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Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery

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In several decades of unseemingly bitter back-biting strife, the doyen of
Greek vase studies, Sir John Boardman, has attacked Michael Vickers'
theories, summed up on Vicker and Gill's Artful Crafts (date), which
insists, against all evidence and reason, that Greek elites _always_ (a
word very dangerous for historians to use) supped and dined from silver
and gold sympotic wares. In fact, "the Greeks," however wealthy during
Mycenean times, were far too poor during their dark age and even their
early Archaic period for any any of them, except perhaps for a few early
tyrants, to have used sympoticware made from precious metals. The
iconoclastic Vickers even goes so far as to claim that black figure pots,
which began to be produced around 630, copied gold ones, the red
background of Athenian clay being equated with gold, and the black figures
painted upon it with inlaid unpolished silverware. He goes on to state
that the red figure vases, replacing the black figures around a half
century later, copied gold inlaid into silver, which unpolished was black.
Even more astounding, he claims that purple, a rarer color on pottery,
represented copper originals, while white represented ivory originals --
total nonsense. He does prove that the cost of the decorated pots were
minimal, in contrast to Boardman's claims, and that they therefore cannot
have affected, Boardman to the contrary, the balance of payments in
Athenian trade. The silverware, which the Greek elites, excepting an
occasional tyrant, first began to use at symposia after 480, were very
expensive and they did affect the balance of payments in Athenian foreign
trade. Boardman, however, fails to acknowledge that silver sympoticware,
replaced the ceramicware, which he calls vaaaases, equating the painters
thereof to Michaelanelo, but Vickers dubs at pots, worthless ballast and
unrecyclable junk.