A welcome examination of some curious creatures and a more curious god

The eight lectures that comprise this edition were first delivered by John Davidson Beazley in 1949. They were published in 1951 and soon became a of classical study of ancient Greek vases. This revised edition includes many additional illustrations.

This volume contains additions to Beazley's two great works, Attic Black-figure Vase-Painters published in 1956 and the second edition of Attic Red-figure Vase-Painters published in 1963. These additions are partly new finds and partly the result of pondering over unattributed vases. There are also additions to the comments on vases already mentioned in the earlier books. Originally published in 1971, the year after Beazley's death, the book remains indispensable to all students of Greek vase-painting.

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.