sympotic

There was a great sense of loyalty and obligation to one's sympotic group.

The poem was probably written for sympotic performance.

Sympotic topics covered by Theognis include for example wine, politics, friendship, war, life's brevity, human nature, wealth, love and so on.

The elegies, being sung at military banquets, belong to a tradition of sympotic poetry while also being representative of the genre of martial exhortation.

Many "sympotic" epigrams combine sympotic and funerary elements-they tell their readers (or listeners) to drink and live for today because life is short.

The poetic traditions of Ionia and Aeolia featured poets such as Anacreon, Mimnermus and Alcaeus, who composed many of the sympotic skolia that were to become later part of the mainland tradition.

For example the Oxford English Dictionary states: "In Greek and Latin literature elegiac metre was used for poetry expressing personal sentiments on a range of subjects, including epigrams, laments, sympotic poetry, and (in Rome) love poetry."

With the advent of democracy, whose role models were the lovers and tyrant slayers Harmodius and Aristogiton, "access to gymnastic and sympotic culture widened, so the concomitant pederastic emotions and relationships may also have become more widely admired and imitated."

Or so it seemed to modern scholars until the recent discovery of papyrus P.Oxy.3965 in which Simonides is glimpsed in a sympotic context, speaking for example as an old man rejuvenated in the company of his homo-erotic lover, couched on a bed of flowers.

He has unlimited supplies of ivy, myrtle, Achaemenian nard and other key sympotic equipment, and far from being content with plonk he is the world's first serious wine snob and goes on about vineyards and vintages in a way that is unmistakably nouveau riche.