Thinking with drinking: wine and the symposium in Aristophanes

Abstract

The symposium has received much attention recently but, despite the frequency with which comedy refers to it, little has been said about its function in this genre. Pauline Schmitt-Pantel has discussed the public banquets in Aristophanes, and suggests that ‘les banquets “privés … sont décrits avec complaisance, sans que leur fonctionnement soit critiqué et que leur existence soit remise en cause … Les repas publics sont l'objet, par le biais de la distorsion comique, de critiques’. However, we shall find that the imagery of the symposium is not used in so simple and unproblematic a manner, but is employed in a number of different ways to examine and articulate the questions raised by the dramas: like a myth, the symposium seems to be ‘good to think with’.