DOCSLIB.ORG

Illinois Classical Studies

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Illinois Classical Studies 23 Later Euripidean Music ERIC CSAPO In memory of Desmond Conacher, a much-loved teacher, colleague, andfriend. I. The Scholarship In the last two decades of the twentieth century several important general books marked a resurgence of interest in Greek music: Barker 1984 and 1989, Comotti 1989a (an expanded English translation of a work in Italian written in 1979), M. L. West 1992, W. D. Anderson 1994, Neubecker 1994 (second edition of a work of 1977), and Landels 1999. These volumes provide good general guides to the subject, with particular strengths in ancient theory and practice, the history of musical genres, technical innovations, the reconstruction and use of ancient instruments, ancient musical notation, documents, metrics, and reconstructions of ancient scales, modes, and genera. They are too broadly focussed to give much attention to tragedy. Euripidean music receives no more than three pages in any of these works (a little more is usually allocated to specific discussion of the musical fragment of Orestes). Fewer books were devoted to music in drama. Even stretching back another decade, we have: one general book on tragic music, Pintacuda 1978, two books by Scott on "musical design" in Aeschylus (1984) and in Sophocles (1996), and two books devoted to Aristophanes' music, Pintacuda 1982 and L. P. E. Parker 1997. Pintacuda 1978 offers three chapters on basic background, and one chapter for each of the poets. The chapter on Euripides (shared with a fairly standard account of the New Musicians), contains less than four pages of general discussion of Euripides' relationship to the New Music (164-68), which is followed by fifty pages of blow-by-blow description of the musical numbers in each play—a mildly caffeinated catalogue-style already familiar from Webster 1970b: 110-92 and revisited by Scott. Despite the ostensible focus on song or "musical design" in dramatic music, these works are mainly concerned with metrics, musical taxonomy, and questions of function within the dramatic narrative, all of which, though relevant, are not the same thing as musical design. Also highly relevant to Euripides' music is the massive study of the 400 Illinois Classical Studies 24-25 (1999-2000) Euripidean chorus by Hose (1990-91). I have not seen Jane Beverley's recent Oxford dissertation on Euripidean monody (1999). Given the nearly exclusive focus upon music's ethical, social, and political values by our fifth- and fourth-century sources, one might have expected more on musical culture and performance. But the discovery that music has a sociology, and a very central role in cultural discourse, even within general musicology, dates only to the late 1980s, and is no earlier in Classics.' Indicative is the segmentation of Neubecker's bibliographical survey (1990) of works on music published between 1958 and 1986. The largest categories are ancient theory and notation (17.4%), and reconstructions of ancient instruments (15.7%); the smallest categories are ethics and aesthetics (2%), musical education (1.7%), and music therapy (0.9%). A handful of other works of cultural-historical interest ends up in sections labelled "Spezielle Gebiete und Gesichtspunkte," or "Varia." By contrast, Gentili and Pretagostini 1988 includes a section devoted to "Musica e societa." The 1992 International Colloquium on Athenian Democracy and Culture included a short survey by Beschi (1996) on democracy and music, a topic which might scarcely have seemed viable ten years earlier. The forthcoming collection edited by Murray and Wilson will be entirely devoted to the study of music as social practice and cultural discourse in Classical Athens. Of the many articles on ancient music published in the last two decades, the following are of particular interest for tragedy, Euripides, or New Music: Richter 1983 examines change in tragic music in relation to its social and historical context. Wilson has illuminating discussions of the significance of pipe music (1999) and the music of stringed instruments (forthcoming [b]) to the Athenian imagination (cf. Wilson in this volume). Some recent work has been done on the social and economic background of the auletic profession in general (Nordquist 1994; Scheithauer 1996 and 1997). We eagerly await the specific study of theatre auletes by Wilson (forthcoming [a]). Edith Hall has written two fascinating studies of the significance of actors' song in drama (1999a and forthcoming). The social and ideological function of the tragic chorus has received a lot of attention lately (especially Castellani 1989; Gould 1996; Goldhill 1996; Mastronarde 1998 and 1999), but music (perhaps oddly) plays only a small part in this debate. My own contribution (Csapo, forthcoming [a]) to the volume by Murray and Wilson seeks out the links between the socio-economic, professional, technical, stylistic, ethical, and political sides of the New Music. Of direct relevance for the study of New Music is the slim volume (1992) and articles on dithyramb by Zimmermann (1989, 1993). Two startling facts emerge from this discussion. First, there is no extended single study devoted to New Music. Second, Euripides is the only fifth-century dramatist never to have a major work dedicated to his music. ' For developments in musicology, see N. Cook 1998: 87-104. Eric Csapo 401 This leaves gaps precisely where the material is richest. The New Musical revolution is probably the single most widely commented cultural event of antiquity: The great controversy it sparked has left us with plentiful, if scattered, evidence for its reception, which, if collected, might fill a good- sized volume. Much of it, whether comic parody, historical anecdote, or musicological commentary, offers a relative wealth of information on Euripides' innovations and on his performance style. We also have far more remains of Euripides' lyrics than of any other Classical poet. Even sixty-six notes survive on two different papyri that might go back to his original "scores." (The only other possible remnant of fifth-century music, by Sophocles or his grandson of the same name, was published by M. L. West as recently as 1999.) We owe this wealth of text, commentary, and musical notation to the fact that Euripides' songs made a greater impact on contemporary and later audiences than those of any other musician or dramatist.^ II. The New Music The label "New Music" is a coinage of modern scholarship.^ When the ancients spoke collectively of the new style of musical performance that emerged between about 430 and 380, they spoke of "theatre music," or otherwise associated the music with the theatre and with mass audiences."^ Modern treatments generally pay insufficient attention to this detail. They present New Music with a series of mini-biographies of Phrynis, Melanippides, Kinesias, Timotheus, Euripides, Agathon, Philoxenus, and Telestes, as if the movement could be adequately treated as a relay of influence by one composer to another. This stress on individual creativity follows the instincts of ancient (mainly Peripatetic),^ no less than modern (post-romantic), art history. But the price of historical individualism in art history here, as elsewhere, is the misrecognition of the social and economic factors which make innovation acceptable, desirable, or consistent enough to be reckoned coherent movements. For the purposes of cultural history, "New Music" can be better understood, with the ancients, as "theatre music." New Music's association with the theatre was anything but casual. It mainly affected the theatrical genres of dithyramb and drama.^ Its heyday 2 See Michaelides 1978; E. Hall 1999a: 99. ^ In order to reduce the compass of this very short historical introduction, I have kept to a minimum those arguments and annotations which I have treated more fully in Csapo, forthcoming (a) and (c). * PI. Lg. 700a-01d; Arist. Pol. 1342al8; Aristox. frr. 26, 29 da Rios; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1140d-f, 1142d(aicnviicri). ^Seee.g. Arist. Mer.993bl5. ^ Also nome, performed by the same poets as dithyramb, and also for large audiences, and eventually in theatres. 402 Illinois Classical Studies 24-25 (1999-2000) coincides with the time of the theatre's first great expansion. In Attica, apart from the City Dionysia, we have no certainly attested dramatic festivals until after 440, but by the mid-fourth century there were at least fifteen. Dithyramb too spread to another eight or nine festivals at this time. Outside Attica, theatrical festivals are certainly attested for Macedonia at the end of the fifth century and probably for Syracuse, Taranto, Metapontum, Argos, Eretria, and Isthmia. Drama was widespread in Greece by the mid-fourth century, and ubiquitous by the late fourth century. Outside Athens dithyrambic contests are attested in the fifth century at Delos and Delphi, and by the end of the fourth century at Thebes, Keos, Euboea, lasos, and probably Thasos. Theatre had a profound impact both on the economics of musical performance and on the sociology of patronage, performance, and spectatorship. With the building of large theatres and the creation of annual theatrical festivals, musical performance attained an unprecedented magnificence and frequency. Its cost had far outgrown aristocratic patronage; only tyrants and democracies could afford it. The Athenian democracy did so with a complex combination of public and private money, not to mention entrance fees, appearing for the very first time in Greece. Democratic theatres, at least, were less "sponsor-directed" (Bremer 1991: 59), more consumer-oriented, and considerably less bound to tradition. For the various interests engaged in theatrical production, success was measured entirely by the satisfaction of the theatre public, which sat in judgment over the competition—in theory at least the judges not only represented but were expected to gauge the public preference. The audience felt, not only free, but obliged to give frequent expression to its approval and disapproval. The "mass entertainment industry" which grew up in the theatres came to support a larger and more specialized class of professional performers than had ever been seen in Greece.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • PLATO's SYMPOSIUM J
    50 ccn~ PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM j - - -- ________j e Library of Liberal Arts PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM Tran lated by BENJAMIN JOWETT With an Introduction by FULTON H. ANDERSON Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto THE LIBERAL ARTS PRESS NEW YORK CONTENTS SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .. .... ................................... ......... ... ........... 6 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION ................... ............................................. 7 SYMPOSIUM APOLLODORUS 13 THE SPEECH OF PHAEDRUS ...... .......................... .......................... .. 19 THE SPEECH OF PAU ANIAS ................. ... ................................. ... .. 21 THE SPEECH OF ERYXIMACHUS 27 THE SPEECH OF ARISTOPHAN E .. ............................... .................. 30 THE SPEECH OF AGATHON ............ .............................................. .. 35 THE SPEECH OF SocRATES ................................ .. ................... ..... .. 39 THE SPEECH OF ALCIBIADES ................. ............... ... ........... ...... .... .. 55 8 PLATO INTROD CTION 9 crescendo, and culminates in the report by Socrates on wi dom and epistemology, upon all of which the Symposium ha bearing, learned from the "wi e" woman Diotima. are intertwined, we m ay set down briefly a few of the more general The dialogue i a "reported" one. Plato himself could not have principles which are to be found in it author's many-sided thought. been present at the original party. (What went on there was told The human soul, a cording to Plato, is es entially in motion. time and time again about Athens.) He was a mere boy when it It is li fe and the integration of living functions. A dead soul is a con­ took place. Nor could the narrator Apollodorus have been a guest; _lladiction in terms. Man throughout his whole nature is erotically he was too young at the time. The latter got his report from motivated. His "love" or desire i manifest in three mutually in­ Aristodemus, a guest at the banquet.
    [Show full text]
  • Dionysus, Wine, and Tragic Poetry: a Metatheatrical Reading of P.Koln VI 242A=Trgf II F646a Anton Bierl
    BIERL, ANTON, Dionysus, Wine, and Tragic Poetry: A Metatheatrical Reading of a New Dramatic Papyrus , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 31:4 (1990:Winter) p.353 Dionysus, Wine, and Tragic Poetry: A Metatheatrical Reading of P.Koln VI 242A=TrGF II F646a Anton Bierl EW DRAMATIC PAPYRUS1 confronts interpreters with many ~puzzling questions. In this paper I shall try to solve some of these by applying a new perspective to the text. I believe that this fragment is connected with a specific literary feature of drama especially prominent in the bnal decades of the bfth century B.C., viz. theatrical self-consciousness and the use of Dionysus, the god of Athenian drama, as a basic symbol for this tendency. 2 The History of the Papyrus Among the most important papyri brought to light by Anton Fackelmann is an anthology of Greek prose and poetry, which includes 19 verses of a dramatic text in catalectic anapestic tetrameters. Dr Fackelmann entrusted the publication of this papyrus to Barbel Kramer of the University of Cologne. Her editio princeps appeared in 1979 as P. Fackelmann 5. 3 Two years later the verses were edited a second time by Richard Kannicht and Bruno Snell and integrated into the Fragmenta Adespota in 1 This papyrus has already been treated by the author in Dionysos und die griechische Trag odie. Politische und 'metatheatralische' Aspekte im Text (Tiibingen 1991: hereafter 'Bieri') 248-53. The interpretation offered here is an expansion of my earlier provisional comments in the Appendix, presenting fragments of tragedy dealing with Dionysus. 2 See C.
    [Show full text]
  • Athenians and Eleusinians in the West Pediment of the Parthenon
    ATHENIANS AND ELEUSINIANS IN THE WEST PEDIMENT OF THE PARTHENON (PLATE 95) T HE IDENTIFICATION of the figuresin the west pedimentof the Parthenonhas long been problematic.I The evidencereadily enables us to reconstructthe composition of the pedimentand to identify its central figures.The subsidiaryfigures, however, are rath- er more difficult to interpret. I propose that those on the left side of the pediment may be identifiedas membersof the Athenian royal family, associatedwith the goddessAthena, and those on the right as membersof the Eleusinian royal family, associatedwith the god Posei- don. This alignment reflects the strife of the two gods on a heroic level, by referringto the legendary war between Athens and Eleusis. The recognition of the disjunctionbetween Athenians and Eleusinians and of parallelism and contrastbetween individualsand groups of figures on the pedimentpermits the identificationof each figure. The referenceto Eleusis in the pediment,moreover, indicates the importanceof that city and its majorcult, the Eleu- sinian Mysteries, to the Athenians. The referencereflects the developmentand exploitation of Athenian control of the Mysteries during the Archaic and Classical periods. This new proposalfor the identificationof the subsidiaryfigures of the west pedimentthus has critical I This article has its origins in a paper I wrote in a graduateseminar directedby ProfessorJohn Pollini at The Johns Hopkins University in 1979. I returned to this paper to revise and expand its ideas during 1986/1987, when I held the Jacob Hirsch Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In the summer of 1988, I was given a grant by the Committeeon Research of Tulane University to conduct furtherresearch for the article.
    [Show full text]
  • A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century Damnatio of Euripides Ernst Behler
    BEHLER, ERNST, A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century "Damnatio" of Euripides , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 27:4 (1986:Winter) p.335 A. W. Schlegel and the Nineteenth-Century Damnatio of Euripides Ernst Behler N HIS 1802-04 Berlin lectures on aesthetics, August Wilhelm Schle­ I gel claimed that his younger brother Friedrich (in his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry U795]), had been the first in the modern age to discern the "immeasurable gulf" separating Euripides from Aeschylus and Sophocles, thereby reviving an attitude the Greeks themselves had assumed towards the poet. The elder Schlegel noted that certain contemporaries of Euripides felt the "deep decline" both in his tragic art and in the music of the time: Aristophanes, with his unrelenting satire, had been assigned by God as Euripides' "eternal scourge"; 1 Plato, in reproaching the poets for fostering the passionate state of mind through excessive emotionalism, actually pointed to Euripides (SK I 40). Schlegel believed that his younger brother's observation of the profound difference between Euripides and the two other Greek tragedians was an important intuition that required detailed critical and comparative analysis for sufficient development (SK II 359). By appropriating this task as his own, August Wilhelm Schlegel inaugurated a phenomenon that we may describe as the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides. The condemnation of Euripides by these early German romantics was no extravagant and isolated moment in their critical activity: it constituted a central event in the progressive formation of a new literary theory. Their pronouncements must be seen in the context of a larger movement, towards the end of the eighteenth century, that transformed the critical scene in Europe: the fall of the classicist doctrine and the rise of the new literary theory of romanticism.
    [Show full text]
  • The Satrap of Western Anatolia and the Greeks
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The aS trap Of Western Anatolia And The Greeks Eyal Meyer University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons Recommended Citation Meyer, Eyal, "The aS trap Of Western Anatolia And The Greeks" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2473. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2473 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2473 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The aS trap Of Western Anatolia And The Greeks Abstract This dissertation explores the extent to which Persian policies in the western satrapies originated from the provincial capitals in the Anatolian periphery rather than from the royal centers in the Persian heartland in the fifth ec ntury BC. I begin by establishing that the Persian administrative apparatus was a product of a grand reform initiated by Darius I, which was aimed at producing a more uniform and centralized administrative infrastructure. In the following chapter I show that the provincial administration was embedded with chancellors, scribes, secretaries and military personnel of royal status and that the satrapies were periodically inspected by the Persian King or his loyal agents, which allowed to central authorities to monitory the provinces. In chapter three I delineate the extent of satrapal authority, responsibility and resources, and conclude that the satraps were supplied with considerable resources which enabled to fulfill the duties of their office. After the power dynamic between the Great Persian King and his provincial governors and the nature of the office of satrap has been analyzed, I begin a diachronic scrutiny of Greco-Persian interactions in the fifth century BC.
    [Show full text]
  • Storytelling and Community: Beyond the Origins of the Ancient
    STORYTELLING AND COMMUNITY: BEYOND THE ORIGINS OF THE ANCIENT THEATRE, GREEK AND ROMAN by Sarah Kellis Jennings Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Departmental Honors in the Department of Theatre Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas May 3, 2013 ii STORYTELLING AND COMMUNITY: BEYOND THE ORIGINS OF THE ANCIENT THEATRE, GREEK AND ROMAN Project Approved: T.J. Walsh, Ph.D. Department of Theatre (Supervising Professor) Harry Parker, Ph.D. Department of Theatre Kindra Santamaria, Ph.D. Department of Modern Language Studies iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 GREEK THEATRE .............................................................................................................1 The Dithyramb ................................................................................................................2 Grecian Tragedy .............................................................................................................4 The Greek Actor ............................................................................................................. 8 The Satyr Play ................................................................................................................9 The Greek Theatre Structure and Technical Flourishes ...............................................10 Grecian
    [Show full text]
  • Bacchylides 17: Singing and Usurping the Paean Maria Pavlou
    Bacchylides 17: Singing and Usurping the Paean Maria Pavlou ACCHYLIDES 17, a Cean commission performed on Delos, has been the subject of extensive study and is Bmuch admired for its narrative artistry, elegance, and excellence. The ode was classified as a dithyramb by the Alex- andrians, but the Du-Stil address to Apollo in the closing lines renders this classification problematic and has rather baffled scholars. The solution to the thorny issue of the ode’s generic taxonomy is not yet conclusive, and the dilemma paean/ dithyramb is still alive.1 In fact, scholars now are more inclined to place the poem somewhere in the middle, on the premise that in antiquity the boundaries between dithyramb and paean were not so clear-cut as we tend to believe.2 Even though I am 1 Paean: R. Merkelbach, “Der Theseus des Bakchylides,” ZPE 12 (1973) 56–62; L. Käppel, Paian: Studien zur Geschichte einer Gattung (Berlin 1992) 156– 158, 184–189; H. Maehler, Die Lieder des Bakchylides II (Leiden 1997) 167– 168, and Bacchylides. A Selection (Cambridge 2004) 172–173; I. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans (Oxford 2001) 35–36, 73. Dithyramb: D. Gerber, “The Gifts of Aphrodite (Bacchylides 17.10),” Phoenix 19 (1965) 212–213; G. Pieper, “The Conflict of Character in Bacchylides 17,” TAPA 103 (1972) 393–404. D. Schmidt, “Bacchylides 17: Paean or Dithyramb?” Hermes 118 (1990) 18– 31, at 28–29, proposes that Ode 17 was actually an hyporcheme. 2 B. Zimmermann, Dithyrambos: Geschichte einer Gattung (Hypomnemata 98 [1992]) 91–93, argues that Ode 17 was a dithyramb for Apollo; see also C.
    [Show full text]
  • (Eponymous) Heroes
    is is a version of an electronic document, part of the series, Dēmos: Clas- sical Athenian Democracy, a publicationpublication ofof e Stoa: a consortium for electronic publication in the humanities [www.stoa.org]. e electronic version of this article off ers contextual information intended to make the study of Athenian democracy more accessible to a wide audience. Please visit the site at http:// www.stoa.org/projects/demos/home. Athenian Political Art from the fi h and fourth centuries: Images of Tribal (Eponymous) Heroes S e Cleisthenic reforms of /, which fi rmly established democracy at Ath- ens, imposed a new division of Attica into ten tribes, each of which consti- tuted a new political and military unit, but included citizens from each of the three geographical regions of Attica – the city, the coast, and the inland. En- rollment in a tribe (according to heredity) was a manda- tory prerequisite for citizenship. As usual in ancient Athenian aff airs, politics and reli- gion came hand in hand and, a er due consultation with Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, each new tribe was assigned to a particular hero a er whom the tribe was named; the ten Amy C. Smith, “Athenian Political Art from the Fi h and Fourth Centuries : Images of Tribal (Eponymous) Heroes,” in C. Blackwell, ed., Dēmos: Classical Athenian Democracy (A.(A. MahoneyMahoney andand R.R. Scaife,Scaife, edd.,edd., e Stoa: a consortium for electronic publication in the humanities [www.stoa.org], . © , A.C. Smith. tribal heroes are thus known as the eponymous (or name giving) heroes. T : Aristotle indicates that each hero already received worship by the time of the Cleisthenic reforms, although little evi- dence as to the nature of the worship of each hero is now known (Aristot.
    [Show full text]
  • Who Was Protagoras? • Born in Abdêra, an Ionian Pólis in Thrace
    Recovering the wisdom of Protagoras from a reinterpretation of the Prometheia trilogy Prometheus (c.1933) by Paul Manship (1885-1966) By: Marty Sulek, Ph.D. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy For: Workshop In Multidisciplinary Philanthropic Studies February 10, 2015 Composed for inclusion in a Festschrift in honour of Dr. Laurence Lampert, a Canadian philosopher and leading scholar in the field of Nietzsche studies, and a professor emeritus of Philosophy at IUPUI. Adult Content Warning • Nudity • Sex • Violence • And other inappropriate Prometheus Chained by Vulcan (1623) themes… by Dirck van Baburen (1595-1624) Nietzsche on Protagoras & the Sophists “The Greek culture of the Sophists had developed out of all the Greek instincts; it belongs to the culture of the Periclean age as necessarily as Plato does not: it has its predecessors in Heraclitus, in Democritus, in the scientific types of the old philosophy; it finds expression in, e.g., the high culture of Thucydides. And – it has ultimately shown itself to be right: every advance in epistemological and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists – Our contemporary way of thinking is to a great extent Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean: it suffices to say it is Protagorean, because Protagoras represented a synthesis of Heraclitus and Democritus.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 2.428 Reappraisals of the authorship & dating of the Prometheia trilogy • Traditionally thought to have been composed by Aeschylus (c.525-c.456 BCE). • More recent scholarship has demonstrated the play to have been written by a later, lesser author sometime in the 430s. • This new dating raises many questions as to what contemporary events the trilogy may be referring.
    [Show full text]
  • Aristophanes and the Definition of Dithyramb: Moving Beyond the Circle
    Aristophanes and the Definition of Dithyramb: Moving Beyond the Circle Much recent work has enhanced our understanding of dithyramb’s identity as a “circular chorus,” primarily by clarifying the ancient use of the phrase “circular chorus” as a label for dithyramb (Käppel 2000; Fearn 2007, ch. 3; Ceccarelli 2013; D’Alessio 2013). Little of that work, however, has investigated the meaning of the phrase “circular chorus,” which is most often assumed to refer to dithyramb’s distinctive choreography, whereby the members of a dithyrambic chorus danced while arranged in a circle around a central object (Fearn 2007: 165-7; Ceccarelli 2013: 162; earlier, Pickard-Cambridge 1962: 32 and 1988: 77). In this paper, I examine one of the earliest moments from the literary record of ancient Greece when dithyramb is called a “circular chorus,” the appearance of the dithyrambic poet Cinesias in Aristophanes’ Birds (1373-1409). I argue that when Aristophanes refers to dithyramb as a “circular chorus” here, he evokes not just the genre’s choreography, but also its vocabulary, poetic structure, and modes of expression and thought. In Birds, the poet Cinesias arrives in Cloudcuckooland boasting of the excellence of his “dithyrambs” (τῶν διθυράμβων, 1388) and promoting himself as a “poet of circular choruses” (τὸν κυκλιοδιδάσκαλον, 1403), thus equating the genre of dithyramb with the label “circular chorus.” Scholars have long noted that, upon Cinesias’ entrance, Peisetaerus alludes to circular dancing with his question “Why do you circle your deformed foot here in a circle?” (τί δεῦρο πόδα σὺ κυλλὸν ἀνὰ κύκλον κυκλεῖς;, 1378; cf. Lawler 1950; Sommerstein 1987: 290; Dunbar 1995: 667-8).
    [Show full text]
  • Athenaeus' Reading of the Aulos Revolution ( Deipnosophistae 14.616E–617F)
    The Journal of Hellenic Studies http://journals.cambridge.org/JHS Additional services for The Journal of Hellenic Studies: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here New music and its myths: Athenaeus' reading of the Aulos revolution ( Deipnosophistae 14.616e–617f) Pauline A. Leven The Journal of Hellenic Studies / Volume 130 / November 2010, pp 35 - 48 DOI: 10.1017/S0075426910000030, Published online: 19 November 2010 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0075426910000030 How to cite this article: Pauline A. Leven (2010). New music and its myths: Athenaeus' reading of the Aulos revolution ( Deipnosophistae 14.616e– 617f). The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 130, pp 35-48 doi:10.1017/S0075426910000030 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JHS, IP address: 147.91.1.45 on 23 Sep 2013 Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010) 35−47 DOI: 10.1017/S0075426910000030 NEW MUSIC AND ITS MYTHS: ATHENAEUS’ READING OF THE AULOS REVOLUTION (DEIPNOSOPHISTAE 14.616E−617F) PAULINE A. LEVEN Yale University* Abstract: Scholarship on the late fifth-century BC New Music Revolution has mostly relied on the evidence provided by Athenaeus, the pseudo-Plutarch De musica and a few other late sources. To this date, however, very little has been done to understand Athenaeus’ own role in shaping our understanding of the musical culture of that period. This article argues that the historical context provided by Athenaeus in the section of the Deipnosophistae that cites passages of Melanippides, Telestes and Pratinas on the mythology of the aulos (14.616e−617f) is not a credible reflection of the contemporary aesthetics and strategies of the authors and their works.
    [Show full text]
  • Lectures on Greek Poetry
    Lectures on Greek Poetry 1 2 ADAM MICKIEWICZ UNIVERSITY IN POZNAŃ CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY SERIES NO. 35 GERSON SCHADE Lectures on Greek Poetry POZNAŃ 2016 3 ABSTRACT. Gerson Schade, Lectures on Greek Poetry [Wykłady o poezji greckiej]. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Poznań 2016. Pp. 226. Classical Philology Series No. 35. ISBN 978-83-232-3108-0. ISSN 0554-8160. Text in English with a summary in German. The series of lectures contained in this volume were written for students at Adam Mic- kiewicz University. A first group of these lectures are intended to serve as an introduc- tion to Greek poetry of the archaic, classical and pre-Hellenistic age. They treat a selection of texts, ranging from the eighth to the fourth century BC. A second group of these lec- tures focuses on Homer’s Iliad: while the whole work is treated, the lectures follow the story of Achilles, which is developed mainly in five books. All texts are provided in trans- lation, and secondary literature is discussed and used to make the texts more accessible for young students interested in poetry. The lectures introduce to some of the main issues that characterise the texts, such as their relationship to their primary audience, the impact of orality, and the influence of the eastern poetic tradition on the Greeks. Where appro- priate, the lectures also treat the interrelation between various texts, their intertextuality. They try to answer the questions of how poetry did work then, and why these texts do matter for the European poetic tradition. Schade Gerson, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology, Institute of Classical Philology, Fredry 10, 61-701 Poznań, Poland Reviewers: prof.
    [Show full text]