It is thirty years since the study of the symposion began to attract serious research. The pioneers have had their say, and a new generation is taking up the challenge; recent studies of sympotic literature and the art and archaeology of the symposion are breaking new ground, and the theme seems as vibrant as ever. C.'s work is welcome as the first full book-length survey, which demonstrates what has been achieved so far. She does not, however, venture into new avenues of research, and even since her publication the discoveries at Methoni Pierias and the publication of the sympotic contents of a well in the Athenian agora by K. Lynch have raised important new questions (M. Besios, G.Z. Tziphopoulos, A. Kotsonas, Methoni Pierias I [2012]; K.M. Lynch, The Symposium in Context, Hesperia Suppl. 46 [2011]).

Chapter 1 offers a description of the social rituals of the symposion; this is the most complete account I know, and will place all future students of the subject in her debt, though it is worth adding the discussion of the archaeological evidence in Lynch. Typically, however, C. ends with an aporia: this picture has been created from a whole range of types of evidence and across many periods: how can we know that any individual symposion in any period ever conformed to the rituals that she has described? It seems to me that this formulation involves a category mistake. What our evidence offers is not a description drawn from real events which can be read back into individual occasions in order to complete them, but the concept of a symposion drawn from poetic and artistic imagery, and from later literary and scholarly recreations of an imagined world. No symposion will have conformed exactly to this composite image, but all will have been experienced by the participants as individual examples in relation to an ideal concept, just as in Plato's cave the true reality of the world of ideas exists beyond the sensory experience of apparent events: social rituals belong to the sphere of the imaginaire, not to the world of fact.

In the second half of her work C.'s main focus is on the problem of the relationship between poetry and art. This is the most controversial part of her analysis: she follows Neer in assuming that the sympotic lifestyle was confined to an aristocracy of which poets were full and natural members: their words are performed within and to the sympotic group. But potters on the other hand were excluded from the symposion as craftsmen or banausoi (R.T. Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting [2002]). This conventional picture is accepted without serious discussion; yet, as she clearly sees, it leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the evidence of poetry and pottery should be treated, not as complementary, but as two opposite viewpoints on the symposion, one internal and the other external – as ‘imperfectly aligned lenses in which the focus can be directed to different aspects of the same phenomenon’ (p. 247) This view runs as a leitmotif through her argument, and causes her immense problems in understanding the relation between word and image.

Much of the evidence she produces therefore requires complex reinterpretation. The chapters ‘Vasi e parole’ and ‘Immagini controluce’ tackle the evidence for the self-confidence of potters and painters exhibited most clearly in their signing their works and dedicating on the Acropolis. She collects and analyses inscriptions on vases, both before and after firing – these include poems and ownership inscriptions (both of which appear already in our earliest evidence from the eighth century) together with the offer of gifts and the inscribing of kalos vases, many of which suggest a close relationship between inscriber of the message and symposiast: some of these inscriptions may be straightforward, but others involve sophisticated games which play with and subvert the expectations of the user. Did the potters who created trick vases, obscene shapes and ‘mask’ eye-cups not share in the jokes they perpetrated? Is this simply, as she says, an external ‘form of contact with these values and a mode of participating in the symposion, the toasts, the music and the games’ (p. 215)? It is difficult to believe that all this carefully collected evidence can be explained in terms of a hierarchical patron–craftsman relationship, rather than a shared activity.

This interpretation is hard enough to sustain in the earlier periods of sympotic poetry and art; it becomes impossible in the late archaic period of professional poets working for patrons and of the artists of the Red-Figure group known as the Pioneers. The late sixth century produced an art of poetry and image centred on the sophisticated development of the sympotic lifestyle characterised by self-reference, playfulness, inventiveness and the creation and decoration of new objects of luxury such as the psykter. Both poets and painters demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of the rituals of the symposion, and both make an explicit claim to belong to the drinking culture they are representing. C. fully recognises the problem of divorcing poetry and pottery in this world, but follows Neer into complex interpretations of the painted images, which are held to be the illusory fantasies of a group unable to enter the sympotic world. So she interprets the Pioneers as seeking to enter a desired world across an impossible divide: finally, in a quite extraordinary tour de force of interpretation, according to her it was only Euthymides as a citizen who was able to enter the aristocratic world, proclaiming ‘as never Euphronios’ as an expression of social rather than artistic pride.

The idea of an absolute divide between aristocrats and banausoi in the archaic period has long been recognised as problematic, and is regarded by many historians as an illusion reflecting the views of reactionary authors of the late classical period (see already the collection of F. Coarelli, Artisti e artigiani in Grecia [1980]; A. Duplouy, Le Prestige des élites [2006]). The convoluted interpretations of Neer and C. run the risk of failing to convince the viewer, who will prefer his own more or less ingenious interpretation. Some will welcome the ambiguity attributed to the resulting image as simply reflecting the view of the participant in the symposion, who is able (like Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium) to imagine any interpretation that he wishes; but the problem is that if every pot is unique in its sophistication and does not respond to a tradition, there is no reason for preferring one modern interpretation to any other: this is well illustrated by the differing views of C. and others over the vases she discusses. As she demonstrated in her brilliant earlier work on schemata, the correct interpretation of images in any art form depends on the close study of gesture and image within a continuously evolving iconographic tradition (La Comunicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica [2008], esp. p. 203). Yet here she offers no such analysis for either of the art forms that she studies: the result is that her interpretations of the art appear curiously arbitrary, and her reliance on the evidence of poetry unfocussed. And certainly I do not find helpful her suggestion that the similarities between the two art forms are due to the artefacts influencing the poetic sympotic world, rather than both responding to each other within the symposion.

The result of this insistence on divorcing literature and art is to create a picture which is out of focus for both contemporary art forms, and obscures the continuities within each and the common developments visible between them. It also assumes a curiously static interpretation of sympotic history. The rituals and the art of the symposion developed over time, from the relatively simple pleasures of a merchant and aristocratic world in the early archaic period, to the military and political uses of the symposion within the emerging polis, and to the tyrannical excesses and the pleasures of habrosyne of the late archaic period. The subsequent decline of sympotic art and literature in the fifth century reflects the movement of patronage to the demos, when poets and painters were seduced into public projects such as the Stoa Poikile and the theatre of Dionysus: then we can well believe that the formulaic character of representations on vases reflects the orders of purchasers and the responses of producers in a banausic mass market industry.