Besa
βήσα
Besa or BESSA (βήσα, Eustath. on Od. 1.1405 b, 16; βήσσα, Ath. 11.784b; βησίον, an Alexandrine vessel used both for drinking from and also for holding perfumes in, of the shape of a flask, broad at the bottom and gradually getting narrower towards the top (Ath. l. c.); similar to the ἀλάβαστρον (Schol. on Aristoph. Ach. 1048, compared with 1050) or the βομβύλιος, which Suidas defines by βησίον. In Anth. Pal. Appendix 30, 3, Dindorf and Jacobs understand βήσαν as the name of a dancer, but Ussing does not see any reason to refuse to take it as a goblet propter salientem inde liquorem. The vessel is Egyptian, so called from having the features of the god Bes modelled on it, and we may see the shape of it in Birch (Ancient Pottery, p. 29). (See also Ussing, De nominibus vasorum Graecorum, p. 62; Krause, Angeiologie, 379, 380, 407, 408.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.