ABSTRACT
At Sotheby’s London auction rooms in December 1993 a collection of sixty-four Greek vases was sold for a total of five and a half million pounds, far outstripping the absurdly low estimates given in the sale catalogue (Hirschmann 1993). Three million pounds of that sum was paid for just two rare vases: a pair of Caeretan hydriai (Bloesch 1982: nos. 10 and 11; Hemelrijk 1984: nos. 29 and 25; Hirschmann 1993: lots 35 and 36; cf. Figure V: 5 for a Caeretan hydria). One alone fetched over two million – it is a perfectly preserved piece which on the front shows a hero, either Perseus or Herakles, fighting against a sea-monster and on the back a hunt after a stag and a goat. The prices paid for this and the other vases confirm, in one commentator’s words, ‘the continuing strength of the Greek vase market’ (Eisenberg 1994: 30). Twenty years earlier the first ‘million-dollar’ vase was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of New York (von Bothmer 1976; 1981a): a red-figure Athenian calyx-krater (Figure II: 1) which displays a scene with the body of the Trojan ally Sarpedon being lifted from the field of battle by Sleep and Death in the presence of Hermes (cf. Iliad XVI.666–83). The vase bears the name of the painter: Euphronios, and of the potter: Euxitheos; the protagonists are also named, as is a young man of the day, Leagros, who is saluted as kalos, meaning ‘handsome’. It is an excellently preserved and high-quality example of Late Archaic work, c. 510 bc.
