Pelike with Youths

Around 515 BC, while Athens was ruled by the tyrant Hippias, the city's vase painters kept writing one young man's name. "Leagros is handsome" appears on dozens of their vases, and on this jar it is written twice, beside a youth leading a horse. He wears a broad-brimmed traveller's hat, a short cloak and boots, and a bird flies above him.

Leagros was a real Athenian, the son of a man called Glaukon. A generation later he was one of the city's generals, and in 465 BC he was killed in Thrace, in northern Greece, leading Athenians in a fight over the gold mines there. On a wine cooler now in the Getty Museum, a younger painter, Smikros, even showed a drinking party at which a man named Euphronios courts a youth named Leagros.

The museum attributes this jar, a pelike, to Euphronios, and specialists count it among his early works. The other side carries a harsher scene, a seated man punishing a naked youth with a sandal. The pelike was recovered through a confiscation, and it is said to come from the area of Viterbo, north of Rome.