good-drinking cup tea break

* ok, the last words of the last post (and i) deserve the prosaic break because i learnt something quite fascinating (for someone who made up their mind about doing archaeology following the steps of Schliemann, with 'The Deam of Troy' in my backback, inherited from their mother):

In one of the shaft-graves at Mycenae, in 1876 Schliemann found what he believed was

... a cup,

a magnificent work Nestor had brought from home,

studded with gold. There were four handles on it,

around each one a pair of golden doves was feeding.

Below were two supports. When that cup was full,

another man could hardly lift it from the table,

but, old as he was, Nestor picked it up with ease. (Iliad 11.632ff, transl. J.Johnson)

... he was wrong, the cup was made several centuries before any Trojan war and any Nestor.
But in 1954, at Pithekoussai, one of the oldest colonies near Naples, excavations unearthed a clay cup, which spoke for itself (in a hexametric inscription, one of the earliest snippets of Greek we have!):
I am Nestor’s good-drinking cup.
Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway
the desire of beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize.
The clay-cup came from a child's grave, I think as a symbolic solution to completing his early-ended life cycle to the point where he would have been as old as myth or Nestor.

Other entertaining associations include Romanian death-weddings, the purposes of Platonic myths, structuralism / cognitive theory applied to Geometric vase painting, and so on, ... I'd better get on with visions and revisions.