In Greece from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC the symposium was an important institution both for the social and political life of men from prosperous households and for the creation of songs that constitute a significant portion of our surviving archaic poetry. Between seven and seventeen men, mostly in their early or later teens – παῖδες, ‘boys’, or μειράκια, ‘youths’ – and νέοι, ‘young men’, in their twenties (or sometimes even their thirties) – would recline on couches to engage in the ritualised consumption of wine and to enjoy entertainment. This entertainment provided either by their own conversation, singing and sympotic games like κότταβος, or by the musical, gymnastic and sexual diversions offered by ἑταῖραι, female entertainers.1 Although light food was on offer, drinking was the central and defining mode of communal consumption, and the symposium was clearly distinguishable from a banquet.2 Much light is thrown on sympotic entertainments by painted vases, and their evidence has been brilliantly interpreted by Francois Lissarrague in his book Un flot d’images.3 Only from the fifth and fourth centuries BC do we find texts that set out to report the subjects of sympotic conversation (above all Aristophanes’ Wasps, and the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon) but comparison of these with the texts of poetry that was composed for sympotic performance, chiefly sung performance, suggests that these poetic texts are a fair guide to the topics that figured in archaic conversation too.4