The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase by Nigel Spivey

186 PHOENIX or others. Levin-Richardson’s examination of legal texts supports such use of property among the elite as a revenue stream. The next three chapters (Six to Eight) put the evidence discussed previously to work and tease out themes already touched on. Focusing on clients, then female prostitutes, and finally male prostitutes, Levin-Richardson considers each group’s relation to the space, graffiti, objects, and each other. Her attention to multiple perspectives is a strength of the book. Like the frescoes, the graffiti mostly presents a “normative” sexuality that positions the male client as penetrator. Despite their variable status, all visitors to the brothel experienced the masculinity of free elite males by enjoying privileged lines of sight as they entered and reclining on couches to drink and have sex when inside. The graffiti reveals visitors boasting of their sexual exploits and engaging in masculine rivalry in ways that may not have been possible for all outside the walls of the brothel. At the same time, repeated names in the graffiti suggest some clients sought emotional connections with prostitutes and became regular visitors. The inclusion of prostitutes as workers and social actors is a welcome approach. Levin-Richardson uses the graffiti to showcase the emotional labour performed by prostitutes who greet and praise clients and thus foster special or long-term interactions. Viewing such relations as labour allows her to acknowledge the work prostitutes undertook to obscure their exploitation when servicing customers. The graffiti also suggests that prostitutes took on “stage names” and used these names to construct personas for themselves to please clients and transcend their circumstances. Her arguments that some of the graffiti was written by the workers themselves is surely correct and reveals prostitutes proclaiming sexual agency, expressing grief, and interacting in myriad ways with the space and clients. Such graffiti challenge us to rethink these women and men (and I dare say also children) who found ways to memorialize themselves and enact agency even as they were exploited. These chapters also consider male versus female sexual labour. In sum, Levin-Richardson pushes the boundaries of the evidence in productive ways. Her approach constitutes a gold standard in the examination of “marginal” individuals for acknowledging the complexity of their experiences and not confining them to Roman discourses of power. Beautifully produced, this new monograph will be of interest to both experts and novices, within and outside the field of classics. The accessible style is handled with balance so that both equally benefit and remain engaged. Brock University Allison Glazebrook The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase. By Nigel Spivey. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2019. Pp. 256, 3 plates, 78 figs. Spivey's treatment of the “Sarpedon krater,” an Athenian red-figure vase painted by Euphronios in the late sixth century b.c., is a wide-ranging discussion of the krater’s original use in ancient Greece and Etruria, its artistic legacy in the Roman and Renaissance worlds, and the present-day issues of archaeological looting and museum collecting in Italy and the United States. Chapter One is a very brief preface to the book that begins : “As vases go, the Sarpedon krater is relatively large. As landmarks go, it is almost BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 187 ridiculously small . . .” (10). This curious opening is due to the fact that the book was first published in 2018 in the “Landmarks Library” and therefore Spivey must justify the inclusion of a single, albeit exceptional, vase in this series. He does so with an in-depth discussion of both the actual and symbolic value of the krater in a refreshing reminder of the importance of ancient vases, which highlights a medium that is often sidelined as being of interest only to art historians and archaeologists. Chapter Two deals with the modern value of the krater and the notorious story of its discovery and collection. Looted from an Etruscan grave by tombaroli, the krater was sold, with a fictional provenance, by the unscrupulous art dealers Giacomo Medici and Robert Hecht to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 for the record price of $1,000,000. Although the buyers suspected that the vase had been...

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