THESEUS AND THE MINOTAUR BY THE BLACK SEA: A NEW KLEINMEISTERSCHALE FRAGMENT FROM HISTRIA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14795/jaha.12.1.2025.1220Keywords:
Histria, Theseus, Minotaur, BMN Painter, Athenian pottery in the Black Sea regionAbstract
I offer a description of a little-master lip-cup fragment (540–530 BCE) discovered in Histria in 2024 and illustrating Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Only their heads are preserved, and, highly unusually, they are touching, which is attested on fewer than 20 out of more than 400 painted vases showing the scene. I endeavor herein to find the scene’s stylistic and compositional analogies and compare it to the pyxis lid BM 1859,0301.4 and to vases in the manner of the BMN Painter. Further contrasting this scene with works of the Painter of Vatican 365, the Affecter, Taleides Painter, Antimenes Painter, and the Long-Nose Painter proves it to be part of the dynamic artistic environment in which artists experimented with the ideologically-charged topic in Pisistratid Athens. An overview of Archaic lip-cups and band-cups in Histria indicates that our shard bears the first representation of Theseus in Archaic pottery from the city of Histria. The only Greek heroes identified so far there had been Herakles (twice with the Nemean lion, and once with a Centaur), Peleus (albeit indirectly), and one Homeric hero. However, of these five instances, only one showed the face of the hero (Herakles). Our shard is also the oldest representation of Theseus on pots found in the Black Sea settlements, and testifies to the Pontic Ionian echoes of the Athenian hype surrounding the specifically Attic hero Theseus. The reasons for importing a cup with Theseus in Histria must have been primarily aesthetic, but perhaps a contributing factor was the perception of the Athenian hero as the spearhead of the fight against barbarians and Orientals, in the years leading up to the destruction of the city during Darius’s campaign or its aftermath.
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