De-centering the Symposium: Characterizing Commensality in Late Classical Olynthos, Greece

Abstract

This project, “De-Centering the Symposium: Characterizing Commensality in Late Classical Olynthos, Greece,” aims to do two things. First, it seeks to determine to what extent the site of Olynthos in northern Greece participated in Athenian cultural practices, particularly surrounding social drinking. Although we know that Olynthos and Athens interacted during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, this relationship has been understudied. Athenian evidence has been privileged in scholarship on drinking in the Greek world. Athenian sources have also contributed to the centering of the symposium, a formal, all-male drinking party in drinking scholarship; forms of drinking that are not considered to be sympotic have been largely ignored. Therefore, the second aim of this project is to develop a model for identifying and characterizing both formal and informal social drinking in Classical Greece. The purpose of this project is to expand our understanding of the social importance of drinking in the Greek world to include groups beyond the small elite group traditionally associated with sympotic drinking.

Accomplishing this goal requires a critical re-assessment of the textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence for the symposium from Athens. The evidence available from Olynthos is more limited, so this project puts the material evidence from Athens and Olynthos into dialogue with one another. To evaluate the relationship between Athens and Olynthos, I examine the production of pottery used for mixing and drinking wine at both sites. This involves close analysis of form (e.g., height and rim diameter) and surface decoration. My analysis of the production of these pottery shapes reveals similarities in the styles of the pottery from Athens and Olynthos, which suggests that the cities were a part of the same overarching community of practice (communities constituted by shared histories of learning). Analysis of the distribution of the same pottery shapes across the settlement at Olynthos, however, indicates that Athens and Olynthos participated in different communities of consumption. Although the two centers shared the knowledge of how to produce these shapes, they made different choices about what to use at local drinking events. There were clear differences in what kinds of drinking shapes each city preferred. For example, although stemmed cups are a characteristic feature of the Athenian symposium, they do not appear at Olynthos. Instead, the preferences shown for other, sturdier drinking shapes at Olynthos reflects trends seen at other sites in northern Greece.

These findings indicate that although Olynthos was influenced by Athens in many ways, locals still made idiosyncratic decisions about what, how, where, and with whom to drink. These decisions may have resulted from more sustained contact with neighboring cities such as Molyvoti, Torone, and even Pella, the capital of Macedon in the 4th century. Although there is evidence that some Olynthians participated in symposia, formal drinking parties were not the only drinking event available to them. The wide distribution of pottery traditionally associated with the symposium suggests that these shapes were used more widely, by a more diverse group and in a broader range of contexts, than traditionally assumed.