Image Details

Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

This detail from a 5-inch-high, fifth-century B.C.E. cup from Capua, in southern Italy, shows the Trojan hero Hector (center, with a sword) fighting the Greek hero Ajax (with a spear). Hector is depicted wearing a helmet with a horsehair crest in the shape of a fantail. According to Gregory Nagy, the references to horsehair helmets in Homer’s Iliad—and the depiction of them in Greek art—are a survival from the second millennium B.C.E., for by the first millennium such helmets were no longer produced.