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 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.