Die Frauen von Amphissa

Alma-Tadema built his career convincing Victorian London that he could show them the ancient world exactly as it looked, down to the veining in the marble. Here he reaches for an old story from the Greek writer Plutarch. A band of exhausted priestesses of the wine-god Dionysos, the Thyiades, have danced through the night and collapsed to sleep in the marketplace of the town of Amphissa. As they wake, the local women gather around them, not to scold but to protect them from soldiers stationed in the town and see them safely home. For a Victorian audience it read as a quiet lesson in charity between strangers. Two years after he painted it, the picture won him a medal at the Paris exhibition of 1889.