The sixth century BC in Athens is the classic moment in ancient Greek vase painting; this composition was executed about 560 BC by Lydos, a major figure in Athenian painting, in black paint on the natural red of the plate itself. Details were scratched through the black with a needle, and other colors were added on top.

Lydos shows us here the Greek king Menelaos forcibly bringing Helen, his unfaithful wife, back to Greece after the Trojan War. Menelaos, in sword and armor, climbs up the side of the plate, grasping the hem of Helen’s robe, while she stands, dignified and calm, her servant waiting modestly to the right. At the bottom, the king’s dog—a favorite animal in Lydos’s work—sniffs curiously at Helen, perhaps anticipating the couple’s reconciliation and future happy years together. Much of the composition of the plate is based on an amphora in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

In sixth century BC Greece, painting on vases was one of the most important ways in which problems of representation and narrative were worked out. This process is apparent in Lydos’s lively scene, with each character given its own distinctive personality. The story of the Trojan War itself is told in Homer’s Iliad, the touchstone for ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry and one of the great sources for writers and painters for the last three thousand years.