Someone alert Plan II!

How could a program whose students hosted multiple parties advertising "libations" never point this out:"The Greek symposium was, literally, a 'drinking-together'"?

That's from a New Yorker piece by Steven Shapin, one of those back-of-the-mag book reviews that are a welcome relief from the politics out front.

Shapin continues:

Wine was the perfect drink for the Greeks: with proper management, you could position yourself at the golden mean between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Plato’s Symposium instructively ends with everyone except Socrates having gone home, fallen asleep, or gotten drunk: a true philosopher, it is implied, can hold his liquor.

No doubt. And that's why I don't like no thinkin' parties.

Having been to "symposiums," typically of the Plan II variety, that featured some Socratic asshole guarding the keg, I bet if I'd been a Greek, I too would've told him to shut up, thrown back a couple chalices*, and hit the dance floor.

*I obviously have no idea what Greeks drank from