HOUSEWIVES, <em>HETAIRAI</em>, AND THE AMBIGUITY OF GENRE IN ATTIC VASE PAINTING

Abstract

So-called genre scenes or scenes of everyday life in Attic vase painting have proven irresistible to scholars of Greek iconography, and indeed to many historians working on classical Athens. Not only were the vases objects used by “regular people,” but their imagery provides tantalizing potential glimpses into the quotidian activities and everyday concerns hinted at in surviving texts. What transpired behind the closed doors of the oikos or at the height of a symposion? Yet, as iconographers have well demonstrated over the past few decades, it would be a mistake to rely upon these images as if they were photographic documents. A more fruitful interpretive strategy is to treat a scene as if it were a text, to decipher a painter’s pictorial language while recognizing the image for the construction it is. Because of their unusual or provocative iconography, certain vases have received repeated attention. Among these is an Attic red-figured hydria by the Harrow Painter (ca 470 b.c.) in the Tampa Museum of Art (Figs. 1–3), formerly in the collection of Joseph Veach Noble and discovered at Vulci in the early nineteenth century. The scene on the body (Fig. 2) is deceptively simple, lacking inscriptions or discernible mythological narrative. At the left stands a building or portico; inside sits a woman enveloped in her mantle, wearing a sakkos and holding a large mirror whose face is turned outward toward the viewer. A small boy faces her, also enveloped in his himation and wearing a red fillet (mostly flaked away), with an alabastron hanging in the field between them. Outside the structure stands a bearded, half-draped man with a mostly lost red wreath who leans on his walking staff, left hand clutching a purse or