Ain't No Party Like a Macedonian Party Because a Macedonian Party Don't Stop Until at Least Someone Has Been Murdered During an Argument at a Symposium Where Undiluted Wine is Served (Barbarians)

By the end of the fifth century, the Macedonian court was sufficiently Hellenized to have become the "off-off Broadway" of Greek tragedy: Euripides ended his career by producing his plays for Macedonian audiences. Some elite Macedonian social customs were, however, still regarded as typically "barbarous" by the Greeks - notably the Macedonian symposium, at which heavily armed men downed mass quantities of undiluted wine (wine was always mixed with water in a proper Greek symposium). The impression of barbarism was not reduced when, as sometimes happened, drunken arguments escalated into murderous violence.

Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015, 267.