Herodotus, Histories 1.51.2 · 1.51.2
The gold and silver mixing-bowls
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μετεκινήθησαν δὲ καὶ οὗτοι ὑπὸ τὸν νηὸν κατακαέντα καὶ ὁ μὲν χρύσεος κεῖται ἐν τῷ Κλαζομενίων θησαυρῷ, ἕλκων σταθμὸν εἴνατον ἡμιτάλαντον καὶ ἔτι δυώδεκα μνέας, ὁ δὲ ἀργύρεος ἐπὶ τοῦ προνηίου τῆς γωνίης, χωρέων ἀμφορέας ἑξακοσίους· ἐπικίρναται γὰρ ὑπὸ Δελφῶν θεοφανίοισι.
These too were moved when the temple burned down. The gold bowl now lies in the treasury of the Clazomenians, weighing eight and a half talents and twelve minas besides, while the silver one stands at the corner of the forecourt, holding six hundred amphoras; for the Delphians mix wine in it at the Theophania.
Word by word
The setting
The two great mixing-bowls Croesus dedicated, one gold and one silver, were later moved when Delphi's temple burned down.
A note on this passage
Metekinēthēsan, "were moved," ties this sentence to the end of the one before it: the two great bowls once stood somewhere else in the sanctuary, and after the fire the Delphians resettled them, one in the strongroom of a Greek city and one out in the open air of the forecourt. The fire itself, katakaenta, "burned completely," is the same blaze that destroyed Delphi's old temple in the sixth century BC, a disaster Herodotus treats here as something the reader already knows, never pausing to explain it.
Herodotus gives the gold bowl's weight down to the mina, a precision he saves for Croesus: eight and a half talents, hēmitalanton, and twelve minas over. The silver bowl gets no weight at all, only its capacity, six hundred amphoras, because unlike the gold one it was still working: it epikirnatai, "is mixed," every year at the Theophania, the festival of the god's return, when the bowl held wine for the whole city.
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