This is a shocking cup in many ways. It is massive, if quite fragmentary, and provides the most heartbreaking rendering of the sack of Troy (the Iliupersis) in all of Greek art.
Shown is the interior – the circular tondo in the centre, and the the upper part of a more fragmentary frieze encircling it. Absent are the warriors of Troy, who have all fallen (some of their bodies lie slack on the ground). Left behind are desperate civilians (for lack of a better word), attempting to defend themselves with household implements (not shown in this view), or making piteous gestures of grief or supplication.
In the tondo an altar anchors the scene and underlines sacrilege of the Greek endeavour, taking place in a sanctuary. Neoptolomos (son of Achilleus) has Astyanax (child prince of Troy) held by the ankle, preparing to bludgeon Priam with his grandson’s body before throwing the boy off the city’s battlements. White-haired Priam raises his upturned hand in a futile gesture of supplication. Behind him, his grand-daughter Polyxena pulls at her unbound hair – a gesture of mourning and in this case perhaps self-mourning or premonition as she will soon be sacrificed by the Greeks for favourable winds homewards.
In the section of frieze directly above, nearly nude Kassandra (priestess and prophetess) kneels and clutches at the cult statue of Athena (Troy’s Palladion) gorgeously kitted out in an embroidered peplos). She turns backwards towards her attacker, also making a gesture of supplication. But to no avail – he has grasped her by the hair (a near universal symbol of rape and humiliation in Greek art), and she will eventually be taken captive to die in Mycenae.
Likely made in the intervening years between the Persian invasions of the Greek homeland, it is not difficult to imagine what the Athenian drinker would contemplate when reaching the bottom of this glorious cup…soon, perhaps, he too would be called upon to save his city from destruction and the terrible human cost that would come with it.
