Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 92-93.(Budapest, 2000)
SZILÁGYI, JÁNOS GYÖRGY: "Les Adieux". A Column-krater of the Syracuse Painter
willing to put an end to the good company and the drinking. Their drunkenness is of the cheering rather than the shocking kind; tomorrow morning they will wake up in a sour mood. By contrast to the scene on side A, 39 komos-scenes and, in general, pictures that draw on the world of Dionysos are very common on the Syracuse Painter's kraters and his vessels for pouring and drinking, occurring as they do by the logic of the vases' function on the pieces of most Attic masters from almost the very beginnings of black figure, though komasts appear on only one other of the painter's known vases, on side B of the column-krater in Copenhagen (5), opposite to Dionysos flanked by satyr and maenad on side A. The difference of mood between the two pictures is striking. The Copenhagen komasts are beardless youths, their merry threesome in its artistic composition is almost the exact parallel of the triad on side A: the god is driving away their worries; he is among them in his aspect of liberator (Eleutherius), conferring an ecstasy different in both character and meaning from that to be seen on side B of the Budapest vase. That one should find some connection between the scenes on the two sides of a vase is certainly not the rule, but hardly rare, especially in red-figure; 40 we should not exclude this possibility, particularly if we recognize the frequency of the phenomenon on the vases of the Syracuse Painter and his contemporaries. Choosing this as our starting-point, and concentrating primarily on the case at hand, we must, first of all, take account of the vase's original function. As a constant, central, and emblematic participant of the drinking-party, 41 the krater was intended for wide visibility in the centre of the symposium, an organic part of the life of the painter's Athenian contemporaries, more widely visible than the cup, seen only by one or two symposiasts, or the jug used to carry wine from the krater around to the drinkers. This means that the decoration of a krater had to address its audience in terms of a markedly "social" discourse. This discourse naturally included the whole of Greek mythology as it was then known and accepted at Athens, but also, more directly, presented an implied self-portrait of the /w//.v-citizens with full rights and accompanying duties through the representation, with very few exceptions, of the "lovely customs that give us joy day by day", 42 customs treated quite consciously as distinctive features of their way of life as members of the community. Thus, alongside depictions of athletes and symposia and the somewhat rarer festival-scenes, we find these representations of hoplites leaving home. In the decades when the Persian Wars were fought and still threatening, these pictures may well have acquired an especially topical meaning: the renown of a death in battle had become a fundamental value of the democracy. Its visual evocation is at 39 Similar or related scenes only on the column-kraters (3), (7), (8), (10) and according to J. Frel's convincing supposition (Acta Mus, Nul. Prague, Ser. A, vol. 13 [19591 257, no. 80), on a vase of which only a fragment (54) remained. 40 Thus already Robert, C, Bild und Lied, Berlin 1881, 80 ff., in particular 85, although one could hardly agree today with either his methodology or his conclusions (128, 250). 41 Lissarrague, F. in Sympotica (ed. O. Murray). Oxford 1990, 196-209, in particular 204-206 (also for what follows); d'Agostino, B., in d'Agostino-Cherchiai, Il mare, la morte, l'amore, Roma 1999, 25-26 (previously in several places, for the first time: Prospettlva, Jan. 1983). 42 Thuc. 2. 38.
