Music and Socio-Cultural Identity in Attic Vase Painting: Prolegomena to Future Research (Pt 1)

Music in Art XXXVIII/1–2 (2013)

MUSIC AND SOCIO-CULTURAL IDENTITY IN ATTIC VASE PAINTING:PROLEGOMENA TO FUTURE RESEARCH (PT 1)

THEODOR E. ULIERIU-ROSTÁS

École des hautes études en sciences sociales, ParisUniversitatea din Bucureşti

Since classical studies started absorbing and adapting the concept of alterity in the 1980s, Greek inter-action with foreign cultures and the use of ethnicity as a means of self-definition and socio-cultural dif-ferentiation have been investigated within an increasingly larger scope of domains and discursive contexts.1

Despite the fact that some of these contexts were inherently related to the field of mousikē, no concertedattempt has yet been made to examine the construction of cultural identities through music in the Greco-Roman tradition.2 Furthermore, iconography represents the less explored corpus of evidence pertaining tosuch musical identities, perhaps because of the methodological problems raised by its mediated reading.

In this paper, I will review several of these methodological issues as a starting point for a series of futureinquiries in the field of Greek musical iconography. The first section will address ethnicity and musicalidentity as social constructs, outlining their means of expression in Classical Athens. A second chapter willattempt to review the social relevance of Attic painted pottery in relation to its intended users, resorting toa brief case study of Anakreontic imagery. The third and final section of this paper will outline the analysisof musical instruments as contextually variable signifiers in Attic vase painting, with special attention de-voted to the visual treatment of the aulos in the red-figure tradition.

ETHNIC IDENTITY, MUSIC AND DISCURSIVE MEDIA. Aeolic harmonia, Dorian choreia, Thracian musicians,Phrygian pipes: ethnic descriptors and references are a common presence in the cultural radius of Greekmousikē. Naming structural features or instruments, defining traditional types of performance, recallingorigins and musical genealogies, Greek tribal endonyms and exonyms of neighbouring non-Greek popula-tions articulate musical discourse from Archaic melic poetry down to late antique handbooks of musicaltheory.3 However, such ethnic descriptors are far from being a priori socio-cultural categories or static resultsof historical contingency. On the contrary, the defining elements of such ethnic descriptors are open to adap-tation, amalgamation, schematisation, while their relative visibility and social relevance are equally subjectto change. Most importantly, the adaptation of foreign elements of material culture and behaviour may serveas a means of social differentiation—as illustrated in the Greek case, for instance, by the emulation of Near-Eastern élite culture in the social behaviour of archaic aristocracy.4 Seen from this point of view, the adapta-tion, rediscovery or even invention of ethnic identities are to be evaluated not as the result of a unilateral pro-cess of cultural diffusion, but as a dynamic response to the tensions within a given society, shaping whatLesley Kurke has called “the cultures within Ancient Greek culture”.5 It only comes as a natural consequencethat such ethnically coloured discourses, music included, can serve as a pathway to the very articulation ofGreek societies, before telling us something about the foreign cultures they purportedly represent.

Perhaps no other example illustrates better the applicability of these general observations to the field ofGreek mousikē than the concurrent Athenian discourses on the aulos in the late fifth and fourth centuries BC.In spite of its well-documented omnipresence in public and private contexts, the aulos is often described as

9© 2013 Research Center for Music Iconography CUNY

Theodor E. Ulieriu-Rostás, Music and Socio-Cultural Identity in Attic Vase Painting. I

a foreigner in the Athenian musical landscape, usually associated with the barbarian Asia Minor. These east-ern references regarding the aulos transcend the boundaries of literary genres, to the point of becoming a locuscommunis asserted through different discursive strategies in tragedy and melic poetry, as well as in mytho-graphical, historical and philosophical prose. In the surviving classical melic corpus, for instance, the aulosmight be linked to Phrygia in general terms, connected with such Eastern-flavoured divinities as the GreatMother of Gods or Dionysos, but also with the equivocal silenic figure of Marsyas.6 In the radical terms ofPlato’s Politeia, the association of the instrument with dangerous ēthē and unwanted musical innovation leadsto its banishment from the ideal city.7 While such Eastern connections may well preserve the memory of anactual import of the aulos from Asia Minor during the early Iron Age, the aesthetics of late fifth-century NewMusic and the polemic responses it engendered among certain Athenian conservative groups seem to be res-ponsible for the new emphasis put on the a priori foreignness of the aulos.8 Far from being only a passive re-membrance of a remote musical past, the resignified foreignness and easterness of the aulos could be usedin Athens so as to fit the exotic clothes of poetical/musical innovation or, on the contrary, the idea of musicalinappropriateness and social inferiority.9

The focus of the research project presented here regards the identification and interpretation of visualreferences to such musical identities, understood in the broadest sense of the term—that is, musical expres-sions of distinct social groups and subcultures, actual (or purported) non-Greek threads included (or re-invented) within the Greek musical tradition and features connected to the depiction of ethnic difference inAttic iconography.

One of the possible starting points for this inquiry would consist in defining the ways musical identitiesmight have been asserted, signified and recognised in the cultural milieu of Classical Athens. To be sure,such an inventory would already represent a historical construct open to questioning from a methodologicalstandpoint—but its heuristic value surpasses the disadvantages of relegating an extended discussion to aseparate paper. I will therefore try to cut the Gordian knot and put forward an empirical and provisionalsummary of identity markers that one may find transmitted or sieved out in our extant corpus of evidence.

A. Verbal enunciation materialized in written form, which may comprise material intended for or re-flecting performance (melic poetry, drama), as well as prose intended primarily for reading (historical,philosophical, technical prose). Poetic enunciation might also include intrinsic auto-referential orperformative elements, such as imitations of dialects and “barbarized” Greek.10

B. Musical substance: scales, melodic or rhythmic patterns, as well as vocal techniques and performingpractices acknowledged as pertaining to a certain ethnic or cultural group.11

C. Musical instruments, costume and other related accoutrements. These fall under the all-encom-passing concept of material culture, but musical instruments obviously reflect musical structures cove-red by the previous entry. One should perhaps distinguish between the innate musical properties ofan instrument (which may reflect structural particularities recorded at point B) and its materialappearance, which may assume exotic traits without differing structurally from mainstream Hellenicinstruments, as might be the case of the so-called Thracian cithara.12

D. Body language and dance embedded in poetic/musical performance.13

E. Visual representations of (or including) musical performance, which may comprise auditory andverbal elements (onomatopoeias, sung verse and perhaps musical notation), as Greek iconographymakes extensive use of inscriptions.14

This tentative list outlines the complex interplay of elements at work behind the extant corpus of textualand iconographic data available to the researcher.15 However, this inventory is better understood if oneapplies here a qualitative distinction between (i) identity markers and (ii) discursive media. While all theelements inventoried in my B, C and D entries may function as identity markers within a given discursivemedium, elements of material culture or musical structures do not generate discourse themselves, nor dothey carry social meaning in absence of such a discourse. Musical instruments, as we have seen in the caseof the aulos, may loose or gain cultural values in a changing social context, but the technical data of an instru-ment or its historical pedigree do not clarify its cultural associations within a given social context. Similarly,a musical scale may evade ethnic or contextual associations to become a purely functional element in thescope of musical practice, but such a phenomenon can only be judged against a textual background.16 On the

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other hand, verbal enunciation (A), as a discursive medium per se, not only provides new strategies ofmarking musical identities, but also mediates, integrates and generates new social meaning for the elementsdiscussed above. What about images (E), then? Should we envisage them as quasi-photographic reproduc-tions of reality and/or mere “illustrations” of narratives which may naturally depict musical identity markersor, on the contrary, as an autonomous discursive medium which plays with and perhaps reworks suchmusical identities for its own ends?

Three decades of innovative structural, semiotic and narratological studies have shown the extent towhich images on Attic pottery articulate an autonomous visual language governed by its particular syntaxand tradition.17 While the influence of drama or other types of visual material (sculpture, panel painting) onthe repertoire of vase painters remains open to dispute, it has become clear that images on Attic pottery arenot to be treated as passive reproductions or illustrations. Consequentially, a supposed identity marker isto be evaluated firstly within the visual syntax of the individual image and confronted with the larger contextof Attic iconographic tradition, just as a text analysis should not fail to address questions of pragmatics andliterary tradition. The third section of my paper will be largely devoted to the specificities of the internalanalysis of iconography.

Before trying to confront a textually fuelled historical reconstruction with the particular problems of aniconographic corpus, one should question the manners in which images differ from surviving texts in termsof visibility, authority and dynamic. Do they overlap their audience or even share their interests? What isthe degree of innovation permitted or, conversely, adaptation required from such images in relation to theirpublic? The answers to these questions, even if stated only as working hypothesis, should have direct conse-quences on our reading of musical iconography and, moreover, on our expectations about what musicaliconography can offer us. The following section will attempt to give a partial response to these dilemmas,by reviewing the influence of pottery production and distribution mechanics on Attic vase painting.

QUESTIONING THE SOCIO-CULTURAL RELEVANCE OF ATTIC PAINTED POTTERY. Attic painted pottery hasbeen traditionally studied against the Athenian political and socio-cultural background, taking its populationas the primary consumer of painted pottery, i.e. intended receiver of its iconography. However, the economi-cal and social dimension of its usage in the Greek world has come under closer scrutiny in the last decades,and the ensuing debates demand at least a few words in this preliminary paper. Moreover, the large scaleexports of Attic pottery in non-Greek areas as remote as Etruria or the Black Sea region raises the importantquestion of whether painted pottery was produced with a specific external market in mind—and, if so,whether the adaptations and alterations implied by such market targeting warrants the reading of the imagesin direct relation with the Athenian culture of mousikē.

For the greater part of the twentieth century, scholarly literature has envisaged the proper Greek sympo-sion as the primary context for the usage of Attic painted vases related to the consumption of wine. However,the massive exports of Attic pottery to non-Greek markets, such as Etruria, included pieces apparently boundto an Athenian context: vases with kalos inscriptions, Panathenaic prize amphorae and other images related,for instance, to musical competitions in Athens.18 In the early 1970s, T.B.L. Webster attempted to link uparistocratic patronage, specially commissioned vases and local consumption, on one hand, and the substan-tial exports outside the Greek-speaking world in a unified model of production and distribution of Attic pot-tery. At the centre of his approach stood the assumption that vases (or sets of vases) would be commissionedfor special Athenian circumstances, and then resold in a second-hand circuit which would profitably exportthem to non-Athenian markets.19 While the idea of a direct upper-class patronage over pottery workshopslacks positive evidence, a hypothetical second-hand vase market does provide a viable explanation for someexports in non-Greek areas, without qualifying for an all-encompassing model.20

Traditional approaches to Greek vase painting came under fierce fire in the 1980s and early 1990s, as anew approach advanced by Michael Vickers and David Gill argued that earthenware vases were only cheapcopies of aristocratic silver and gold plates, targeted at lower social strata and non-Greek buyers.21 Consequently,one is to understand that the relevance of an iconographic study would either be restricted to the lower echelonof the Athenian society, or just speculatively extended so as to fit the indirect evidence for the lost silver andgold ware of the Athenian élite; to my knowledge, such a new social reading of Attic vases was never pursued

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systematically. While the ensuing debate did emphasise the need for a more contextualised analysis of theiconographic material, the radical aspects of Vickers’s and Gill’s hypothesis seem to have been largely super-seded by recent research.22 A more balanced approach stemmed from similar premises has been formulatedby Herbert Hoffmann: Attic painted vases are to be understood as substitutes of real sympotic metal vases,facsimiles used exclusively as votive offerings, grave goods or, at the most, used in funerary banquets. Thus,in Hoffmann’s words, the vases were produced “not for a different social group but for a different contextentirely”.23 Such a reassessment would imply, in turn, a rethinking of the entire interpretative framework usedin the study of Attic iconography—and a significant part of Hoffmann’s work is indeed focused on readingreferences to ritual and competing forms of immortality on vases. As with the Vickers-Gill model, contextualisedarchaeological evidence of Attic pottery associated with dining spaces weakens Hoffmann’s point, while recentinterpretative trends tend to circumscribe the funeral offerings of Attic sympotic pottery within the boundariesof secondary use and reception, unless positive evidence suggests otherwise.24

Such generalising approaches left aside, one should still take into account the possibility that a more orless significant part of the Attic sympotic pottery output might have been produced with a specific externalmarket in mind. There is a fine line to be drawn here between (i) the simple selection of a certain subject mat-ter within the potter’s workshop (i.e. customer targeting, so to speak) or later in the process of distribution,

1. Late Anakreontic komast with barbitos. Attic red-figureneck amphora attributed to the Zannoni Painter (ca. 460–450 BC). London, British Museum, E308; ARV2 673.7, BA207891. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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which would be nonetheless treated indifferently by the Athenian painter and, on the other hand, (ii) theactual alteration of iconographic content in connection with the demands of an external market. Shortly put,the first scenario would demand cautious consideration of statistics, but would not change substantially theirreading as directly relevant for Athenian identities and perceptions. The second scenario, on the other hand,would necessarily raise additional questions regarding the nature and motivations of such alterations.

Recent research is showing an increasing interest in exploring the two ends of the commercial circuit ofAttic pottery—production in Athens and local reception—and the results support the idea of a process ofselection based on iconography as well as form.25 Only a few clear cases of conscious adaptation ab initio tothe local markets have been identified to date in the Attic output. Most of these regard vase forms, while onlytwo or three sixth-century series of vases show alteration of the iconographic content in response to Etruscanconventions. The most convincing case is provided by the Perizoma group, which resorts to such exotic solu-tions as concealing athletic nudity with loincloths, or admitting respectable women in symposia.26 It is perhapssignificant that these series of vases predate rise of Athens to the status of hegemonic power in the EasternMediterranean and the subsequent diffusion of Athenian cultural models. More than a century later, perhapsno other single vase illustrates the selection vs. alteration conundrum better than the famous Pronomos Vase.Held for a long time as the centerpiece of an Athenian celebration of a dramatic victory, a primary exampleof Webster’s specially commissioned vases, this oversized volute-krater found in a Peucetian tomb, waspersuasively shown to have been designed for export, perhaps specifically for funerary use. Nevertheless,its imagery is rooted in the tradition of choregic dedications and reworks it within the Athenian vase paintingtradition so as to suit “what a group of apparently successful and market-wise Athenian painters thoughtwould sell in Italy and points further west”, at a high-point of Athenian cultural influence.27 Many will agree,I think, that the Pronomos Vase’s staging of an imaginary theatrical Athens remains a fully relevant socialdocument for the study of late fifth-century Athenian perceptions, in a way that differs fundamentally fromthe sixth-century Etruscanised images of the Perizoma group.

The case of the Pronomos Vase pleads, above all, for a contextualised study of vase forms, imagery andarchaeological contexts, avoiding generalisations and unilateral models. To be sure, the examples reviewedabove stand out of the major Attic production, leaving us with an optimistic perspective for such researcheswhere detailed archaeological information and analogies are lacking: unless positive evidence suggestsotherwise, generic sympotic imagery can be securely read as relevant for their Athenian background, whilealso paying attention to the distribution patterns and the subtler counterpoint between Athenian references,market targeting, panhellenic and non-Greek reception. This basic premise, which continues to inform recentsemiotic approaches of Attic iconography, will serve as a background for the reading of musical identitiesproposed in this research project.28

Having reviewed the case of the basic pertinence of Attic vase painting for a study of Athenian percep-tions, it is now time to narrow our focus on the question of relating the dynamics of iconographic repertoireto social groups, while also bringing up the functioning of visual identity signifiers. Did Attic workshopstarget distinct customer groups within the Athenian society? Can we make any inferences with regard to thesocio-cultural identity of such intended audiences, based on individualised series of images? Rather thanelaborating on abstract distinctions, let us consider as a brief case study what is probably the most compellingexample of social self-differentiation through exotic garments documented to date in the Attic visual record:the so-called Anakreontic imagery. This series of images, spanning from around 530 forward to 470–460 BC,features men in sympotic contexts, sporting distinctively exotic attires (mitrai, sakkoi, unbelted chitōnes,earrings and parasols, usually associated with women in Attic iconography). Among musical instruments,the barbitos seems closely, but not exclusively associated with Anakreontic komasts [fig. 1].29 The name ofthe Ionian poet Anakreon, who came to Athens around 525 BC, at the invitation of the tyrant Hipparchos,appears on two vases of the series, hence the rather misleading name used with regard to the entire corpus.30

One view which has gained currency in recent literature identifies these attires as Eastern Greek adaptationsof Lydian garments, linking the Anakreontic images to an aristocratic-orientalising trend which has its closeanalogies in sympotic poetry.31 In turn, diverging interpretations address the concepts of Dionysiac otherness,gender ambiguity or transvestism.32 Significantly, the social reference of the Anakreontic scenes seems eitheraccepted or compatible with all these readings.33

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From a traditional Athenocentric standpoint, one would be tempted to associate the vases featuring Ana-kreontic kōmoi with the aristocratic sympotic groups they probably depict—perhaps not in the narrow senseof Webster’s special-commissions model, but nonetheless understanding the images as a direct and favour-able reflection of their intended audience.34 On the other hand, several images suggest that the same identitymarkers also engaged other social groups, carrying an altogether different perspective on orientalisinghabrosynē: one of the earliest pieces of the series depicts a grotesque kōmos with obvious anti-aristocraticovertones.35 At least some images of fully equipped komasts overtly invite comparison with feminine figures,highlighting their effeminacy in what could be understood as an exterior, arguably derisive view of suchsympotic behaviour—a tendency which becomes more conspicuous around the second quarter of the fifth cen-tury.36 All this suggests that, in the changing social context marked by Kleisthenic isonomy and the Persianwars, Anakreontic imagery suited a tongue-in-cheek disclosure of aristocratic privilege for the entertainmentof the generic Athenian symposiast, and not just a self-referential encoding of habrosynē. In any case, themajority of the painters represented in the Anakreontic dossier did not avoid generic sympotic scenes; thestandardised, non-Anakreontic images of well-represented painters such as Douris or the Brygos Painterclearly surpass the number of Anakreontic kōmoi. Looking beyond the borders of Athens at the distributionof these vases, as far as it has been documented, widens the perspectives of this reading. A considerable num-ber of vases come from Etruria, but others were found in varied Greek communities, among which Gela andSelinus in Sicily, Rhodos (Kameiros), Rheneia and Corinth, as well as Attica (Vari and the Athenian Agora).37

One can pertinently question, for instance, the reasons why inhabitants of rural Attica, Delos or Gela choseto bury their dead with vases bearing Anakreontic scenes: first of all, did they pay the same amount of atten-tion to the images, in addition to vase forms? Were they envisaging the Dionysiac affinities highlighted byLissarrague and Frontisi, or rather projecting on their genē the prestige of a luxurious élite whose imagescame from Athens, but nevertheless enjoyed panhellenic resonance? As long as we are facing generic red-figure vases, such a question could be relegated to the domain of reception, as it does not reveal any dis-cernible targeting on the painter’s side. Nevertheless, an isolated pair of white-ground lekythoi, one of themdepicting an (apparently caricatured) Anakreontic komast, the other one a nearly identical hetaira, shows thatthe funerary use of Anakreontic imagery was in fact known in the Kerameikos—but, for one reason oranother, it did not lead to a more substantial market adaptation.38

While a fully developed study of Anakreontic imagery, including its strong musical component, will bein order at a later stage of this research, the questions raised by this brief case study outline several guidelinesfor an extended socio-cultural reading of Attic iconography. Individualised series of images may prove crucialin the identification of social difference, even if the luxury of concurring textual and visual evidence, as illus-trated by the Anakreontic example, seems to be a rare one. For instance, the quest for visual reflections of thepolemical standpoints of the late fifth century BC—New Music included—has yet to be systematically pursued.39

Furthermore, the enormous output of the Attic workshops may well shed light on the views and needs ofsympotic communities which may have differed significantly from those expressed in surviving texts. However,the visual specificities should not to be simplistically equated with a single group of Athenian customers,in search for a tightly knitted model of social agency and consumption. The particularities of such visual dossiersare better understood, I believe, if related to a flexible horizon of concentric audiences, which would includeat least (i) the tastes and needs of (potentially concurrent) Athenian sympotic groups, (ii) the generic/dominantvalues of Athenian society, (iii) the interests and shared values of a generic Greek audience and (iv) non-Greekcustomers. Rather than just mirror the social values of their purported users, images on vases may export,engage, mediate, divulge and even caricaturize other identities for the use of different groups or communities.This concept of concentric audiences implies an analogous layering of readings, which depend on how con-nected or remote the eventual viewer happens to be from the Athenian iconographic tradition and its underlyingcultural values.40 While the potential polysemy and schematic readings of images in non-Athenian contextsare of secondary importance for a research focused on the Athenian society, one nevertheless has to pay atten-tion to the eventual statistic impact of the reception contexts when assessing the popularity of certain typesof images. For an intelligible (and perfectible) starting point, I tried to synthesize these working hypothesesin the following diagram.

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There is a ghostly, yet essential element in the vase production equation that I left aside up to this point:the painter. While the socio-cultural profile of the vase painter and his agency in the making of the vaseremain largely conjectural, style as it has been defined and studied within Beazley’s attributionist school,allows us to bridge statistics, semiotic reading and reconstructed audiences around a descriptive and quasi-objectivised category. Recent works rooted in the semiotic reading of Attic iconography have renewedcontacts with Beazley’s heritage, but the latter’s lists have been used more as a classification criterion thanas an interpretative tool properly speaking.41 The present paper aims to advance this combined approach toa slightly different direction. Despite a trend towards certain forms of naturalism becoming discernible atthe end of the sixth century BC, vase paintings have by and large remained a conceptually articulated visualconstruct, dependent on tradition and, moreover, open to self-referential play on tradition.42 It only comesas a natural consequence that the level of detail and/or accuracy invested in representing a certain object orvisual feature is dependent on its role in the economy of the entire scene, as well as on the painter’s techni-que. Stylistic analysis allows us to ascertain the relative singularity, originality or semiotic value of certainiconographic features within the output of a painter or workshop. In other words, one can use Beazley’spainters as a verification tool for semiotic interpretation, checking whether (i) the visual feature under scru-tiny is used in a recurrent and coherent manner within a painter’s production and (ii) if the proposed inter-pretation actually fits similar contexts. Such guidelines might appear rather self-explanatory, but Anakreonticimagery still awaits a systematic treatment of its disputed (ethnic or gender) signifiers within the context ofeach painter’s visual specificities. This approach will be tested in the third and final section of the presentpaper, to a limited corpus of representations of the aulos.

READING MUSICAL DIFFERENCE ON GREEK VASES: INSTRUMENTS. In a now classical contribution on theuse of visual arts in musicology, Emanuel Winternitz denounced the common error of taking “pictures atface value, without critical discrimination between real and imaginary objects; without sufficient regard forsuccessive styles, technical peculiarities, and mannerisms of pictorial representations” as well as ignoringthe requirements of pictorial composition.43 Winternitz’s remarks had more to do with Medieval and Renais-sance iconography, but they remain fully viable in the field of Greek iconography, which has been not onceapproached by musicologists with little awareness of style and visual context.

Table 1. Production and audience of Attic red-figure vase paintings. A preliminary model.

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This issue becomes particularly visible when analysing the relationship between context and the minimalvisual reference to music: the instrument. Unsurprisingly, organological studies of musical depictions havetended to pay little attention to these aspects; Daniel Paquette’s L’instrument de musique dans la céramique dela Grèce antique is an influential example of a decontextualised, technical approach which may at best capturethe variability of individual depictions, but remains of little value for a socio-cultural investigation.44 Thus,Sheramy Bundrick strikes a familiar chord when observing that,

too often, musicologists have treated vase-paintings as if they were photographs in evaluating the size,proportions, and form of instruments. It is essential to remember that the quality of these representa-tions varies, and an artist may or may not have been intimately familiar with a certain instrument.Even the most detailed and seemingly perfect rendering may not be realistic; there is always thepossibility that the artist opted for aesthetics rather than accuracy.45

The Attic vase corpus provides us with examples of both intricate and thoroughly sketchy depictions ofmusical instruments included in recurrent contexts. In the case of visually conspicuous specimens, such aslyres and kitharai, the task of confronting instrument subtypes and contexts has proved fairly unambiguousand assuredly productive. Perhaps the most instructive example is that of the so-called “Thracian kithara”,a peculiar form of box-lyre which appears in the fifth century in the hands of Thracian legendary musicians,such as Orpheus, Thamyras and Mousaios. There is little certainty with regard to the exact place of the instru-ment in the Athenian musical landscape or, for that matter, as to whether it was a functional instrument, atheatrical prop or just a visual fantasy of the painters.46 However, these mythical associations outline anethnic or, at the very least, an exotic identity which may in turn assist the interpretation of a minority of

2. Choir of satyrs playing Thracian kitharai, accompanied by an aulos player. Attic red-figure bell krater attributed to Polion (ca. 430–420 BC). New York, Metropolitan Mu-seum of Arts, 25.78.66; ARV2 1171.8, BA 215506.

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contexts unrelated to any other Thracian element. This would be, for instance, the case of the well-knownkrater of Polion depicting a chorus of old satyrs singing to Thracian kitharai, labelled as “singers at the Pana-thenaea”(ΟΙΔΟΙ ΠΑΝΑΘΗΝΑΙΑ) [fig. 2].47

When it comes to the aulos, however, the situation is infinitely more problematical. On one hand, we haveknowledge of a plethora of aulos types, some defined by structural features, others precisely by their contextof use, as well as a complete late Classical taxonomy in five classes.48 On the other hand, its two thin tubeshave only a meagre visual potential and cannot organise an entire composition, nor do they allow for anyparticularly appealing details, like those provided by the intricate design of the kithara. Hasty vase painters,both black-figure and red-figure, would often reduce them to two inexpressive lines, which can only beevaluated in terms of relative length, by comparison with the body of the aulos player.49 As it appears, thetask of positively identifying the attested aulos subtypes in images has failed to yield significant results, andrecent iconographic enquiries have operated only with the basic designation of the instrument.50

However, tying up this discussion with my earlier observations on style, there seems to be a middle roadbetween Paquette’s naïveté and Bundrick’s informed scepticism. At the very least, one can analyse the de-piction of musical instruments as an integral part of a vase painter’s style, very much like ornament patternsand anatomic details: something which may not significantly advance organological studies, but may pun-ctually assist the interpretation of atypical images.51 Secondly, even if the painter privileges aesthetics overorganological accuracy, this does not mean that aesthetic deformations and recompositions cannot refer tospecific performing contexts or musical identities within the vase painter’s visual language. Obviously, such

3. Aulos player, agonistic context. Attic red-figure neck amphora attri-buted to the Berlin Painter (ca. 490–480 BC). Paris, Musée du Louvre,CP 10841; ARV2 199.32, BA 201840. © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN/ Maurice et Pierre Chuzeville.

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an assumption needs to be systematically verified for individual painters, quantified and checked out againstcontexts. In the limits of this preliminary article, I will illustrate this approach with a brief case study of theauloi depicted by the Berlin Painter, confronted with some of his close contemporaries.

As noted by previous research, a significant proportion of the early fifth-century red-figure painters re-present the aulos as a plain tube fitted at the blowing end with one, two or even three bulb or olive-shapedsections, which should correspond to the holmos and hypholmion mentioned in textual sources.52 However,this variety is not matched up by archaeological findings. All the Archaic and Classical auloi discovered inarchaeological context up to this moment feature only one bulbous section, which (i) either served directlyas a mouthpiece, or (ii) was connected to a free-standing cup-shaped mouthpiece.53 In the light of these disco-veries, Stelios Psaroudakēs has even surmised that,

there never actually existed any auloi with two bulbs per pipe, as some vase paintings seemed to indi-cate. Undoubtedly, what looks in iconography like a “second bulb” near the mouth is simply thecombined curve of the stem of the reed and the cup.”54

Let us shift our focus from organological realia to the painters’ craftsmanship and visual conventions. Theworks of the Berlin Painter include some of the most intricate depictions of musical instruments in Attic vasepainting, his often-illustrated kitharai having informed organological studies, as well as reconstructions.55 Asurvey of the Berlin Painter’s ascertained vases shows that no less than three forms of auloi appear on hisascertained vases. An early fragmentary neck-amphora in the Louvre features a crowned, beardless aulosplayer wearing the phorbeia and an ankle-length chitōn, paired with a bearded listener on the other side ofthe vase [fig. 3].56 The instrument is visually defined by the combination of a long, plain tube (crossed by anarrow rim-like band at its lower end), and four increasingly shorter segments leading to the blowing-endof the instrument; three of them follow a moderately bulbous outline, while the fourth has a distinct flaretowards the joining with the phorbeia. A similarly structured aulos appears on a hydria fragment in Athens,played by a crowned boy, most probably in an agonistic setting.57 The instrument played by a professionalaulos player on a column-krater in Basel shows slight differences: the main tubes are symmetrically delimitedat both ends by narrow bands, the right pipe has only three shorter sections, while the left pipe has an addi-tional fourth one, but the overall proportions of the instrument match the previous two.58 We find signi-ficantly different and less uniform depictions of the aulos in the dionysiac imagery of the Berlin Painter. Theauloi played by satyrs may feature either three or two segments fitted to a main unornamented tube, whichappears, in some cases, distinctly shorter than the agonistic instruments reviewed above.59 There seems tobe no particular relation between more specific visual contexts and these two aulos forms, since both variantsappear in kōmos/processional scenes (though not on the same vase).60 Moreover, the length of the main tubeseems to have more to do with the available space on the vase than with any underlying typological realia,since the shortest ones appear in the more crowded compositions.61 I have charted the quantifiable data foreach vase in table 2.62

vase overallform bulbs narrow rim on

main tube context

Northampton, Castle Ashby: 2 T + 2 S 2 dionysiac (processional)

Berlin F2187 T + 2 S 2 dionysiac (probably processional)

Louvre CA2981 T + 3 S dionysiac (processional reference ?)

Louvre G201 T + 3 S 1 dionysiac (sympotic)

Louvre G 185 / CA944 T + 3 S 1 / 2 dionysiac (processional)

Basel KA422 T + 3/4 S 2 agonistic

Athens 2.934 T + 4 S 1possibly 1

(lower end lost)agonistic

Louvre CP10841 T + 4 S 2? 1 agonistic

Table 2. Aulos forms in works by the Berlin Painter.

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These observations call for several provisional conclusions regarding our case study. First, the Berlin Painterdepicts in a largely coherent and distinct manner the auloi associated with musical competitions and the solemngarments of professional aulētai. These instruments stand apart from the more varied auloi played by satyrs;at this point, the absence of other contexts in the Berlin Painter’s output does not allow for a fine-grained under-standing of such variations. Secondly, a closer look at the vases reveals the Berlin Painter’s technique andvisual priorities: the overall form of the aulos is first sketched, then the vertical lines delineating segmentsare added; finally, some of the smaller segments are given a rounded outline. This last sequence is the oneaccomplished with less care and greater variation, as also visible in the chart. Surprisingly, given the musicalfocus of the images, only the right pipe is given this detailed treatment on the Athens and Basel agonistic vases,

4. Aulos player, agonistic context. Attic red-figure neck amphora attributedto the Kleophrades Painter (ca. 480 BC). London, British Museum, E270; ARV2

183.15, BA 201668. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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while auloi in dionysiac scenes do not lack it. This, in turn, suggests that the differentia specifica which linksauloi and contexts in the visual language of the Berlin Painter does not actually rely on bulbs, as some modernscholars would wish, but on segmentation and intricacy. One cannot help but compare the Berlin Painter’sfocus on the composite nature of the aulos with Pindar’s contemporary description of the aulos as a jointureof thin bronze and reed (λεπτοØ […] χαλκοØ θ`μα καÂ δον•κων, Pyth. XII.25).63

But this should not obscure the fact that the Berlin Painter’s visual solutions were not commonplace inthe late Archaic vase painters’ milieu, nor do they represent the only way of expressing musical difference.For instance, a slightly earlier depiction of an auletic competition on a calyx-crater by Euphronios shows anaulos player mounting the bema, wearing the same type of long chiton seen on the Berlin Painter’s Louvreagonistic amphora.64 Euphronios’s aulos has two clearly shaped bulbs and a visible reed, while the main tubeis marked with two rows of parallel lines painted in thin, reddish slip, suggesting that these might be orna-ments, rather than distinct components of the instrument, as seen on the Berlin Painter’s vases. This seemsto be the only feature which distinguishes the instrument from Euphronios’s two-bulb auloi included in othercontexts. Finally, the Kleophrades Painter’s often reproduced amphora in the British Museum [fig. 4] playson the subtle contrast between the flowing lines of the aulos player’s plain chiton and the strict geometry ofhis ependytes—but his aulos follows the generic two-bulb form which appears with little variation throughouthis entire output.65

Should we see in the Berlin Painter’s varied and intricate auloi the signs of realism, or rather those of amannerist recomposition of objects, as conjectured above? Are the finely drawn auloi of the KleophradesPainter a simplified visual convention? The limited scope of the present case study cannot offer a simple wayout of this dilemma. Instead, it does confirm the supposition that musical instruments are an integral partof a vase painter’s manner and may function, within the boundaries of such individualised visual conven-tions, as contextually variable signifiers—thus establishing a solid semiotic premise for a study of musicalidentities in Attic iconography. Furthermore, these remarks call for a substantially revised approach to Atticvase painting as a source for organological studies, through the combined use of stylistic analysis, semioticsand statistics.

(to be continued)

NOTES

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Prof.Zoe Petre and Prof. Claude Calame, my thesis advisors, for theircontinual support of my work; to Zdravko Blažeković, for accept-ing an early version of this paper at the 11th Symposium of theICTM Study Group on the Iconography of the Performing Arts(Beijing, 29 October 2012); to Alexander Heinemann, for kindlysharing the proofs of his article (see note 28); to Daniel AlexandruChiriţoiu and Radu Răzvan Stanciu, for their substantial helpwith bibliography; to Anne Coulié and the Department of Greek,Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Musée du Louvre, for their helpwith the Berlin Painter’s fragmentary amphora (see note 56). Iacknowledge the essential aid provided by the Beazley Archivepottery database in the documentation of this project. This workis made possible by the financial support of the Sectoral Opera-tional Program for Human Resources Development 2007–2013,co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project num-ber POSDRU/107/1.5/S/ 80765.

1 A few essential contributions for the development ofresearch in this area: François Hartog, Le miroir d’Hérodote: Essaisur la representation de l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); TimothyLong, Barbarians in Greek Comedy (Carbondale; Edwaedsville:Southern Illinois University Press, 1986); Edith Hall, Inventing theBarbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1989); François Lissarrague, L’autre guerrier: Archers, pel-tastes, cavaliers dans l’imagerie attique (Paris: Editions la Décou-

verte; Roma: École Française de Rome, 1990); Carol Dougherty &Leslie Kurke, eds., Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Perfor-mance, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)and The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict,Collaboration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);Margaret Christina Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC:A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997); Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Benjamin Isaac,The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004); P.M. Fraser, Greek Ethnic Terminology(Oxford: British Academy; New York: Oxford University Press,2009).

2 Some pioneering discussions of musical identities in theClassical Athens are to be found in Richard P. Martin, “The Pipesare Brawling: Conceptualizing Musical Performance in Athens”,The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture, 153-180; Eric Csapo,“The Politics of the New Music”, Music and the Muses: The Cultureof Mousikē in the Classical Athenian City, ed. by Penelope Murray& Peter Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 207-248;Peter Wilson, “Athenian Strings”, Music and the Muses, 269-306.

3 Surprisingly few contributions have discussed in a largercultural perspective the uses of this ethnic terminology within theGreek musical tradition; the best summary is offered by Csapo,“The Politics of the New Music”, 232-235. For the perceived ēthē

20


of ethnic modes in the Classical period, see Warren D. Anderson,Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1966) and the shorter summary of Martin L.West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 177-184, as well as individual studies, such as Alessandro Pagliara,“Musica e politica nella speculazione platonica: Considerazioniintorno all’ethos del modo frigio (Resp. III 10, 399a–c)”, Synaulía:Cultura musicale in Grecia e contatti mediterranei, ed. by A.C. Cassio,D. Musti & L.E. Rossi (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale,2000), 157-216.

4 For Eastern-flavoured aristocratic habrosynē, see Kurke,“The Politics of habrosynē in Archaic Greece”, Classical Antiquity11 (1992), 91-120 and infra, §2.

5 Dougherty & Kurke, The Cultures within Ancient GreekCulture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration, esp. 9-13.

6 For such late fifth- and early fourth-century BC associa-tions, see for instance Ion, fr. 54 Leurini = TrGF 19 fr. 45, cf. fr. 49Leurini = TrGF 19 F 42; Melanippides, Marsyas, PMG 758 +Telestes, Argo, PMG 805 and Asklepios, PMG 806 = Ath. Deipn.XIV.616e-617b; Ar. Nub. 311-313; Eur. Bacch. 127-128 and Iph. Aul.576-577, as well as infra, note 10.

7 Plat. Resp. 399c-d, with the comments of EvanghelosMoutsopoulos, La musique dans l’oeuvre de Platon (Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1959), 82-88, Andrew Barker, Greek Mu-sical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol.1, 132-133 and Fabio Massimo Giuliano, Platone e la poesia: Teoriadella composizione e prassi della ricezione (Sankt Augustin: Akade-mia, 2005), 60-62. For the opposite discursive effect, see the digni-fying musical genealogy which links Dorian choreia and Egyptianmusic in Plato, Leg. 656d-657b, with the comments of Ian Ruther-ford, “Strictly Ballroom: Egyptian Mousikē and Plato’s Compara-tive Poetics”, Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. by Ana-stasia-Erasmia Peponi (Cambridge; New York: CambridgeUniversity Press), 67-82.

8 An alternate, perhaps complementary reading of the anti-aulos discourse of late fifth century Athens emphasizes the con-nection of the aulos with the rival city-state of Thebes, as for in-stance Plut. Alc. 2.5-7. For this reading, see Helmut Huchzer-meyer, Aulos und Kithara in der Griechischen Musik bis zum Ausgangder Klassischen Zeit (Emsdetten: H. & J. Lechte, 1931), esp. 46-48and 73-74, partially followed by Peter Wilson, “The Aulos inAthens”, Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. by Si-mon Goldhill & Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1999), 61-62. For an up-to-date overview of Thebanmusical traditions, see Francesca Berlinzani, La musica a Tebe diBeozia tra storia e mito (Milano: CUEM, 2004), as well as Ales-sandra Manieri, Agoni poetico-musicali nella Grecia antica. I: Beozia(Pisa; Roma: Fabrizio Serra, 2009).

9 For the New Music, see notes 2, 3 and 8, as well as West,Ancient Greek Music, 356-372; Warren D. Anderson, Music andMusicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 113-144; Eric Csapo, “Later Euripides and Music”, Illinois Classical Stu-dies (Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century) XXIV–XXV (1999–2000), 399-426; Domenico Musti, “Musica greca traaristocrazia e democrazia”, Synaulía, 7-55; Andrew Barker,“Transforming the Nightingale: Aspects of Athenian Musical Dis-course in the Late Fifth Century”, Music and the Muses: The Cultureof Mousikē in the Classical Athenian City, 185-204; Armand d’An-gour, “The New Music – So What’s New?”, Rethinking Revolutionsthrough Ancient Greece, ed. by Simon Goldhill & Robin Osborne(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 264-283.

10 Two classical examples would be the monody of the Phry-gian slave in Eur. Or. 1369-1502 and the Celanaean’s lament in

Timoth. Pers. 150-161, with the comments of John R. Porter, Stu-dies in Euripides’ Orestes (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 173-213, esp. 199-207for the link between the two, and J.H. Hordern, The Fragments ofTimotheus of Miletus (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,2002), 204-214. For this device employed in comedy, melic poetryand, to a lesser extent, in tragedy, see the summary of Hordern,The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 204-206.

11 For the Classic perception of the musical modes bearingEastern names, see note 3. Two examples of melodic material ofpurported Phrygian origin reused in tragic context: (i) themonody of the Phrygian slave in Euripides’s Orestes, 1369-1502and esp. 1384 cum schol. using the harmateios melos, with thecommentaries of Andrew Barker, “The Music of Olympus”, Qua-derni urbinati di cultura classica XCIX/3 (2011), 51-52; Edith Hall,“Actor’s Song in Tragedy”, Music and the Muses, esp. 117-119,West, Euripides: Orestes (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1987), 278,as well as the metrical commentary of M. De Poli, Le Monodie diEuripide: Note di critica testuale e analisi metrica (Padova: S.A.R.G.O.N., Editrice e Libreria, 2011), 293-318; see also note 10. (ii) theonomatopoeic and probably melodic imitation of a threnodic sy-naulia attributed to Olympos in Ar.Eq. 7-10 cum schol., cf. Suid. Ξ118 Adler. For the portrayal of barbarian music in Attic comedy,see Long, Barbarians in Greek Comedy, 63-68.

12 Cf. infra, §3.13 See the summaries of Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 132-133

(tragedy) and Long, Barbarians in Greek Comedy, 68-69.14 For inscriptions accompanying images of musical perfor-

mance in general, see Fr. Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of Greek Banq-uet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 123-139, as wellas the old catalogues of Max Wegner, Das Musikleben der Griechen(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1949), 202-203 and 221. For the difficulties inreading such inscriptions, see for instance the extended discus-sions on Smikros’s Berlin neck-amphora: Antikensammlung1966.19 (ARV2 20.3bis, Para 323.3bis, Add2 154, BA 352401) with therecent interpretations of Martin Steinruck, “Un glyconien sur uneamphore de Smikros”, Mètis XIII/1 (1998), 187-189 and AnnieBélis, “Une inscription dépourvue de sens sur une amphore deBerlin?”, Revue de philologie, de litterature et d’histoire anciennesLXXXII/2 (2008), 247-255. No indubitable musical notations havebeen identified on Attic vases, but at least three vase inscriptionshave been brought into discussion: (i) syllables imitating thesound of the salpinx on a black-figure epinetron by the SapphoPainter, Eleusis Archaeological Museum inv. 907 (Haspels 228.54,BA 7965), interpreted by Annie Bélis, “Un nouveau documentmusical”, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique 108 (1984), 99-109as an early example of solmization; for a more balanced view,Egert Pöhlmann & Martin Litchfield West, Documents of AncientGreek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 8-9. (ii) Imitations ofletters or instrumental notation around aulos players on twoblack-figure lekythoi by the Athena Painter: Paris, Cabinet desMédailles 272 ABV 531.6, Add2 132, BA 330884) and H2985(Haspels 257.76, BA 11337), commented by Anna Boshnakova,“Reading Ancient Greek Music in Documents, Images and Arte-facts and the Practical Application of Music Archaeology”,Studien zur Musikarchäologie, ed. by Ellen Hickmann, Ricardo Eich-mann & Arndt Adje Both (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf), vol. 6,413-421. A brief comparison with the extended use of nonsenseletters in the non-musical images of the Athena Painter casts se-rious doubts on this interpretation. See also the dubia listed byStefan Hagel, Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press), 256, n. 1.

15 I am leaving aside the corpus of Greek musical notation.The earliest ascertained fragments (3rd century BC) on papyrus,possibly recording the original music of two Euripidean choral

21


odes, are of little relevance to this research; see Pöhlmann & West,Documents of Ancient Greek Music, 12-55 and the detailed analysisof Lucia Prauscello, Singing Alexandria: Music between Practice andTextual Transmission (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2006), 123-183. For thepurported musical notations on Attic vases, see note 14. For theorigins of Greek musical notation, see West, “Analecta musica”,Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 92 (1992), 36-46 andHagel, Ancient Greek Music, 20-25 and 366-371.

16 An interesting example is provided by the (probably fun-ctional) use of the Dorian mode in Philoxenus’s Mysians (PMG826), criticized on traditionalist-ethical grounds by Arist. Pol.VIII.7, 1342b, but also described in greater detail by Ps.-Plut. Demus. 1142f (drawing on an Aristoxenian source), with the com-ments of West, Ancient Greek Music, 180-181, 364-365 and Csapo,“The Politics of the New Music”, 233-234.

17 A few landmarks of these approaches: C. Bérard et al., LaCité des Images: Religion et société en Grèce antiques (Lausanne; Paris:Fernand Nathan-L.E.P, 1984); Image et céramique grecque, ed. by Fr.Lissarrague & Fr. Thelamon (Rouen: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1983); Images et société en Grèce ancienne: L’iconographiecomme méthode d’analyse: Actes du colloque international, Lausanne,8–11 février 1984, ed. by Cl. Bérard, Chr. Bron and A. Pomari (Lau-sanne: Institut d’archéologie et d’histoire ancienne, 1987); Fr.Lissarrague, Un flot d’images: Une esthétique du banquet grec (Paris:A. Biro, 1987), esp. 1-12; F. Frontisi-Ducroux, “Vingt ans de vasesgrecs: Tendances actuelles des études en iconographie grecque(1970–1990)”, Métis 5 (1990), 205-224; Christiane Sourvinou-In-wood, “Reading” Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals andMyths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); G. Ferrari, Figures ofSpeech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2002), esp. 1-10 and 20-26; A. Steiner, Reading GreekVases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Richard T.Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Paintings: The Craft of De-mocracy, ca. 530–640 BCE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), esp. 7-8 and 27-86; Hermeneutik der Bilder: Beiträge zur Iko-nographie und Interpretation Griechischer Vasenmalerei, ed. by StefanSchimdt & John Howard Oakley (München: C.H. Beck, 2009).

18 For kalos names, see T.B.L. Webster, Potter and Patron inClassical Athens (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), 21-24 and 42-62;Fr. Lissarrague, “Publicity and Performance: Kalos Inscriptions inAttic Vase-Painting”, Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy,359-373; Neil W. Slater, “The Vase as Ventriloquist: Kalos-Inscrip-tions and the Culture of Fame”, Signs of Orality: The Oral Traditionand Its Influence in the Greek and Roman World, ed. by E. AnneMackay (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 143-161. For Panathenaic vases, seeJ. Neils, “Panathenaic Amphoras: Their Meaning, Makers, andMarkets”, Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in AncientAthens, ed. by J. Neils (Hanover; Priceton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1992) and Panathenaika: Symposion zu den PanathenaischenPreisamphoren, Rauischholzhausen, 25.11–29.11. 1998, ed. by M.Bentz & N. Eschbach (Mainz: Zabern, 2001). For vases interpretedas celebrating a victory in a musical context, see below, note 28.

19 T.B.L. Webster, Potter and Patron in Classical Athens; for abriefer overview, see as well Athenian Culture and Society (London:Bastford, 1973), 127-145.

20 For cautious, yet favourable reactions to Webster’s hypo-thesis, see for instance Alan Johnston, “Greek Vases in theMarketplace”, Looking at Greek Vases, ed. by Tom Rasmussen &N.J. Spivey (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,1991), 203-232, esp. 214-221; Martin Robertson, The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992), 255 and B.B. Rasmussen, “Special Vases in Etruria:First- or Secondhand”, Papers on Special Techniques in AthenianVases, ed. by K. Lapatin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,

2008), 215-224.21 For the definitive formulation of this hypothesis, see Mi-

chael Vickers & David Gill, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverwareand Pottery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), with refer-ences to precedent articles; add Vickers & Gill, “They WereExpendable: Greek Vases in the Etruscan Tomb”, Revue des étudesanciennes 97 (1995), 225-249.

22 A few notable replies to the Vickers-Gill hypothesis (re-views left aside): Martin Robertson, “Beazley and Attic VasePainting”, Beazley and Oxford, ed. by D.C. Kurtz (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985), 19-30; John Boardman, “Silver is White”,Révue Archéologique fasc. 2 (1987), 279-295; R.M. Cook, “ArtfulCrafts: A Commentary”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987), 169-171; M.C. Keuls, “New Light on the Social Position of Vase Pain-ters in Late Archaic Athens”, Mélanges Pierre Lévêque III (Paris: LesBelles Lettres, 1989), 149-167, esp. 150; Spivey, “Greek Vases inEtruria”, Looking at Greek Vases, 134-138; Neer, Style and Politics inAthenian Vase Paintings, 206-215; Steiner, Reading Greek Vases, 232-234. By now, recent textbooks also follow these conclusions: soMark Jackson & Kevin Greene, “Ceramic Production”, The OxfordHandbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed.by J.P. Oleson (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),496-519, esp. 499.

23 H. Hoffmann, “Dulce et decorum est pro patri mori: TheImagery of Heroic Immortality on Athenian Vases”, Art and Textin Ancient Greek Culture, ed. by S. Goldhill & R. Osborne (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 28-51, esp. 30-32, withreferences to previous articles (quote on p. 31); see also Sotades:Symbols of Immortality on Greek Vases (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997), esp. 4-9.

24 For the mixed responses to Hoffmann’s Sotades, see thereviews of Susan B. Matheson, American Journal of ArchaeologyCIII/4 (1999), 711-712; Jeremy Tanner, Journal of the Royal Anthro-pological Institute V/2 (1999), 284; and K.W. Arafat, ClassicalReview L/2 (2000), 664-665; with reference to the iconography ofthe pygmy and crane battle, Brian A. Sparkes, “Small World:Pygmies & Co.”, Word and Image in Ancient Greece, ed. by N. KeithRutter and B.A. Sparkes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress), 79-98, esp. 93 and 95. For a synthetic criticism of Hoff-mann’s approach within the wider discussion of the uses of Atticsympotic pottery, see Steiner, Reading Greek Vases, 232ff. For con-textualized analysis of grave offerings, see infra, notes 25 and 27.

25 For the selection and reception of Attic painted pottery inEtruria, see the summaries of Nigel Jonathan Spivey, “GreekVases in Etruria”, Looking at Greek Vases, 131-150; K. Arafat & C.Morgan, “Athens, Etruria and the Heuneburg: Mutual Miscon-ceptions in the Study of Greek-Barbarian Relations”, ClassicalGreece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies, ed. by I. Morris(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108-134; J.P.Small, “Scholars, Etruscans, and Attic Painted Vases”, Journal ofRoman Archaeology 7 (1994), 34-58; A. Nilsson, “The Function andReception of Attic Figured Pottery: Spina. A Case Study”, AnalectaRomana Instituta Danici 26 (1999), 7-23; Robin Osborne, “Why didAthenian Pots Appeal to the Etruscans”, World ArchaeologyXXXIII/2 (2001), 277-295, esp. 278, supplemented by “The Ana-tomy of a Mobile Culture: The Greeks, their Pots and their Mythsin Etruria”, Mobility and Travel in the Mediterranean from Antiquityto the Middle Ages, ed. by Renate Schlesier & Ulrike Zellmann(Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 23-36, esp. 24-25; C. Isler-Kerényi,“Images grecques au banquet funéraire étrusque”, Pallas 61(Symposium: Banquet et representations en Grèce et à Rome, 2003), 37-47; C. Reusser, Vasen für Etrurien: Verbreitung und Funktionenattischer Keramik im Etrurien des 6. und 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.(Zürich: Akanthus, 2002); A. Avramidou, “Attic Vases in Etruria:

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Another View on the Divine Banquet Cup by the Codrus Painter”,American Journal of Archaeology CX/4 (2006), 565-579. For MagnaGraecia, see the fertile exchange between C. Marconi, “Images fora Warrior: On a Group of Athenian Vases and Their Public” andR. Osborne, “Images for a Warrior: On a Group of Athenian Vasesand Their Public”, Greek Vases: Images, Contexts and Controversies,ed. by C. Marconi (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 27-40 and 41-54;Giada Giudice, Il Tornio, la nave, le terre lontane: Ceramografi atticiin Magna Graecia nella seconda meta del V sec. a.C. (Roma: L’Ermadi Bretschneider, 2007). In the Italic milieu: L. Hannestad, “TheReception of Attic Pottery by the Indigenous Peoples of Italy: TheEvidence from Funerary Contexts”, The Complex Past of Pottery:Production, Circulation and Consumption of Mycenaen and GreekPottery (Sixteenth to Early Fifth Centuries BC), ed. by J.P. Crielaard,V. Stissi & G.J. van Wijngaarden (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 303-318. ForNear-Eastern markets, see the summary of Miller, Athens andPersia in the Fifth Century B.C., 69. For the Black Sea region ingeneral: G.R. Tsetskhladze, “Greek Colonisation of the Black SeaArea: Stages, Models, and Native Population”, The Greek Colonis-ation of the Black Sea Area, ed. by G.R. Tsetskhladze (Stuttgart:Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 9-68, esp. 62-64; for the interpretationproblems raised by Xenophantos’s relief lekythos in relation withits Crimean context, see M.C. Miller, “Art, Myth, and Reality:Xenophantos’s Lekythos Re-Examined”, Poetry, Theory, Praxis: TheSocial Life of Myth, Word and Image in Ancient Greece: Essays inHonour of William J. Slater, ed. by E. Csapo & M.C. Miller (Oxford:Oxbow Books, 2003), 19-47 and H.M. Franks, “Hunting theEschata. An Imagined Persian Empire on the Lekythos ofXenophantos”, Hesperia 78 (2009), 455-480. See also the articlescollected in Griechische Keramik im kulturellen Kontext: Akten desinternationalen Vasen-symposions in Kiel vom 24. bis 8.9.2001veranstaltet durch das Archäologische Institut der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, ed. by Bernard Schmaltz and Magdalene Söld-ner (Münster: Scriptorium, 2003); for a comparative analysis ofthe uses of Attic pottery in a number of Etruscan and Greek con-texts, see Dimitris Paleotheodoros, “Archaeological Contexts andIconographic Analysis: Case Studies from Greece and Etruria”,The World of Greek Vases, ed. by V. Nørskov, L. Hannestad, C.Isler-Kerényi & S. Lewis (Roma: Edizioni Quasar, 2009), 45-62.

26 For summaries of these cases, see Spivey, “Greek Vases inEtruria”, 139-147; Arafat & Morgan, “Athens, Etruria and theHeuneburg”, 115-116; Osborne, “Why did Athenian Pots Appealto the Etruscans”, 278; and “The Anatomy of a Mobile Culture:The Greeks, their Pots and their Myths in Etruria”, 24-25; Steiner,Reading Greek Vases, 234-236. For the Perizoma group: H.A. Sha-piro, “Modest Athletes and Liberated Women: Etruscans on AtticBlack-figure Vases”, Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construc-tion of the Other in Greek Art, ed. by B. Cohen (Leiden; Boston: Brill,2000), 313-337. For the Tyrrhenian and Nikosthenic amphorae: M.von Mehren, “Two Groups of Attic Amphorae as Export Ware forEtruria: The So-called Tyrrhenian Group and ‘Nikosthenic Am-phorae’”, Ceramics in Context: Proceedings of the Internordic Collo-quium on Ancient Pottery Held at Stockholm, 13–15 June 1997, ed. byC. Scheffer (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001), 45-53. For theview that the Etruscan market has exerted a formative influenceon Attic iconography, see S. Lewis, “Representation and Recep-tion: Athenian Pottery in Its Italian Context”, Inhabiting Symbols:Symbol and Image in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. by J.B. Wilkins& E. Herring (London: University of London, Accordia ResearchInstitute, 2003), 175-192 with further references. For the (un-proven) hypothesis that the Arimaspian & griffon scenes in fourthcentury Attic production were specifically targeted at the BlackSea market, see H. Metzger, Les representations dans la céramiqueattique du IVe siècle (Paris: Édition de Boccard, 1951), 327-332.

27 The Pronomos Vase and its Context, ed. by Oliver Taplin andRosie Wyles (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)is the state of the art monograph on the Pronomos Vase. For itscontext of finding, see Lucilla Burn, “The Contexts of the Produc-tion and Distribution of Athenian Painted Pottery around 400 BC”,15-31, esp. 26-31; for its choregic imagery and non-Athenian cus-tomers: E. Csapo, “The Context of Choregic Dedications”, 79-130(121 for the quotation); for the fictive identities of the theatricalcasting: R. Osborne, “Who’s Who on the Pronomos Vase?”, 149-158.

28 See the largely similar approaches of M.D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in ArchaicAthens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37-41 (forAttic black-figure ware) and Alexander Heinemann, “Perfor-mance and the Drinking Vessel: Looking for an Imagery ofDithyramb in the Time of the ‘New Music’”, Dithyramb in Context,ed. by Barbara Kowalzig & P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, forthcoming in 2013), 282-310, esp. 282-284 and 299.

29 On the barbitos, see Kurtz & Boardman, 62-64; MarthaMaas & Jane McIntosh Snyder, Stringed Instruments of AncientGreece (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989), 113-128; West, Ancient Greek Music, 57-59; Landels, Music in AncientGreece and Rome (London: Routledge, 1999), 66-67; Thomas J.Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquityand the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999),249-253; Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, 21-26.

30 Syracuse, Museo Archeologico Regionale 26967, red-fi-gure lekythos attributed to the Gales Painter, ca. 510–500 (ARV2

36.2, Para 325, Add2 158; BA 200207); Mario Torelli, “Le ceramichea figure rosse di Gela: Contributo alla construzione del profilecultural di una città”, Ta Attika: Veder greco a Gela. Ceramiche attichefigurate dall’antica colonia, ed. by R. Panvini & F. Giudice (Roma:L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003), 99-144, for this vase 108 cat. 11:komast wearing chiton, chimation and a damaged headdress.Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet 13365, red-figure kalyx-crater attri-buted to the Kleophrades Painter, ca. 510 BC (ARV2 185.32, Para340, Add2 187, BA 201684), labeling a barbiton. On the relation of“Anakreontic” komasts with the historical Anakreon, see notes30-31. For the wider context of the Attic iconography of Ana-kreon, see Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intel-lectual in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),22-31 and Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, “An Issue of Methodol-ogy: Anakreon, Perikles, Xanthippos”, American Journal of Archaeo-logy CII/4 (1998), 717-738, esp. 721-723 with further reference.

31 Anakreontic figures as reflections of the orientalisingculture of aristocratic habrosynē: Keith de Vries, “East Meets Westat Dinner”, Expedition XV/4 (1973), 32-39; Donna Carol Kurtz &John Boardman, “Booners”, Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Mu-seum 2 (1985), 237-250; Sarah D. Price, “Anacreontic Vases Recon-sidered”, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies XXXI/2 (1990), 133-175; Leslie Kurke, “The Politics of βροσÛνη in Archaic Greece”,Classical Antiquity 11 (1992), 91-120, esp. 97-102; Neer, Style andPolitics in Athenian Vase Paintings, 19-23; Sheramy D. Bundrick,Music and Image in Classical Athens (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005), 84-87. On the different approaches to thecorpus of Anakreontic figures, see also note 34.

32 Fr. Lissarrague & Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, “Del’ambiguité à l’ambivalence, un parcours dionysiaque”, AION 5(1983), 11-32, reviewed as “From Ambiguity to Ambivalence: ADionysiac Excursion through the ‘Anakreontic’ Vases”, BeforeSexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient GreekWorld, ed. by David M. Halperin, John J. Winckler & Froma I.Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 211-256 insiston Dionysiac otherness and gender ambivalence, without ruling

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out the Near Eastern connection attached to the figure of Dio-nysos; cf. Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, 11-13: “atonce feminine and oriental”. The transvestism interpretation isfollowed by Marie-Hélène Delavaud-Roux, “L’énigme des dan-seurs barbus au parasol et les vases des Lénéennes”, Revue archéo-logique, fasc. 2 (1995), 227-263 and rediscussed on more solidgrounds by M.C. Miller, “Reexamining Transvestism in Archaicand Classical Athens: The Zewadski Stamnos”, American Journalof Archaeology 103 (1999), 223-253.

33 Among the proponents of the transvestism interpretation,Miller, “Reexamining Transvestism”, 251-253 explicitly analysescross-dressing as an upper-class response to socio-politicalchange.

34 This seems to be the view of Neer, Style and Politics inAthenian Vase Paintings, 22 and Miller (see note 33). For Webster’srestrictive views on the Anakreontic series, see Potter and Patronin Classical Athens, 54 and 110.

35 Black-figure grotesque kōmos: Athens, National Museum1045, black-figure oinochoe by Kleisophos and Xenokles (ABV186, Add2 51, BA 302454), with the commentaries of Lissarrague,The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, 96-97 and Neer, Style andPolitics in Athenian Vase Paintings, 22-23.

36 The pondering of this phenomenon is hampered by theinherent incongruities in the definition and treatment of the Ana-kreontic corpus in recent secondary literature. Miller, “Reexa-mining Transvestism”, 230, n. 28 and 240 distinguishes between(a) images of symposiasts wearing peculiar mitrai or chitōnes (suchas the one cited above, n. 36), which “would seem to be malefigures emulating East Greek/Anatolian dress” and (b) figuresdefined by the combined use of the chitōn, himation and mitra,which she judges as instances of transvestism properly speaking.A specific detail present in the second series and absent from thefirst would be typically feminine manner of wearing the hairpulled through the mitra. A somehow similar distinction is madeby Delavaud-Roux, 261-262, who refers only to the first group asAnakreontics, despite the presence of Anakreon’s name on theCopenhagen krater of the Kleophrades Painter (see note 30). Onthe other side of the debate, Kurtz & Boardman, “Booners”, 65had already noticed that “given […] the effeminacy attributed tothose areas from which this dress and behavior derived, it islikely enough that the feminine aspect became emphasized oreven sought after, especially once the sakkos was adopted” (i.e.,in the second quarter of the fifth century BC). Price, “AnakreonticVases Reconsidered”, 167-168 understands the later images of theseries as reflections of “popular burlesque” rather than aristo-cratic products. Kurke, “The Politics of βροσÛνη in ArchaicGreece”, 98-106, discusses in detail the development of a negativeconcept on aristocratic luxuriance as effeminacy in fifth centuryAthens, but does not take into account the possible influence ofthis discursive trend on late Anakreontic imagery.

37 Gela: Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 13.199, red-figurelekythos attributed to an undetermined early Mannerist (ARV2

588.73, Para 393, Add2 264, BA 206804), Lacey D. Caskey & J.D.Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. II(London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 55-61, cat. 99; Kurtz &Boardman (1986), 49, cat. 32; Fronti-Ducroux & Lissarrague 212;Torelli, “Le ceramiche a figure rosse di Gela...”, 112, cat. 78 andSyracuse 26967 (see note 30). Selinus: Palermo, Museo Archeo-logico Regionale, unattributed black-figure amphora fragment(ABV 676, BA 306476); Ettore Gabrici, Il santuario dello Malophorosa Selinunte = Monumenti Antichi pubblicati per cura della RegiaAccademia Nazionale dei Lincei XXXII (Milano, 1927), 339; Miller,“Reexamining Transvestism”, 230, n. 27. Rheneia (PurificationPit): Mykonos Archaeological Museum, red-figure neck amphora,

manner of the Aegisthus Painter, ca. 460-450 BC (ARV2 508.4, BA205712), Charles Dugas, Exploration archéologique de Délos. XXI: Lesvases attiques à figures rouges (1952), 38-39, cat. 57; Kurtz &Boardman 49, cat. 26; Delavaud-Roux 236-237, cat. 12 and 240.Rhodes (Macrì Langoni, tomb 138): Archaeological Museum13.129, red-figure pelike attributed to the Pig Painter, ca. 470-460(ARV2 564.28, Add2 260, BA 206457), Kurtz & Boardman 49, cat. 34and 63; Frontisi-Ducroux & Lissarrague 223-234; Delavaud-Roux241 cat. C and 249. Corinth: Archaeological Museum CP 998, red-figure fragment in the manner of the Leningrad Painter, ca. 470-460 BC. (ARV2 573.14, BA 206599), Kurtz & Boardman 49, cat. 38.I was not able to locate the whereabouts of the red-figure column-krater found at Perachora and included, without further refer-ence, in the catalogue of Caskey & Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings inthe Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. II, 59, no. 16bis and reproduced byKurtz & Boardman 49, cat. 30. Attica, cemetery near Vari: Cam-bridge, Mass., Harvard Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum1959.125, red-figure column-krater in the manner of the PigPainter, ca. 460 (ARV2 566.3, BA 206479), Kurtz & Boardman 49,cat. 35. Athens, Agora: Agora Museum P 7242, red-figure column-krater fragments in the manner of the Pig Painter, ca. 470–760(ARV2 566.4, BA 206480); Kurtz & Boardman 49, cat. 36; Frontisi-Ducroux & Lissarrague 221-222; Mary B. Moore, The AthenianAgora. XXX: Attic Red-Figured and White-Ground Pottery (Prince-ton, N.J.: The American School of Classical Studies in Athens,1997), 163-164, cat. 196.

38 Paris, Musée du Petit Palais 335 and 336, namepiece of thePainter of Petit Palais 336, ca. 490-470 (ARV2 305.1-2; BA 203123and 203122), Kurtz & Boardman 48, cat. 13; Frontisi-Ducroux &Lissarrague 218; Miller, “Reexamining Transvestism”, 238 and240. Alexandre G. Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting and the Origins ofVisual Humour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),155 understands the second vase as a comic depiction of a manstealing clothes from a woman, seemingly ignoring the Anakreon-tic connection.

39 Two recent contributions: Wilson, “Athenian Strings”,285-287 (comparing the image of Marsyas kitharōdos with Philo-xenos’ Cyclops as an “icon of counter-culture”); Alexander Heine-mann, “Performance and the Drinking Vessel”.

40 Erich Kistler, “The Encoding and Decoding of Satyr-Symposiasts on Vases in Archaic and Classical Athens”, in V.Nørskov et al., The World of Greek Vases (Roma: Edizioni Quasar,2009), 193-204 has explored the inherent polysemy of imagesinside Athenian sympotic groups in terms of “failed visualcommunication”. The limits of this paper force me to relegate thisconcept to a future discussion.

41 For the intellectual genealogy and reception of Beazley’sattributionism, see Philippe Rouet, Approaches to the Study of AtticVases: Beazley and Pottier (Oxford; New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001). Semiotics and attributionism have been successfullypaired, for instance, by Steiner, Reading Greek Vases, esp. 17-39(repetition illustrated through the work of Exekias and hisdisciples), Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Paintings, esp.87-134 (potter-portraits) and M.D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, VasePainting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006).

42 For a developed discussion of naturalism and the emer-gence of the red-figure technique, see Neer, Style and Politics inAthenian Vase Paintings, 27-86.

43 Emanuel Winternitz, “The Visual Arts as a Source for theHistorian of Music”, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism inWestern Art (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1979),31.

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44 Daniel Paquette, L’instrument de musique dans la céramiquede la Grèce antique: Études d’organologie (Paris: Diffusion deBoccard, 1984), with the reviews of West, Journal of Hellenic Studies105 (1985), 209, Jane McIntosh Snyder, American Journal of Archaeo-logy XC/1 (1986), 111 and A. Bélis, Revue archéologique 2 (1986),170-172.

45 Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, 13.46 For the “Thracian Kithara”, see Wegner, Das Musikleben

der Griechen, 45-46 (“Thamyras kithara”); Maas & Snyder, StringedInstruments of Ancient Greece, 145-147; West, Ancient Greek Music,55-56; Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, 67-68; Mathie-sen, Apollo’s Lyre, 266-267; Daniela Castaldo, Il Pantheon musicale:Iconografia nella ceramic attica tra VI e IV secolo (Ravenna: LongoEditore, 2000), 20-21; Annie Bélis, “La cithare de Thamyras”, Lanaissance de l’Opéra 1600–2000, ed. by Françoise Decroisette, Fran-çoise Graziani & Joël Heuillon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), esp. 40-45 (who tentatively equates it with the skindapsos); Bundrick,Music and Image in Classical Athens, 26-29. Annie Bélis is the onlyone to have noticed that the Meidias P. seems to hold a special po-sition in the production of vases depicting Thamyras or the Thra-cian kithara, but does not elaborate on this point.

47 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Arts 25.78.66: red-fi-gure bell krater attributed to Polion, ca. 430–420 BC. ARV21171.8,Para 459, Add2 339, BA 215506; LIMC VIII s.v. Silenoi 97; HeideFroning, Dithyrambos und Vasenmalerei in Athens (Würzburg:Konrad Triltsch, 1971), 25-26; Bundrick, Music and Image in Clas-sical Athens, 28-29 and 174; Guy Hedreen, “Myths of Ritual inAthenian Vase-Paintings of Silens”, The Origins of Theater in An-cient Greece, ed. by. E. Csapo & M.C. Miller (Cambridge; NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150-195, esp. 165-166;Bernd Seidensticker, “Dance in Satyr Play”, The Pronomos Vase andIts Context, 213-229, esp. 225-256. A Muse plays a Thracian kithara(while Thamyras plays a standard kithara) on Polion’s Thamyraskrater in Ferrara, Museo Nazionale di Spina T127/3033: ARV2

1171.1, Para 459, Add2 338, BA 215539; LIMC VI s.v. Mousa,Mousai 92; Fede Berti & Donatella Restani, Lo specchio della musica:iconografia musicale nella ceramic attica di Spina (Bologna: NuovaAlfa Editore, 1988), 60-61; Bundrick, Music and Image in ClassicalAthens, 129-130; Mauro Menichetti, “Thamyris, il cantore dellapolitica cimoniana e il cratere di Polion a Ferrara”, Il greco, il bar-baro e la ceramic attica: Immaginario del diverso, processi di scambio eautorappresentazione degli indigeni, ed. by F. Giudice & R. Panvini(Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2007), vol. 4, 107-122.

48 For a survey of these classifications, see West, AncientGreek Music, 89-94 and John G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greeceand Rome (London: Routledge, 1999), 40-41.

49 The results of Hagel, Ancient Greek Music, 88-89 (lyres) and328-332 (auloi) show quantitative approaches to be largely viableon a substantial sample of images. On the other hand, the use ofsuch calculations as a qualitative criterion applied to smaller corpo-ra or individual images must take into account material and com-positional constraints, as well as the inherent visual deformationson photographs. For this reason, I leave aside overall pipe lengthin my analysis of the Berlin Painter’s auloi: cf. note 61.

50 For instance, Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens,34-42 and Castaldo, Il Pantheon Musicale, 80-87.

51 Obviously, this approach is not restricted to the aulos. Aminimal example regarding lyres: the group of four lyre playerson the Omaha Painter’s black-figure amphora in the Louvre, ca.570–550 BC (Paris, Musée du Louvre E 861; Para 33.1; Add2 24; BA350214). Both Bélis, in her review of Paquette’s iconographiccorpus (see note 45), 172 and Maas & Snyder, Stringed Instrumentsof Ancient Greece, 38 notice the odd visual treatment of the lyres:

clusters of strings unconnected to the kollopes, the bridge placedhigh up the soundbox, the whole instrument depicted as thoughreversed or played by left-handed; Bélis thus identifies them as“accéssories de théâtre”. However, the presence on the other vaseattributed to the same painter (Omaha, Joslyn Art Museum1963.480; Para 34.2, Add2 24, BA 350215) of a similar lyre, this timein a straight-forward sympotic context, suggests that such formaloddities are reducible to the painter’s manner and do not carryany additional meaning. For the further interpretations of theLouvre lyre players, see also Hedreen, “Myths of Ritual inAthenian Vase-Paintings of Silens”, 164; Timothy Power, TheCulture of Kitharoidia (Washington, D.C.: Center for HellenicStudies, 2010), 470 n. 146.

52 West, Ancient Greek Music, 85; Landels, Music in AncientGreece and Rome, 32-33 summarize the textual and iconographicevidence. Cf. also the next note.

53 For an up-to-date overview of the archaeological dossieron early auloi, see Stelios Psaroudakēs, “The Auloi of Pydna”,Challenges and Objectives in Music Archaeology: Papers from the 5th

Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology atthe Ethnological Museum, State Museums Berlin, 19–23 September2006, ed. by Arnd Adje Both, Ricardo Eichmann, Ellen Hickmann& Lars-Christian Koch, Studien zur Musikarchäologie (Rahden:Marie Leidorf, 2008), vol. 6, 197-216 (199-200 for bulbs) and “TheDaphnē Aulos”, Greek and Roman Musical Studies 1 (2013), 93-121(97-99 and 101 for bulbs).

54 Psaroudakēs, “The Auloi of Pydna”, 200.55 For instance, Maas & Snyder, Stringed Instruments of

Ancient Greece, 65; A. Bélis, “La cithara du relief des Théores: Essaide datation”, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique CXIX/1 (1995),369-374; C. Steinmann & P.J. Reichlin, “Instruments and theirMusic from 5th Century BC in Classical Greece”, Music Archaeol-ogy in Context: Archaeological Semantics, Historical Implications,Socio-Cultural Connotations, ed. by E. Hickmann, A.A. Both & R.Eichmann, Studien zur Musikarchäologie (Rahden: Marie Leidorf,2006), vol. 5, 237-254, esp. 241-242.

56 Paris, Louvre Cp 10841: ARV2 199.32, BA 201840; M.F. Vos,“Aulodic and Auletic Contests”, Enthousiasmos: Essays in Greek andRelated Pottery Presented to J.M. Hemelrijk, ed. by H.A.G. Brijder,A.A. Drukker, C.W. Neeft (Amsterdam: Allard Pierson Series,1986), 129, cat. 12. On the early particularities of this vase withinthe Berlin Painter’s output, D.C. Kurtz, “Gorgos’ Cup: An Essayin Connoisseurship”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 103 (1983), 76, n.72.

57 Athens, National Museum, Acropolis Coll. 2.934: AR2

210.176 and 469, BA 201994; Vos 129, cat. 10.58 Basel, Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig KA 422:

ARV2 207.136, Para 343, Add2 194, BA 201955; Paquette 44-45, cat.A22; Vos 129, cat. 11.

59 T + 3S: Paris, Louvre G 201, neck-amphora (ARV2 201.63,Para 342, Add2 192, BA 201871; Paquette 42-43, cat. A16); Paris,Louvre CA 2981, amphora type A (ARV2196.2 and 1633, Para 342,Add2 190, BA 201810); Paris, Louvre G 185 / Ca 944, stamnos (AR2

207.142,Ad2 194, BA 201961). T + 2S: Northampton, Castle Ashby2, stamnos (ARV2208.145; Add2 194, BA 201964; Paquette 50-51, cat.A34); once Berlin, Antikensammlung F 2187, fragmentary stam-nos (ARV2208.146, BA 201965). An early calyx-krater partiallyreconstructed from fragments scattered in the Louvre, the GettyMuseum and the Herbert Cahn collection included a pipe case,but no trace of an aulos survives: BA 11658; Robertson, “The Ber-lin Painter at the Getty Museum and Some Others”, Greek Vasesin the J. Paul Getty Museum 1 (1983), 55-73, esp. 61-66.

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60 Explicit processional scenes: Louvre G 185 and Northamp-ton 2, probably also Berlin F 2187. Louvre CA 2981 may refer onthe whole to a non-narrative kōmos, if not to the return of He-phaestus, as Beazley had surmised (ARV2 1633). Louvre G 201 is,to my knowledge, the only apparition of the aulos in a symposi-um among the works of the Berlin Painter.

61 On the Northampton stamnos (intersecting with Diony-sos’ staff) and the Louvre G 201 amphora (blocked by the upperedge of the frieze). On quantitative statistics of pipe proportions,see note 49.

62 T stands for the main tube, S for the shorter segments.Recognizing bulbs in the slightly rounded segments is a moresubjective matter and should be taken cum grano salis.

63 For the description of the aulos in Pindar’s Pythian XII,see firstly Jenny Strauss Clay, “Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian: Reedand Bronze”, American Journal of Archaeology CXIII/4 (1992), 519-525, esp. 524; Zozie Papadopoulou & Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge,

“Inventer et réinventer l’aulos: Autour de la XIIe Pythique dePindare”, Chanter les dieux: Musique et religions dans l’Antiquitégrecque et romaine, ed. by Pierre Brulé and Christophe Vendries(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001), 37-58, esp. 48-51.

64 Paris, Musée du Louvre G103: ARV2 14.2 and 1619, Para322, Add2 152, BA 200064; Vos 129, cat. 6; H.A. Shapiro, Art andCult under the Tyrants in Athens (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1989),42-43; Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens, 163-164.

65 London, British Museum E270: ARV2 183.15, Para 340,Add2187, BA 201668; Paquette 20-21, cat. IIB; Vos 129, cat. 9; H.A.Shapiro, “Hipparchos and the Rhapsodes”, Cultural Poetics inArchaic Greece, 92-107, esp. 95- 97; Bundrick,Music and Image inClassical Athens, 35-37 and 165 with further reference. If the twosides of the vase are read together as depicting an aulodic contest,the context is not readily analogous to the Berlin Painter’s andEuphronios’s auletic contest scenes.

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Music and Socio-Cultural Identity in Attic Vase Painting: Prolegomena to Future Research (Pt 1)

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