The introduction provides an overview of certain recurring subjects of the study, including music’s role in fostering the “good cheer” of the banquet, the power of metasympotic representations, the use of music for communication and display, the social and political aspects of self- and class-display through social music, ways in which elite music-making at archaic and classical symposia influenced customs of later periods and their interpretation, and the interconnections between dining and the festival/theater in all periods.

Chapter 3 discusses the fading of music rituals at elite symposia, which was due in large part to the diminishing cultural significance of the musical arts in defining the aristocrat (a process that was already well underway by the fourth century), an increasing preference for professional entertainments, and the evolution of the upper-class domestic symposion itself. The last of these included the abandonment of rituals marking the transition from meal to symposion, the replacement of the communal wine krater with individualized wine service, and a shift to larger social meals, which new forms of dining architecture accommodated. The group paean and scolia disappeared very quickly. Other forms of organized music-making by dining groups continued in some places during the third century but were nearly obsolete by the middle of the second. It is likely that recital of poetry became at least as common or more common than singing it. In addition to describing these developments, the chapter gives special attention to stories about occasional singing and dancing by diners who engaged in those activities as self-display, performing for others.

The group music-making at aristocratic symposia, described in Chapter 1, developed in a sixth-century social context where ordinary people (the demos) were gaining power in ways that threatened elite claims to superiority and oligarchic right to rule. In this cultural environment, sympotic music-making by upper-class men, “gentlemanly lyrody,” served as a symbol of the superiority that elites arrogated to themselves and expected ordinary people to respect. The ability to perform a certain repertoire to self-accompaniment was a badge of social superiority. This lyrody was directly connected to the refined education that aristocratic boys received; when practiced at adult men’s symposia, it represented a display of paideia. The chapter also examines the question of whether nonelites eventually acquired the skills and repertoire of gentlemanly lyrody, which might have robbed it of its social cachet; and what happened to that cachet when increasing numbers of professional musicians came to dominate the entertainment scene, offering a popular new music for the stage that eventually entered the drinking party. The chapter also considers evidence that some elites did not participate in the sympotic musical culture of their class.