| According to the prevalent view, the symposion was an aristocratic institution, generating solidarity on the basis of class distinction. It represented an exclusive, private, elitist social world at odds with the egalitarian civic community of the polis. I argue the opposite: that the symposion arose in tandem with the polis in the Archaic period and played a crucial role in its formation. In turn, I argue that this casts doubt upon the universally held view of Archaic Greece as aristocratic and opens the way for a fundamental re-examination of this seminal period in Greek history.; The symposion was not an elite anti-city, but an institution that mediated the relationship of oikos and polis and structured the symposiast's experience as a lived lesson in citizenship. As such, it provided a microcosm in which the symposiast concretely and immediately experienced, and was socialized into, the otherwise abstract and imagined terms of citizen community. In the banquet, goods were distributed, social bonds formed and a sense of self conceived, such as to detach a man from narrow individualism, class corporatism and exclusive family loyalty. He opened his house to the public world of male society, forging bonds with men who were not family, sharing a common identity with the men with whom he shared the city. These bonds transcended class difference, transcended a man's household interests, his identity in terms of birth and wealth, and instead identified him with the collective interest of male, egalitarian community. In the dining room, he formed himself as a polites; he imagined himself in civic community. Despite a wealth of scholarship, there is still not a single, comprehensive account of the symposion, examining integrally all its facets and systematically conceptualizing its place within society. I endeavour to provide such an account, analyzing all media of sympotic artefact (archaeological, iconographic and literary) in a holistic account of the symposion as it symbolically figured and materially structured sociality and as these functions came together in its capacity as a key site of socialization. To conceptualize this, I draw on a variety of social scientific models and ethnographic comparanda. |
