Terracotta lekythos (oil flask)

Painter of Vatican G.31

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ajax and Achilles playing a board game, and Athena During the second half of the sixth century B.C., a popular subject was that of the Greek heroes Ajax and Achilles playing a board game to while away their time during the siege of Troy. The most famous representation occurs on an amphora now in the Vatican Museums. Exekias, perhaps the greatest black-figure artist, made and painted the amphora, and he may also have invented the iconography. The subject was applied to all manner of other vases, as this representative example indicates.

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