A Comforting Massacre: 200 years of Ilioupersis Scenes

Debra A. Trusty (Florida State University)

The following abstract serves as a supplement to a previous CAMWS-SS lecture regarding the inspiration for Onesimos’ Ilioupersis cup. Since the presentation of this topic, I have completed my own more detailed and in-depth study of over seventy Ilioupersis scenes, which will illuminate and reinforce the importance of political iconography to ancient Greeks. From my research, it has become evident that Attic representations of the Ilioupersis, or sack of Troy, changed significantly during the early fifth century B.C. Artists at this time portrayed a gorier version of the Achaeans’ crimes: Priam’s death on a bloody altar, the rape of a naked Kassandra at the statue of Athena, and the harassment of Trojan citizens. Three unique pieces were produced by Onesimos, the Brygos Painter, and the Kleophrades Painter, which emphasize the gore and horror of the event. In order to better understand the uniqueness of these three vases, this paper focuses on a statistical analysis of over seventy Ilioupersis scenes from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.E. and demonstrates that the three featured vases have an exceptionally high quantity of violent features and features that allude to the vengeance of the gods. Motifs such as representations of blood, facial expressions, and prophetic elements are found on earlier Ilioupersis scenes but never to the magnitude seen on the three featured vases. Based on findings from previous scholars (John Boardman Antike Kunst 19 [1976] 3-18; Dyfri Williams 1991), the appearance of these scenes correlates directly to Persian attacks on Greece between 494-480 B.C.E. Boardman has already hypothesized that the sack of Athens provided the stimulus for the Kleophrades and Brygos Painters. In this manner, I argue that the sack of Miletos was the inspiration for the Onesimos cup (ca. 490 B.C.E. by Williams), since the cup dates at least a full decade prior to the Athenian encounter. Therefore, this new, gory version of the Ilioupersis may have served as a political and spiritual message to disheartened Greeks: just as the Achaean violence was avenged, so would be the Persians’ acts.