Attic Red-Figure Cup (Interior)

In the tondo 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 vessel itself, situate this scene in the symposium, and the staff at left is a marker of the youth’s leisured status.



The symposium was an integral part of Athenian aristocratic 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 central part, and the woman on this cup, nude, save for a small amulet around her thigh, is likely to be a prostitute or hetaera (courtesan).



The scene thus conveys 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.