By Tasos Kokkinidis — GreekReporter.com
A wine cup believed to belong to ancient Greek politician Pericles discovered in 2014 is the highlight of the Epigraphical Museum in Athens.
The cup was discovered in an ancient tomb, during excavations for the foundations of a new building in Kifisia, northern Athens.
Pericles was born in Athens in 495 BC. He was one of the most eminent and revered figures of ancient Greece as he reigned during the Golden Age of Athens. He died of the plague in 429 BC during a Spartan siege.
Measuring 8 centimeters in height, was found shattered into 12 pieces. It was colored black, inside and out, with two handles and thin walls.
When the archaeologists pieced the fragments back together, they were astonished to see six names scratched onto the side of the cup, which they could read, but only when they turned it so the bottom was facing up.
Whoever had written the names had first turned the cup upside down, as if it had just been washed and left to dry.
Seven names inscribed in the Pericles wine cup
Then he inscribed the names and drew a box around them. From top to bottom, the names read: “Aristides, Diodotos, Daesimos, Arriphron, Pericles, Eukritos.” On the base is one more name, Drapetis, which means that there are seven names in all.
Of the seven names, the one that jumps out at us is Pericles, for that was the name of one of the most famous Athenians ever to live.
He was an annually elected general whose soaring oratory inspired and influenced the Athenians until his death, captured most dramatically in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. He is the one who came up with the idea of the building program on the Acropolis in Athens, which included the Parthenon and Phidias’s statue of Athena.
From his family tree, we know that Pericles had an older brother and a grandfather both named Arriphron, which otherwise is a very rare name. On this cup, Pericles and Arriphron are listed one above the other, like brothers should be.
Archaeologists are “99 percent” sure that the cup was used by the Athenian politician and that Ariphron was Pericles’ elder brother.
“The name Ariphron is extremely rare. Having it listed above that of Pericles makes us 99 percent sure that these are the two brothers,” Angelos Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society, told the newspaper Ta Nea.
Wine cup used in a symposium
The cup was likely used in a wine symposium when Pericles was twenty years old and the six men who drank from it engraved their names as a memento, Matthaiou said.
It is not hard to imagine that these seven men attended such a party and that one of them, perhaps Drapetis, took a cup as a souvenir when the evening came to an end.
Maybe after the party one of them scratched their names onto the cup as a memento. The men’s names inside the box seem to have been written by just one man, but the name on the bottom, Drapetis, by another.
This rare and important finding is displayed at the Epigraphical Museum in Athens.
The museum is located in the Plaka district of Athens, close to the Acropolis and other major archaeological sites. It houses a vast collection of inscriptions from ancient Greece, ranging from everyday documents to monumental texts.
The Pericles cup is one of the most popular exhibits in the museum, and it offers a unique opportunity to see an object that may have been used by one of the most important figures in ancient history.