These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society… — Thomas Cahill
These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it.
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...the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."
Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter... poet against poet."
The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)
