Greek Symposia: Drinking, Conversation and Social Status

The Greek symposion was a drinking gathering held after a meal. Guests reclined on couches while attendants served wine mixed with water, and a symposiarch regulated the mixture and pace of drinking. Participants sang or recited poetry and could play games between conversation and hired performances. A host needed a room, supplies and labour to accommodate this selective form of hospitality.

On this page5 sections

What happened before the drinking began

A banquet generally had two connected stages. The first was the meal, when guests ate prepared food. The second was the symposium proper, when drinking became the central activity and entertainment, conversation and performance took place alongside it. The division was not absolute: wine might be offered during the meal, and guests could continue to eat small portions during the drinking session. These later foods, sometimes called tragēmata, included fruit, dried fruit, sweets, beans and roasted chickpeas.

Hosts held symposia to celebrate family occasions or victories and to entertain friends or associates. Plato sets his Symposium at the house of the poet Agathon after his Dionysia victory in 416 BCE, using the gathering as the setting for speeches on love.

Hosts, guests and social boundaries

The host supplied food and wine and could hire performers. Invitations brought friends and political associates together within an elite social circle. Guests contributed songs, conversation or games, with familiarity with poetry helping them participate. Female musicians and companions, including hetairai, could attend male drinking parties as hired or enslaved performers. Their terms of participation differed from those of invited male guests. Servants prepared and carried the wine and food and maintained the reception room.

Spartan common meals were a civic obligation for citizen men. Macedonian court banquets instead centred on the king and his companions. These institutions gave shared dining different rules and participants.

Reclining, seating and the organisation of the room

A dedicated andron could arrange couches around the room’s edges, with a doorway positioned to preserve usable wall space. A raised floor border or decorated central floor can help identify such a room. Its layout separated guests’ reclining places from the space needed to serve them. Attic pottery depicts reclining drinkers and the vessels, furniture and musicians associated with their parties. Dionysus and satyrs appear in related scenes, linking the equipment used for drinking with imagery of the god.

Room size and the arrangement of couches limited the gathering. Couch spaces can indicate the scale of hospitality, but do not yield a fixed number of guests: the way a couch was used could vary, and not every drinking party took place in a purpose-built room.

At Pella, wealthy houses included banqueting rooms beside their courtyards. The House of Dionysus had two colonnaded courts and a floor mosaic depicting the god with a panther. Excavated plans and mosaics displayed in the museum preserve this investment in reception space.

Servants helped organise the transition from arrival to dining. Guests could be washed and shown into the room, and hand-washing equipment was provided because food was commonly eaten with the fingers. Cups, jugs and other vessels were handled by attendants, while the guests’ reclining positions made the service of food and drink a coordinated task.

Mixing wine and controlling the evening

Wine and water were mixed in a krater before the drink was served into individual vessels. The mixing bowl made the shared supply visible and gave the group a way to regulate its strength and distribution. Its size and material varied with the setting and the host’s resources.

The group selected a symposiarch, or master of the drinking party. The host could choose this person, or the guests could appoint one by lot. The symposiarch decided how much water to add to the wine and helped regulate the number and pace of the servings. The choice mattered because the strength of the mixture affected the character of the evening. A gathering devoted to serious discussion required a different balance from one aimed at exuberant entertainment.

A libation, prayer or song could open the drinking. Offerings and songs connected the gathering with worship of the gods, including Dionysus.

A passage from Eubulus’ comedy Semele or Dionysus, written around 375 BCE, turns this ideal into a sequence of ten mixing bowls. The first three are associated with health, love and pleasure, and sleep; later ones lead to shouting, insults, fighting, broken furniture, depression, madness and unconsciousness. The passage is comic rather than a drinking manual, but it captures the warning that an orderly symposium could descend into violence when restraint failed. Literature and vase painting indicate that the proposed limit of three bowls was not always observed.

Music, poetry and conversation

Entertainment was not merely something performed for passive guests. Symposiasts were expected to contribute through singing, recitation, conversation and games. A lyre or a barbiton, a stringed instrument associated with the drinking party, could accompany songs. The aulos, a double-reed wind instrument sometimes compared with an oboe, was played by professional female musicians and other performers. Slaves and boys could also provide service or entertainment.

Guests might perform drinking songs known as skolia. These could express patriotic or bawdy themes and were sung competitively, with one participant completing or improvising after another. Poetry associated with figures such as Theognis of Megara, Alcaeus and Anacreon reflects the close relationship between song, wine and elite group life in the Archaic period.

Kottabos required a reclining participant to throw the remains of wine from a cup towards a target. The game combined dexterity with the drinking already under way.

Conversation ranged from jokes to political argument and poetry. Literary authors adapted this social setting for dialogues on particular subjects. Plato’s Symposium presents successive speeches about love. Xenophon’s work of the same name combines conversation with performances and wit. These are composed dialogues using the arrangements of a drinking party as their setting.