Oliver Taplin: Comic vase-paintings

Lecture by world-known British academic and classicist Oliver Taplin (University of Oxford) aimed at wide academic public.

Comic vase-paintings: the first signs of Greek Comedy spreading into Italy 

We are fortunate to have a large and entertaining body of vase-paintings from the first half of the fourth century BC, commonly (but wrongly) known as “phlyax vases”). They not only show scenes which seem to be specific incidents in specific plays, they are explicitly shown as scenes of performance, with masks, costumes, stages, props etc. It has not been sufficiently recognised 
that the majority of thee vases have been found in tombs in the northern part of Apulia, inhabited by Italians for whom Greek was not their first language. This lecture will ask how and how far they would have been able to appreciate these pervasively theatrical scenes of Greek comedy. 

Oliver Taplin is a British academic and classicist. Now retired, he was a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. His research and teaching deal with all aspects of ancient Greek epic, tragedy and comedy with related subjects of theatre, vase painting and (drama) translation. Among his most influential works is The Stagecraft of Aeschylus; Greek Tragedy in Action; and Pots and Plays. Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century BC.