Greek painters, especially those from the 5th century BCE, were remarkably skilled and created many hundreds of vases and other paintings. The many varieties of surfaces include terracotta plaques, walls, ceilings, panels, wood, marble, ivory, leather, parchment, and ceramic slabs. They used some of the most beautiful natural and synthetic pigments available at that time. From China, they imported the manufactured variety of vermilion. Egypt was the source for Egyptian blue and green frit, which were also synthetically made.
There will be no shortage of any color for my project, as the Greeks had a wide variety of colors for their palettes. I am most thrilled to learn they used natural cinnabar and synthetic vermilion, both splendid reds. These were two pigments I sorely missed during all of my Egyptian painting. The closest was red iron oxide bumped with madder. That was adequate, but cinnabar and vermilion are much more intense and exciting to use.