Image Details

Photo courtesy the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California/Caivano Painter

Armed with a burning pine-resin torch, a Greek warrior climbs a ladder to attack a city wall on this fourth-century B.C. amphora from central Italy. The ancients routinely waged war with incendiary weapons, arrow poisons, venomous snakes, plague-ridden corpses and, not least, noxious smoke.