🍷 Symposium

A symposium (Greek symposion, a drinking party) was a gathering of male citizens in ancient Greece, where guests drank wine, listened to music, recited poems, played games and talked. The wine was mixed with water, and an evening's leader, the symposiarch, kept order. This is history, not advice about drinking.

The symposiarch decided how much was drunk and how much water went in. Servants mixed wine and water in a large vessel, the krater, filled pitchers from it and poured the drink into cups. The cups were shallow, wide and two-handled, called kylikes. Greeks saw diluting wine as a mark of civilisation, a way of setting themselves apart from the barbarians, who in their view drank it neat.

The theory was that diluted wine allowed philosophical conversation without too much drunkenness. Archaeologist Emlyn Dodd told Getty that other evidence survives: people got extremely drunk whether they diluted or not. Water was not the only additive, he adds: islanders of Kos were known for pouring seawater into their wine.

A favourite game was kottabos. A player finished his wine from a kylix and flicked the dregs at a target, such as a disc balanced on a pole, to knock it off. Winners got cakes, kisses or other erotic prizes. On an Athenian bell krater in the British Museum, from a tomb opened by Sir William Hamilton in 1766, four men in wreaths recline on two couches. One plays the flute, while Deximachos swings a kylix on his finger to take his throw. A boy with a strainer stands nearby.

The male character of these evenings was not absolute: on a Getty kylix of about 490 BCE a reclining woman plays kottabos. For the people and their wine, see the pages on the Greeks and on wine in ancient Greece.