Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

152 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
to some other means of support and a crossbeam was placed on top
with a vessel balanced at each end. Under each vessel stood a pan
of water with an object fixed upright in the center. Players were
required to flick a drop of wine from their cups into one of the vessels.
The object was to cause the vessel to topple off and strike the
object in the center of the pan. The winner was the one who spilled
the least wine and made the most noise. Another game was to flick
wine into nutshells that were floating in a kratêr or mixing bowl
filled with water so as to make them sink.
Dancing was also popular. One of the most famous symposiastic
dances was the kordax, which, according to Theophrastos (Characters
6.3), a man would be out of senses to dance when sober.
Unfortunately, we have no description of the kordax, though we do
of other energetic dances that it probably resembled. At the end of
Aristophanes’ Wasps, the Chorus encourages the elderly Philokleon
thus, “Whirl around, punch yourself in the belly, hurl your leg skyhigh,
become a spinning top!” (line 1529f.).
Hired Entertainers
In Plato’s Protagoras, Sokrates makes the following haughty pronouncement:
Where the drinkers are men of breeding and culture, you won’t see flute
girls or dancing girls girls playing the harp. They are quite capable of
being in one another’s company without such frivolity and foolery, using
their own voices and each taking his turn to speak or listen in sober fashion,
even if they drink a lot. (347d)
It is questionable, however, whether Sokrates was quite such a killjoy
as Plato suggests. Xenophon, who, like Plato, was a personal
friend of Sokrates and also wrote a dialogue entitled Symposium,
paints a strikingly different picture of the great philosopher in his
cups. In it we encounter a Sokrates who delighted in the acrobatics
of the hired entertainers and who even deigned to make a spectacle
of himself by attempting to emulate their agile movements.
Whatever the truth about Sokrates’ liking for live entertainment,
hired entertainers were in great demand among the drinking fraternity
as a whole. They included flute girls, dancing girls (the
ancient equivalent of lap dancers perhaps), jugglers, tumblers,
and buffoons.