Accustomed as we are to white paper and canvas surfaces for drawing, it is easy to take for granted the freedom and subtlety of line that are possible on a vase prepared as this one was, with a white ground. This lekythos, or oil flask, was decorated by a master draftsman, who has been named the Achilles Painter. He worked at Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C.
The lekythos was made for the tomb. In its decoration, two young men meet at a gravestone adorned with fillets, woolen ribbons tied around it. With line alone, the Achilles Painter gives his figures the monumentality of sculpted images. In the line that describes the shoulder of the man to the right, for example, variations in thickness suggest the volume of the body. The painter drew the figures as nudes and then covered them with colored garments, which have faded to transparency in this exceptionally well-preserved piece.
The young men stand with such apparent vitality that one assumes they are both alive. But over the head of the boy to the right, there is a tiny winged figure. This is his psyche, or soul, the only clear indication that he is in fact dead. The other young man has come to remember him or to bring offerings. The living and the dead meet with the gravestone between them, like equal quantities on either side of a balance.
Most white-ground lekythoi come from tombs, where they were included as offerings for the dead. Grave goods in the classical period tend to be modest, and funerary art restrained in spirit. The Athenians of the classical period practiced both cremation and inhumation, that is, burying the whole body. But irrespective of the type of burial, they prepared the corpse in the same way. Women washed it, and laid it out on a bier, annointed with oil. A lekythos was itself a container for oil, and sweet oil a common offering for the dead. Often a simple gravestone, such as appears on the lekythos, marked the grave after the funeral, and relatives came regularly to visit the grave and honor the dead with offerings.
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