Fancy encountering this fearsome beauty at the bottom of your wine cup? Skylla’s lovely nude torso projects from this small disk as she prepares to over-head-hurl a boulder at an unsuspecting sailor while a decidedly complicated lower body roils in the waves beneath her. Fishtails flail and dog-heads snap, these last giving the monstrous sea-hybrid her most enduring epithet: ‘dread-yelping Skylla…’
With mythological and maritime associations, she was a popular decoration choice for drinking vessels in the Classical period, and although quite small (under 10 cm diameter), this is undoubtedly the finest representation. A sea snake coils around her torso like a chain, sinuous and scaled. The elaborate cold work is carried onto the shaggy fur of the Molossian hounds flanki ng her and the scales of the fishtails. All these creatures and the boulder are further ornamented with niello-blackened splotches. High Hellenistic metalworking at its best!
Skylla terrorized sailors near the Straits of Messina, the treacherous waterway separating Calabria and Sicily. Which is appropriate somehow, as this disk and cup were part of a hoard, thought to be buried in a private residence in the inland city of Morgantina. The circumstances behind its burial are not known, but perhaps in advanced of the marauding Punic army.
While some speculate the ensemble might have been produced in a Pergamene workshop, I find it even more tempting to see it as a more local production: a testament to the ingenuity and luxury of Hieron II’s splashy Syracusian court, and reflecting the Sicilian’s very real respect for the dangers of the ‘wine-dark’ sea.
