Drinking vessels: Bowls, beakers and rhyta.
The cups were of various shapes and sizes. The "depas" had two handles and was made of wood, thickly covered with gold studs. Another, the "kypellon," was broad and shallow, made of various metals, usually gold. The "phiate" was very similar in appearance to the kypellon. The "kotyle" was so small as to merely hold "a scanty draught, which only wet the lips, but not the palate."
The "sykphos" and "kissybion" were simple wooden cups in use amongst the peasantry. They were usually made of the wood of the cypress.
Skilled cooks were seldom regularly employed on the domestic staff. They usually congregated in the market places and when any particular occasion necessitated their services they were hired by the day. As also nowadays they generally represented several nations, and they gained in social importance as the love of luxury gradually overcame the custom of simple fare.
The regular staff of household servants, slaves in fact, were under the management of a general steward, himself a slave, who attended personally to the buying and superintended the details of all the other departments.
Wine jugs or oinochoai.
But besides these private dinners, occasion often brought about banquets on a much larger scale, sometimes in honor of religion or of death.
"* * * There upon the ocean's side
They found the people offering coal black steers