5

SYMPOSIA, SEALS, AND CERAMICS IN THE ARCHAIC

PERIOD

The Symposium

Seals

Tyranny

Ceramics

This chapter examines some additional features that characterize Greek culture of the Archaic Period. The
symposium was a private, ritualized feast, accompanied and followed by consumption of wine, which
provided affluent male citizens with an opportunity to display to a small company of their peers the social
and intellectual skills that both individualized them and enabled them to blend in to this exclusive
community. Such men could be expected to possess an engraved gemstone, which was a unique mark of its
owner’s identity that could be used to seal such things as documents and storerooms. Paradoxically, for
all the uniqueness and individuality of each engraved stone, the repeated marks it left were uniform and
indistinguishable from one another. The social and political pressure both to “fit in” to the Archaic polis
and to display one’s fitness precisely by excelling led to the rise, in many poleis, of an individual known
as a “tyrant” who wrested political power for himself. Tyrants often sought to secure their authority by
encouraging public works projects and by supporting the expansion of religious festivals that served to
enhance their popularity with the citizen body as a whole. In Athens, for example, the sixth-century tyrant
Peisistratus is connected with the development of the Panathenaic festival, which included prestigious
competitions in athletic and equestrian contests. Prizes at these contests included impressively decorated
ceramic vessels. Athens was at this time the leading producer of fine pottery in the Greek world, and the
survival of large numbers of black-figure and, later, red-figure ceramics allows us to follow in great
detail the developing skill and creativity of Athenian artists, several of whom proclaim their individuality
by putting their names to their work.

Poetry  in  the elegiac meter,  with    which   we  closed  our discussion  in  chapter 4,  was written not

only to inspire martial courage. Toward the end of the Archaic Period it became common practice to use
elegiac meter to compose epitaphs for inscription on tombstones – the Greeks thought that the word
elegos originally referred to a song of lamentation – and during the Classical and Hellenistic periods
epigrams on all manner of subjects were regularly composed in elegiac couplets. In the Archaic Period as
well the elegiac meter was used for a great variety of purposes, including the expression of intense erotic
and political feelings. In fact, these feelings were not unrelated. The Greeks were well aware that the lust
for power is essentially erotic in nature, and one of the standard perils (or advantages, depending on
one’s perspective) of absolute power, according to Greek authors, is the ability to impose oneself
sexually on whomever one wished as often as one wished. The context in which sexual and political
matters were frequently discussed, and the context in which elegiac poetry on both these topics was
frequently performed, was the SYMPOSIUM, an institution that attained considerable importance for