Hello I'm Vicky Donnellan
I'm a curator in the Department of Greece and Rome
and welcome to my corner!
Today I'm going to talk about this storage vessel or storage jar or amphora
which was made in Athens or around Athens between 530 and 520 BC
An amphora or storage jar like this would have been used to store
either wet or dry goods.
Some of these things were found in tombs
so they rather than being used in day to day life
they might have been used instead for a kind of funerary use
to honor the dead person in the tomb.
This particular example was found not in Greece where it was made
but in Italy in Chiusi which was a major Etruscan settlement
and very many tombs have been found in that area with Greek pottery in them
so it is quite likely that this example may have come from from that funerary context.
It's an amphora in the black figure technique
and it shows the two Trojan War heroes
Achilles on the right
and Ajax on the left.
It's created by moulding the vase
shaping the vase
and then painting the figures onto the vase with a clay slip
which is basically a diluted version of the same clay
and the figures are painted and then the details
all these amazing fine lines that you can see
are scratched into that painted clay slip
using a fine metal stylus.
What I love about it is the the use of detail
this use of the narrow metal stylus really lends itself
to picking out these intricate details
the patterning that you get on the figures
and things like these beautiful sort of snail like curls in the hair.
And when the pot is fired in a kiln
with the clever kind of control of the way oxygen goes into the kiln
the painted surfaces turn to this beautiful glossy black
while the rest of the pot turns red.
The wonderful thing about Greek painted pottery
is that it carries these beautifully painted scenes.
They can be scenes which we think are of everyday life
generic scenes of the things that people in ancient Greece would have done
but they also very often carry scenes which we know are stories from myth.
And this example has the two Trojan War heroes:
So Ajax here is labeled with his name
so we know without a doubt that this is Ajax
'Aias' is inscribed on the pot
and the other figure is inscribed...
'Where is his inscription? Ahh. Over here.'
'Axilius'
So that's Achilles the other Trojan War hero.
Interestingly though this is a scene which isn't described
in the literary texts about the myth of the Trojan War
it's a scene which is only known from pottery.
And it's not only known from this pot
it's known from around 150 examples of Greek painted pottery
the most famous perhaps is one in the Vatican Museums
which was painted by the Greek vase painter Exekias.
This particular example is painted by someone that we now
as scholars of Greek pottery
call the Lysippides painter
and that's a name that's actually made up in modern scholarship
from the inscription on this actual pot which says
'Lysippides kalos' painted down the middle here.
His works are identified by the style by similar style
and the name has been given to him and by John Beasley
who was a very famous scholar of Greek vase painting.
This inscription 'Lysippides kalos' means 'Lysippides is beautiful'.
Very regularly on Greek pottery you get these inscriptions with somebody's name and 'beautiful'
and that's part of that context in ancient Athens
of admiration of the the male human body
and a culture where relationships between men were were a common part of society.
So the pot shows the two heroes Ajax and Achilles sitting
each of them on a sort of box
with another box between them
and they're playing a game.
They're playing a board game.
You can see the counters lined up on the top of the box-like table.
And Ajax is reaching down here
looks like he's about to move one of his counters
Achilles is gesticulating towards him
The context for this scene is the Trojan War.
So the story is that the Trojan Prince Paris has visited one of the Greek kings; Menelaus
and he's seduced or abducted Menelaus' wife Helen
and taken her away to Troy.
So the Greek King Menelaus
together with his more powerful brother Agamemnon
has gathered a great fleet of Greek warriors to sail over to Troy
which is on the west coast of what's now Turkey
and get her back.
So the Greek heroes gather
Ajax and Achilles are two of those heroes
and they are the preeminent heroes
they're the ones that are thought to be the greatest fighters.
They set up camp
They start sieging the city
but Troy is a formidable opponent.
It's a well-defended city
and it holds out against the siege for ten years.
Surviving texts about the Trojan War
tell us a lot less about the first nine years of that ten-year siege
than they do about the last year.
So the whole story of the ten years is told in what's known as
the 'Epic Cycle'
which is a whole series of epic poems which were composed by storytellers
oral storytellers originally.
Those included the famous Iliad and Odyssey by the poet Homer
but there were other poems and one of those was the Cypria
which told the early part of the story
and that doesn't survive
it's only known from brief summaries.
And so this this scene is not a story that's known from elsewhere
so what we're to imagine here is that this is two heroes
two fighters who have had to do a lot of waiting around
and they're passing the hours by playing this board game.
This scene was perhaps so appealing to pot painters
because of the beautiful way it fits on the shape of an amphora.
So on this example the spears line up with this part of the handle
and the shields line up with this part of the handle
when you're looking straight on to the vase.
There's also interesting things that different artists do with the
the way they're the two figures relate to each other.
So in Exekias' version he shows Achilles with his helmet on
and Ajax with his helmet off
so that Achilles is naturally slightly taller and dominant in the image
and he actually also shows the results of the dice throw in that particular game
there's an inscription on that version of this pot of this type of pot
which says four on Achilles' side and three on Ajax's side
and as a clear sense that Achilles is winning.
On the other hand on this example by the Lysippides painter
the two characters seem to be much more evenly matched
they're both wearing their helmets
so they're similar in stature.
There's no obvious sense of which one is winning.
It's much more about sort of equality between them.
They look like friends
they look like comrades who are comrades in arms
enjoying themselves in a moment's pause in the battle.
Although there is still a sense in that world of competitive Greek heroes
that of course they are fully armed
you see Ajax is wearing his corslet here
you see the sort of spiral shape of the shoulder of that metal corslet or breastplate
He's wearing his leg protectors his greaves to protect the front of his shins
and they both have their spears at the ready
their shields behind them
you imagine that if if one of them were not to play fair
that they would soon be be at each other's throats.
For the ancient users of a pot like this either in Greece or in Etruria
these myths and these stories would have been incredibly familiar
they'd have known the whole thing
they'd have known what happened in the Trojan War
and they'd have known how it ended for these characters
and unfortunately their endings were not a happy ending.
Both Ajax and Achilles died during the Trojan War.
Achilles of course famously is shot by Paris
and the version in which he's shot in his Achilles' heel is perhaps a bit later
but he certainly dies young.
He has this famous fate that's described in Homer's Iliad
that he's got the choice:
he can either have a long and uneventful life in obscurity
or he can have a glorious life
fight at Troy and die as a young man.
And Ajax also dies at Troy.
So a pot like this showing these two very kind of masculine perfect heroes
but who are doomed to die relatively young perhaps that had a particular resonance
for someone who might have chosen to put this into a family tomb
a tomb of a for a family member.
That kind of message that even the brightest and the best have to die.
So one of the reasons I chose this object to talk to you about today
is that it really is a great example of what objects can do to fill in areas of stories
where we don't have the literary sources
to enrich the picture that we get from those literary sources
and also to add sort of nuance and interest to some of those characters
that we know from the literature too.
And it's certainly true that the art of of Greek pottery and also in sculpture and other media
does tell its own versions of the story
they're not just pictures illustrating the texts
they're their own versions
they develop and enhance and change the story in their at their own imaginative ways.
Thank you for watching my Curator's Corner
if you'd like to watch other Curator's Corners
you should be able to see them there
and if you'd like to know more about Troy and the Trojan myth
The British Museum has an exhibition coming up soon and all the information
should be
there!