Laudator Temporis Acti

Attic black-figure pelike, 6th century BC, found at Cerveteri, now in Vatican City, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco Vaticano, cat. 16518, image from Athina Chatzidimitriou, "Représentations de vente et d'achat d'huile sur les vases attiques à l'époque archaïque et classique," in Lydie Bodiou et al., edd., Parfums et odeurs dans l'Antiquité (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008), pp. 237-244 (at 237): Side B, from the museum's web site: Drawings showing more clearly the Greek lettering, from Matthias Steinert, Griechische Inschriften als Zeugnisse der Kulturgeschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), pp. 62-63: H.A. Shapiro, "Literacy and social status of archaic attic vase-painters," Revista do Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, São Paulo 5 (1995) 211-222 (at 216-217, footnote and figures omitted, Greek slightly modified):

On a pelike in the Vatican, an oil seller fills a small jug from a large pelike that sits on the floor beside him (Fig. 6). A custo­mer or co-worker sits opposite him and seems to be playing with the dog. Such scenes of banausoi, though not very numerous, do several times occur on pelikai, in part to illustrate the uses to which the shape was put (Shapiro forthcoming). Stretching from one figure to the other is the opening line of an impromptu hymn:

ὦ Ζεῦ πάτερ, αἴθε πλούσιος γεν<οίμαν>

“O Zeus, would that I might become rich!”

The metre is again Aeolic and the invocation to Zeus reminiscent of skolia like the one on Euphronios’ krater, only the sentiment somewhat less lofty. In fact the diction recalls even more closely another type of skolion of which Athenaeus records two examples. One reads:

εἴθε λύρα καλὴ γενοίμην ἐλεφαντίνα
καί με καλοὶ παῖδες φέροιεν Διονύσιον
ἐς χορόν

“Would that I might become a lovely ivory lyre, and that beautiful boys might take me to the chorus of Dionysos.”

In the context of the oil merchant’s shop on the Vatican pelike, the verse turns the scene into a gentle parody of the symposium, in which two working stiffs daydream of being leisured aristocrats. The painter’s sense of humor perhaps reflects a feeling of kinship or empathy with his fellows in the oil business, who must have had close ties to the pottery industry. The humor in fact extends to the reverse of the pot (Fig. 7). In a different vignette, which may be only loosely related to the first (the setting has moved outdoors), the oil merchant, who has perhaps been accused of shortchanging a customer, exclaims:

ἤδη μὲν ἤδη πλέο<ν>, παραβέβακεν

“It’s already full. It’s spilling over!”

Although the wording probably captures a typical speech pattern of colloquial Attic Greek, at the same time it appears to be metrical, based on a succession of cretics, usually considered a Doric metre (West, 1982: 54-55). The use of a Doric form with long alpha in the final word would be consistent with this. Possibly the doricisms reflect the non-aristocratic status of the speakers.