Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 92-93.(Budapest, 2000)
SZILÁGYI, JÁNOS GYÖRGY: "Les Adieux". A Column-krater of the Syracuse Painter
Etruria as well has not yet, it seems, been systematically examined, but we do have at least one example from a regular excavation of an imported Athenian column-krater used as an ossuary, and that in Cerveteri. 79 So it seems, on the basis of the Caeretan material known at present - limiting the value of our conclusion to the known facts that an Early Classical column-krater imported from Athens, as to its final destination, would have had two main functions: either it was placed in a sanctuary as a votive offering like the pieces found in Pyrgi, or it was buried as a grave offering, and, like the Praxias krater, whether as ash urn or not, it accompanied the dead on their final journey; just so the vase of the Syracuse Painter and other contemporary pieces found outside sanctuaries, all from scientific excavations. Naturally there is no way to follow the path taken by the Budapest krater (or its fellows) from the Athenian workshop to its last ancient employment at Caere. It is just possible that the Athenian vases eventually buried were used for a time in their original function in Athens (which hardly seems likely) or at Caere. But it is also possible that their Etruscan customers intended them from the beginning for use as funerary offerings. In both cases it is conceivable that not only the shape of the buried krater, but its decoration as well was felt appropriate to this purpose. If this is true, we can suppose that the meaning of the pictures painted on the vase invited an Etruscan interpretation, a reading bearing witness to the emerging religion of Dionysos-Fufluns, 80 untouched by and distinct from its profoundly alien Athenian message that had proclaimed the consciousness of po/zs-membership: the heroization of the deceased as warrior (without regard for its reality in fact), in accordance with the ideology of initiation 81 or without it; and on the other side, by way of compensation, wine, the gift of the god and his symbol that gives "forgetfulness of everyday sorrows", 82 shown through its workings in the image of the komos as it relieves the grief of the living with a promise of the indestructibility of life. The pair of scenes painted on the vase meant something quite different to its Caeretan public in the years of the battle of Cumae than to an Athenian citizen after Plataiai and Salamis. JÁNOS GYÖRGY SZILÁGYI Translated by Péter Agócs 79 Ricci, G., MonAnt 42 (1955) 567, 129. For the type of the krater Sparkes, B.A. - Talcott, L., Black and Plain Pottery (The Athenian Agora, vol. XII), Princeton 1970, 54-55 and 240, no. 58, pi. 3 ("500480"). 80 According to the opinion of O. de Cazanove, which deserves consideration, the Fufluns Pachie inscriptions from Vulci (mid-5th c.) show that the identification was not yet self-evident (in Dionysos. Mito e mistero [Atti Comacchio 1989J, Comacchio 1991, 176). 81 As Colonna, G. (in Dionysos. Mito e mistero, op. cit. 118 ff.) and Bruni, S. {Ocnus 4 [1996] 79) assume, at present only on the basis of parallels drawn from other cultures. M. Torelli is more cautious, speaking of the "Dionysiac message of salvation" without mentioning initiation (in several works, most recently in The Art of Ancient Spectacle [Proc. of the Symposium Washington 1996, ed. B. Bergmann Chr. Kondoleon], Washington D.C. 1999, 154). 82 Eur. Bacch. 282. See Kerényi, K., Dionysos. Urbild des unzerstörbaren Lebens, München-Wien 1976, 58-70; Détienne, M., Dioniso a cielo aperto (transi. M. Garin), Bari 1987, 49-53.
