συμπόσιον

Symposium comes from Ancient Greek συμπόσιον (sympósion), meaning 'a drinking together,' from σύν (syn, 'together') and πόσις (pósis, 'drinking,' from the verb πίνω, pínō, 'to drink'). A symposion was not a lecture or a debate but a highly ritualized drinking party, the second course of an aristocratic Greek dinner: after the food was cleared (the deipnon), the wine was mixed, libations were poured, and the evening's real business — conversation, song, poetry, and philosophical argument — began. The symposium was where Greek intellectual culture happened, and it happened while drinking.

The symposion followed strict conventions. A symposiarch was elected to govern the evening, determining the ratio of water to wine (Greeks drank wine diluted, considering unmixed wine barbaric), the order of speakers, and the topics of conversation. Guests reclined on couches arranged in a circle, drank from shared kraters (mixing bowls), and participated in a sequence of toasts, songs (skolia), and competitive displays of wit. Entertainment might include poetry recitation, philosophical dialogue, flute girls, acrobats, or the kottabos — a game that involved flinging wine dregs at a target. The symposion was simultaneously highbrow and hedonistic, a space where Socrates and a courtesan might share the same room.

Plato's Symposium (circa 385–370 BCE) immortalized the institution by setting a philosophical dialogue about the nature of love at a drinking party hosted by the poet Agathon. The guests — including Socrates, Aristophanes, and the drunken general Alcibiades — each deliver speeches on Eros, culminating in Socrates' account of Diotima's ladder of love, one of the most influential passages in Western philosophy. Plato chose the symposion as his setting because it was the natural habitat of Athenian intellectual life: a place where ideas circulated with the wine, where argument was a form of play, and where drunkenness could produce either wisdom or embarrassment.

The word entered English in the sixteenth century, initially referring to the Greek institution or to Plato's dialogue specifically. By the eighteenth century, 'symposium' had begun to mean any meeting for intellectual discussion, and by the twentieth century it had become indistinguishable from 'conference' or 'seminar' — a gathering with name badges, PowerPoint presentations, and coffee breaks. The transformation from wine-fueled philosophical party to fluorescent-lit academic panel represents one of the great demotions in intellectual history. The Greeks would not recognize what we have done to their word.