One of the central institutions of the Ancient Greek world was the symposion, a kind of ritualised dinner-party, in which the youth of the city (polis) would meet to discuss the issues of the day, to engage in philosophical debate, or otherwise promote the intellectual life of the city. Exclusively reserved for men, and held in a room whose very name, andron (‘man-place’), excluded the feminine gender, there was some suspicion about what the elite youth of the city got up to in these dinner parties. This was not without reason. The symposion became something of a debauched environment for drinking and sexual titillation. In the symposion, so it was thought, those impulses that threatened the very existence of the state – sexual freedom, alcohol, foreign influences, and even homosexuality – could be safely explored without ever leaking into the more refined world of the polis. Prostitutes (pornai) were banned, but ‘courtesans’ (hetairai), another ill-defined class of sex workers, were very much invited. Wine-drinking was an essential element of these symposia, and a whole repertoire of sympotic pottery designed to deal with the vast quantities drunk, and the games and rituals associated with it. There was, however, one rule which was scrupulously maintained: wine should always be mixed with water. The idea was to prevent the kind of drunkenness so well-known among the enemies of the Athenians in particular, and the Greeks more generally. The Persians, the prototypical anti-Greeks, were famed for their love of wine. The Greek historian Herodotos reported that the Persians so esteemed drunkenness that they ensured to make every important decision twice, once while sober and once while intoxicated. If the two outcomes matched, then it was a good decision worthy of pursuing (Herodotos Histories 1.133). Drunkenness did, however, occur in the symposion. In one famous example, the drunk youths of Athens spilled out of a symposion rather the worse for wear; they proceeded to go around knocking the penises off of the ithyphallic figures of the god Hermes which adorned most doorways in Ancient Athens. This was considered a terrible omen; when the Athenians subsequently experienced a military disaster in Syracuse, they blamed the defeat on the unruly youths and their blasphemy. Mob justice prevailed, and, after a show-trial, the cream of Athens’ elite youth was either exiled, or had their property confiscated by the state.

The importance of sobriety, and of the mixing of one part wine to three parts water, was therefore paramount. Only barbarians or the god Dionysus could drink unmixed wine, the former because they were uncouth, and the latter because he was divinely ordained to handle his drink. As a result, one of the most numerous and important types of sympotic pottery are the kraters, large often bell-shaped vessels with two handles, in which the wine and water would be mixed before consumption. This remarkable vessel is a fine example of the kind of bell kraters produced not in Athens, the home of the symposion, but abroad in Magna Graecia, the Greek colonies around the Sicilian and Southern Italian coasts. Such vessels were produced in direct imitation of the Athenian originals, and were designed – alongside the adoption of the characteristically Greek symposion itself – to prove that Greek colonists (and, indeed, native elites) had maintained the Hellenic ideals.

On one side of this vessel, we see three youths in what can best be described as a ‘locker-room’ scene. They stand tightly-wrapped in their himatia, the most common kind of cloak worn by Greek men. The posture of being tightly wrapped in one’s cloak was a signal of the chastity and reserve expected of young Greek men. The Greeks, famous for their permissive attitudes to homosexuality, were in fact somewhat less open to male-male affection than we might presume. The typical homosexual encounter was pederastic, between a boy of thirteen or fourteen, and an older mentor. These relationships were supposed to be chaste, but everyone knew what kind of improprieties went on within them. Despite complex and often polyvalent approaches to homosexuality, the traditional punishment for engaging in sexual intercourse with another male was to be stripped of one’s citizenship. The image of a youth wrapped tightly in his himation, even in the confines of a sporting environment where athletes traditionally participated naked, was an expression of his adherence to the social norms of a citizen. In fact, the only feature of this otherwise nondescript scene which informs us of its athletic context is the presence in the hand of the rightmost youth of a strigil, a metal implement for scraping sweat and oil from the body after physical exertion, which he offers to the other two athletes in the scene. We can perhaps interpret this explicitly chaste scene as an admonition or warning to the party-goers at the symposion, encouraging them to maintain the decorum of a citizen.

The reverse of the vessel has a somewhat more boisterous scene. An athletic victor, identified by his nudity, is crowned with laurel, while his loose cloak billows around him. Despite her lack of wings, we must presume that the female figure crowning him is Nike, the goddess of victory, or else one of the many nymphs associated with the Games at Delphi, Olympia, and the Isthmus of Corinth. He holds a jug, likely containing the perfumed olive oil with which he will clean himself after his exertions (using a strigil like the one borne on the other side of this krater) and reaches towards a dancer. This was one of the few pursuits acceptable for women, sometimes performed competitively, but more often as part of a troupe of dancers performing in honour of the gods. She is twisted in movement, her body contorted towards the athlete, her hands in refined delicate poses. In a rare twist on usual Greek vases, the athlete and the dancer hold each other's gaze; eye contact in Greek vases usually indicates the moment of falling in love, an unexpected benefit awarded to this already lauded athlete. Behind the pair is a kind of string hanging from a peg, to provide some kind of athletic context for the scene. It is unclear what equipment this might be, but it might be tentatively suggested that this is the athlete’s kynodesmē, a kind of athletic support worn around the penis to prevent it from moving uncomfortably during competition, which was always performed naked. The whole scene rests on a meander pattern, and the rim of the vase is encircled by another wreath of laurel, in a play on the scene unfolding below. Below each handle is a double-palmette.

Athletic competition is the perfect motif for a Greek sympotic vase from Magna Graecia. The Greeks were, of course, obsessed with athletics, which were performed not only for the health of the body and the skills required in war, but also as an essential religious festival. Games were carried out in honour of Zeus (at Olympia), Poseidon (at the Isthmus of Corinth), Apollo (at Delphi), and Athena (at Athens). All of these games, other than the last, the Panathenaic Games, were open to all Greeks, and participation was one of the hallmarks of Greekness. Indeed, foreign rulers such as Philip III of Macedon, used participation in the Games as a mark of their worthiness to rule over Greeks. Success in the Games was met with lifelong wealth and fortune, and was a mark of supreme achievement. The symposion was a place to brag about athletic victories; indeed, wealthier victors hired poets such as the famous Pindar to compose poems in a special genre, epinician poetry, to celebrate their success, and these poems were read largely at symposia. Reading through the poems of Pindar, it is remarkable how many victors come from Magna Graecia, and particularly from Syracuse. The Greeks in this region emphasised participation in the Games in order to legitimate their Greekness, even hundreds of miles from their homeland.