Interpretations of metal graters and pottery tripod bowls as Leitfossils of a trans-Mediterranean ‘orientalizing’ culture of spiced-wine consumption have of late become a staple of scholarship on sympotic banqueting, shaping our perception of ancient wine-drinking and its role in cross-cultural interaction in the first half of the first millennium BC. Yet a closer look at the evidence for spiced wine and the use of graters casts serious doubt on assumptions of a widespread practice of adding ‘spices’ to wine during the Greek symposion and of the use of graters or tripod grinding bowls for such a purpose in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. A more plausible scenario, it is argued, arises from the well-attested association of graters with cheese and other primarily culinary commodities. It sees the grater’s prime function and symbolic significance shift from a use in Early Iron Age ‘Homeric’ hospitality to becoming a tool in the increasingly complex cuisines associated with the Archaic and Classical banquet – an indicator of evolving Mediterranean commensality with no less of an international horizon, but a commensality that involved interaction and shared consumption beyond the narrowly sympotic.

This article revisits the question of how elegy was performed at the symposion, and argues that, rather than being either musical or non-musical, elegy situates itself between speech and song. None of the passages in which elegy mentions song are clearly self-referential: they tend to be generic, set in the future, concerned with other performers and other compositions or altogether too slippery in their language to pin them down. Moreover, there are a number of elegiac pieces that appear designed to allow symposiasts to shift from song to speech or speech to song, thereby introducing a new mode of performance, and so are themselves transitional. These observations about the way elegiac texts position their own performance are complemented by considerations about their actual performance. Evidence both from ancient musicologists and from other tonal languages suggests that inbetween modes of delivery were common in Greek poetry and the metrical shape makes elegy a prime candidate. The final section of the article turns to the difficult term elegos in fifth-century drama. It argues that several of these passages draw on inbetweenness as one association of elegos and thus decreases the gap between elegos and surviving elegy. A coda points out that the elegiacs in Euripides' Andromache are a further example of elegy transitioning between two modes of performance.