360 S. Rebecca Martin
Figure 24.3 Priests bring Herakles before an enthroned Bousiris from an Attic red-figure cup
from Vulci of ca. 450–440. Attributed to the Painter of Louvre G 465. Berlin, Antikensammlung,
Staatliche Museen F2534. Courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
To reflect on Miller’s sophisticated (and here very truncated) argument: what had made
the Bousiris story unusual in black figure was the visual emphasis on violence and the char-
acters’ foreign appearance when the norm was to show mythological aristocrats and most
other figures (except archers; cf. Figure 24.1) as Greeks, using expository inscriptions
and other visual conventions for clarity. In the fifth century, as foreign costume became
more popular, generally, Athenian pot painters made conscious departures from visual
tradition and what they believed to be accurate traits of Egyptian pharaohs and priests.
If dress is a visual marker of ethnicity, then the Bousiris of Figure 24.3 is no longer an
ethnic Egyptian—though he clearly is not a Persian, either. This paradox is usually rec-
onciled as Otherness expressed broadly, Egyptian as barbarian and Herakles as Greek. As
Bousiris lost his ethnic specificity to the Great King, the once humorous myth became a
metaphor for the conflict with Persia (on symbol and allegory in antiquity, see, recently,
Smith 2011). Miller sees the changes as nevertheless underscoring the importance of eth-
nicity in Athens, reflecting how apolisobsessed with Persians “distorted [ethnicity] into
a concentrated Greek and Persian opposition in defiance of the rich patterns of reality”
(in Cohen 2000: 441; cf. Miller 1997).