Kraters without Banquets:The Ritual Space of sympotic Vessels in South Italian Funerary Wall Painting (IV-II BCE)

The wall paintings that decorated several late Classical and Hellenistic tombsin South Italy display a wide range of iconographic motifs that can be ultimately connected withthe traditional repertory of Greek and Italiote vase painting (Benassai 2001; Pontrandolfo, Rouveret 1992; Baldassarre 1998; Steingräber 2000; Mazzei 1995; Cassano (ed.) 1992). Within this context, this paper will discuss the reasons and implications of the unexpected absence of banquet scenes in the South Italian tombs. The symposion represented a crucial rite of passage in antiquity, but also more generally an occasion to establish and reinstate social hierarchies. Since the Archaic period, banquet scenes had populated funerary wall paintings across the Mediterranean, from Etruria to Macedonia, Thrace, and Anatolia (Dentzer 1982). What werethen the political, cultural, or religious reasons for their absence in the painted tombs found in Apulia, Campania, and Lucania? What wasfor the local populations of these regionsthe ritual and social equivalent of the symposion gathering? This paper will analyze a selection of tombs in which banquet vessels were depicted,pursuing two main objectives: first, to reconstruct the meanings that these objects were assignedwithin non sympotic scenes, and secondto investigate their relationships with the vases found among the grave goods. A comparison between the composition of the grave assemblages and the types of vessels that occurred most frequently in the wall paintings suggests that painted and real vases fulfilled different ritual functions. It will be argued that in South Italian funerary painting sympotic vessels, and in particular the krater, underwent a process of re-functionalization, from which they acquired new symbolical values.Already from the end of the fifth century BCE, Attic and Italiote vase painting showed the use of the krater in much more diversified types of scenes, with an emphasis placed on the ritual function of the vessel in connection with the cult of Dionysos (Lissarague 2006; Pouyodou, Jacquet-Rimassa 2003; Tzennes 1997). Whether they belonged to figural scenes or were represented by themselves, in the South Italian wall paintings these vases were not associated with Afterlife banquets or generic dining parties. Instead, they seemedto allude to purification rituals, initiation practices, or funerary ceremonies, in accordance with the liminal nature of Dionysos, a god of life as well as death, who was in charge of overseeing any process of transition and transformation, offering both to the living and the dead a paradigm of communal joy (Isler-Kerényi 2009).

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