On the shoulder sit four cast bronze figures: on one side a youthful Dionysos with an exhausted maenad, on the other a sleeping Silenos and a maenad handling a snake. Snakes with copper and silver inlaid stripes frame the rising handles, wrapping their bodies around masks of underworld deities. Found in an undisturbed Macedonian tomb of the late 4th century B.C., the volute krater is a tour de force of highly sophisticated methods of bronze working.An unusual program of iconography informs every area of the vessel.

But what was the need of the second pair? Are we to suppose that he was going to need the greaves anyway in the Underworld, but not the papyrus, or perhaps that no male in the family thought he could use the deceased’s second pair of greaves? The deceased buried with the epistomia needed the texts with them inside the grave, on or inside the mouth, on the chest, or in their hands.“This beautifully illustrated book represents the first full publication of the most elaborate metal vessel from the ancient world yet discovered. Did they not see that the papyrus was not burned, or did they not care? Was the papyrus not as valuable as all these objects inside the grave, which the deceased probably needed to take with him? The deceased obviously needed a second pair of greaves (Figure 4), which was placed inside the grave, because the one he was wearing on the bier melted down on the pyre and became useless. The entire corpus of the epistomia and the Derveni Papyrus ( P.Derv.) betray certain similarities-to state the most obvious ones: both are the deceased’s remains were laid inside the krater (Figure 3), the grave was shut, and whatever remained of the pyre was strewn above the grave (Figure 1).

The derveni krater download free