The glass jug with inner jug, thought to have been made in a factory in Cologne in the early 4th century, is a masterpiece of the glassblower’s art.
Kantonsarchäologie Schaffhausen / Rolf Wessendorf

The priceless ceremonial bowl holds about quarter of a litre of wine mixed with water. It’s when in use that the vessel unfolds its full magic; when filled with white wine, the light catches the glimmering, slightly viridescent glass and makes the reddish-brown figures glow. Only a high-ranking official of the Roman provincial administration would actually be likely to have owned the sumptuous vessel. This magnificent glass item would have been used on solemn occasions, with funeral banquets being a notable example.

The use of the bowl as a burial object and the motifs depicted on it are a reference to the belief in immortality. Both the Greek inscription ‘PIE ZESAIS – Drink, live long!’, and the two hunting scenes with the pine tree representing the tree of life, belong to the context of this World and the Afterworld. The inscription is ambiguous. It is found in Latin and in Greek versions on various drinking vessels, inter alia on Late Roman wine cups from the Rhineland. The set phrase on these wine cups is, of course, first and foremost a toast along the lines of the Latin ‘Prosit!’ or the equivalent ‘Your health’. But it is also found on grave goods and in particular on the gold leaf tablets that, in the 4th century BC, were buried with the dead in the Orphic-Pythagorean regions of southern Italy, including precise instructions for the journey through the Underworld to the Islands of the Blessed. On the gold tablets, the phrase ‘Drink, live long!’ refers not to wine, but to the life-giving water from the Fountain of Memory, the Mnemosyne, which according to the beliefs of antiquity was located directly adjacent to the Fountain of Forgetfulness, the Lethe. So the utmost caution was required on the path to eternity. The water symbolises not only remembering and forgetting, but also life and death.

Simon Engel

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