Tripods

Whilst impressive three-legged bronze cauldrons (“tripods”) formed a focus for elite feasts, gift exchange, and prestige dedications in LG-early Archaic times, a subsequent shift in their archaeological contexts and decoration marks the redirection of the city-state’s population toward communal values. Ancient sources confirm that tripods could be won in athletic or artistic competitions by non-aristocratic citizens, whilst increasingly in Archaic times tripods were dedicated and displayed prominently by “the city” to honor its protective deities. Near the sanctuary of the local hero-god Ptoos, an alignment of tripods lined the road to the Boeotian city of Akraiphia, collectively dedicated by that city to express its religious identity. A number of Archaic tripods also seem to mark a civic identification when we see the former elite warrior ornament on their rims or handles replaced by unarmed youths “offering” the tripod, probably representing the collective of citizens (Papalexandrou 2005).

Nonetheless, tripods and other prestigious and expensive dedications remained a medium through which the rich and influential could remind people of their status, even in the more democratic ethos of the Classical city-state: rich sponsors of dramas or chariot-teams were entitled, even in extremely democratic Athens, to claim the tripod awarded to theater choruses or chariot-drivers, for themselves, in order to display these trophies in prominent urban locations. Just inside the pre-modern core of Athens, the Plaka, in the shadow of the Acropolis, just such a monument has survived, the fourth-century BC “choregic” victory column of Lysicrates (he subsidized the chorus of a successful drama).

Symposion, probably evolved in early Archaic times as a merger of the older elite feast and emulation of Oriental dining habits. Murray has suggested (1990) that ninth-century kits of drinking equipment anticipate this culture of elite feasting, but the sharp rise in relevant ceramics and representations of symposia are a feature of the final seventh century. The distinctively Oriental contribution is for guests to recline on bed-like benches. A well-known illustration of this custom, on an early sixth-century BC Corinthian BF table-service jar (krater) for mixing water and wine (the central object in such drinking-parties), shows the hero Heracles dining with a king, whilst a frieze of horsemen underlines the aristocratic character of the scene. By the sixth century a whole range of drinking-cup shapes appears in Greek ceramics, to remain a very frequent find in archaeological domestic assemblages through Classical and Hellenistic times. Men-only was already becoming the norm for the guests at these formal meals, where politics, art, and literature mixed with social alliances and a form of extreme male-bonding which already produced a blatantly homosexual slant to the proceedings, enhanced by the sharing of couches by two males. Wives and daughters were becoming excluded, although the bisexual Greek male might, even if not that wealthy, pay for demimonde females to perform as musicians and/or sexual playthings at such gatherings. Indeed many of the first examples of the use of writing comprise love-messages or verses incised on symposium vases, generally male-to-male in character. By Classical times, however, a symposium space, the andron, was commonly created in the standard Greek middle-class home (Figure 12.8), in popular emulation of the elite lifestyle.