Apollo took the body and cleaned it, before handing it to Sleep and Death. The Greeks seize the amour of the fallen warrior, but Zeus asks Apollo to carry his body to Lycia to be buried with honour. The king of Lycia (Turkey), he was one of the greatest of the men fighting on the Trojan side, but he is felled by Patroclus. The Sarpedon Krater depicts the moment in the Trojan War when Sleep and Death carry off the slain body of Sarpedon (the son of Zeus). Drama is not my forte, but Spivey’s gripping narrative is as exciting and shocking as anything on TV. If there’s a Netflix director looking for a new true crime story, they will find it here. In 2008 it was repatriated to Italy as part of a negotiated settlement. They are paid about $ 800.Ī year later Robert E Hecht, a shady American antiques seller based in Rome sells, to the Met Museum in New York a krater signed by one of the ancient world’s most revered artists for $1,200,000. Nothing is said of what they have done that night.
They head to the lights of town, to drink in cafes, to dance and make love. A shiver runs down his spine and he lights a cigarette. He thinks he sees a bowl and several smaller cups drawn up from the earth and then nothing. A lock out on the edge, still wearing his Barena sports jacket and black turtleneck against the night’s chill, glances back. No words are spoken, but a frisson moves through the group. Now the sound of shovels digging the rocky soil in unison, syncopated and fast, is like hot jazz. When they hit something, the team turns and works on that point. Long poles with spikes ( spillones) piercing the earth rhythmically like the V8 engine in a 33 Stradale.
A man stops here to comb his hair, another, perhaps, takes off his sunglasses for a second to massage the bridge of his nose. Sports jackets, the day to day uniform of Italians from that time, lying nonchalantly on rocky walls. Their muscles bulging beneath their sweat stained Salvatore Piccolo shirts. The healthy glean of their sun kissed skin, kept young with a healthy Italian diet, visible from the light of their torches. We can imagine them- handsome and nattily dressed. Omertà, the ancient code of honour has prevailed to this day.
On a dark and stormy night, in Etruria in late December 1971, a ragged band of diggers called the tombaroli unearthed a masterpiece of Greek art: the Sarpedon Krater.
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