Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

146 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
DRINKING PARTIES
When the Greeks wanted to relax at the end of the day, the
choices available to them were extremely limited. Institutions such
as the cinema, theater, concert hall, jazz club, and dance hall had
no ancient equivalent. As far as we know, no enterprising individual
ever had the bright idea of charging admission to a place of
public entertainment. There does not seem to have been anything
comparable to the local pub or coffee bar. Confronted with such
a barren landscape—as we at least would see it—the Greeks had
no alternative but to entertain themselves. This they did foremost
through the symposium, a word which means literally “drinking
together.”A symposium was not, however, the ancient equivalent
to a few guys getting together to shoot the breeze and down a
few drinks. On the contrary, it was a highly ritualized institution
with its own precise and time-hallowed rules, even though some
symposia, judging from illustrations found on vases, resulted in a
drunken orgy.
Strictly speaking, symposium refers to the communal drinking
of wine that took place at the conclusion of a dinner. Only after
the tables containing food had been cleared away, garlands of
flowers distributed, libations performed, and a hymn sung was it
permitted to begin drinking. Symposiasts did not sit on chairs but
reclined on couches, a custom that the Greeks probably learned
from the Near East around the turn of the seventh century b.c.e.
Although a symposium served a variety of purposes, for definition,
we can hardly do better than quote Plutarch, a Greek writer
living in the Roman era, who described it as “a passing of time
over wine, which, guided by gracious behavior, ends in friendship”
(Moral Precepts 621c).
Much of the evidence for symposia derives from images found
on pots that were specifically designed for this purpose. In fact,
scenes depicting the symposium outnumber any others relating to
daily life—hardly surprisingly in view of the facts that a tastefully
decorated set of drinking cups, hydriai (water jugs), oinochoai (wine
pourers), and kraters (mixing bowls) was de rigueur in any wellappointed
Greek house and that it was customary for scenes on
vases to complement the function of the vase.
Agathon’s Symposium
The most famous drinking party of all time was held at the house
of a young tragic poet named Agathon in 416 b.c.e. The pretext for