The Imagery of the Athenian Symposium

This book explores what it meant to be a Greek community and how Athenians thought about past and present.

Kathryn Topper (Author)

9781107011021, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2012

233 pages, 64 b/w illus.
26 x 18.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.68 kg

'… [A] meticulously researched book … The overarching emphasis on the imagined 'pastness' of the symposium makes for a refreshing antidote to other recent approaches … This all makes for a great teaching resource - a carefully argued 'position-piece' backed up with sixty-four good-quality images.' Michael Squire, Anglo-Hellenic Review

The late sixth and early fifth centuries BC were a dynamic time in the history of the symposium, and hundreds of vase paintings from this period show people engaged in sympotic activities. Most scholars have understood these images as illustrations of contemporary Athenian practices, but such an interpretation cannot account for the enormous variety of settings, costumes and participants in the images, nor is it easily reconciled with recent methodological developments in the study of vase painting. Noting the close link between the symposium and the polis in ancient thought, this book approaches the images not as documents of contemporary sympotic practice but as vehicles for exploring what it meant to be a Greek community. It argues that many of the images depict imagined ancestral symposia and that they thus shed new light on how the Athenians envisioned the history of the symposium and its importance to their city.

Introduction: vase painting and the symposium in Athens
1. Ancient visions of the sympotic past
2. Symposia of the primitive
3. Eros, service, and the oinochoos
4. The symposium and its foreign pasts
5. Female symposiasts and the limits of civilization
6. Symposia of the present?
Conclusion: vase painting and the construction of the sympotic past.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Painting & paintings [AFC], History of art: ancient & classical art,BCE to c 500 CE [ACG]