The chapter is focused on one of the leading examples of ancient Greek pottery from the seventh century BC: the so-called Chigi jug. The images on the jug are of two different sorts: the first one depicts habitual forms of human aristocratic behavior, the second refers to one specific story. Such a distinction, it seems to me, can be usefully applied to Greek iconography in general.

Mobile objects decorated with images referring to stories (I shall call them narrative images) are far from being frequent. This is true for the world at large, but also specifically for ancient Greece, where they emerge only around 700 BC and remain relatively rare throughout the following centuries. The obvious question to ask is: what caused them to emerge, and what kept them from disappearing again?

It seems important to understand that no image is able to tell the story it refers to, for it lacks the very words that would be necessary in order to do so; the task of telling the story inevitably falls to the beholder, who must of course already know the story he is supposed to tell. Narrative images therefore require additional effort, both from their producer and from their audience. Additional effort is only invested if it leads to some kind of additional benefit. Of what kind was this benefit?

Narrative images are found on luxury artifacts that were produced for the elite – but we have to understand what kind of elite this was. I shall focus on two peculiar features of elites in Archaic Greece: one is a striking lack of criteria of belonging, the other is an equally striking predisposition to competitive forms of behavior (the Greek term for this being ‘agón’). The two features are related: exactly because membership in the elite was not given by genealogical criteria, it had to be determined by a permanent competition for social prestige. The ancient Greek elite had the tendency to turn almost any kind of social interaction into a competition. This is true not only for war and sports and homoerotic love, but also for something as apparently uncompetitive as drinking parties (symposia).