What Dionysos meant to the original buyers of vases decorated with figures produced in Athens may be deduced from the importance of Dionysiac sub-jects within the image repertoire. Such investigations are now facilitated by a most helpful tool: the Beazley Archive in Oxford. The following contentions and considerations are all based on the more than 80.000 Attic vases and vase fragments dating from the 7th to 4th centuries registered in that archive.1 The relation between this number and the amount of excavated pottery is unknown. In addition, the question of the ratio between the excavated items and the total production of the time is a matter of fierce debate.2 In any case, we cannot but assume that the number of vases unknown to us, is much larger than the number we know of, and this fact renders any statistics problematic.
Nevertheless, the number of vases available to us through Beazley’s inventories and the files of the Beazley Archive is large enough to assess the importance of Dionysiac subjects within the larger repertoire.
Dionysiac subjects, just like any others in the repertoire, were not applied in equal measure to every type of vase. Every scholar who is sufficiently familiar with figural Greek vase painting knows that, even though certain themes are found on all shapes, every shape also has its own preferred imagery, depend-ing on the function of the vessel. Therefore, the frequency of a subject much depends on its appropriateness for the actual use of the carriers of the image.3
In the Athenian production of figure pottery, certain vase shapes are more common than others. Cups are by far the most numerous, with almost one third of the total production as known to us. Vessels for mixing wine and water come next; there are about half as many as there are cups. Already in the 6th century, however, a difference was made between the sumptuous, ornate and expensive volute kraters and the more modest column kraters. The calyx krater came into use around 540 BC, at a time when the image repertoire, too, saw
1 Personal communication from Thomas Mannack, 18 March 2013, for which I am most grate-ful. The black- and red-figure vases listed by J.D. Beazley constitute less than half of this number: according to Sparkes 1996, 94 and Mannack 2002, 19 this concerns around 10.000 black- and 20.000 red-figure vases (excluding the 5000 additions in Paralipomena).
2 Kratzmüller 2003; van der Put 2009, 38 (less than 1%); Sapirstein 2013, online supplement 9 (c. 0,5%).
3 Schmidt 2005, 25 f.; for Dionysiac subjects in this perspective see Kästner 2008a.
important innovations. The bell krater was only invented by the end of the 6th century at the earliest, for which reason all bell kraters are red-figure. In the first few decades, bell kraters were quite rare and their decorations often quite original. After about 440–30, however, they were produced in ever greater numbers; in the 4th century bell and calyx kraters were practically the only types of mixing vessels. Parallel to this development, the number of volute and column kraters sharply diminished after the middle of the century; around 400 BC both types had virtually disappeared. The number of amphorae is less than a third of that of all types of kraters; that of the hydriai about a quarter, around the same amount as that of the oinochoai.
The share of the individual shapes varies over time and so does the total pro-duction itself. It steadily increases during the 6th century as the Athenian mar-ket expands into Italy, peaks in the first half of the 5th, and markedly decreases after about 430 BC. The latter can be easily explained by the economic and political crises Athens went through as a result of the Peloponnesian War. The peak production of the second quarter of the century reflects the political and economic heyday of Athens following the successful outcome of the Persian Wars. Remarkably, vase scholarship has so far given very little attention to the question what the one-year evacuation of 479 BC (which took place as a reac-tion to the approach of the Persian armies), and the extensive damage to the city meant for pottery production.4
Let us now return to the significance of the Dionysiac subject matter.
Regarding the vase shapes that will be discussed in this chapter—the cup; the amphora; the column, bell, and calyx krater; the hydria—, it should first be made clear that the human figures the original viewers of the imagery would most readily have identified with were not the Dionysiac figures, nor even the mythological ones, but the anonymous, prototypical ones.5 By far the most common among these is the figure of the beardless youth, followed by the anonymous woman and the bearded man. Men and youths are more often found on cups—the symposium vessel par excellence—than women, whereas women are the preferred figures to decorate the hydria, a type of vase that, more than cups and kraters, has female connotations.6
That these figures are anonymous does not mean they had no meaning or, as Beazley still contended, were mere space fillers. Closer consideration of, for instance, the youths wrapped in their mantles that are standard figures for the reverse side of column kraters has revealed that this motif most certainly
4 Isler-Kerényi 1977a, 38; Kunisch 1997, 21; Isler-Kerényi 2009a, 14.
5 For this term see Isler-Kerényi 2007, 111.
6 Schmidt 2005, 222.
referred to a specific state of life and also that there could be concrete and meaningful links with the image on the main side of the vessel.7 However, as such figures excited less interest than the mythological ones, they have so far been little studied.8
As far as the cups and our three types of kraters are concerned, the proto-typical figures are followed, be it at a considerable distance, by more specific Dionysiac subjects: Dionysos, satyrs, Dionysiac women, the komos and the symposium.9 Equally numerous, at least on cups, are anonymous athletes and warriors. These, on the other hand, were clearly not very popular for hydriai and amphorae, and even less for kraters. As for the mythological subjects, it is significant to distinguish between scenes with recognizable protagonists and general scenes depicting amazons, centaurs, and giants; the fights that took place in mythical times between heroes or gods and these adversaries are of a very special nature, and it is no coincidence that they were also often the sub-ject of the sculptural decorations of temples. They represent the preconditions required for the current world order and are, therefore, of a more comprehen-sive character than single mythological events concerning only the individuals in question. Cups and kraters more often feature Dionysiac figures than other identifiable mythological figures—Eros, Herakles, Nike, Athena, and so on.
This is the other way around for amphorae and, especially, for hydriai.
After what has been said about the relationship between vase forms and imagery, and taking the use of the vessels into account, it is not surprising that Dionysiac subjects are mostly found on cups. After all, these were, in the first place, meant to be used at the symposium. The fact that they were found in graves and must have been given as burial gifts does not at all imply that the people of the ancient world believed they were actually used by the dead.10 A much simpler explanation would be the surviving relatives’ wish and hope that the cups would accompany their deceased to an afterlife as full of delight as a symposium.11 It should be mentioned that Dionysos himself is not the most-represented figure in Dionysiac imagery: satyrs are more numerous (a ratio of 6:1), as are dancing women (3:1). As groups of figures in motion are more attractive on the surface of a cup than stationary single figures, we
7 Isler-Kerényi 1993b and 1996.
8 Ferrari 1990; Langner 2012.
9 Because of their limited number, volute kraters may be left out of consideration. For the history and repertoire of the column krater, see Isler-Kerényi 1993b, 94–96.
10 This typically modern materialistic projection is still widespread.
11 See a comparable interpretation of the images of bliss on Roman sarcophagi by Zanker in Zanker/Ewald 2004, 177.
usually find Dionysos surrounded by several members of his retinue. The fact that we find much more satyrs than dancing women may be explained from the notion that the symposium was primarily a male affair. It also explains why the cups present us with almost as many representations of komos and symposium as of satyrs; these were the two occasions that would have made participants identify with satyrs.12
Parallel to the increase in the production of decorated pottery in the first half of the 5th century, we see, on the whole, an increase in Dionysiac rep-resentations. This again, however, mostly concerns depictions of satyrs and their dancing female companions, and to a much lesser extent the god himself.
The increase in representations of komos and symposium should probably be linked to a peak in the demand for column kraters. During the second half of the century, however, the number of Dionysiac figures and subjects suffers a decrease of more than 50%. The total number of vases of all types under discussion also dropped sharply, but this decrease was less than that in the Dionysiac imagery. At that time, especially after 430, mythological representa-tions, too, went into a decline, while, simultaneously, we see a relative increase in the use of anonymous figures. This, like the reduction in the number of vase types already mentioned, is an obvious sign of the decline of red-figure pottery in general.
It would, however, be wrong to conclude that the interest in Dionysiac sub-jects had diminished, since Dionysos, Ariadne, satyrs and maenads are the most popular figures of the bell and calyx kraters of the 4th century.13 These were now joined by Pan, who had, until then, only made sporadic appear-ances. During the centuries that followed (the Hellenistic period and the Roman Imperial period), he became an integral part of the Dionysiac thiasos.14 However, we definitely find fewer representations of the komos and sympo-sium; kraters were no longer symposium vessels—they had developed into exclusive burial gifts, as had already happened in Greek Southern Italy and in Sicily.15 The mythological aura that surrounds Dionysos and his retinue was more suitable for this purpose than either komos or symposium. In this context, a comparison with the, less numerous, hydriai is instructive: here the komos does not appear at all and the symposium only sporadically. On the other hand, Ariadne, Dionysos, satyrs and maenads are only outnumbered by Aphrodite and, especially, Eros. A comparison with cups is equally interesting.
12 See above p. 4 f. and notes 13–15.
13 Similarly Paul-Zinserling 1994, 12 f. and 46.
14 Schöne-Denkinger 2008, 45.
15 Pontrandolfo 1995, 194–195; De Cesare 2007.
Bell kraters are evidently more numerous than cups, but there are twice as many cups as calyx kraters. Cups mostly show representations of anonymous youths, and also many anonymous women and athletes. With Eros and, less frequently, Nike, Dionysos, satyrs, and maenads are practically the only mytho-logical figures.16 In the worldview of the original buyers of these types of pot-tery, who no longer lived in Etruria, but in Greece, Spina, Magna Graecia and on the Black Sea, Dionysos is clearly taking a dominant position.
16 Pellegrini 2009, 201; Lissarrague 2013, 238.