Plato’s most famous dialogue is set at one, everybody is hungover, and the word now means an academic conference
Symposium holds a 4.7 from four hundred and twelve people, charges ten to sixty pounds, and it is a natural wine bar and bottle shop.
And the word means a drinking party.
Sym-posion
Syn, together. Posis, drinking.
Drinking together. That is the whole word, and it means precisely what a symposium was: a gathering of Greek men, after dinner, to drink wine and talk.
It had rules. There was a symposiarch, elected, whose job was to decide how strong the wine would be – because the Greeks mixed their wine with water and regarded drinking it neat as barbaric – and to set the pace.
Which is exactly the tamada, the Georgian toastmaster, and we wrote about him at Violet’s in Soho, and the two institutions are separated by two and a half thousand years and are functionally identical.
Plato’s
Which is the most famous dinner party in history.
The Symposium is a dialogue in which a group of men, at a drinking party, take turns making speeches about love – and it contains some of the most extraordinary writing in Greek philosophy.
And the framing is superb, and it is the thing people forget.
They agree, at the start, to drink lightly, because they are all hungover from the party the night before.
Socrates then drinks steadily throughout, out-argues everybody, and is the only man still awake at dawn, sitting with two exhausted playwrights, forcing them to agree with him about comedy and tragedy while they fall asleep.
He then gets up and goes about his day.
The word now
An academic conference.
A room with a projector, a lanyard, and a plate of biscuits.
The Prat’s etymological desk has watched this language do a great many things across six postcodes and would like to record that this is the single most disappointing journey any word has made.
Speakeasy meant a bar you could be arrested in and now means a bar with a rope. Craft meant a small independent brewer and now means one of four multinationals.
And symposium meant a drinking party at which men argued about love until dawn, and it now means a conference.
The bar
Small. Short list. Somebody who knows.
Six postcodes, five hundred and ninety-seven articles, and it has never once failed – and a 4.7 across four hundred people is a strong number on a real sample.
Verdict
Excellent. Go, drink, argue, and stay until dawn.
That is what the word means and it is the only correct way to honour it.
Mixing the wine
Which the Greeks did universally and which they were fierce about.
Wine was mixed with water in a large vessel called a krater – and the ratio was decided by the symposiarch, and it was typically something like one part wine to three of water.
Drinking wine neat was regarded as the behaviour of barbarians, and specifically of the Scythians, and it was believed to cause madness.
And they may have had a point, because ancient wine was not what we drink. It was frequently thick, resinous, sometimes flavoured with herbs or seawater, and probably a good deal stronger.
The Prat’s classical desk would note that a civilisation which insisted on diluting its wine and appointing an official to control the pace has a considerably better claim to sophistication than the country that invented the yard of ale.
My therapist says I’m using comedy to avoid dealing with difficult emotions. This validates that strategy entirely.