(jazz music)
Dr. Zucker: We're in the Etruscan Museum
in the Vatican Museums in Rome and we're looking
at my favorite pot in the entire world.
Dr. Harris: I can see why it's your favorite pot.
It seems to almost glow.
Dr. Zucker: The thing that makes it so fabulous
is we have these two heroes and we have
a very simple image, but it's giving us
so much information.
Dr. Harris: The heroes are Achilles on the left
and Ajax on the right, two of the great Greek heroes
featured in Homer's Iliad and Exekias, the potter,
who signed only two pots as the potter and the painter,
has identified these two figures by including their names
above them, but he's also telling us what's happening
between the two.
Achilles on the left is saying the word "four".
Dr. Zucker: You can see "tesara".
Dr. Harris: And on the right, we see Ajax,
saying "three".
Dr. Zucker: "Tri".
Dr. Harris: We know immediately that Achilles is winning
the game that they're playing.
Dr. Zucker: But this is, of course, a metaphor
for the way that this myth will unfold.
Dr. Harris: On either side we see their shields.
Achilles still has his helmet on, although Ajax
has taken his off.
A moment of relaxation between battles.
Dr. Zucker: They're on the battlefield of Troy,
but Exekias has given us even more information
than this, not simply the rolls of the dice,
but in a larger sense, their fate.
Look at the way, for example, that both figures
are hunched over and clearly focused
on the game at hand.
Remember, these two men are really close friends,
so there's an intimacy here, brotherhood.
Nevertheless, Achilles, who has the higher roll,
is holding his spears loosely.
You can see the way the points are actually separating.
At the bottom, you can see from the lines,
they're not as parallel, but look at the figure on the right,
Ajax, whose spears are held in a more parallel way,
so that we know that he's actually clenching
with his fist, he's tense.
Dr. Harris: I even sense a little bit of that tension
in his brow.
Dr. Zucker: That's right.
If you look at the brow really closely, you can see
that Achilles has a single incised line to represent
his eyebrow, but Ajax has a double line
and it is a subtle clue that perhaps there's a little bit
of tension there.
One other detail that can be easily seen,
although it's really subtle, look at the feet
of both figures.
Achilles, again, is relaxed.
His heel is on the ground line, but Ajax, his heel
is picked up ever so slightly, so you can see
just a little bit of light underneath it, which means
his calf is engaged, those muscles are tense,
his body is tense.
Dr. Harris: He's also a little bit more hunched over.
His head is a little bit lower than that
of his friend Achilles.
That does seem to mean something wider
than just this board game.
Dr. Zucker: Anybody who was looking at this pot
in the ancient world would have known the story
of Ajax and Achilles that Homer tells, as you said,
in the Iliad.
Achilles is a great hero.
In fact, as a child, his mother dipped him
in the river Styx, which had the magical quality
of making him invincible.
It's just that she held him by his heel, so his heel
was not protected and ultimately, he would be killed
by an arrow that hits him there.
Dr. Harris: Hence the term that we use often
of someone's Achilles heel, that is their vulnerable spot.
Dr. Zucker: Nevertheless, Achilles will die a great hero.
Ajax will have a more complicated fate.
He will outlive Achilles, he will carry his great friend
off the battlefield, but ultimately, he'll be in a battle
for Achilles' armor.
Dr. Harris: Achilles had very special armor,
which had been made by the god Hephaestus,
the god of the forge.
Dr. Zucker: Two people would want that armor
and they would both give speeches to convince judges
as to who should get the armor, but Ajax,
although he was much closer to Achilles,
would lose the contest, have a bad moment
where he slayed a bunch of Greeks, and ultimately,
would kill himself on his own sword.
Humiliation at the end of his life.
Dr. Harris: It's really interesting to think about this
as an ancient Greek viewer who knows that whole story
and what will unfold for both of these heroes,
but the story is one thing and the way that Exekias,
the potter, has represented this moment
and these two figures with so much nobility,
with such fine detail in the shape of a vase,
which is so elegant, is something else.
Dr. Zucker: Exekias really was the great master
of attic black figure vase painting.
These are black figures, they are silhouettes.
If you look closely, the decorative forms
is mostly incised with a needle.
Dr. Harris: And the black surface is like paint,
but it's not quite paint.
Dr. Zucker: This is slipware.
The Greeks didn't have the technology to get kilns,
ovens hot enough to vitrify, that is to create true glazes,
the way ceramics do now.
What they would do instead is they would take
very fine particles of clay, suspend them in water,
and use those as a kind of paint.
Depending the amount of oxygen that they allowed
into a kiln, they could turn it black or red.
They would paint the surface with this slip
and then they would burnish it.
That is, they would take a very smooth surface,
imagine the back of a spoon, and they would rub it
back and forth so you get this surface
that is really glossy and it almost looks like glaze.
Dr. Harris: When I look closely at the decorative borders
on the handles or the decorative border just above
the (unintelligible) of figures, I can see beautiful detail
and almost three dimensional form of the slip
is almost raised in areas, so it catches the light.
Dr. Zucker: The Greeks did often use a syringe
to paint the finest lines onto the surface,
so one could imagine, almost, decorating a cake.
You have a kind of syringe and you have the icing
and it leaves a kind of bead that is raised
against the surface and at a much finer level,
that's what we're seeing here.
Dr. Harris: So Exekias is a master.
His pots stand out in so many ways in their shape,
in the painting, in the detail, in the drama
that he was able to convey.
Dr. Zucker: Certainly the Etruscans thought
that was the case, because they must have spent
a good deal of money importing this pot from Greece,
across the Mediterranean, all the way to the
Italian peninsula where they lived.
So many of the great pots from ancient Greece
are actually buried in Etruscan tombs.
They were imported.
The Greeks did a tremendous business exporting
such pots, but Exekias was one of the great masters.
(jazz music)