Kottabos

ceramica italiota e siceliota. Produzione, circolazione, fruizione Francesco Marcattili, Libertas e Iuppiter Liber in Aven-tino. Schiavitù e integrazione negli anni della seconda Guerra Punica Françoise-Hélène Massa-Pairault, La tombe François et la vision politique de l'Étrurie au IV e siècle a.C. Françoise-Hélène Massa-Pairault, Turnus: de Virgile à Ca-strum Inui Concetta Masseria, La natura "augurale" del tempio lucano Theodoros Mavrojannis, Consequences of the battle at Salamis in the Eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus from 478 to 449 b.C.: the «Hellenikos Polemos» Carmela Roscino, La sposa ritrovata. L'iconografia di Elena Phainomeris nella ceramica attica del terzo venticinquen-nio del V secolo a.C. Jacopo Tabolli, All'origine dell'Agro falisco Sommario Luigi Todisco, La fanciulla inseguita di un vaso lucano da Vaste nel Museo di Taranto Mario Torelli, Spurinas e non Murinas. Appunti per la sto-ria della famiglia fondatrice della tomba dell'Orco Girolamo Visconti, Il gioco del kottabos oltre i confini del simposio. Un'analisi attraverso la ceramica italiota, tra ce-ramica attica ed etrusca Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Das Begehren von dem Ovid nicht spricht: Hermaphroditos in der hellenistisch-römischen Kunst Recensioni M. Castoldi, Alberi di bronzo. Piante in bronzo e in metal-li preziosi nell'antica Grecia, Bari 2014 [Pier Giovanni Guzzo] V. Nizzo, Archeologia e antropologia della morte. Storia di un'idea. La semiologia e l'ideologia funeraria delle società di livello protostorico nella riflessione teorica tra antropo-logia e archeologia, Bari 2015 [Pier Giovanni Guzzo] Edizioni ETS

Place of sociability par excellence for the ancient Greeks, the symposion is also a privileged setting for playing with social norms. Beyond the shared consumption of wine, which underpins the group’s cohesion, the symposion allows values and norms to be reaffirmed, but also to be exceeded, within a circumscribed framework. This constant wobbling between the rules and their transgression often takes the form, in the iconography of Greek vases, of a game of mirrors between civilisation and wildness, in which komasts and satyrs embody a counter-model of civic sociability. At a second level of interpretation, this wobbling can also be interpreted metaphorically, throughout the notion of balance. Excessive drunkenness threatens the drinker’s equilibrium by causing him to lose enkrateia, the control of the senses and the body. The use of games of skill and dexterity – of which the kottabos is the best known – makes it possible to materialise, in a playful way, this tension at work in the...

The Paestan vase-painting of Zeus on a see-saw (from an unidentified mythological comedy) represents a type of comic scene known in ancient Greek theatre: erotic flirtation between two personages (an aspiring lover and his ladylove) is theatrically rendered through an actual game played by those two characters on stage. Parallels include Platon Comicus fr. 46 and 47 (Heracles playing kottabos with a prostitute), Antiphanes fr. 57 (possibly an enamoured god teaching the kottabos to young Aphrodite), Diphilos fr. 74 and Plautus, Asinaria 904ff. (hetaira and lovers playing dice). The Paestan picture parodies the traditional mythical image of Zeus weighing the fates or souls of opposed warriors in his divine scales, to determine the outcome of a fight (see e.g. Iliad 8.69–74, 22.209–213, Aeschylus' Psychostasia). In comic reversal, Zeus himself is now put "in the balance", rising and falling on the see-saw like the heroes placed in the scales. Such laughable inversion of traditional mythical roles was a staple technique in ancient mythological comedies.