Exekias

Around 540 BC, in the potters' quarter of Athens, a man named Exekias signed his vases with a short sentence spoken by the vase itself, "Exekias made me". On a few he added that he had painted them too. No document tells us anything else about his life, so everything known about him comes from the pots.

His best-known amphora, now in the Vatican Museums, shows Achilles and Ajax, two heroes of the Trojan War, bent over a board game in a pause from the fighting, still holding their spears. Tiny letters beside their heads give their calls, "four" for Achilles and "three" for Ajax. No surviving text of the period tells this story, yet other Athenian painters copied the scene about 150 times over the next half century.

Inside a wide drinking cup in Munich, the god Dionysos reclines on a ship whose mast has sprouted a vine heavy with grapes, on a coral-red ground with dolphins around it. In the old Greek hymn the picture recalls, pirates who kidnapped the god leapt overboard and became dolphins, and those pirates were Tyrrhenians, the Greek name for the Etruscans. The cup itself was found in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci, north of Rome, and so was the amphora with the game.

On a third amphora, kept in the museum of Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, Ajax kneels alone and fixes his sword point upward in a mound of earth, ready to fall on it.