Oooh, pretty.
That’s something called the Athena Bowl, a treasure recovered from a buried hoard in Germany.
In 1868, soldiers from an Imperial Prussian Army regiment discovered a hoard of dozens of ancient silver artifacts while constructing a new shooting range near the city of Hildesheim in central Germany. The Hildesheim treasure included elaborate and expensive tableware, including the Athena bowl, that may have belonged to Publius Quinctilius Varus or another Roman military commander who fought against Germanic tribes in the first century.
Fortunately, it ended up in a museum. If I found it, I’d be proudly serving soup in it. In my neighborhood, though, all we ever dig up is the occasional fossil and worthless old rocks.
Looks like a quaich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaich).
So I’d be drinking beer out of it?
WHERE ARE MY LEGIONS?!?!
Makes me want to visit the Old Museum again. But the best exhibits are still in the penis room or the ancient Byzantine rolling ball sculpture.
Given the classical context, it’s probably safer to equate this vessel to the Greek kylix (a handled bowl for drinking wine) or the Roman patera (a bowl or saucer, usually for libations of wine, though technically those don’t have handles), rather than a specifically Celtic type of drinking vessel. Give the clear depiction of a goddess never associated with making merry, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t a religious item for ritual offerings, rather than domestic or party ware. A Dionysus, maenad or pan would probably be more usual for drinking vessels of the sort used at a symposium or cena. That we have Athena (Minerva) here probably lends a little weight to the notion that this was owned by a military man, though it’s far from certain. Minerva’s military aspect was widespread, but she was a patron of so much else that it’s unsafe to assume an entirely military context for this. It’s just as likely to be a craftsman’s master-piece giving thanks to a goddess of handicrafts and technical skill.
Of course, it is entirely possible that frontier communities at the edge of the Graeco-Roman world had very different opinions on the uses of traditional Greek and Roman religious imagery than someone back in the cultural heartlands would. Or not. It is quite plausible that wealthy Romans or Romanising elites on the frontiers would try to be as ostentatiously Roman as possible to assert their cultural identity. I am reminded that most of the best pottery depictions of Greek theatre come not from Athens but from the fringes of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, a marker of belonging to the Hellenic cultural sphere in opposition to the native Italic one.