Wine cup used by Pericles found north of Athens

[Lyceum]

Hi Jass,

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's improbable. Especially the way it ended up with a low-born makes me raise my eyebrows.

I'm not sure how improbable it is. Yes the low-born grave is itself interesting. But then, by low-born one usually means "not necessarily with aristocratic accoutrements" which can mean anything really. Also this is classical Athens, it's not unlikely for a family to drop in fortune materially.

As to names, if you read publications like the prosopography of the later Roman empire (PLRE), you realise how few names are actually known to us - it covers AD 260-641 in 3 volumes in 4157 pages with c. 20 names to a page. That's c. 80.000 names out of the hundreds of millions who must have lived during that period. How many names of the time of Pericles do we know? More than ten thousand? Epigraphy indeed also gives us more names of commoners, but still not many. Also, no more than modern graffiti tells us about how often names occur in our society (and this we can check against birth records), can ancient records (written on paper or in stone or clay) tell us which records reflect the occurrance of names in ancient society.

I'm quite aware of prosopographies, what makes the Greek names list so important by the way isn't just the sources it uses (everything from inscribed jewellery to archon lists) but the kind of data they give you like deme and phratry lists, legal proceedings and so on. No, we don't have every single name but we have more than enough data to draw patterns. Especially when many names can be linked to father, maternal uncle, grandfather and phratry/deme.

Don't be fooled by the apparent meaning of names, either. I can give you the example of Vortigern, one of the first rulers in post-Roman Britain. The name means 'most royal' or something (and may be taken upon accession). But he was something like a king. However, we also know of eleven (!) other Vortigerns, who are all commoners with no noble connection wahatsoever. Meaning of names don't mean we know the status of the person behind it.

My sister btw is named after three queens (Wilhelmina Johanna Elizabeth). I wonder if she wrote her birthnames on a cup, buried it in the back garden, maybe in 2000 years an archaeologist would publish about a rare chance find of a 'royal cup from the Kingdom of Holland'.

I'm not fooled by anything, I'm making an important statement as to what we know of the culture of classical Athens. The comparison with modern names is facile and unwarranted actually given the different parameters:. It's is nice that your mother is named after three queens to whom, I assume, she is not related to directly and that two of those names are Semitic while you and your family (assumptions) are Germanic but you don't get patterns like necessarily. What one sees is that the onomastic record is able to tell us quite a bit about social patterns and naming. If 90% of people with -hippos- or -kles- in there name come from a better of background you have to assume a pattern there. These names were assigned for a variety of reasons and, indeed, this is still not that uncommon in traditional societies today for names to be highly stratified like that.

There society worked quite differently from ours, and while that doesn't make the cup genuine it is important to note that what little information we have so far fits in with the pattern we might expect more or less. I'd be more interested in details on cup morphology and composition as well as the script usage cf'd with other sympotic inscriptions. To reiterate I'm not necessarily accepting of this and I'm sure some better refutation will come along but it's not as crazy as it sounds.