Vertiges du banquet : jeux d’habileté et d’équilibre au symposion

Abstract

Place of sociability par excellence for the ancient Greeks, the symposion is also a privileged setting for playing with social norms. Beyond the shared consumption of wine, which underpins the group’s cohesion, the symposion allows values and norms to be reaffirmed, but also to be exceeded, within a circumscribed framework. This constant wobbling between the rules and their transgression often takes the form, in the iconography of Greek vases, of a game of mirrors between civilisation and wildness, in which komasts and satyrs embody a counter-model of civic sociability. At a second level of interpretation, this wobbling can also be interpreted metaphorically, throughout the notion of balance. Excessive drunkenness threatens the drinker’s equilibrium by causing him to lose enkrateia, the control of the senses and the body. The use of games of skill and dexterity – of which the kottabos is the best known – makes it possible to materialise, in a playful way, this tension at work in the symposion. However, these formalised games are only the visible part of a much wider semantic field of the balance, which unfolds in the image through graphic games that combine wine, vases and drinkers in scenes characterised by the imminence of falling.

Keywords

• Greek and Hellenised world
• Greek history
• iconography
• Greek pottery
• banquet
• symposion