The international community of vagrants calling themselves Classicists can well appreciate at least one problem faced by the poets whom they study. Wittingly or not, modern scholars have replicated the complicated itineraries, competitive atmosphere, quest for patronage and desire for publicity that were all known to ancient Greek performers. They may not get mugged like Ibycus or have to jump ship like Arion but, eventually, as did the ancients, they face the rhetorical dilemma: what should I say when I get there?

My solution to the dilemma (at least for this paper) is to take a look at their solutions. Rather than pick one synchronic slice in the long history of Greek poetic practices, I shall attempt to make a diachronic cross-cut. By examining the poetic strategies of those figures who were represented as performers who moved from place to place, we can nail together a rough typology. That typology, in turn, can enable us to explore further the poetics of a number of genres, beyond those that are explicitly connected with travelling poets. In fact, just as heroes and outlaws usefully trace for us the outlines of the possible, wandering poets are most beneficial when they force us to scrutinise the habits of the stable and stay-at-home.

This dynamic, the give-and-take between centre and periphery, may sound like another version of metanastic poetics, a term proposed some years back to describe the workings of Hesiodic composition.