Might live no more in amity together,
But plunge in feuds and slaughters, and contend
For their inheritance: and the Furies heard.[[446]]
Agathocles, tyrant of Sicily, appears to have been an amateur of cups, and would sometimes while exhibiting his collection to his friends make a good-humoured allusion to his original occupation. “These golden vessels,” said he, “have been made out of those earthenware ones which I formerly manufactured.”[[447]] Drinking-bowls in fact made no inconsiderable figure in ancient times. They were bestowed as the prizes in gymnastic contests, and in Greece men boxed and wrestled for the cup as horses run for it in England. Parasites, like the jester of Louis XIV., used sometimes to carry home the cups and dishes set before them at dinner; but the tables were often turned when the subject gave and the prince pocketed the dole.
A curious legend has been preserved to us connected with the subject of cups. Several princes uniting, in remote times, to send a colony to Lesbos, were commanded by an oracle to cast a virgin, during their voyage, into the sea, as a sacrifice to Poseidon. Obedience, in those superstitious ages, was seldom refused to such injunctions. The maiden was precipitated into the waves, but Enallos, one of the chiefs, in whom love had quenched the reverence for oracles, immediately plunged in to save her. Neither the chief, however, nor the virgin appeared again, and the fleet proceeded. The remainder of the tradition may be illustrated by an event said to have taken place in the Tonga islands.[[448]] They were probably near some uninhabited isle, and instead of rising to the surface of the sea, emerged into a cavern elevated considerably above its level, and opening perhaps upon the land. “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” says a modern writer, and so Enallos found it. By means unrevealed in the ancient narrative, the hero and his bride continued to subsist on the rock, and many years afterwards, when the colony was already flourishing, he one day presented himself before his old friends at Methymna, and entertained them with a very romantic account of his residence among the Nereids at the bottom of the sea, where he was honoured with the care of Poseidon’s horses when sent out to grass. At length, however, getting on the back of a large wave it bore him upwards and he escaped from the deep, bearing in his hand a golden cup, the metal of which was so marvellously beautiful that in comparison ordinary gold appeared no better than brass.[[449]]
Even the loftiest and least worldly-minded of the Homeric heroes, Achilles, set great value on a favourite drinking-cup, which he preserved for his own particular use, and for pouring out libations to Zeus alone. Priam[[450]] was careful to include a rare goblet in the ransom of Hector’s body, and a similar gift aided in alluring Alcmena from the paths of virtue.[[451]] But the most famous bowl of antiquity was that of Heracles, which, more capacious than the barber’s basin in Don Quixote, served its illustrious owner in the double capacity of a drinking-cup and a canoe; for when he had quenched his thirst, he could set his bowl afloat, and, leaping into it, steer to any part of the world he pleased. Some, indeed, speak of it as a borrowed article, belonging originally to the Sun, and in which the god used nightly to traverse the ocean from West to East.[[452]]
To pass, however, over the goblets of mythology. It was fashionable to possess plate of this kind finely sculptured with historical arguments; and history has preserved the names of Cimon and Athenocles, two artists who excelled in this style of engraving. These cups were sometimes of silver gilt, sometimes of massive gold crusted with jewels.[[453]] In addition to the two artists named above, we may enumerate Crates, Stratonicos, Myrmecides of Miletos, Callicrates the Lacedemonian, and Mys, whose “Cup of Heracles,” celebrated in antiquity, had represented upon it the storming of Ilion, with this inscription,
Troy’s lofty towers by Grecians sacked behold!
Parrhasios’ draught, by Mys engraved in gold.[[454]]
The names by which the ancients distinguished their several kinds of goblets are too numerous to be here given. Some were curious—“Amalthea’s Horn,” “The Year,” &c. Rustics made use of two-handled wooden bowls in which, when thirsty, they drew fresh milk from the cow in the fields.[[455]] There was a big-bellied cup with a narrow neck which being shaped like a purse, participated with this very necessary article in the name of Aryballos.[[456]]