Drawing on a vast array of sources both in literature and in art, Warren D. Anderson here illuminates the place of musicians and music-making in Greek life from the Archaic to the Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman periods.

In his treatment of the musicians, Anderson addresses such topics as their costumes and sacral robes, their affinities with shamans and gods, the nature of their identification with the individual (the "outsider") or with the group, and their status as slaves or as freeborn citizens. As part of the larger picture, he discusses their instruments, principally the lyre or kithara and the double reed pipes, and he introduces the musical practices of other cultures as suggestive parallels.

Appendices include technical descriptions of the instruments, details of scale-building and notation, and fragmentary remains of actual texts with notation, among them settings of passages from Euripides' tragedies.