Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)

JÁNOS GYÖRGY SZILÁGYI: A Boar Hunt

already killed a boar without a net: as it were, in single combat with the animal.

2, Odysseus' youthful adventure with the boar, whose mark, the scar, allows his nurse to recognise him, is a rite of passage from boyhood to the community of adult warriors in just this same sense, as is the tragic Calydonian boar-hunt of Meleager.

28 The quarry on the "Thracian rider" stelai is in most cases a boar, supplanted only rarely by the lion, extinct by that time in the region, proving that the image of the mounted rider is not a realistic representation. Its meaning is symbolic. This interpretation seems particularly likely in a case where the image occurs on a lekythos intended for deposition in a grave, or on "Thracian rider" reliefs, like the one from Macedonia in the Budapest collection (fig. 6), which were made as funerary monuments and dedicated by a grieving father to the memory of a dead son.

2<; In both cases the boar hunt commemorates the symbolic moment of transition in which the deceased, whom the vase accompanied to the grave, or the youth whose memory is preserved by the relief, passed from one form of being to another: from the community of the living to the more populous society of the dead. The existence of the individual is finite, but the soil of the society from which he grew is indestructible. The symposium scene found on earlier boar-hunt reliefs (fig. 7) and on the back of a "Thracian rider" stele

30 opposes this promise of indestructible life to the destiny of a single, unrepeatable moment of extinction.

31 János György Szilágyi is chief scientific advisor of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. NOTES 1 On hunting garb, see J. Aymard, Essais sur les chasses romaines des origines à la fin da siècle des Antonius, Paris 1951, 203-4. On body-armour: I. Laube, Thorakophoroi, Rahden/Westf. 2006, 19-20 (there is no parallel for the chain); see also Th. Schäfer, Andres Agathoi, Munich 1997, 36-37. : E. Reeder Williams, Hesperia 47 (1978), 359-60 and n. 12 (traces of black gloss are carefully recorded in the catalogue). 5 M. TrumpfLyritzaki, Griechische Figurenvases des reichen Stils und der spáten Klassik, Bonn 1969, 119-21. 4 Reeder Williams 1978, pl. 96, no. 34 (back). 5 P. Knoblauch, AA 1938, 342, n. 3. 6 The basic study of fifth- and fourth-century examples with a catalogue of known pieces: TrumpfLyritzaki 1969. More recent finds (with no pretense of exhaustiveness): J. Schäfer, Hellenistische Kunst aus Pergamon (Pergamenische Forschungen Band 2), Berlin 1968, 116-7 with Taf. 50 (almost certainly Athenian); Reeder Williams 1978, 379-97 (pieces found in the Athenian Agora, not mentioned