Seventeen papers, from an interdisciplinary colloquium held in Guenzberg in 1999, discuss the depiction and representation of reality or real life in Greek art during the 5th and 4th centuries AD. Divided into sections on politics, religion, roles and technique, subjects include the depiction of slaves and other people deemed ethnically, socially or physically inferior, the presentation of the elite and superior, the depiction of gods as men and men as gods, religious rituals, representations of the male and female body, the athlete and the hero. Contributors, who include both historians and art historians, discuss a variety of artistic mediums with emphasis on vases and sculptural reliefs.