Dinos by Exekias (fragments)

At Greek drinking parties around 540 BC, wine was mixed with water in a big round bowl like this one, a dinos, and the talk often borrowed the language of the sea. The drinkers were a ship's crew, and too much wine was a storm. Exekias, the Athenian potter and painter, took the image literally.

Only seven fragments of the shoulder and rim survive. Inside the rim he painted a wavy line at the level the wine reached when the bowl was full, and on it a miniature fleet of warships, five of them still visible out of probably six, with boar-headed prows and rows of oarsmen's heads. Filled, the bowl showed ships riding on wine, an echo of Homer's wine-dark sea.

Outside, two inscriptions were scratched in after the bowl was made. One, in the Athenian alphabet, reads "Exekias made me", the only signature of his known for certain to be incised, since the others are painted. The other, in the alphabet of Sicyon near Corinth, records that Epainetos gave the bowl to Charops. It was dug up from a tomb at Cerveteri, in Etruria, before 1861.