Appendix A—
Toreutica:
The Cups as Silver Vessels

Each cup (MonPiot 5 [1899]: cat. 103, 104; see pp. 140, 146–47) is 10 cm high; the diameter at the mouth is 12 cm (20 cm with the handles), at the foot 9.5 cm. In worn condition at the time of discovery BR I weighed 964.2 g; BR II, 949.7 g; the original weights will also have been nearly equal. The silver has been recognized as "Italian" because it is "duller and denser" than East Mediterranean silver.^[1] There are no inscriptions or weight marks. The type is a ring-handled skyphos, of a discrete class that has a low, flat foot and deep, straight sides.^[2] The distinctive ring handles have a curved grip below and a flat thumb plate projecting from the rim whose lateral extensions along the rim are tipped with a stylized plant bud. As usual, the thumb plates (cast separately and attached) are engraved above, with a garlanded bucranium (MonPiot 5 [1899]: 147; pl. 26). The relief decoration was executed in repoussé technique (hammered out from behind with secondary chasing and engraving) on a thin shell fitted over a plain inner bowl.^[3]

Skyphoi of this originally Hellenistic class, like other skyphos types, were very popular in Italy and the Roman West in the late Republic and early Empire^[4] in a variety of other media: glass,^[5] obsidian,^[6] crystal,^[7] molded ceramics.^[8] They were depicted in Rome and the West in votive replicas^[9] and relief,^[10] decorative^[11] and funerary^[12] sculpture, triumphal and funerary relief,^[13] still-life^[14] and narrative^[15] painting and mosaic,^[16] decorative relief,^[17] lamps,^[18] relief silver,^[19] Arretine ware^[20] and gem vessels,^[21] and gem seals,^[22] sometimes in the context of an integrated contemporary drinking service.^[23] These examples are mostly late Republican and early imperial. Some painting and sculpture groups derive from earlier Hellenistic compositions, but their garland skyphoi seem Roman interpolations;^[24] as yet no such representation has a clearly Greek Hellenistic con-

text. Classification by shape, then, gives only a general Julio-Claudian date, just as with the vessels shown on BR I:1, Amor's shell-shaped dish and alabastron (chap. 1, p. 15; pl. 17). Shell dishes, modeled^[25] or real,^[26] were popular in the late Republic and early Empire, as they had been in Hellenistic South Italy and Asia Minor; alabastra of our general type were current in the Greco-Roman world for centuries.^[27]

The Boscoreale skyphoi are in fact related to the class of "vegetal" silver popular from about the last quarter of the first century B.C. through the third quarter of the first century A.D.^[28] This mode of decoration includes the rendering of vessel attachments, such as handles and their projections, in the form of vegetal elements, as in the rendering of the BR cups' lateral handle attachments in the form of budding twigs. Several other pieces from within the BR hoard itself have the same kind of secondary ornament, which is used at least by Augustus' reign.^[29] The cups' links with the primary class of vegetal silver are less obvious but no less real.

The BR cups' decoration is worked in such high relief that many elements are almost completely detached from the ground from which they were hammered out; the thinness of the silver at the highest points of relief made the decoration vulnerable to being torn away, as seen at points on these cups. Many other Roman drinking vessels of this general period (late Republic and early Empire) are worked in much lower and flatter relief, even though they may still display subtle manipulation of the planes of low relief to evoke a sense of depth. There is also a distinct taste for a Neo-Attic figure style, linear and gracile, with figures silhouetted against an open ground (cf. the Hoby cup).^[30] The perfected sculptural handling of repoussé seen on the BR cups does occur in some mythological or Dionysiac schemes and can be observed applied to such subjects already in the Augustan period. This sculptural repoussé technique is wedded most firmly, however, to the decoration of drinking vessels with simulated vegetation,^[31] the primary class of vegetal silver, where its purpose is to create the illusion of a real garland on a plausible scale wreathed about the vessel, as actual garlands were often employed; Vergil has his shepherds imitate such silver with homemade wooden drinking cups (Ecl. 3.35–37).

The ornament of such vessels is typically worked in such high repoussé that organic elements such as leaves and berries are almost completely detached (fig. 1, BR olive skyphos); the exploitation of relief planes in the quest for convincing illusion runs the gamut from such modeling in the round to the most delicate low relief possible. It is exactly this kind of handling of relief that characterizes the BR cups. The link is not just tech-

nical, for the kind of rusticating taste that gives rise to the vegetal genre evinces itself in the rendering of the legs of Augustus' sella curulis (pl. 2, BR I:1) as tree branches bearing the swollen scars of lopped shoots. Although the class of vegetal silver is popular too widely (late Republic and early Empire) to date the cups exactly and is imitated in other media over an equally long span, it is worth pointing out the BR cups' link in technique and taste to this genre. Such metalwork had close ties to relief in stone,^[32] the medium that inspired the BR cups' figured decoration. Compare the Ara Pacis (13-9 B.C.)—a stylized acanthus^[33] frieze hems the outer enclosure walls; "real" garlands hang inside the enclosure. By the early first century B.C. there were artists at Rome like Pasiteles, distinguished for skill in both sculpture and luxury metalwork (Pliny HN 38.156; cf. Cic. Div. 1.36).^[34]

Precisely because the cups use very high relief, some date them as late as Claudius' reign, and this is sometimes used to justify a post-Augustan date reached on iconographic grounds.^[35] Silver executed in very high relief was, however, made already in the Augustan period, both with vegetal and with figural decoration.^[36] The choice between baroque or illusionistic high relief on the one hand and low, flat "painterly" relief on the other hand was just that—a choice from available modes. One did not succeed the other in time in strict organic evolution; either mode could be employed at will, with good Hellenistic models for both modes. Those elements of the Ara Pacis described immediately above provide a good example of the synchronous employment of the two modes.