the returning of the revellers at dawn. Both its integration within a larger ritual sequence (sacrifice–feast–symposium–kōmos) and, by implication, the moment of the day when the “drinking” starts are peculiar indeed. In purely functional terms, they distinguish the time when one eats from that devoted to drinking and furthermore confine the symposium itself to the night.
Both these characteristics are meaningful in social and ideological terms as they set the participants of such gatherings apart from their immediate social environment. The divide between the necessary sustenance and the expendable drinking goes hand in hand with the nocturnal activities that logically prevent their participants from fully engaging in early-morning and daytime labors that await the other members of their community. In other words, the very setting of the symposium emphasizes the diners’ membership in the “leisure class” of the community. The logic of all the pastimes of the symposium points in the same direction.
At one extreme of the scale of indispensable sympotic skills one finds the dexterity game called kottabos, whose essence was to knock a wobbly metal disc off a tall pole set in the middle of the dining room.17 The trick had to be executed using the last drops of wine left in one’s cup just emptied and the elegant, catapult-like hand-gesture of the diner was as important as the accuracy itself. At the other extreme, the symposium featured sophisticated intellectual games such as thematic exchanges of elegiac verse (improvised on the spot or memorized from well-known authors) or short performances in prose, including more or less ingeniously commenting on classical utterances of the poetic “sages” (Homer, Hesiod, and others), contests of riddles etc. Literacy would play an important role here since shorter or longer inscriptions, at times poetical and often provocative, were frequently inscribed on the cups circulating among the diners. Reading and interpreting them aloud, sometimes in combination with their accompanying images in painted pottery, would add to the amusing atmosphere of the gathering. Thus, the symposium required not only literary or poetical, but also iconographic competences from the diners (cf. Lissarrague 1987).
It is important to note that the crucial role of musical and poetic performances at symposia, both when executed and “capped” from one another by the diners themselves and when expertly applauded by them while being performed by professional singers or musicians, may be revealing for our understanding of both the aristocratic culture and of the lyric poetry of this period. On the one hand, one should emphasize that full participation in sympotic circles required a rather high level of (at least purely amateurish) proficiency in formally complex poetical genres. On the other hand, the overwhelmingly competitive character of such dilettante performances at symposia strongly suggests that this very proficiency was an important means of testing aspiring aristocrats and that utter incompetence here must have been compromising for one’s prestigious ambitions. Therefore, it is fully understandable that archaic Greek poets, both dilettante and professional, composing both for symposia and for wider public performances, naturally belonged to this social group and that lyric poetry was a natural medium of aristocratic culture, but also of moral, religious, and even socio-political thought reaching out to broader audience both in one’s local community and on a pan-Hellenic scale.
What deserves our special attention in the context of sympotic performances are provocative exchanges of gibes (skōmmata), which were supposed to fall short of an affront and thus to test the sense of humor and the mental balance of the diners. With the progress of drinking, physical, intellectual, and ethical equilibrium was more and more difficult to keep. Therefore, from one perspective, all the pastimes involved can be viewed as an incessant moral challenge and an all-night long test of one’s good manners.18 Not inappropriately, in extant sympotic poetry and even in the relevant iconography of Greek vase painting, the symposium is regularly depicted as vacillating between the moral ideal of moderation (often rendered as sophrosynē) and the danger of hubris, or insolence.19
What may be called sympotic ethos combined complex symbolic skills, both physical and intellectual, with an ethical ideal focused on friendly equality and mutual trust. Mastering this ethos gave access to the elite circles regularly enjoying their symposia. As a result, external credentials of potential fellow-aristocrats must have involved cultural skills or competences to be deployed at symposia. These can be identified with the “cultural capital” indispensable to join the ranks of aristocracy and to retain this social position, both at home and when travelling abroad.
Aristocratic Culture and Social Mobility
In its social aspect, the archaic and early classical symposium can be defined as a hub or focal point of the mechanisms of natural selection for the Greek aristocracy in that “ambitious non-aristocrats striving for social advancement, beyond requisite economic success allowing them to be admitted to the ranks of their local elite, had to learn, alongside their male offspring, some elements of the aristocratic culture and in particular some sympotic poetry. Once ready to join in the social élite of their community in economic terms, they would need at least some rudimentary cultural competences to be admitted” (Węcowski 2014: 76–77). In other words, investing in a family’s “cultural capital,” in the banquetal skills and sympotic poetry in the event, was a necessary prerequisite of future social advancement, so in principle all the ambitious kakoi of the highly competitive Greek communities should gravitate to a more conspicuous intimacy with aristocratic culture.
In practical terms, non-aristocratic members of Greek civic communities would have regular contact with the aristocratic symposia. At numerous festive occasions involving animal sacrifice and communal feasting, elites would customarily withdraw at some point to more specialized facilities such as hestiatoria (banqueting halls) or even impermanent huts or improvised tents—in order to ostentatiously dine and then to drink in more secluded groups all night long.20 Meanwhile, their fellow-citizens would dine and drink within the confines of the same sanctuary in the open. There were many other occasions for the kakoi to get access to the “cultural content” of the aristocratic symposia. Their familiarity with the publicly performed poetry goes without saying.21 But those interested would have had easy access at least to the widely circulating memorable utterances of sympotic poetry that must have quickly become popular.22 Those truly determined to acquire the aforementioned “cultural capital” could conceivably adopt several strategies open to them. Imitation or emulation of aristocratic symposia by non-aristocrats was always possible. But it is important to bear in mind that those groups which were capable of doing so successfully would functionally join the ranks of aristocracy as nouveaux-riches provided that they were able to deploy rudimentary elements of the said “cultural capital” and to copy those characteristics of the symposia that bestowed on their participants the status of the “leisure class.” In other words, to regularly enjoy all-night drinking but also culture-oriented parties they would need to achieve the material condition of an aristocrat anyway. A very special case of group ambitions resulting in an imitation of aristocratic symposia was identified by Kathleen Lynch in her study of the material from the Athenian Agora. Observing the sudden rise in quantity of the sympotic pottery (combined with the concomitant decline in its quality) in the final decades before the Persian Wars, Lynch concluded that aristocratic symposia must have been “democratized” in the wake of the reforms of Kleisthenes (Lynch 2011). Elaborating on this ingenious theory, I would rather interpret this phenomenon as a sign of the “aristocratization” of the new political elite who would adopt (some elements of) the aristocratic lifestyle to assert themselves as a leading group of the new regime, thus functionally becoming self-proclaimed aristocrats (Węcowski 2018). But in the socio-political realities of the archaic Greek cities, individual social advancement of successful kakoi and their families must have been by far more common. Inculcating oneself and one’s progeny in a set of specifically aristocratic cultural skills, essentially, those related to athletics and to the symposium, would be the most wide-spread strategy of social promotion among the citizens of the archaic period.
Greek Aristocracy as a Cultural Phenomenon
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