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.
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