleophrades

Painter does not.

12

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.

Figure 6. Villa Giulia 121110. Detail of the Interior of the cup in Figure 1: Helen and

Menelaos. After Moretti Sgubini 1999.

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 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.

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

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].

13

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.

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

27 Williams 1991:56.

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

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.

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

31 Konstan 2001:31–33.

14

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.

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

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

32 Erskine 2001:61–76.

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

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.

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

15

of sacrilege the Greeks would later experience at the hands of the Persians, only here

perpetrated by Greeks.36

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.

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

132 on Sardis.

37 Rosenbloom 1993.

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.

16

Kroisos of Lydia and the Greeks

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

17

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.

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

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.

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

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).

18

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).

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?

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

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).

43 Hölscher 1973:30–31.

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

45 Burkert 1985, who reviews the various traditions about the death of Kroisos, including Near

Eastern sources.

19

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?

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

Figure 8. Basel, Cahn Collection. Black-figure fragment, ca. 560 BCE. Herakles

banqueting, attended by Athena. After Boardman 1985.

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),

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

47 Early black-figure fragment; Basel, Cahn Collection; Boardman 1985.

48 Tsingarida 2009a; Simon 2004. Tsingarida 2009b demonstrates that when the phiale is shown

being used as a drinking vessel by symposiasts, even in the period before the Persian Wars, it

can be interpreted as an example of perserie.

20

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

Figure 9. Berlin 2278. Red-figure cup attributed to the Sosias Painter. Gods on Olympos.

After Euphronios der Maler 1991.

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 Kroisos’ phiale 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

49 Berlin 2278; ARV2 21; 1620; Simon and Hirmer 1976:pl. 118–119.

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.

21

The Phiale Between East and West

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

51 See Tsingarida 2009a:for the red-figure phialai and for the big phialai and the parade cups as

part of a single phenomenon.

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

by Robertson 1991.

22

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

author.

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

53 Cardon 1978–79; Cohen 2006:cat. nos. 11–12. The fragments of a fifth phiale, also in the Getty,

have not been published, but are briefly described by Robertson 1991:93.

54 Baglione 1988.

55 Williams 1993:23. For Onesimos’ particular interest in the Ilioupersis and related subjects

(e.g. Achilles murdering Troilos at an altar) see Sparkes 1985; Williams 1976.

23

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

490 BCE. Photo author.

24

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

Photo author.

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

25

(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

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.

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

56 See Topper 2009 for the motif.

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.

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

26

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:

ARV2 Beazley, J. D. 1963. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. 2nd ed. Oxford.

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

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