Drinking cup (kylix) depicting scenes from the Odyssey

Homer's Odyssey recounts the journey of Odysseus, the wiliest of the Greek heroes, from Troy to his home in Ithaka. During his long voyage, Odysseus visited Aeaea, the island of the sorceress Circe, who changed his men into swine. An enormous amount of detail is packed onto the side of this kylix, compressing this part of Homer's narrative into one scene. Circe stands in the center, stirring and offering a cup to a companion of Odysseus who is caught in the midst of transformation: his head is that of a boar, but his hands are still those of a human. Other half-humans-with lion, wolf, and boar parts-stand about. Eurylochos, who held back from Circe's spell and returned to the ship to give warning, runs off to the right; from the left, Odysseus rushes in with his sword drawn to rescue his men. Details represented on the kylix but not present in the Homeric text may be signs of an industrious attempt to flesh out the story even further: Homer recounts only the transformation of Odysseus's men into swine, not into lions and wolves, although he mentions tame lions and wolves running around Aeaea; Circe's nudity may presage the fact that Odysseus will lie with her soon after he arrives. The inscriptions that dot the picture plane are meaningless; this is common on Greek vases and may indicate that an illiterate artist was drawing on a visual tradition of Trojan tales, rather than a literary one.Often thought to be an imaginative innovation on the part of this artist, the half-human, half-animal figures may have roots in representations of Egyptian gods such as Anubis; during the Archaic period, Greek artists borrowed and adapted many forms from their Mediterranean neighbors. The ambitious painter of this kylix is named after the more fragmentary Hom-eric scene depicted on the other side: Odysseus offering wine to the Cyclops Polyphemos.