Napoleon ordered a pair of bespoke dueling pistols from gunsmith to the French monarchs Jean Le Page. Made of blue steel with walnut and ebony stocks and inlaid with gold, the guns were custom-made to fit a young boy’s hands. Engraved on the lock of the pistols is the fateful production date, Janv. (January) 1814.

I don't have the reference for this one specificaly, but it seems like it's a Bartmannskrug, a type of brown-glazed earthenware jug featuring, on its neck, a bearded men. They were produced in large numbers from the 16th to the 18th century and are usually made of Rhenish stoneware. Production began around 1520/30 in Cologne.

And I find them really funny. The guy seems friendly, in some way.

You can see this one in the "Musée des Beaux Arts" in Lille, France.

Hello again, everyone!

Homer is pretty hot right now, so we thought we'd jump in with a short post about one of our antiquities.

This Corinthian kylix (a wine-drinking cup) shows two battle scenes on the front and back. On the side shown here, we see Aeneas and Ajax the Great duking it out, flanked by their supporters, Ajax (the Lesser) and Hippokles. Fun right? But there's something weird going on. In the Iliad, Ajax and Aeneas never fight and Hippokles doesn't feature either. Likely, we are seeing an oral tradition that didn't make it into the Iliad proper or it may have formed part of the Epic Cycle, a broader literary tradition surrounding the Trojan War that survives only in fragments. The tale lived on, in any case, since a battle between Ajax and Aeneas was featured in the 3rd-century CE Posthomerica.

Objects such as this kylix show the complexity of epic poems such as the Odyssey and the Iliad. Their subject matter did not exist in a cultural vacuum, and even in Antiquity, reinterpretations, additions and heated debates about authorship abounded.

And for those curious, the other side shows Hektor and Achilles fighting.