Attic Red-Figure Cup

In the scene on the interior of this cup, a man has sex with a woman. He stands behind her, with one hand on his hip and the other clasping the back of her thigh. The woman bends over, supporting herself on a stool, her face pressed into a full wine-skin. The wine-skin and the young man’s wreath, as well as the shape of the cup itself, associate this scene with a symposium - an all-male drinking party - and the staff at left is a marker of the youth’s leisured status.

The symposium was an integral part of Athenian society, a social gathering at which men ate, drank, played party games, sang songs, recited poetry, and were entertained with music and dance. Sex and the fulfilment of physical desires also played a part, and the woman on this cup, nude, save for a small amulet around her thigh, is likely to be a prostitute or a hetaera, a woman of independent means, sought after for her desirability.

The scene presents what a young Athenian man might expect – or hope for – in attending a symposium. Where known, however, most vases with explicit sex scenes have been discovered at Etruscan sites in Italy, and so may reveal as much about the marketing of ancient pottery as they do about Athenian behavior.