Significance. One of the most important leisure activities in Greece was the symposium. The symposium was, on the one hand, a drinking party: its name is derived from the words sun and posis and literally means "drinking together." It was, on the other hand, a complex institution that had important social and political implications. Perhaps no other institution reveals more about the lives of Greek citizen males, and about class and gender ideology.

Exclusive Club. Meals assume a great symbolic importance in all cultures. For the Greeks, eating together had the function of asserting the cohesiveness of the community: all citizens in Athens could get an equal share of sacrificial meat, while Spartan men ate at communal messes to reinforce their sense of being an army, not just a citizen body. The symposium is an application of this principle to smaller, more...