Terracotta neck-amphora (jar)

Edinburgh Painter

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Obverse, Theseus and the Minotaur with Ariadne (?) Reverse, Herakles battles an Amazon This small neck-amphora shows Theseus slaying the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull who lived in the Labyrinth at Knossos. According to myth, Theseus, one of the seven young men offered as a sacrifice to the Minotaur, killed the beast and was rescued from the Labyrinth with the help of a string given to him by Ariadne, daughter of King Minos. As Theseus began to represent many of the qualities Athenians thought important about their city, the subject of Theseus and the Minotaur became a popular scene in Athenian vase painting of the Archaic period.

Greek and Roman Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Museum's collection of Greek and Roman art comprises more than thirty thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period (ca. 4500 B.C.) to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312. It includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The geographic regions represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: Greek colonies were established around the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea, and Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The department also exhibits the art of prehistoric Greece (Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan) and pre-Roman art of Italic peoples, notably the Etruscans.

Metropolitan Museum of Art