Symposium scene
Fresco from the Tomb of the Diver, 475 BC.
Paestum National Museum, Italy
Symposium originally referred to a drinking party attended by intellectuals in ancient Greece, but has since come to refer to any academic conference. The sympotic elegies (a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead) of Theognis, as well as two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium, all describe symposia in the original sense, that is, along with games, boys, and singing, symposiasts could also compete in rhetorical contests, for which reason the term symposium has come to refer to any event where multiple speeches are made.
In relation to the origins of symposium as a festive gathering, the Greek verb sympotein indeed means to drink together, however, in keeping with Greek notions of self-restraint and propriety, the symposiarch decides the ratio of wine to water, and would often prevent matters from getting out of hand. The playwright Euboulos, in a surviving fragment of a lost play has the god Dionysos describe proper and improper drinking:
For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health, the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
ScholarlyCommuns at Penn. (online journal) Euboulos' Ankylion and the Game of Kottabos. [cited Jan 30, 2008] http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/13/
