Ethnicity and Representation 365type (Lissarague 1995): two females, one unpainted and presumably Athenian, and the
other painted black and presumably a dark-skinned “African.” Physical contrast also
includes the shape of the nose and lips and texture of the hair. The inscription running
around the lowest section of the white ground field repeats “the boy is beautiful.” In these
plastic vessels, Frank Snowden detected an unbiased fascination with physical difference
(Snowden 2010: 155–6, Figures 159–60). Snowden (1983, Figure 20), nevertheless
considered somatic markers accurate and significant, such as when he called the priests in
Figure 24.3 “mulattoes” because of their physiognomy. However, Jeremy Tanner (2010,
especially 15–8) challenges the claim that the representation of skin color was indexical,
and suggests, rightly, that the treatment of skin color in art was neither necessarily nat-
uralistic nor always important (on the latter, see Isaac 2004, Figures 5A, 6). Although
women were sometimes indicated through white skin, white skin was associated also
with Persians, and, later, Gauls, whereas Ethiopians and Egyptians were black-skinned,
and Greeks fell somewhere in between (Tanner 2010, especially 14, 25–6, after Helm
1988). The representation of particular skin color can have meaning, but like dress, it is
an unstable signifier (see Chapter 33 by Ursula Rothe in this volume).
Snowden is not alone in reading the janiform kantharoi as positive representations of
genuine somatic difference. Others emphasize the beauty of the representations, which
lack obvious caricature or irony (Claude Bérard in Cohen 2000: 390–412, here 410–1;
Gruen 2011: 216–20). The only known exception dates to the early fifth century and
shows a dark-skinned man and unpainted woman; the man’s side is inscribed “Timyllos
is beautiful like this face” (Archaeological Museum, Thessaloniki I.ΔΓ.8 cited in Gruen
2011: 219, n. 143). The man’s face is clearly not beautiful by Greek norms, however,
which suggests the inscription here is ironic. The “Timyllos” kantharos shows that Greeks
were not always sympathetic to physical difference. Caricature in the sense of extreme
exaggeration of physical features was not necessarily required for images to be derisive
or prejudicial, any more than skin color or somatic racism covers all bases of prejudice (a
major theme of Isaac 2004; McCoskey 2006; Mitchell 2009: 34–5, 263–4, Figure 133).
Maybe the “the boy is beautiful” inscription in Figure 24.6 is ironic, too.
Surely, the appeal of these cups was their potential for alterity in the symposion (Tanner
2010: 31; cf. Lissarague 1995; cf. “to drink like a Skythian” in Hieron. Rhod. ap. Ath.
499, Mitchell 2009: 83). Each pairing of female, satyr, Herakles, or African was directed
simultaneously at fellow symposiasts and those who masked their own faces while drink-
ing, allowing drinkers to temporarily assume or project the attributes of the cups’ faces
and inscriptions (Korshak 1987; “the feeling of superiority” in Mitchell 2009: 13–5). If,
indeed, the particular African physical conventions that appear on the janiform cups and
in the Bousiris myth indicate traits considered inherited, environmentally determined, or
otherwise unchanging and unchangeable, and if they were seen as derisively inferior to
innate Athenian traits, they seem undistinguishable from modern racism (what Benjamin
Isaac [2004] has called “proto-racism”; see Lape 2010).
The kantharoi can be read against another vessel that plays with its two sides, the
Eurymedon Vase(see Figure 24.7). The oinochoe shows a male figure, nude but for his
chlamys, striding forward with one arm outstretched and the other brandishing his penis
like a sword. In a riff on pederastic pursuit imagery, the other side shows another male
with a quiver and wearing a spotted costume and soft-lapelled cap. The figure is bent
over with raised arms, palms and face forward. An inscription in the gap between the