Anyway, I needn’t have worried, since the students (and my tremendous teaching assistants, who have four of the five seminar groups) did very well, and talked to me in intelligent and interesting ways about why Hermes in this image might have been made to stand in for Apollo in the Iliad, about how an Athenian viewer might have related the depiction of Sarpedon to that of the contemporary Athenian warriors (if that is what they are) on the other side of the pot, and about the way in which the artist has concentrated our attention on Sarpedon’s lovingly depicted corpse, shockingly marred by the bold red diagonals of blood from his wounds.
As is common with reception, this took me a bit out of my comfort zone (I am definitely a Literature Person, and late sixth century pottery – any pottery, come to that – is not where I feel most at ease on the other hand, I am very interested in literary receptions of Homer around this period, especially in the work of the poet Simonides, who has occupied a great deal of my research thinking for some years). I asked the students to look at the image and to think about how it related to the passage in the Iliad, how it was different, and why, and to consider what this might mean for Athenians looking at the pot in the late sixth century. Even though Zeus pities his son, he is persuaded by his wife Hera not to intervene to save him – but he does provide Sarpedon with a burial at home, by sending Apollo to recover the corpse, wash it, and hand it over to Sleep and Death, who take it to Sarpedon’s homeland of Lycia for burial. The pot was a natural one to choose for part of that seminar, because the scene depicted seems to relate quite closely to a great moment in book 16 of the poem: Zeus’ mortal son, Sarpedon, is killed by Achilles’ companion Patroclus, shortly before Patroclus comes to his own death at the hands of Apollo and Hector. I have been thinking about this recently because I included a seminar on ‘reception’ in my undergraduate module on the Homeric Iliad. As we’ll see, we also know something of its history since it was made. We know the name of the potter (Euxitheos) and the painter (Euphronios), because both are named on the pot (one signature reads ‘Euxitheos made me’ and another ‘Euphronios painted me’). The pot in the picture is a big (about 45 cm tall) krater (mixing bowl for wine), manufactured in Athens in the late sixth century BC. January 23, 2014, by Richard Rawles Sarpedon: Looking at the Past
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