This chapter traces the history of professional poets and musicians at ancient Greek banquets from the archaic period through the Hellenistic age, including pipers, citharists, citharodes, harpists, and others. It also discusses various ways in which banquet music served self-promotion, personal and political. Elite symposia were venues for reperformances of victory odes, republishing a man’s fame with members of his class, sometimes beyond his own city and even his own generation. Philip II and Alexander used mocking poets at drinking parties to undercut and intimidate powerful members of the inner circle at a court where royal symposia had a quasi-constitutional function. They and other fourth-century rulers used professional musicians for display at banquets to enhance the royal vanity and promote their image. The chapter also discusses the extent to which social dining was a setting for professional poets and their poetry in the Hellenistic age and whether the works of academic poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus were sung.

Chapter 5 looks at the music that elite men and women made at their banquets, including their singing and dancing, and the types of professional entertainments they provided as hosts of social affairs. Music of the concert stage and theater were sources of entertainment for upper-class banquets and included excerpts from plays, solo works by citharodes, various kinds of dance (including mime and pantomime), and occasionally even staged plays with music and all. Elites differed about which forms of entertainment were suitable for a dinner party and whether it was proper for an aristocrat to sing or dance at a dinner party. Where aristocrats of the classical era had performed music as a form of personal self-display, reflecting their educations, elites of the Roman era engaged in self-imaging through their choices in music and their talk about it.