Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 92-93.(Budapest, 2000)
SZILÁGYI, JÁNOS GYÖRGY: "Les Adieux". A Column-krater of the Syracuse Painter
the same time an allusion to the indissoluble ties that bind it to the komos on the other side of the krater, which symbolized the everyday customs that kept body and soul together. But another voice of the two pictures, juxtaposed on the body of the vase, certainly must have made itself felt to the participants of the Athenian symposion: those fallen in war will receive their just honour, the common public burial and the grave monument, the place in civic memory won by their glory, but their death is at the same time the guarantee that the community will blossom again out of the contingent life of its individual members, like a flower from the grave-mound. This is not the place to embark on an analysis of the Greek religious ideas that bind the two pictures together 43 or to reflect on the political realities underlying the hoplite scene; we must, however, return to the question of what connexion can be found between the vase and the scenes that decorate it. Both images can be found separately on countless Attic vases of the Archaic and Classical periods, but their association on redfigured vases is rare. It occurs only here in the Syracuse Painter, and, on the basis of Beazley's lists, it has in fact only a single close parallel in the abundant series of Attic red-figured mixing bowls, a column-krater by a contemporary of the Syracuse Painter found at Gela; 44 the obverse shows a hoplite leaving home, in a composition similar to that on the Budapest vase; his shield device, an alpha, stridently calls attention to his Athenian identity. 45 Among the several hundred red-figure kraters known to us, we can find hardly more than a few examples of an asssociation that might provide even a distant parallel to the two Budapest panels: an unarmed youth on the one side, and a Dionysiac scene replacing the komos on the other. 46 In the light of these facts, one is almost compelled to ask whether the krater is not a unique piece commissioned to commemorate a fallen soldier with heroizing overtones; in this case the komos-scene on the reverse may have acquired a more explicitly eschatological meaning. This can be neither confirmed nor denied; at best all we can say is that if this is the case, the anonymity of the scene well suits Athenian custom at the time. One might also suppose, not without parallels, that the piece was intended as a votive offering for a hero-cult perhaps centuries-old, like the more-or-less contemporary column-krater of the Eucharides Painter found in the Agora. 47 In this case those participating in the maintenance of the cult would have been able to name the figures on the obverse, and the scene would have required no name-inscriptions. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that the piece was in no way originally in43 1 am thinking first and foremost of the religion of Dionysos. 44 Beazley, ARV 2 , 510,1 (P. of Syracuse 23510); the picture on the obverse: MonAnt 17 (1907) pi. 42; for the vase see Orsi, P., ibid. 502-504. 45 For the A-episema see Chase, op. cit. (n.29) 54. 46 Beazley, ARV 2 , 228, 2; 290, 10 (komos); 547,28 (komos); 592, 33bis (komos); 1073, 13; 1112,1 (komos); 1170,2. The pairing of a departure-scene with a Dionysiac scene is much more common in blackfigure (Spiess, op. cit. [n.20] 148-149). 47 Thompson, H.A., Hesperia 27 (1958) 152-153 and pi. 42 (P 25957); Beazley, ARV 2 , 230, 50 (who also comments on the problem of the shape of the vase); Moore, op. cit. (n.38) 157, no. 165, pi. 25. On the problems with the sociological approach to hero-cult, see Hall, J.M., in Ancient Greek Hero Cult (ed. R. Hägg), Stockholm 1999, 49-59.
