Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 291
ond century b.c.e. by Antipater of Sidon for the benefit of tourists
were Greek—though since Antipater was himself Greek, he may
not have been entirely objective. They include the statue of Zeus
at Olympia, the temple of Artemis at Ephesos, the Mausoleum at
Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos (or Lighthouse)
of Alexandria.
Painting
Until fairly recently, our knowledge of the great paintings that
decorated the interior walls of Greek temples and public buildings
was mainly reliant upon literary descriptions, which failed to convey
any real sense of the technical quality of the originals. Recently,
however, thanks partly to the discovery of the Macedonian tombs
at Vergina, we have direct evidence of these murals.
Even so, when we talk about Greek painting, we tend to think
first of the relatively humble medium of vase painting, which happens
to be far more durable. Vase painting is a major source of
information about Greek life. Especially popular subjects are drinking
parties and visits to the tomb, because most painted pottery
was intended to be either used at a symposium or deposited in the
grave. Other popular subjects include athletic activities and scenes
taking place in the women’s quarters. Earlier vases are decorated
in the black-figure technique against a red background. Around
525 b.c.e. , however, the process was reversed, and the background
was painted in black, leaving the figure in red. Most scenes of daily
life are rendered in red-figure pottery.
The Politics of Greek Art
Although art was predominantly religious in function and its subject
matter was largely confined to the mythological, it was often
used to make a political statement. When, for instance, in 447 b.c.e. ,
the Athenians made the historic decision to rebuild the temples on
the Acropolis destroyed by the Persians, they incorporated a number
of barely disguised references to Athens’s heroic struggle for
freedom into the sculptures. The Parthenon metopes, for instance,
which depict the battle between the Lapiths and the centaurs, evoke
the Persian Wars, since this involved a conflict between a higher
order of civilization and a lower. It is possible, too, that the great
frieze that ran around the outer wall of the naos, whose principal
feature is a procession of Athenian cavalry, is intended to depict the