The Symposium
At this juncture, two remarkably Greek social practices stand out, both marked by a highest degree of competition among equals, and both requiring a set of otherwise highly symbolic skills, sometimes impractical in real-life’s terms, namely athletics (see Nicholson (Chapter 4) in this volume) and the symposium (see Węcowski 2014).
Symposia were held at night.13 They were culture-oriented and highly ceremonial elite gatherings over wine (only light snacks were served in the process) with more or less sophisticated pastimes involving both dexterity games and intellectual, mostly poetical entertainment. Almost all sympotic pastimes had competitive character and were organized as a series of tournaments that were supposed to determine the winner of each particular contest. Usually, individual performances accompanied the movement of the common cup of wine, consecutively refilled, and changing hands from one diner to another from left to right (epidexia, endexia). Whenever the circulating cup reached a participant of the banquet, he was supposed to perform. This order assured both a rigorous equality of the performers and naturally stimulated competition. At the very beginning of the symposium, the diners appointed one particularly experienced colleague, called “the leader” of the drinking occasion (symposiarchos, archōn), or simply “the king” (basileus), to supervise the gathering, decide on the volume of wine to be consumed and its strength (as wine was always diluted with water), organize the pastimes, and to suggest suitable subjects for competitive performances.14
The participants of the symposium can be categorized into several groups. First come the full-members of a given sympotic circle, the self-proclaimed “friends” (philoi) or “companions” (hetairoi), adult men of aristocratic status providing for the (relatively) luxurious banquet. They could either organize symposia in their houses taking turns or contribute together to a shared banquet in a rented room in a sanctuary or in a public space. Specialized public buildings for elite drinking are alluded to in Homer and archaeologically discernible as early as the Late Geometric period in the late 8th century. In classical times, they would usually gather in a specialized room, called andrōn (“men’s room”), a square chamber with an off-center entrance to accommodate along its walls seven or more couches, each for one or two reclining revellers (before the end of the seventh century BC, one sat at symposia). The cozy space assuring intimacy among the “friends” was particularly important for sympotic entertainment. The diners would most probably be summoned there by the host or organizer of a given party.
Next, their young sons or other male relatives to be inculcated with aristocratic values and practical skills would be in a subordinate seated position with no right to drink wine or speak unasked. Besides the hetairoi, who belonged together and regularly attended the same social circles, there were the so-called “shadows” (skiai), occasionally invited by one of the full-members and probably tested by the company before being admitted on a more regular basis.
The group of attendants was a mixed bunch, starting with those in-between the aristocratic participants and their non-aristocratic servants and slaves. The group of the so-called “uninvited ones” (aklētoi) encompassed both free-born, regular parasites of lowly origin, on the one hand, and impoverished aristocrats on their way down the social scale, on the other. Recently deprived of their economic solvency, they could no longer participate on an equal footing as they were unable to invite their former “friends” back to their houses for symposia. But they still possessed the requisite “cultural capital” (see below) and the cherished sympotic competences to be admitted as attractive wine-companions, albeit no longer peers. Just as the regular parasites, in return for the invitation to eat and to drink, they would perform amusing tricks, participate to some extent in sympotic games and performances, but most importantly, when doing so they would be exposed to diverse self-humiliating activities in their function of buffoons.15
The unfree or low-born servants included young male and female attendants (paides), mostly slaves, presumably often selected for their physical beauty. Besides distributing sweetmeats, preparing, mixing, and serving wines, their important function was to fuel the eroticism of the gathering and the erotic discourse among the diners. Both visual arts and literary sources regularly concentrate on the courtesans, the “female-companions” (hetairai), as they were called to emphasize their ambiguous status. They participated in some of the sympotic pastimes, both cultural and dexterity ones (see below), but were subordinate and exploited nonetheless. They would be open to more or less brutal courtship by the diners and perform erotically-laden activities, including dancing, but it would be wrong to envision full-blown sexual orgies during well-ordered symposia. The courtesans were perhaps a socially variegated group, including compromised free women, metics, and slaves.16
They had to possess some cultural education and sympotic skills. Sometimes it is difficult to draw the line between the courtesans and female musicians brought to the symposium, the “flute-players” (pl. auletrides).
In fr. 146 PCG, the comic playwright Epicharmus says that “† A sacrifice (θυσία) leads to a feast, | and a feast leads to drinking (πόσις). | […] But drinking leads to wandering the streets drunk (kōmos), and a kōmos leads to swinish behavior (ὑανία), | and acting swinishly leads to a lawsuit, <and a lawsuit leads to being found guilty>, | and being found guilty leads to shackles, stocks, and a fine” (tr. S. D. Olson, adapted). This time frame is actually one of the most important characteristics of the symposium, which lies between the daytime sacrifice and feast and the returning of the revellers at dawn. Both its integration within a larger ritual sequence (sacrifice–feast–symposium–kōmos) and, by implication, the moment of the day when the “drinking” starts are peculiar indeed. In purely functional terms, they distinguish the time when one eats from that devoted to drinking and furthermore confine the symposium itself to the night.
Both these characteristics are meaningful in social and ideological terms as they set the participants of such gatherings apart from their immediate social environment. The divide between the necessary sustenance and the expendable drinking goes hand in hand with the nocturnal activities that logically prevent their participants from fully engaging in early-morning and daytime labors that await the other members of their community. In other words, the very setting of the symposium emphasizes the diners’ membership in the “leisure class” of the community. The logic of all the pastimes of the symposium points in the same direction.
At one extreme of the scale of indispensable sympotic skills one finds the dexterity game called kottabos, whose essence was to knock a wobbly metal disc off a tall pole set in the middle of the dining room.17 The trick had to be executed using the last drops of wine left in one’s cup just emptied and the elegant, catapult-like hand-gesture of the diner was as important as the accuracy itself. At the other extreme, the symposium featured sophisticated intellectual games such as thematic exchanges of elegiac verse (improvised on the spot or memorized from well-known authors) or short performances in prose, including more or less ingeniously commenting on classical utterances of the poetic “sages” (Homer, Hesiod, and others), contests of riddles etc. Literacy would play an important role here since shorter or longer inscriptions, at times poetical and often provocative, were frequently inscribed on the cups circulating among the diners. Reading and interpreting them aloud, sometimes in combination with their accompanying images in painted pottery, would add to the amusing atmosphere of the gathering. Thus, the symposium required not only literary