This tag refers to the ancient Greek symposion (i.e. συμπόσιον), a type of feast during which the participants reclined on couches.
The ancient Greek symposium was a drinking party in which the participants engaged in a number of activities. In this article, Daniel Woon focuses on cultural aspects of the symposium.
How should readers of Virgil’s Aeneid interpret the relationship between the Trojan soldiers Nisus and Euryalus? Harrison Voss argues that the pair is best understood as a depiction of the “ideal” pederastic relationship described in Plato’s Symposium.
A kalos cup currently on display at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes depicts a youth flattening the ground at the palaestra, an area set aside for wrestling, boxing, and other athletic activities.
A black-figure olpe or jug, currently in the archaeological museum of Rhodes, features a scene with a character who has been identified as the god Apollo. On what is this identification based?
Our understanding of ethnic diversity within the classical world owes much to how museums have curated their Greco-Roman antiquities. These collections were strongly influenced by the interests and values of the original collectors themselves, many of whom were antiquarians living and working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article raises the question of whether their traditions have had an impact on how we understand and curate Black bodies in Greco-Roman galleries today.
What really went on at ancient Greek house parties? In this article, Daniel Woon explores what people gained in a personal sense from attending a symposium, with an emphasis on Athenian sources.
We finish up our chores in Phocis, talk to Herodotus at Thermopylae, and then head over to Athens, the greatest city in Greece.
What is true now was true in antiquity, too: wine is always good business. Tracing Mediterranean wine culture, this article focuses especially on the last three centuries BC.
Poetic fragments attributed to Archilochus of Paros show him to have been a warrior. But was he also, as is often suggested, a mercenary?
An extensive look at the beautiful archaeological site and museum of Paestum in Southern Italy.