Introduction. Achilles and Ajax at play: Inventing a canonical image
p. 24-26
Texte intégral
Fig. 1.1. Amphora signed Exekias (painter and potter), c. 540. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco 16757 (344).

1In the second half of the 6th century, Attic ceramic workshops elaborated the image of two warriors playing a board game, which would soon become canonical. A series of over 200 vases of different shapes and quality reproduced the subject for almost seventy years, between around 540 and 470.1 The oldest, most refined examples are vases that were used for banquets (amphorae, kraters, oinochoai, cups, etc.). Many were exported to Etruria along with other luxury goods (e.g., figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 1.8).2 From 500 to c. 470, black-figure lekythoi (fig. 1.14), small perfumed oil containers for body care, largely intended for Greek customers, also featured the motif, but in a more schematic form.3 There are also a few shield armbands from the second half of the 6th century (fig. 1.48) and possibly a fragmentary statuary group from the Athenian Acropolis (fig. 1.43; c. 510/500). The theme ceased to be represented in Greece shortly after the Persian wars, with one or two exceptions (figs. 1.42, 1.44), but it was revived in Etruria in the 4th and 3rd centuries in a variety of media (intaglios, mirrors, wall paintings, etc.) with new variants (figs. 1.27, 1.49, 1.52).4
2Why was this scene of play between two warriors so popular in the Archaic period, and why was it so closely tied to Athens? The iconographic scheme created by the painters invites us to question the relationship between the cultural value of play and the ideology of the elite under the tyrannical regime of the Pisistratids (561/560-511/510). The images are not a direct reflection of a historical reality, but they do provide models—here from the epic repertoire—that explore the status of warriors during the Archaic period.5 The success of this series could be due to the perfect match between its innovative composition and the ideology of different social groups during this period. We will examine the value of play within this metaphorical framework. First, we will focus on its relationship with education, paideia, the elite’s manly education, which cultivated kalokagathia, the harmony of body and mind, then on arete, individual excellence, which combined intelligence and courage, acquired in battle, and finally sophrosyne, wisdom and self-control. The dynamics of play also reveal how eusebeia, the respect due to the gods, could be reconciled with a non-passive view of fate. Play contributed to the construction of a heroic model that was accessible and appealing to the demos, the people on whom Pisistratus built his power, while a new democratic order was emerging.6
Notes de bas de page
1List in Kossatz-Deissman 1981 and Woodford 1982: 181-184, completed by Buchholz 1987: 137-177, nos. 1-186 and Kunze 2022 with 24 additions and corrections by Buchholz 1987.
2On Attic exports to Etruria, Reusser 2002.
3On Attic production intended for Greek customers, Villanueva Puig 2014; on the schematic type of the Haimon Painter’s lekythoi, Volioti 2014.
4Buchholz 1987, nos. 12-18; list completed by Lovergne 2022. The warriors at play motif is not featured in the vase paintings produced in southern Italy in the 4th century.
5For an epic vision of war and the heroization of the warrior in the Archaic period, Lissarrague 1990.
6See Lissarrague 1990: 97: “Paradoxically, it was when Athenian society was establishing the egalitarian institutions that would give rise to classical democracy, that the epic model of war took on its greatest importance in iconography”. On this period, de Oliveira Gomez 2007 and Azoulay 2014.
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