Talk:Euthymides

Query

Could it please be clarified whether the article is written in British or American English?

• ...whose work was characterised by a detailed study of anatomy... "Characterised" is British spelling.
• ...leaving the foreground rendered by the negative space in the natural color of the clay. "Color" is American spelling.

MSincccc (talk) 16:06, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

British English. I've added the relevant template and fixed the typo of "colour". UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 16:51, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

The article was an enjoyable read. I went through the prose and found it perfectly fine. Best of luck with the GA nomination. MSincccc (talk) 17:01, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

GA review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Euthymides/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 10:08, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: AmazingAce123 (talk · contribs) 17:24, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I believe this article qualifies as a GA.

This article is 1. well-written, 2. verifiable, 3. broad (covering both the artist's biography and the highlights of overall artistic movement), 4. neutral, 5. stable and 6. illustrated.

It might be worth expanding on his selection of compositions - the Italian version of the article does this well. Adding subheadings could also help readers more easily skim to the relevant sections. That said, both suggestions are ultimately matters of personal opinion, so I leave them to the author’s discretion.

Well done on your article overall - I particularly enjoyed the way you summarized the red-figure style and contrasted it with the pre-existing black figure style. Beautiful work!

Sources

All sources are certainly reliable for the purposes for GA. Spot check from this revision:

• [4] Y
• [8a] Y
• [12a] Y
• [16] Y Although I would also explicitly reference page 51.
• [17] Y
• [18] Y
• [19] Y
• [23] Y

All looks good. Accordingly passing on CLOP/OR, and after a brief look within used sources and elsewhere, broadness. I'll leave you some optional suggestions that go past the GA criteria:

• You can link the Internet Archive's copy of The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture.
• Your spelling for Encylopedia may also be adjusted, as I don't see a copy of the book which uses the Encyclopaedia spelling.
• I think for Keuls (2011) just keep it simply as 1997. The actual book doesn't identify itself as a 2011 edition, and entering the ISBN you give in Worldcat simply gives the original 1997 edition.

Rollinginhisgrave (talk | contributions) 14:34, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, Rollinginhisgrave -- all done as suggested. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:59, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Transcribing "H" as a mark of aspiration

Euthymides lived during a time when the Athenians used Η to mark the "h" sound (much) later rendered as a rough breathing, rather than as the "long e" for which it's used in schoolbook Ancient Greek. I had previously rendered the famous inscription of the Revellers Vase into "standard" later Attic, as ὡς οὐδέποτε Εὐφρόνιος. However, a recent image caption rendered a different inscription as οἶνον hεδὺν ἔνχε, taking the opposite approach and rendering the Η with a Latin h.

I am well outside my expertise when it comes to judging the merits of each approach, but for now have changed the renditions of the first inscription to read hως οὐδέποτε Εὐφρόνιος, so at least we're consistent. Smooth breathings remain marked as "normal". I would welcome a correction if I've erred in doing this, but otherwise this note can serve as a record of the article's established (such that it is) style. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:32, 28 December 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't think of checking to see how you had transcribed the inscription on the Munich amphora. Good for you for noticing that we had gone about it in different ways. In general, I prefer to reproduce such inscriptions with the letter forms in use at the time, or at least a close approximation of them, rather than converting them to the later forms that appear in most modern Greek texts. It's not only the aspirate that we're talking about here. The Athenian alphabet did not consistently distinguish between short and long E and between short and long O before the end of the 5th century: the Ionian characters eta and omega were only officially adopted in 403/2 B.C. Before that time, long and short E were both reguarly represented by the character E (naturally, since the character H was in use for the aspirate), and long O and short O were both represented by the character O. The same is true for some Ionic consonants, like Ψ for the combination Φ + Σ. So on the amphora in Munich, Euthymides signed his name ΕΥΘΥΜΙΔΕΣ ΕΓΡΑΦΣΕΝ, not ΕΥΘΥΜΙΔΗΣ ΕΓΡΑΨΕΝ, and the first word in ὡς οὐδέποτε Εὐφρόνιος is written ΗΟΣ, not ΗΩΣ or ΩΣ. (And of course he wrote in all caps and without diacritics, since lower-case letters and accents are Byzantine inventions.) Epigraphers usually prefer to transcribe the characters that were actually used by the writer of the inscription, as far as possible, but in the special case of the character H, to avoid confusion between its use as an aspirate and its use as a long E, the convention of using a lower-case Latin letter h for the aspirate is widespread in epigraphical publications. (To see the dangers of the confusion you don't have to look any further than the MFA's own description of the Apollo and Herakles amphora, where they incorrectly transcribe the label naming Herakles in the genitive as ΗΡΑΚΛΕΟΣ, interpreting the first character as an eta rather than an aspirate. That looks normal to someone used to late Classical and Hellenistic orthography, but the inscription on the vase is actually ΗΕΡΑΚΛΕΟΣ: the long E in the first syllable was represented by E, not H, and the first character is an aspirate, not an eta.)

Although in my file descriptions at the Commons I usually prefer to use the letter forms that the original artist or stonecutter used, it's not particularly important here in an article intended for nonspecialist readers, so if you'd rather stick to your original practice (converting to the letter forms of the 4th century and later), feel free to change them back. One benefit of doing so is that it will prevent some readers, who have just enough Greek to read the inscription but not enough to be familiar with specialist epigraphic conventions, from assuming that the Latin h is a typo and trying to fix it. Why confuse them if you don't have to? I have no objection to doing it your way, and I can see some distinct advantages for general readers. In that case, you'd write οἶνον ἡδὺν ἔνχε in the caption of the Warsaw vase. (Strictly speaking, we should write hε<δὺν> or ἡ<δὺν>, since according to the descriptions by Beazley and Immerwahr only the first two letters of the adjective (HE) are actually present on the vase -- but again, no one in the target audience cares about that, so why bother?) Choliamb (talk) 03:48, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

I'm now tying myself in a knot with σοὶ τένδι Εὐθυμίδῃ καλῷ -- I can't find a good picture of the end of that inscription, but the personal name definitely seems to end ΕΙ, so presumably we should have σοὶ τένδι Εὐθυμίδει καλοί -- with the accent on the iota?

I can see it both ways with the transcription, and it would make sense to follow what the "grown-ups" do -- yes, there's value in transliterating it in a way that will make sense to people who can read Greek but don't know the philological differences from textbook C4th Attic, but we also have the Latin transcription, so there's something also to be said for making sure we're satisfying those who do know the whole picture as well as those who don't (who can use the transcription anyway). UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 14:12, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

Oh, yes, I missed that one. As you correctly deduced, the inscription on the hydria by Phintias is ΣΟΙ ΤΕΝΔΙ ΕΥΘΥΜΙΔΕΙ ΚΑΛΟΙ (although not everyone agrees that the last word belongs with the others). For transcriptions see ARV² 23,7 and AVI 5285, the latter with notes on readings. The lower-case version you tentatively suggest above is fine as regards letter forms, but it runs aground on the accentuation of ΚΑΛΟΙ, which requires a circumflex over the penultimate vowel (long O), not an acute over the iota adscript (if you write καλοί, it looks like the nominative plural). The problem, of course, is that in Greek a circumflex is never found over a short vowel, so most unicode fonts don't include the characters E + circumflex and O + circumflex, because it never occurs to the designers that E and O might, in some cases, be long. Specialty Greek fonts used in classical publications are a different matter (Hesperia, for example, uses Kadmos for most of its Greek, supplemented by New Athena, and both of them have these characters), but for that to work a user has to have the font installed, and even if they do, I doubt there's a way to force a word or a phrase in a Wikipedia article to display in a font other than the one the user has set as their default. You can try to kludge something together with HTML escape codes that add a separate accent glyph to a preceding unaccented letter, like this: καλο͂ι (look at the wikicode to see what I did there), but the result is not really satisfactory, since the circumflex isn't properly centered over the vowel as it is when the letter and accent are composed as a single glyph. Wikipedia is not set up to serve the needs of epigraphic specialists (no reason why it should be) and that's just the way it is.

So -- what to do? Two choices, I think:

• Print the Greek inscriptions in upper case without diacritics. This reproduces what the vase painter wrote with the greatest fidelity, and doesn't force you to make any compromises involving letter forms and accents. For short inscriptions it's not really any harder to read than lower case, and for those who can't read it, you have the transliteration. Downside: all caps looks a bit shouty, although these inscriptions are all short enough that perhaps that's not a deal-breaker. I see that the article on the amphora in Boston, which we are discussing elsewhere, uses all caps for its inscriptions (transliterations rather than Greek, but same principle).
• Go back to your original plan and print them in the standard form used in modern classical texts, observing the distinction between omicron and omega and epsilon and eta and marking aspirates with a rough breathing. This is anachronistic but not misleading in any important way, since it's purely a matter of orthography, not meaning. We use lower-case letters and diacritics when quoting Sappho and Thucydides, after all, a practice far more anachronistic than the simple substitution of Η for Ε and Ω for Ο! Choliamb (talk) 15:46, 29 December 2025 (UTC)

I've just tried it with the all-caps Greek, no diacritics -- not sure I have a strong opinion here. Philologically better but aesthetically less so, perhaps. Of course, it's still not quite "right", since we're using the later form of sigma, so it's still a sort of compromise: but at least it's now easier to look at the inscription as we record it in the text and see how it maps onto the vases. Others very welcome to chime in: you can see what the alternative looks like by taking the edit history from 28/12/25 or earlier. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 17:02, 29 December 2025 (UTC)