Field-working scholars in the discipline of ethnomusicology have often suggested that widely endorsed and employed concepts such as 'folk song' and 'popular song' and their ideological implications may be misleading for context-sensitive and anthropological approaches to expressive culture. Viewed in terms of the socio-cultural dynamics of (especially) archaic Greece, these concepts might rather be considered as conventional classificatory terms that have been attached to ancient Greek songs for several centuries. Folk song and folk culture are marked categories that have been emphatically promoted since the eighteenth century. The aim of this chapter is not to investigate the historiography of a significant and influential concept but rather to point to ways of viewing what I shall call the interdiscursivity of 'literary' and 'popular'/'folk' songs in archaic, classical and Hellenistic Greece.

The problems with the term 'popular song' do not lie in possible associations with a post-1960s political economy of mass-media-related popular song. In the context of this chapter, carmina popularia (as 'folk/popular songs', 'game songs' and traditional 'ritual songs' are collectively labelled in Page's Poetae Melici Graeci) refer to song texts apparently stemming from - and expressing aesthetic thought patterns of - a so-called ancient vox populi ('people's voice').