Terracotta lekythos (oil flask)
Related to the Painter of Vatican G.31
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.
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