In this paper I explore archaic wandering poets' representation in their poetry of themselves and of their performances. I confine myself (some comparanda apart) to non-hexameter poetry of the period down to 500 BC and to pieces that I take to be in the first instance for monodic rather than choral performance. That is one of the reasons I have decided to exclude Stesichorus; another is that in his surviving poetry itself there is almost nothing that contributes to the issues I investigate. My cut-off date of 500 BC is partly to legitimise my exclusion of Bacchylides and Pindar. But another, and better, reason for that exclusion is that even their surviving epinikia on their own merit a separate treatment, and I am pursuing some related issues concerning them in another volume.

A high proportion of the surviving poetry whose audience of first performance can be identified purports, at least, to be delivered to an audience outside the poet's polis. To some extent the bare data may be misleading: a huge proportion of the surviving poetry bears no unambiguous indication of the location of its first audience, and when we can be sure, or almost sure, that this audience is not in the poet's own polis, it is because there is either an identifying vocative plural address or a clear marker of some other sort – e.g. the poet praises an overseas host – features that we have much less right to expect in poetry composed for a poet's regular Friday-night drinking-companions in his own community.