The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.

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.