In the literary view of the Hellenistic Period, a significant space is occupied by wandering intellectuals, artists, and musicians of various talents. They coexisted with poets who worked in the court (Van Bremen) and travelled from city to city, travelling all around Greece, the Aegean Sea and the coasts of Asia Minor, in search of fame, glory and money (Guarducci). This "movement", which increased in the Imperial Era (Bowersock; Porter; Korenjak), finds its roots, its reasons and its first developments in the Hellenistic Period. This cultural phenomenon is documented mainly by epigraphic sources, which are sometimes validated by literary evidence. The inscribed evidence consists mainly of honorary decrees, but also of dedications and celebratory epigrams, which allow us to reconstruct important phases of the artists' careers. In fact it is possible to learn the specialties in which these intellectuals distinguished themselves and the occasion of the performance (Pallone), the birthplace and family home (Cinalli), and the privileges granted. It is also possible to understand the extent of their fame (Bouvier) and in those cases where, thanks to the approval of the public, the text and the content of performances have been transcribed, it can be observed the modus operandi of these specialists and the features of their compositions. While in decrees and dedications it is clear that in many cases, people honored for artistic skills were often employed in diplomatic missions between their city of provenance (not necessarily the birthplace) and the one in which they performed (Chaniotis), in epigrams a willingness to celebrate their artistic career emerges, highlighting the nature and topics of their compositions and recording the victories obtained in agonistic exhibitions. Considering the situation of Delos as an example, thanks to the epigram in honor of Apollonios (ID 2551), poet devoted to Apollo, we learn that he gained fame thanks to a composition of astrological topic; with the one for the herald Zenobios (ID 2552) instead, we can reconstruct the stages of his career through the victories in major contests. These and other important headlines can be inferred from the analysis of the inscriptions, and in this sense the epigrammatic evidence is particularly relevant to shed light on the artistic life of itinerant androi mousikoi of Hellenistic Age and gain a perspective view, and as much as possible exhaustive of a cultural and to some extent "popular" (Gentili) occurrence, that had a large following in the centuries to come.
