ABSTRACT
So far we have considered depictions of women’s lives, and the ways in which they are reflected on pots, largely in isolation, looking at women among women. We have touched on representations of women with men to a limited extent, men as sexual partners, husbands or slaves, but have by and large preserved a distinction between male and female spheres. This division is one to which the Greeks adhered too, yet one of the surprising features of later pot-painting is the number of non-mythological images depicting men and women in each other’s company. There are numerous scenes of men and women ‘in conversation’, and images of men and women together in contexts both public and private. For example, a column-krater by the Orchard Painter in New York depicts a man and two women in conversation (fig. 5.1), a pyxis in Manchester a scene of men and women in an interior (fig. 5.2), and a cup by the Veii Painter in Tokyo shows a woman conversing with an athlete (fig. 5.23).1
