Eye-Cup with Odysseus Escaping Polyphemus

When a drinker raised this cup, the two big eyes painted on its outside looked out at the rest of the room, almost like a mask. Between the eyes on one side, Odysseus escapes from the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, clinging beneath a great ram. In Homer's Odyssey he has blinded the giant, who feels the backs of his sheep as they go out to pasture and misses the man underneath. On the other side a horse stands between the eyes, and inside the cup a satyr, a companion of the wine god, carries a wineskin.

The cup was found in 1998 at Vulci, in a tomb the excavators named after kottabos, a drinking game in which guests flicked the last drops of wine from their cups at a target. The museum attributes it to Oltos, an Athenian painter of the late 6th century BC. The Beazley Archive at Oxford is more cautious and calls it only comparable with his work. One clue sits in the round picture inside, the words Memnon kalos, "Memnon is handsome", a praise name found almost only on cups by Oltos. In 2022 the cup travelled to Gela for an exhibition on Odysseus in Sicily, the island where ancient writers placed the Cyclops.