366 S. Rebecca Martin
two says: “I am Eurymedon; I am bent over.” Most often, this pot is interpreted allegor-
ically as the Greek victory at the Battle of Eurymedon in the 460s (a final “fall of Troy”;
cf. Figures 24.2 and 24.5). The nude male represents Greek forces and the costumed
one the Persians. As Kenneth Dover (1978: 105) so famously put it, theEurymedon Vase
makes an enthusiastic ethnocultural proclamation: “We’ve buggered the Persians!”
The problems of interpretation here are many, and three are especially relevant: it is not
so clear who is speaking which line; the archer figure’s gesture might be mocking; and, as
we have discussed already, there is no way to know if his apparently impenetrable costume
here only signals “Persian.” I do not follow Alexandre Mitchell’s (2009: 84–6) idea that
archer’s frontal face indicates direct address to the audience; it was probably meant to
simultaneously shock the viewer and signal a loss of control (Korshak 1987: 43). I do
agree that the pot is meant to be a humorous play on binaries and confused expectations,
which implicate, significantly, the appearance and actions of the Greek figure, as well
as the costumed one:erastes/eromenos, dress/undress, sword/penis, Greek/barbarian,
aidos/desire, etc. The viewer’s frequent surprises are mirrored by the archer’s expression
and heightened by punning, which suggests thataporia—a-poros, “without passage,” so
here “difficulty” incurred by perplexity and astonishment—is inherent to the pot’s visual
and textual constructions.
The body’s appearance, then, was neither unimportant nor necessarily separated from
ethnicity. At the same time, these vessels use a mixture of sexual, ethnic, and physical
markers, and do not present Hellenes as normative and desirable in simple contrast to all
Others. Visual cues are used inconsistently, and any presumption of ethnic binaries may
not hold up to context-dependent scrutiny (cf. dress/undress and nakedness/nudity in
Greek art in, e.g., Bonfante 1989, Cohen in Malkin 2001: 235–74). Ethnic markers are
regularly complicated by other aspects of identity (as discussed in Chapter 3 by Bernard
Knapp in this volume), too, by shifting perceptions and independent developments in
visual culture. It is difficult to tease out these differences even in the relatively famil-
iar realm of Athenian imagery where the identities of makers and viewers are taken for
granted.
Style, Iconography, Contact, and Change
On the one hand, style has long been disassociated from the ethnic unit (cf. Gates 2002,
especially 114–5; also see Chapter 12 by Jennifer Gates-Foster in this volume). On the
other hand, stylistic and iconographical classification (assumed to be inherent in the
objects; see Siân Jones in Bentley, Maschner, and Chippindale 2008: 324) is regularly
used to answer the basic questions of ethnicity. Who made this? Who lived here? And
so on. Greek art history, as with much historical archaeology, is driven by such clas-
sifications, which we then use to re-create what we call a “Greek” or, as we will see
below, a “Phoenician” culture. Such normative cultures are derived from the mate-
rial remains that can be tied to biological factors such as race or kinship, geography,
and language. The materiality of objects ensures that normative culture is empirically
evident.