National Archeological Museum Pt. II

Once again, my apologies for the gap in days for blogging; Athens has kept us all at a running pace! On our first day back, we journeyed back to the National Archeological Museum in order to meet William and Mary’s very own classics professor: Professor Oakley, so that he could walk us through the vase collections. He shared with us the inside scoop on ancient pottery. I am going to keep this post short because I have already covered this museum. These are some of the new things I saw!

Corinthian style pot in black figure.

Molds for fruits.

Orientalizing period black figure vase with mythology (Heracles and Nessus) depicted.  

My favorite! Simple and elegant. Black figure, early Classical.

Archaic period sphinx.

Loutrophore. A vase that can be used for funerals or weddings. This one is for a funeral and shows funeral preparations.

A cup with a negress upon it. Greeks referred to all people darker than them as Ethiopian which means "burnt face."

A Classical red figure vase depicting Heracles attacking Egyptians.

Pyxis, black figure with white ground accents.

Amphorae from the Panhellenic games which depicts wrestlers. (Spencer and Seth, this one is for you!)

A bronze sculpture from the Hellenistic period of a stoic philosopher. This sculpture was found in the Antikythera shipwreck. 

A bronze young man found in the shipwreck.

A marble wrestler. 

A corroded marble statue of Odysseus.

A siren found outside of a burial chamber.

A creepy theater mask.

A statue of Aphrodite warding of the advanced of the nature god, Pan. Eros (Cupid)  is trying to defend his mother.

A dying Gaul. A very common pose of the day.

These last two pictures are part of a comedic piece. From the back, the statue is quite androgynous. However, when one walks around the stature to determine what the gender is, he is surprised to find that the stature has the lower genitals of a male and the chest area of a female. The shock factor of the hermaphrodite stature is just to tease viewers. This one, however, was simple all female.