Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

154 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
the attempted abduction of Lapith women by the centaurs, wild
creatures half human and half horse whose bestial natures got the
better of them under the influence of alcohol, is the archetypal
drinking party gone wrong. It became a stock joke that the worst
behaved guests at a symposium were the philosophers. In another
work entitled the Symposium, written by the second-century c.e.
satirist Lukian, a philosopher of the Cynic school called Alkidamas
is the chief instigator of a bloody rumpus that leads to a broken
head, smashed jaw, gouged-out eye, and several broken teeth.
Comic writers, as was their wont, tended to see the more humorous
side of drunkenness. Euboulos, in a fragment from a lost play,
describes its effects as follows:
The first cup is to health, the second to love and pleasure, the third to
sleep, the fourth to violence, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to drunken revel,
the seventh to black eyes, the eighth to the summoner, the ninth to bile,
and the tenth to madness and throwing chairs around.
The symptoms of drunkenness were of scientific interest to Aristotle,
who wrote a lost treatise on the subject containing the following
observation:
Under the influence of all other alcoholic beverages, people who become
drunk fall in all directions, namely to the left, to the right, on their faces,
and on their backs. But those who drink barley wine only fall on their
backs and lie supine.
Conclusions
In Plato’s Laws, an Athenian who claims to have made the symposium
the subject of inquiry observes:
I have never yet seen or heard of one that was properly conducted from
beginning to end. Here and there a few minor details may not have been
amiss, but by and large I have found them badly conducted. (639e)
The Laws was Plato’s last work, written a few years before his death,
and this statement is no doubt a reflection of the bitterness of his
old age. It has to be viewed in connection with his own disenchantment
with the society around him. Apart from their social importance,
symposia played a key role in the educational, cultural, and
political life of the Greeks.