Symposium, community and cultural exchange in Archaic Sicily and South Italy.

In recent years, as students of antiquity have shown renewed interest in the Greek symposium, an idealized image of the ancient drinking-party's form and function has emerged---an image that, as a result of the surviving sources, primarily reflects Athenian practice in the 5th century BCE. This study challenges the universal and synchronizing application of that image, presenting instead a diachronic and contextual analysis of the shifting socio-political meanings of drinking-parties. By combining comparative, literary and theoretical discussions with an in-depth analysis of the archaeological record of Sicily and South Italy, it seeks to demonstrate that the social role of communal drinking can only be understood in the light of local realities and the choices of individual agents. The first chapter applies comparative and theoretical approaches to commensality to the archaeological record of the Greek Dark Age in order to establish the foundations of the relationship between feasting, drinking and power in Greek society. The second turns to the poetic testimony of the participants in Archaic symposia to demonstrate that an undercurrent of tension and anxiety runs through sympotic discourse. The recognition of the political implications of this tension leads in Chapter 3 to a hypothetical reconstruction of the changing social role of drinking in the colonial poleis, and the impact of local context on that role suggests in turn that the model of Hellenization is insufficient to describe the use of Greek drinking equipment by non-Greeks. These discussions set the stage for the final part of the dissertation, a diachronic and contextual case study of the appearance between 700 and 400 BCE of the wine-mixing), bowl known as the krater at a selection of 15 well-excavated Greek and indigenous sites in Sicily and South Italy. Distribution patterns in the West, I argue, undermine the assumption that Archaic Greek symposia invariably took place in private homes. Instead, they may often have been located in public and religious space. Analysis of funerary assemblages furthermore confirms that non-Greeks, far from being passive recipients of predefined sympotic practices, used the krater to express hybrid social and cultural realities particular to their own communities.Ph.D.Ancient historyArchaeologyClassical literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124298/2/3137928.pd