Cup with Dionysus and Ariadne ('Today I Will Drink Wine')

Around the picture inside this cup runs a line in Faliscan, the language of Falerii, painted as part of the decoration before the cup was finished. It reads foied vino pafo, cra carefo, which means today I will drink wine, tomorrow I will have none. A sister cup from the same tomb, by the same painter and with the same scene, carries the line spelled foied vino pipafo, and some scholars think the shorter pafo here is a slip by a craftsman not fully at home with the script. Set beside its Latin equivalent, hodie vinum bibam, cras carebo, the line shows how close the two languages were.

In the middle Dionysos, recognisable by his thyrsus, kisses Ariadne, the princess he found abandoned on the island of Naxos, and a dove, the bird of Aphrodite, sits on a branch beside them. The museum points out that the line anticipates by some 250 years the carpe diem of the Roman poet Horace. The cup was made around 350 BC and found with its twin in tomb 4 of the Penna cemetery at Falerii.