[2] The vase has been variously assigned to the middle and late Proto-Corinthian periods and given a date of c. 650–640 BC;[3] it is now in the National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia, Rome (inv.

It was found amidst a large number of potsherds of mixed provenance, including one bucchero vessel inscribed with five lines in two early Etruscan alphabets announcing the ownership of Atianai, perhaps also the original owner of the Chigi vase.

For one thing, the hoplites shown here meeting at the moment of othismos (or "push") do not carry short swords, but instead like their Homeric forebears have two spears; one for thrusting and one for throwing.

To render the phalanx tactics unambiguously the painter would have had to have given a bird's-eye view of the action, a perspective unknown in Greek vase painting.

However, Thucydides does state that a Spartan phalanx in the Battle of Mantinea was accompanied by aulos-players in order to keep step as they approached the opposing army, which may suggest that they were used in the same way at the time when the vase was made.

[14] The scene with the Judgement of Paris on the Chigi vase is the earliest extant depiction of the myth, evidence perhaps of knowledge of the lost epic Cypria from the 650s BC.

In line with recent scholarship of the Paris structuralist school,[17] Jeffrey Hurwit suggests that reading upwards along the vertical axis we can discern the development of the ideal Corinthian man from boyhood through agones and paideia to full warrior-citizen, with the sphinx marking the liminal stages in his maturation.