Between these figures is an inscription that reads εύρυμέδον ειμ[í] κυβα[---] έστεκα, restored by Schauenburg as "I am Eurymedon, I stand bent forward".

Indeed, Pinney would take this as evidence that we are presented here with a burlesque mock epic, and that the comedy, such as it is, lies in the unheroic behaviour of our hero caught in a base act.

Amy C. Smith suggests a compromise between the purely sexual and the overtly political reading with her argument that when the Greek figure announces himself as Eurymedon he adopts the role of personification of the battle in the manner of prosopopoeia or "fictive speaking" familiar from 5th-century tragedy.

The vase has been presented as evidence both for and against the theory advanced by Foucault, Dover, and Paul Veyne[9] that sexual penetration is the privilege of the culturally dominant Greek citizen class over women, slaves, and barbarians.

James Davidson, however, offers the alternative view that the practices identified and stigmatised in the Greek literature as katapugon (κατάπυγον)[10] and with which we might characterise our archer, is better understood as not as effeminacy but sexual incontinence lacking self-discipline.