“Painted Pottery and the Transformation of Athens” by Robin Osborne

The pots painted in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BC depict different scenes from those painted at the end of the sixth century and depict them in a different way. This fact is so well known to scholars that it is taken for granted. In this lecture Robin Osborne looks more closely at what changes occurred, and in particular at the changes in the scenes depicted. He argues that, rather than taking the changes for-granted, we should see them as the best evidence we have for the moral, political and aesthetic preferences that constituted and distinguished classical Greek culture. Athenian pottery, he shall claim, not only offers us an unparalleled window through which to view the transformation from archaic to classical Greece, but also an insight into why that transformation took place.

Athenian red-figure pottery offers unique possibilities for the sort of rewriting of art history that he is advocating because of the quantities in which it survives and because of the range of subject which it represents. Past scholarship has often concentrated on the artists, at the expense of the subject matter of their art, or, when analyzing subject-matter, has ignored the fact that the choice of scene changes over time; by contrast, this study takes diachronic change as its central problem.

Osborne looks in turn at various scenes that attracted the attention of painters of red-figure pottery, concentrating particularly on athletics and warfare, but casting a glance towards sexual relations too. His primary question is how the choice of scenes relating to soldiers, athletes, courtship and sex changed over time. He argues that the history of images of warfare or of athletics or of sexual relations is not determined by changes to fighting or what happened in the gymnasium, or to changes in how men and women related, but rather by a changed view of the world that encompassed all of these activities.

In conclusion, he explores the moral and political implications of the changes in the selection of scenes represented, and he makes the case for the impact of aesthetic factors on how people saw the world and considered their own relation to it. He then discusses the ways in which the history of sculpture does and does not parallel the history represented in painted pottery.

Robin Osborne was introduced to both Classics and the History of Art at Colchester Royal Grammar School in the UK. He read Classics as an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge (1976–79), stayed in Cambridge to write a Ph.D. on Classical Athens and Attica under the supervision of Anthony Snodgrass (1979–82) and was then elected to a Research Fellowship at King’s Cambridge (1982–86).

From 1986 to 2001 he taught in Oxford as a Fellow of first Magdalen College and then Corpus Christi College, being promoted to a titular Professorship in Ancient History in 1996. In 2001 he returned to Cambridge to the established chair in Ancient History, from which he retired in 2024. He has published widely on Greek History and Greek Art and Archaeology, including Archaic and Classical Greek Art in the Oxford History of Art series (1998), Greece in the Making 1200–479 B.C. (1996, 2nd ed. 2009), Athens and Athenian Democracy, (2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (2011). He is a past President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and of the Classical Association, a former Chair of the Council of University Classical Departments,  and he was Chair of the Classics Sub-Panel in the 2014 UK Research Excellent Framework exercise. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2006.