2023 Trendall Lecture

Uncover the stories of the quintessential Athenian hero Theseus, through an examination of ancient Greek vases made in Southern Italy.

From the founding of the Athenian colony of Thurii in Lucania in the 440’s BCE, emigré Athenian painters adapted their city’s principal hero to the colonial landscape of Southern Italy.

Some subjects, such as Theseus abandoning Ariadne on Naxos and her rescue by Dionysos, can be seen to derive directly from traditions in Attic red-figure pottery going back to the early fifth century BCE. Others however, including Theseus and his friend Perithoös trapped in the Underworld, have few precedents on Attic vases but are standard elements of the panoramic scenes of the Underworld on large Apulian kraters from Southern Italy.

There are also scenes unknown in Attic pottery, such as Theseus mourning the death of his hunting companion Meleager, that must be inspired by revivals of now lost Athenian tragedies that were so popular in the Greek colonies in the West.

US-based scholar Alan Shapiro will discuss a broad range of scenes featuring Theseus on vases from Southern Italy and what these representations can reveal to us about the spread and adaptation of ancient Greek culture.

Speaker
Alan Shapiro is the W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology, Emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, and former Dietrich von Bothmer Research Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A specialist in Athenian vase-painting and sculpture, Greek mythology and religion, he is the author of Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (1994) and Refashioning Anakreon in Classical Athens (2012).