Antiquities Exhibits

Throughout my travels to various museums around the world I have often encountered red-figured fish plates. First developed in Athens, these beautifully detailed serving pieces became especially popular in South Italy and Sicily in the 400s BCE. I stumbled across this excellent video about them and learned that fish plates produced in Magna Graecia were usually more colorful with white accents and the fish are portrayed with their bellies facing inwards towards the small central depression that is thought to have contained dipping sauce like garum. Fish on plates produced in Athens are painted with their bellies facing outwards. I thought this is quite a peculiar style difference.  There also seems to be disagreement among scholars as to whether these plates were actually used in everyday life or produced for funerary purposes only, as almost all of the 1,000 examples that have been recovered came from ancient burials. Art historian Lucas Livingston points out that many of the reco...

In her paper, "Fish and Fishing in the Roman World," Annalisa Marzano of the University of Reading observes: "On the whole, fishermen in antiquity had a low social status and although fishing could be the topic of literary works, of mosaics in elite dwellings, and a recreational activity, the ordinary men who engaged in large-scale fishing and supplied the many fish-salting establishments of the Roman world remain almost invisible. It seems very likely that the same individuals engaged both in fishing and salting the fish, but to date we do not have definite evidence. There are only few surviving attestations of groups of fishermen from the Roman Mediterranean. Some clearly refer to proper collegia, which seemed to have worked in collaboration with the fishmongers, who sold only fresh fish. Others were business partnerships (societates) formed in order to operate large-scale fishing, and, possibly, also fish-salting operations." Sought after fish that could command ...