LAUSR

Despite much excellent work on the social roles that mousikê played in antiquity, aesthetic taste has been too little studied: that is, the preferences that different individuals possessed, and the way in which these preferences can be understood to relate to different kinds of identities. In an attempt to tease out some of these preferences in the early Imperial period, this article discusses one of the richest, though under-studied, texts for such topics: namely, Plutarch's Quaestiones convivales (QC), which represents intellectuals engaging with Greek poetry and music in a variety of sympotic contexts. For these educated individuals, mousikê and taste in it are treated as an intrinsic aspect and component of imperial paideia.