The Gorgons' Lament: Auletics, Poetics, and Chorality in Pindar's

The Gorgons’ Lament: Auletics, Poetics, and Chorality in Pindar’s Pythian 12

Deborah Steiner

American Journal of Philology, Volume 134, Number 2 (Whole Number 534), Summer 2013, pp. 173-208 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/ajp.2013.0015

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajp/summary/v134/134.2.steiner.html

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THE GORGONS’ LAMENT: AULETICS, POETICS, AND CHORALITY IN PINDAR’S PYTHIAN 12

Deborah Steiner u

Abstract. This article offers a fresh reading of Pindar’s Pythian 12, an ode composed for a victorious aulete, which demonstrates its engagement in current musicological debates concerning innovations in instrumentation, relations between the musical and vocal elements in choreia, and the status of the pipes. In ways that intersect with these issues, Pindar anticipates a motif that resurfaces in later Attic drama and other texts concerning the origins of choral lyric and that identifies women’s lament as the prototypical form of song.

For sources from the late fifth century on, Pindar stands as a stalwart traditionalist, a bulwark of an old-style mousike \and maintainer of a standard of correctness and “austerity” that subsequent composers would vitiate;1 by the generation of Eupolis, his works were already considered somewhat dépassés.2 A number of recent discussions have challenged this ancient characterization, recasting Pindar as a member of the early fifth-century musical avant-garde and proponent of innovations in current compositional and instrumental practices. Wallace’s account shows how the poet participated wholeheartedly in the “revolution in aulos music” of his age, and for Franklin he was a practitioner of a modulatory and complex style of auletic composition and promoter of the polupho\nia and poikilia that would notoriously come under attack

1 E.g., Aristox. fr. 76 ap. Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1142b–c; cf. 1137e–f; Dion. Hal. Comp. 19, 22; Ael. Arist. Against Plato in Defense of the Four, 1.498, citing Pind. fr. 32 S-M. For additional sources and discussion, see Ieranò 1997, 214–18. 2 Eup. frr. 139, 366.

American Journal of Philology 134 (2013) 173–208 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 174 deborah steiner in late fifth-century Athens.3 Noting that later sources associate Pindar’s “traditionalism” almost exclusively with his dithyrambic compositions (for all the clear puff for innovation in the second Dithyramb, fr. 70b S-M; note, too, Horace Carm. 4.2.6–8), Prauscello tracks the poet’s innovatory melodics and, most specifically, his use of the novel and contested Aeolian mode in his epinicians.4 The evidence gathered by these and other scholars thus positions Pindar as both heir and contributor to experimentation in auletic and other musical practices that can be further traced back to such sixth-century pipe-players as Sacadas, Clonas, and the Sicyonian Pythocritus, initiators of new forms of aulos music designed for solo execution and to accompany choral performances.5 My discussion aims to contribute to this reassessment by focus- ing on a single Pindaric composition where the aulos, its invention, development, and the nature of its music occupy center stage and that, curiously, has featured only in passing (if at all) in attempts to recover Pindar’s self-positioning in the rapidly developing musical landscape of his age.6 The close reading offered here of Pythian 12, a work composed on behalf of Midas of Acragas, the aulete who carried off the prize at the musical contests at Delphi in 490,7 has a two-fold purpose: first, to foreground a central motif that unites the song’s several parts and that existing accounts of the work have left unexplored; second, to link this motif to the question of the representation of the aulos and its music given by the poet. This approach to the ode raises several questions in its turn. To what extent does the Pindaric account of auletics anticipate developments in late-fifth century musical and instrumental styles and endorse precisely the practices that would be singled out for critique by those posing as champions of what they claim to be an older style mousike\? And if, as I argue, Pythian 12 does place Pindar unequivo- cally on the side of experimentation and change, and more specifically endorses a complex, heterophonic style of playing on the pipes, how is it that the poet, in keeping with other early innovators, escaped the censure that Phrynis, Timotheus, Philoxenus, and those of their kind notoriously

3 Wallace 2003, Franklin (forthcoming); see, too, d’Angour 2006. 4 Prauscello 2012, 61–62. 5 Franklin (forthcoming). 6 Martin 2003 is something of an exception, but with a very different, expressly socio- political focus. Pythian 12 is cited in full in the article’s Appendix; the translations there and in the remainder of the discussion are my own unless otherwise stated. 7 The date is securely attested by the existence of a list of Pythian victors; for this, see Tod 1946–50, 2.246–48. the gorgons’ lament 175 attracted in later decades? Was there, for ancient audiences, a qualitative difference between Pindar’s melic poikilia showcased in this and other odes, and the musical extravagances of the so-called New Musicians of late fifth-century Athens, and how do we explain the differing responses they provoked? The reading that follows falls into four principal parts. In section 1, I explore how Pindar’s initial account of Athena’s invention of the music played on the aulos highlights that melody’s multiplicity, elaboration, and complexity, a theme that will continue through the remainder of the work; here, too, drawing on several other texts, I further suggest that the poet’s (novel) use of the Gorgon sisters’ lament as the originary source of the goddess’ melos proves fundamental to the characterization auletic music receives. Section 2 proposes that Pindar prompts his audience to associate the tune devised by Athena with innovatory practices attributed to several real-world pipe-players credited with the introduction of new and complex musical techniques, and notes the intersections between the poet’s portrayal of the makeup of the goddess’ pipes and recent developments in aulos construction and technique that would enhance its polyphonic properties. In section 3, I address the larger myth that frames these particular elements: not only do we witness here a fresh instance of variegation, elaboration, and change that comments, in meta-poetic fashion, on the creation of the aulos and its music, but in re-imagining an existing story in newly fashioned form the poet again foregrounds the musical innovations advertised in the work. As I suggest, by virtue of the particular version of the myth that Pindar constructs, he also retrojects what is properly novel (and controversial) into the hallowed time of myth and so gives the new the patina of antiquity by grounding it in the actions of gods and heroes; as the concluding portion of the discussion argues, this retrojection also serves the poet’s broader agenda, the transformation of the one-off celebration of Midas’ victory into an enduring and recurrent event.

1. TRANSFORMING THE GORGONS’ CRY: REPLICATION AND DIFFERENCE

The story of Athena’s deployment of her powers of invention begins, in typical Pindaric fashion, with the relative pronoun τάν in line 6, and immediately depicts the goddess as engaged in a technological activity (cf. τεῦχε, 19) that serves as the point of origin for the cognate τέχνη (6) 176 deborah steiner of Midas celebrated in the ode.8 Elaboration is the hallmark of Athena’s craftsmanship from the outset: the goddess weaves or more properly “interweaves” (διαπλέξαισ’, 8) the Gorgons’ dirge into her melos. Schol- ars have offered differing accounts of the sounds that go into what the verb depicts as a medley or composite of several elements. Revising the older view that Athena combines the two plaints uttered by Medusa’s remaining sisters, Clay, followed by Segal and most readers after him,9 argues that the melos more properly consists of the Gorgons’ unitary lament and the victory shout that, if we accept the standard emendation ἄυσεν at 11, Perseus utters immediately afterwards. Held’s discussion, however, offers a persuasive case for returning to the earlier view and, among other points, notes that when the poet refers again to the Gorgons’ plaintive cry in lines 18–21 and to Athena’s imitation of this noise on the pipes, Pindar not only omits any reference to Perseus’ shout, but makes clear that the original lament contained two strains.10 As Held’s careful review of early usages of διαπλέκω also illustrates, in the majority of instances, and typically in Pindar’s own compositions, the verb describes not the several materials woven together but the object or end result of that interweave: not the warp and woof of the tapestry, but the finished fabric. Following these examples, the threnos\ fabricated by the goddess and introduced at line 8 properly applies to the end product of Athena’s handicraft: the melody generated by her technical artistry. The third strophe bears out this reading: when the poet circles back to the act of invention, Athena imitates not a threnos\\ but Euryale’s goos (21). While many later fifth-century sources make scant distinction between the nouns, the two Homeric passages where threnos\\ occurs clearly set the terms apart.11 In the Odyssey, the goos of Thetis’ sisters, kin of the dead Achilles, stands in contrast to the antiphonal and more formalized threnos\ performed by the Muses at the hero’s prothesis (24.58–62). So,

8 Note how Timotheus, in the sphragis of his Persians (202–5), re-sounds this topos of innovation when he calls on Apollo to defend the poet’s “new-fashioned” (νεοτευχῆ) Muse. 9 Clay 1992, with discussion of earlier accounts; Segal 1998. 10 Held 1998, 384; in support of his claim, here Held also observes that when the poet singles out the “echoing wail” of one of the two sisters, Euryale, at 20–21, he may suggest that the second Gorgon produces a different sound (or that Euryale’s plaintive utterance might be a reprise of what her companion had already cried out); note, too, his further comment at 381: while “the passage does imply that another sound occurs while the Gorgons are mourning, [it] in no way suggests that Athena attempts to imitate this other sound on the aulos.” 11 Alexiou 2002, 10–11. However, Swift 2010, 299–304, cautions that fifth-century drama does not draw a sharp distinction between the terms. the gorgons’ lament 177 too, at the funeral of Hector in the Iliad, it is the professional mourners who perform the threnos\\ while goos describes the wailing of the kins- women (24.720–23). As Alexiou notes, in Plutarch’s discussion of Solon’s funeral legislation, the law prohibits the singing of “set dirges” (θρηνεῖν πεποιημένα, Sol. 21.6), an expression that implies a “polished composition” rather than a spontaneous cry of grief; hence the appropriation of the threnos\\, not the goos, by the lyric poets who rework it into a fully literary form.12 Important also is the responsive relation between the two types of laments; in the Iliadic scenario, the threnos\\ is answered by a “refrain of cries”; in the Odyssey, as in Pindar’s Pythian 12, the sequence is reversed: the goos initiates the performance, the threnos\\ follows. Latent in these Homeric accounts of female lamentation, and in the Pindaric depiction, too, is a property native to the dirge which fuels its propensity for the repetition, multiplication, and generic diversification that my discussion goes on to document: the mourning performed by women almost inevita- bly involves antiphony between the individual(s) initiating the lament and a larger group that sings in response, typically picking up, repeating, and, on occasion, elaborating on the phrases used by the solo voice. Indeed, as Alexiou remarks, “there seems to be no example in Greek antiquity of a lament which has lost all traces of refrain.”13 In addition to the more “finished” quality observed by Plutarch, the threnos\ can be distinguished from the more primitive goos by its frequent association “with divine performers and a dominant musical element.”14 For the gods as practitioners of threnoi\\, we have, beyond Homeric epic, Pindar himself. In a self-referential nod to the composition being sung, he traces the origins of threnoi\\ back to a series of archetypal dirges composed by the Muses on behalf of Calliope’s mortal children, whose names, reiterated by their mother in her grief, became the designations or “memorials” for the diversified strains of lamentation sung in his times (fr. 128c S-M). Two passages from later Attic drama, which dovetail with the Pin- daric ode to a striking degree, suggest that the distinctions between the Gorgons’ primary utterance and Athena’s elaborated threnos\\ form part of broader and more commonplace notions concerning the nature of the originary female cry of grief and its relation to more formal lyric forms. In the parodos to Euripides’ Helen, what Helen, the solo singer at the start, initially designates a goos (if we follow the reading at line 170),

12 Alexiou 2002, 11. 13 Alexiou 2002, 134; see further Tsagalis 2004, 48–52, and Swift 2010, 306. 14 Alexiou 2002, 103. 178 deborah steiner will, when taken up by the immortal choral Sirens, become the threnos\ to which line 174 refers.15 In keeping with the Pindaric template, the move from goos to threnos\ and from a more earth-bound singer to the realm of the immortals presaged by the protagonist also involves instrumental supplementation. Although Helen invokes the Sirens as singers (173), in the first instance she calls on them as pipers: “would that you might come, bringing the Libyan lotus-flute or the pan pipes to my woeful wails” (169–71).16 When the chorus members describe what they have heard Helen utter, they draw attention to its un-instrumented character, an ἄλυρον ἔλεγον (185). The adjective is typically used by tragedians for something marked out as mournful, threnetic, and a departure from the desirable harmony, but here the expression suggests other anomalies too; elegies—in the sense of funerary laments—and funeral songs in general are typically performed to the accompaniment of the aulos, but Helen’s plaint lacks any instrumentation. A musical component likewise comes to transform Procne’s avian lament as described in the Hoopoe’s song in Aristophanes’ Birds (209–22), this within a passage that, many critics argue, offers the model on which Euripides then draws for his Helen parodos of just two years later. Even before the divine choral singers appear to perform their work of melic elaboration on Procne’s solo cry, Tereus imagines Apollo playing an instrumental prelude (217–18). The Pindaric Athena’s melos possesses other properties indicative of how this archetypal auletic strain is not just a composite but also something multiplied and/or polished and refined. Standard translations of οὔλιον used of the threnos\\ (8) render the adjective “deathly,” “dread,” “destructive,” but both the parallel expression ἐρικλάγκταν γόον in line 21, with its patent focus on the sound imitated by the goddess, and the ode’s larger musical and acoustical orientation suggest that Pindar may have a second sense in mind.17 Twice in the Iliad, Homer refers to companies of birds and men as οὖλον κεκλήγοντες (17.756, 759), a phrase descriptive of the “often repeated” or “close packed” quality of the cries. This meaning fits the character of the sounds that mourners typically make, whether in the form of the goos or threnos\\; repetition is the “characteristic mode of lament,”18 both in its internal diction and in the way, already noted, in

15 For this, see the rich discussion of Ford 2010, 287. Both the Helen parodos and the passage from Aristophanes’ Aves discussed below are cited in the Appendix. 16 Artistic representations from the late archaic and classical period regularly show Sirens variously equipped with lyres and with pipes, the latter more frequently. 17 Here I draw on the observations of Gerber 1986. 18 Ford 2010, 297. the gorgons’ lament 179 which another mourner echoes the cries uttered by the initiator of the performance. There may even be a recollection of the Homeric phrasing as Pindar divides up the two terms of the epic expression, applying οὖλον to the threnos\\, and κλάζω to the goos. The Aristophanic Hoopoe’s song observes the same evolution; it is not so much Procne’s cry that travels upwards to Olympus as its “echo,” this repeated element passing to the seat of Zeus through the “leaf-tressed bryony” (Av. 214–16). If the move from goos to threnos\\ in Pythian 12 involves artful and specifically musical elaboration when divinely supplemented, then this is not the only transformation that the Gorgons’ wailing undergoes. As Pindar is careful to specify, the source of these plaints is not so much the sisters as their “unapproachable snaky heads” (παρθενίοις ὑπό τ’ ἀπλάτοις ὀφίων κεφαλαῖς, 9). The characterization is important on two counts: first, because it shows that the lament, even in its initial form, already features the multiplicity further developed by those who take it up, and second, because it conveys the move from the world of unacculturated, bestial sound to a finished manufactured and artistic product. While most scholars translate line 9 as indicating the plaint’s point of origin—it comes “from” or “from under” the serpents’ heads—in fifth-century poetry,ὑπό with the dative may be used to describe “attendant circumstances,” including, on several occasions, musical accompaniment.19 This, I suggest, makes better sense of the account: the snakes act as ophidian antiphonists, their bestial hissing answering to or accompanying the shrieks of the maidens,20 a combination that, as my discussion in section 2 details, looks forward to Athena’s finished and composite product. The termκλαγγή within the phrase foregrounds the discordant and animalistic quality of these sounds; frequently, although not exclusively, used of the shriek of birds and cries of other animals, it appears again in the harshly dysphonic characterization of the noises issued by the snakes that adorn Athena’s aegis in Pindar’s second Dithyramb (μυρίων φθογγάζεται κλαγγαῖς δρακόντων, fr. 70b.18 S-M).21 Again, the poet’s choice of expression may draw on more broad- based conventions used in the characterization of the goos: much as Pindar—with Athena as auditory “focalizer” here—hears the outpouring of grief on the Gorgon sisters’ part as mere serpentine cacophony, so,

19 See LSJ for examples. Note, too, the formula in the hexameter tradition, ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδε, used of “singing under,” i.e., along with or to the accompaniment of the lyre. 20 Segal 1998, 83, suggests this in passing but does not elaborate. See, too, Frontisi- Ducroux 1994, 255. 21 Cf. Aesch. Ag. 1150, in the context of Cassandra’s threnetic song. 180 deborah steiner too, in the view of the responding chorus in Euripides’ Helen, the singer’s initial cry of grief is incoherent, inarticulate sound, further likened to the νόμον γοερόν (188) uttered by a Naiad-in-distress.22 Deploying another verb also used of avian shrieks and the bark of dogs, Helen, the chorus observes, “screams out” (ἔλακεν, 185) her wail. Like the Gorgons’ goos, too, this mourner’s plaint finds accompaniment not in music, but in another set of natural sonorities: “and in accompaniment to the screams the rocky vales shout aloud” (ὑπὸ δὲ πέτρινα γύαλα κλαγγαῖσι . . . ἀναβοᾶι, 188–90). Ford’s translation of ὑπό, which he views as indicating not the locus of the cry (“within” the caves), but, in tmesis with the verb, as that cry’s accompaniment, brings out not just the supplementation that these rocky elements supply (much as the snakes do in Pindar, and the bryony in the Birds) but also freshly marks the pre-cultural, elemental, and even chthonic character of the still unrefined goos. One final facet of Pindar’s opening account differentiates the Gorgons’ wail from the revisionary, “artificed” tune that Athena will produce: the mourning cry is “poured forth” (10). While λείβω belongs to many different spheres, and perhaps most appositely to an outpouring of tears, blood, or the libations integral to the commemoration of the dead (this last typically accompanied by the aulos), it also underscores the spontaneous, natural, and boundless quality of the utterance.23 So in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, the poet likens the divinity to a nightingale that “gushes out a dirge in a gush” (θρῆνον ἐπιπροχέουσ’ ἀχέει, 18).24 The same liquid stream belongs to an earlier mourning nightingale, the bird to whom the Homeric Penelope compares herself; this avian griever also “pours forth” (χέει, Od. 19.521) its song in a ceaseless liquid stream. Turned into Athena’s melody—this both delimited by the goddess’ act of naming which gives it a definable form, and, as Segal highlights,25 contained or confined by the bronze channel of the pipes in the final strophe—the Gorgons’ sound loses its unbounded quality. The nightingale, the prototypical singer of laments, supplies a further key to the motifs of multiplicity, repetition, and variegation so prominent in Pythian 12 and illuminates Pindar’s seemingly unlikely choice of the Gorgons’ wails as the original source of Athena’s “pamphonic melos”

22 Ford 2010, 294–95, details the point. 23 Cf. Segal 1998, 93, for a different view. 24 The translation is from Ford 2010, 296, n. 48, who nicely preserves the element of repetition native to the lament. 25 Segal 1998. the gorgons’ lament 181

(19).26 As numerous ancient descriptions of the bird affirm, its tuneful strains are diverse, proliferating, and capable of fresh metastasis into different forms. In the Odyssey passage just cited, the nightingale pours out a complex, “many-turned,” and “much-echoing” sound (θαμὰ τρωπῶσα χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, 521); like the close-packed, οὔλιον, quality of the Pindaric Gorgons’ cry, this avian melody also comes out “thick and fast” (θαμά), and πολυ-compounds multiply in later accounts of the bird’s song, some in explicit reference to the threnetic quality of its strains.27 In Homer’s deployment of the motif, the bird perches in foliage that is “dense” or “close-packed” (πυκινοῖσιν, 520), much as the abundantly leafed bryony surrounds the Aristophanic diva. Like οὔλιον in Pythian 12, πυκνός can also be applied to the nature of the nightingale’s song, its compression of many elements into a single composite.28 A rather different form of “many-ness” belongs to another prototypical song of mourning. As already noted, Pindar locates the source(s) of the threnos\\ in the laments sung by the Muses by way of “memorials” for the sons of Calliope, the name of each generating its own threnetic form, the Linos, Hymenaios, and Ialemos strains. In what we know of these, one element of sound, or the name itself, is repeated several times, while one ancient etymology for elegos, in its later fifth-century sense of “sung lament,” would derive it from the cry ἒ ἒ λέγειν (“to say ‘woe! woe!’”).29 A song of Alcman, which begins with the poetic ego mourning his lost youth, likewise builds repetition into the diction and poetics of lament: assuming the character of the kerylos, the male counterpart to another archetypal avian mourner, the halcyon, the speaker sounds out his pre-verbal and iterative plaint: “if only, if only I were a kerylos” (βάλε δὴ βάλε κηρύλος εἴην, fr. 26.2).

26 For the question of Pindar’s innovatory version of the myth, see section 3. 27 E.g., Simon. fr. 586 PMG, Eur. Rhes. 546, πολυχορδοτάται, fr. 773.26 πολύθρηνον; for the adjectives ποικίλος and αἰόλος also used of the nightingale and its song, see Steiner 2007, 180. In Helen (1111) and the Aves (214), the expressions ξουθᾶν γενύων and γένυος ξουθῆς describe the nightingale’s throat (cf. the καρπαλιμᾶν γενύων at Pyth. 12.20); in their respective commentaries, Allan 2008 and Dunbar 1995 both explain the adjective as a reference not to color but to a vibrating, quivering sound and motion; this very much parallels the Pindaric adjective, also evocative of a rapid and repeated movement. 28 See Rosen 1990, 109; as he comments, by the fourth century the term has taken its place in Greek musical theory for the compression of intervals between notes. Also apposite is a further meaning of πυκνός, “continuous, quick.” 29 For this, see Bowie 1986, 25. Note the repeated use of the refrain derived from the Linos melody, αἵλινον αἵλινον εἰπέ, in the parodos of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. 182 deborah steiner

The multiplicity adhering to the primordial lament may in part explain a final aspect of this type of music-and-vocalization: the mutability or capacity for diversification, heterogeneity, and generic transformation featured in Pythian 12. Even with Perseus’ triumphal cry subtracted from the composite, Athena’s melos takes the form of an epinician melody marking the moment when the hero brings his trials to their victorious conclusion.30 This generic instability belongs to the two closely comparable songs in Attic drama cited above: Helen signals the shifting and generically protean quality of her cry by re-styling the “woeful wails” a paean (Eur. Hel. 177),31 while in Aristophanes, the Muses issue an ὀλολυγή (Av. 222), the shout that regularly accompanies a moment of triumph and joy and paeans too,32 as Apollo re-plays Procne’s lament on his lyre. Herodotus also notes how the song of mourning can diversify and be transformed into multiple other strains: in his account, the Egyptian threnos\\ (and Egypt is the land of so many primordial things) stands ancestor to all subsequent melic genres, the very first aoide \\from which heterogeneous later forms in Egypt and Greece evolved.33 The variegation and mutability attributed to the dirge in fifth-century sources feature again in a later author who, citing the portrayal of the mournful nightingale to which the Odyssean Penelope likens herself, freshly draws attention to what happens when a spontaneous lament evolves into a more finished, polished product and generically diverse forms.34 Discussing a variant to Odyssey 19.521, Aelian comments, “there are even those who write πολυδευκέα φωνήν” (NA 5.38). The frame for his remark is the naturalist’s report of what he heard from one Charmis of Massalia, who describes how, dependent on the circumstances, the winged mourner can change her tune: “[Charmis] goes on to say that when [the nightingale] is singing to herself in deserted places, her melody is simple and the bird sings without preparation. But when she is captured and has no lack of listeners, he says that she strikes up her melody in a varied (ποικίλα) manner and meltingly winds (τακερῶς ἑλίττειν) the melody around.” As in the earlier accounts, once the performer of the dirge moves from a solitary or natural locale to a public setting and the company of

30 As Swift 2010, 313, observes, encomia and thre\noi are proximate genres insofar as lament for the dead often features praise of their achievements. 31 See Allan 2008 for good discussion. 32 Barker 2004, 192, comments on the unstable and shifting nature of what Procne sings: “It is too many things at once. It is a νόμος, a ὕμνος, a θρῆνος, an ἔλεγος.” 33 See Ford 2002, 151–52, for discussion of the passage. 34 My account builds on the illuminating reading in Nagy 1996, 7–38. the gorgons’ lament 183

(potentially responsive) others, the spontaneous, unpolished cry acquires the quintessential hallmark of ornamented and highly wrought works of art, becoming ποικίλα, a term that describes variegation, patterning, decking out, the simulation of motion and change, and, in fifth-century meta-musical texts, melic complexity. The expression τακερῶς ἑλίττειν signals the generic diversification also at work in this nightingale’s passage from the natural to the accul- turated realm. The adverb regularly occurs in erotic contexts, used of the “melting” looks cast from the eyes of a beloved;35 the bird of mourning now sings a song evocative of the love poetry performed by the lyric and elegiac poets of the archaic age. With ἑλίττειν, a further melic form makes its entry. Typically such winding appears in the context of the choral dance whose performers spiral about a central object, whirling and eddying in circular formations;36 the solo singer seems to become a whole choral company that performs in unison. This spiraling motion also implies passage from place to place and, concomitantly, from one melic genre to another; recall the account given by the Aristophanic Hoopoe of the nightingale, whose utterances describe the self-same “whirling” or eddying motion (ἐλελιζομένη, Av. 213, usually rendered “vibrating” in this instance) as they spiral upwards before being incorporated into a divine choreia. The close of Aelian’s discussion may likewise be read not just as a learned disquisition on a textual variant but also as a gloss on the musical evolutions that Charmis has described. Explaining the obscure phrase πολυδευκέα φωνήν, Aelian notes that the expression describes a voice “making imitation in a varied way” (ποικίλως μεμιμημένην) and comments that the adverb’s antonym, ἀδευκέα, means “not at all adapted for mimesis.” The mimetic property assigned here to the Odyssean mourner’s voice is similarly realized in the event that Pythian 12 narrates: hearing in the Gorgons’ spontaneous, simple lament the sound’s latent “imitability,” Athena devises a melody “so as to imitate” (μιμήσαιτ’, 21) the goos and in so doing adds those elements of complexity and variation—the emission is no longer singular, but a “many-voiced” (πάμφωνον, 19) tune—that Aelian’s ποικίλως evokes. As the next sections will detail, the set-piece threnos\\ that Athena creates from the Gorgons’ originary cry of mourning will generate several mimetic musical responses in its turn, these standing in a chronological line leading from the myth to Pindar’s day.

35 E.g., Ibyc. 287.2, AP 9.567; cf. Anacr. 459. 36 For detailed discussion, see Csapo 1999/2000, 419–22. 184 deborah steiner

2. AULETIC DIFFERENTIATION AND MULTIPLICITY

Closing the ring initiated in line 7, the poet returns at line 18 to his point of departure and re-visualizes, or re-sounds, his earlier account of Athena’s act of invention. Where my earlier discussion of this reprise flagged the ways in which it both cohered with and artistically elaborated on what we had heard before, I now focus on the more narrowly musicological issues introduced in the ode’s second half. Detailing the particular types of multiplicity that belong to the instrument and melos that Athena invents, I highlight how these properties prove key both to the several earlier (or legendary) auletic compositions which Pindar’s diction invites his audience to understand as offshoots of and counterparts to what the goddess first devised, and to the poet’s representation of the music and makeup of the originary pipes. Each of these facets of Athena’s invention turns out to bear closely on musicological developments current with the composition of Pythian 12. Pindar’s mention of the title that Athena gives to her newly created tune is nothing if not finely calculated. Through the choice of name, the κεφαλᾶν πολλᾶν νόμον (“tune of many heads,” 23), the goddess/poet invites us (in a fresh duplication with a difference) to hear in what she plays a forerunner or prototype of an auletic air performed by virtuosic pipers in Pindar’s own day, the so-called πολυκέφαλος νόμος (“many-headed tune”), supposedly the creation of the Phrygian pipe-player Olympus and performed in honor of Apollo at Delphi (Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1133d).37 According to both the scholiasts whose glosses on the Pindaric passage identify this latter-day tune with Athena’s invention, and the other sources that discuss it, the “heads” of the title refer either to the musical sections of the nome, or to the heads of the snakes in the Gorgons’ bestial coif- fure. A performance of this melody became a “required element” in the auletic competitions in the Pythian Games at which Midas triumphed. But implicit in Athena’s act of naming is a reference to another prize piece performed at the contests.38 If our scholia and Ps.-Plutarch correctly link Athena’s πολυκέφαλος νόμος to celebrations of Apollo, then the poet points his audience towards a nomos still more intimately connected with that second god and that, in keeping with Pindar’s ear-

37 As noted by Held 1998, 385, and Frontisi-Ducroux 1994, 259–60. For the nome, see Barker 1984, 51–53, 253, and West 1992, 214. West notes that according to Aristox. fr. 80, Olympus was also credited with being the first to perform an auletic lament for the Pythian serpent; together his two melodies supply an antecedent to Pythian 12, which combines lament for the dead and celebration. 38 See Frontisi-Ducroux 1994, 259–60. the gorgons’ lament 185 lier description of Athena’s innovation as “mimetic” (μιμήσαιτ’, 21), was designated an “auletic imitation” (μίμησις αὐλητική). First associated with the pipe-player Sacadas of Argos (himself a three-time victor in the auletic competition at the Pythian games between 586 and 578), the so-called “Pythian nome” (Πυθικὸς Νόμος) aimed to conjure up through sound the fight between Apollo and the snake guarding the Delphic site. Particularly ample is Pollux’s description of the five parts, orμέρη , that work included (Onom. 4.84, trans. following Barker): The auletic Pythikos nomos has five parts, peira, katakeleusmos, iambikon, spondeion and katachoreusis. The nomos is a showing forth of the battle of Apollo against the serpent. In the peira [test, trial], he surveys the ground to see if it is suitable for the contest. In the katakeleusmos [challenge] he calls up the serpent and in the iambikon he fights; the iambikon also includes kroumata [beatings, sounds] like those of the salpinx and gnashings like those of the serpent as it grinds its teeth after being pierced with arrows. The spondeion shows the victory of the god; and in the katachoreusis [dance of triumph] the god performs a dance of victory.39

Pindar may even be giving a foretaste of this Πυθικὸς Νόμος earlier in the song, when he describes how his hero “shouted out as he carried off the third part of the sisters, bringing doom to maritime Seriphos and its people” (ὁπότε τρίτον ἄυσεν κασιγνητᾶν μέρος / ἐνναλίᾳ Σερίφῳ λαοῖσί τε μοῖραν ἄγων, 11–12). This victory cry would correspond to the final two portions (note Pindar’s matching use of the unlikely term μέρος)40 of the Πυθικὸς Νόμος where the tune imitates Apollo’s triumph and celebration of his defeat of his monstrous, serpentine female aggressor, an act that so closely resembles Perseus’ own (see section 3). It is, perhaps, in order to point his audience not just towards this “Pythian nome,” but to a second musical innovation assigned to Sacadas, that Pindar includes this somewhat abrupt reference to events in Seriphos and designates Medusa, in a curious expression puzzled over by commentators,41 the “third part.”

39 For discussion, see Barker 1984, 52–53, and West 1992, 214. Strabo’s broadly similar description contains an additional detail; among the different parts he includes the syringes, in which “players imitated the death of the monster as it expired with its final whistlings” (συριγμούς, 9.3.10). Olympus was also credited with the invention of the spondeion that makes up the melody’s final part; Frontisi-Ducroux 1994, 259, n. 45, suggests a possible allusion to this in Pindar’s use of λειβόμενον at 10. 40 See Frontisi-Ducroux 1994, 256–59, for this and other overlaps between the language and conceits of Pythian 12 and Pollux’s account. 41 For other readings and discussions of lines 11–12, see Segal 1995, Segal 1998, 30, and Held 1998, with earlier bibliography. 186 deborah steiner

According to post-Pindaric ancient accounts, the Argive aulete devised something called the “Piece in Three Tunings” (Τριμελῆ Νόμον; note, too, the variant in Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1134a–b, Τριμερῆ Νόμον), a composition notorious for its novel practices in tonal modulation, with the chorus singing the first strophe in the Dorian tonos, the second in the Phrygian, and the third in the Lydian.42 What is apparent from the sources’ descriptions of these several real-world analogues to Athena’s auletic air is that each aimed to showcase the pipe-player’s ability (and in the last instance, that of the chorus too) to produce a broad spectrum of notes, sounds, and “tunings.” The scholia suggest the incorporation of the snakes’ hisses in Olympus’ πολυκέφαλος νόμος, and the πολυ of the melody’s title stands as proof of the heterogeneous elements and “sound effects” that the piper would be required to achieve; so, too, Pollux details the range of sonorities included in the five-part Pythian Nomos, and its exploitation, like Olympus’ innovation, of the mimetic powers of the instrument so as to generate something resembling that πάμφωνον μέλος of Pindar’s poem; diverse registers of sound and ethos are likewise the defining feature of Sacadas’Τριμελῆ Νόμον featuring modulation between the different harmoniai. Motivating Pythian 12’s emphatic pointers towards what is musically manifold is, I further suggest, the poet’s desire to use his ode to broadcast audibly as well as verbally the musical/compositional practices he endorses. Such a concern is very much at home in a work designed to celebrate a star musician through a notional reconstruction of the history of his art and that congratulates a victorious pipe-player who, our scholia inform us, emulated Sacadas by imitating the hissings of the snake. Support for these suggestions comes from the correspondence between the musical preferences on display in Pythian 12 and those in other Pindaric poetry. As scholars have recognized,43 the opening portion of the second Dithyramb (fr. 70b S-M) offers a qualified endorsement of the recent innovations of the late sixth-century Lasus of Hermione, credited with a variety of experiments in music for the aulos and with having written the first work of musicology (and even with being Pindar’s teacher in some ancient accounts).44 While rejecting Lasus’ ill-conceived attempts

42 Pindar supposedly wrote a proemium (fr. 282 S-M) about Sacadas; so Pausanias 9.30.2 and Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1134a with Franklin (forthcoming). 43 See D’Angour 1997, Porter 2007, 6, and Porter 2010, 371–401, for an expanded version. 44 For the Lasus-Pindar affiliation, see Privitera 1965, 86–88, Wallace 2003, 78, and Prauscello 2012, 63; for Lasus’ treatise, Suda s.v.; cf. Mart. Cap. 9.936. the gorgons’ lament 187 to compose asigmatic songs, Pindar not only approves his rearrangement of the members of the chorus in circular rather than linear formation45 but, in his evocation of the originary performance of a dithyramb among the gods, seems also to practice precisely the polyphony and expansion of the sonic spectrum that Ps.-Plutarch, drawing on fourth-century sources, assigned to Lasus; according to De musica 1141b–c, “Lasus of Hermione, by altering the rhythms for the music of the dithyramb and by pursuing the example of the multiplicity of notes (πολυφωνίᾳ) belonging to the aulos (and so making use of more notes, widely scattered about) transformed the music that existed before him.”46 Although scholars continue to puzzle over the exact meaning of Ps.-Plutarch’s terms, the account suggests that Lasus aimed to transpose the tonal range and versatility of the aulos and its melodic structures to the kithara (it was supposedly lyre-playing that Pindar learnt from his “teacher”) and to the voice in his choral compositions.47 The opening of Pindar’s second Dithyramb puts these practices very much on show: through song and auletic accompaniment, the poet conjures up not just the hissing of the snakes but also the sounds of rhomboi (“bull-roarers”), cry of castanets (9–10), and the “loud-thudding groans” (ἐρίγδουποι˘ στοναχαί, 11) of the Naiad chorus; cap- ping this aural barrage comes the resounding “fire-blowing thunderbolt” in line 15.48 Relevant to the emphasis on deep sonorities and the lower tonal registers apparent here is another of Lasus’ acoustic experimenta- tions, this advertised in the poet’s sole extant fragment where, in the last of three asigmatic lines, he announces his embrace of the “deep-sounding (βαρύβρομον) Aeolian mode” (702 PMG). Another Pindaric fragment, this from a composition of unknown genre, again promotes heterogeneity and an expansive repertoire of sounds and makes clear the polemical aspect to the “Lasian” choices audible in the Dithyramb. According to the scholia on fragment 140b S-M, the song critiques an innovator from a century before, the Locrian Xenocritus, who, the poem and scholia record, “devised the [Locrian]

45 This is the now broadly accepted reading of D’Angour 1997. Ancient commentators already saw a reference to Lasus in the opening reference to the “impure san” (2). 46 Trans. Barker 1984, 325. 47 In the further suggestion of Porter 2007, 10, Lasus himself stands heir to Sacadas’ practices, perhaps transposing his predecessor’s auletic innovations to choral compositions. 48 These phrases appear in lines 7–18: σεμνᾷ μὲν κατάρχει Ματέρι πὰρ μ⎣εγ⎦άλᾳ ῥόμβοι τυπάνων,/ ἐν δὲ κέχλαδ[εν] κρόταλʹ αἰθομένα τε/ δαῒς ὑπὸ ξαν[θα]ῖσι˘ πεύκαις·/ ἐν δὲ Ναΐδων ˘ρίγδουποι˘ἐ στοναχαί/ μανίαι τ’ ἀλαλ[αί] τʹ ὀρίνεται ῥιψαύχενι/ σὺν κλόνῳ./ ἐν δʹ ὁ παγκρατὴς κεραυνὸς ἀμπνέων/ πῦρ κεκίνη˘[ται˘ τό τ’] Ἐν˘υαλί˘ ου/˘ ἔγχος, ἀλκάεσσά [τ]ε ˘Παλλάδο[ς] αἰγίς/ μυρίων φθογγάζεται κλαγγαῖς δρακόντων. 188 deborah steiner song and harmonia for the pipes” (2–4). In the lines that follow, Pindar makes a bid for the mantle of innovation assumed by Xenocritus, stak- ing his challenge on the grounds of his more varied and polyphonous instrumentation:49 “hearing him playing his few (παῦρα) notes and plying my loquacious ([γλώ]σσαργον) [art], I am roused to rival his song” (11–14). A piece by the mid fifth-century Ion of Chios confirms that a poet-composer might distinguish himself from predecessors, rivals, and practices viewed as outmoded through a heightened musical heterophony: in his fragment 32 W, Ion rejects the “meagerness” (σπανία) of earlier music and celebrates an extended range of sounds by virtue of innovations not in auletics but in the construction of the lyre.50 Fresh evidence for intervention in current musical debates, and pertinent to the pamphonia\ showcased by Pythian 12, is Pindar’s endorsement of loquacity in fragment 140b, a property that in his epinician works regularly draws fire; the inconsistency may be explained on the grounds that a practice deserving censure in the verbal/encomiastic sphere (i.e., digressing or praising at excessive length) becomes desirable in composition and instrumentation, where it can refer to the multiplicity of notes produced by rapidly plying hands and tongue (so “being busy about,” ἀμφέπων, at line 14) on the lyre or pipes. The issue that Pindar and Ion of Chios raise may surface again in a line assigned to a possible adherent of an opposing musical, and here expressly auletic, style and technique. When the contemporary Simonides (a rival of Pindar’s, according to the scholia at least) critiques the mythical piper Marsyas, he charges him with having a “greedy mouth” (στόμα λάβρον, fr. 160 D), perhaps a reference to the overly diverse sounds that the piper generated by varying the tension and position of his mouth and lips against the aulos reed (see below).51 In later Attic comedy at least, Simonides appears a musical old fogey, who “trains a chorus” to rival that of the forward-looking Lasus (Ar. Vesp. 1410–11).52

49 For discussion of this and the passage from Ion of Chios, see Porter 2007, 8. 50 “Eleven-stringed lyre, with your arrangement of ten steps and your concordant junctions of tuning, previously you were seven-toned and all Greeks plucked you four by four, raising a meager muse (σπανίαν μοῦσαν)” (trans. Campbell 1992). It is, of course, the same Ion whom Callimachus associates, approvingly, with polyeideia (Ia. 13.43–45, with the gloss in the Diegesis), whether this refers to writing in multiple genres in serial fashion or to generic contamination. Suggestively, Callimachus’ lines go on to mention a “Lydian aulos” and “strings.” 51 Fr. 160 D = Plut. Mor. 456c. See, too, Theophr. Hist. pl. 4.11.4–5. 52 Wallace 2003, 80; for a different characterization of Simonides, see Franklin (forthcoming); as he notes, fr. 947b PMG, attributed to the poet, describes the πολύχορδος αὐλός. the gorgons’ lament 189

The aulos is, of course, absolutely integral to this expanded sonority. There is no need to revisit the sources (so finely treated by Wilson, Csapo, and Martin)53 that present the pipes as the “panphonic” instrument par excellence or, in the term that Ps.-Plutarch selects in the passage cited earlier, able to produce “a multiplicity of notes” (πολυφωνίᾳ). The epithets used by the lyric poets, and by many (frequently hostile) sources after them, repeatedly signal this dimension of the aulos: it is dubbed not just πάμφωνος, but also πολύχορδος, πολύφωνος, ποικίλος, and αἰόλος;54 so, too, Plato designates the pipes the “most many-noted of instruments” and traces what he calls “panharmonics” back to the instrument.55 While I address the typically pejorative cast of these characterizations at this section’s end, for the moment I want only to note that many of the auletic and other musical practices styled “new” in these critics more properly, following the passages cited above, have their origins in the late sixth and early fifth centuries.56 Retrojecting these innovations onto the rapidly developing musical landscape of almost a century before illuminates several other aspects of Pythian 12. Among the charges marshaled by traditionalists against New Musical techniques, and specifically auletic novelties and the players’ appropriations of other genres, the pipes’ mimetic powers frequently appear.57 Alongside the Pindaric ode’s emphasis on musical and generic multiplication is this motif of mimesis: the impetus for Athena’s creation of her auletic air is her desire to “imitate” the sound made by the Gor- gons. As noted above, the nome devised by Sacadas and evoked by Pin- dar’s language was also called a μίμησις αὐλητική, an imitative re-play of Apollo’s defeat of the Pythian serpent. But mimesis exists at several other levels in the ode; not only, as Frontisi-Ducroux observes,58 does Athena’s invention offer an auditory parallel to the act of visual re-presentation that Medusa’s decapitation allows (her head becomes an artistic artifact displayed on Athena’s shield and reproducible elsewhere) but the goddess’ mimetic musicianship also allows us to hear, in sanitized and artful form, the previously “unapproachable” sounds that the Gorgons made.

53 Wilson 1999, Csapo 2004, Martin 2003. 54 E.g., Ol. 7.11–12, Isth. 5. 27, fr. 947b PMG (Simonides?), Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1141c. 55 “Well then, will you admit to the city makers of auloi and aulos-players? Or is this not the most ‘many-stringed’ of instruments and are not the ‘panharmonics’ themselves an imitation of the aulos?” (Rep. 339d). 56 See nn. 3 and 4 for the current scholarship arguing for a backdating of the innovations traditionally assigned to the New Musicians. 57 Csapo 2004, 219, documents this. 58 Frontisi-Ducroux 1994. 190 deborah steiner

Pythian 12 supplies two other grounds for backdating the types of changes targeted by later critics and musical reactionaries. In the closing strophe, whose opening lines concentrate more narrowly on the instrument than the poet has done before, Pindar describes the makeup of the aulos on which Athena composed her melody; the tune once played by the goddess now “often passes through the thin bronze and the reeds” (25). The phrase has attracted persuasive readings from Segal and Clay,59 but notable here too is the central role that both materials singled out for mention could play in enhancing the instrument’s heterophony.60 First, the “reeds” used to fashion the mouthpiece of the pipes, and which, as Theophrastus details, were critical in determining the notes issued by the aulos and the pipers’ playing styles.61 Describing the plants growing around Lake Copais, precisely those on which Pindar dwells at lines 26–27, the author remarks that their processing was advanced from autumn to late summer so as to suit altered fashions in auletics, a move he dates to the period “when they changed to an elaborate (εἰς τὴν πλάσιν) style of playing.”62 Granted, Theophrastus dates this elaboration to the late fifth or early fourth century,63 but a fragment from the mid fifth-century poet Telestes, which reworks several terms and conceits from Pythian 12, already makes reeds integral to its representation of the complex, poly- morphic, and variegated quality of the sounds produced by the pipes. In lines that offer an alternate organological “history,” and whose focus on breath, use of alliterative expressions, and complex aural design mimic the playing of a virtuosic instrumentalist,64 Telestes describes Marsyas as the “Phrygian king of holy auloi with beautiful breath (καλλιπνόων πνεύματος) who was the first to fit together the quivering Lydian strain (νόμον αἰόλον) . . . weaving together the well-winged breeze of his breath to the reeds of changing form” (αἰολομόρφοις / πνεύματος εὔπτερον αὔραν

59 Segal 1998, 96, 97; Clay 1992 emphasizes the duality of the aulos with its two reeds and two pipes and traces the series of syntheses of other twofold phenomena in the ode; her insights have proved very valuable for my approach. 60 For more detailed discussion of several of the points made below, see Papadopoulou and Pirenne-Delforge 2001, 47–51. 61 Indeed, as Barker 1987, 106, points out, the only way that pipe-players could tune their instruments before their actual performance was by “adjusting the length of the reed protruding from the bore.” 62 Hist. pl. 4.11.4. In so describing this style, Barker 1984, 187, n. 5, suggests Theo- phrastus would have in mind its elaborate ornamentations. 63 Like other sources of the time, Theophrastus may be down-dating innovations of an earlier age so as to align them with New Musical practices. 64 For excellent discussion of these points, see Leven 2008, 54–55. the gorgons’ lament 191

ἀμφιπλέκων καλάμοις, 806.3–4 PMG).65 Αs αἰολομόρφοις confirms αἰόλος( and its compounds typically describe things that rapidly change; it is also used, from the early fifth century on, for heterogeneity in melody and instrumentation),66 musical complexity and stylistic variegation depend on the no less metamorphic reeds. In a still closer nod to auletic technique, Telestes may also allude to the literal change in shape that the mouthpiece would undergo: as an amphora by the Peleus Painter of ca. 430 illustrates in the person of a pipe-playing Muse,67 the piper softened his reed with his fingers before performing so as to give it the desired form. While most scholars regard as mere fantasy the view recorded in the scholia to Pythian 12 that interprets the closing gnomic lines as an allusion to the misfortune that befell Midas in the course of the competition (his reed supposedly broke),68 as so often the ancient commentators may be picking up on a topic of central concern in the poem: the role of the mouthpiece in new-style instrumentals. With innovation and virtuosity so much at issue within the ode, Pindar’s description of the “thin bronze” that he couples with the reeds may likewise glance towards recent developments in manufacturing pipes. Although, again, the modification is usually dated to the second half of the fifth century, Papadopoulou and Pirenne-Delforge have recently sug- gested that Theban instrument makers (the leaders in the field) might already have introduced the practice of covering the aulos in a casing of hammered bronze, this equipped with some sort of mechanism complete with hooks or viroles, at this earlier time.69 (It is tempting to imagine that Midas would even have owed his win to his new-style instrument.) The development would be critical in expanding the range of the instrument since it permitted a second invention, keys. Later sources again attribute this novelty to Theban pipers, and not just to Pronomos, who postdates Pindar, but to his predecessor Diodorus, an aulete whose dates remain frustratingly unknown.

65 Here I adopt the emendation proposed by Wilamowitz for the final expression in line three; different editors offer a variety of possible supplements for the corrupt phrasing transmitted in Ath. Deipn. 617b. 66 See Pratin. fr. 712a PMG, where the poet puns on αἰόλος so as to evoke the vari egated nature of the controversial Aeolian (Αἰολεύς) mode (noted by Csapo 2004, 230, n. 101); the same adjective recurs in Telestes’ celebration of the aulos: here Athena plays the instrument with “flashing fingers quivering like wingsαἰολοπτερύγων ( )” (805c PMG). See, too, Soph. Ichn. fr. 314 for the use of αἰόλισμα in reference to the diverse tones of the lyre (with Prauscello 2012, 74, n. 98). 67 London, British Museum E 271. 68 See Gentili and Luisi 1995 for a detailed account of the incident. 69 Papadopoulou and Pirenne-Delforge 2001, 48–50. 192 deborah steiner

While a reference to the metallic covering enclosing the instrument remains a matter of conjecture, the adjective Pindar chooses here maintains the ode’s focus on wide-ranging sonorities. Later authors regularly use “light” or “delicate” (λεπτός) of certain registers of sound, and of ones eminently well suited to and explicitly connected with the pipes. In Ps.-Aristotle, λεπτός describes “fine” as opposed to “coarse” voices (φωναί), a distinction that in part depends on the regulation of the speaker’s breath. In the prolongation of the discussion, the Peripatetic author applies these same adjectives to the sounds produced by different modes of playing the pipes, these in part dependent on the character of the mouthpiece cited next in the phrase: “if one compresses the pair of reeds, the sound becomes higher-pitched and thinner (λεπτοτέρα), as it does if one pulls down the syringes;70 and if one closes them, the bulk of the sound becomes fuller because of the quantity of breath.”71 A self- referential glance towards the higher-pitched notes currently supplied by the ode’s piper, and reproduced in the singers’ voices, seems plausible at this point in the Pindaric song; here sound and sense could correspond. The juxtaposition of bronze and reeds may bear on the powers of the aulos in one final respect. As Barker reminds us, a skilled aulete could use the two pipes of the instrument to produce what Ps.-Plutarch calls “conversations” (διάλεκτοι, De mus. 1114c), one pipe sounding the melody, the other the contrapuntal accompaniment,72 and vase representations of pipe-players illustrate this practice by showing both hands of the player concurrently engaged. Barker’s interest is in the non-unison relation between the line of melody followed by the singer and the instrumental accompaniment on the pipes or lyre, but his discussion also helps to elucidate a potentially polemical element of Pythian 12. While Pindar’s songs more regularly vaunt the verbal powers of the poet, for the duration of this ode we hear not a single voice that speaks or sings (Perseus’ shout, the serpentine hisses, and the wail from Euryale’s jaws take pre-verbal form, mere sound). The poem’s unusual neglect of what was, of course, so critical a part of the finished product contains its own promotion of a central characteristic of the aulete’s craft, one both cited by the instrument’s detractors and a sticking point for Marsyas in his contest with Apollo: in some versions of the encounter, Apollo’s victory depends on the satyr’s inability to meet the challenge issued by the

70 For this problematic term—perhaps descriptive of the holes in the aulos akin to the “speaker hole” on the clarinet—see Barker 1989, 108, n. 42. 71 De audib. 803b19; 804a9; see Krevans 1993, 157, for discussion. 72 Barker 1995, 45–46. the gorgons’ lament 193 god, that he should sing at the same time that he plays.73 The “dialogic” powers of the aulos, enhanced by recent innovations, grants the piper new autonomy; performing his two tunes in contrapuntal relation, the aulete would supply the rhythm and use his expanded range of notes and tonal modulations mimetically to tell the story too. The ode’s neglect of song and speech in favor of auletic τέχνη could be viewed as a riposte to a probably contemporary poet fighting a rearguard action against these novel trends. In a much-discussed choral composition,74 Pratinas presents a company of satyrs who, posing as musical (and religious) traditionalists, object to the increasing hegemony of the aulos in choreia: “song (aoide)\\ was made queen by the Pierian; so let the pipes dance in second place” (fr. 708 PMG). Pindar’s celebration of the aulos, by contrast, endorses its primacy: instrumental music sublimates the singers’ words, not so much consigning them to second place as inextricably merging sound and meaning in the divinely composed melos.75 It belongs to a later critic of the types of auletic and compositional practices that Pythian 12 seems so wholeheartedly to embrace to provide what reads much like a summary of the innovations detailed above—the use of polyphony and a broad bandwidth of notes, the mimetic powers of the musician and his instrument, the occlusion of the verbal element by sound and music’s capacity even to jettison words altogether—and to offer what, in retrospect, appears an apt description of the Pindaric piece. Although Plato launches his attack against the New Musicians of a later age, he, like many other sources cited in my discussion, is actually disparaging changes visible as much as a century before. In his pejorative depiction of the “novel” type of mousike,\\ he contrasts the ideal composition that the Muses would devise with those produced in recent times (Leg. 2.669d–e, trans. R. G. Bury 1926, adapted): Nor would the Muse ever combine in a single piece the cries of beasts and men, the clash of instruments and clashes of all kinds, by way of rep- resenting a single object; whereas human poets, by their senselessness in mixing such things and jumbling them up together, would furnish a theme for laughter to all men who, in Orpheus’ phrase, “have attained the full flower of joyousness.” For they behold all these things jumbled together, and how, also, the poets rudely sunder rhythm and gesture from tune, putting

73 Diod. Sic. 3.59.3; cf. Plut. Quaest. conv. 7.8.11. 74 Both the genre and date of the fragment remain issues of considerable dispute. Those who advocate an early date include, most recently, Napolitano 2000; Barker 2002, 56; Cipolla 2003; d’Alessio 2007; Leven 2010, 39, n. 12; and Prauscello 2012, 73, n. 89. For a late fifth-century dating, see Zimmermann 1992; Wallace 2003, 84–85; Csapo 2004, 214, n. 30. 75 See Ap. Rhod. 4.902–11, with discussion in Hunter 1996, 146–47. 194 deborah steiner

tuneless words into meter, or leaving tune and rhythm without words, and using the bare sound of the harp or pipes, wherein it is almost impossible to understand what is intended by this wordless rhythm and harmony, or what noteworthy original it represents.

But for all the overlap between the Platonic critique and the portrayal of the aulos and its music in Pythian 12, it would be a mistake to read the Pindaric piece as a New Musical manifesto avant la lettre and to conflate the “pamphonics” and heteropho\nia it broadcasts with the properties which attract Plato’s censure. Absent from the ode is the accumulation of stylistic features (among them astrophic verses, a profusion of rococo compounds, asyndetic and paratactic clauses, “agglutinative syntax,” and dense synaesthetic and mimetic effects),76 and the loaded vocabulary, frequently larded with political and/or sexual associations and innuen- does introduced with expressly provocative intent, deployed by the later poets.77 And while the ode is a harbinger of things to come insofar as, like the later compositions, it locates its multiplicity and elaboration in acoustics and instrumentals (what might be termed, following Pindar’s lead in Pythian 12, the province of techne)\\ rather than in poetics, there is nothing to suggest that Pindaric pipers exhibited the “vulgar” theatrical- ism that Aristotle and others held responsible for the debasement of late fifth- and fourth-century mousike.\\78 As section 3 goes on to detail, one further dimension of the ode both palliates its musical experimentalism and sharply differentiates Pindar’s composition from those of the New Musicians to come. Not only are Midas and his celebrant placed in a long tradition that reaches back through earlier historical, legendary, and divine aulos-players, Athena the first of these (and the goddess’ invention, as existing readings of the song concur, itself involves a process of acculturation, the transformation of an unearthly, monstrous wail into the lovely music that accompanies choreia),79 but the poet also frames his account within a larger myth that “nativizes” the pipes, disassociating the aulos and its music from the Eastern origins and barbarism paraded by the later composers.80

76 For detailed characterization, see Csapo 2004, 222–29, and, with modifications, Leven 2008, esp. chap. 4. 77 D’Angour 2006, 273, notes several of these distinctions between the innovatory practices of the late sixth and early fifth century and that of the New Musicians. 78 See Arist. Poet. 1461b30 and Pol. 1341b15–18. 79 So, particularly, Clay 1992, Frontisi-Ducroux 1994, and Segal 1998. 80 See Csapo 2004, 232–35, for the charge of “barbarism” leveled against the New Music. the gorgons’ lament 195

3. MYTHICAL DUALISM

Two unsolvable puzzles revolve around the myth that Pindar tells: first, insofar as this is the first extant text attributing the invention of the aulos to Athena, is the poet the originator here? And second, if some form of the story was already circulating in late archaic Greece, has Pindar altered (or perhaps foreshortened) the more familiar narrative of events? In the version that increasingly gained ground, which first appears in a work of the dithyrambic poet Melanippides (whose period of activity West dates from ca. 440–415, and Barker to between 480 and 430)81 and then again in Myron’s statue group on the Acropolis portraying the episode, matters take a very different turn: the goddess no sooner invents the instrument than she discards it because it literally puts her out of coun- tenance; Marsyas, a witness to or participant in the scene, then retrieves the aulos in her place.82 While a few uncertain pieces of evidence grant Athena a more posi- tive association with the pipes, some even predating Pythian 12 (notable is a black-figure amphora of ca. 520–10 showing Athena playing the aulos while Heracles accompanies her on the lyre),83 from the mid fifth century on even sources that counter the story of the goddess’ rejection have to reckon with it. For some recent modern readers, Athena’s renunciation of her short-lived role as aulos-player is a product of the shifting ideology surrounding the instrument, “a piece of aristocratic discourse within the larger culture of democratic politics,”84 and a deliberate revision of an earlier, more favorable representation. But while there is no determining at what point either of the different versions arose, or their precise relationship, I want to position Pindar’s narrative vis à vis a different strand of aulos “history,” suggesting that the poet does revise, but in ways that have to do with the instrument’s (also later politicized) geographic- cum-ethnic orientation. Central to the work’s mythical construct are the details introduced in the closing strophe, where Pindar, seemingly abruptly, establishes a direct connection between the moment of divine invention just described and the auletic music still performed at choral celebrations localized at Boeotian Orchomenos. As Pierre Chuvin’s discussion observes,85

81 West 1992, 357; Barker 1984, 93. 82 See particularly Melanipp. fr. 758 PMG, Xen. An. 1.2.8, Pl. Symp. 215b–c, Leg. 677d, Arist. Pol. 1341a. 83 LIMC II.I s.v. Athena, no. 617. 84 Martin 2003, 160. 85 Chuvin 1995. 196 deborah steiner this otherwise apparently unmotivated contemporary reference makes excellent sense when read within the context of the more wholesale reorientation visible in Pindar’s version of the myth. Sources that both predate and postdate Pythian 12 all agree in giving the pipes and art of aulos-playing a Phrygian origin,86 a connection visible too in the person of the Phrygian aulete Olympus, supposedly Marsyas’ pupil and originator of the “nome of many heads” alluded to by Pindar’s terminology at line 23. But, this oblique reference to Olympus apart, Phrygia is conspicuous for its absence from the narrative in the ode. Further corroborating the archaic evidence pointing to Phrygia as the home of the aulos is the story of Athena’s rejection of the pipes in post-Pindaric sources: the goddess’ initial act of invention typically occurs in Phrygia, by the banks of a lake called “Pipes-spring” or Aulokrene, whose waters nourish the reeds growing round about, and that is adjacent to the city of Kelainai. Save for its geographic relocation, Pindar’s account matches this more familiar story to a striking and probably deliberate degree: both versions feature a lake (Kopais in Pindar), Pindar’s Boeotian Orchomenos answers to Phrygian Kelainai, Athena appears on both occasions, and in each instance the reeds growing lakeside furnish the material for the aulos. Where the two stories pull apart is, of course, in Pindar’s (perhaps pointed) omission of the aftermath to that invention, an episode that in later accounts occurs uniquely on Phrygian ground: Athena’s renunciation of the instrument and its recuperation by the (Phrygian) Marsyas, himself eponymous with one of the two streams which joined at Kelainai. These overlaps support Chuvin’s conclusion that the Boeotian story told by Pindar, and its choice of particulars, “makes better sense if we project behind it its Phrygian doublet”87 and suppose that the poet has modeled his narrative on the preexisting template. Pindar’s choice to transfer events wholesale from Phrygia to Boeotia may also, although the point should not be pressed, tessellate with the ode’s pronounced musicological focus. A story that situates the invention of the aulos and the evolution of its music on foreign ground could have implications for the melodic mode adopted for auletic compositions; since Marsyas and his followers came from Phrygia, the Phrygian mode was

86 A passage of Athenaeus (14.624b) cited by Chuvin 1995, 122, notes the Phrygian origin of the names of pipers found in Alcman and Hipponax; Chuvin observes that the name of the Pindaric victor Midas is typically “Phrygian and servile.” 87 Chuvin 1995, 127. Both Martin 2003, 163, and n. 45, and Chuvin 1995, 126, suggest some qualification of the unequivocal celebration of the aulos in the work, but they also note that such devalorization of the instrument would be in poor taste in an ode for a piper. the gorgons’ lament 197 most closely associated with the pipes, and any number of sources con- nect this harmonia with the aulos and with the genre most “native” to the instrument, the dithyramb, the song type so frequently vilified in late fifth- and fourth-century sources for its embrace of New Musical extravagances. Indeed, according to a story cited by Aristotle and introduced as proof for the intimate link between the pipes, the dithyramb and the Phrygian mode, when Philoxenus sought to compose a dithyramb, which “is by general consent held to be a Phrygian thing,” in the Dorian mode, he had to abandon the attempt since “the nature of the genre forced him back into the proper mode, the Phrygian” (Pol. 1342a32–b12). While the stark opposition between the Phrygian and Dorian modes visible in Aristotle became entrenched only in the attacks mounted by the critics of the New Music, who invest that music’s properties and style with pejorative ethnic-cum-ethical values,88 the distinction may already belong to earlier polemics; if Pratinas and his (dithyrambic?) fragment contrasting the primacy of the aulos with the “Dorian dance song” belong to the late archaic or early classical period, then Pindar would be familiar with a controversy already current in the musical culture of his time. Following this, can we see in the poet’s choice to reorient his myth from Phrygia to Greece his disassociation of the pipes from the Phrygian mode and their investment with an impeccably native veneer?89 Although the absence of any internal reference to the mode adopted in Pythian 12 prevents determining the melody of this composition, it is tempting to propose the use of the Dorian mode (described by Pindar in fr. 67 S-M as the “most solemn” of available harmoniai) on account of the meter chosen by the poet. Here we are necessarily on uncertain ground. While Prauscello’s very careful review of the evidence for Pindaric odes suggests no firm coincidence between meter and mode, she observes that for epinicia composed in dactyloepitrites, “a correlation between Dorian mode and dactyloepitrite meter is possible but not necessary.”90 The ode for Midas stands as the first extant Pindaric ode in this meter,91 and this in a work that takes an act of invention as its master narrative. Could, then, the geo- graphical relocation implicit in that story also draw attention to a metrical as well as melodic shift, and might Pindar be flagging hisintroduction of a

88 For the evidence, and incisive treatment, see Csapo 2004, 232–35. 89 Since Pindar’s compositions include no actual references to the Phrygian mode, it is impossible to determine what associations it might carry in his view. 90 Prauscello 2012, 65. 91 This point is also made by Papadopoulou and Pirenne-Delforge 2001, 52, n. 86. 198 deborah steiner rhythm, earlier developed by (the Western) Stesichorus, that had hitherto not been used for this particular genre?92 Olympian 3, also in dactyloepitrites, seems to hold up that meter as innovatory when the singer declares, in language filled with musical terms, “the Muse stood by me while I discovered a new-shining way to join the Dorian measure to the voice of dazzling celebration” (Μοῖσα δ’ οὕτω ποι παρέστα μοι νεοσίγαλον εὑρόντι τρόπον/ Δωρίῳ φωνὰν ἐναρμόξαι πεδίλῳ/ ἀγλαόκωμον·, 3–6).93 There is no mistaking Pindar’s self-promoting claim to first-finder status here, nor, as Prauscello notes, his association of this φωνάν (“voice” or “sound”) with the epinician art (so, ἀγλαόκωμον).94 In their rewriting of musical history, later sources would recast Pindar’s use of the Dorian mode, presented in Olympian 3 as a challenge to existing practice, as evidence rather of his traditionalism, his adherence to the “the only true Greek mode.”95 Placed together, Pindar’s recalibration of the myth concerning the origins of the aulos and the possible instrumental, modal, and metrical novelties audible in the ode help us better to understand why duality and mimesis play so central a role in Pythian 12. Taking his cue from Athena, who creates something that both imitates what already exists and radically transforms its nature, Pindar likewise sublimates an existing narrative into something fresh, turning, again on Athena’s model, a tale of sadness, defeat and rejection on foreign soil into a celebratory and affirmative account that occurs on native ground. Read this way, the myth furnishes a “meta-narrative” that serves to comment on Pindar’s own procedure here, a device also visible in works like Olympian 1 that more patently amend existing, overly negative myths.96 That this revisionism “Hellenizes” and makes Athena “first finder” of the controversial musical innovations demonstrated in the ode is an additional benefit of the stratagem, a means by which Pindar skillfully gives to contested novelties a home-based and archaizing pedigree. Nor does this exhaust the refractions and multiplicity of myths that Pindar’s revisionary version encompasses, even as, in typical fashion, it gestures towards the story it displaces. As already observed, Pythian 12 invites us to understand Athena’s composition as precursor to Sacadas’ “Pythian Nome,” no less than to Olympus’ “melody of many heads.” The

92 Of the nine odes that can be dated to the first period of Pindar’s epinician activity, only Pythian 12 and Nemean 5 are composed in dactyloepitrites. 93 See Prauscello 2012, 77–78, for the many differing interpretations of the phrase in ancient and modern commentators. 94 Prauscello 2012, 78. 95 Pl. Leg. 188d; cf. Arist. Pol. 1342b13. For this, see also Csapo 2004, 232–34. 96 Hubbard 1987 argues the point for Ol. 1. the gorgons’ lament 199 events that Sacadas’ auletic air aimed to reproduce offer a close precedent for Perseus’ winning feat: in both a juvenile protagonist achieves man’s estate by triumphing over his female snake-like monster. In Pindar’s upending of mythic chronology, it is Athena’s invention on the occasion of Perseus’ victory that supplies the model for these musical commemora- tions of Apollo’s (prior) slaying of the Pytho, which paved the way for the Pythian Games framing the later compositions. Here, too, Pindar promotes his ode, his laudandus and the event in which Midas has prevailed. As Martin comments, Athena “resembles an actual contestant in the auletic contest,”97 her prize-performance a melody that celebrates a victory in an ago\n much as the pieces that Midas was required to play—the “nome of many heads” and the Pythian Nome—would have done;98 concluding this multiplying chain is the current victory song that celebrates yet another agonistic victory. Over and above its aggrandizement of Midas now placed in a direct line which leads from Athena through Olympus and Sacadas, and who is made executor of melodies that owe their origin not to mortal “first finders” but to a divinity instead, this imbrication of mythical and historical events also prepares the way for the move from past to present and future times in the final strophe.

4. CHORAL CONCLUSIONS

Pindar does not leave us with the scene of Athena’s musical celebration of her protégé; instead, characteristically, he supplies a closing to the ode that guarantees lasting life for his song and its innovatory music. What had its starting point in the mournful cry of the Gorgons with its serpentine accompaniment, and then devolved into the auletic air composed by Athena, and found fresh realization in the works performed by pipers, Midas among them, at the Pythian games, ends up as the melody which furnishes a “renowned commemoration/reminder of the contests,” and whose pipes serve as “witnesses of choruses” that dance at Orchomenos. The language used for this final snapshot introduces still another musical and explicitly choral offshoot of the original act of mourning and one that encompasses both the mythical past earlier rehearsed and contemporary events. If the closing move to choral dancing at Orchomenos forms an integral part of the Boeotian reorientation of the history of the aulos and

97 2003, 163. 98 Many odes make reference to an auletic accompaniment alongside the music of the lyre, and it seems more than likely that Pythian 12 was performed by an aulete. 200 deborah steiner the piper’s art, it makes sense on several other grounds. With the mention of the Graces, Orchomenos’ tutelary divinities, the poet both replaces the Gorgons introduced earlier and develops the hint of choral activity already present in his initial account of these monstrous performers; even as archaic artists (and some poets too) portray the three Gorgons as a perverted version of the normative parthenic chorus,99 here the Graces correct that deformation and offer in the sisters’ place a fresh triad of divine maidens whose signature activities are dance and song. As an archetypal choral ensemble, the goddesses are preeminently suited to the role that Pindar goes on to assign to them, that of presiding over the dancing spaces of the city that is their chief cult site.100 But beyond recasting the Gorgons in this delightful, most civilized form, there is an additional explanation for the introduction of the Orcho- menos choruses here. Although the epigraphic evidence belongs only to the second and first centuries b.c.e.,101 the auletic, dramatic and poetic contests at the Charitesia, a festival celebrated on behalf of the Graces, are likely to have existed at earlier times, with choral performances, as Pindar’s text suggests, included among these and other rites addressed to the divinities. The θαμά of line 25 points to the regularized, recurrent nature of these celebrations, and proves key to their underlying function in the ode. Inasmuch as the Boeotian choruses furnish counterparts to the performers executing Pythian 12 in the here and now, most probably at Acragas, the Pindaric chorus engages in a stratagem familiar from Attic drama, the act of “choral projection” in which the chorus currently dancing and singing assimilates itself to another group of performers, whether real, mythical, or divine.102 Although the device occurs more rarely in epinician than in the Attic theatre, odes by both Pindar and Bacchylides deploy such projection on several occasions.103 The rationale that Power gives for its use in Bacchy- lides 13 works very well for this Pindaric celebration too. In Bacchylides’ piece, the poet grants legitimacy and a recurrent, civic character to his ad hoc group of performers, an Aeginetan chorus praising a one-time victor without distinguished heritage, by having his singers map their identity

99 See Langdon 2008, 5–6, 112–13, and Topper 2010 and 2007 for the Gorgons as a triadic, parthenic chorus in visual and literary accounts. 100 Note that the combination of the bronze flute, choral performances, and the Graces occurs again in the scant remaining portions of Pindar’s Paian 3. 101 The documentation is found in Schachter 1981, 140–44. 102 For the term, see Henrichs 1994–95 and 1996. 103 Power 2000 documents the instances. the gorgons’ lament 201 onto that of a standing maiden chorus celebrating the island’s eponymous nymph and her heroic descendants in established polis festivals. In much the same fashion, Pindar’s introduction of choruses on Orchomenos’ dancing floor endows the performers celebrating Midas’ victory (in an event that Pindar eulogizes on no other occasion, won by an individual whose lack of patronymic and name hint at his obscure, even foreign origins) with an authority and longstanding character that transforms the transient victory and its musical/choral commemoration into things of longue durée. One element of Bacchylides’ extended description of his local chorus particularly resembles Pindar’s strategy in Pythian 12: at line 86, Bacchylides uses ταρφέως (“regularly” or “continuously”) of the movement of the choregos, an indicator of the iterative nature of the performance visualized here.104 The θαμά of Pythian 12.25 does much the same.105 The final transformation that the Gorgons’ lament undergoes directs us back to the ode’s opening in one further respect, with a return to the opening suggestion that the archetypal choral voice, before its refraction into multiple forms, was one of mourning.106 The ode’s closing gnomic lines contain more than a passing reminder of the song’s darker point of origin. As Pindar’s choreuts bring their joyous epinician performance to its end, their reminders of the labors and trials integral to achieving supreme felicity (ὄλβος) and of the capricious and oscillating nature of good fortune, not only sound the cautionary note typical of Pindaric diminuendos; more than this, the language here draws on stock motifs of laments, among them the toilsome nature of human life, the inelucta- bility of ill fate, the fleeting nature of all happiness. How better, then, to end a song tracing the history of an instrument whose versatile nature and polyphony make it no less suited to the funeral than to scenes of celebration and revelry?107

Deborah Steiner e-mail: [email protected]

104 Power 2000, 81. 105 The same stratagem is visible in Pindar fr. 52b.96–101 S-M; again, θαμά at 98 endows the single performance of the Abderites with the recurrent character of the Delian and Delphic standing choruses. 106 See Ferrari 2008, 121. 107 Many thanks are owed to Andrew Ford, who kindly read and commented on an earlier version of this piece, and to my two anonymous readers at AJP for their judicious suggestions. Lucia Prauscello also generously shared her forthcoming work. 202 deborah steiner

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APPENDIX

Pindar Pythian 12:

Αἰτέω σε, φιλάγλαε, καλλίστα βροτεᾶν πολίων, Φερσεφόνας ἕδος, ἅ τ’ ὄχθαις ἔπι μηλοβότου ναίεις Ἀκράγαντος ἐΰδματον κολώναν, ὦ ἄνα, ἵλαος ἀθανάτων ἀνδρῶν τε σὺν εὐμενίᾳ 5 δέξαι στεφάνωμα τόδ’ ἐκ Πυθῶνος εὐδόξῳ Μίδᾳ αὐτόν τε νιν Ἑλλάδα νικάσαντα τέχνᾳ, τάν ποτε Παλλὰς ἐφεῦρε θρασειᾶν Γοργόνων οὔλιον θρῆνον διαπλέξαισ’ Ἀθάνα· τὸν παρθενίοις ὑπό τ’ ἀπλάτοις ὀφίων κεφαλαῖς 10 ἄϊε λειβόμενον δυσπενθέϊ σὺν καμάτῳ, Περσεὺς ὁπότε τρίτον ἄυσεν κασιγνητᾶν μέρος ἐνναλίᾳ Σερίφῳ λαοῖσί τε μοῖραν ἄγων. ἤτοι τό τε θεσπέσιον Φόρκοι’ ἀμαύρωσεν γένος, λυγρόν τ’ ἔρανον Πολυδέκτᾳ θῆκε ματρός τ’ ἔμπεδον 15 δουλοσύναν τό τ’ ἀναγκαῖον λέχος, εὐπαράου κρᾶτα συλάσαις Μεδοίσας υἱὸς Δανάας, τὸν ἀπὸ χρυσοῦ φαμὲν αὐτορύτου ἔμμεναι. ἀλλ’ ἐπεὶ ἐκ τούτων φίλον ἄνδρα πόνων ἐρρύσατο παρθένος αὐλῶν τεῦχε πάμφωνον μέλος, 20 ὄφρα τὸν Εὐρυάλας ἐκ καρπαλιμᾶν γενύων χριμφθέντα σὺν ἔντεσι μιμήσαιτ’ ἐρικλάγκταν γόον. εὗρεν θεός· ἀλλά νιν εὑροῖσ’ ἀνδράσι θνατοῖς ἔχειν, ὠνύμασεν κεφαλᾶν πολλᾶν νόμον, εὐκλεᾶ λαοσσόων μναστῆρ’ ἀγώνων, 25 λεπτοῦ διανισόμενον χαλκοῦ θαμὰ καὶ δονάκων, τοὶ παρὰ καλλίχορον ναίοισι πόλιν Χαρίτων Καφισίδος ἐν τεμένει, πιστοὶ χορευτᾶν μάρτυρες. εἰ δέ τις ὄλβος ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν, ἄνευ καμάτου οὐ φαίνεται· ἐκ δὲ τελευτάσει νιν ἤτοι σάμερον 30 δαίμων – τὸ δὲ μόρσιμον οὐ παρφυκτόν – ἀλλ’ ἔσται χρόνος οὗτος, ὃ καί τιν’ ἀελπτίᾳ βαλών ἔμπαλιν γνώμας τὸ μὲν δώσει, τὸ δ’ οὔπω. 206 deborah steiner

I beg you, lover of radiance, fairest of mortals’ cities, seat of Persephone, you who dwell upon the well-built height above the flock-grazing banks of the Akragas, o queen, with the good will of gods and men graciously receive this crown from Pytho on the part of the well-reputed Midas, and welcome the man himself who was victorious over Hellas in the skill which Pallas Athena discovered by interweaving the fierce close-packed dirge of the Gorgons that she heard pouring out in accompaniment with the unapproachable snaky heads of the maidens in their mournful travail, when Perseus shouted out as he carried off the third portion of the sisters, bringing doom to maritime Seriphos and its people. Indeed, he made faint the awesome race of Phorkos and baneful the feast for Polydektes, the constraining bondage of his mother and enforced marriage bed, after severing the full-cheeked head of Medusa the son of Danaë, who, we tell, was born from the free-flowing gold. But when she rescued her beloved man from these toils, the maiden fabricated the melody of every sound for the pipes, so that she might imitate with instruments the echoing shrilled wail forced from the vibrating jaws of Euryale. The goddess invented it for mortals to have, and she called it the tune of many heads, famed reminder of contests thronged with people, the tune that frequently passes through the thin bronze and the reeds which grow alongside the Graces’ city with beautiful dancing spaces in the precinct of Kephisos’ daughter, trustworthy witnesses of dancers. If there is any blessedness among men, it does not appear without toil. A divine spirit will bring it to fulfillment either today— there is no avoiding what is fated—but there will come that time which, striking a person in unlooked for manner, contrary to expectation will give one thing, but defer another.

Euripides Helen 166–90:

δάκρυσιν ἢ θρήνοις ἢ πένθεσιν; αἰαῖ. πτεροφόροι νεάνιδες, παρθένοι Χθονὸς κόραι, Σειρῆνες, εἴθ’ ἐμοῖς 170 †γόοις μόλοιτ’ ἔχουσαι Λίβυν λωτὸν ἢ σύριγγας ἢ φόρμιγγας αἰλίνοις κακοῖς† 172 τοῖς ἐμοῖσι σύνοχα δάκρυα, πάθεσι πάθεα, μέλεσι μέλεα, μουσεῖα θρηνήμα- σι ξυνωιδά, πέμψαιτε 175 Φερσέφασσα †φονία χάριτας† ἵν’ ἐπὶ δάκρυσι παρ’ ἐμέθεν ὑπὸ μέλαθρα νύχια παιᾶνα νέκυσιν ὀλομένοις λάβηι. the gorgons’ lament 207

{ΧΟΡΟΣ} κυανοειδὲς ἀμφ’ ὕδωρ 180 ἔτυχον ἕλικά τ’ ἀνὰ χλόαν φοίνικας ἁλίωι †πέπλους χρυσέαισιν αὐγαῖς θάλπουσ’† ἀμφὶ δόνακος ἔρνεσιν· ἔνθεν οἰκτρὸν ὅμαδον ἔκλυον, 185 ἄλυρον ἔλεγον, ὅτι ποτ’ ἔλακεν < 22  > αἰάγμα- σι στένουσα νύμφα τις οἷα Ναῒς ὄρεσι φυγάδα νόμον ἱεῖσα γοερόν, ὑπὸ δὲ πέτρινα γύαλα κλαγγαῖσι 190 Πανὸς ἀναβοᾶι γάμους. Winged girls, maiden daughters of Earth, Sirens, would that you would come having the Libyan lotus-flute or pan pipes to my wails of woe; and would that tears in accord with [my tears], sufferings with sufferings, songs with songs, a deadly concert hall sounding in unison with dirges, Persephone might send, so that she might have a thanks-offering and in her halls of night receive from me with my tears a paian for the dead that are gone. By the dark-blue water I happened to be drying along the verdant tendril the purple garments in the golden rays upon the shoots of the reeds, whence I heard a piteous din, a song of grief not fit for the lyre, some Nymph crying woefully, such as a Naiad in flight sends out to the mountains, a mournful strain, and in accompaniment with the shrieks the rocky vales shout aloud the nuptials of Pan.

Aristophanes Aves 209–22:

Ἄγε σύννομέ μοι, παῦσαι μὲν ὕπνου, 210 λῦσον δὲ νόμους ἱερῶν ὕμνων, οὓς διὰ θείου στόματος θρηνεῖς τὸν ἐμὸν καὶ σὸν πολύδακρυν Ἴτυν, ἐλελιζομένη διεροῖς μέλεσιν γένυος ξουθῆς. Καθαρὰ χωρεῖ 215 διὰ φυλλοκόμου μίλακος ἠχὼ πρὸς Διὸς ἕδρας, ἵν’ ὁ χρυσοκόμας Φοῖβος ἀκούων τοῖς σοῖς ἐλέγοις ἀντιψάλλων ἐλεφαντόδετον φόρμιγγα θεῶν ἵστησι χορούς· 220 διὰ δ’ ἀθανάτων στομάτων χωρεῖ ξύμφωνος ὁμοῦ θεία μακάρων ὀλολυγή. 208 deborah steiner

Come, sharer of my musical pieces, cease from sleep, emit the nomes of sacred hymns, lamenting through your godlike lips for my child and yours, much–mourned Itys, quivering in the liquid melodies of your oscillating throat. Pure the echo goes apace through the well-tressed bryony to the seat of Zeus, where golden-haired Phoebus listens and for your elegy plucks in response the ivory-inlaid lyre and sets up divine choruses. And from the mouths of the immortals proceeds together [with it] and in harmony the godlike cry of joy of the blessed ones.