Structural Analysis as an Approach to Defining the Comic Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell sword, as Sourvinou-Inwood argued, signals a potential- ly more lethal threat to the pursued. The other figures in both compositions play several structural roles in the narrative. The lower scene has an additional woman, who runs away while turning back and looking at the pursuer – a figure like the Nereids found in Thetis pursuits, indicating that the victim was a member of a group and not wandering alone. Her action confirms the general threat implicit in the youth’s action, but since she is not the object of his action, it does not affect her directly in the unfolding narrative. As such, she serves as a catalyst, contextualizing the main pursuit as part of the larger story. Similarly, in the upper scene are two man-animal hybrids, a pig-headed and a horse- or donkey-headed man. The former runs behind Odysseus with both arms forward, while the latter moves away from the nucleus but turns back to look. As catalysts, these figures fill out the story of Odysseus and Kirke, being his metamorphosized sailors, but they also serve additional structural roles in the picture. As indexes, they reference Kirke’s earlier action in which her potion trans- formed them into animals. The painter here, as in most such representations of the episode, has left them as hybrid animal-humans, letting the viewer recognize their metamorphosized state. 6 In this form, they also serve as informants, providing information about the specific identity of the scene as Odysseus and Kirke and distin- guishing it from the more prototypical youth with sword pursuit. Formulating the visual narrative as a pursuit creates a very legible composition, but it also shows that in telling a story, a painter follows visual rather than literary con- ventions. In the Odyssey, Odysseus drinks the potion but remains unchanged after Kirke touches him with her wand. The hero then draws his sword and rushes toward her; rather than flee, Kirke runs under his sword and clasps his knee in lamentation (Od. 10, 321 – 324). After she recognizes him as Odysseus, she invites him into her bed, an invitation that he eventually accepts. Rather than showing Kirke clinging to Odysseus’s legs as he strides forward with his sword, vase-painters approach the story P ursuit scenes in Greek vase painting not only encom- pass a wide range of individual stories, but also require a variety of approaches to understand their meaning. In a fundamental series of articles, C. Sourvinou-Inwood defined a semiotic approach to pursuits, showing that one can decipher a semantic range of signs without neces- sarily depending upon the mythological identification of the figures. 1 Her comparison of two scenes, a youth pur- suing a woman while holding spears, and a second scene that is similar except that the youth is armed with a drawn sword, showed that the substitution of a major sign, the weapon, offered a significant change in the meaning of the scene. While the scene with spears can be described as an erotic pursuit, the scene with the sword has a more lethal intention. She relates the latter formula to the story of Theseus threatening Medea, but concludes that there do not have to be any signifiers of specific mythological identity in order to understand the contrast between the two versions of the pursuit formula, and to recognize that not all pursuits are the same. Both types of pursuit scenes, with spears and with sword, can be found on a calyx krater in New York at- tributed to the Persephone Painter (Fig. 1). 2 The bottom register of the krater has a youth carrying spears and pur- suing a woman in a formulation that matches Sourvi- nou-Inwood’s type of erotic pursuit. On the upper regis- ter Odysseus charges Kirke with a drawn sword. Kirke has dropped both skyphos and wand and runs from Odysseus while looking back. The action of Odysseus charging with a drawn sword signifies a show of lethal in- tent, as Sourvinou-Inwood has noted. 3 Looking at the picture as a narrative using structural analysis, we can de- fine this pair as the nucleus of the composition, per- forming the core actions that advance the narrative. 4 It follows the normative conventions of the pursuit for- mula, in which we have an asymmetric pair of actions: a dominant striding figure pursuing a weaker fleeing figure in a strongly directional composition. 5 This same type of structure is found in the scene of the youth pursuing the woman in the frieze below. Comparing the two, how- ever, one can see that the change of sign from spear to