The symposium and its past in Athenian vase painting, ca. 530--450 B.C

About this book

This study examines hundreds of images of symposia on late Archaic and early Classical Athenian vases that are traditionally interpreted as illustrations of daily life. In four case studies--focused on symposia without furniture, the sympotic wine-pourer, symposiasts in barbarian headgear, and female symposiasts--it demonstrates that many scenes thought to show contemporary life are better understood as constructions of life in the past. Some images represent the lives of the Athenians' primitive ancestors, while others show life in the heroic age; still other scenes show barbarians whose customs were thought to resemble those of the most primitive Hellenes. Although the images make it clear that not every society of the past was imagined to share the same sympotic customs, the pictures collectively define the symposium as an ancient Hellenic institution, and they point to the need for the contemporary symposium as a practice founded on the exclusion of women, minors, and other non-citizens. The fifth chapter of the study examines more closely the kinds of discourses to which the images on the vases belong, and it suggests that the primitive symposium, in particular, was often a humorous image. The images analyzed in this project suggest that the modern understanding of the reclining symposium as an Orientalizing import was not shared by the ancient Athenians, who instead endowed the institution with a proud Hellenic pedigree. This realization calls into question the modern conception of the late Archaic symposium as a countercultural institution practiced exclusively by aristocrats who distinguished themselves from common citizens by engaging in a practice that was understood to be more Asian than Hellenic. On the contrary, I argue, the images' emphasis on the symposium as an ancient institution practiced by a community of equals has parallels in the rhetoric surrounding Athenian democracy, which sought legitimacy in a myth of autochthony that defined all citizen men as each other's equals. Far from being hostile to the common Athenian citizen, the symposium is represented on the vases as his birthright.