From Homer onwards, the composition, performance and dissemination of poetry are inextricably linked to stories of migration and wandering, rejection and assimilation. Welcomed or stigmatised as wandering poets may have been, the process of self-definition of many Greek local communities is in part also the history of different responses, in terms of integration or resilience, towards poeti vaganti, their poetry and their music. To sketch a map of the physical journeys of travelling poets is also, to a certain extent, to trace the mental routes by means of which different conceptualisations of ‘Greekness’ and other, competing forms of cultural identity took shape. The aim of the present paper is to investigate one of these routes, focusing on the various ways of exploitation and re-interpretation on the part of Greek micro-cultures to which the songs of a poeta vagante of iconic status such as Timotheus of Miletus may be open. In doing so, I shall be concerned with whether and to what extent re-performances, both those historically attested and those merely fictionalised, and musical re-settings, staged at times and places different from the original ones, may have affected the generic boundaries of the text itself and its reception among the intended audience.

A dynamic tension between tradition and innovation, the latter often being disguised as the re-emergence of a past open to varying degrees of re-appropriation, frames the history of Greek music from its earliest time onwards.