In the world of Ancient Athens, there was one institution, above all others, which defined the life of young citizens. It was not the law-courts or the Assembly, where their democratic voices could be heard, nor even the army or the navy, where their martial prowess could be displayed. Instead, it was a ritualised drinking-party, an important rite of passage, encouraging prosocial bonding between younger and older men, a forum through which the great deeds of the past could be relayed, and within which philosophical and political discussion were encouraged. But the symposion, as it was known, was not as restrained and genteel as the equivalent modern English word ‘symposium’ might suggest. These parties were raucous, even debauched, environments within which drinking and sexual titillation were the norm. While the guests were exclusively male, the drinks were poured by hetairai, scantily clad women whose role, while not technically that of a prostitute, was very close. In many respects, the symposion was a kind of outlet for the main Athenian passions – women, boys, poetry, wine, seafood – where they could be enjoyed without threatening the fabric of Athenian elite society. Young men could, in the context of the symposion, enjoy things they could never enjoy outside of the andron (the room specifically set aside for the symposion in the Athenian house, whose name literally translates as ‘man-room’). But there were important rules nonetheless. First, what happened in the andron stayed in the andron. On the rare occasions that the revels escaped onto the streets, disaster often followed. In one famous example, the drunk youths of Athens spilled out of a notable 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 almost every doorway in Ancient Athens. This was considered a terrible omen, and, sure enough, the Athenians subsequently experienced a terrible military disaster, losing almost all their ships and a great number of men in their ill-fated invasion of Sicily. The Athenians blamed the drunken youths for offending the gods, and mob justice prevailed. After a show-trial, almost all of the mutilators of the herms (statues of Hermes) were either exiled or had their property confiscated.

To prevent this kind of lewd drunkenness, the symposion carried strict rules about how wine was to be consumed. Drinking to excess was a barbarian attribute – Herodotos, the famous Greek historian, recorded how the Persians always made important decisions twice, once while sober and once while blind drunk; if the two outcomes matched, it was a good decision and they stuck to it (Herodoos Histories 1.133) – and a true Greek only drank his wine mixed with three parts water. As a result, the genre of ‘sympotic’ pottery – that is, the ceramics associated with the symposion) included a number of vessels associated with the pouring and mixing wine and water, as well as consuming the end product. The oinochoe was for carrying and pouring the wine; the hydria carried and poured the water; they were mixed in a krater, using a kotyle to measure out the parts. Then, the drinks would be poured into a kylix, a cup, to drink. Other variations on this order existed, and no fewer than eighteen different pottery types are specifically associated with the symposion. These vessels were often richly decorated, usually with scenes which evoked the theme of the symposion. Sometimes this would include characteristic representations of foreigners, such as to remind the youths not to drink too much and sacrifice their Greekness. Others bore the god Dionysos in various guises, since he was the patron of wine. Some were light-hearted – a famous example from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum depicts a famous scene from the Odyssey, Odysseus’ escape from the island of the Cyclopes, but replaces Odysseus’ boat with wine amphorae, and makes Odysseus a balding, corpulent man, with an unnaturally large penis – and others more serious, like the coded warnings to youths not to let themselves become sexual prey for older men.

This remarkable vessel’s purpose is encoded in its name. The term hydria comes from the Greek hydor, meaning ‘water’. These vessels were designed for the easy carrying and pouring of water, which was needed in thrice the quantity of wine. The two side handles enabled easy carrying when full, and a third, positioned behind the neck of the vessel, assisted the slave or servant in pouring the water into the kylix, or mixing-bowl. Rather than following the earlier design of the hydria, this vessel is of a form known as the kalpis, a shorter and somewhat squatter version of the vessel, with a more elegant curve to the neck, and with the rear handle attaching to the neck, just under the rim, for a more robust join. The vase is decorated in the Red-Figured style, the second and more mature of the two phases of Greek vase-painting. In the Red-Figure technique, the background of a vessel is painted in a black clay slip, which is shiny and smooth to the touch. The decorative figures are allowed to stand out in the orange clay from which the vessel is formed; fine details are first scratched in, then coloured with black slip using a fine reed brush. Additional details were then sometimes added in white slip, to ensure a three-part contrast of colour and tone. This hydria, executed in a remarkably free style, demonstrates the maturity reached by the Red-Figure technique in Apulia, southern Italy, where the trends coming from Athens were hungrily taken up, and where a special local flavour was added to the decorative motifs. The use of white slip is rarely seen in the pure Athenian article, and represents something of an innovation on the part of regional potters both in Italy and the Black Sea region.

This vase depicts an elegantly clad female figure with wings. This is the goddess Nike, the harbinger of victory. Associated with victory both in war and in friendly competition, she was as much a goddess of the arts and music as she was of martial prowess. Nike was especially associated with Athens, since she was seen variously as an attendant to or an aspect of the city’s patron goddess, Athena. She brings courage to those who struggle. In one myth, recorded in Nonnos’ Dionysiaca, reports that, when the great snake-headed giant Typhon laid siege to Olympus, it was Nike who went to Zeus and urged him to gather his thunderbolts to defend the mountain. Her speech was apparently so inspiring that all the other gods who had fled the battle – Ares, Hermes, Apollo, Aphrodite and Hephaistos – returned to their stations and resumed the fight until victory was achieved. In this vessel, Nike is presented offering a victory laurel to a nude youth, who stands nonchalantly leaning on a stick, with his cloak (chlamys) slung across his arm. It is usually either gods and heroes or athletes who are presented in such a way on vases, and we must assume that this individual is the latter, from the discus depicted hanging from the wall behind the pair. He reaches out to receive the acclaim of Nike, despite the fact that he already wears one laurel denoting victory. The upturned shield carried by Nike bears a third laurel which we must also assume was given to this victor. Between the two figures is a waist-high funerary monument which gives us another function of this vase: in commemoration of the dead.

One of the characteristics of the Greeks of Italy was a constant need to prove oneself to not only be Greek, but to be more Greek than even the Athenians, who, after success in the Persian Wars, rather dominated the view of Greekness on the mainland. While there can be no doubt that the Greeks of Sicily and Italy – known collectively as Magna Graecia, or ‘big Greece’ – were in fact ethnically Aegean, since they originated as colonists sent by the Greek cities, there was always something of a sense among the Greeks of the mainland that these peripheral Greeks had somehow ‘gone native’. To combat this narrative, the Italian Greeks built temples far larger than any in the Aegean, competed with more regularity (and, indeed, success) at the Olympic Games and other Panhellenic competitions, were greater sponsors of poetry, and participated in the symposion almost to excess. They also maintained very old Greek traditions, like the use of pottery vessels as grave markers. This is likely the purpose of this vase, or else it was designed to go into one of the tombs still furnished by the Western Greeks long after they were abandoned in the Aegean. The presence of the grave-marker alongside the athlete suggests that this hydria adopts a sympotic form to commemorate a youth who may, in fact, have been a three-time victor at one of the great games himself.