The Picnic Chronicles, Vol. III: Ancient Greece — When the Symposium Went Outside
Part of The Picnic Chronicles — a journey through the entire human history of gathering, feasting, and eating outdoors. From ancient civilisations to the present day, this series traces the one instinct that has never changed: the urge to share food somewhere beautiful, with the people you love. Browse the full series below.
Here is a thing about the ancient Greeks that nobody tells you. They weren't particularly bothered about the food.
Not really. Not compared to the Romans, who built entire rooms facing the best garden view and developed a fish sauce so powerfully good it survived two thousand years and lives on quietly in your Worcestershire sauce. Not compared to the Egyptians, who packed food for the afterlife and hosted annual feasts beside the tombs of their dead.
The Greeks, for all their brilliance, largely ate bread, olives, figs, and cheese. Twice a day. Modestly. On purpose. Socrates himself was famously barely interested in eating at all — his diet was so frugal that his critics mocked him openly for it, calling it a life not even a slave would put up with. He appears not to have minded.
And yet.
The Greeks gave us something the Egyptians and Romans didn't quite manage. Something that took the outdoor feast and turned it into something else entirely. Something that, once you see it, you recognise immediately in every good gathering you've ever had.
They gave us the conversation.
The word itself
The Greeks called their great communal feast the symposium — συμπόσιον — and like the Roman convivium, the word does more work than it first appears. It means, literally, drinking together. Not eating together. Not gathering together. Drinking together. Which tells you immediately what the Greeks considered the real point of getting everyone in a room.
The meal itself — the deipnon — came first. It was, by all accounts, a fairly straightforward affair: bread, olives, cheese, onions, some fish or a little meat, figs. Eaten relatively quickly, without great ceremony, with the fingers, using crusts of bread as improvised napkins that were then dropped on the floor for the household dogs. There was no cutlery. There were no napkins. The food, frankly, was not the point.
The point was what came after.
Once the eating was done, the tables were cleared and perfume was distributed — Plato describes this specifically, and it's worth pausing on: they finished the food and then someone walked around and put perfume on everyone. The room was garlanded with flowers. Libations were poured to the gods. And then the serious business began.
The symposiarch — the master of ceremonies, chosen that evening — decided the ratio of wine to water in the large central mixing bowl, the krater, and set the tone for what was to follow. Too little water, and it would be a wild evening. More water, and things would stay philosophical. As the night wore on, the mixture typically grew stronger and the guests less restrained, though the ideal — the thing every host aspired to — was the warm, loosened, but still lucid conversation of men who had drunk just enough.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Who was in the room — and who wasn't
This is the part that requires honesty.
The symposium was, in classical Athens, a gathering of men. Specifically, of aristocratic men. Women of good standing did not recline at dinner parties. They managed the household, they raised the children, they wove the cloth and ran everything that kept the city functioning — but they did not join the symposium.
The women who did appear were of two kinds. There were the aulētrides — the flute girls, hired musicians and entertainers who performed during the early part of the evening and were then dismissed when the serious conversation began. And there were the hetairai — courtesans, but the word does them a disservice. The hetairai were educated, witty, politically aware, and financially independent women who occupied a curious and fascinating space in Greek society. Several became genuinely celebrated: Phryne was so famous for her beauty that she posed as the model for the sculptor Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite — the first full-frontal nude female statue in Greek history. Aspasia, the companion of Pericles, was said to be so intellectually brilliant that Socrates brought his friends to hear her talk and claimed she had taught him the art of rhetoric.
The hetairai joined the symposium, played kottabos with the men, and sometimes entered the intellectual debates. That they were excluded from civic life while being welcomed into the most prestigious intellectual gatherings in the ancient world is one of the great contradictions of Greek culture — and one the Greeks themselves never seemed to find particularly troubling.
It is worth knowing. And then we can move on to the kottabos.
Kottabos: the world's first after-dinner game
In the later stages of the symposium, once the philosophy had been thoroughly dispensed with and the wine mixture had grown stronger and the room considerably more relaxed, the Greeks played a game.
They flung wine at a target.
Not randomly — there was a target, and there were rules, and there were prizes, and there was considerable skill involved. Kottabos was played by gripping the handle of a shallow wine cup called a kylix with one finger, swinging it elegantly from a reclining position on the couch, and flicking the wine dregs across the room at a bronze disc balanced on top of a tall pole in the centre of the andron. The objective was to knock the disc down so that it fell with a crash onto a metal plate below — a satisfying clatter that announced your shot.
There were variations. Some versions involved floating small dishes in a bowl of water and trying to sink them with your wine dregs. One version recorded on an ancient vase featured a target of deeply dubious shape which I will leave to your imagination.
Players dedicated their shots, as lovers dedicated gifts — you'd declare the name of whoever you were infatuated with before releasing your throw, making every shot either a romantic gesture or a very public embarrassment. Winners received sweets, or kisses, depending on who was in the room.
Researchers who have actually recreated kottabos — because of course they have; archaeology is brilliant — report that it must have got very messy very quickly. By the end of a symposium, the walls, the floor, and quite possibly the other guests would have been extensively spattered with diluted wine. In Aeschylus's play Ostologoi, Odysseus describes a game where his opponent kept deliberately aiming his wine at Odysseus's head rather than at the target, to humiliate him. In Aristophanes' comedy Acharnians, a drunken game of kottabos manages to trigger the entire Peloponnesian War.
So: after-dinner games, ancient Greek style. Competitive, messy, erotic, occasionally catastrophic. Party bag sent home by the host in the morning. Absolutely nothing about this is unfamiliar.
By Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany - Detail from lateral walls of the Tomb of the Diver depicting a symposium scene, 5th century BC, Paestum Archaeological Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37880673
What they actually ate — and the philosophy of modest food
The Greek diet, described plainly, is startling in its simplicity.
Breakfast — akratisma — was barley bread dipped in wine, sometimes with olives or figs alongside. Lunch was light: bread, olives, cheese, perhaps some salted fish. The evening meal, the deipnon, was the most substantial of the day, but even then the ancient authors are consistent about what it looked like at an ordinary table: bread made from barley or wheat as the staple, sitos; olives, salt fish, hard cheese, and pickled vegetables as the relishes, ôpson; figs, dried fruit, nuts, and honey for dessert.
Meat was expensive, hard to come by in everyday life, and largely reserved for two occasions: festivals and the very wealthy. This is important, because it means the main source of meat for most Greeks was not the butcher or the farm — it was the sacrifice. When animals were slaughtered at a festival altar, the gods received the smoke from the bones and fat. The flesh — the part entirely useless to immortals but extremely useful to humans — was distributed among the congregation. The great public festivals of Athens were, in practice, the most significant communal meat-eating occasions in the Greek calendar. To feast with the gods was, conveniently and deliciously, to feast rather well.
Athenians, particularly, ate almost everything the sea could offer. Red mullet, sea bream, grey mullet, tuna, eels, octopus, squid, prawns, oysters. The fish market at the agora was one of the most important and most socially animated spaces in the city. Aristophanes' characters argue about fish prices. Plato's characters discuss whether it's vulgar to be seen at the fish stall. Fish was everywhere. Meat was an occasion. Bread and olives were every day.
At important banquets, things were considerably more elaborate. An account of a grand feast from around 350 BCE describes: hare cooked with mint and thyme, lamb and pork skewers in coarse salt, flour sweets in honeyed wine, roast quail, cheese from Achaia, figs, honey from Attica, wine from Chios and Lesbos, eels from Lake Kopais, seafood from Euboea, and barley bread from Pylos. Each ingredient named for its origin. Each origin a claim to quality and connection. The Greeks, long before any farmers' market existed, cared very deeply about provenance.
Wilkinson, Charles K. and Marsha Hill 1983. Egyptian Wall Paintings: The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Collection of Facsimiles. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Socrates and the virtue of eating simply
Socrates, who was the most important thinker to emerge from Athens and arguably from anywhere, had a great deal to say about food. Almost all of it was: eat less of it, and think more carefully about why you're eating.
His own diet was famously austere. Barley bread. Olives. Cheese. Whatever was necessary and no more. He was so indifferent to fine food that his critics used it against him — your food and drink are the poorest, the sophist Antiphon taunted; you are living a life that not even a slave would put up with. Socrates apparently thought this was quite funny.
At symposia, he was a legend of a different kind. Plato records that he could drink more than anyone at the table and remain completely clear-headed — the last man standing at dawn, still discussing the nature of love while everyone else had either fallen asleep on their couches or wandered home. He ate and drank what was put in front of him without complaint and without excess, because for Socrates, food was simply not the point. The conversation was the point. The thinking was the point.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates describes his ideal city's diet: barley meal and wheat flour made into cakes and loaves, accompanied by olives, cheese, onions, vegetables, and desserts of figs, chickpeas, and myrtle berries. Wine in moderation. Everything simple, wholesome, and enough. His companion Glaucon is aghast — you'd have them feasting without any relishes! Socrates is unbothered. The perfect meal, he suggests, is one that feeds the body without enslaving the mind to appetite.
For Socrates, the great gathering was not about what was on the table. It was about what happened around it. The conversation that clarified something. The question that unsettled a comfortable assumption. The moment when someone said something that changed how you thought about everything.
I find this rather beautiful, and rather recognisable. Some of the best gatherings I've ever had involved very ordinary food. It's the people and the thinking and the laughing that you remember. Always.
The outdoor dimension: festivals, groves, and the democratic feast
The symposium happened indoors, in the andron — the men's room — of a private house. But much of Greek eating and gathering happened outside, in ways that were more democratic, more physical, and considerably louder.
The Greek festival calendar was extensive and saturated with outdoor feasting. Athens alone observed over a hundred festival days per year. Almost every one of them involved a procession, a sacrifice, and a public distribution of meat. The city came outside together. The gods were honoured. Everyone ate.
The most spectacular of these was the Panathenaia — the festival of Athena, patroness of Athens, held annually and in grand form every four years. A procession assembled before dawn at the Dipylon Gate and marched through the city to the Acropolis, carrying a newly woven robe — the peplos — as a gift for Athena. At the Acropolis, a hecatomb was sacrificed: a hundred cattle, slaughtered at the altar. The gods received the smoke. The citizens received the beef. The meat was carried down from the Acropolis to the Agora in a ceremonial procession and distributed to every Athenian present. Free meat, for everyone, in the open air, in the city's heart, as a civic act of communal belonging.
This is the outdoor feast as political statement. You are Athenian. You are fed. The goddess provides, through the city. Here is your portion.
The sacred groves, too, were places of outdoor feasting. Every sanctuary had its precinct, its altar, its grove of trees. After sacrifices, the worshippers ate together in the open air, in the shade, in the presence of the divine. The geographer Pausanias describes the grove at Patrai as a delightful place for idling in the summer, its plane trees so vast that parties were given inside the hollow trunks and guests slept there afterwards. A feast in a hollow plane tree, two thousand years ago, in southern Greece. Rather wonderful, that.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
The Tomb of the Diver: a picnic painted for eternity
In 1968, an archaeologist named Mario Napoli was excavating a small necropolis outside the ancient Greek city of Poseidonia — now Paestum, in southern Italy — when he found something that had no business existing.
A tomb, built from five limestone slabs, dating to around 480 BCE. And on the inside of every slab, painted in vivid, perfectly preserved fresco: a symposium.
The Tomb of the Diver is one of the most extraordinary objects to survive from the ancient world, partly because it is the only complete example of ancient Greek wall painting that exists anywhere. Every other Greek fresco has rotted, faded, crumbled. This one survived in the dark for nearly two and a half thousand years, and when it was opened, the colours were as vivid as the day they were painted.
On each of the long interior walls, men recline on couches — bare-chested, garlanded, holding wine cups, utterly at ease. One plays the lyre. One is mid-throw at the kottabos target, arm elegantly extended. A flute girl plays on the end wall. A boy tends the wine mixing bowl. On the ceiling slab — the one the dead man would have faced throughout eternity — a young figure dives from a high tower into a curling sea. Most scholars now read the dive as a metaphor for the passage from life to death: the soul leaping from the known world into the unknown.
The man buried here, whoever he was, chose to spend his eternity surrounded by the image of a symposium. Not a battle. Not a hunt. Not a religious procession. A gathering. Reclining on couches, wine in hand, music in the air, friends on either side.
For the Greeks, this is what a good life looked like. And it's what they wanted for the life after.
KottabosSymposium scene from the ancient Greek fresco, dating to 480-470 BCE. On the left, a bearded man reclines on a kline (ancient couch) drinking wine from a kylix (drinking cup). In the center, a couple drinks wine from kylixes and plays kottabos (an ancient game), while on the right, a couple plays the chelys, a stringed musical instrument. | Tomb of the Diver, c.480–470 BCE, Paestum Archaeological Museum. CC BY-SA 4.0
Athenaeus and the world's greatest dinner party book
I cannot leave ancient Greece without introducing you to Athenaeus of Naucratis, because he is one of my favourite people in the history of food writing, and almost nobody has heard of him.
Athenaeus was a Greek writer living in Rome around 200 AD, and he wrote a book called the Deipnosophistae — meaning, more or less, The Dinner Table Philosophers, or as one modern translator rather brilliantly suggests, Banquet Wits (because it sounds like Banquet Twits, which is also accurate).
The book is structured as a series of letters describing elaborate dinner parties hosted by a wealthy Roman patron, at which the guests — grammarians, philosophers, musicians, doctors, and miscellaneous hangers-on — sit around the table and talk. About food. About every piece of food and drink mentioned in all of Greek literature, from Homer to their own day. About the proper way to eat an oyster. About the history of bread. About whether it is vulgar to be seen buying fish at the market. About what wine from which island is finest. About the correct etiquette of the symposium. About every recipe, every feast, every scandalous dinner party from the previous eight hundred years of Greek culture.
It runs to fifteen books. It quotes approximately two thousand five hundred separate ancient sources, many of which survive only because Athenaeus quoted them. It contains the oldest European fish recipes. It preserves fragments of seventy lost works of Aristotle. It is, on almost every page, extremely funny.
One modern editor describes it as the work of people who are serious, but perhaps not to be taken seriously. Another calls it a work where each dish brought to the table inspires the guests to quote every relevant passage in Greek literature — so for oysters, perhaps two or three references; for figs, a common staple, Athenaeus deploys quotes from over fifty authors.
There are conversations in the Deipnosophistae where the guests begin shouting over each other, slinging insults, citing authors with contradictory views, and dissolving into the kind of joyful, competitive, deeply well-read chaos that could only happen around a table where the wine is good and everyone present has read an enormous amount.
It is, in other words, a very Greek dinner party. And it is free on Project Gutenberg, if you'd like to spend a long evening with it.
What the Greeks understood
Egypt gave us the sacred feast — the gathering that connected the living to the dead, to the gods, to the rhythms of the river. Rome gave us the architectural feast — the outdoor dining room built into the villa, the sightlines planned toward the garden, the conviction that where you eat is part of what you taste.
Greece gave us something softer and harder to name. A belief that the gathering mattered most not for what was on the table but for what happened around it. That the best meal you'll ever have is the one where someone says something that stays with you. That the right amount of wine with the right people in the right place will, reliably, produce something close to wisdom — or at least something very close to joy.
Socrates, walking the streets of Athens barefoot, eating olives and bread and asking everyone he met the most unsettling questions he could think of, understood this perfectly. Food feeds the body. The conversation feeds everything else.
A picnic is not really about the food either. You know this. You've always known it. The food is the excuse, the occasion, the reason to stop and settle and be still somewhere beautiful together. The actual thing — the thing you remember, the thing that fills you — is the people, the light, the laughter, the moment when someone says something that makes you look at each other and think: yes, this. This is it.
The Greeks, all those centuries ago, lying on couches in a candlelit room, throwing wine at a bronze disc, discussing the nature of love — they knew this too.
Nothing has changed.
Where to go and where to read
Paestum, in southern Italy, holds the Tomb of the Diver in its archaeological museum and is also home to three of the best-preserved Greek temples in existence. If you're ever within reach of the Amalfi Coast, it's an hour by train from Salerno and completely unmissable. The Tomb of the Diver will stop you dead. Take your time with it.
The British Museum (free, London) has one of the finest collections of Greek symposium pottery in the world — red-figure kylixes showing kottabos, reclining figures, flute girls, kraters. Room 69, Greek and Roman Life. Worth an hour of your Saturday.
Plato's Symposium — free on Project Gutenberg. One of the most beautiful and readable things in all of ancient literature. It takes an afternoon and you will think about it for years.
Xenophon's Symposium — also free on Project Gutenberg. The companion piece to Plato's, and in some ways more entertaining: earthier, funnier, and featuring Socrates making a very long argument that he is, in fact, the most beautiful man at the party.
Athenaeus: Deipnosophistae — free on Project Gutenberg. Start anywhere. Read for an hour. You will either adore it or find it completely maddening. Possibly both.
Next in The Picnic Chronicles: The Medieval Hunt Feast — where the food gets significantly more dramatic, the serving staff significantly more elaborate, and the word "picnic" still doesn't quite exist. Yet.
With love, Gemma x
The Duchess of Picnics
Further reading
National Geographic History: Wine, Women, and Wisdom — The Symposia of Ancient Greece — one of the best introductions to the symposium written for a general audience (nationalgeographic.com)
Ancient World Magazine: Cultural Aspects of the Athenian Symposium — more detailed on the ritual and religious structure (ancientworldmagazine.com)
Smarthistory: Tomb of the Diver — beautifully written introduction to the most important surviving Greek painting (smarthistory.org)
World History Encyclopedia: Symposium in Ancient Greece — thorough, well-sourced, and free (worldhistory.org)
Britannica: Kottabos — full history of the wine-flinging game, concisely told (britannica.com)
Atlas Obscura: The Wild Ancient Greek Drinking Game That Required Throwing Wine — the kottabos recreation experiment, gloriously reported (atlasobscura.com)
History Cooperative: Ancient Greek Food — Bread, Seafood, Fruits and More — comprehensive guide to the actual diet (historycooperative.org)
Peter Sommer Travels: Feasting — Celebrating a Very Ancient Cultural Tradition — excellent on the festival feast and the thusia (petersommer.com)
Plato: Symposium — free, Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
Xenophon: Symposium — free, Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
Athenaeus: Deipnosophistae — free, Project Gutenberg. Fifteen books of ancient dinner party chat. Start anywhere. (gutenberg.org)
Wikipedia: Symposium (Ancient Greece); Kottabos; Hetairai; Panathenaia; Tomb of the Diver — solid foundations throughout
The Picnic Chronicles — the full series
A complete history of outdoor feasting, from the ancient world to the present day. Each post stands alone, but they're rather good together.
Vol. III — Ancient Greece: When the Symposium Went Outside (you are here)
Vol. IV — The Medieval Hunt Feast: Picnics for the Powerful (coming soon)
Vol. V — The Renaissance & The Fête Champêtre: Picnics as Art (coming soon)
Vol. VI — Georgian England: When Picnics Became a Word (coming soon)
Vol. VII — The Victorians: The Golden Age of the British Picnic (coming soon)
Vol. VIII — Edwardian & Early 20th Century: The Picnic at Its Peak (coming soon)
Vol. IX — Post-War to the 1970s: The Democratic Picnic (coming soon)
Vol. X — The 1980s–2000s: The Picnic Gets Complicated (coming soon)
Vol. XI — The Modern Picnic Renaissance: 2010 to Now (coming soon)
Stay a while …
Is there anything more quintessentially British than a Scotch egg? This golden, breadcrumb-coated delight is the very definition of a picnic staple — a portable, savoury snack steeped in tradition, bursting with flavour, and endlessly versatile. Whether nestled in a Fortnum & Mason hamper, gracing a gastropub menu, or tucked into a well-loved picnic blanket, the Scotch egg is nothing short of a national treasure.