The association of music-making with dining is not difficult to understand: both activities occur in "real time" and are dynamic or kinetic in nature. Both banqueting and music-making involve similar creative processes. Both originate in raw material: undifferentiated pitches and pitch durations in the case of music-making; more or less undifferentiated foodstuffs in the case of banqueting. The fifteenth century inherited particulars of the practice of convivial music-making from the earlier Middle Ages. Consistent with the larger program of the Italian Renaissance, convivial music-making in fifteenth-century Italy either imaginatively resuscitated ancient Greek and Roman tradition or reframed and reinterpreted medieval tradition, overlaying it with a classicizing veneer. A well-known poetic description of the wedding banquet for Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti by Francesco Filelfo's contemporary Antonio Cornazano depicts a performance by the celebrated lutenist-singer Pietro Bono. Banqueting was a time-honored occasion for music-making during the fifteenth century.

In 293, two soldiers, Constantius Chlorus and Maximianus Galerius, were raised to the purple as Caesars. The diarchy was transformed into a tetrarchy. With the partition into four areas, the western parts to Maximian and Constantius Chlorus, the eastern to Diocletian himself and Galerius, the centres of decision were brought closer to the more critical frontier zones. It was an attempt to resolve a structural problem in a large territorial Byzantine empire. To strengthen the new regime a new legitimation of imperial power was devised: one that exploited a particular religious climate, while at the same time aiming to trace its roots in the Roman tradition. The administrative reforms, which were connected with the reorganizations of the army, of taxation and even of the coinage, were an effective response to danger from without and to the threat of disintegration. The main feature of Aurelian's reform was the division of the existing provinces into smaller territorial entities.

This chapter focuses on the Roman tradition and Greek world through the eyes of two contrasted writers, such as Polybius and Fabius Pictor. The other fact that Polybius stresses is the sheer size of the Roman military and naval effort. The manpower resources of Rome and her Italian allies were, in the eyes of a Greek from the Peloponnese, enormous; her navies in particular larger than anything a Greek power could produce. The senator Fabius Pictor, who wrote a history of Rome in the Greek language, perhaps shortly after rather than during the c, attempted to prove not only that her policy in her recent wars had been eminently just, but that she was to all intents a Greek city. The Second Macedonian War brought Rome into direct contact with the Greek world and initiated a period of unprecedently rapid social and cultural change.

For centuries the Romans had achieved considerable political sophistication, and that involved public debates with carefully composed speeches. This chapter discusses the genesis of poetry in Rome. The word carmen was adopted by Augustan poets as the generic term for their own compositions. This meaning of poem and poetry was a specialization imposed on a word whose meaning was originally much wider. The most extensive surviving carmen is a prayer quoted by the elder Cato. Early in the nineteenth century, the great German historian Niebuhr, anxious to give a basis to his reconstruction of the early Roman tradition, revived the theory that legends such as that of Horatius or Verginia had been preserved by oral tradition in great families in the form of heroic lays. The ancient Roman custom was to set a man's titulus over his grave. L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus's consul in 298 BC has epitaphs in Saturnian verse.