Nikomachos Series

The Nikomachos Series is a label for a group of vases, a name given by John Beazley, the Oxford scholar who sorted Greek pottery by hand and workshop. It covers Panathenaic prize amphorae made in Athens in the later 4th century BC, the big jars handed to winners at the city's festival for its goddess Athena. Beazley took the name from Nikomachos, a potter whose name appears on vases of this kind, and the group is generally read as the output of one workshop, with more than one painter at work in it.

By then Athenian painters had long since moved on to red-figure, yet these jars kept the old black-figure technique and an Athena striding forward in the stiff manner of some two centuries earlier, since the prize was meant to look as it always had. What did change was the lettering. Along one of the columns that frame the goddess, the painter wrote the name of the archon, the official whose name marked the year in Athens, and that is why vases from this group can often be dated to a single year.