ANDREA ROTSTEIN Classical Antiquity. Vol. 31, Issue 1, pp. 92–127. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e). Copyright © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http:/www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/CA.2012.31.1.92. Mousikoi Agones and the Conceptualization of Genre in Ancient Greece This article inquires into the shaping force that competition at musical contests exercised on ancient perceptions of literary genres, particularly for the non-choral and non-dramatic kinds of the Classical Period. Three musical contests of the fourth century bce, the Panathenaia, the Amphiaraia, and the Artemisia, are taken as case studies. After a reconstruction of their programs, principles of categorization that spectators might have inferred from the contests are deduced, and modes in which categories of competition and literary genres interacted are put forward. The article concludes by suggesting that, by enacting taxonomies, either strengthening or weakening the specificity of traditional types, institutionalized poetic and musical competitions contributed to the ancient conceptualization of literary genres. In his short dialogue Ion, Plato endows his fictional rhapsode with the usual attributes of the profession: fine clothes and wonderful stupidity. Ion’s vanity and Socrates’ questions goad the rhapsode to boast that his expertise in Homer’s poetry also grants him an expertise in every other topic mentioned by Homer. Consequently, Ion would not only be the best of rhapsodes, but the best of generals too. “So why,” asks Socrates, “why do you go about as a rhapsode when you could be a general? . . . You are like Proteus,” Socrates rebukes Ion, “you become all sorts of people.” 1 “Proteus” is obviously meant This article circulated for a few years before reaching its final form. I am very grateful to Ewen Bowie, Dwora Gilula, Richard Martin, and Ian Rutherford for their comments and criticism at various stages of this work. Earlier versions were presented at the Thirty-Third Conference of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies (June 2004, Ben Gurion University, Be’er Sheva, Israel) and the International Colloquium “Song Culture and Social Change: The Contexts of Dithyramb” (July 2004, Oxford, UK). I would like to thank those audiences for their inspiring feedback. Comments and criticism by the two anonymous referees of Classical Antiquity were of great help in improving my argument. Errors and misapprehensions remain of course mine. 1. Adapted from Pl. Ion 541a-542.