Hesiod is very much admired for beginning thus, A vast chaos first was made.
(Hesiod, "Theogony," 116.) For it was necessary that there should be first a place and room provided for the beings that were afterward to be produced; and not as was seen yesterday at my son's entertainment, according to Anaxagoras's saying, All lay jumbled together.
But suppose a man hath room and provision enough, yet a large company itself is to be avoided for its own sake, as hindering all familiarity and conversation; and it is more tolerable to let the company have no wine, than to exclude all converse from a feast.

And therefore Theophrastus jocularly called the barbers' shops feasts without wine; because those that sit there usually prattle and discourse.

But those that invite a crowd at once deprive all of free communication of discourse, or rather make them divide into cabals, so that two or three privately talk together, and neither know nor look on those that sit, as it were, half a mile distant.
Some took this way to valiant Ajax's tent, And some the other to Achilles' went.
("Iliad," xi.

7.) And therefore some rich men are foolishly profuse, who build rooms big enough for thirty tables or more at once; for such a preparation certainly is for unsociable and unfriendly entertainments, and such as are fit for a panegyriarch rather than a symposiarch to preside over.
But this may be pardoned in those; for wealth would not he wealth, it would be really blind and imprisoned, unless it had witnesses, as tragedies would be devoid of spectators.

Let us entertain few and often, and make that a remedy against having a crowd at once.