«Symposion» and «Philanthropia» in Plutarch - Bad Request ...

IntroductionIntroductionChristopher PellingChrist Church, University of OxfordSymposion and philanthropia, civilised drinking and friendship towardsone’s fellow‐humans: the two things have always gone closely together, andwere appropriately linked as the subject of the eighth International Conferenceof the International Plutarch Society.In his smug Roman way, Cicero claimed that the Latin notion ofconvivium was somehow superior to the Greek symposion, because the Greekword focused just on communal drinking while the Latin extended to thewhole notion of a shared life (ad Fam. 9.24.3, de Senectute 45). But Greeks, andPlutarch in particular, knew that there was a lot more to the symposion thansimply drinking. Indeed, one could reply to Cicero that the symposion, when itwent well, did not embrace every aspect of shared human life, but rather someof its highest elements – as Plutarch might put it himself (see Lopes’ paper inthis volume), goodwill (eunoia), fellowship (koinonia), friendship (philia), andof course philanthropia, that warm affection for one’s fellow human beings.Those qualities gave participants much to talk about at the conference, whichwas held at Coimbra in Portugal on 23–27 September 2008.Any reader of this volume will be struck by the range of topics that arecovered. As Teodorsson brings out in his introductory essay, symposia wereimportant features both of real Greek life and of the Greek literary landscape;and inevitably the literary and the social aspects interact in multiple ways,as the literary descriptions both reflected and provided a model for real‐lifebehaviour: that suggests a rather refined sense of ‘realism’ in the portrayal, atopic discussed by Titchener. That ‘modelling’, educational aspect is indeedimportant, for just as real‐life symposia provided an opportunity for theyounger participants to learn from the elder, so Plutarch’s own representationsof fictional symposia provide a picture of how such occasions ought to proceed:one can learn manners, certainly, and also a vast range of other things, as themore experienced and better‐informed give a practical illustration of theiii