This volume is a feast for the eyes and the intellect, a richly illustrated text with 127 colour and 5 black-and-white illustrations of pottery and statuary from various museums, including Athens, London, New York and Berlin. The text explores the act of libation in various contexts, with a unique and striking interpretative emphasis on how the scenes depicted on libation vessels would have appeared to and affected their users. We are called upon to shift our attention to the act of libation as a meaningful act in itself, and in the service of this, G. takes an imaginative approach of visualising how various vessels would have appeared to those using them in libation ceremonies. She goes beyond merely examining the images to considering the relationship between instrumentality and visual effect in Greek art by imagining and thinking through how these images would have affected and perhaps even instructed those using them in the fifth century.
We are presented with a rich and learned exploration of ‘the intersection between the visual, daily life and religion’ (p. 14). The study is not intended to be comprehensive; instead, images are chosen for visual resonance, presentation of libations and the statement being made about libations on the pieces examined. Four areas are explored in four separate chapters: Chapter 1: animal sacrifice, Chapter 2: domestic life, Chapter 3: funerals, Chapter 4: the participation of gods in libations.
Chapter 1 discusses the ritual act of pouring liquids in the context of animal sacrifices, employing textual accounts in Homer and Herodotus to inform as well as problematise interpretations of the imagery examined. Notably, G. offers a fascinating account of the selection of scenes on a pitcher that are visible depending on one's position were it to be used in acts of libation and sacrifice, suggesting more thoughtful and clever artistry went into the depictions than mere mimetic representation: ‘the vessel constructs the social and religious space for a libation at a sacrificial altar and resonates especially strongly with the male viewer by presenting a variety of role models and eliciting desires’ (p. 33).
Chapter 2 opens with reflections on spondai as send-offs and truces before moving on to a discussion of the festive elements of drinking at banquets, most interestingly with the examination of a symposium kylix in Berlin (inside and outside), with a central medallion at the bottom depicting a symposiast with an empty cup. The examination of a Paris cup again reveals a fascinating juxtaposition of inside and outside surfaces, with the outside depicting a lover and beloved apart, and the bottom showing them reclining together.
Chapter 3 investigates choai or libations to the dead. There is a great deal of textual evidence for this in epic and tragedy, and G. recounts some highlights before embarking on an examination of images on various vessels. Notable is an examination of a skyphos in Copenhagen, depicting a scene ostensibly from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, made within two or three decades of its first performance. G. astutely observes the differences and similarities between the scene on the cup and the play, as she recounts significant elements of the play, pointing out that there are discrepancies between textual testimonia and images depicted on many vessels.
Chapter 4 opens with a puzzle over whether Athena is making a libation in a vase from Berlin, raising the question of whether gods can perform acts of religious devotion. Such depictions are widespread on vases, statues, reliefs and even coins, but why would gods – the recipients of sacrifices and libations – be involved in religious acts? G. offers a learned exposition of various scholarly attempts to answer this question, employing the Berlin vase to test various theories. With no single satisfactory answer, she returns to her own strategy of examining the visual force of the depicted scene in its ancient context. At the very least a deep bond between gods and mortals is visually presented through the iconography of libation; the gods are like us but different, but no single answer can be provided to the complex question given the variety of scenes depicted. One thing that occurs to me regarding the Athena vase is that the goddess may be teaching mortals how to perform religious rituals properly, much as Christ taught his devotees to pray and demonstrated the communion, with the phrase ‘do this in memory of me’ after drinking the wine and eating the bread at the Last Supper.
G. consistently imagines how a holder of a vessel would have experienced it and felt about it and thought about it, leading to insightful interpretations that reveal important ways of thinking about, and interacting with, extant material culture and what it can offer us over and above pictorial representation. We are invited to imagine holding vessels and to contemplate how the original holder would have held and manipulated them, what they would have seen and thought. Inevitably this is always tentative, and G. is responsibly cautious not to draw more than the evidence can provide with confidence. The text is a remarkable achievement of learned scholarship; it moves with ease between history, philosophy, literature and daily life practices as the author offers a guided tour of how to read and interpret ancient pottery. The examination of libations highlights the affirmation of ties and hierarchies between gods and mortals; who holds the vessel and how it is handled is revealing with regard to the roles and hierarchies implicit and explicit in the rituals, issues of bonds, connections, dependencies and co-dependencies as well as didactic functions regarding the vessels.
