Summary

Sotheby’s. New York City. June 19, 1990.

Nothing of its kind had been sold to the public in more than a century. On this rainy June evening on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with the auction-house showroom crammed with the wealthy, the curious, and the press, history was made when an anonymous man in a green golf sweater won the 2,500-year-old chalice. After that night, this historical artifact disappeared, its whereabouts a mystery. Until now.

It is among the most prized of antiquities—the Greek artist Euphronios’s wine cup depicting the death of Zeus’s son Sarpedon at Troy. Its bigger twin, the legendary Euphronios Krater, was already famous as the centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ancient collection. Lost for more than two millennia, the chalice—one of only six of its kind found intact—mysteriously surfaced in the collection of a Hollywood producer who sold it to a Texas billionaire. Coveted by obsessed private collectors, dealers, and museum curators, it was also of intense interest to the Italian police, who believed it belonged to the country where it had been dug up earlier in the 20th century.

In this tale of history, adventure, and intrigue, archaeologist and journalist Vernon Silver pieces together the extraordinary tale of this lost cup and offers a portrait of the modern antiquities trade: a world of tomb raiders, smugglers, wealthy collectors, ambitious archaeologists, rapacious dealers, compromised curators, and international law enforcement. Spanning 2,500 years, The Lost Chalice moves from the mythic battlefield of the Trojan War to the countryside of twentieth-century Rome, the dusty libraries of Oxford University to the exhibition halls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cramped law enforcement offices of the Carabinieri to the tony auction rooms of New York’s auction houses to solve the mystery of the world’s rarest masterpiece.

As Silver learns, the discovery of the chalice exposes another riddle—and even greater missing treasure. The Lost Chalice is a true-life detective story that illuminates an illicit, global trade second only to the traffic in weapons and drugs. Using a high-profile crime, Silver’s tale opens a window onto Italian history, culture, and life rarely seen, while exposing a worldwide network shrouded in mystery.

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