Vanessa Cazzato - Böcker

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.

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classical Greek poetry, a distinction attested by its continued hold on the poetic imagination even after its demise as a performance setting. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic relationship of poetry and the symposion throughout Greek literary history, considering the latter both as a literal performance context and as an imaginary space pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications.This collection of essays by an international group of leading scholars illuminates the various facets of this relationship, from Greek literature's earliest beginnings through to its afterlife in Roman poetry, ranging from the Near Eastern origins of the Greek symposion in the eighth century to Horace's evocations of his archaic models and Lucian's knowing reworking of classic texts. Each chapter discusses one aspect of sympotic engagement by key authors across the major genres of Greek poetry, including archaic and classical lyric, tragedy and comedy, and Hellenistic epigram; discussions of literary sources are complemented by analysis of the visual evidence of painted pottery. Consideration of these diverse modes and genres from the unifying perspective of their relation to the symposion leads to a characterization of the full spectrum of sympotic poetry that retains an eye to both its shared common features and the specificity of individual genres and texts.