The World Underfoot: Mosaics and Metaphor in the Greek Symposium by Hallie M. Franks (review)

One might say that this book aims to do for the mosaics of the andron (the "men's quarters" in which guests were received and drinking parties held) what F. Lissarrague's The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine and Ritual (Princeton 1990) did for vase painting. The mosaics are perhaps especially liable to be treated as merely decorative, with no meaning beyond (occasionally) a cursory reference to the room's function: vines for the andron like fish-themed bathroom decor today. Franks seeks to show us that the metaphors at play are much richer than this. Placing the imagery in the context of the lived experience of the symposium, she offers a reading of it as ripe with meaning.

The study treats pebble mosaics of the "long fourth century." Most are found in private homes, the overwhelming majority in association with the andron. As Franks acknowledges, the andron mosaics that we have are "surprisingly varied" (often unique) and their subjects often not obviously "sympotic." Thus, she has elected to "concentrate in particular on mosaics that respond to patterns of sympotic activity," on that basis elucidating how some of these images are, in fact, related to the symposium. In contrast to vase painting, not much attention has been paid to the meaning, in context, of these mosaics. Scholars have argued that they may be understood as Dionysiac, or as Orientalizing, or as evocative of masculine ideals. These claims, Franks contends, are either problematic or stand to be considerably complicated and expanded upon.

After a methodological introduction and a first chapter introducing the mosaics and the symposium, chapter 2 treats a set of mosaics that may be read as figuring the symposium as a sea voyage, whether as focused on the condition of being out at sea or on the journey to exotic and fantastical places. In chapter 3, she turns to mosaics related to the journeying or wandering Dionysos or hero, and in chapter 4 to mosaics featuring the wheel. Finally, chapter 5 treats mosaics whose imagery Franks relates to symposia of an imagined, primitive past. She reads the mosaics in relation to scholarly treatments of related vase painting and literature and considers how the mosaic interacts with other aspects of the banqueters' experience to give it a meaningful shape and content. These mosaics, she argues, do not merely exist as a decorative backdrop but actively participate in the construction of conviviality as a shared experience of symbolic circularity or metaphorical journey to remote times or places, generating feelings of fraternity, unity, and equity, and channelling potentially harmful competition, thus strengthening bonds among citizens.

Franks' emphasis on understanding the social function of the symposium in terms of intimately felt, lived experience is welcome. I have myself argued that, rather than an "anti-city," the symposium provided a sentimental education in citizenship in the context of a set of ethical and social protocols that responded to tensions endemic in the microcosm of the banquet and macrocosm of the city ("Symposium," in J. Wilkins and R. Nadeau [eds.], A Companion to Food in Antiquity [Oxford: Wiley Blackwell 2015], 234-242). Franks adopts a judicious and nuanced approach to debates about the symposium, and the originality of her contribution lies not in her view of the institution's social function, but in her reconstruction of the meaning of the mosaics as they contributed to the shaping of the symposiasts' experience.

The result is a short but rich and stimulating study. I was not convinced that the apparatus Franks constructs out of the work of a selection of theorists contributed much. It is not merely that the ideas are presented in gratuitously obscure language, but that those ideas, even when they are intelligible, are of dubious coherence and do little analytic or explanatory work, serving only as rhetorical dressing. This detracts little from the book, however, since, tellingly, Franks makes little...