(Lat.; from Gk. sumposion). In ancient Greece and Rome, a drinking party, often with musical entertainments, after the deipnon or evening meal; weddings, birthdays, victors’ feasts and the arrival and departure of friends were typical occasions on which a symposium would have been held. The order of events generally followed a prescribed plan; they included libations (drink-offerings) and a paean sung to the accompaniment of the aulos each time a fresh kratēr of mingled wine and water was brought. There were numerous entertainments: the guests might sing skolia (see Skolion) or solo drinking-songs; female aulos players were generally in attendance (although women of good character and children were most often excluded); and dancers, either professionals or individual guests, could perform individually or in groups. Other entertainments included games and puzzles. Later, when the popularity of the symposium increased, the mime and the pantomime were an important part of the entertainment. The occasion might end as a Kōmos, from which the symposium was not always sharply distinguished, or, alternatively and more informally, as a brawl.
Music was inseparably associated with the symposium: even when some writers attacked the usual pastimes of the symposium as frivolous, suggesting that wiser people might entertain themselves with serious conversation, the topic thus discussed seems often to have been music (as it was by Aristoxenus, according to Athenaeus, xiv, 632a–b). Plato’s Symposium, Plutarch’s Symposium of the Seven Sages and his nine books of Table-Talk, and Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner convey a sense of the range and nature of the topics pursued at the symposium.
A. Mau: ‘Comissatio’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, iv (Stuttgart, 1901), 610–13
A. Hug: ‘Symposion’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 2nd ser., iv (Stuttgart, 1932), 1266–70
GEOFFREY CHEW/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN