Greek politics, religion, and philosophy can to some extent be explained by referring to Greece's geography and the agriculture and habits of daily life that resulted from the physical environment. When the early Greek invaders conquered their way into the peninsula, the area was heavily wooded and the soil was quite rich, though the good growing lands were mostly confined to river valleys and to a narrow strip close to the sea. There was apparently plenty of game in these forests, and the "heroic" Greeks, the ones Homer writes about, typically ate a great deal of meat. At least, their ceremonial feasts and hunting camps usually included some form of roast meat. Meat, however, is an expensive way to get protein, and it depends on grain or fodder of some sort to be produced. By the time Plato wrote of Socrates' symposium, meat was a scarce commodity in Athens, and the Athenian way of life had changed with its geography.
The Athenians did two things to destroy the physical environment around them. First, they cut down most of the trees in order to build ships. Of course, they didn't cut the trees down all at once, but within a few generations the winter and spring rains had washed away most of the good topsoil; from that point on, Athens not only did without a great deal of fresh game, it also had to import most of its grain.
The second thing Athenians did to destroy their environment was plant the countryside in two crops, what we would today call cash crops, olives and grapes. There was a good market for olive oil throughout the ancient world, but especially in the older lands to the east and in Egypt. There was an even greater market for Athenian wine, which incidentally was probably not very alcoholic and probably tasted awful by today's standards. These wines were quite sweet and often very thick, especially the best wines from Chios and Lesbos. Italian wines eventually beat out the Greek wines, but if you want to get some idea of what the ancient Greek wines probably tasted like, imagine a very sweet retsina, or as one wag put it, kerosene and sugar. Anyway, they had the appropriate effect, as readers of The Symposium know.
Greek economy was thus based on the export of olive oil and wine and the import of grains, spices, and other foods. What the Athenians had to export (including silver) was
worth more than what they had to import, so they grew very rich. But when war came they were in real trouble because the basis of their diet was wheat and barley, and they imported nearly all they used, just as the U.S. now imports too much oil.
The Greek diet was plain beyond belief from the point of view of modern tastes. They ate a kind of grain-paste, a mixture somewhere between granola and whole-wheat bread. Olives, figs, and goat cheese, sometimes a fish, filled out the meal. They drank water, unless they were upper class. The banquets that Plato writes about in The Symposium probably didn't consist of much. From all we're able to gather, the Greeks ate quickly and without much concern for nice details--often standing, always using their fingers to dip into a common bowl of grain-paste. It was probably a pretty rough, grubby, and revolting affair. But once the eating was done --did they eat grapes? Probably, but they certainly were not voluptuous about it, because they had little else to eat--once the eating was done, they got down to the real business of a banquet, which was drinking and talking. Socrates, as you have by now found out, cannily sat quietly till everyone else had his say, drank his wine, and then got in the last word. The party lasted all night.
The rise of commerce meant that Athens supported a growing commercial class, people who neither raised grain nor sailed ships nor milked goats. They were like modern bankers, middle men who, for profit, manipulated various kinds of currency. This commercial class, like today's, was very much interested in education and particularly in the kind of education that would permit them to further their own interests in public debate. They hired teachers who knew how to teach such things as rhetoric and these were known as the sophists. Originally the name had no bad connotations, but eventually it came to refer to men who knew how to convince an audience of the truth of an argument even when they themselves knew the argument was false. By the time Socrates came along, these sophists were widely respected by the commercial class, and in several of the dialogues part of what Socrates does is deflate the pretensions of both the sophists and their pupils, usually portrayed as hard-headed, practical men of affairs.