No other Greek ritual act appears as often, in as many different settings, as the sponde. It was folded into thysia, the animal sacrifice, at the moment the victim's blood was shed and again as the meal that followed began; it opened and closed formal oaths sworn between individuals, cities or armies, and the very word for a truce, spondai, is the plural of the libation's own name, since a truce was sealed by the same act that sealed lesser promises. A Greek symposium began only after wine was poured out, unmixed, to the Olympian gods, and household worship at the hearth included a small daily libation as a matter of course rather than a special occasion.
Xenophon and other classical authors describe soldiers pouring a libation before battle and travelers doing the same before setting out on a journey, treating the act less as a discrete ceremony than as the basic punctuation mark of Greek religious and social life, present at the start or close of nearly any undertaking that mattered. Even a private letter could close with a wish that the gods receive a libation on the writer's behalf, showing how thoroughly the gesture had become shorthand for good will and closure in everyday Greek expression, not only in formal cult.