Laconian Cup with Herakles and the Amazons

Sparta is remembered as a city of soldiers with little time for art, an image drawn largely by later writers. Around 560 BC it also had workshops turning out fine painted cups, and they travelled across the Mediterranean, to the island of Samos, to Taranto in southern Italy and to the Etruscans.

On this cup the main picture sits inside the bowl, where Laconian painters liked to put it. Herakles, naked and bearded, raises his sword and goes after two Amazons, the warrior women of Greek myth. He was the favourite hero of Laconian painters, and both of Sparta's royal families claimed him as their ancestor. A band of lotus flowers and palmettes fills the segment below the scene, and behind the hero there is a small lizard, which the museum's label names alongside Herakles and the Amazons. The cup was once in a private collection in Rome, and where it was found is not recorded.