Lydos the Slave

Around 520 BC, a painter in Athens wrote his name on a small black-figure cup and called himself a slave. The words read "Lydos painted, a slave", and what follows is unclear. It may say whose slave he was, or that he came from a place called Myrina.

Lydos means "the Lydian", from Lydia in western Asia Minor, and it was also the name of a better-known Athenian painter active a generation earlier. The Villa Giulia treats the two as namesakes. Names like this suggest that foreigners worked in the potteries of Athens, some of them unfree. One hypothesis, still unconfirmed, sees this Lydos as an Etruscan who had settled in Athens. His drawing is close in places to Etruscan painters, and a tradition already current in Athens held that the Etruscans descended from the Lydians.