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 tombs in South Italy display a
wide range of iconographic motifs that can be ultimately connected with the 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 were then the political, cultural, or religious reasons for their absence in the painted tombs found in
Apulia, Campania, and Lucania? What was for the local populations of these regions the 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 assigned within non sympotic scenes, and second to 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 seemed to 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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