Nonelites made their own music and were also consumers of music performed by professionals in various settings. These included not only the private parties of the lower classes but public banquets at festivals and recreation in drink shops and the like, as well as the banquets held by voluntary associations to which nonelites belonged. The recreations of the lower classes took on larger public and political significance at festivals and their associated public banquets. Wealthy people and rulers used public entertainments to curry favor with the public and promote a public image of themselves. Rulers did the same. These public entertainments included banquets in theaters and amphitheaters where food and wine were served, sometimes in a fashion that amounted to a kind of mass dinner theater. This custom began with snacks and wine being provided to theatergoers in fifth-century Athens and seems to have mushroomed into something grander by the late Hellenistic era. The style was adopted by certain emperors, and one imperial format was a public banquet held in an arena where musical entertainments were provided and the gladiatorial matches and beast fights and hunts were also accompanied by music.

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 8 is an account of music-making at Christian social meals over the course of the first four centuries of the Common Era. Topics include musical activities at community suppers, private Christian dinner parties, and martyr festivals, as well as ways in which certain Christian writers saw a parallel between singing by turns at Christian social meals and the customs of classical Greeks. The earliest form of Christian music was the self-composed song or hymn, whose setting was the community supper and private Christian dinner party. In time, biblical psalms were taken up as part of the individual Christian’s song repertoire for social meals and prayer gatherings. During the third and fourth centuries, personal hymnody was largely displaced by psalmody. Meanwhile, differing preferences and moral sensibilities among Christians, typically with overtones of class, troubled inner church relations over musical recreations in both church and nonchurch social settings.

Chapter 9 synthesizes certain leading themes of the book and discusses some opinions of ancient intellectuals who reflected on the purpose and pleasures of music in convivial settings. The topics include musical self-display and public honor, social music as play, and the purpose of a symposion and its music. The chapter examines the philosophical opinions of Aristotle, Xenophon, Diogenes of Babylon, Philodemus, and Plutarch about various aspects of these topics, and concludes with a look at musical figures in the introduction to Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists (Learned Banqueters).

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.

Chapter 7 examines music in various Jewish meal-settings: elite Jewish banquets, rabbinic dinners, wedding feasts, public festivals, and the communal meals of the Jewish sects. Music and social dining were occasions for self-definition, personal and corporate, as Jewish elites sought to place themselves along a continuum from resistance to assimilation in relation to the prevailing non-Jewish culture in the Diaspora and foreign rule in Palestine. The occasions included upper-class Jewish dinner parties, as well as Jewish festivals, where national music helped define Jewish identity in settings that included private dinner parties and mass public dining. The Jewish festival was also an occasion for social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. A smattering of non-Jews attended Jewish festivals, and there is reason to believe that many Jews attended the public banquets of the gentiles. Moreover, upper-class Jews such as Philo, who had Hellenic educations, were interested not only in cultivating relationships with upper-class Greeks by dining with them but also in believing that their own people had music just as fine as that of the Greeks and just as ancient in its foundations.

Chapter 5 looks at the music that elite men and women made at their banquets, including their singing and dancing, and the types of professional entertainments they provided as hosts of social affairs. Music of the concert stage and theater were sources of entertainment for upper-class banquets and included excerpts from plays, solo works by citharodes, various kinds of dance (including mime and pantomime), and occasionally even staged plays with music and all. Elites differed about which forms of entertainment were suitable for a dinner party and whether it was proper for an aristocrat to sing or dance at a dinner party. Where aristocrats of the classical era had performed music as a form of personal self-display, reflecting their educations, elites of the Roman era engaged in self-imaging through their choices in music and their talk about it.

This chapter describes the music performed by upper-class diners at archaic/classical symposia as documented by literary evidence and red-figure pottery. Following a discussion of the rise of the aristocratic symposion and shifts in musical entertainment from the picture given in Homer to the period when upper-class men began singing a repertoire of elite poetry at drinking parties, the following topics are taken up: the group libation paean, scolia, elegiac verse and its performance mode, other types of sung poetry, and dance. The aim is to identify the musical rituals as precisely as possible. This prepares for a discussion in Chapter 2 of the social function of aristocratic lyrody at symposia and its historical development.