Drinking cup (skyphos) with the departure and recovery of Helen

Visual vignettes of the beginning and end of the Trojan War decorate this skyphos, a form of drinking cup. An initial scene shows Paris (identified by his alternate name, Alexandros) arriving at Sparta to claim Helen as his bride. Helen was reluctant to leave her home, husband, and son (probably the small boy beneath one handle), until Aphrodite filled her with love-embodied by the tiny winged Eros close to her face-for Paris. Combining forces, Aphrodite veils Helen while Peitho (Persuasion) waves her on. Paris grasps Helen's hand, a gesture signifying both abduction and marriage, two concepts often conflated in the ancient world. This act began the war: Helen's husband Menelaos called on other Greeks, notably his powerful brother Agamemnon, to help him recover his wife. In the concluding scene, set in Troy during the fall of the city, a vengeful Menelaos finds Helen in the Sanctuary of Apollo. Once again, Aphrodite comes to Helen's aid, this time removing her veil so that Menelaos, overcome by her beauty, will drop his sword. The priest of the sanctuary, Chryses, and his daughter, Chryseis, witness the action, as does Priam, the king of Troy, who is seated under the handle at the right. These supporting characters flesh out additional details of the conflict: Priam, too old to fight, watched many of the battles from the city's walls, and Chryses and Chryseis figure prominently in the first book of Homer's Iliad, bringing both plague and internal conflict to the Greek forces. The artist responsible for this beautiful and complex rendering of the framing episodes of the Trojan conflict was Makron, one of the most influential red-figure painters in early fifth-century-B.C. Athens. He was exceptionally prolific, with more than six hundred extant vases attributed to him, and he appears to have worked exclusively with one potter, Hieron.