Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson

and minimal accountability. The result? Whenever we charge them with drinking up the wine they reproach us and swear that they have had no more than a single cup. But this single one is greater than a thousand cups.

      A similar contrast is made by Epigenes in his play Heroine: ‘But the potters don’t even make kantharoi nowadays, you poor chap, not those fat ones; they all make these low-lying elegant things instead … as if it were the cups themselves we were drinking rather than the wine.’⁴¹ The size and shape of the vessels represented a difference in the manner of drinking. Deep cups meant deep drinking, long draughts knocked back from fat vessels, bottoms-up; shallow cups in contrast were drained more elegantly, tilted slightly and sipped frequently between dialectical contributions.

      Typical of these vessels of depth was the bat-eared goblet of the Boeotians and Etruscans, the kantharos: ‘Let’s put out into the deep; into the kantharos, boy, pour it, by Zeus, into the kantharos,’ says a comic character to his slave. A huge kantharos is what gets the nurse drunk in Eubulus’ Pamphilus (she drains it dry in one go), and it is a kantharos that Hermaiscus is seen knocking back in Alexis’ Cratias. It is no surprise, then, that it is this cup above all that Dionysus keeps by his side, that, indeed, becomes so closely associated with the god of wine as to constitute an attribute.⁴²

      The horn-shaped vessels called rhyton and keras belong to the same capacious category. A fragment of Epinicus describes three cups of legendary capacity, all of them rhyta. One holding two choes, approximately twelve pints, is known as the elephant tusk, to be drunk, apparently, in one go. At least one other source refers to such a vessel; it may be more than a figment of comedy’s hyperbolic imagination. Drinking-horns share the kantharos’ symbolic associations with Dionysus and his retinue, indicating in particular a primitive or barbarian approach to drinking. Often, it seems, they were filled with akratos. One striking image from a vase of about 500 BCE shows a foreshortened symposiast dressed up for drinking like a Scythian, a huge drinking-horn silhouetted against him in the foreground. When someone in a comedy asks for a drinking-horn or even for ‘cups deeper to drink from than drinking-horns’, it is clear that the well-ordered Greek forms of drinking are being ushered out of the door. A striking illustration of this comes from the plastic vases, ceramic cups moulded into figures. The cups come in a variety of forms, but never assume the features of the white males for whose lips they were intended, a striking exception that François Lissarrague in his study of the imagery of the symposium thought significant: ‘there are no gods except for Dionysus and Heracles; instead one finds only women, both male and female blacks, Asians and satyrs … It is as if the anthropology of such moulded vases was meant to define the opposite of the Greek drinker and to hold up to him all the things that he was not.’⁴³ It is no coincidence that the cups most often used for refashioning into the form of these notoriously immoderate drinkers are the cups of immoderate drinking, the kantharos and the horn being particular favourites for makeover.

      Drinking-horns presented something of a problem for moralists. For if, as the philosopher Chamaeleon of Heracleia insisted, in his treatise On Drunkenness, big cups were an invention of modern decadence and did not exist in earlier times, how was it that the rhyton was an attribute of the heroes of the past? The philosopher had an answer for this objection. The artists represent heroes with large cups, so that it will be seen that their characteristic rage is due not to their temperamental nature, but to their inebriation.⁴⁴

      Other rather more obscure shapes share the reputation of the kantharos and the rhyton. The kumbion was a deep vessel shaped like a boat, a favourite shape of one notorious drinker in the fourth century, known as Euripides. Another deep cup called lepastē was associated with the verb laptō, which Athenaeus glosses as ‘to drink in one go’. A fragment of Pherecrates has a character offering one to the thirsty members of his audience suggesting they swig it like Charybdis. Elsewhere, we find it emptied by old women, and used successfully to charm Lysander when a kōthōn had failed. One of thesedeep cups is actually called a ‘breathless cup’, because its contents were drunk down without a breath.⁴⁵

      Despite the competition, it is Critias’ kōthōn that comes to stand par excellence for deep drinking at Athens. It shares many of the features of those deep cups associated with Dionysus and his followers, emptied in single draughts. A kōthōn referred to in a play of Alexis could hold about two pints. In a painting described by Polemon in a fragmentary ecphrasis from his To Adaeus and Antigonus, Dionysus is seated on a rock accompanied by a bald-headed satyr holding a kōthōn. A woman in Theopompus’ Stratiotides describes the customary way this cup was drained: ‘I, for one, would be prepared to stretch back my throat to drink from the neck-twisting kōthōn.’ Most commentators suggest that this comic drama played on the consequences of the fantastic scenario of women in the army, and there seems to be more to the kōthōn, s military connection than special pleading on the part of Critias. They are found in the hands of soldiers in Archilochus’ early archaic Elegies, and in Aristophanes’ late-fifth-century Knights. However, contra Critias, the liquid most likely to be discovered inside was not water but wine. There has been some debate over what the Spartan cup actually looked like. Many have been misled by Critias’ description to look in vain for a vessel with an elaborate folded-over rim to catch impurities. But the fragment refers more simply to ambōnas, meaning ‘ridges’ or ‘ribs’. At least one vase, shaped like a stout mug or tankard, has been discovered with kōthōn actually written on the base, and it now seems clear that this shape satisfies most of the literary references. By Critias’ time at the end of the fifth century they were being made with vertical ridges all the way round. Normally such ridging was simply decorative, an attempt to make ceramic ware look like silver, but on the kōthōns the ridging is often found on the inside too, apparently a rather pointless exercise that would only weaken the fabric. Some students of vases have suggested this could only be explained as an obsession with imitating metalware taken to counter-productive extreme. But Critias explains it much better. What is the point of having ridges to collect the lees unless you have them on the inside?⁴⁶ If such vessels are rarely mentioned in modern accounts of Greek drinking it is because they do not fit the image of the classic elegant sympotic cup, looking more like a medieval tankard. Beazley, the great connoisseur of Greek pots, preferred to leave them nameless, classifying them (despite their lack of a pouring-spout) with jugs.

      We are now in a position to subvert Critias’ special pleading and to restore to the kōthōn its normal connotations. It was a very useful cup for scooping, not from streams of mountain water, but from vats of wine as described with such relish by Archilochus. Its contents would be less visible than in an ordinary flat sympotic cup, not to disguise the dirtiness of the water drawn from mountain streams, but simply because it was a deep cup made for deep drinking. The ridging was suitable not for catching Critias’ river-dirt but for saving the swigger from getting a mouthful of lees and all the other bits and pieces left in ancient Greek wine. It may have started as a military cup, but it seems to have found its way into the symposium at an early date.⁴⁷ There it will have stood alongside the keras and other deep cups as a challenge to the orderly blending and distribution of the wine. The kōthōn, with its characteristic single handle does not look like a cup made for sharing.

      From the name of this cup the Greeks generated the noun kōthōnismos and the verb kōthōnizein which first appear in the fourth century. They refer to ‘deep drinking’: ‘je vide la grande coupe’ is how a French commentator begins the conjugation of this interesting verb. The physician Mnesitheus wrote a treatise in the form of a letter around the middle of the century, suggesting that in certain circumstances kōthōnismos could be good for you, like an emetic or a purgative. He gives three main points to bear in mind when engaging in