Oinochoe with a Sacrifice Scene

This small wine jug was made in Athens in the years around 430 to 425 BC, when the city was at war with Sparta and had just been struck by plague. The scene on it is an ordinary act of Athenian religion. At a stone altar, its flames picked out in added white and yellow, a young man in a cloak pours a libation from a shallow cup. Facing him, a naked youth holds a long spit threaded with four pieces of meat over the fire. In a Greek sacrifice the first meat roasted this way was usually the innards, eaten on the spot by those taking part. A third youth stands apart, leaning on his staff, and all three wear wreaths of leaves. Above the young man with the cup the painter wrote a name, Pythodelos, in the kind of acclamation Athenian painters used to praise a handsome youth.

The jug was found in 1829 at Vulci, in Etruria, during excavations by Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, and the Louvre bought it in 1879.