The classic Greek meal unfolds in two stages. First, the deipnon: a sitos (the cereal base—bread or barley cake) accompanied by an opson (the "what-goes-with-it": cheese, olives, pulses, sometimes fish). Then comes the symposion, the drinking banquet where wine mixed with water flows, punctuated by honey cakes (tragemata), music, and speeches—exactly the setting of Plato's *Symposium* where Diotima speaks. To the gods and the dead, liquid offerings are reserved separately: libations poured from the phiale.

Two threads tie this whole table together: barley, the mother grain of the Greek world (daily bread, drink of the mysteries), and the thyme-scented honey of the Attic hills, which is not just a sweetener but the sacred link between humans and gods, present in the festival cake as in the libation.