Symbolic 'Lived Spaces' in Ancient Greek Lyric and the Heterotopia of the Symposium

This paper looks at the presentation of space in ancient Greek lyric poetry of the seventh through the fifth century BCE and its ideological function in the cultural-historical context. This poetry, by authors including Sappho, Solon and Pindar, comes after the Homeric epics about Troy and Odysseus (eighth century BCE) and precedes the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (fifth century BCE). The first part of this paper, based on theories of ‘lived space’, will argue that space is foremost symbolically presented in the lyric poems. The second part will then explain the symbolism of space by embedding the poems in the cultural-historical performance context of the symposium, which will be defined in terms of Foucault’s 'heterotopia'.