The Greek symposium was not just a drinking party but a highly formalized social institution that served as the primary context for the production and performance of lyric poetry, philosophical dialogue, political discussion, and erotic pursuit among the male citizen elite.

The symposium was organized around a set of rituals. Wine was mixed with water in a large bowl (krater) — drinking unmixed wine was considered barbaric and dangerously intoxicating — and distributed to reclining guests by enslaved servers. The kottabos game (flicking wine dregs at targets) provided entertainment; performances of lyric poetry, riddles, and philosophical debate provided intellectual content.

The symposium's role in the production of lyric poetry is fundamental: the poems of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Sappho (though Sappho's symposia were female, an interesting variation) were composed for symposiastic performance. Pindar's victory odes were performed at symposia celebrating athletic victories. Plato's Symposium, with its sequence of speeches on the nature of Eros culminating in Socrates' account of Diotima's teachings on love's ascent toward divine beauty, is both the most famous philosophical text produced by the institution and the richest evidence for its intellectual possibilities.

The symposium's erotic dimension — the pursuit of young male companions (eromenoi) by older men (erastai) in a formalized pederastic relationship — is the aspect most alien to modern readers and most debated by classicists. The extent to which the relationship was sexual rather than merely pedagogical, the degree to which it was normative rather than exceptional, and the power dynamics involved have been analyzed extensively in the past thirty years as part of the broader reassessment of ancient sexuality.