In this volume T. provides a timely re-appraisal of the contents, meanings and effects of depictions of drinking on Athenian figured pottery. Over twenty years have passed since the publication of F. Lissarrague's Un flot d' images (1987 = The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet [1991]), and while his detailed analysis of sympotic scenes on Attic drinking vessels remains seminal, new questions are being asked about the images on Greek pots, the symposium and its diverse representations. With its dissociation of sympotic scenes from ‘real life’, a focus on the symposium in one locale, and the assessment of sympotic representations within wider discourses, T.'s study reflects these admirably.
This is at heart an iconological study, dedicated to unravelling the semantics of iconographical features in drinking party scenes on painted pottery from late Archaic and early Classical Athens. Starting with analysis of a feature that is not commonly considered – the representation of symposiasts reclining on the ground – T. moves on to evaluate some more well-recognised elements in the repertoire: serving boys, ‘foreign’ symposiasts, female participants and written words. Interpretation is grounded in wider ideas attested in a broad sway of literature, allowing a sense of how the visual images responded to and participated in conversations about, for example, primitive and foreign drinking practices (Chapters 1 and 2; Chapter 4), dangers to serving boys (Chapter 3) and women's wine consumption (Chapter 5). Of prime importance are the conclusions of the first two chapters: that reclining without furniture is an indicator of primitive behaviour. Other elements, like vegetation, animals, rocks and caves, further generate an impression of rusticity, while the sometime presence of named heroes emphasises the point: these symposia are set in the past. A similar conclusion is drawn from the study of wine-pourers in Chapter 3: while Ganymede serves Zeus in youthful perpetuity, his real-life counterparts (like Sappho's brother and Euripides) undertook such service only on ceremonial occasions. The presence of a beautiful serving boy must indicate a time before the replacement of young boys by slaves (who by default would not be beautiful) in service at the symposium. Here youths rather than missing couches create a temporal distance. In Chapters 4 and 5, hat-wearing ‘foreigners’ and female symposiasts are subject to similar re-evaluation. Like the beautiful young wine-pourer, they have no place at the contemporary party, but might be imagined in a pan-Mediterranean past where primitivism and foreignness collide and equate to one another, and women had an abnormal degree of licence. As Chapter 6 emphasises, by showing how even tags identifying ‘real life’ individuals do not facilitate straightforward readings, the symposium on Athenian pots is not a representation of real life, but of a past marked by difference. Painted symposia thus provided a prism through which Athenian citizens might conceptualise their collective past and learn ‘about the history of the symposium’ (p. 156).
En route, issues of broader significance are raised. Modern scholars might understand sympotic practices to spread into Greek communities via the Near East, but at Athens they were believed to be indigenous. Theories about why the Greeks began drinking whilst reclining merit reconsideration. In addition, by transforming female symposiasts into wives from a liberal bygone age, their standard interpretation as hetairai is refuted. Without sympotic scenes to draw upon, the identity and function of the hetaira requires re-evaluation. In a similar way, if young serving boys belong only in heroic symposia, then assumptions about pederasty drawn from the ‘evidence’ of painted pottery merit review. This volume challenges some fundamental perspectives on aspects of ancient Greek society.
While keen to raise questions, however, the study at points draws back from grappling with some complexities and uncertainties. Not all readers will be convinced that scenes without couches automatically or always connote reclining on the ground. The decision not to put symposiasts on couches is rightly considered a deliberate choice, but what motivates that choice is debatable, as are possible responses. On kylikes and rhyta, removing the couch foregrounds the drinkers and their indulgence in sympotic activities within the available field; but is the couch then omitted or elided? T. effectively refutes any lingering notion that pictures on figured pottery show ‘real life’, but then invents another reality, albeit an imagined reality of a distant time. Despite the semantic approach, there is a tendency towards a literal interpretation of the scenes that prohibits the images from working in other ways: perhaps as a-temporal expressions of sympotic conviviality.
The notion that the images identified convey a history for the symposium again feels too neat. In defence, the argument by Pierce (‘Death, Revelry and Thysia’, ClAnt 12.2 [1993], 219–66) that images of sacrifice on painted pottery encode social and cultural ideas about sacrifice is cited. However, sympotic scenes are largely found on vessels that by shape belong in a drinking service. Any ‘statements about the symposium itself’ (p. 158) are statements that speak to individuals immersed in the symposium, right now. A strength of T.'s study is the connection drawn between the images on pots and the wider thought-world of the Greeks, a world in which Athenian symposiasts shared. Yet, no consideration is made of how the images operate in a distinctively sympotic context. Conversations at the symposium might be playful, instructional, disputatious, competitive or self-defining. Within this discursive environment, sympotic scenes confront symposiasts with a mirror through which to rethink who they are, as individuals and members of the group. This is the atmosphere in which T.'s primitive symposia came alive. Much remains to explore. For example, when observing the beautiful wine pourer on his cup, would the drinker always see distance and dissimilarity, or would the ideas encoded there about beauty and desire be recast onto his immediate neighbours? Does their present immersion in the pleasures of the symposium bring the symposiasts closer to the primitive past they see depicted, elevating them towards the Golden Age of Hesiod's first men (perhaps) or associating them with the world of heroes? The scenes do not just juxtapose past and present, but bring the past into the present in a potentially consequential fashion.
Similarly, the resonance of the images at the Athenian symposium bears further consideration. Early on the pots are placed firmly within an Athenian context, and useful connections are drawn between the images and notions of democratic equality and myths of autochthony. Such analysis assumes a citizen audience, invested in the ideology of the emerging democracy. Yet, there is endemic uncertainty concerning the make-up and interests of sympotic groups at Athens during this period. Compare arguments by Neer (Style and Politics in Athenian Vase Painting [2002]) and Sutton (‘The Good, the Base and the Ugly’, in B. Cohen [ed.], Not the Classical Ideal [2000], pp. 180–202). The former proposes that scenes of conviviality helped aristocrats reassure and find a place for themselves in the changing city. For the latter, more raucous scenes humorously undercut the pretensions of the supposedly refined symposium for viewers with a distinctively democratic ethos. Both hypotheses are plausible, based upon the selected vessels, but they imagine quite different sets of drinker-viewers. Who then does the primitive symposium of the heroic past speak to, and what does it say? To follow one opening, the statement of a ‘foreign’ past may have been palatable and self-reinforcing to rich eupatrid Athenians who were already sympathetic towards, and possibly had links of xenia with, the Persian empire. By contrast, Athenians who were not part of an inter-polis elite and were more susceptible to the sabre-rattling and eventually triumphalist public rhetoric against the Persians might feel discomforted. Embracing the possibilities would move the study closer to the experiences and ideas of imagined symposiasts at Athens, and enrich understanding of the discursive potential of the imagery of the Athenian symposium that T. sketches so carefully.
