The Symposion: Drinking Greek Style Essays on Greek Pleasure 1983-2017

Symposion is the Greek word for 'drinking together'—the social institution of reclining on couches and enjoying the pleasures of wine, sex, and song. Although the Greeks learned the rituals of communal drinking from the Near East, they turned them into a way of life entirely their own, such that for the male revellers they were elevated into a conception of euphrosyne (bliss), the highest form of pleasure. The symposion became a focal point of Greek aristocratic art and culture in the archaic age, proclaimed in poetry and the visual arts, while its structures affected the Greek attitude to life in all its aspects, from the perception of politics, society, philosophy, and psychology, to attitudes towards sexuality, death, and religion. Even when the symposion began to lose its dominance in the classical democratic city state, it was never abandoned, but continued throughout the Hellenistic age and was transmitted through trade and cultural contact to the Etruscans, the Romans, and throughout the Mediterranean. One of the longest surviving works from antiquity is an encyclopaedia of Greek drinking customs compiled in the third century AD, and we can still trace the remnants of this sympotic culture today: the story of Greek pleasure thus lies both at the heart of antiquity and of the western history and conception of pleasure, and even now continues to resonate down the ages.

Oswyn Murray's research on ancient Greek drinking customs, beginning in 1983, ignited a major new field of research in archaeology, art history, Greek literature, and Greek history and established him as an expert in the field. This volume consolidates his unrivalled contribution by gathering together the numerous essays on sympotic subjects that he has written over a span of thirty years, and charting half a lifetime of thought on a theme on which he has had a shaping influence.

Oswyn Murray, Emeritus Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford

Oswyn Murray is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He studied under the great scholar Arnaldo Momigliano before taking up a research position at the Warburg Institute and becoming successively, between 1968 and 2004, Tutor, Senior Tutor, vice-Master, and Director of the Graduate Centre at Balliol. He is the author of Early Greece (originally published by Fontana Press in 1980 and translated into numerous languages, including Chinese) and over a hundred articles, and has also edited, among other volumes, The Oxford History of the Classical World (OUP, 1986), The Greek City (OUP, 1990), Sympotica (OUP, 1990), and In Vino Veritas (The British School at Rome, 1995). His current interests include Herodotus' Histories (on which he is overseeing the publication of a major new commentary), the history of classical scholarship from 1700 to the present day, and the history of pleasure. In his spare time he makes his own cider.

Vanessa Cazzato trained in Milan, Dublin, and Oxford and currently holds a post-doctoral research position in the Netherlands, where she works on archaic and classical Greek poetry.



Michael Gabriel, painter, illustrator, and printmaker, has specialized in animation art direction and background painting, with work on films including The Snowman, Pink Floyd-The Wall, The Tailor of Gloucester, Pumpkin Moon, and We're Going On A Bear Hunt. He is an associate artist at Oxford Playhouse where he draws from live theatre.

I. DEFINING THE SUBJECT
1. The History of Tastes (2016)
2. The Greek Symposion in History (1983)
3. Symposion and Mannerbund (1982)
4. Sympotic History (1990)
5. SympoticaTwenty Years On (2003)
6. Conviviality in Early Cultures: The Ancient Mediterranean and China (2000)
II. ORIGINS
7. Nestor's Cup and the Origins of the Greek Symposion (1994)
8. The Symposion between East and West (2016)
9. The Odyssey as Performance Poetry (2008)
III. THE SYMPOSIONSOCIAL FORMS, MODES, AND LIMITS
10. The Iconography of the Symposion (2015). Appendix: Some Modern Interpretations
11. Sympotic Drinking Rituals: Mixing Wine with Water, Kalos Vases, and the Meaning of Epidexia, Proposis, and Philotesia (2015)
12. The Symposion and Social Status (2017)
13. War and the Symposion (1991)
14. Violence at the Symposion (2016)
15. Law and the Symposion (1992 and 1990)
16. Eros and the Symposion (2016)
17. Death and the Symposion (1988). Envoi (2016)
18. The Affair of the Mysteries: Democracy and the Drinking Group (1990)
19. The Chorus of Dionysus: Alcohol and Old Age in the Laws (2013)
20. Euphrosyne and the Psychology of Pleasure (2005)
21. Hellenistic Royal Symposia (1996)
22. Conclusion: Greek Forms of Sociality (1991)
IV. ROMAN REFLECTIONS
23. Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace (1985)
24. A 'Stork-Vase' from Mola di Monte Gelato (1991)
25. Athenaeus the Encyclopedist (2014)
V. THE HISTORY OF PLEASURE
26. Histories of Pleasure (1995)
27. Hedonism and History (2011)
28. Renewing l'Histoire des moeurs (2012)
Endmatter
Abbreviations and Conventions
List of Illustrations
Bibliography
Index of Ancient Authors
Index of Greek Vases
General Index