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 setting. The Cup of Song explores the symbiotic relationship of poetry and the symposion throughout Greek literary history, considering the latter 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 that retains an eye to both its shared common features and the specificity of individual genres and texts.

Table of Contents:
Vanessa Cazzato and Enrico Emanuele Prodi: Introduction: Continuity in the Sympotic Tradition 1: Oswyn Murray: The Symposion between East and West 2: Ewen Bowie: Quo usque tandem...? How Long Were Sympotic Songs? 3: Gauthier Liberman: Some Thoughts of the Symposiastic Catena, Aisakos, and Skolia 4: Giovan Battista D'Alessio: Bacchylides at Banquet 5: Lucia Athanassaki: The Symposion as Theme and Performance Context in Pindar's Epinicians 6: Guy Hedreen: Smikros: Fictional Portrait of an Artist as a Symposiast by Euphronios 7: Ralph M. Rosen: Symposia and the Formation of Poetic Genre in Aristophanes' Wasps 8: Deborah T. Steiner: Parting Shots: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1384 98 and Symposia in the Visual Repertoire 9: Vanessa Cazzato: Symposia en plein air in Alcaeus and Others 10: Renaud Gagné: The World in a Cup: Ekpomatics in and out of the Symposion 11: Alexander Sens: Party or Perish: Death, Wine, and Closure in Hellenistic Sympotic Epigram 12: Gregory O. Hutchinson: Hierarchy and Symposiastic Poetry, Greek and Latin