The Cup of Song: Studies on Poetry and the Symposion

The symposion is arguably the most significant and well-documented context for the performance, transmission, and criticism of archaic and classical Greek poetry, a distinction attested by its continued hold on the poetic imagination even after its demise as a performance context. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic relationship of the symposion and poetry throughout Greek literary history, considering the former both as a literal performance context and as an imaginary space pregnant with social, political, and aesthetic implications.

This collection of essays by an international group of leading scholars illuminates the various facets of this relationship, from Greek literature's earliest beginnings through to its afterlife in Roman poetry, ranging from the Near Eastern origins of the Greek symposion in the eighth century to Horace's evocations of his archaic models and Lucian's knowing reworking of classic texts. Each chapter discusses one aspect of sympotic engagement by key authors across the major genres of Greek poetry, including archaic and classical lyric, tragedy and comedy, and Hellenistic epigram; discussions of literary sources are complemented by analysis of the visual evidence of painted pottery. Consideration of these diverse modes and genres from the unifying perspective of their relation to the symposion leads to a characterization of the full spectrum of sympotic poetry from its very beginnings through to the Hellenistic age that retains an eye both to its shared common features and to the specificity of individual genres and texts.