On one of the four sides of an Attic red-figure astragalos of ca. 470–450 B.C.E. from the workshop of Sotades, a man stands positioned next to a rock-like structure or open-mouthed cave (fig. 0.1). With one arm raised up high and the other pointing forward, he looks towards a file of three maidens performing a ring dance while directing the girls’ (and external viewer’s) attention to the scene that fills the remaining three sides of the vessel: here ten maidens dance in mid-air, executing a variety of motions and steps (fig. 0.2). As Gloria Ferrari’s rich reading of the image confirms, the original publisher of the vase correctly identified that ethereal chorus: they are the constellations of the Pleiades and Hyades, both originally maiden collectives then catasterized, who form among the principal archetypal parthenaic choruses in the Greek sources; it was they, according to a scholion to Theocritus (Σ ad Theoc.

Setting up golden columns beneath the well-walled porch of our dwelling, we will fix in the ground, as it were, a hall to be gazed at with wonder; when a work is begun it is necessary to make its forefront far-shining. If someone should be an Olympic victor and a steward of the mantic altar of Zeus at Pisa and co-founder of famous Syracuse, what hymn could he escape, a man such as that, falling in with townsmen ungrudging in lovely song?

As Alex Hardie points out, the syntax of lines 5–6 can be construed in several ways. While most commentators assume that it is the sound of the fountain, its plashing waters, that lacks the accompaniment of the dance, a different sense emerges if we read ὕδατι with Castalia and ψόφον with ἀνδρῶν: ‘for having heard, at the bronze-gated water of Castalia, a noise – bereft of males – of dancing … ’. Read in this manner, the sound belongs not to the fountain, but to that made by the choral dancers as they perform.

A well-known Protoattic neck amphora from Eleusis by the Polyphemus Painter dated to ca. 670–650 preserves the largest extant vase painting (fig. 2.0). On its central field, two Gorgons, presented frontally as they move away from the headless body of their sister who seemingly floats horizontal in mid-air, pursue Perseus fleeing around the damaged curve of the vase. The vessel fascinates scholars for any number of reasons: not only do its dimensions outstrip those of other amphoras for the period (it measures some 1.42 m in height), while its decoration offers ‘the most complete example known of the Black and White style’; it also features our earliest visual representation of Perseus’ flight and among the first depictions of the Polyphemus episode on its neck. On this pot too Athena makes her début in Attic vase painting.

This chapter explores the question of how erotic tenderness was represented pictorially in early Imperial art. The pinakes from cubicula B and D in the Villa della Farnesina in Rome (ca. 20s BCE) are among the earliest surviving tender representations of lovers to have been found in Roman domestic spaces. Since the villa’s discovery in the late nineteenth century, these frescoes have prompted numerous interpretations, mostly of a moralizing, biographical bent. Instead of focusing on the ultimately unanswerable question of who might have owned this splendid residence, the argument presents these well-known wall paintings as expressions of a contemporary cultural phenomenon, namely the formation of a new romantic ideal. Close readings of key passages from Latin love elegy help to situate these images within a larger concomitant debate on privacy and domesticity. This chapter also traces the diffusion of the Roman ideal of amatory tenderness beyond the capital and the court. Two first-century wall paintings from Pompeii, one from the House of Caecilius Jucundus and the other from the House of Lucretius Fronto, demonstrate how quickly this new romantic ideal was absorbed into Roman familial ideology and became emblematic of widespread socio-cultural aspirations.

This chapter addresses the more common subject of mythological representations, focusing on one of the most frequently depicted mythological lovers in Roman wall painting, the cyclops Polyphemus. Beginning with the earliest extant Roman depiction of Polyphemus as a lover, a now much damaged fresco in the so-called House of Livia on the Palatine (30s BCE), the analysis proceeds by exploring the creation of a tender iconography for this well-known monster over the course of the first century CE. At the same time, it considers different literary treatments of this myth by Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid. These poetic and pictorial portrayals of Polyphemus as a long-suffering, sympathetic romantic protagonist likewise point to the emergence of a Roman aesthetic of tenderness, capable of transforming even the most savage of Homeric characters into a pitiable, domesticated creature. This study of Polyphemus as a lover in Roman poetry and painting also traces the reception of the Roman aesthetic of tenderness among non-elite contexts on the Bay of Naples. A well-known Campanian image of Polyphemus receiving a love letter points to the influence of Latin elegy in the representation of this well-known mythical character in Roman art.