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.

Under some emperors, the imperial court was a social space in which writers could seek and obtain patronage. However, as this chapter cautions, later generations of writers romanticized such patronal relationships (especially those of the Augustan era), so we must be wary of accepting fantasy as truth. The chapter accordingly commences with a discussion of evidence and methodology. What counts as evidence for an author’s presence and activities in the imperial court? It then focuses on common themes that reflect the experience of authors from Augustus to the Severan dynasty, after which evidence for court patronage becomes even patchier. These are: the court as a privileged performance space for literature; the polarities of ‘autonomy’ and ‘subservience’ that defined the patronage relationship between author and emperor; and the ways in which the writer both contributed and conformed to the official messaging of the regime.

The selection of literary, epigraphic, and papyrological sources presented in this chapter illustrates the key categories of courtier at the Roman imperial court, and the relationships of courtiers with each other and with the emperor. Categories of courtier include: the emperor’s friends (amici principis); his advisors; poets, writers, and other cultural figures; members of the imperial family; domestic workers; astrologers; the emperor’s sexual partners; and foreign royals. Various themes relating to the emperor’s relationships run through the sources, including: the tensions between ideals and realities; the competing claims of independence and subservience; the instability of court hierarchy; the operation of influence, brokerage, and patronage; the existence of power groups and factions at court; and the consequences of relationship breakdowns between emperors and courtiers.

Irish and Welsh have divergent literary beginnings. Irish, the first western vernacular to achieve literary status, produced hundreds of works by 1100, whereas Welsh literature is hard to quantify before then. Starting with the oldest vernacular manuscripts – Lebor na hUidre (late eleventh/early twelfth century) and the Black Book of Carmarthen (ca. 1250) – the chapter addresses the difficulties of reconstructing earlier literary activity. In Ireland, well-founded dating strategies reveal literature forming in the seventh century with legal and religious writing, and blossoming in the eighth with original narratives such as ‘The Voyage of Bran’. Church schools created a vernacular literary system closely modelled on Latin Christian learning, including a metatextual tradition which canonized Irish-language texts through commentary and glossing. This activity was promoted by professional users of the vernacular – lawyers, poets, historians – who entered into a close relationship with the church. In Wales the picture is far harder to discern. Some aspects of the Irish story – the professional orders, the church schools – are comparable, but chronology eludes us and by the time the literature becomes fully describable, in the twelfth century, it appears to be an amalgam of older traditions and Anglo-Norman influences.

Book X of the Republic does not ban more mimesis than Book III, nor operate with a different concept of mimesis, two claims often made. It surveys the same territory from a higher, more philosophical perspective, illuminating it particularly by reference to the theory of Forms and the psychology of soul parts that were introduced in sections of the Republic subsequent to Book III. Indeed, its arguments are directed to the philosopher, or someone sympathetic to Plato’s philosophy, not to any and every potential reader. Where they go beyond Book III in scope of what is banned is in pronouncing an anathema upon any poetry oriented towards pleasure rather than to what is beneficial, or upon what Socrates refers to as ‘the honeyed Muse’ – leaving only hymns to the gods and encomia of exemplary, heroic citizens. We endanger our souls and our grip on truth if, in watching tragic drama, we allow ourselves to enjoy grieving over suffering, and to some extent to believe, against our better judgment, that ups and downs of fortune are much more significant than they really are. Book X speaks to us from the viewpoint of eternity, from a position of deep spiritual elitism.

The naming of poetic predecessors within one’s own composition, often associated with a so-called Hellenistic aesthetic, has a less explored heritage going back to the sixth century BCE. This chapter traces the strategy in its earliest phases, especially as we find it within lyric poetry, from the reported statement by Stesichorus [fr. 168 Finglass] that the Shield of Heracles was indeed composed by Hesiod, to the Simonidean allusion to Homer as his forerunner in praise-poetry (fr.11.15–18), and on to Pindar’s complex and varied namings of Archilochus, Terpander, and the masters of hexameter verse. It offers a typology of three main functions of such naming (approbation, criticism, or the representation of conversational interaction), and then an in-depth analysis of two problematic issues: the generic affiliations of Stesichorean art, and the difficulties related to the Pindaric naming of Homer, in particular at Nemean 7.20–7. The device of naming a predecessor emerges as a sort of reception degree-zero, whereby previous verbal art is highlighted, distilled, and set up as a foil, while a new performative space is opened up for the presentation of one’s own innovative productions.