The Seba library treats Goblet in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Lattimore, Richmond, Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, Zimmer, Heinrich).
In the library
7 passages
He was on the point of lifting up a fine two-handled goblet of gold, and had it in his hands, and was moving it so as to drink of the wine, and in his heart there was no thought of death.
The goblet held at the moment of mortal reckoning becomes the supreme image of unconscious complacency before fate, the vessel of life and the occasion of death coinciding in a single gesture.
This is why I am first giving you the golden goblet. So he spoke, and put in her hand the cup of sweet wine, and Athene was happy at the thoughtfulness of a just man, because it was to her he first gave the golden goblet.
The golden goblet given first to the disguised Athene signals the ritual function of the vessel as a medium for establishing contact with the divine, where hospitality and sacred offering are inseparable.
'Goblet' translates jue, which Wang Bi regards as a reference to noble rank, as it does in the term juewei: rank (wei) involving investiture with a ceremonial goblet (jue).
Wang Bi's gloss establishes the goblet as an emblem of invested social and cosmic authority, its ceremonial bestowal constituting the very act by which rank is conferred and legitimized.
Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
In Mesopotamia this device appears in a very early design traced on the sacrificial goblet of King Gudea of Lagash. In this work of the Sumerian period, ca. 2600 B.C., we find the familiar pair of serpents, entwined, and facing each other.
Zimmer grounds the goblet's symbolic depth in its ancient Near Eastern form, where the sacrificial vessel bears the entwined-serpent motif that links it to primordial fertility religion spanning Mesopotamia and India.
Zimmer, Heinrich, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
To Wordsworth, Frost owes 'A broken drinking goblet like the Grail.' From The Ruined Cottage: When I stooped to drink / A spider's web hung to the water's edge, / And on the wet and slimy foot-stone lay / The useless fragment
Bloom identifies how Frost inherits from Wordsworth the broken goblet as a Grail surrogate — a fragment of the numinous embedded in ruin, connecting the depth-psychological resonance of the Quest vessel to the American Sublime.
Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
the son of Atreus took up the goblet, handled on both sides, and told Megapenthes to carry the mixing bowl, that was made of silver
The goblet here functions within the economy of royal gift-giving, marking the vessel as a bearer of social and affective value, its passage between hosts and guests inscribing bonds of obligation and reciprocity.
Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting
A bibliographic index entry in Jung's collected works registers the name 'Goblet d'Almellas' as a cited authority, indicating marginal but traceable presence of the term within the Jungian scholarly apparatus.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside