Event

Speaker: H. Alan Shapiro, W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology, Emeritus, and Academy Professor at Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: The paper revisits the so-called 'courtship scenes' on Attic vases between ca. 560 and 475 BCE, depicting, usually, a bearded man (erastês) wooing a beardless youth (eromenos). The typology of the scenes was established by Sir John Beazley as long ago as 1948 and has been accepted by scholars ever since. But Beazley did not consider one very small group of scenes showing anal intercourse, the activity that would seem to have been especially prevalent in male same-sex relationships to judge from later literary sources such as the plays of Aristophanes. A few recent finds have added to the small corpus of images, and the paper seeks to analyze the disparity and to determine the contexts in which anal intercourse is depicted in the setting of the symposium and komos. The notion that such scenes were made specifically for the Etruscan market, as has often been argued, is investigated and found to be unlikely. Other interpretations are suggested.