From the Beginning to Plato

THE POLIS AND ITS CULTURE 29
The admiration for the ‘practical joker’ embodied in Homer’s image of
Odysseus and in the tradition of the seven sages is a central feature of that
characteristic aristocratic form of association, the symposium. From the classical
period we have selective descriptions of symposia from both Xenophon and
Plato but our knowledge of the archaic symposium is largely dependent on the
literature and pottery produced for it. 39 It was a setting for performance both
formal and extemporized (where song passed round the circle of guests and each
was expected to cap the previous singer’s lines), accompanied by the aulos. A
favourite ploy of the singer is to imagine himself as a character, not necessarily
male, in a particular situation which has some analogical relevance to the actual
situation; the listeners are invited to see their environment as if it were another,
and so to see it with new eyes. Much sympotic poetry is explicitly political, with
storms and shipwrecks proving images as appropriate to turmoil within the city
as to inebriation, much also is personal and concerned in particular with the life
of love, and much is self-reflexive. The personal side dominated the games of the
symposium, such as the game of kottabos in which the last drops of wine were
flung from the flat cup and aimed at or dedicated to one’s lover, and that side is
most evident in sympotic pottery. Sympotic pottery reflects the symposium both
directly, with images of reclined symposiasts, singers at the symposium, and so
on, and also indirectly: it is full of jokes. There are explicitly joke vases, vases
with hidden compartments which enable them to be filled as if by magic, dribble
vases, and so on. Many cups have eyes painted on them, but some take the
analogy with the body further, replacing the standard round foot, which the
drinker grips to raise the cup for drinking, by male genitalia. The images on the
vases take the jokes further, extending the sea imagery of the poetry by having
ships or sea creatures swimming on the wine, concealing images of inebriation at
the bottom of the cup, or exploring the limits of acceptable sympotic behaviour
by representing satyrs behaving unacceptably.
The cultural importance of the symposium lies in part in the context which it
provided for poetic and artistic creativity: almost all surviving archaic elegaic
poetry, including the poetry of the ‘philosopher’ Xenophanes, was written for the
symposium; and whether or not directly made for use at symposia, the imagery
of much archaic Athenian pottery presupposes and exploits the sympotic context.
But the symposium is important too for the way in which it provided a
microcosm of the city itself in which the issues of city life were explored in an
intensely self-critical milieu. Drinking at the symposium was strictly regulated
by rule and convention, political positions were explored, personal relations were
exposed and the boundary between private and public behaviour both tested and
patrolled. As there was no room for inhibitions, so also there was no room for
pomposity. Dominated by the elite, and often closely linked with official or
religious events, the symposium was nevertheless always oppositional, a forum
for disagreement rather than laudation. In the symposium the competitive ethos
encouraged in religious festivals was internalized and intellectualized.