‘The only itinerant poet mentioned in Homer is the Thracian Thamyris’: thus Bruno Gentili, in a book that perhaps more than any other indicated the road to understanding the social meaning of poets in early Greece, whether wandering or not. The assertion is not quite true. In the Odyssey, the swineherd Eumaeus enunciates the general principle that one would not ‘seek out and summon a stranger from abroad, unless it be one of those dēmioergoi’ like a prophet, a healer, a carpenter – ‘or a divine aoidos, who gives pleasure with his song. For these men are summoned all over the boundless earth’ (17.382–5). Eumaeus seems to have an eye for professionalism that his social superiors lack: he is the only person in Homeric epic to remark that aoidoi are specialists from outside a community akin to the prophet, healer or builder. It is, however, certainly true that Thamyris is the only named wandering poet-singer in Homer, and the only one about whose story we hear anything of note. For that reason, and for the priority of his mention in the older epic, he has a claim to the title of archetypal ‘wandering poet’. But he is, to say the least, a difficult rôle-model.

Thamyris is in some ways a marginal figure in Greek myth and literature, at least as it survives. But his is an ancient and persistent presence all the same.