The advantages of a Classical education

A curious little bar, not so far from where I live (now, alas, defunct, but a small favourite of mine a couple of years back), was distinguished by this rather striking mural.

This is not in Greece. It is about as far from Greece as it is possible to get, without going way down into the Southern Hemisphere. And yet here is a classic piece of ancient Greek art. The bar manager - an Australian girl called Anna - and her boyfriend had painstakingly copied it from a book using the simple-but-effective gridsquare method. It sent shivers down my spine as soon as I saw it.

Most of the customers (and there were never very many anyway), if they gave this a second glance at all, probably thought only, "Hey, cool painting." But I... I actually studied Classics for my first degree (one of the reasons, I maintain, that I have remained so steadfastly unemployable ever since); so I said, "F**k me! That's Exekias!!" And so indeed it was. To be honest, I doubt if I would have recalled that fact from my undergraduate days, but I had considerably improved my grasp of this sort of stuff subsequently through having to teach the Art & Architecture module of the A-Level Classical Civilization course during my schoolmastering days.

Exekias, an Athenian master pot-painter of the later 6th Century BC, was the pre-eminent exponent of the 'black figure' style; and this is his most famous work, an interlude in the Trojan war where the two leading Greek heroes, Ajax and Achilles, amuse themselves with a board game (a form of backgammon, I suspect, since in the original - I'm pretty sure - they are each calling out their die rolls).

You do find the strangest things in bars.