Drinking From The Same Cup

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Chapter 4
DRINKING FROM THE SAME CUP:

SPARTA AND LATE ARCHAIC COMMENSALITY
Adam Rabinowitz

,
,

And this custom and practice has also been laid down at Sparta:
to drink from the same wine cup,
and not to give it over when making toasts by name,
nor [send it] to the right in a circle of the company...
(Kritias, fr. B 6 Diels-Kranz, 14)
In these verses, the Athenian poet and oligarch Kritias expresses an

opposition between Spartan and Athenian drinking practices that continues
to echo in modern scholarship. After formal dinner gatherings on special
occasions, Athenians of the fifth century BC turned to the highly ritualized
drinking-party known as the symposion, in which male citizen participants
reclined on luxurious couches to recite poetry, enjoy the company of flute
girls, courtesans, or attractive young men, and spur each other to drink
wine mixed with water from fancy cups. These drinking parties revolved
around conspicuous consumption and often led to misbehavior as the
guests paraded home by torchlight in a drunken ko-mos (revel).1 The dour
male citizens of fifth-century Sparta, on the other hand, by law took all
their meals together in the common messes called syssitia,2 where they sat
or reclined on plain furniture to eat plain food contributed by all the
members of the mess, converse only on topics conducive to martial virtue,
and drink moderately without peer pressure. No revels followed, and
Spartan diners made their way home in the dark.3
The syssition and the symposion have been treated as mutually exclusive
models since antiquity. The syssition is public, moderate, harmonious,
deemphasizes drinking and builds civic values; the symposion is private,
excessive, fractious, celebrates wine and gives rise to elitist, anti-polis
conspiracies. The two have thus attracted separate traditions of scholarship.
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From the 19th century onwards, the syssition figured prominently in
discussions of Spartan militarism (e.g. Trieber 1871, 15 ff.), and by the early
20th century, it had also become the object of anthropologically-oriented
investigations into primitive Dorian social organization (Schurtz 1902).4
The symposion, on the other hand, rarely appeared as an object of inquiry in
its own right. Instead, its elaborate formal characteristics were occasionally
used to embellish overviews of dining in antiquity, while its social role was
reduced to literary trope (Martin 1931) or stage for poetic production
(Rsler 1980). This scholarly divergence was also due to the nature of the
ancient sources: the syssition was consistently of interest to the Classical
political philosophers, while the symposion found its most vivid expression
in the less serious comedies of Aristophanes.
In recent years both traditions have been the object of revision.
Historians of Sparta have challenged the notion that the Spartan syssition
was an ancestral institution that persisted unchanged to the time of the
Classical authors who discuss it, while students of the symposion have set
out to give the drinking-party a more central role in the social and political
development of the Greek city. The two approaches have intersected, with
sympotic scholars using the military role of the syssition to explain the early
symposion (Murray 1983), and their counterparts looking in turn to the
symposion as a model for Archaic Spartan commensal behavior (Nafissi
1991, 1757, 21524; Powell 1998; Hodkinson 2000, 21617). The symposion
and the syssition have great potential to illuminate each other but the
intersection also brings a serious risk. Scholars of Sparta now recognize
the danger of projecting Classical Spartan institutions into the distant past,
but much recent work on the symposion assumes that this practice remained
essentially the same, in its social role as well as its formal characteristics,
from its origins in the eighth or seventh century BC to the Classical period.
As a result, when historians argue that Spartans participated in symposia
much like those of other Greek cities in the Archaic period, it becomes
easy to transfer to Sparta several assumptions about the Archaic symposion
that are ultimately drawn from the same fourth-century sources most
responsible for the perpetuation of the Spartan mirage. These assumptions
have a particular impact on our understanding of the interplay between
public and private in the Archaic city, an issue central to the study of the
development of the Spartan political community.5
To understand the role of sympotic behavior in Archaic Sparta, it is
therefore critical that we first examine those assumptions about symposia in
the rest of the Archaic Greek world that we turn to primary Archaic
evidence to confront what I would like to term, borrowing Olliers phrase,
the sympotic mirage. I propose to examine this evidence (textual and
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Drinking from the same cup: Sparta and late archaic commensality
archaeological) on its own terms, rather than through the lens of the
Classical sources. The Classical sources exert such disproportionate
influence, of course, because the Archaic material is fragmentary, oblique,
ambiguous, and largely decontextualized. In dealing with such material,
one must find other ways to fill in the blanks. Here I attempt to do so by
deriving general diachronic trends from those areas where there is enough
evidence to examine Archaic attitudes and behaviors in their social or
archaeological context. To explain some of these trends, I bring to bear
recent anthropological work on commensality.6 Without attempting to
treat all evidence for drinking as the reflection of formal symposia, I will
insist on the special importance of communal wine-drinking in the
investigation of Archaic Greek commensal behavior. The communal
consumption of alcohol is not the same as that of food. On the most
general level, the consumption of alcoholic beverages like wine dramatically
changes the emotional and physiological state of the drinkers in a way that
food does not. In the Archaic Greek world in particular, sympotic settings
inspired and housed most of the literary and artistic production that has
been passed down to us, providing direct insights into the attitudes that
surrounded these settings. Finally, on the level of material culture, evidence
for communal drinking is much more recognizable in the archaeological
record and more often reported in publications than evidence related to
communal dining in general.
Current scholarship places great emphasis on the wide variability of
Greek social and political arrangements, and the applicability of evidence
from one city or region to another is open to question. Nevertheless, a
careful consideration of the available primary evidence (however
incomplete and far-flung) in its chronological context is the prerequisite to
any effort to stop looking at the Archaic world through Classical eyes. In
the following pages, I use such evidence to call into question some of the
most deep-rooted assumptions about the Archaic symposion. I will challenge
the idea that Archaic sympotic groups were typically composed of likeminded friends who defined themselves in opposition to the political
community, and the notion that these groups usually met to drink in the
well-appointed private homes of aristocratic hosts. Instead, I will argue
that Archaic drinking-parties were more tense, more contested, and more
political than is commonly recognized, and that their physical location
fluctuated between public and private in conjunction with changes in the
distribution of social and political power. The second half of the sixth
century, I propose, saw a major upheaval in drinking behavior across the
Greek world. The juxtaposition of this general trend with changes in sixthcentury Sparta will clarify the timing and meaning of developments in both
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contexts. The characteristics of the Classical Spartan syssition, observed
from this angle, will then further help to define the Archaic sympotic
culture the Spartans seem to have shared.
Commensal mirages
Kritias contrasts the sober Spartans to his drunken Athenian countrymen
in part because Spartan practices really were strikingly different and in part
because his political inclinations were pro-Spartan.7 The verses cited above,
however, seem specifically intended to convince sympotic listeners that
Spartan practices reflected an ideal of moderate and harmonious drinking
that was preferable to disorderly Athenian behavior. Kritias takes particular
issue here with the compulsory and competitive drinking that results from
toasts and passing cups: in effect, these practices force each participant to
keep up, without regard to varying levels of alcohol tolerance and selfcontrol. That compulsory drinking was a recurrent and serious concern
for Kritias, rather than the target of a light-hearted poetic gibe, is confirmed
by a fragment of his prose Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, in which he
contrasts Chian, Thasian, Athenian, and Thessalian cup-passing and
toasting practices with Spartan self-regulation (fr. B 33 Diels-Kranz).8 His
younger contemporary Xenophons Constitution of the Lakedaimonians
addresses the same issues, adding an economic dimension. The Spartans,
Xenophon writes, used to drink and dine at home like other Greeks but
had been organized into syssitia by Lykourgos in order to curb any tendency
to excess in consumption and expenditure. Lykourgos specifically banned
forced drinking ( ), with the result that no Spartan was
tempted to destroy his body or his household through habitual
drunkenness () (Lak. Pol. 5.17). Plato picks up the same theme
on a more philosophical level when he uses an idealized image of Spartan
sobriety to discuss the role drinking parties should play in an ideal state in
the Laws (Leg. 1.648a ff.). And a generation later, in his development of a
theoretical framework to explain the way states function in practice,
Aristotle identifies the original intent behind the Spartan syssitia if not its
actual effect in his own time as a democratic leveling of differences in
wealth (Pol. 1271a2637; cf. also 1265b401266a1 and 1294b1931, where
syssitia are described with some other elements of the Spartan system as
democratic). These sources have left subsequent scholars with a set of
ideal and essential traits they could associate with the syssition: sobriety,
moderation, the inculcation of communal and military values, the limitation
of the commensal role of private wealth and the exceptional relocation of
dining and drinking to public space.
Several of the same writers also provided the image of the symposion that
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has had the greatest resonance in modern scholarship. The Symposia of
Plato and Xenophon describe in great detail friendly drinking parties in
private homes, graced by entertainment and intellectual discussions. At the
same time, these sources recognize the more problematic aspects of the
occasion: Platos Symposium also provides a view of the sympotic misbehavior
of young aristocrats like Alcibiades, and Xenophon cites problems with
unruliness in same-age sympotic associations (Lak. Pol. 5.5). More seriously,
late fifth-century Athenian history encouraged the association of symposia
with political conspiracy. The most famous example is the mutilation of the
Herms on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, which was connected to other
accusations of sympotic misdeeds leveled against Alcibiades and his
comrades.9 The connection between hetaireiai and factional conflicts in
Aristotles Politics (1305a32; 1306b31) and in the Constitution of the Athenians
(Ath. Pol. 20.1; 34.335.1) consolidates the anti-polis connotations of the
elite drinking group in political theory. This association was recognized in
the popular culture of late fifth-century Athens as well: in Aristophanes
comedy Wasps, Philocleon, a salt-of-the-earth democrat, returns from a
symposion a drunken, arrogant reveler, aping aristocratic sympotic repartee,
assaulting his fellow-citizens and scoffing at the law-courts (Wasps 1381
ff.). The ancient authors reconcile the apparent contradiction between
pleasant drinking games and the violent seizure of political power by
stressing the bonds of friendship between elite insiders and their shared
hostility to the broader community. Thus the sources provide the symposion
with essential characteristics of its own: dining rooms in private houses,
wealthy hosts, physical and mental pleasures and luxuries, drunken hubris,
and elitist attitudes that sometimes turn seditious.
As these Classical sources treat syssitia and symposia differently, so
modern scholarship on these institutions has followed two different paths.
After the nineteenth century, when its Dorian ethnic origins were the focus
of study, the syssition was generally examined from a functional perspective,
with particular attention given to its military implications and the
information it might provide about the structure of very early Spartan
society. Ethnological investigations treated it as the survival of primitive
social practices (Schurtz 1902; Nilsson 1912). More recent scholarship,
however, has returned to the ancient idea that the syssition was the result of
deliberate social engineering, while rejecting the notion that it was created
by a mythical lawgiver at the beginning of Spartan history. The second half
of the seventh century, in the years after the Second Messenian War, is
now considered the earliest moment at which some version of the system
could have been established (Nafissi 1991, 1757), and several historians
argue that the syssition as we know it from the Classical sources was
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instituted as late as the middle of the sixth century (Hodkinson 1997;
Powell 1998; Thommen 2003, 4550). These scholars have demonstrated
convincingly that Spartan poetry and vase-painting between the late
seventh and the middle of the sixth century indicate a society much more
connected to the culture of the symposion, and thus more aristocratic, than
is commonly thought (Nafissi 1991, 21426; Powell 1998, 129; Hodkinson
2000, 21617; Thommen 2003, 49).
What the presence of an aristocratic sympotic culture means for the
social structure of Sparta in the seventh and sixth centuries, however,
depends heavily on how we understand aristocratic culture and the
symposion in the rest of Archaic Greece. Our understanding of the latter is
presently somewhat monolithic, for discussions of the nature of the
symposion and its aristocratic connotations have been dominated for the last
three decades by a particular view of the Greek drinking-party constructed
by Oswyn Murray and his followers. This view insists on the fundamentally
private nature of the symposion in all periods, in its political aspects (elitist,
anti-communitarian), its social environment (escapist, given to shared and
sometimes transgressive pleasures), and its physical location (the wellappointed houses of wealthy aristocrats). If early Spartan commensality is
placed in this framework, the Classical Spartan syssitia can be explained as
the result of the extraordinary transformation of an Archaic private and
elitist practice into a public and communal institution.10 If the framework
itself is not interrogated, however, the assumptions on which it rests have
the potential to distort significantly our understanding of social change at
Sparta.
Murray deserves credit for single-handedly resurrecting the symposion as
an object of inquiry. His own work, and the two symposion-centered
conferences he organized, continue to inspire scholars to investigate the
practice in its social contexts (Murray 1986; 1988; 1990; Murray and
Tecusan 1995). The symposion had been a hot topic of Second Sophistic
literature, with extensive discussions provided in Plutarchs Quaestiones
convivales in the first or second century AD and in the Deipnosophistai of
Athenaios of Naukratis in the second or third century AD. Between the
third century AD and the 1970s, however, the symposion appeared only in
passing in scholarly work. When it did, the focus was almost always on its
formal characteristics rather than its social role. The result was a synthetic,
ahistorical picture that relied primarily on the Symposia of Plato and
Xenophon and on Attic vase painting, with a large helping of Aristophanes
and a sprinkling of Archaic poetry for atmosphere.11 In the 1970s and early
1980s, however, anthropological work on food and the application of
structuralist thought to the ancient world brought new theoretical
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opportunities. At the same time, several thorough iconographic studies of
the symposion and ko-mos provided a visual basis for research (Seeberg 1971;
Fehr 1971; Dentzer 1982). Shortly thereafter, in a brief but important
article, Murray sketched the outlines of an approach to the symposion as an
important social and historical phenomenon in its own right (1983). This
article contained in embryonic form a series of propositions that directed
Murrays own approach and have molded most subsequent studies of the
institution. Specifically, it saw the origins of the symposion in the martial
commensality of aristocratic warrior bands (Murray termed them
Mnnerbnde, after Schurtz), and associated its subsequent development
with the withdrawal of the Archaic aristocracy into itself as it was
marginalized by a citizen society in which the aristocratic champion and
his companions had no place.12
Murrays discussions of the ludic, pleasurable, and escapist elements of
the symposion (1994; 1995) rely on its separation from the political world
and its location in private space, and to highlight these characteristics he has
drawn extensively on the clearer fourth-century sources for his treatment
of the Archaic evidence. The evidence and approaches available in the
1980s have also left their mark: the legacy of structuralism is visible in a
certain reliance on binary pairs (popular/aristocratic, polis/anti-polis,
public/private), and the iconographic studies, by identifying long-lived and
consistent visual cues for the symposion, have encouraged assumptions about
stability and continuity in its meaning and social function as well.
At the moment of the renovation of the symposion as an object of inquiry,
then, we see also its fossilization as something distinctly Other in the
history of the polis: the world of this drinking party, and of the aristocrats
who participate in it, is rigidly private, homogeneous and cemented by
fellow-feeling, removed from the polis and often in direct conflict with
polis values from its earliest appearance. Murray retrojects these
characteristics, derived largely from Classical sources, into the Archaic
period, where they have been picked up by scholars who see the
development of the polis as a struggle in which a civic-minded middling
class finally wrested power from an elitist, individualistic, hereditary
aristocracy (Morris 1996; 1998; Kurke 1999; Neer 2002). These scholars
thus understand the Archaic symposion as a context in which increasingly
marginalized aristocrats desperately attempted to invent new vocabularies
of prestige as their political powers were curtailed. The middling
argument, as put forth by Ian Morris and Leslie Kurke, has recently been
subject to criticism on both evidentiary and conceptual grounds, and this
is not the place for a detailed discussion.13 It is worth mentioning, however,
that this argument divides Archaic poetry into two mutually-exclusive
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ideological camps, contrasting middling, civic, mainly elegiac poetry with
elitist, individualistic, mainly lyric poetry and associating the latter
particularly closely with the symposion (Morris 1996, 336). It thus treats in
political terms differences in content that are more likely to be generic
(elegy seems to be the typical medium for the conveyance of group values
and behavioral norms, while lyric is more suitable for the celebration of
the pleasures of the drinking-party),14 pays little attention to the
complicated issue of poetic performance in the symposion, and rules out the
possibility that the same individuals could subscribe to both ideologies.
Although Morris implies that there were middling symposia attended by
elite proponents of middling values, he sees the practice primarily as the
locus for the development of elitist ideology. The result is again an
essentialized and timeless idea of the symposion as a unitary, elitist antipolis, located physically in private space and conceptually outside the
political community altogether.15
The essentialized symposion is not without its critics. Pauline Schmitt
Pantel has persuasively challenged the idea of a diametrical opposition
between banquet and symposion in the Archaic city, while calling attention
to the overly global use of the latter term in Murrays discussions.16 In a
similar vein, Mario Lombardo critiques what he sees as Murrays
transformation of all Archaic commensal activities into symposia and argues
for the recognition of the variety of commensal occasions and practices in
the ancient Greek world (Lombardo 1989, 31520). In doing so, however,
Lombardo endorses the mutual exclusivity of syssition and symposion, argues
that the latter was essentially foreign to Sparta, and identifies it, with
Murray, as the unifying practice of an emergent aristocracy (1989, 3212).
These challenges highlight the importance of a contextual approach to
Archaic communal drinking, and the relevance of such an examination to
discussions of the development of Spartan society. The well-documented
and legitimate contrasts between the symposia and syssitia of the fifth and
fourth centuries BC are the products of commensal interactions in earlier
periods. Thus the prevalence of the essentialized, synchronic symposion in
secondary scholarship creates fundamental problems for our understanding
of Spartas place in the wider Archaic Greek world.
The extent of these problems can be seen if we return to Kritias fr. B 6
Diels-Kranz. Even in a period for which we have extensive primary sources
and a relatively clear view of Spartan and Athenian commensality, this
poem and its historical context confound the orthodox approach to the
symposion described above. In this elegy, Kritias condemns toasts and
praises Spartan sobriety, but elsewhere celebrates in lyric form the same
toasts () together with sweet Anakreontic poetry and the refined
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drinking-game called kottabos (fr. B 1 Diels-Kranz). And his endorsement
of middling Spartan ideals of moderation was somewhat undermined by
his own actions when, with Spartan support, he became leader of the Thirty
Tyrants and the most hubristic and excessive of all thirty, if we are to
believe Xenophon (Memorabilia 1.2). Clearly, even Classical Spartan models
had a more complex relationship to elite commensal attitudes in other
contemporary Greek states than we generally admit and those attitudes
themselves cannot easily be boiled down into diametric oppositions
between polis and anti-polis, democratic and aristocratic, communitarian
and individualist. In the Archaic period, the situation is even murkier. While
there is reasonably extensive evidence from both textual and archaeological
sources for Spartan commensality in the seventh and sixth centuries, its
fragmentary and uneven nature leaves critical gaps. Before turning to a
discussion of Archaic drinking in general, then, let us examine what we
know and do not know about drinking in Archaic Sparta.
Seven couches and as many tables
The primary sources for Spartan drinking fall into the same categories as
those for the rest of the Greek world: literature, iconography, and
archaeological remains. In the first category, two poets of early Sparta have
left reasonably substantial but very different corpora. Alkman and Tyrtaios
were probably contemporary, and most scholars now place the activity of
both in the second half of the seventh century, Tyrtaios during the Second
Messenian War (e.g. Thommen 2003, 28) and Alkman shortly thereafter
(e.g. Nafissi 1991, 208 n. 115).
Alkmans connection with the world of communal drinking is
undisputed: not only do several of the fragments of his poetry mention
typically sympotic elements, but he makes the first known reference to the
arrangement of seven couches considered canonical for the symposion (fr. 19
Page).17 Among the sympotic features he mentions is the Lydian headdress
known as the mitra (fr. 1 Page, 679), which sometimes appears on the
heads of both male symposiasts and their female companions in Lakonian
and Attic vase-painting.18 It may also be significant that several other
fragments refer to Sardis and Lydia (fr. 10 Page, 31, 414; fr. 13 Page; fr.
16 Page) and perhaps even to the poets own connections to that milieu:
the claim that Lydia played a major role in the transmission to Archaic
Greece of both musical techniques and sympotic practices has recently
been revived.19 Sparta seems to have had extensive connections with Samos
(Cartledge 1982) and with Sardis itself in the first half of the sixth century
(Hdt. 1.6970), and it would be surprising if Spartans remained entirely
unaffected by the sympotic practices of their eastern contacts. A final
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connection between the poetry of Alkman and the world of the symposion
comes in the verses also used as evidence for early Spartan syssitia. At feasts
and among the company of the andreia, the poet states, it is fitting to begin
with the paian (fr. 98 Page).20 The andreia here is often taken to refer to an
early version of the Spartan mess, for the same term is used to describe
Cretan common messes. On the other hand, the paian (a ritual cry or
invocation sung in unison, usually to Apollo) was often associated in
Classical literature with the beginning of the symposion that followed a dinner
(cf. Xen. Symp. 2.1). The juxtaposition of these two elements strongly
suggests a commensal occasion involving drinking.
While the surviving fragments of Alkmans poetry provide convincing,
if indirect, evidence for stereotypically sympotic behaviors in early Sparta,
they are too scattered to give clear insight into sympotic attitudes. Alkman
is known to have composed choral odes that were presumably sung in
public, and it is not always clear from the fragments which were public
and which might have been sung among a closed group of drinkers. Most
of the verses suggestive of Eastern luxury, for example, are too fragmentary
to be assigned to either context, while the mention of the Lydian mitra
comes in the course of a poem meant to be performed by a chorus of
young women (fr. 1 Page). The verses describing the seven couches (fr. 19
Page) hint at a relatively luxurious commensal occasion, while in fr. 98 Page
the term thiasos (translated as company above) has a strong religious
connotation. Another fragment suggests that Alkman has arranged a
dinner ( ), but contains no mention of the nature or
location of the event (fr. 95 Page). Finally, the famous lines in which the
gift of a tripod is promised and the poet expresses his preference for a
simple lentil dish ( ) (fr. 17 Page) might be choral or monodic; the poet
might or might not be the person giving the tripod, who might or might
not be a commensal host; his endorsement of the food of the damos and his
rejection of fancy dishes might be evidence of Spartan austerity but then
it is contradicted by fr. 19 Page, with its sweet pastries. Nafissi, in his
extended exegesis of this fragment, concludes that it should be understood
as a choral poem for a ceremony connected with the world of the syssitia
(Nafissi 1991, 211). He stresses its didactic content, connecting it with the
expression of a certain sympotic e-thos, so to speak, and ultimately arguing
that it refers to the initiation of a young man into the commensal group by
his eraste-s (21114).
By contrast, the martial elegies of Tyrtaios make no reference to drinking
or luxury. These elegies can also be considered didactic, however, in that
they promote and reinforce specific ideals of adult male behavior. There is
later evidence that the Spartans sometimes sang the poems of Tyrtaios in
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commensal settings (cf. Philochoros, FGrH 328 F 216). On the basis of
these features, a strong case has been made that these poems, too, were
meant for performance in sympotic settings (Bowie 1990, 225 n. 16; 229).
If this view is correct, we have more reason to associate Spartan drinkingparties with the inculcation of communal values. These values would seem
to revolve for both poets around the subordination of individual desires to
communal goals, although the poetry of Alkman appears to exhibit at the
same time an attraction to luxury.
Here ends the contemporary literary evidence that describes (or at least
may be associated with) Archaic Spartan drinking. The next specific
mentions of Spartan sympotic practices come from Athenians two
hundred years later, with Kritias in the fifth century and Xenophon in the
fourth. In the absence of textual evidence for the way Spartans drank and
thought about drinking after Alkman, scholars have turned to the
iconographic record. From the seventh to the early fifth century, Lakonia
was home to a thriving ceramic industry, and between the first decades
and the third quarter of the sixth century, this industry produced highquality figural pottery. A figural ceramic tradition had already emerged in
the late seventh century, but it involved relief decoration on large coarse
jars, rather than painted decoration on tableware, and it focused on scenes
of warfare, hunting, and chariot processions (Christou 1964a; 1964b).21
The creators of Lakonian painted pottery, on the other hand, were
interested in scenes of daily life and ritual as well as battle and myth, and
they placed their images on vessels clearly meant for wine consumption.
Many of these images depicted communal drinking and wine-related revels,
and they share many features with Corinthian and Attic vases that clearly
depict symposia.22 Drinkers recline, holding cups (e.g. on a cup by the
Naukratis Painter: Pipili 1987, no. 194); the sympotic groups sometimes
include women, usually flute players (e.g. on a cup by the Arkesilas Painter:
Pipili 1987, no. 196); kraters and dinoi, the large open vessels in which wine
and water were mixed, stand in prominent positions (e.g. between revelers
in the tondo of a cup by the Rider Painter, British Museum B3: Smith 1998,
79); komasts (revelers) dance to music, some with cups still in their hands
(e.g. on a cup by the Allard-Pierson Painter: Stibbe 2004, no. 339).
Yet these images also contain a number of idiosyncrasies that complicate
their interpretation. Many sympotic scenes seem to take place outdoors,
with the participants reclining on the ground. Several such scenes include
small winged figures floating above the symposiasts, bearing wreaths. And,
as several scholars have observed (Pipili 1998, 83; Smith 1998, 78; Powell
1998, 126), a striking number of depictions of symposia and ko-moi on
Lakonian pots suggest religious or ritual contexts (for instance, a komast
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with cup in hand dancing outside what may be a temple with a snake in the
portico: Stibbe 2004, no. 336; Smith 1998, 756). At the same time, no
strictly sympotic scenes have yet been found at Sparta,23 while a large
number have been found at Samos a circumstance that has led Pipili to
argue that these painted symposia were made for Samian consumers and
reflected Samian cult practice (1998, 90 and n. 9). Furthermore, the
Lykourgan prohibition of Spartiate involvement in banausic activity has
generally been taken as evidence that these vases were not produced by
the Spartan citizens who would have been participants in symposia. This
further complicates the question of the identity of the symposiasts and
komasts depicted on the vases: were they meant to be representations of
Spartan citizens, of perioikic society, of Samian celebrants, or of generic
drinkers copied from Corinthian prototypes? Despite Pipilis hypothesis,
it is widely assumed that the scenes of drinking and revelry in Lakonian
vase-painting reflect Spartan society on some level,24 and that the
participants were members of the elite (Powell 1998, 120). Even if this is
the case, one can go no further than Powell on the basis of iconography:
Archaic Spartans drank together in settings that looked much like symposia
elsewhere, and some of them were interested in the display of luxury in
these settings (Powell 1998, 1356). The vases provide little conclusive
evidence about the spatial location of such communal drinking or about
the political or social relationships among those involved.
It is somewhat easier to answer the oft-raised question of who was using
those vases. Here the evidence no longer takes the form of iconography,
but of archaeological context. Although the larger part of Lakonian pottery
production was destined for export, a substantial portion was consumed in
Sparta, the majority of it in the form of vases meant for drinking. The
forms and distribution of these vases provide more reliable evidence for
Spartan drinking in the Archaic period, although here too there are serious
gaps. A great deal of pottery has been recovered from sanctuary contexts,
but the paucity of built space in these sanctuaries and the re-deposition of
votive material makes it difficult to understand how and where it might
have been used.25 No Archaic residential areas have been extensively
excavated, leaving the sanctuary material without domestic assemblages
for comparison. Tombs, which might provide insight into the symbolic
value of sympotic equipment, are also scarce. On the other hand, survey
projects in the hinterland of Sparta have collected an extensive sample of
surface pottery that can be associated with rural settlements and
farmsteads, as well as several sanctuaries (Cavanagh et al. 1996; 2002).
Despite the gaps, certain conclusions can be drawn. By the beginning of
the seventh century, the Lakonian fineware assemblage included a full
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range of shapes suited for communal drinking (cups, kraters,
hydriai, amphorae, oinochoai, and the specifically Lakonian cup known
conventionally as the lakaina).26 These shapes appear frequently in
assemblages at the major sanctuaries of Artemis Orthia, the Amyklaion,
and the Menelaion, as well as at more distant sanctuaries like that of Zeus
Messapeus, from 700 onwards.27 A cup probably of the first half of the
sixth century, found in the sanctuary of Athena Chalkioikos on the
acropolis, bears an inscription ( ) that might be interpreted as a
call for moderate drinking (Woodward 192829, 192930; Nafissi 1991,
184).28 There is also a tenuous association between drinking and burials. At
least one late seventh- or early sixth-century cremation burial in a pithos
included two lakainai,29 and a set of seven cups and plates found in
association with a religious or funerary structure and dated to the early
sixth century have been interpreted as the remains of a commensal
celebration of a hero or heroized deceased.30 Finally, undecorated versions
of most of these sympotic shapes are also represented in wealthier rural
residential contexts after 550 (Catling 2002, 1934), with the exception of
lakainai, which seem to be specifically associated with sanctuaries (Catling
1996, 34). All of these contexts can be assumed to have been frequented
by Spartan citizens, and thus it is reasonable to suppose that it was
Spartiates who used the drinking vessels found in them.31 It also seems
reasonable to claim that some of the Spartan drinking represented by these
vessels took place around the sanctuaries and he-ro-a (or grave monuments?)
where they were deposited.
A final group of objects provides the most unequivocal evocation of
large-scale communal drinking, but perhaps the least reliable contextual
associations. These are the very large kraters produced first in clay and then
in bronze.32 The clay versions with relief decoration began to be produced
in the last quarter of the seventh century or perhaps at the beginning of the
sixth,33 and their form and decoration may have inspired the large bronze
versions that were first produced as early as the first quarter of the sixth
century (Stibbe 1989, 63). The ceramic relief kraters are generally
considered to be funerary objects, since the only example found in situ
appeared in what was interpreted as an Archaic burial plot (Christou
1964b), and since they seem to have been designed to be viewed only from
one side.34 The funerary context of this find which was itself empty
has been challenged, however, and none of the other examples have
actually been found in situ in tombs (Hodkinson 2000, 240). The bronze
kraters are likely to have been used by the living, but most of the surviving
examples have been found outside Sparta, especially in non-Greek tombs.35
Stibbe is confident that metal kraters are depicted in at least nine of the
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symposion and ko-mos scenes on Lakonian vases (1989, 19), but given the
interpretive difficulties of these images, this is at best tenuous evidence for
Spartan symposia involving large and expensive metal vessels. We can
conclude, however, that the krater, a fundamentally sympotic form, had
particular significance in Archaic Sparta: when the Spartans had to choose
an appropriate gift for Croesus in return for gold for a statue, they decided
on an enormous bronze krater (Hdt. 1.70). The broad distribution of both
metal and smaller ceramic versions produced in Lakonia may indicate that
this Spartan significance resonated in other parts of the Archaic
Mediterranean.36
By the fifth century, most of the Lakonian objects associated with
communal drinking had ceased to be produced, with the exception of
simple black-gloss stirrup and bell kraters (and the connection of the latter
with drinking is questioned by Catling 1996, 87). The decline of Lakonian
artistic production is a complicated issue, and Hodkinson has argued
persuasively that changes in the production and consumption of luxury
items cannot be connected with the imposition of an austere regime in the
mid-sixth century (1997, 49; 1998a, 58; 1998b; 2000, 271302). Nevertheless,
the chronology of objects associated specifically with drinking suggests
increasing elaboration in the first half of the sixth century (painted pottery,
bronze kraters), followed by the gradual disappearance of the figural
tradition, special drinking forms like the lakaina, and bronze kraters over
the course of the second half of the century (trends are laid out in a clear
chart in Frtsch 1998, 523). By the first quarter of the fifth century, plain
black-gloss stirrup kraters of modest size are the only sympotic form still
being produced, and many of these seem to have been destined for a
specific export market in Sicily (cf. Nafissi 1991, 23953).
Let us briefly summarize the Archaic evidence. Early communal
drinking in Sparta is suggested by the presence of cups and kraters from ca.
700 onwards. The evidence comes primarily from sanctuaries, but the
absence of residential or public structures allows us only to conclude that
sanctuaries were one context in which drinking probably took place. In
the third quarter of the seventh century, after the Second Messenian War
and the establishment of a new social order, literary references to more
formal sympotic behavior emerge in the poetry of Alkman, and, if we
accept Bowies argument, the poetry of Tyrtaios is composed to be recited
among sympotic participants whose character it is meant to shape. A
tension between luxury and moderation might be glimpsed in the
fragments of Alkman. Around this time the local production of ceramic
stirrup kraters and volute kraters begins.
The archaeological record indicates that in the last quarter of the seventh
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century or the beginning of the sixth, more elaborate drinking equipment
began to appear, including large relief kraters. These may have been used
in funerary contexts. Some evidence suggests that drinking was also
spatially connected with the funerary sphere before 550. Drinking vessels
of this period continue to figure significantly in ceramic assemblages from
the major sanctuaries close to Sparta. In the first half of the sixth century
bronze kraters and figured pottery, with a repertoire focusing on drinking
shapes like lakainai and stemmed cups (kylikes), began to be produced at
Sparta. The scenes on many of these vessels involve features typically
associated with symposia and ko-moi: reclining drinkers, luxurious clothes,
kraters, dancing komasts. These representations, however, are ambiguous,
and may have catered to an export market in Ionia, perhaps in connection
with the strong ties Sparta developed in this period with Samos and Lydia.
The first half of the sixth century also saw the elaboration of ceramic
stirrup and volute kraters and their export in large numbers. The largest
number of Lakonian kraters found in Lakonia itself, and in Samos,
Naukratis, Cyrene, Sicilian Greek cities, Etruscan areas and the Panhellenic
sanctuaries, date to the second quarter of the sixth century (Nafissi 1991,
2436). At the same time, relief kraters ceased to be produced. It was
around this time that the Spartans failed in their attempt to annex the
territory of neighboring Tegea (Hdt. 1.658).
In the third quarter of the sixth century, figural pottery production fell
off; bronze kraters apparently ceased to be produced by the 520s. Ceramic
volute kraters disappear at this time, but black-gloss ceramic stirrup kraters
continued to be made. These continued to be exported and to appear in
Lakonian religious contexts, where they were presumably used by Spartan
citizens. They also appear in rural settlements established in the area to the
east of Sparta from around 550 (Catling 2002, 225). The export of stirrup
kraters to indigenous sites in Sicily and Magna Graecia seems to reach its
peak in the last quarter of the sixth century before falling sharply in the
first quarter of the fifth (Nafissi 1991, 2479). The historical tradition notes
the reforming activity of the ephor Chilon at Sparta in the middle of the
sixth century, and current historical thought places the development of the
Lykourgan regime in this period as well. By 475 BC, literary sources and
the archaeological record appear to agree on Spartan austerity, at least with
respect to drinking.
This evidence leaves us with a series of questions, the answers to which
have been traditionally sought in later sources and logical assumptions.
The literary and iconographic evidence largely fail to tell us what place
communal drinking had in Archaic Spartan society, and whether it should
be considered primarily a public or private activity. Nor do these sources
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provide any conclusive information about the physical location of Archaic
Spartan drinking: the vague hints in Alkman are generally interpreted only
with reference to much later practice, and the religious overtones of some
Lakonian sympotic iconography can just as easily be associated with the
practices of foreign consumers as they can with those of Spartans. The
archaeological record is little better. Although it suggests more strongly
that Spartans sometimes drank together in sanctuaries and perhaps near
tombs, it provides little information about other contexts, or about the
symbolic expression of sympotic ideologies in funerary settings. Finally,
none of the evidence is extensive enough to identify and explain social
changes in drinking over time, or to relate such changes to the rest of the
Greek world.
The same situation applies to most Greek cities. Most lack their own
literary or artistic traditions, and few have provided enough archaeological
evidence to discuss the location of drinking in urban space across time.
Even at Athens, where the literary and artistic evidence is richest, the nature
of Archaic drinking is usually largely reconstructed from Classical evidence.
How, then, can we examine Archaic drinking on its own terms, at Sparta
or anywhere else?
I propose to integrate the best primary evidence we do have, in an
attempt to create a general background against which the fragmentary
records of specific communities might be fleshed out. My approach will
rest on three fundamental assumptions: that the residents of all early Greek
poleis shared an intense preoccupation with the distribution of political
and social power within their communities; that this preoccupation was
entangled with their commensal attitudes and behaviors; and that their
collective anxieties about power and political participation can be
recognized in the corpus of Archaic sympotic poetry that has been passed
down to us. This approach will necessarily start with generalizations; but
by identifying and analyzing large-scale patterns, I hope to be able to use
the results to explain the unique characteristics of individual contexts.
I will begin with a synoptic review of Archaic poetry, almost all of which,
it has been convincingly argued, was composed for and performed in
sympotic contexts.37 This provides the most direct evidence for the
thoughts and feelings of Archaic drinkers. Rather than enhancing my
interpretation of this fragmentary material with reference to later literature,
I will instead attempt to fill in the gaps through an archaeological
investigation of the patterning of sympotic activity in the only places where
we can observe a full spectrum of evidence for urban life and death, and
where we can place sympotic activity in both its spatial and symbolic
context: the well-excavated Greek colonial cities of Sicily. I will limit myself
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here to Megara Hyblaia, Selinous, and Himera, all of which were planned
from scratch in the eighth or seventh century, destroyed in the fifth
century, and extensively excavated and published in the twentieth century.
Although the Sicilian colonies arguably followed a different developmental
path from their mainland peers, the historical record suggests that they
were equally concerned with the distribution of social and political power
among their citizens, and they offer a range of archaeological evidence
unparalleled by the cities of the mainland or Asia Minor.
I will then try to reconcile the literary and archaeological records with the
aid of recent anthropological theories of commensality before returning to
Sparta to examine from a new angle its place in broader trends in Archaic
Greek drinking. The major targets of my investigation will be the assumptions
that underlie the orthodox view of the symposion: that it was from its origins
marginal to and in conflict with the political life of the polis; that it was
usually attended by mutually sympathetic groups of friends with shared goals,
worldviews, backgrounds and intentions; and that it was typically hosted by
aristocratic private individuals in private houses at all points in its history.
The politics of drinking
The anti-polis bias ascribed to the symposion is perhaps the easiest
assumption to challenge, since it is the least firmly rooted in the primary
evidence and the most reliant on late fifth and fourth-century thought. By
the Classical period, many Greek communities were large and diverse, and
citizens at a variety of socio-economic levels had opportunities to
participate in civic life and to develop a political self-consciousness. In the
smaller Archaic polis, with its primarily agrarian economic base and its
political focus on personal relationships, these dynamics did not apply. The
existence of an enfranchised, politically activist non-elite class and that of
a closed noble stratum rigidly defined by birth are equally improbable.38
Instead, most social and political power is likely to have been wielded by a
relatively small, fluid, and fractious group of individuals who drew their
status from an unquantifiable amalgam of family history, personal qualities,
behavior and wealth. The members of this group were largely identical to
those entitled to occupy formal positions of executive, juridical and religious
power within the community, and seem often to have been at odds with
each other over the distribution of that power. In Lin Foxhalls elegant
formulation, Archaic poleis, as political entities, were little more than a
stand-off between the members of the elite who ran them (1997, 119).
In essence, then, most Archaic communities were divided into two
classes after all, but these classes were neither impermeable nor based
clearly on economic or inherited status. On one side of this divide stood
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those who could reasonably expect their individual opinions to matter in
decisions that affected community life; on the other side, those who could
not. This separation between those I would like to term full political
agents and the rest of the population was probably further reinforced, at
least in the earlier Archaic period, by extensive vertical networks of
hierarchy and personal patronage.39 In the sympotic model sketched out by
Murray and elaborated by Morris and Kurke, it is this very group of agents
who withdraw into escapist, reactionary symposia after being militarily and
politically marginalized by a rising civic-minded middle class. I agree rather
with Schmitt Pantel, who, in her discussion of the symposion, argues that
[t]he groups practising this form of sociability are the very groups which
comprise the civic body of the Archaic city (1990, 25). Whether or not the
symposion was a dominant metaphor for civic life,40 its importance in
Archaic elite self-representation suggests that participation on a practical
level played a fundamental role in the demonstration and maintenance of
elite status (Schmitt Pantel 1992, 111). Since, then, Archaic symposia were
likely to have been populated by the main political actors in the community,
the relationships, alliances, ideas and agreements that were mediated and
performed in them were inherently political, for they directly affected
decisions that in turn affected the life of the community itself. This is most
evident in the connection between symposia and intra-community conflicts.
Unlike their Classical counterparts, however, these conflicts are usually
between elites and often between the fellow symposiasts themselves.
The symposion and its discontents
Concerns about stasis have long been recognized in Archaic poetry: Alkaios,
Solon and Theognis all warn that the unjust behavior of a few can engulf
the whole community in internecine war.41 That these fears were wellfounded is demonstrated by several fragments of Alkaios, in which he
describes Pittakos as an erstwhile ally who then defected to the camp of the
tyrant Myrsilos, eating up the city with him ( : fr. 70 LobelPage). Pittakos injustices are specifically associated here with his
commensal practices: the same fragment places him in a symposion where a
lyre plays among vain buffoons.42 The consequence of these interactions
for Alkaios and his allies seems to have been exile; the consequences for
the community as a whole, if Aristotles report is accurate, were disruptive
and violent conflicts that led it to appoint Pittakos as leader when the exiles
tried to return (Politics 1285a). Alkaios own testimony and the sympotic
context for which the elegies of Theognis and Solon were composed
thus point to the symposion as one of the main stages on which such political
dynamics were played out.
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Most Archaic poetry, even that composed for a specific occasion, was
meant to be repeated by participants in future symposia. Theognis expects
as much when he tells his interlocutor Kyrnos that his name will be on the
lips of young symposiasts long after he has died (Theog. 23648). Since all
symposiasts were expected to perform, the recitation of poetry was not a
passive experience: it involved the memorization and internalization of
ideas, aphorisms, and attitudes, and thus played a normative and didactic
role in the symposion. In essence, sympotic poetry was composed to shape
attitudes, as well as express them, and there is good reason to suppose that
the social concerns of Theognis in late seventh-century Megara felt very
familiar to the symposiasts who kept his poetry alive by reciting it in early
sixth-century Megara Hyblaia.43 This ceases to be true when a society has
changed so fundamentally that the old poetry can only be fossilized or
misconstrued,44 but I maintain that between perhaps 650 and the late sixth
century, the consistent attitudes visible in poetry from various parts of the
Greek world closely reflect the desires and anxieties of Archaic Greek
drinkers in general. Only in the second half of the sixth century does a
poetic shift become evident, and even then the attitudes of the earlier poets
continue to resonate alongside the new well into the fifth century.45 The
concerns of these earlier poets center on what I identify above as a basic
preoccupation of Archaic Greek society: the distribution of social and
political power, particularly as it relates to the interactions between an
individual and his peers.
It is undeniable that a great deal of Archaic poetry focuses on eroticism,
the pleasures of drinking, and the joy of good company. Surprisingly
frequent, however, are dark warnings about the behavior of the listener,
real or imagined, and about the intentions of his fellow drinkers.46 This
gloomier poetry seems to have been equally popular among Archaic
symposiasts, and the anxieties it displays should thus be considered an
important element of the Archaic symposion. In the following section I will
attempt to identify the main sources of those anxieties, with examples
drawn primarily from the lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh and early
sixth centuries who deal explicitly with sympotic themes (Arkhilokhos,
Alkaios, Theognis, Solon).
The iambic gibes of Arkhilokhos are difficult to interpret, and cannot
necessarily be seen as reflections of actual events or relationships.
Nevertheless, the poet is obviously sensitive both to the significance of
commensality in the creation of social bonds and to the fragility of those
bonds: he accuses Lykambes of breaking an oath made over salt and table
(fr. 173 West). The commensal group can also serve as a theater in which
behavior and consumption can be monitored and criticized, as is the case
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with the fellow-drinker whom Arkhilokhos reproaches for having arrived
uninvited and empty-handed to guzzle raw wine.47 Similarly, Alkaios
attacks on Pittakos are framed squarely in the context of sympotic
associations and habits of consumption. In fragment 129 Lobel-Page, he
calls Pittakos the potbellied one ( , line 21) while damning
him for the breaking of oaths he swore with Alkaios and other hetairoi, and
a list of his other terms of opprobrium emphasizes gluttony and anti-social
eating habits.48 Other more fragmentary verses also hint at the darker side
of sympotic associations. Like Arkhilokhos, Alkaios mentions a former
friend who appears to have betrayed the trust of the shared table (fr. 71
Lobel-Page; cf. Page 1955, 295). More seriously, in a commentary on lyric
preserved in P. Oxy. 2506, Alkaios seems to be shown defending himself
from an accusation that he had a hand in the violent death of a comrade
or love object; the following lines mention fellow drinkers (: fr.
S280 Page, line 26).
A general interest in discerning the intentions of ones fellows is also
evident in more neutral statements attributed to Alkaios. The gnomic
assertion that wine is a way to look through a man (
: fr. 333 Lobel-Page) highlights the usefulness of intoxication in
revealing the true character of others; and the call for wine, dear child, and
truth (fr. 366 Lobel-Page) perhaps associates drink with transparency in
the same way. At the same time, the poet warns of the consequences of
speaking too freely: too much drinking leads one to say things better left
unsaid (fr. 358 Lobel-Page), and such things inspire unpleasant replies
(fr. 341 Lobel-Page). The same tension between the desire for true
knowledge of ones friends and the fear of divulging too much about
oneself is even more apparent in the Theognidean syllogy, where
contradictory poetic instructions suggest an audience slipping into
cognitive dissonance. Warnings about the inconstancy and faithlessness of
ones comrades are rife (e.g. Theog. 658, 734, 11524, 41518); the poet
complains that it is easier to identify impure metals than a mans intentions
(11924) and curses friends who have one tongue but two minds (912).
At the same time, the listener is specifically advised not to make his own
plans known to his fellows (73) and to hide his true thoughts behind
honeyed words (365). In a famous turn of phrase, the poet suggests that the
symposiast change color like the octopus to match whatever environment
he finds himself in (21516).49 He also instructs his listener to blend into
the background in the syssitia ( ), the better to assess his
fellows (30912); and he baldly suggests feigning friendship with ones
enemies in order to attack when they least suspect it (3634). In light of
these conflicting instructions, it is difficult to determine whether the
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statement that it is hard and troublesome to deceive an enemy...but it is
easier for a friend to deceive a friend (121920) should be understood as
a warning or as a helpful suggestion.
As in the poetry of Alkaios, wine serves in the Theognidea as a tool for
the assessment of ones fellow-drinkers. The metaphor of the touchstone
takes the place of Alkaios dioptron: when exposed to wine, a mans true
character is shown (499502).50 Questions of consumption are again
foremost. Imbibing more or less than ones friends is problematic (6278),
as is drinking so much that ones enemies can take advantage (8412). In
one set of verses, the poetic voice is that of a drunken symposiast who
fears saying something that will bring reproach (5078). The answer to the
dangers posed by wine is a middle course between excess and abstinence
(cf. 83740). This middle course is not simply a good way to avoid
embarrassment; it is also a politically charged concept, as its use in explicitly
civic contexts shows (e.g. 21920, where the poet advises Kyrnos not to be
upset by civil unrest, but to walk a middle road like him). Statements like
this provide Morris with the evidence for his middling ideology, and they
reflect similar ideas of balance and moderation expressed in the elegies of
Solon. Solon, in turn, uses the language of commensality to describe
balanced and harmonious social relations in the political community. The
city is threatened, he writes, by those who do not know how to restrain
their desire / nor order their pleasures in the calm of a feast.51
The other side of moderation in consumption, for all the poets
mentioned, is unbridled greed. Greed for food and drink is consistently
associated in the poetry of Alkaios, Theognis and Solon with greed for
power and wealth and the willingness to employ unjust means to acquire
them. This is not just a desire for more, in a general sense. Both Solon and
Theognis use a term (koros) that specifically connotes an insatiable desire
to have more than ones proper share what later authors will term pleonexia.52
The association is made explicit at Theog. 6045: You know, the koros of
hunger has destroyed by far more / men, as many as wanted to have more
than their share.53 In these poems, such greed is not a moral, but an ethical
failing, in that the unjust acquisitions subtract from the resources available
to others. That the distribution of wealth and power is a zero-sum game is
made very clear by all three poets, and is closely associated with concepts
of baseness, expressed by the adjectives kakos and deilos, and nobility,
expressed by agathos and esthlos.54 The acquisitiveness of base people (that
is, those who place gain above fairness55 and honesty in social relations)
inevitably reduces noble people (that is, those who place fairness above
wealth) to poverty and exclusion from power.56 The behavior of ones
peers in the symposion, therefore, is a fundamental measure of their political
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intentions, and it is no coincidence that the social and political consequences
of greed for the rest of the sympotic community are a major concern in this
poetry. The most terrible of these consequences is the impoverishment of
agathoi, which brings loss of political agency and with it strife.
The fear of a descent into poverty appears in all these poets, despite the
different ideological camps into which Morris argument places them. In
each case, poverty is explicitly associated with the difficulty of maintaining
ones status as an agathos, which I argued above is not simply a function of
birth, but is bound up in a tangled semantic web of economic resources,
ethical choices, and public performance.57 Epic models suggest that much
of the public performance of goodness lies in equal participation in
reciprocal relationships, and in fact it is in these terms that a speaker
defends himself in Arkhilokhos fr. 23 West: I might seem like a base (deilos)
man, / but I am not such, nor from such men born. / I know how to be
a friend to a friend, / and to be an enemy to an enemy and [do?] harm....58
Despite apparent poverty, the poetic persona emphasizes his ability to
reciprocate for good and especially for ill; given other statements about
reciprocity in the verses of Arkhilokhos, this ability seems to rest not so
much in possessions as in a poets caustic voice and his strong right hand.59
Solon and the Theognidea also identify reciprocity as a characteristic of
the agathos, but in these verses the ability to reciprocate is associated less
with violence and more with participation in social and political structures
within the community. As a consequence, reciprocity becomes more
dependent on economic resources and thus more uncertain. Solon prays
to bring joy to his friends and pain to his enemies in fr. 13 West, and in the
same breath he asks for the wealth to make this possible, although he does
not want to acquire it unjustly. The poet of the Theognidea focuses more
on the breakdown of reciprocity: although he hopes he will be able to help
his friends and best his enemies (33740; 86972), he bemoans much more
frequently the uselessness of favors offered (101112; 3334; 8534 =
1038ab; 9556; 12636; 133740) and feels it necessary to remind the
beneficiary not to forget the service (9578; 10956=1160ab). The poor
are least able to participate in these reciprocal networks: when one suffers
misfortune, friends disappear (6978) and poverty means that one is no
longer an agathos man (930).
The last statement is the crux of the issue for the Archaic poets. Lack
of material resources is inextricably connected with political and social
disempowerment, whatever ones birth and background. Despite a certain
hopeful insistence that the true agathos will be recognized as such by his
upright conduct in the face of poverty (Theog. 1456; 3939; Solon fr. 13,
above), the raw reality shines through more clearly. Poverty is accompanied
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by her sister Powerlessness (: Alkaios fr. 364 Lobel-Page): a poor
man irritates the agathoi when he associates with them (Theog. 6678), he
can neither say nor do anything, his tongue is tied (1778), and he is
dishonored by all (621). Poverty personified is excluded from assemblies
and the execution of justice, the very activities that define political agents
(26770). Poverty is particularly terrible for an agathos, who should die (181)
or throw himself into the sea (175) before that base figure (deile-) can force
him, who once knew good and beautiful things (esthla kai kala), into
shameful behaviors (64952; cf. 38890).
The behavior of ones fellow-drinkers and the associated fear of poverty
and political exclusion are the most prominent sources of anxiety expressed
in this poetry. Such anxieties appear equally in Morriss elitist and
middling poets between the mid-seventh and the mid- to late sixth
century, and they offer a sharp contrast to Murrays vision of group
harmony created by shared eastern pleasures. Central to this poetic
discourse is the question of what defines an esthlos, and the poets seem to
be working as hard as possible to convince their audience that the answer
is loyalty to other esthloi, expressed by the refusal to take more than ones
share. Those who seek more break faith with their fellows, who are then
forced out of the ranks of full political agents and the result is civil war.
An esthlos demonstrates, through both economic resources and behavior,
that he is worse than no man; at the same time, he must suppress his innate
desire to push himself in front of his peers within the community.
Departure from either of these principles, not literal low birth, is the
primary characteristic of a kakos, although the two are certainly connected,
since those not born into wealth and accepted into the right circles will
lack the social training that enables them to follow these rules.
From the evidence I have outlined above, it seems clear that symposia
played a major role in the right circles, and Archaic sympotic poetry itself
was perhaps the most important element in such training. Indeed, far from
being concerned with the actions of those outside this context altogether,
it is particularly focused on behaviors within the commensal group.
Learning the poetry meant learning from good men, and in the process
becoming good oneself. That this was not a conclusion determined by
noble birth is clear from poetic statements that kakoi are not born but
made by association with bad men (Theog. 3058), and that the same man
can be agathos at one time and kakos at another (cited by Plato in Prot.
344d).60 These statements strongly suggest that status in Archaic poetry
depends not on innate qualities but on performance. To perform correctly,
one needs the proper upbringing, and therefore the proper birth; one must
also have enough wealth and leisure to make performance possible. To
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that extent some of the connotations of aristocracy, in our sense, still apply.
But the definition of status in terms of actions and public appearance does
not necessarily exclude new esthloi, provided they follow the rules, and it
certainly permits the exclusion of former esthloi who no longer meet all the
criteria. This is borne out by Alkaios assertion that possessions are the
man, and no poor man can be esthlos or honored (fr. 360 Lobel-Page): lack
of wealth makes it impossible for such a man to behave properly, which in
turn silences his voice among the decision-makers, which in turn leaves
him vulnerable to exploitation and outrage. Alkaios attributes this not
useless ( ) statement to the Spartan Aristodamos. Whether
or not this attribution is accurate, it indicates that a late seventh-century
Lesbian thought the same social dynamics were operating among
contemporary Lakedaimonians.
The symposion and its poetry certainly helped to form the group identity
of the full political agents in the Archaic city, and separated them from
those without the leisure, training, or resources to participate. At the same
time, both drinking-parties and verse served as stages on which anxieties
about the maintenance of status and suspicions about the intentions of
ones peers were played out. These anxieties focus on the social climbing
of others only to the extent that it causes ones own movement down, and
the poetry tends to present potential fellow-drinkers, rather than those
outside the group, as the most likely cause of such downward motion.61
Far from exhibiting ideological consensus about elite and non-elite
behavior, the poetrys obsession with badness and deception highlights
the deep-seated fear that the listeners themselves will reject solidarity for
personal advantage. The ultimate consequence of such a rejection, in these
poems and sometimes in reality, is the disenfranchisement of some or all
of ones fellows.
The early Archaic poetry reviewed here reveals two important
characteristics. First, it does not always depict harmonious bands of
drinkers, allied with their comrades against the world. For every expression
of fellow-feeling, there is another of mistrust or fear. Second, these more
negative sentiments are directly connected with a concern for the
maintenance of ones identity as a political and social agent, and with the
recognition that the actions of ones peers are the most likely to endanger
that agency. The desire of those peers to have more than their share, in
particular, constantly threatens to reduce ones own share to the point
where social participation is no longer possible. These attitudes are not
particular to an historical moment of social strife at Megara, nor are they
products of a middling ideology. They are shared to some extent by all the
poets discussed, and I would argue that they were probably shared in the
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seventh and sixth centuries by most Greek men who felt entitled to be
heard, socially and politically, within their communities.
These political concerns seem to recede into the background in the
second half of the sixth century, as both lyric and elegiac poetry begin to
focus more exclusively on sensuality, sentiment, intellectual issues and
eroticism, and some poets ban discussions of conflict from the symposion
altogether (Xenophanes fr. B1 West; Anakreon eleg. fr. 2 West). The same
period sees the rise of epinician poetry, which not only celebrates individual
athletic achievement but asserts the cosmic superiority of the athletic victor
and his family. Before the second half of the sixth century, however, both
lyric and elegiac poems avoid or minimize the sources of personal
excellence clearly accepted by Archaic elites in public life athletic
competition, horse-raising, martial skill, guest-friendship and dwell
instead on a social world defined by good and bad relationships among
full political agents within the same community.
The poetry of both Alkman and Tyrtaios can be inserted without
difficulty into this general context. Alkmans lyric, like that of Alkaios, can
concern itself with the soft pleasures of the drinking company (as in fr. 19
Page), but it can also endorse moderate tastes in the manner of
Arkhilokhos or Theognis (as in fr. 17 Page). Tyrtaios may be exceptional
in his emphasis of military values, but he frames those values in terms of
the same opposition between the agathos who is honored and the man who,
through poverty and loss of community, becomes a kakos. In fr. 10 West,
the poet compares the agathos man who dies fighting for his country with
a man who leaves his city as a wandering beggar, whose poverty makes
him hateful to all, who disgraces his noble appearance, and who is
followed by the paired shames of atimia, the loss of a voice in community
decisions, and badness.62 And in the famous fr. 12 West, Tyrtaios
emphatic rejection of a series of aristocratic measures of excellence (of
which the third is wealth, after athleticism and beauty) suggests that at least
some of his listeners felt that these measures were valid. Perhaps it is telling
that the lines of this poem that refer to the intact social agency of a
victorious warrior are quoted with minor differences in the Theognidea.63
The world described by the Spartan poets, then, is not very different from
the world described by Archaic poets across the Greek world. It was a
world very concerned with the definition of the agathos, and the production
of more such men but only to the level of their peers, for too much
individual excellence in any category threatened the social position of other
good men.64 Equality and equilibrium among those who could expect
their voices to be heard in the community seem to have been particularly
important. The evidence of contemporary Archaic vase painting, in
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Lakonia as at Athens and Corinth, suggests that this world revolved around
the deep bowl that held the mixture of wine and water shared equally by
the symposiasts: the krater.
Placing the krater
But where did that krater stand in the Archaic period? Conventional
discussions assume it stood, as it did in the fifth century, in the diningrooms of the private houses of the agathoi. There, aristocratic drinking
groups could enjoy private luxuries, conspire, and create a self-contained
world outside the constraints of the polis. The primary evidence for the
fifth century is very clear on this account: literary sources explicitly describe
symposia in rooms in private houses, and such domestic dining-rooms can
also be conclusively identified in the archaeological record.65 Yet for the
Archaic period, such definitive sources of evidence are lacking, as the
Spartan material shows. In fact, the location of drinking in the Archaic
period is an open question and a critical one, since the answer will bear
heavily on our understanding of the political content of commensality in
pre-Classical Greece.
As natural as drinking in private houses might seem, the Archaic literary
and iconographic sources provide no clear confirmation of this practice.
The reluctance of these sources to indicate clearly where drinking-parties
are happening forces scholars to interpret them with reference to fifthcentury material, creating circular arguments and further confusing the
issue. A discussion of built space in Archaic sympotic poetry illustrates this
problem particularly well.66 The fifth-century sources use specific
terminology for the rooms in which symposia take place: the most frequent
are andro-n and oikos, the latter of which has longstanding associations with
domestic space (cf. Xen. Symp. 1.4 [andro-n], 2.18 [oikos]). But andro-n does not
appear at all in the lexicon until the fifth century, when it first appears to
describe dining rooms in palaces or free-standing buildings.67 Oikos, on the
other hand, is used in early Archaic poetry, where it clearly has domestic
connotations.68
That word is never used, however, in the very few references to the
space of the symposion in Archaic poetry. When the oikos is mentioned in
conjunction with drinking, it is only as the place where one goes after
leaving the party (Theog. 476, 566, 844). Of the poets mentioned, Alkaios
is the most interested in the physical setting of the symposion; but although
several of his poems imply interior space (fr. 338 and 346 Lobel-Page),
only one provides an extensive description. This is the well-known poem
set within a great hall ( ) hung with gleaming armor (fr. 357
Lobel-Page). Page takes this as an accurate representation of the drinking-
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hall in the house of a Lesbian noble, although he notes that the arms are
old-fashioned (Page 1955, 211). Burnett offers a more circumspect
interpretation, in which the Homeric imagery is a device to create a heroic
impression in the mind of the listener, not an accurate description of actual
weapons hanging before the drinkers (1983, 125 and n. 11). She is also less
certain than Page that the space is a room in Alkaios house (123, n. 8).
Van Wees, however, in a broader discussion of the changing peacetime
role of weapons in Archaic Greece, sees the domestic interpretation as
most likely, citing a series of early sixth-century vases depicting symposia
with arms and armor hanging on the walls behind the drinkers (1998,
3635; cf. Fehr 1971; Shfer 1997).69
Here, however, two basic problems come into play. The first involves
the relation between poetry, image, and practice: the first two cannot
necessarily be taken at face value as witnesses to the third. The second
introduces a fundamental ambiguity in the evidence, and with it the risk of
circular argumentation. Both fragments of Alkaios and later reports
associate Archaic Lesbian symposia with public and religious space. If we
assume that fr. 357 was meant for performance in the setting it describes,
we should equally take other fragments (such as 129 and 130 Lobel-Page)
to indicate that Alkaios and his comrades held symposia in sanctuaries. If
one is to believe Athenaios, Sappho further testifies to non-private drinking
spaces in poems that praised her brother for serving as a wine-pourer
() in the prytaneion of the Mytilenians (Athen. 2.2.30). Arms and
armor were frequent dedications in sanctuaries70 and were not out of place
in civic spaces (e.g. the display of Spartan shields from Pylos in the
Athenian agora). Another fragment of Alkaios mentions the arms (of
faithless comrades?) hanging in the Myrsileion (fr. 383 Lobel and Page),
but it is unclear whether this would have been a public or private
building.71 It becomes difficult, at this point, to distinguish domestic from
public or religious settings in poetry and images that never take us outside
the doors of the drinking space. The use of the term domos in line 1 could
be telling, since the same term in the singular or plural clearly refers to
domestic physical space in Semonides (fr. 7 West, line 29) and to the
household on a conceptual level in Theognis (354, 958). But the term is also
an epic one, and it is used repeatedly in Archaic poetry on an epic level to
refer to the halls of the gods (e.g. Alkaios fr. 1 Lobel-Page). Meter too may
play a role. We are left with a word as semantically indeterminate as the
word hall in English.
Vase-paintings are no more help. It is clear from the depiction of items
hanging on walls that many, if not most, symposia are indoor affairs from at
least the turn of the sixth century. Yet the occasional presence of the
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mysterious padded dancers, with their ritual overtones, complicates the
reflexive identification of those indoor settings as domestic (Smith 2000;
Isler-Kernyi 2001, 43). Schmitt Pantel, too, in her examinations of the
iconography and social role of the banquet, insists on the overlap between
the symposion and other modes of Archaic commensality, emphasizing the
lack of evidence for domestic interpretations of the early representations
(Schmitt Pantel 1990; 1992; 1995). Her work in particular suggests that we
rarely have sufficient grounds to read a symposion on a black-figure vase as
either private or public.72
Unfortunately, the same ambiguity applies to most studies of Archaic
domestic architecture. The Classical andro-n, with its square plan, offset
door, and paved floor with raised borders, has no obvious analogue in our
limited corpus of Archaic houses; the architectural form seems to appear
first in the third quarter of the sixth century in buildings generally
interpreted as public or religious, such as the hestiatorion at Megara Hyblaia
and the West Building in the Argive Heraion.73 Several scholars have
identified an increasing architectural complexity in Archaic houses and the
reorganization of domestic space around a courtyard from the seventh
century forward (Morris 1998; Lang 2005), permitting the sort of spatial
distinctions for insiders/outsiders that have been identified as critical for
entertaining in Classical houses (Nevett 1999). Buildings presented as
aristocratic houses suitable for the hosting of symposia, however, usually
have characteristics that could equally suggest religious or public uses, and
there is often scholarly disagreement about their functions.74 The ceramic
assemblages cited as evidence for the use of these buildings are invariably
composed of fineware drinking vessels, which in itself tips the balance
neither one way nor the other.75
This ambiguity should remind us that, with the exception of peristyle
temples, public and private buildings from the Geometric to the Classical
period largely share the same architectural vocabulary, and spaces that
originate in one seem to be adapted readily to the other. The argument has
been made that temples themselves evolved from and took the form of
houses of rulers (Mazarakis Ainian 1997). This makes it very difficult to
identify function on the basis of form in the best of cases, and the situation
is much worse when the plan is the only piece of evidence recorded,
published, or cited in the interpretation of these structures (Lang 2005,
13). In such circumstances, the individual scholars assumptions about
ancient social structure and practice become the deciding factor.
The eighth/seventh-century Megaron Hall at Emporio on Chios is
perhaps the best example of the role of these assumptions. Excavators
found the building a long hall with a porch and a single colonnade down
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the center, located within the walls of the acropolis near a contemporary
temple of Athena stripped of its associated finds by the activity of
modern charcoal burners, and interpretations of its function have thus
been based on its plan alone (Boardman 1967, 345). In some respects, it
seems a larger version of some of the clearly residential structures in the
lower part of the town, and Boardman therefore identifies it as the great
hall and house of the local baron (1967, 34). This identification is based
on two major assumptions: that the resemblance to house plans indicates
domestic function, and that Archaic Lesbian poetry reflects a feudal
society in which powerful individuals controlled small communities (2501).
If we assume that the great hall described by Alkaios is a private one, the
poetry provides further evidence for the interpretation of the building as
a local barons residence. The scant archaeological evidence, however,
could just as easily support the idea that this was a public dining hall for a
larger segment of the community (cf. Fagerstrm 1988, 88), at which point
the building is transformed into evidence for an interpretation of the poetic
space as non-private.
The situation in Archaic Sparta is even more difficult, since we lack both
buildings and contemporary literary references to buildings. The only
available first-hand evidence is drawn from Lakonian vase-painting, which
is more interested than Attic vase-painting in the architectural context of
drinking. Where drinking is clearly contextualized in space, as we have seen,
it is set outdoors or near columnar facades that suggest temples or
fountain-houses (Pipili 1987, 71; Smith 1998, 756); but this may be meant
to reflect Samian, not Spartan, practice. Smith assumes a scene depicting
a dancing komast and pipers flanking a symposiast on a kline- takes place in
the andron (1998, 78), but even if the scene refers to built space rather
than a tent or outdoor setting, nothing allows the viewer to determine if it
was public or private (and the term andro-n is probably anachronistic in
this context). Even in the Classical period, for which sources are more
numerous and more informative, the spatial location of the syssitia is not
certain. It is generally assumed that they were located along the
Hyakinthian Way, between Sparta town and Amyklai (e.g. Cartledge 1998,
46; Hodkinson 1997, 47; 2000, 217), on the basis of two references
preserved in Athenaios second or third-century AD Deipnosophistai.
Athenaios cites Polemon for the establishment of cult for heroes
called Matto-n and Kerao-n (Kneader and Mixer) by some cooks
( ) among the messes ( ) (Athen. 2.6
Kaibel), and later reports Demetrios of Skepsis clarification that the herocult of Matto-n and Kerao-n had been established at a point along the
Hyakinthian Way by the servants who made bread and mixed wine in the
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messes (Athen. 4.74 Kaibel).76 While the resulting logical connection
between the messes and the Hyakinthian way is reasonable, the evidence
is not incontrovertible, and it offers no clues as to when these messes were
established and whether their establishment represented continuity or a
break from tradition.
I have tried to show that no compelling argument literary,
iconographical, or archaeological has yet been made for the location of
Archaic drinking, public or private, on the basis of anything other than
Classical evidence.77 It seems reasonable to assume that Archaic symposia
were private affairs but in the end, it only seems reasonable because later
sources tell us so. Yet on such a foundation is based an interpretive
framework that has now been applied to almost every corner of Archaic
Greek society, including Sparta.
Drinking in context
An analysis of Archaic poetry alone cannot clarify the Archaic Spartan
social situation: one can argue equally persuasively that Tyrtaios is a didactic
sympotic poet in the same vein as Theognis or a military poet of uniquely
Spartan character. Neither can a discussion of the scattered evidence for
buildings associated with dining or symposia explain whether Archaic
Spartan commensality was more public or more private, especially when
such buildings can be defined equally well as public or private on the
basis of the same material. Isolated clues from other communities known
only fragmentarily can give us nothing more than impressions. The
situation calls for a broader approach to drinking in context, with evidence
drawn from urban sites where a full spectrum of inhabited and funerary
space is represented (and published).
For the Archaic period, such sites are only available in Sicily. As a result
of the historical circumstances of the island, several cities were occupied
for just a few hundred years, abandoned, and built over only lightly. The
same cities were then carefully excavated in the 20th century, and, in most
cases, the information derived from these excavations was published
thoroughly and contextually. There are still lacunae, and the Archaic
contexts are often fragmentary, but these sites provide an unparalleled
opportunity to examine how and where their residents drank, and how the
same residents deployed drinking vessels in their tombs, across time. It
can be argued that colonial Sicily was a world unto itself, and that these
cities are not appropriate parallels to mainland poleis like Sparta. Yet the
Sicilian cities participated extensively in the Panhellenic social networks of
the elite, as their treasuries and victories at Olympia demonstrate, and their
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sympotic attitudes are likely to have been similar to those of their mainland
peers. At home, they confronted the same basic questions about the
distribution of power and resources, and they seem to have had similar
reactions (the foundation of Himera was the result of political conflict, just
as the Spartan foundation of Taras seems to have been). The Sicilian cities
allow us, therefore, to watch these shared concerns play out on a much
more complete stage.
My discussion has been largely a negative one up to this point; in this
section, I will provide some positive archaeological evidence for the
sympotic attitudes and practices of Archaic Greeks. I present here a brief
and necessarily abridged summary of part of a much larger project that
sought to analyze the distribution of kraters as an index of sympotic activity
at fifteen Greek and non-Greek sites in Sicily and South Italy.78 I have
already mentioned the apparent centrality of the krater to Spartan drinking,
and the krater seems to have been the vessel most representative of
communal drinking in the rest of the Greek world as well. It is thus a
particularly useful tracer of sympotic activity. Symbolically, strong
arguments have been made that kraters were very closely associated with
communal drinking in the imaginaire of the Archaic Greeks, and unlike cups,
they reflect not individual participation but the symposion as a whole
(Lissarrague 1990). The krater is furthermore a bivalent symbol, since it
can represent either the egalitarian sharing of wine among a drinking
community or the control and distribution of wine by a host or leader
(Luke 1994). Like the symposion itself, then, the krater can evoke community,
hierarchy, or the tension between the two. On a more practical level, kraters
are large vessels with thick walls that tend to survive disproportionately in
the archaeological record, and their size and frequent decoration also lead
archaeologists to publish their fragments more consistently than they do
other vessels. The published sample, therefore, can be considered
reasonably representative of what was actually found during excavation
(this is hardly the case with most other types of pottery). I will consider
equivalent to kraters examples of another large, open shape: the deep,
rounded bowl known conventionally as a dinos. Although it lacks the
articulated neck, body, and foot of the krater narrowly defined,
iconographic evidence and its form both indicate that this vessel was also
used for the mixing of wine and water in the symposion.
This sort of study relies on a series of assumptions. All have been much
debated, and I will simply state the positions I take here. First, in full
awareness of the complicated nature of taphonomic processes, I will
nevertheless assume that broad patterns in the distribution of material
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across an urban landscape are not random and that, in the aggregate,
fragments of pottery do not wander too far from the area in which the
vessels were used.79 Second, for the interpretation of funerary contexts, I
will assume that choices made by the buriers are deliberate and reflect
attitudes about social behaviors as well as funerary rituals and religious
belief, even if they cannot be considered transparent representations of
practices like the symposion. Finally, I will insist on the idea that the
distribution of ceramic vessels is connected, at least indirectly, to elite
drinking practices. Vickers and Gill have argued that metal vessels were of
primary importance in elite symposia, but while this may be at least partially
accurate for the Classical world, there are significant problems with its
retrojection into the Archaic period.80 Even where metal vessels can be
reasonably postulated, ceramics continue to offer an accurate picture of
the sorts of contexts in which people were drinking, especially in
conjunction with other evidence (Cahill 2002, 1867).
I will discuss the three sample sites individually and diachronically. In
each case, I will record fragments of kraters as representative of the original
vessels, so that when I mention a certain number of kraters, I refer to the
minimum number of individual kraters represented in the ceramic record.
For the urban areas, I will use as my primary evidence only those kraters
that have been published with enough contextual information to locate
their findspots precisely within the urban space of the city, and I exclude
fragments from contexts associated with large-scale earth-moving (e.g.
road-beds). Evidence from these sites is not uniform, and I will rely on
strong evidence from each to minimize gaps in the records of the others.
For each site, I will follow the same rough chronological breakdown,
dividing the material into four basic periods: 725650 BC, 650550 BC, 550
475 BC, and 475400 BC. In my treatment of each city, I will begin with a
historical synopsis, describe the residential, religious, civic, and funerary
evidence in each of those periods, and conclude with a summary of the
diachronic patterns in that evidence.
Megara Hyblaia
Thucydides tells the story of the difficult foundation of Megara Hyblaia
on the east coast of Sicily, dating its foundation to 245 years before the
destruction of the city by Gelon of Syracuse, and thus to ca. 728 BC (Thuc.
6.3.1).81 Roughly three generations after its foundation, in the mid-seventh
century, Megara Hyblaia sent out its own colonial expedition, which
founded Selinous on the southwest coast of Sicily. There is little other
historical notice of the city until its destruction at the hands of Gelon,
tyrant of Syracuse, in 483, at which time Herodotus testimony suggests
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that it was controlled by an oligarchy of wealthy citizens (the fat ones:
Hdt. 7.156). The urban area and the cemeteries were investigated by Paolo
Orsi in the last years of the nineteenth century. Work was resumed by a
French mission in the 1950s and has continued under this team until the
present.82 Their work has focused on the area immediately surrounding
the Archaic agora, and although there have been limited investigations in
other parts of the city, this area is by far the best known.
The first structures to appear after the citys foundation were modest
houses.83 The urban area was given an orthogonal plan with several
different axes perhaps as early as the first decades of the communitys
existence, and scholars have argued that zones were already designated
during that process for civic, residential, and religious activity.84 The earliest
houses built in permanent materials at the turn of the seventh century
occupy residential lots defined by a street grid, although some are later
absorbed into expanding civic space. These houses are single square cells,
usually five meters or less on a side, spread throughout the urban area. In
the early years of the colony, domestic lots also seem to have housed
communal drinking: of the 27 kraters dated between 728 and 650 that
could be contextualized within areas with clear functions, 20 were found
in residential spaces. This number excludes a much larger number of
kraters of the first half of the seventh century mentioned in publications
without reference to findspot, many of which are likely to have been found
in domestic contexts.85
Religious contexts in the years between 728 and 650 are represented by
a votive deposit near what seems to be the main urban sanctuary of the
city (Vallet and Villard 1953; de Polignac 1999), and by a series of round
and square platforms located at the intersections of residential lots. The
latter structures, also present at Selinous and perhaps at Himera, may be
associated with social or religious groupings among the first settlers;
deposits of animal bones and pottery indicate long ritual use.86 Kraters
were found in association with these platforms (Figure 1, nos. 1 and 2),87
as well as in the votive deposit associated with the main sanctuary. And an
early krater was found in a silo or ritual pit (bothros) at the northeast corner
of the agora, where it might reflect wine consumption in either a religious
or a civic context (Figure 1, no. 3). The graves of the first generation of
settlers have not been located, but kraters are not unknown in Sicilian
funerary contexts of the late eighth century: they appear in tombs of this
date at nearby Syracuse (Orsi 1895). No early kraters have been reported,
however, among a large number of tombs dated to the seventh century in
the citys south necropolis.88
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Fig. 1. The zone of the agora of Megara Hyblaia at the end of the sixth century,
with areas differentiated by function: 1) circular platform; 2) circular platform and
enclosure; 3) silo or bothros; 4) well; 5) silo or incomplete well; 6) building i;
7) silo or bothros; 8) well and hestiatorion; 9) he-ro-on. (after Vallet et al. 1976)
Although houses were still very much in evidence in the area of the
agora between 650 and 550, and although their plans increasingly included
spatial divisions that would have facilitated private drinking,89 this period
brought a decrease in the association of kraters with domestic space. Of the
14 identified, only one was from an unambiguously residential context. At
least three others came from wells near the agora that contained rich
drinking assemblages that might have been public or private (Fig. 1, nos.
4 and 5: Vallet and Villard 1965, 308; Vallet et al. 1976, 126; Gras et al.
2004, 494).90 Three more were found in the votive deposit associated with
the urban sanctuary. The remaining contextualized kraters of this period
were found in areas that can probably be considered civic, in connection
with an energetic public building program that began in the second half of
the seventh century.91 Lakonian kraters were found in a well deposit in a
portico of the trapezoidal building i (Fig. 1, no. 6) and in a silo or bothros
in the agora near the north stoa (Fig. 1, no. 7); both building i and the
stoa are dated to the third quarter of the seventh century. A Late Corinthian
krater dated to the second quarter of the sixth century and four Lakonian
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kraters dated generally between 580 and 510 were found in a well in front
of the hestiatorion, a monumental building in ashlar blocks built around
530, with three square rooms almost certainly meant for dining (Fig. 1,
no. 8).92 Although the earlier structure associated with the well might have
been a house in the early sixth century, and although the deposit is
characterized as of the same sort that one finds in houses (Vallet et al.
1976, 54), its proximity to what became a public space shortly thereafter
hints that the kraters may reflect civic rather than private drinking.93 Finally,
although no kraters were found in association with it, the he-ro-on
constructed in the seventh century at the northwest corner of the agora
(Fig. 1, no. 9) might also have served a commensal purpose.94
Kraters continue to be largely absent from graves between 650 and 550.
Only one burial clearly dating this period may involve a wine-mixing vessel,
in this case a bronze bowl (a dinos?) set in a sandstone block and used as an
ossuary for the unburnt bones of several individuals, perhaps including a
woman, to judge from the presence of metal hair-spirals (Orsi and Cavallari
1890, 900). If indeed a womans remains were included, a sympotic
interpretation is made more difficult, and this type of burial has sometimes
been thought to carry more Homeric than sympotic connotations.95 This
grave can be dated to the second half of the seventh century by a ProtoCorinthian kylix, but two other similar burials in bronze bowls may be
dated anywhere from 650 to 500.96
For the period from 550 to 483, when the city was destroyed by Gelon,
only two kraters could be associated clearly with residential contexts,
despite substantial ongoing residential occupation around the agora.97 Two
late sixth-century kraters were from contexts for which no definite
associations could be established, as were four kraters dated more generally
to the sixth century.98 At least two Attic black-figured volute kraters were
found in the area of a small Late Archaic sanctuary (Vallet and Villard 1952,
47: kraters, number unspecified), and another Attic krater was uncovered
in the area of a temple on the south plateau of the site (temple ZR: Gras
et al. 2004, 62). Finally, one more Lakonian krater that can be dated after
the middle of the sixth century comes from the well in front of the
hestiatorion.
In the necropoleis, however, kraters are more numerous in tombs dating
between 550 and 483 than in the previous period. They are all used as
cinerary urns, and one notes again the prevalence of black-gloss Lakonian
stirrup kraters: for this period, five Lakonian kraters, two Attic black-figure
kraters, and four kraters for which no details have been published have
been found in the necropoleis of Megara Hyblaia. After the citys
destruction, the necropoleis continued to be used throughout the fifth
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century, perhaps by a rural population. Attic red-figure kraters appeared as
cinerary urns in two of these fifth-century tombs, one of the second quarter
of the century and the other of the last.99 In one other grave of the fifth
century, however, two small bell kraters appeared as grave-goods with a
double inhumation in a sarcophagus, and in another a small krater served
as a cover for a cinerary urn (Orsi 1892, 278; 287).
Residential Religious
Civic
Unknown
Funerary
Total
750650
19
32
650550
6*
15
550475
3*
11
21
475400
Seventh century
Sixth century
Fifth century
Fig. 2. Summary of contextualized kraters from Megara Hyblaia, by type of

context and period.
(*Of the nine kraters represented here, six are from the well in front of the
hestiatorion. Four of those are dated broadly to 580510. Here those four have
been divided between 650550 and 550475, with two in each period).
The relatively small number of kraters with precise contexts in the urban
area thus suggest the following pattern (Fig. 2). In the early years of the
colony, from its foundation in 728 to around the time of the foundation of
Selinous in the mid-seventh century, communal drinking took place in both
private and public contexts. The Syracusan evidence suggests that among
the first generation of colonists, kraters could be used in funerary display,
but none are found in graves at Megara Hyblaia dated between the late
eighth century and 650. After about 650 the evidence for domestic drinking
declines sharply, while kraters are increasingly found in connection with
both religious space and several new civic buildings in the agora. This
dissociation of kraters from private space persists until the city is
destroyed.100
In the necropoleis, from 650 to 550, only three tombs can be associated
with wine-mixing bowls, and then only if one assumes that the bronze dinoi
found in them are meant symbolize wine consumption.101 This gap is not
due to bias in the funerary record, since many of the 767 tombs with grave
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goods in the sample belong to the seventh or early sixth century. It seems
reasonable to conclude that during this period, kraters were not generally
considered appropriate for burials. After 550, kraters appear in graves more
frequently, usually as cinerary urns. After the citys destruction in the fifth
century, a non-urban population using its necropolis occasionally employed
kraters as both cinerary urns and grave goods. Differences in the number
of kraters in graves before and after the middle of the sixth century cannot
be explained simply by a change in burial rites (de la Genire 1987), since
secondary cremation was well represented among burials of all periods at
Megara Hyblaia. Nor can the exclusion of kraters from tombs before 550
have been due to a conceptual incompatibility between the world of the
symposion and the world of the dead, as argued by Murray (1988), since the
connection appears in the Classical tombs. If the choice to include or
exclude kraters from burials is a deliberate and symbolic act, its explanation
must be sought elsewhere.
Himera
Himera, on the northwest coast of Sicily at the mouth of the river of the
same name, was a secondary colony. According to Thucydides, it was
founded by Khalkidians from Zankle (Messina), in concert with some
Syracusans driven out during a political struggle (Thuc. 6.5). A notice in
Diodorus Siculus suggests that this took place around the middle of the
seventh century (13.62), at a time when public building intensified at
Megara Hyblaia and some of its citizens departed to found Selinous.
Himeras history in the late Archaic period seems to have revolved around
tyrants: according to Herodotus, it sheltered the tyrant of Zankle at the
beginning of the fifth century (Hdt. 6.24) and by the 480s was ruled by a
tyrant named Terillus, who, when deposed by Theron, tyrant of Akragas,
helped assemble the Carthaginian army that was defeated before Himera
by Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, in 480 (Hdt. 7.165). The city was then ruled
by Theron and his son, but after Therons death, his son lost the throne
after a failed war against Syracuse and Himera enjoyed peaceful autonomy
(Diod. Sic. 11.53,5; 11.49,4). The city was destroyed by the Carthaginians
in 408 BC and only lightly reoccupied. Extensive excavation campaigns in
the 1960s revealed large parts of the urban fabric on the upper plateau,
and ongoing work has added information about the lower city and the
necropoleis.102
The city saw two phases of construction, with a major reorganization of
the city plan as a consequence of the second. The first phase can be dated
to the second half of the seventh century. The dating of the second phase
of construction is more controversial: it was long associated with the
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historical notice of the tyranny of Terillus, but recent work suggests it took
place much earlier, perhaps near the beginning of the sixth century (Allegro
198889; Allegro 199394). The excavators also initially thought that the
earliest occupation was limited to scattered small, rectangular houses on the
upper plateau, but it now seems that the coastal plain below was also
occupied at the time of foundation (Allegro and Vassallo 1992).
Architectural space between 650 and 550 can be recognized only in the
scant fragmentary remains of the modest houses of the first phase, in a
small sanctuary embedded in a residential block on the west side of the
city (Fig. 3, no. 1), and in the main urban sanctuary (Fig. 3, no. 2), all of
which preserve the orientation of the early grid. A third sanctuary was
located in the Quartiere Est: it is represented by an early votive deposit
and a later architectural complex dubbed the santuarietto by the
excavators (Fig. 3, no. 3). Only one of the six kraters with published
findspots dated between 650 and 550 seems to be associated with a
residential context of the first phase. Three others are directly associated
with religious space: two were found in the main urban sanctuary, and the
third in the santuarietto. In addition to these, sherds from two more were
found in a sealed early sixth-century deposit including animal bones and
ash in a pit near the western neighborhood sanctuary (Allegro et al. 1976,
255). It is unclear whether they represent domestic debris or material from
Fig. 3. The northern end of the upper plateau of Himera in the fifth century, with
areas differentiated by function: 1) neighborhood sanctuary; 2) main urban
sanctuary; 3) sanctuary in the Quartiere Est (after Allegro et al. 1976).
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the western sanctuary. In the funerary record for this period, kraters are
perhaps represented by three undecorated local vessels of krater-like form,
dated generally to the sixth century. All three served as burial vessels for
infants, whose unburnt bodies were placed in the pots in the practice
known as enchytrismos.103
More evidence is available for the period between 550 and 475. During
this time, and especially from ca. 525, one can observe a significant shift in
the spatial distribution of kraters toward residential areas.104 Of 35 kraters
dating between 550 and 475, 26 were found in residential contexts. Three
of these were from the Lower City, where recognizable andro-nes were also
identified in private houses of the fifth century (Camerata-Scovazzo and
Vassallo 198889, 703). During this period, a Lakonian krater of the third
quarter of the sixth century appears in one grave, again as an enchytrismos
vessel for an infant,105 and a local miniature krater is part of a grave
assemblage associated with an adult inhumation (Allegro et al. 1976, 824).
The general disinterest in kraters as grave goods, however, is clearer when
one considers that the five examples cited here were the only ones among
the more than 1400 tombs in the main Archaic necropolis at Himera.106
The association of kraters with residential space becomes even more
obvious from 475 to 400, during which time domestic settings seem to
have housed the vast majority of these vessels (45 of 58, counting kraters
dated broadly to the fifth century). The ongoing association of kraters with
religious contexts, however, suggests that sanctuary space also continued
to house some communal drinking activity. Fragments from six kraters
were found in the area of the shrine in the Quartiere Est, another five
were represented in the rooms around the western shrine (including two
dated generally to the fifth century), and two more were identified in the
main sanctuary. During this period, three Attic red-figure kraters from
graves echo fifth-century developments in the necropolis of Megara
Hyblaia. Two are sporadic finds, but the third was a cinerary urn found in
situ (Allegro 199394, 1132). It bore Dionysiac imagery and was accompanied
by two wine-transport amphorae, strongly suggesting that in this burial,
the krater was conceptually connected with the world of the symposion.
At Himera, the spatial distribution of kraters across time shows some
similarities to the distribution at Megara Hyblaia, although there are some
important differences (Fig. 4; Fig. 5).107 As at Megara Hyblaia, kraters are
more evident in public (in this case religious) than in domestic areas for
the period between 650 and 550. Between 550 and 475, however, many
more kraters appear in residential contexts at Himera than at Megara
Hyblaia, while fewer kraters are found in graves.108 From 475 to 400,
Himera provides a picture of fifth-century practice fully consistent with
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contemporary literary sources. Kraters and dining spaces during this period
are found overwhelmingly in private homes. Although a few figural kraters
appear in fifth-century tombs at Himera, their funerary use continued to
be less pronounced there than at Megara Hyblaia, even though the latter
no longer existed as a polis.
Civic
Unknown
Funerary
Total
750650
650550
550475
26
37
475400
40
11
54
Sixth century
Fifth century
Fig. 4. Summary of contextualized kraters from Himera, by type of context and

period.
Fig. 5. Comparison of numbers of kraters by period and by function of the areas

in which they were found at Megara Hyblaia and Himera, 750400.
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Selinous
The history of excavation at Selinous has left us with a much less clear
understanding of its urban space and the distribution of finds within it than
at Himera or Megara Hyblaia. But it is included here because in
compensation it offers a much more extensive diachronic sample of
contextualized funerary material, drawn from as many as 5000 scientificallyexcavated tombs at the site (Kustermann Graf 2002, 11). It thus presents
a much more extensive sample of tombs with which the evidence at the
other two sites can usefully be compared. In addition, recent well-published
excavations in the agora provide a very thorough view of developments in
a particular urban area.109
Selinous was the daughter-city of Megara Hyblaia, founded according to
Thucydides in 628/27 but according to Diodorus Siculus around 650 on
the southwest coast of Sicily (Thuc. 6.4; Diod. Sic. 13.59). The archaeological
evidence now seems to bear out the earlier date, since excavations in the
area of the later agora uncovered six carefully reburied early seventhcentury urns containing small fragments of burnt bone (Rallo 1982). Over
the course of the sixth and fifth centuries, Selinous grew prosperous and,
to judge from the necropoleis, fairly large.110 Herodotus reports tyranny
and instability in connection with the expedition of the Spartan Dorieus in
the late sixth century (5.46).111 After a tumultuous fifth century, punctuated
by disputes with neighboring cities like Egesta, the city was destroyed by
the Carthaginians in 409 BC and never extensively reoccupied.
Among the urns discovered near the agora were three Geometric
stamnoid kraters imitating Argive and Corinthian production, probably of
Sikeliote Greek production (Rallo 1982, 20711). The funerary use of these
kraters may echo the late eighth-century use of kraters in burials at
Syracuse. Evidence for the use of urban space, on the other hand, does
not appear until the late seventh century. Between the late seventh and the
early sixth century, several private houses were constructed in a block along
the citys agora. These houses have been excavated and published by a
team led by Dieter Mertens, who sees them as the homes of some of the
original settler families (Mertens 2003; Mertens 2006, 179 ff.; 328). A typical
plan consists of two or three modest rooms, around five meters on a side,
arranged along one side of a courtyard, with additional rooms added over
time (Mertens 2003, 422 ff.). No kraters are reported in connection with
any of these structures.
Religious areas were integrated into this residential space: two circular
platforms of the sort described at Megara Hyblaia are present, as is a cult
area with an early votive deposit. The circular platforms were a focus of
ritual activity, represented by animal bones and drinking cups of ca. 600
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Adam Rabinowitz
(Mertens 2003, 416, 419 ff.), but again kraters are not mentioned. Kraters
do appear in religious space in large numbers, however, at the extramural
sanctuary of Demeter Malophoros, west of the city. They date from 625 to
approximately the middle of the sixth century, after which drinking vessels
are supplanted by terracotta figurines in the ceramic record at the
sanctuary.112 Civic or religious space, perhaps associated with dining, may
also be represented by an early sixth-century complex in massive ashlar
masonry at the entrance to the main sacred area on the acropolis. Mertens,
however, hypothesizes that this might be the house of an Archaic
potentate, instead identifying built dining space in another part of this
sanctuary from the middle of the sixth century.113
The funerary evidence from 650550 reveals the ongoing use of kraters
in funerary contexts, albeit rarely.114 In contrast to Archaic practice at
Megara Hyblaia, however, kraters here are not used only as urns but in a
few cases also as grave goods: in one grave, a krater accompanied an
enchytrismos burial in a pithos, and in another, two kraters were found
together with a primary cremation (Kustermann Graf 2002, 208; 180). Four
Lakonian kraters of this period are probably also from graves (Stibbe 1989,
nos. D18, F3, F8, F20).115 Another burial dated generally to the sixth century
took the form of a very small bronze dinos containing ashes and set in a
sandstone block, like the dinos burials at Megara Hyblaia (Meola 1997, 10).
Between 550 and 475, the residential city blocks around the acropolis
underwent a major reconstruction. The new buildings that occupied them
were two-story private houses in ashlar masonry, sharing party walls
(Mertens 2006, 324 ff.). Little is known about the internal plan and nothing
about the contents of these houses, but they were certainly large and
elaborate enough to have contained spaces appropriate for symposia. The
block on the east side of the agora provides a more contextual picture. In
the early fifth century, perhaps in the same moment of reconstruction that
produced the ashlar houses near the acropolis, an indisputable andro-n was
built in the pastas of one of the houses in this block (Mertens 2006, 327).
At the same time, religious space continued to be associated with
commensal activities: somewhat earlier, around the middle of the sixth
century, the cult area in this block was elaborated with a monumental room
clearly designed for nine couches (the hestiate-rion) and a four-room building
(Mertens 2003, 430). The ceramic assemblage includes a very large number
of wine-cups that suggest drinking in the area (Mertens 2003, 434). Kraters,
however, are still entirely absent.
Sixteen kraters appear in graves dated between 550 and 475. Thirteen of
them were Lakonian black-gloss stirrup kraters, which seem to have been
favored in Selinuntine necropoleis, and most served as cremation urns.
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Three of the Lakonian examples may be dated to the very end of this
range.116 A red-figured Attic vase of the first quarter of the fifth century
appears as a cinerary urn in this period, marking the beginning of a
pronounced taste for figured Attic vessels in Selinuntine graves. From 475
to the destruction of the city in 409, 14 of the 21 kraters associated with
graves at Selinous are Attic or South Italian red-figured pots used as
cremation urns. These graves are concentrated in a particular group of
burials in the Manicalunga cemetery, where they represent 10% of the total
number of fifth-century depositions (Kustermann Graf 2002, 35).
Continuing a rare practice noted above, in two late fifth-century cases, local
imitations of Attic bell or calyx kraters do not serve as cinerary urns, but
are instead among the grave goods included in inhumation burials.
For Selinous, then, the following observations can be made (Fig. 6).
Kraters are acceptable funerary vessels in the middle of the seventh
century, in the very first years of the colony. As the urban fabric is built up
between 650 and 550, residential and religious spaces within the city are
integrated, and cups testify to drinking in the religious area in the block
next to the agora. Kraters, however, are only reported in the context of
the extramural sanctuary of Demeter Malophoros, where they seem to be
used in communal drinking practices until the middle of the sixth century.
A small number of tombs of this period deploy kraters in a funerary
context, usually as cinerary urns. From around 550, there seems to be an
increased interest in the monumentalization of dining facilities in religious
space in both the sanctuary on the acropolis and the neighborhood shrine
in the block along the agora. The monumentalization of dining in domestic
architecture follows close behind, with the addition of an andro-n to one of
the houses along the agora and perhaps the construction of the ashlar
Civic
Unknown
Funerary
750650
3?
3?
650550
74
84
550475
16
16
475400
21
21
Seventh century
Sixth century
Total
Fig. 6. Summary of contextualized kraters from Selinous, by type of context and

period.
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Adam Rabinowitz
Fig. 7. Numbers of kraters associated with tombs in the excavated and published
necropoleis of Megara Hyblaia, Himera, Selinous, Gela, and Kamarina, by period.
houses near the acropolis in the early fifth century. During the same period,
the use of kraters especially imported red-figured kraters as cinerary urns
becomes increasingly popular, reaching its peak in the mid-fifth century.
The increasing popularity of kraters in tombs in certain Sicilian cities
during the late sixth and fifth centuries is even more visible when our three
examples are compared with two other sites on the south coast of Sicily:
Gela and Kamarina (Fig. 7).117 Wine-mixing bowls appear very infrequently
in tombs dated between 750 and 650, and when they are present, they are
used in a variety of ways (as grave goods, cinerary urns, enchytrismos vessels)
and are often associated with children (and perhaps women). During the
next hundred years, from 650550, kraters continue to appear only rarely
in burials of various rites, although their association with cremation grows
stronger. The rise in the graph for 650550 is almost certainly due to an
increase in the number of excavated tombs, not to a proportional increase
in frequency. This may also be true of the period between 550 and 475.
Yet the rise in the number of kraters in the fifth century seems to represent
a true proportional increase. At Gela, for example, only 2% of the 476
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published tombs with ceramic offerings in its Archaic necropolis are
associated with kraters, compared to 7% of the 188 tombs in its Classical
necropolis.118 After 550, and especially after 500, kraters seem to enjoy
some status in the necropoleis of all five sites, primarily as cinerary urns.
This burial type, however, seems to take on particular importance in
funerary practice only at Selinous, Gela, and Kamarina, all cities along the
south coast of the island.119
Filling in the gaps
The three sites examined here develop very differently on both
archaeological and historical levels. Kraters appear at each site in different
constellations. Two distinct patterns are visible in the overlaps between
them, however. First, at all three sites, despite their differences, most
kraters dated between 650 and 550 come from spaces that can be
associated with religious or civic functions. At Selinous and at Himera,
evidence for drinking in domestic space emerges after 550 and becomes
overwhelming in the fifth century. Second, at all three sites, burials with
kraters are very rare between 650 and 550. At Megara Hyblaia and Selinous,
kraters appear in graves with increasing frequency after 550. After 475, the
comparison of Selinous with Gela and Kamarina indicates the development
of a common funerary vocabulary in which the krater plays a major role.
If kraters are a reliable marker of sympotic activity, if they can be
understood in funerary contexts as symbols of sympotic attitudes, and if we
can use these three case studies to illuminate each other, we are left with
the following composite picture. In the new communities formed by the
first colonists in the mid-eighth century, drinking took place both in public
and in private, probably on both casual and formal levels. At the same time,
the earliest settlers continued a Geometric funerary tradition that used the
krater to express elite male identity. Its appearance in the graves of children
may have been meant to denote the participation in communal drinking a
male child could have expected as an adult.120 Around 650, however, the
symbols and practice of drinking shifted away from individual tombs and
private houses toward religious and civic space. Drinking activities seem to
have centered on these public spaces between 650 and 550, at the end of
which period the canonical andro-n makes its first appearance in civic and
religious buildings. After 550, evidence for drinking seems to be pulled
increasingly back into the private sphere at Himera and Selinous, if not at
Megara Hyblaia. As kraters begin to appear more frequently with other
evidence for drinking in residential contexts during this time, they also
become more common in individual tombs in some cities. By the end of
the sixth century, the andro-n begins to appear in domestic space. During
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the fifth century, the Sicilian Greeks seem to have enjoyed most of their
symposia at home, and this private enjoyment is perhaps related to the
popularity of kraters as cinerary urns in the cities of the south coast of the
island.121
I have argued that the literary evidence depicts the symposion as a highly
political event, and that Archaic sympotic poetry emphasizes the tensions
of the drinking party as much as it does harmony. It is particularly
concerned with ones ability to keep up with ones peers, and with the latent
threat of the loss of social agency. I also claimed that the poetry itself
provides no conclusive evidence for the spatial location of Archaic
drinking. The Spartan material evidence I discussed is little better in this
regard: it indicates only that some Archaic drinking probably took place in
sanctuaries and perhaps in connection with tombs or he-ro-a. The distribution
of kraters in urban space in the more complete cities of Sicily, on the other
hand, suggests that there, at least, drinking shifted substantially toward
public venues between 650 and 550 before swinging back to private
contexts in the late sixth century. How can these rather disparate
observations shed light on Archaic history and society, and what
can they contribute to our understanding of developments at Sparta in
particular?
Drinking and power
To put the pieces together, it will be helpful to turn to recent
anthropological work on commensality. In the wake of anthropological
discussions in the 1970s and 80s of the importance of communal eating
and drinking as bonding rituals, a series of works between the 1990s and
the present have associated the communal consumption of food and drink
with the negotiation of power. Ideas originally developed through
ethnographic observation of specific societies have increasingly been
applied to explain patterns in archaeological remains. These theoretical
developments focus on the ways reciprocity and consumption can create,
undermine, or reinforce the distribution of social or political power within
a community. The most prominent representative of this school is Michael
Dietler, whose ideas about the social dynamism of commensality have
recently had great influence on archaeological examinations of feasting
(Dietler 1996; 1997; 1998; 2001; Dietler and Hayden 2001a; 2001b).
To better tease out the dynamic qualities of feasting, Dietler has
attempted to categorize commensal practices according to the power
relationships they express or create, with an emphasis on the role of
reciprocity and obligation. He argues for three basic sorts of feasts, as
defined by the nature of the reciprocal relationships they involve:
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entrepreneurial feasts, patron-role feasts, and diacritical feasts. The first
characterizes feasts among nominal equals, in which the provision of the
feast itself allows an individual to build social capital that can raise his
status. The second asserts hierarchy through the controlled distribution of
food and drink to subordinates who cannot reciprocate in kind; while the
third demonstrates group identity or superiority through the use of special
foods, dining areas, or commensal behaviors (1996, 63 ff.; 2001, 77 ff.).
Dietler also seeks to identify the material correlates of these different
modes of feasting in the archaeological record (Dietler 1997; Dietler and
Hayden 2001a, 8). His framework presents commensality as a tool for the
creation and maintenance of power and status that works in part through
the manipulation of concepts of reciprocity. It also highlights the role of
competition and performative display in the negotiation of power in
commensal contexts, and as a result is well suited to the analysis of the
Archaic Greek material.
A tension between these three modes of feasting is already visible in the
Homeric poems. Within their immediate communities, the Homeric heroes
are the hosts of patron-role feasts: in the home of Odysseus, the suitors
of Penelope transgress as much in their usurpation of Telemakhos control
over the distribution of his resources as in their pursuit of Odysseus
wife.122 Among their peers in broader social networks, on the other hand,
they engage in diacritical feasts, participation in which marks them off
from the rest of the community and defines them as the equals of other
members of the elite.123 In the latter case, however, the potential exists to
host more often or more lavishly than ones guests in an entrepreneurial
mode, transforming reciprocity into obligation (Rundin 1996, 193). It is of
fundamental importance for social agency, therefore, that a man participate
in feasts equally as host and as guest, that he satisfy reciprocal expectations,
and that he not be perceived as a subordinate (Van Wees 1995, 1747;
Rundin 1996, 1958). The Homeric poems suggest that the system starts
to break down when a large number of men with claims to full political
agency are compressed into the same community, where reciprocal
demands are not long-term but immediate and public status must be
constantly and aggressively maintained.124 In this situation, the distinction
between those who are agathoi and those who are kakoi becomes both fluid
and fragile.
Conflicts over social and political participation may lie behind many
colonial expeditions in the second half of the eighth century (Malkin 1994);
they certainly seem to be connected with the foundation of Taras by the
Partheniai expelled from Sparta (Arist. Pol. 1306b2931). The equilibrium
achieved by new conquests or the expulsion of part of the community,
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however, is unlikely to have lasted, as new groups advanced claims to
power in communities of increasing size and nucleation. In this fluid social
setting emerged the characteristic features of the symposion: orientalizing
displays of luxury and prestige paired with an emphasis on equality among
the drinkers. These features begin to gain prominence in art and literature
three or four generations after the first wave of Greek colonization, around
the middle of the seventh century. They appear clearly at Sparta three or
four generations after the stabilization of Spartan society in the wake of
the First Messenian War and the foundation of Taras, in the last thirty years
of the seventh century. Perhaps not coincidentally, this also seems to have
been a moment of instability at both the colonial cities and Sparta: the
foundations of a number of secondary colonies, including Selinous and
Himera, can be dated to this time, as can the Second Messenian War.
In the face of this instability, elaborate sympotic behaviors may have
offered a novel outlet for the social tensions created by the constant
struggle of political agents to maintain or recapture their position. On one
hand, distinctive diacritical postures, smells, sounds, furniture, vessel
forms, poetic language, and behavioral rules set participants apart from the
rest of the community and marked them as members of a social elite. On
the other hand, several of these distinctive features in particular, reclining
on couches, the distribution of wine from a communal vessel, and rules for
turn-taking in toasting and singing (Wecowski 2002) also served as
physical expressions of equality among the participants. This idea is
reinforced by the decoration of the sympotic vessels themselves: as Schmitt
Pantel notes, the depictions of symposia in Corinthian vase-painting of the
late seventh and early sixth century stress the equivalence of the
participants (1992, 22). The development of these formal innovations had
the potential to transform the drinking that followed a communal meal
(already a separate phase in some epic scenes: e.g. Il. 1.46971) into the
activity of a restricted elite subgroup, among the members of which the
hierarchies expressed in Homeric public feasts could be downplayed.125 As
an added benefit, intoxication inspired feelings of camaraderie while
providing drinkers the opportunity to monitor the character and intentions
of their fellows.
The creation of such an environment would have been especially
important as urban centers grew more crowded and as the focus of political
life turned away from far-flung networks and toward affairs within the
community. It offered members of a co-resident elite a relatively peaceful
setting in which to negotiate and assert status among themselves. At the
same time, however, the formal features associated with the development
of the symposion would have been even more subject to entrepreneurial
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exploitation than those of the Homeric feast. Men with more wealth and
better connections had more access to eastern luxury goods, and wine was
more suitable for both connoisseurship and surplus accumulation than
were sacrificial victims.126 Furthermore, intoxication could also lead to acts
of violence, hybris, and outrage, which were bad enough in the context of
xenia but if the Homeric poems are to be believed a recipe for bloody
internecine conflict when they took place among members of the same
community.127
Viewed in Dietlers terms, both the positive and the negative aspects of
the symposion were political, in that they were the central concerns of
political agents and affected the life of the community as a whole.
Diacritical drinking helped to define the agathoi and consolidate their
claims to political agency. Entrepreneurial drinking, however, could lead
to unsustainable competition in which some agathoi, no longer able to
reciprocate, would be forced into dependent roles, and from which
patrons, so hateful to the Greek elite, could emerge. Sympotic poetry
seems to dance on the line between the positive and negative potential of
the symposion, sometimes endorsing luxury and excess among the drinkers
with Alkaios, sometimes insisting on the rejection of greed with Theognis.
Universally, however, it obscures the role of the host, highlights fears of
exclusion from the ranks of the agathoi, and is hostile to those who claim
more than their fair share of power.
Explaining the patterns: Sparta and the West
Dietlers emphasis on the connection between commensality and power
suggests a way in which the literary, historical, and archaeological evidence
might be coherently integrated. If communal drinking practices and
attitudes are taken as an indicator of the organization of power within the
communities considered here, the sketchy outlines of a social history
emerge.
In the early eighth century, competition for political agency in
increasingly large and nucleated communities led to demands for more
land, as more members of the community jostled for control of a limited
pool of social and economic resources necessary for the behaviors that
defined an agathos.128 These demands were met in the second half of the
eighth century with either territorial expansion or the departure of part of
the community to claim land elsewhere. At Sparta, both seem to have taken
place. When the dust settled, the status of members of the new or
reorganized communities was better defined and more secure. This is
particularly clear in cases where land was allotted, as at Sparta and in the
colonies: each lot-holder could expect to be a full political agent and the
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equal of his peers. In the early years of these communities, the potential for
the political exploitation of commensality was minimal, and each lot-holder
could essentially act as a Homeric host. This may be the situation reflected
symbolically by the use of kraters as funerary vessels among the first
generation of colonists at Syracuse and perhaps at Selinous.129 It may also
explain the frequency of kraters in domestic space between the end of the
eighth century and the middle of the seventh at Megara Hyblaia.
As these communities grew, however, and the vagaries of weather,
fortune, and reproduction led some families to accumulate land and others
to lose it, tensions must have arisen.130 Some men would have been able to
host commensal activity more often than others, and those who could not
reciprocate would have been forced into relationships of dependency or
excluded from political power. The latter, however, would not have
forgotten their families original claims to social and political equality.
Tensions would thus have grown with population in these communities,
until renewed demands for land and status forced a new colonial or military
solution. At Sparta, it is possible that such factors lay behind the Second
Messenian War (Arist. Pol. 1306b361307a2, citing Tyrtaios Eunomia for
demands for land redistribution), which led in the end to a new land
division. A similar social and political crisis may have been the motive for
the foundation of Selinous, and the foundation of Himera is directly
connected in the sources with the exile from Syracuse of an elite political
faction.131
Although such incidents are often understood by scholars as evidence
of demands for land by a rising lower class, I would suggest that they are
more likely to have been the result of conflicts over resources by those
who had existing claims to political power but were threatened with
exclusion. The elaboration of the formal symposion visible from the midseventh century onward took place in the context of such conflicts, and I
have argued that it may have acted as a damper, confirming political agents
by their participation and reinforcing the idea of equality among them. In
communities in which status was in flux, however, it presented several
problems. First, it was particularly open to entrepreneurial exploitation;
second, it required a certain elaboration of space that was foreign to Greek
domestic architecture of the mid-seventh century; and third, within the
modest domestic space available, the violent or inappropriate actions of
intoxicated male guests would have posed a threat to the honor of both
male and female members of the hosting family.
The most obvious solution to these problems is to locate the practice in
a context where both individual sponsorship and the risk of family
dishonor are minimized: that is, in civic or religious spaces, rather than
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private houses. Religious spaces had already been used for drinking rituals
in Sparta and Megara Hyblaia from the late eighth century forward, and a
shift away from domestic drinking could have emerged naturally after the
middle of the seventh century, as a tacit reaction to the dangers of the
symposion and its potential for individual self-promotion. At the same time,
the placement of communal drinking in highly visible public contexts would
have maximized the diacritical value of new practices and equipment.
The relative infrequency of kraters in domestic contexts at Megara
Hyblaia and Himera from 650 to 550, together with the increased emphasis
on the architectural elaboration of public and religious spaces at the former
in the third quarter of the seventh century, would thus reflect a major shift
in sympotic activity from predominantly private to predominantly
public.132 In the West, neighborhood sanctuaries scattered throughout the
urban fabric may have assisted in this transition. In addition, from the
middle of the seventh century to the middle of the sixth century, the krater
was largely absent from the vocabulary of funerary display, perhaps
because it was now seen as a problematic symbolic claim to the individual
sponsorship of sympotic activities.133
Such an interpretation is consistent with the archaeological evidence for
drinking in sanctuary contexts at Sparta, which includes a substantial
number of kraters. It might also help to understand the faint evidence for
Archaic drinking in connection with tombs and hero cult (cf. Nafissi 1991,
318 ff.), which, in the more diffusely settled landscape of the Spartan polis,
might have played the same role as the neighborhood shrines in Sicilian
cities.134 Alkmans apparent references to public sympotic and commensal
occasions, too, can thus be understood as part of a broader cultural koine-,
rather than as descriptions of an early Spartan mess system. It is more
difficult, however, to interpret the appearance of the relief kraters at this
time. Apart from the one in situ example excavated by Christou, with its
dubious funerary associations, most of the fragments of these vessels have
been found near sanctuaries. If they were used as kraters by the living, they
may represent the elaboration of drinking rituals in religious contexts. If
they were made primarily as funerary vessels, however, they might have
been deployed by elite families attempting to assert symbolic control over
sympotic sponsorship.135
Both explanations are possible in light of early Archaic poetry and the
evidence from Sicily and Sparta in the first half of the sixth century. The
interactions of Alkaios, Pittakos, and Myrsilos suggest that as quickly as
the symposion developed, individuals sought ways to turn it toward selfpromotion and the acquisition of political power. In Sicily, this is perhaps
visible in the rare but noticeable use of wine-mixing bowls (both metal
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dinoi and Lakonian kraters) in tombs. At Sparta, the first half of the century
saw a sudden expansion in the range of decorated expensive vessels
available for drinking: both figured pots and metal vessels could now be
used to increase the clat of a symposion. Plutarchs mention of a Lykourgan
rhe-tra prohibiting the decoration of the oikos (Lyc. 13.5 ff.) may also reflect
emerging individualistic claims to sympotic prestige at Sparta by the midsixth century.136 An increase in personal expenditure on communal
drinking would have increased social pressures on those who could not
keep up, at a moment when enough time had passed for major differences
in wealth among those with citizen rights to reemerge. Catling, in an
attempt to explain the evidence for the internal colonization of Lakonia
after 550 collected by the Lakonia survey, suggests that such disparities
may be responsible for the unsuccessful war with Tegea and the
subsequent occupation of marginal land near Sparta (2002, 243). They may
also explain why Alkaios, writing in the late seventh century, attributes to
a Spartan the statement that possessions are the man.
In the Sicilian cities, individual claims to sympotic sponsorship seem to
have increased after 550. At Himera and Selinous, communal drinking and
dining began to move back into private houses, while at Megara Hyblaia
and Selinous, kraters became more frequent grave-goods. On a political
level, both Himera and Selinous, where the privatization of the symposion
among the living was more pronounced, acquired tyrants in the late sixth
century, while there is no tradition of tyranny or civil war at Megara Hyblaia
though perhaps it pushes the evidence too far to argue that the dearth of
kraters in residential contexts in late Archaic Megara Hyblaia is a reflection
of a stable oligarchic regime. Perhaps in compensation, civic and religious
dining areas at all three sites receive another burst of attention in the
second half of the sixth century, in conjunction with the emergence of the
canonical andro-n as an architectural unit.137 This suggests that public space
was still the main focus of commensality, since members of the elite would
presumably choose to display wealth by first elaborating the spaces in
which they were already dining. By the turn of the century, however, this
form too had been co-opted by the private sphere, and by the middle of the
fifth century both kraters and dining halls could be found in domestic
contexts more often than public spaces.
There is substantial evidence that these changes were widespread in the
Greek world in the late sixth century. This period marks a moment when
Greek houses suddenly increased dramatically in size, a trend that becomes
more pronounced in direct correlation with the increasingly elaborate
private symposia reported in the literary record (Morris 2005, 10810).
Tyrants themselves may have led the way in this it was in their andro-nes
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that Late Archaic poets like Anakreon sang their soft songs (cf. Hdt. 3.121)
or the elite may have reacted to the weakening of the public functions of
the symposion by pulling it into the private sphere. The shift away from
public contexts may also be visible in scenes of prostitutes at symposia on
Attic vases, a motif that first appears in the second half of the sixth century
and peaks between 525 and 475 (Kurke 1999, 199200). Just as members
of the Archaic elite must sometimes have drunk together in private
contexts, however, the late Archaic domestication of the symposion does
not exclude the public and religious spheres: the latter have long been
attested as loci of commensality in literary contexts, and there is
archaeological evidence for drinking in civic spaces and sanctuaries
throughout the Late Archaic and Classical periods.138
Within this general framework, individual communities reacted
differently to the seismic shift in commensal practices during this period.
The funerary appropriation of symbols of sponsorship of the symposion, for
example, seems to have been particularly favored by the Western Greeks.
The degree to which such responses could vary is nowhere more apparent
than in the comparison of Sparta to its colony Taras.139 At Sparta, within
a generation after 550, opportunities for sympotic display in both public
and private contexts dried up. Bronze kraters and figured drinking vessels
apparently ceased to be produced, and bronze vessels in general become
less frequent among the finds from Spartan sanctuaries.140 Plain black-gloss
kraters do not disappear,141 as the Laconia Survey and the Laconia Rural
Sites Project have demonstrated, and at one site in particular, a number of
stirrup kraters and other drinking vessels suggest private Spartiate sympotic
activity in the later Archaic period (Catling 2002, 194; Cavanagh et al. 2005,
114; 314: site R27577 = site LP18). Yet the function of the site is unclear,
the pottery is not especially luxurious, and in any case the rules for common
drinking away from the urban center, in a less political environment, may
have been more relaxed.142
The poverty of Spartan sympotic display in the last quarter of the sixth
century is even starker when contemporary material from Taras is taken
into account. There, tantalizingly vague historical reports of intra-elite
conflict and monarchy (tyranny?)143 coincide with an increased emphasis on
the imagery of the symposion in Tarentine society. The reclining banqueter
first appears as a major motif in terracotta votives toward the end of the
sixth century (Iacobone 1988), but the most dramatic developments can be
seen in the construction between ca. 525 and ca. 470 of at least five large
chamber tombs in the shape of andro-nes (Lippolis 1994). The largest of
these tombs, excavated in the 1920s in the area of the via Crispi at Taranto,
contained seven sarcophagoi arranged like dining-couches along the walls.
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Six of them were occupied; one, painted red on the inside, contained an
individual perhaps the sponsor of this eternal symposion who wore a
crown of gold leaf. The sarcophagoi also contained cups and strigils,
indicators of participation in elite athletic and sympotic practices. In the
center of the room, among kylikes and amphorae, stood five large Attic
black- and red-figure kraters (Masiello 1997, 76, 292). The andro-n tombs
disappear after the first quarter of the fifth century, and no kraters appear
in any other known Archaic or Classical Tarentine tombs. The via Crispi
tomb, probably the most vivid and physical evocation available to us of
the typical symposion, is thus not the rule but the exception, and in its
private claim to the drinking party it reflects not a timeless, stable image of
Archaic practice, but the contested and rapidly changing commensal world
of the late sixth century.
The disappearance of sympotic display in Sparta, on the other hand, can
be interpreted as an effort to recreate that timeless, stable commensal ideal,
and a rejection of late Archaic transformations. The syssition, far from being
the inverse of the symposion, thus becomes its perfect expression on a
political, if not a formal level. Schmitt Pantel associates the institution of
the messes with the need to reconstruct social relations in response to a
crisis, and in particular as a way to redefine and stabilize the citizen body
(1992, 745). The crisis was in part the increasing entrepreneurial
exploitation of commensal practices by the wealthy and powerful, and the
resulting relationships of dominance and subordination. By extending the
right of commensal participation to all citizens while removing opportunities
for individuals to manipulate commensal relationships for personal
advantage, the Spartan polis created the homoioi. The Archaic poets
rejection of greed was made law. It is no coincidence that the expression
nothing in excess ( ), which appears several times in the
Theognidea, is attributed in later sources to the sixth-century ephor Chilon
(Diog. Laert. 1.41).
When viewed in conjunction with the literary and archaeological
evidence discussed above, the rules regulating the Classical syssition appear
designed to reconstruct the Archaic symposion not as it was, but as it should
have been. The syssition is placed in public space, as I argue the early symposion
was; but the rules prohibit the elaboration of its setting.144 Equality among
the participants is emphasized: they share the provision of food and drink,
but the contributions are set at a level an individual kle-ros should be able to
meet.145 Those who can give more are allowed scant space to create
obligation through generosity (Xen. Lak. Pol. 5.3); those who cannot give
enough are expelled entirely from the citizen body, rather than kept on as
dependents or resentful subordinates (Arist. Pol. 1271a337). The fellow-
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feeling of the participants is ensured by the consensual choice of new
members of the group (cf. Singor 1999). The didactic nature of the
symposion is preserved, but limited to the recitation of noble deeds. Younger
men are included, with an eye toward their formation as members of the
community; but the sensual side of pederastic interaction is formally
downplayed (cf. Link, this volume). Wine is present, but the passing of
toasts, and with it the forced drinking that leads to violence, is absent (cf.
Fisher 1989).
Spartas uniqueness lies not in a rejection of the aristocratic symposion
in favor of communal values, but in its deliberate and idealizing reaction to
a disturbance in commensal behavior that seems to have affected much of
the Greek world from 550 onward. This disturbance centered on the
collapse of the symposion as a buttress of elite political equilibrium and its
increasing subjection to private control. The timeframe of these sympotic
upheavals fits with the chronology proposed in recent scholarship for
major changes across Spartan society. Those changes seem to have been
designed on a general level to suppress internal conflict by removing
opportunities for the public display of inequality.146 Hlkeskamp has argued
that Archaic written law tended to react to existing problems, the nature
and ramifications of which were treated in great detail, instead of creating
general rules according to abstract principles (1992). Sparta seems to have
taken precisely such an approach to the reformation of commensality. The
result was the conscious reworking of the Archaic symposion, with all its
problems, into a new, idealized commensal structure to which no individual
could lay claim, from which no responsible participant need fear exclusion,
and a share in which guaranteed ones status as an esthlos.
The symposion and the syssition can thus continue to inform each other,
provided that we are more aware of the idealizing assumptions that have
colored the study of both institutions since antiquity. For upper-class
Athenians like Kritias, the Classical Spartan syssition reflected the traditional
ideals of the aristocratic symposion much more closely than its bastardized,
popularized, disorderly Athenian equivalent. There is thus no contradiction
between his participation in sympotic culture and his endorsement of
Spartan practice. His later actions show not hypocrisy, but the same deep
internal tension between elite cooperation and individual self-promotion
that characterized Archaic drinking parties. The same irrepressible tension
had perhaps already re-emerged in the syssitia of Kritias own time, despite
his insistence to the contrary.147 Our sympotic mirage is rooted in Platos
Symposium. The sympotic mirage of Platos own circles, by contrast, lies in
an idealized vision of Spartas idealized solution to a general crisis in late
Archaic elite commensality.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Hodkinson for the
opportunity to participate in this conference and for his constructive
criticism on this work, to Anton Powell for his thoughtful editorial
suggestions, and to the other participants for their feedback. Many of the
ideas I outline here are treated at greater length in my doctoral dissertation,
and I owe a great debt to the members of my dissertation committee ( John
Pedley, Sharon Herbert, Malcolm Bell III, Sara Forsdyke, and Sabine
MacCormack) for the role they played in shaping my thoughts. I also owe
thanks to Stefano Vassallo and especially to Nunzio Allegro, who not only
helped me gain a clearer picture of the archaeological situation at Himera
but assisted me in my research in many other generous ways.
Notes
1
Cf. Aristophanes Wasps, especially lines 1122 ff., in which the young sophisticate
Bdelycleon prepares his more rustic father Philocleon for a symposion (and then is
forced to deal with the consequences).
2
In this work I shall use the more general term syssitia to refer to the Spartan
messes, although by the Classical period they were also known as phiditia.
3
This contrasting picture of Spartan commensality is laid out in detail in the
Constitution of the Lakedaimonians of Xenophon, himself an Athenian contemporary of
Aristophanes (Lak. Pol. 5.2 ff.).
4
For a comprehensive review of the nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography
of the syssition, see Lavrencic 1993.
5
In the following discussion, I will use private and public to distinguish spheres
that are controlled by one nuclear family from those that are shared by more than one
nuclear family. Private is thus closely connected with the idea of the household and
of hosting. Public drinking or dining does not denote drinking or dining open to
everyone in the community, but it does imply a context in which a host is absent or
of minimal importance.
6
There are, of course, various modes of sharing food and drink, but here I will use
commensality specifically in connection with the relationships negotiated when
politically empowered individuals (in the Archaic Greek case, usually members of the
elite, and almost always adult men) who did not share the same household and were
not necessarily joined by ties of kinship came together to eat and/or drink as a group.
7
Davidson argues that Kritias discussion of the Spartan ko-tho-n as a cup conducive
to moderation is apologetic, and that in fact such a cup would have been understood
by Classical Greeks as a cup meant for excessive and anti-social wine-consumption
(1997, 63). He seems to imply, although he does not state, that Spartan practices were
not so uniquely moderate after all. Davidson focuses, however, on the meaning of
the cup itself, while Kritias, when he talks about Spartan drinking, clearly emphasizes
the absence of toasting, not the equipment. Kritias praise of the ko-tho-n, on which
Davidson bases his argument, comes not in his poetic endorsements of Spartan
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drinking practices but in his prose Constitution of the Lakedaimonians, and in a section
focused on furniture and gear, not commensality (fr. B 34 Diels-Kranz).
,
, .
, <>
(The Chian and the Thasian [drink] from large cups passed to the right,
8
the Athenian from small cups passed to the right, and the Thessalian pledges large
cups to whomever they wish. The Spartans, on the other hand, drink each from the
cup next to him, and the wine-pourer <pours> however much he might drink).
9
Thuc. 6.28, specifically mentioning that the perpetrators were drunk at the time;
Andocides, de mysteriis 1118 and especially 61, where the speaker claims that
Euphiletus proposed the plan to him while we were drinking ( ).
10
Nafissi endorses Murrays argument that the syssitia were products of the
extension of aristocratic practices to an enlarged larger civic body after the Second
Messenian War, and sees this extension as the reason behind lazione statale in un
campo, quello appunto del simposio, per solito rimasto indipendente dall normativa
della plis e regolato invece da principi interni, emanati autonomamente dalle singole
comunit banchettanti (1991, 175). Powell (1998) describes the syssition as a lycourgised
version of the symposion (129), and sees in the sympotic scenes of sixth-century
Lakonian vase-painting the soft pursuits of a wealthy class congratulating itself on
its moments of supreme luxury (1367). Hodkinson mentions sixth-century Spartan
symposia in the context of a wide variety of occasions of private conviviality and
personal hospitality, identifying a host in Alkman fr. 17 Page (2000, 217). Although
I quite agree that Archaic Spartan symposia were similar to those elsewhere, that they
were attended by men of political importance, and that they were later lycourgised,
I cite these examples as evidence for the general impression that the Archaic symposion
was private, inward-looking, and associated with a wealthy elite defined by its
enjoyment of (particularly Eastern) luxuries.
11
See, for example, the summary description of the symposion in Davidson 1997,
439.
12
Murray 1983, 198. This interpretation relies largely on the notion of the military
marginalization of the aristocracy in the course of a hoplite reform often postulated
for the seventh century BC. In this notion, the adoption of hoplite battle tactics, which
relied on the participation of a larger part of the community than did aristocratic
raiding and in which every man had an equal role, would have increased the social
and political power of non-aristocrats while removing opportunities for individual
aristocratic excellence in combat. The hoplite reform model for the development
of the Greek polis has, however, been rejected in recent scholarship as overly
simplified and poorly supported by evidence.
13
Kistler (2004) offers a substantial critique of Morris evidence; Hammer (2004)
convincingly criticizes the use of the term and concept of ideology in the work of
both Morris and Kurke. Note, however, that Hammer, unlike Kistler, does not reject
the idea of a rising middling group in the Archaic city; rather, he objects to the
assignment of defined ideologies to this group or to sympotic participants (4923).
See also Rabinowitz 2004.
14
See Gentili 1988, 34 ff.
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15
Note, for example, Morriss association of the symposion with other extra-polis
environments in his discussion of the elitist poetic tradition: Elitist poetry was the
oppositional literature of an immanent elite, an imagined community evoked in the
interstices of the polis world at interstate games, in the arrival of a xenos from a
different city, or behind the closed doors of the symposium (1996, 36).
16
In particular, she notes that Murray, in making the symposion the key social
institution of the Archaic city, rolls into it a variety of commensal practices that cannot
necessarily be considered under the same heading (Schmitt Pantel 1990, 468).
/ /
/ (Seven couches and as many
17
tables / loaded with poppy seed bread / and in the cups linseed and sesame /
chrysokolla is there for all [translation after Calame 1983]). The sort of sweet or
specially-prepared foods that also appear in this fragment are usually associated with
the symposion rather than the banquet. In fr. 17 Page, the poet rejects similar elaborate
food () in favor of simple lentil stew; Nafissi also identifies sweets in fr. 94
Page (Nafissi 1991, 215). The mention of several different varieties of Spartan wine
in fr. 92 Page suggests connoisseurship.
18
Here it is explicitly a female head-covering ( / , /
[] ). Such a head-covering can be seen on the female aulist
depicted on the Mitra Vase, a Lakonian cup found at Samos (Pipili 1987, no. 196;
extensive commentary in Powell 1998, 123 ff.).
19
Franklin 2007. Although the literary tradition is more doubtful and there is no
poetic evidence, Terpander, who is said to have settled at Sparta and who is also
associated with Lydian music (Franklin 2007, 1978), may offer another connection.
/
.
20
21
These are often referred to as pithoi (storage jars) or amphorae (storage and
transport vessels), but I take Stibbes position that formally, these are best described
as kraters: see below, n. 32.
22
Pipili (1987) provides a summary of Lakonian iconography, with particular
attention to what she refers to as the symposion and the ko-mos; Smith (1998) discusses
images of dancers/komasts in particular; and Isler-Kernyi (2001) recounts the
evidence for both symposion and ko-mos scenes in her discussion of Archaic Dionysiac
imagery. Powell (1998) relates symposion and ko-mos iconography to Spartan social
practice.
23
This is not to say that no scenes with sympotic connotations have been found:
Stibbe (1972) catalogues one fragment with a seated deity and a krater from the
sanctuary of Orthia (no. 278), and one fragment of a krater with a komast holding a
kantharos from the Spartan acropolis (no. 244).
24
Smith 1998; Hodkinson 2000, 217 (but see n. 15, directing the readers attention
to Pipilis thesis).
25
I will assume throughout this work that the vast number of drinking vases at
most Greek sanctuaries cannot be explained simply as static votives, but that a
substantial number of them must have been involved in actual drinking, once or
repeatedly.
26
See Catling 1992 for material of this period from a votive deposit at the
Menelaion, including cups, mugs, lakainai, and a large stirrup krater.
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27
Droop (1929) for cups, oinochoai, lakainai etc. from 700 to 500 from the
sanctuary of Artemis Orthia; H. Catling (197677) for cups and a krater from the
deposit in the Great Pit at the Menelaion; R. Catling (1992) for a seventh-century
votive deposit at the Menelaion; Stibbe 1989, for a large number of kraters from the
sanctuaries of Artemis Orthia and Amyklai, and the Spartan acropolis; Stibbe (1991)
for drinking vessels from a small rural sanctuary; Cavanagh et al. (1996) for the
sanctuary of Zeus Messapeus (Lakonia Survey site N415: 390).
28
As Nafissi notes, however, the vessel may be a container rather than a cup, in
which case the inscription would simply be referring to a measure of volume (1991,
1845 nn. 29, 32).
29
Another burial of similar type but uncertain date contained two cups; both burials
are cited in Nafissi 1991, 328. Early burials in pithoi at Sparta seem to be associated with
high-status individuals: Raftopoulou cites one Late Geometric pithos containing iron
weapons and bronze ornaments and another containing bronze cylinders and spiral
rings, that might have been used as hair ornaments. There was no trace of ash or
bone, leading Raftopoulou to assume that these were inhumation burials of a man
and a woman, respectively (1998, 133).
30
Raftopoulou 1998, 1345. She interprets the structure as a tomb or he-ro-on and
the pottery as the service used at a funerary symposium for seven, in honor of the
dead...ritually deposited next to his tomb. Hodkinson is more circumspect, however:
although he describes the pottery as from a symposiastic meal, he reserves judgment
on the funerary nature of the building (2000, 239). Nafissi interprets several structures
associated with graves as leschai, which he identifies, with Plutarch (Lyc. 25.2), as the
contexts of poetic performance and perhaps therefore the setting of banquets as early
as the Archaic period (1991, 31927).
31
This is also argued for the sites with more sympotic vessels in the hinterland
(Cavanagh et al. 2005, 314).
32
As mentioned above, the krater was meant to hold the mixture of wine and water
that would then be distributed to the drinkers at a Greek symposion. I follow Stibbe
(1989) in formally identifying these pithoi or amphorae with relief decoration as
kraters: they have the wide mouths, wide bellies, and in some cases volute handles
typical of the shape (cf. Christou 1964a), and the narrow foot preserved is similar to
the profile of kraters depicted in sixth-century Lakonian vase paintings (e.g. Stibbe
2004, no. 123).
33
Stibbe, following Christou (1964a), dates their appearance to ca. 625 (1989, 67).
Hodkinson notes that several scholars prefer a lower date in the early years of the
sixth century (2000, 240 and n. 17).
34
The relief decoration only appears on one side, while the rear is left blank.
Hodkinson (2000) notes the association of a number of fragments of these kraters
with sanctuaries, but concludes that there is a good case for viewing these amphoras
as funerary objects (240).
35
There are examples from Sicily (possibly a local product), Capua and Campania,
Trebenishte in the Balkans, Didyma, Delphi, Dodona, Olbia on the Black Sea, Cilicia,
and the famous krater from the burial of a Halstatt princess at Vix, France (for
catalogue and bibliography, Stibbe 1989, 63: only one fragment, an appliqu of a cow,
was found at Sparta).
36
The literary sources attest a krate-r lako-nikos as a defined type. Stibbe associates
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Adam Rabinowitz
this with the volute krater, especially in its metal version, but suggests it may also have
referred to the stirrup krater, a typically Lakonian shape (1989, 1718). Nafissi suggests
that the clear Spartan associations of these kraters may have been a selling point, given
Spartas impressive reputation (1991, 255).
37
Rossi 1983 (lyric); Bowie 1986 (elegy); Vetta 1995 (all but Solons Salaminia).
38
Figueira argues in several places that the identification of self-conscious, defined
socio-economic classes with specific class interests in Archaic Greece is an inappropriate
anachronism, both in terms of social conflict (1991) and in terms of the meaning of
words like eupatris (1984). In a slightly different context, van Wees argues for the
impossibility of a closed elite in the tumultuous society he sees reflected in the
Theognidea (2000).
39
Cf. the social worlds described by the Iliad and the Odyssey, which, even if they
were not reflections of reality, were certainly relationships that were believable to the
audience. In several ethnographically documented cases, dependent or subsistence
farmers in conservative agrarian societies prefer the stable operation of traditional
patronage systems to modernization that gives them political rights and independence
but removes safety nets (e.g. Johnson and Earle 2000, 340 ff.).
40
Symposion as metaphor for the city: Levine 1985; one of two metaphors, with
banquet: Schmitt Pantel 1995; rejected as metaphor in favor of distributive feast (dais):
Balot 2001.
41
Described in similar terms at Alkaios fr. 70 Lobel-Page, line 11 ( ,
wars among kin); Solon fr. 4 West, line 19 ( , civil war among kin);
and at Theognis 51 West ( , civil war and kinmurders of men).
42
Fr. 70 Lobel-Page, lines 35: .[ / ,
[ / ...
43
For arguments that long-lived and widespread attitudes are reflected in the verses
of individual poets, see Nagy 1985; 1990; Kurke 1999; Lane Fox 2000; Forsdyke 2005.
44
As, for example, the drinking-song dedicated to the aristocratic tyrannicides
Harmodius and Aristogeiton might be when sung by a fourth-century Athenian democrat.
45
Direct evidence for ongoing performance: Sokrates quotes from Theognis in
Xenophons Symposion (2.4), noting that one learns good things from good men;
recognizable verses from the Theognidean corpus emerge from the mouths of sympotic
singers on at least three Attic red-figure vases (Csapo and Miller 1991, 382: Munich
2646, Villa Giulia 50329, and Athens, National Museum 1357). Collins (2004) makes
a convincing case for the importance of the competitive performance of poetry in
symposia, which implies that participants would have memorized enough (or absorbed
enough of the spirit) of this poetry to be able to reel it off without too much thought.
46
For this duality in Alkaios, see Burnett 1983, 156 ff. On the basis of a quantitative
analysis of the vocabulary of friendship in the Theognidea, Donlan (1985) concludes
that negative sentiments are much more common than positive.
47
Fr. 124b West: , /
<> / <> , /
/ .
48
Suda, s.v. sarapous; the list includes bloat-belly () and eater-in-thedark (). For consumption habits as markers of identity and metaphors
for greed in general in Archaic Greece, see Nenci 1989; Nagy 1979.
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49
Neer (2002) takes a positive view of these verses, arguing that they endorse a
more extreme form of group solidarity (16), but this interpretation completely ignores
the long list of cynical Theognidean injunctions to hide ones true intentions.
50
Kurke (1999) uses these passages in her argument for the development of a
vocabulary of aristocratic value set in opposition to a non-elite group. I think the
context shows a much greater interest in the behavior and character of those inside
sympotic circles than those outside.
51
Fr. 4 West, lines 910: /
.
52
Koros literally means satisfaction, enough, the presence of resources that will
bring satiety, and is used in that sense in Homer. The use of the term in Archaic poetry,
however, adds the idea of excess or surfeit, and hinges on the idea that satisfaction is
impossible and having enough simply makes one want more (cf. Solon fr. 6 West,
koros gives birth to hubris). See Balot (2001) for this concept, and for a thoughtful
discussion of greed in general.
53
/ ,
.
54
There is a long tradition that sees in the Theognidea a critique of non-noble

nouveaux riches who are attempting to seize power from a hereditary aristocracy in
Archaic Megara. I think this interpretation fits poorly with the structure of Archaic
society, and side rather with Van Wees (2000) in the view of a society in which status
is fluid and rhetorical attacks on behavior should not be associated with inherited
social status. An esthlos is as an esthlos does, as is a kakos.
55
Fairness is my attempt to emphasize in English a concept of dike- that suggests
not legal justice, but the principle that every man should have and keep the portion
he is supposed to have, also sometimes called geometric equality. Cf. Balot 2001;
Kistler 2004.
56
E.g. Solon fr. 15 West = Theog. 315, many bad people (kakoi) grow rich, and
good men (agathoi) are poor.
57
For these terms as ethical descriptions, rather than references to hereditary class,
see Cerri 1968.
58
Fr. 23 West: [, / ] []
. [ / ] [][] [][, / ]
[] [.
59
Cf. the image of the hedgehog, whose one great trick is the ability to hurt those
who seek to hurt it (frs. 201 and 206 West).
60
On the other hand, one might argue that the poets warnings would not be
necessary if there were not an opposing opinion that kakoi and agathoi were, in fact,
born rather than made.
61
The traditional interpretation of the social conflict in the Theognidea presents it
as the struggle of an aristocracy that does not want to see members of the middle
class as its equals (again, the parallel is to ill-bred nouveaux riches in modern European
society). This assumes that those at the top simply do not want to share a stratum
where there is room for all. The poetry itself, however, clearly presents social status
as a zero-sum game, in which every rise entails anothers fall. The issue therefore is not
so much preventing people from rising as it is keeping oneself from falling.
62
Cf. especially lines 710: , /
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Adam Rabinowitz
, / ,
, / .
63
Lines 3740 roughly = Theog. 9347. Specifically, none wish to hinder him in
respect or in justice (aido-s and dike-). Together with time-, these are precisely the areas
in which a poor man is vulnerable elsewhere in the Theognidea (2667:
/ ; 620:
, ).
64
I think this lies behind the assertion of Herakleitos that the Ephesians should all
be hung, since they exiled a most useful man named Hermodoros, saying let no one
among us be most useful, and if anyone is, let him be so elsewhere and with others
(fr. 121 Diels-Kranz).
65
Compare, for example, the discussions of dining space in Xenophons Symposium
with the andro-nes of the contemporary houses at Olynthus (Cahill 2002).
66
I present here a very compressed synopsis of an argument I hope to present
elsewhere at greater length.
67
Aesch. Ag. 244; Choe. 712; Hdt. 1.34 (palace of Croesus); 3.78 (palace of Darius);
3.121 (palace of Polykrates); 4.95 (andreo-n of the Pythagoreans).
68
Archil. fr. 128 West; Semon. fr. 7 West, lines 3, 60, 104.
69
He also adduces archaeological evidence, but in the case he cites captured armor
from Afrati, Crete he agrees with the interpretation of the material as belonging to
the towns public dining hall, not a private structure (1998, 363). Fehr notes that
hoplite gear is much less common on Corinthian vases than swords, bows and quivers,
which he interprets in conjunction with the dogs on the same vessels as hunting rather
than military equipment (1971, 29).
70
In his exegesis of this fragment, Page finds literary parallels for the linen tho-rakes
only in the context of sanctuaries (Hdt. 2.182 for a linen tho-rax of Amasis in the temple
of Athena at Lindos; Paus. 1.21.7 for three dedicated by Gelon at Olympia after his
victory over the Carthaginians), and concludes that similar dedications might be seen
in numerous sanctuaries (Page 1955, 215).
71
The word itself suggests that this is a stand-alone structure, rather than a room
in a private house (though it could conceivably refer to a palace). Diogenes Laertius
also mentions that Pittakos founded a sanctuary (hieran) that came to be called the
Pittakeion, which, if it is true, further suggests that the Myrsileion was not a domestic
dining-hall (Diog. Laert. 1.75). See also Burnett 1983, 1567.
72
Schmitt Pantel 1992, 24. Similarly Lang 2005, 27: perhaps the gatherings depicted
were held in some more communal structure, such as a hestiatorion.
73
The conventional date for the latter is the last quarter of the sixth century
(Amandry and Caskey 1952); this is still followed by many scholars (e.g. Pfaff 2005,
n. 7), though a case has also been made to date the building at least a century later
(Miller 1973).
74
For example, Kiderlen (1995) identifies as palaces building i at Megara Hyblaia
and (following Shear 1994, 22931) Complex CFD below the tholos in the Athenian
Agora. The most recent work on Megara Hyblaia now leans toward the interpretation
of building i as a grand aristocratic house, although the authors admit that there are
no specifically domestic finds to confirm this (Gras et al. 2004, 4468). The excavators
of building i, however, originally argued (somewhat ambivalently) for a public
structure (Vallet et al. 1976, 193), and Nielsen points out the ambiguities of public or
174
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private function in Complex CFD (1999, 745). Since they are the two Archaic
examples, they are also used to justify each others function (Vallet et al. 1976). In a
similar vein, pastas houses in Sicily have been interpreted as both secular and religious
structures (e.g. the casa a pastas at Naxos: Lentini 198485; 1990; Cordsen 1995;
Mertens 2006, 73).
75
The only finds assemblage Kiderlen cites for the Agora building is Thompsons
H 10:2 (1995, 31), which consists mainly of fragments of cups, kraters, and other
drinking equipment dated to ca. 530. The well deposit cited as evidence for the
domestic character of building i is described only as caractristique, au dire des
fouilleurs, dune <<maison des riches>> (Gras et al. 2004, 447), but it also consisted
primarily of drinking wares spanning a period between 625 and the later sixth century,
including a very large number of imported cups, hydriai, plates, and several Lakonian
kraters (Vallet et al. 1976, 179).
76

.
77
Cf. Lang 2005, 27: while there are many scenes of male banqueting on painted
pottery from the Archaic period, there is no evidence that such activities were already
taking place in private houses, where there simply was no space for them... The
interpretation of rooms in Archaic houses as andro-nes...seems to be a transposition of
the Classical situation. Nevett comes to similar conclusions in a discussion of the
symposion in the context of Greek domestic architecture (forthcoming; I thank her for
sharing this discussion with me before its publication).
78
Rabinowitz 2004.
79
Morris (2005) offers an extensive discussion of the issues, aimed at historians
who use archaeological evidence.
80
Vickers 1985; Gill 1991; Vickers and Gill 1994. For problems with the evidence
for their argument, see the detailed critique offered in the appendix to Neer 2002.
81
For a thorough summary of the development of Megara Hyblaia in both historical
and archaeological context, see De Angelis 2003 and Gras et al. 2004. My discussion
will be much more cursory, and I refer the reader to these works for more detailed
information.
82
Orsi and Cavallari 1890; Orsi 1892; 1921; Vallet and Villard 1952; 1953; 1960;
1965; Vallet 1964; Vallet et al. 1976; 1983; Cbeillac-Gervasoni 197475; 197677;
Gras 197475; 198485; Broise et al. 1983; Gras and Trziny 2001; Trziny 1979;
1980; 2007; Gras et al. 2004.
83
By De Angeliss count, the excavators have identified at least 28, and perhaps as
many as 35, houses that would have been occupied by 650 (2003, 214).
84
De Polignac 1999; Malkin 2002 although the two have different ideas about
which spaces were demarcated at what times, and how the treatment of religious and
civic space developed over time. For the classic treatment of colonial urban planning,
see Martin 1983.
85
Trziny, for example, cites more than 200 unpublished kraters with subgeometric
decoration and spouts from the urban area (1979, 41). He emphasizes the modest
nature of these examples, however, and the twenty decorated and/or imported kraters
published with context are probably more representative of formal sympotic practice.
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86
Gras and Trziny 2001; Gras et al. 2004, 5413. Cf. Mertens et al. (2003) for
examples at Selinous. Examples at Himera were discussed in a paper presented by
N. Allegro at a conference at the Deutsches Archologisches Institut in Rome on May
24, 2002.
87
Vallet et al. 1976, 321; for the more complete of the two kraters, an Attic import
with an image of a ship dated to the last quarter of the eighth century, see Trziny 1980.
88
Cbeillac-Gervasoni 197677. A Laconian krater used as a cinerary urn in this
necropolis, reported by Pelagatti (1992), probably dates to the sixth century.
89
Cf. Mertenss argument that the arrangement of three rooms behind a corridor
( pastas) permits the division of space into a kitchen and a proto-andro-n (2006, 67).
90
In the tables and graphs here, I treat the material as residential, to err on the
side of caution.
91
But cf. the argument of Kiderlen (1995), entertained by Gras et al. (2004, 445 ff.)
and Mertens (2006, 70), that building i is the private palace of a leading family.
92
Well 22, 4: Vallet et al. 1976, 300. The hestiatorion is also called building b and
sometimes the prytaneion: Vallet et al. 1976, 199202; Gras et al. 2004, 4234.
93
The wide date range of the kraters makes it impossible to associate them
definitively with either the period before or the period after the construction of the
hestiatorion. Interpretation is further complicated by the occupation of this side of the
block by a number of public or unusual buildings from the mid-seventh century
onward.
94
This building is identified by Vallet et al. as a he-ro-on, perhaps for the founder of
the colony (1976, 211), but Bergquist has argued for its identification as an early dining
hall (hestiate-rion) (1992, 1413).
95
Examples are concentrated in the Euboian sphere, with a particular concentration
at Cumae: Albanese Procelli 1979; Valenza-Mele 1982; Cerchiai 1998. The identification
of these vessels as mixing-bowls is further complicated by the use of shallow beadrimmed basins (podanipte-rs?), clearly not wine-vessels, as cremation urns in the same
cemeteries in the same period.
96
Orsi and Cavallari 1890, 719; 900; Cebeillac-Gervasoni 197677, pl. 126 (tomb
M 4). Cerchiai (1998) notes a number of late Archaic examples.
97
From the excavated area, primarily around the agora, De Angelis identifies as
many as 38 houses in use by the end of the sixth century (2003, 423). The kraters
associated with residential space, however, were from areas distant from the agora
(Gras et al. 2004, 125; 164).
98
Either because no context was published or because they were from mixed fills
in streets and wells without clear associations with residential space (Gras et al. 2004,
121; 123; 125; 164).
99
The first is published by Gentili (1954, 1045). The second is unpublished but on
display in the Museo Paolo Orsi in Syracuse.
100
The trend seems not to be due to bias against domestic contexts in the record.
A deposit from a well in what is clearly a private house of the sixth century, for
example, contained large amounts of cookware and obviously domestic material
together with a substantial quantity of fineware cups and transport amphorae. Only
two small fragments in this extensive deposit were tentatively attributed to a krater
(Gras et al. 2004, 107: cratre laconien (?) ). Because of the uncertain attribution,
they have not been included in the sample.
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101
Two additional undated Lakonian kraters from tombs at Megara Hyblaia are
mentioned by Pelagatti (1992, nos. 475 and 476), but even if these date to the period
before 550, they do not greatly change the overall picture.
102
Adriani et al. 1970; Allegro et al. 1976; Bonacasa 197677; Belvedere 1980;
Camerata-Scovazzo et al. 198485; Camerata-Scovazzo and Vassallo 198889; Allegro
198889; 199394; Vassallo 1991 [1993]; 199394; Allegro and Vassallo 1992.
103
Stefano Vassallo, pers. comm., January 2002; several of the vessels are on display
in the Himera antiquarium.
104
Although most of the visible houses date to the fifth century, the division of
space between residential and religious space seems to have been constant across the
sixth century.
105
Vassallo, pers. comm., January 2002.
106
The Pestavecchia necropolis: cf. Vassallo 1991 [1993]; Vassallo 199394.
107
In Figure 5, I have included only those kraters that could be assigned a daterange narrower than 100 years, thus excluding those in the seventh century, sixth
century, and fifth century rows in Figures 2 and 4. In the compilation of the tables
in Figures 2 and 4 and the construction of the graph in Figure 5, I have generally
assigned kraters that straddled two date ranges to the lower of the two (so that a krater
dated 575525 would be assigned to the range 550475), on the assumption that these
vessels are likely to have remained in use for some time before being deposited.
108
It is tempting to explain this difference as a product of the focus of Megara
Hyblaias excavators on the public space around the agora, but the number of late
Archaic houses is still substantial, and again the absence of kraters is unlikely to be due
only to this bias.
109
There is a long history of architectural and topographical research at the site that
I will not discuss here. The following publications, however, provide more contextual
information: Rallo 197677; Rallo 1982; Kustermann Graf and Leibundgut-Wieland
1990; Leibundgut-Wieland and Kustermann Graf 1991; Kustermann Graf 2002;
Meola 1997; Mertens 2003. Mertens (2006) is more synthetic but still provides valuable
illustrations of unpublished or semi-published material.
110
It is estimated that there are as many as 100,000 tombs in the area of Selinous:
Isler in Kustermann Graf 2002, 11.
111
The Spartan noble and his associates arrived in Western Sicily in the last quarter
of the sixth century, after an unsuccessful attempt to found a colony in Libya. Dorieus
himself was killed while attempting to seize the Punic city of Eryx. A surviving
member of the expedition made his way to Selinous, where he overthrew a tyrant
named Pythagoras and briefly became tyrant himself before being killed by the
Selinuntines.
112
Dehl-von Kaenel (1995) cites fragments of 45 Corinthian kraters (almost all
Early and Middle), fragments of 24 Lakonian kraters of the first half of the sixth
century, and fragments of five East Greek dinoi of the same period. She argues that the
overall assemblage indicates that these vessels were used in ritual dining and drinking,
rather than solely as votives (31718).
113
Structure as the house of an Archaic ruler: Mertens 2006, 1023; 1854 (citing
Kiderlens argument for the identification of building i at Megara Hyblaia as a palace).
Oikos A as a dining hall: Mertens 2006, 186.
114
There are more kraters in this period at Selinous than at Megara Hyblaia in
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Adam Rabinowitz
absolute terms, but proportionately they are rarer: the total number of Selinuntine
tombs in this sample is 2236, more than three times the sample from Megara Hyblaia.
In Meolas publication of the Buffa necropolis (1997), she provides a quantitative
breakdown of date and rite that strongly contradicts ideas that the use of kraters is
related to cremation preferences: she records 276 sixth-century burials, of which 189
are cremations and among these kraters appear as urns only four times.
115
One of these bears an inscription that suggests it may have been the cinerary
urn of a woman (Villa 1979).
116
Stibbes L10, L11, L12, dated to the early fifth century (1989, 125). These kraters
also appear in Kustermann Grafs catalogue (two of three from tomb 116 and the
cinerary urn from tomb 127), where they are dated instead to the end of the sixth
century (Kustermann Graf 2002, 1834; 1956).
117
In Figure 7, I have included in the figures for 475400 four kraters from Gela
and seven kraters from the Classical necropolis of Passo Marinaro at Kamarina dated
generally to the fifth century.
118
The slight discrepancy between these figures and the graph is due to five kraters
of the end of the sixth or the beginning of the sixth century from the (mostly) Classical
Capo Soprano necropolis: in the graph, these are counted with the period 550475.
119
The same trend appears at the southern coastal city of Akragas, but its
necropoleis have been too heavily damaged by unscientific excavation (in large part
because of the presence of Attic figured kraters) to be included in a quantitative
analysis.
120
The inverse is visible at Il. 11.4908, where Andromache expresses a tragic vision
of the child Astyanaxs future in terms of his exclusion from commensal networks. A
similar interpretation is often applied to the burial of female children with symbols of
marriage like the vessel known as the lebe-s gamikos.
121
There are other possible factors, including contact with non-Greek Sicilian
populations that frequently deployed kraters in their tombs.
122
Telemakhos twice curses the suitors, in the same formula, for their refusal to
stop eating up his patrimony and to engage in reciprocal feasts in their own homes (Od.
1.37480; 2.13945). Cf. Rundin, who sees the Homeric heroes as the centers of
redistributive networks in their own communities (1996, 192). Van Wees, however,
sees the issue as a breakdown of horizontal reciprocity (1995, 171).
123
Van Wees emphasizes this mode in Homeric feasting and associates it with
formation and promotion of a sort of early class identity (1995, 166 ff.).
124
Such is the case in the city of the heroes on the beach at Troy (cf. Rundin 1996,
196) and in Ithaca.
125
Despite the views of some scholars that Homeric feasting was not hierarchical
(Van Wees 1995, 166 ff.), the public feasts of Nestor and Menelaos used as models
of proper commensality in the Odyssey are clearly dominated by those two heroes
and their families, who act as hosts, welcome or reject guests, and distribute portions
of meat and drink (Od. 3.150; 4.167).
126
The curation of wine and its association with wealth is already evident in the
Odyssey: in Odysseus storerooms, valued with arms and vessels of precious metal, are
jars of old wine (Od. 2.33743).
127
Cf. Od. 19.1113 for a statement of the connection between wine-drinking and
physical violence. A foreign guest who has killed a host can flee; a host who has killed
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a foreign guest need not fear immediate retribution from his kin. When an assault
involves a neighbor, however, the resulting acts of mutual vengeance can threaten to
engulf the community, as they do at the end of the Odyssey.
128
Here I follow Malkin (1994) in the identification of stenocho-ria as a political, not
an economic, problem.
129
The use of kraters as burial vessels for infants is not inconsistent with this
interpretation: the vessel may have been intended to evoke to the role a citizen child
would have held in adult society, had he lived.
130
Much early legislative activity, in fact, is concerned with the protection of the kleros: Van Effenterre and Ruz 1994, 5.
131
De Angelis notes that the foundation of the former could not have been
motivated by a shortage of resources at Megara Hyblaia, and may in part have been
the result of internal stresses (2003, 63). Thucydides describes the Syracusans involved
in the foundation of the latter as ,
(6.5.1); the gentilicial name Myletidai suggests an aristocratic
group.
132
Just as Greek men may have begun around this time to emphasize their collective
public role rather than individual identities connected with physical power: Van Wees,
for example, dates to the mid-seventh century the abandonment of the habit of
carrying personal arms and the adoption of the himation, which both indicates leisure
and practically prevents the use of a sword (1998, 347).
133
The disappearance of kraters from funerary contexts is not limited to Sicily.
Kraters are connected with graves in seven of the 14 Geometric burials with vessels
in the North Cemetery at Corinth, where they often served as enchytrismos vessels for
infants, but with only one of six Proto-Corinthian graves and only two of 82 graves
with ceramic objects dated to the sixth century (Blegen et al. 1964). In the necropolis
of Kameiros on Rhodes, a krater appears in only one of 76 seventh- and sixth-century
graves furnished with ceramic vessels ( Jacopi 1931).
134
It has been suggested that the platforms at Megara Hyblaia, Himera, and
Selinous should be connected with some sort of ancestor cult, perhaps reflective of
the social or kinship groupings of the early settlers (Gras et al. 2004, 542). The
important role of tomb, hero, and ancestor cult in the formation of the early polis,
including its connection to commensality, has been extensively discussed by
Antonaccio (1994; 1995).
135
Hodkinson speculates about a connection with upper-class burials on the basis
of the iconography (2000, 2423).
136
Plutarch goes on to associate polyteleia specifically with equipment for the
symposion, including dining-couches and gold cups, but this may be his own opinion
rather than that of his sources.
137
Megara Hyblaia: hestiatorion, ca. 530 (Gras et al. 2004, 423); Selinous: oikos A on
the acropolis and agora block banquet hall, mid-sixth century (Mertens 2006, 182;
186); Himera: possibly some of the rooms in the stoa of the main urban sanctuary,
mid-sixth century (Allegro 1991 [1993], 689).
138
To cite only a few, Kron 1984; Rotroff and Oakley 1992; Steiner 2002; Stissi 2003.
139
In an oft-cited passage of Platos Laws, Megillos, the Spartan character, contrasts
the sobriety of his countrymen with the drunkenness of their Tarentine colonists
(637a1b6).
179
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140
Hodkinson 1998a, 61. The table on this page shows a drop-off in the presence
of bronze vessels (some of which may have been used for drinking) at the sanctuary
of Artemis Orthia, the Menelaion, and the Amyklaion after 550. Only at the acropolis
are the same number of bronze vessels dedicated between 550 and 500 as between 600
and 550 but even here there is only one vessel after 500. Furthermore, as Hodkinson
notes, it is difficult to tell from the fragmentary evidence which vessels were for
practical use and what forms are represented (2000, 287 n. 28).
141
But see Stibbe (1984), where he proposes that a master potter emigrates from
Lakonia to Lipari around 500. This might be compared to what happened to the Attic
red-figure industry at the end of the Peloponnesian War, when Athenian potters
following the market to Italy, and it may indicate that internal demand had slumped.
142
The researchers themselves are unsure how to reconcile this evidence with the
mandatory attendance of Spartans at the syssitia: Cavanagh et al. 2005, 314. Spartans
seem to have been excused from the messes in connection with hunting or sacrificing
(Plut. Lyc. 12.2), and perhaps exceptions were made for those who had to spend time
farther afield. I thank William Cavanagh for directing me to this material.
143
Hdt. 3.13658. Herodotus mentions a late sixth or early fifth century basileus of
Taranto, who has been taken variously as a constitutional ruler (as at Sparta) or a tyrant
(cf. Lippolis 1997, 4). The story of the exile Gyllos, who seeks to return to Taras, is
also taken as evidence of intra-elite conflict.
144
A reference to Chian and Milesian couches in Kritias Constitution of the
Lakedaimonians (fr. B 35 Diels-Kranz) and Plutarchs mention of simple Spartan
furniture (Lyc. 9.4.68), his understanding of the messes as a corrective measure
against the elaboration of dining (Lyc. 10.1.17), and his citation of a rhe-tra prohibiting
decoration in the oikos (Lyc. 13.3.213.5.1) all suggest that the physical space of the
syssitia would have offered few opportunities for luxury display.
145
Contributions to the messes in the fourth century are reported by Plutarch (Lyc.
12.2) and Dikaiarkhos ap. Athenaios (FGrH 2.242, fr. 23). For a synthetic discussion
of the mess dues, see Hodkinson 2000, 1909.
146
Cf. Nafissi 1991, 349: Di fatto, in un modo o nellaltro, le caratteristiche
delleconomia e le forme di dipendenza determinano lo straordinario rigore con cui a
Sparta furono applicate istanze piuttosto diffuse nel pensiero politico-sociale arcaico,
e dunque in fondo la peculiarit della plis lacedemone.
147
Hodkinson associates commensal patronage with the increasing deployment of
wealth to create status in Sparta from the fifth century onward (2000, 3568), and
Nafissi also identifies the resurgence of private interests and renewed economic
inequality by this time (1991, 361).
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Drinking From The Same Cup

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61261_Sparta_Book:Layout 1

DRINKING FROM THE SAME CUP:

In these verses, the Athenian poet and oligarch Kritias expresses an

Fig. 2. Summary of contextualized kraters from Megara Hyblaia, by type of

Fig. 4. Summary of contextualized kraters from Himera, by type of context and

Fig. 5. Comparison of numbers of kraters by period and by function of the areas

Fig. 6. Summary of contextualized kraters from Selinous, by type of context and

There is a long tradition that sees in the Theognidea a critique of non-noble

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