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The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric Edited by Felix Budelmann Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521849449 Online ISBN: 9781139002479 Hardback ISBN: 9780521849449 Paperback ISBN: 9780521614764

Chapter 15 - Timotheus the New Musician pp. 277-294 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521849449.016 Cambridge University Press 15

ERIC CSAPO AND PETER WILSON Timotheus the New Musician

Timotheus was born in Miletus about 450 and died about 360 BCE. His professional activity can be traced from about 415 BCE into the fourth century. Timotheus is said to have written nineteen kitharodic nomoi, eigh- teen dithyrambs, twenty-one hymns, an unknown number of enkômia, 1 thirty-six preludes (prooimia) ‘and some other pieces’. Of the kitharodic nomoi there survive: about a third of the Persians; a single line of Artemis (unless this is a hymn), and nothing more than the titles of Nauplius and 2 Niobe. Certainly dithyrambs and known by title only are Mad Ajax, Elpenor, 3 Birthpangs of Semele and Skylla. Possibly dithyrambic is Cyclops, of which six lines survive. We also know the titles Laertes and Sons of Phineus,bothof unknown genre. Though little verse and no music remains, there is plentiful evidence to show how the ancients reacted to Timotheus. From antiquity to modernity these reactions have been extreme. Indeed the history of Timotheus is the story of his reception – and at the heart of the story is the controversial ‘New Music’. Timotheus’ activity spans the most volatile and most creative period in the history of Greek music. He overlaps with other innovators, conspic- uous for their efforts to develop the musical potential of song: Melanippides (c. 475–415 BCE), Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE), Phrynis (c. 460–400 BCE), Agathon (c. 450–399 BCE), Cinesias (c. 450–390 BCE), Telestes (c. 450–390 BCE), Crexus (c. 440–380 BCE) and Philoxenus (c. 435–380 BCE). Of all these poets the ancients considered Timotheus the most innovative. He soon came to symbolise the innovations of New Music generally.

1 Suda τ 620; cf. Steph. Byz. s.v. ‘Miletos’. 2 If Anth. Pal. 9.429 (Crinagoras) and 11.185 (Lucillius), and Suet. Nero 21.2, 39.3 are evidence that Niobe and Nauplius were nomoi. 3 Unless the ascription of P.Berol. 6870 to Timotheus’ Mad Ajax (Del Grande 1947, 89–90 and Bélis 1998) and P.Hibeh 693 + P.Heidelb. 178 to Elpenor or Skylla (Gerhard 1938, 26–38 and Del Grande 1947, 92–9) are correct.

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The term ‘New Music’ is a modern one, however, and it is misleading in that it suggests a coherent movement with an articulated aesthetic or artistic agenda. For this there is no evidence. Though we do hear of active collaboration between Timotheus and Euripides, and have proof of conscious imitation 4 by one poet of the other, the evidence for relations between this group generally suggest rivalry rather than collaboration.

Reception

Modern The magnitude of Timotheus’ innovations has been compared to ‘the transition from eighteenth-century Classicism to nineteenth-century Romanticism’; more specifically, for sheer violence, West compares the criticism levelled at 5 Timotheus with that aimed at Beethoven. Beethoven at least had the last laugh. Literary histories still continue to give Timotheus bad press and short shrift. In 1902 a papyrus was found containing the last 240 lines of Timotheus’ Persians, the largest continuous chunk of ancient Greek lyric poetry, with the exception only of Pindar’s odes. Scholarship showed little pleasure in this stroke of fortune. Kenyon, after denouncing Timotheus as ‘a curiosity, a monstrosity’ who ‘contradicts in every respect the ideals of Hellenic art and taste’, expressed the fervent hope that such an addition to our knowledge of Greek literature ‘for the credit of Greek literature, will not 6 be repeated’. This was only the beginning of an orgy of vituperation not seen since Timotheus’ lifetime. Pickard-Cambridge complained that Timotheus ‘did not know where to stop’, his expressions were ‘simply grotesque and 7 ridiculous’, and his ‘libretto vapid and silly’. Rose condemned him as ‘a most degenerate poet’ whose language ‘exhibits every possible type of bad taste, including wanton obscurity’, and whose metre was ‘restless and undignified, 8 suggesting the modern horrors of “jazz”’. Levi cried ‘ghastly’, ‘awful’, and 9 ‘sad proof’ of ‘the decline of lyric poetry’. Schmid and Stählin extended their disapproval of Timotheus to all other New Music as a ‘mere fashion- mongering without permanence’, anticipating Segal’s curiously Platonic 10 ‘taste formed by the mob’. Many historians of Greek literature felt it the 11 better part of discretion to ignore Timotheus and New Music altogether. 12 Otherwise he could be dismissed with two or three sentences, a single

4 5 Porter 1994, 199–207. Romanticism: West 1992a, 371; Ieranò 1997, 316–17. 6 7 8 Kenyon 1919, 5. Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 51. Rose 1951, 316. 9 10 Levi 1985, 266, 382, 396. Schmid and Stählin 1946, 516; Segal 1985b, 243. 11 Most prominently: Norwood 1925; Campbell 1983; Romilly 1985; Gerber 1997a. 12 Hadas 1950, 64; Levi 1985, 382; Dihle 1994, 129.

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13 14 sentence or a footnote. Peremptory mention might even take the form of 15 brief comment on a fragment of the minor comic poet Pherecrates.

Popularity in antiquity One might have thought that Greece’s most innovative poet would arouse more interest. But what of the most popular lyric poet in antiquity? Extant sources attest to as many as fifteen revivals (one annual) of Timotheus’ music 16 in public theatres, stretching from the fourth BCE to the third century CE. No lyric poet has anything approaching this record of ancient reperformance: 17 we hear next to nothing of the public reperformance of Pindar’s songs. By the fourth century BCE Timotheus’ songs were not only performed but widely cited and read. Maxims from Timotheus’ poetry came readily to the lips of 18 Greeks living in Asia as early as the beginning of the fourth century. The earliest Greek papyrus found in Egypt (c. 350–325 BCE) is a text of Timotheus’ Persians. Fourth-century comedy regularly quoted and para- phrased Timotheus. Aristotle refers to his poetry six times to exemplify his arguments in the Poetics and Rhetoric, only once feeling it necessary to identify the author by name. In Metaphysics Aristotle cites Timotheus as an example of one who set the modern standard of lyric poetry. By Aristoxenus’ day mainstream professional kitharodes emulated Timotheus’ style at a time 19 when musicians generally dismissed Pindar and Simonides as ‘archaic’. In Hellenistic times Timotheus was a classic commanding stintless venera- tion in even the most conservative backwaters of Greece. Polybius boasts that from childhood his compatriots learned Timotheus’ songs by heart; and in c. 170 BCE Cretan cities honoured a foreign ambassador who charmed his hosts by performing Timotheus in the theatre, ‘as befits an educated/culti- 20 vated man’. No literary canon of dithyrambic poets, however short, 21 excludes him. At the famous library of Pergamon a statue (or bust) of Timotheus appeared alongside such Ionian greats as Homer, Alcaeus and Herodotus (but also with the obscure Balakros and Apollonios who provided

13 14 Baldry 1951, 114; Kirkwood 1974. Kranz 1960, 241 n.1. 15 16 Murray 1937, 278; Kranz 1960, 241–2. Collected by Hordern 2002. 17 Currie 2004. Unlike the work of earlier lyric poets, Timotheus’ lyrics may normally have been reperformed in their original musical setting. 18 Plut. Ages. 14.603d. 19 Anaxandrides fr. 6 K-A; Antiphanes fr. 110 K-A; Menander fr. 167 K-A; Aristot. Poet. 1448a15 (by name), 1454a30, 1457b22, 1461b31–2, Rhet. 1407a17–18, 1415a (but see Hordern 2002, 250–1), 1412b36, Metaph. A 993b15; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 20–1. 20 Polyb. 4.20.8–12; I.Cret.I66, no. 11, lines 10–11. 21 Diod. Sic. 14.46.6; Dion. Hal. Comp. 6.19.8; Ps-Plut. De mus. 1135d.

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22 mandatory Macedonian content). ‘Timotheus’ kithara’ was a tourist attrac- tion in the centre of second-century CE Sparta (and possibly identified by a curious document, forged and inscribed(?) at about the same time and pur- 23 porting to be the ancient decree ordering its confiscation). In Timotheus’ home town of Miletus, we hear of musicians called ‘Timotheasts’, presumably dedicated to the spirit or substance of Timotheus’ music, like Homeridae for 24 Homer, as late as the third century CE. Modern scholarship’s protestations of Timotheus’ ephemerality are belied by over six hundred years of ancient history. In antiquity he outshone and outperformed all the ancient lyric poets to whose credit modern scholars compare him. We learn, at any rate, from Timotheus’ own words (802 PMG) of an early victory, probably c. 415 BCE, over Phrynis, the then most famous kitharode 25 in Greece. Soon afterwards Pherecrates’ Cheiron (a comedy of c. 400 BCE) recognised Timotheus as the most notorious contemporary lyricist. Anec- dotes attest his celebrity and success; a fragment of Alexander the Aetolian (c. 315–227 BCE) claims that ‘all Greece honoured Timotheus for his skill 26 with the kithara and for his songs’. In the last decade of the fifth century BCE Timotheus received an invitation from the Macedonian king, Archelaus, to reside at his court, an honour bestowed only upon the most renowned artists of the day, the tragedians Euripides and Agathon, the epic poet 27 Choerilus and the painter Zeuxis. All the considerable criticism directed against Timotheus and the other ‘New Musicians’ from the comic stage and the scholar’s study is predicated on a high degree of achieved agonistic success. It is, in fact, largely motivated by that success.

Music critics The negative reaction of modern critics is largely prepared by ancient musical criticism stretching back to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Ancient critics certainly conceded that Timotheus was the most innovative musician and composer of antiquity. Pherecrates declared that Timotheus’ musical innovations far surpassed those of Melannipides, Cinesias and Phrynis; Aristoxenus credited Timotheus with ‘the greatest possible innovation’; Pseudo-Plutarch calls him a ‘greater lover of novelty’ (philokainoteros) than any earlier poet;

22 I.Pergamon 200. 23 Paus. 3.12.10; Boeth. Mus. 1.1. On the decree, see Prauscello 2009 with further literature. 24 25 I.Didyma 181.5. Plut. Mor. 539c = Timoth. 802 PMG. 26 Dio Chrys. Or. 32.67, 33.57; Zenob. Athous 2.47 (Timoth. 790 PMG); Alexander Aet. apud Macrob. Sat. 5.22.4–5 (Timoth. 778 PMG). 27 Timotheus in Macedon: Plut. Mor. 334b and 177b; Stephanus of Byzantium 452–3 Meineke = FGE anon. 124a.

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Satyrus speaks of his ‘breaking new paths’ (kainotomia) and Plutarch of his ‘novelty-creation’ (kainopoiia); Proclus ends a list of innovators by saying 28 that Timotheus ‘brought the nomos to its present condition’. From the fourth century BCE till late antiquity Timotheus marked the threshold 29 between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ music. The problem was that the critics – almost to a man diehard conservatives and disaffected elites – simply did not like innovation. Aristoxenus identified Timotheus as a chief author of the ‘barbarisation’, ‘effeminisation’ and ‘great corruption’ he saw in the popular music of his day; Pseudo-Plutarch speaks of his ‘transgressions’ against music and complains that, unlike earlier innovators who initiated change without departing from the beautiful, ‘Timotheus … and all the poets of that generation became more vulgar and more innovative, pursuing the popular and what is now called the “commercial” style’;he ‘dishonoured the traditional Muse’ says the Spartan Decree (mentioned above); the Suda sums him up with the epigram: ‘He led ancient music into 30 degeneration.’ Unlike modern scholars, however, the ancients did not specifically com- plain about the exuberance of Timotheus’ language. Such criticism is levelled against dithyramb generally, which is characterised as intoxicating, obscure and frothy. In antiquity, however, this was less a ground of complaint, than the description of a style which conformed to the requirements of the ancient genre. When modern critics speak freely of New Music’s ‘dithyrambic style’, it is worth recalling, that, on the one hand, many of the scraps of New Music do in fact come from dithyrambs, and that, on the other, Pindar’s dithyrambs are also notably ‘dithyrambic’.

A tempest in a teapot (χειμὼ νἐνκακκάαβᾳ)? Timotheus and tradition Modern reactions to Timotheus are, as we have seen, based on an implicit or explicit contrast with the standard set by Pindar, the usual representative of high-classical, mature lyric. But Pindar’s dithyrambs are not much different

28 Pherecrates fr.155 K-A; Aristox. fr. 26 da Rios; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1135c; Satyrus P.Oxy. fr. 39, col. xxii 5–6; Plut. Mor. 795d; Proclus apud Phot. Bibl. 320 a 33. 29 See above, note 19, and next note. 30 Aristox. fr. 26, 28, 29 da Rios; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1132e, 1135c–d; Boeth. Mus. 1.1; Suda τ 620. Note: thematikon, here translated as ‘commercial’, is often misunderstood. It refers to festival prizes beginning in the Hellenistic period which consisted of cash rather than crowns. It was considered vulgar by some to compete for cash rewards rather than the symbolic prizes, though in fact there was little difference between them since the gold crowns were normally melted down to retrieve their cash value.

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DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.149.52 University on Thu Oct Press, 23 18:57:08 2010 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521849449.016 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric from Timotheus in style and that is how the ancients perceived them. Diogenes of Babylon, at least, found an ‘identity of style’ in the dithyrambs of Pindar and Philoxenus, while Horace celebrates not Timotheus’ but Pindar’sdithyrambs 31 for boldness, neologism and polymetry. Seaford thinks it likely that ‘in respect of language at least the deviants from the dithyrambic tradition were not the 32 later dithyrambists but Pindar and Bacchylides’. ‘Despite Timotheus’ reputa- tion for innovation’, says Hordern, ‘his phraseology and vocabulary are in fact 33 at times highly traditional.’ The ancient wit Dorion once ridiculed the sound and fury of Timotheus’ Nauplius as a ‘tempest in a pot’,butthetermmight sooner be applied to the critical furore surrounding Timotheus himself. The innovation ascribed to Timotheus, whether revolutionary or decadent, is much exaggerated. Greek music and poetry assuredly underwent important changes in the second half of the fifth century BCE. But the New Musical ‘revolution’ may owe more to a sudden change in the climate of reception than to any decisive rupture with musico-poetic tradition. Musical developments some two or more generations in the making came to a head during Timotheus’ heyday and were suddenly imbued with a new and radical significance. Greek music and poetry had always been innovative, and self-consciously so. As D’Angour notes: ‘Hesiod, Alcman, Pindar and Bacchylides all explicitly drew attention 34 to some aspect of novelty in their poetry.’ Timotheus’ contemporary Choerilus even complained that the ceaseless experiments of earlier genera- 35 tions had exhausted the limits of art. But suddenly in the later fifth century musical innovation became an ‘issue’ for the Greeks. From about 430 BCE disaffected elite critics grew to detest, and theatre audiences – it appears – to prize novelty as never before. By the late fifth century, poets were expected to insert self-advertisement into their songs. ‘Cinesias’ twice plugs his originality in the briefest of parodies of his poetry in Aristophanes’ Birds and we 36 have three such boasts in the extant poetry of Timotheus. There were indeed technical innovations which greatly increased the range and volubility of ancient music. But many of these can be dated to a good generation or two before Timotheus. By about 450 BCE, for example, a musician named Pythagoras invented a kithara with three sides, each equipped with a separate set of strings to allow modulations between three

31 Philodemus, Mus. 4 col. 31 (pp. 44–5 Delattre); Hor. Carm. 2.4.20–2. 32 33 Seaford 1977, 92. Hordern 2002, 36. 34 D’Angour 2006, citing Hes. fr. 537 M-W; Alcm. 14a PMGF; Pind. Ol. 3.4–6, Ol. 9.53; Bacch. 19.8–10 M. 35 Choerilus fr. 2 Bernabé. 36 Aristoph. Birds 1377, 1384–6; Timoth. 791.203 and 211–12 PMG, 796 PMG.

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37 modes. In Timotheus’ own lifetime, the piper Pronomos invented a kind of rotating collar, which blocked and opened new holes, so that the same pair 38 of pipes could play in all modes. Yet ancient critics falsely ascribed to Timotheus technical innovations which had been created at least one or two generations before him. They claimed that Timotheus had added an extra string to the kithara, though they could not agree whether it was the seventh, 39 ninth, tenth, eleventh or twelfth. These stories were perhaps encouraged by Timotheus’ own words in Persians (791.230 PMG) where he describes himself as ‘making rise the kithara with eleven-noted metres and rhythms’; or they may have found inspiration in the comic poet Pherecrates, who drew a caricature of Timotheus assaulting Music ‘with twelve strings’. But it is unlikely that Timotheus authored any technical innovations to the kithara and certain that he added no strings. For one thing, Melanippides is said by Pherecrates to have ‘slackened Music up with twelve strings’ well before Timotheus; for another thing, Ion of Chios, who died in 422 BCE, addresses elegiac couplets to an ‘eleven-stringed lyre’, which in the poetic language of 40 the day almost certainly means ‘eleven-stringed kithara’. The passages in Persians and Pherecrates can only refer to Timotheus’ use of a technically advanced instrument. That Timotheus was innovative we should have no doubt. But his con- tribution is inadequately described if framed as a series of contrasts between tradition and upheaval (with the ancient critics), or efflorescence and deca- dence (with the moderns). Certainly no simple contrast between Pindars and Timothei is likely to capture the complexity of this event. The polar oppositions with which the ancient critics set Timotheus against ‘tradition’ seek the forced moral clarity of myth. In opposition to the erstwhile noble simplicity of music, they ascribe to Timotheus an absolute degree of poikilia (both 41 ‘complexity’ and ‘ornamentation’). In opposition to ‘the oligochordia [= ‘few-stringedness’], simplicity, and dignity’ of tradition, they insist upon 42 his polychordia (= ‘many-stringedness’). Since many strings not only allowed more notes (the strings of ancient instruments were played ‘open’), but also allowed one to shift between different ‘modes’ (harmoniai,literally‘tunings’, based on the seven-stringed lyre), Timotheus is accused by Pherecrates of filling music with ‘extra-modal notes’, and by others of mixing not only the modes,

37 38 Athen. 637b; D’Angour 2006. Paus. 9.12.5–6. 39 [Censorin.] p. 76, ll. 8–9 Sallmann (seventh, ninth); Paus. 3.12.10 (eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh); Pliny NH 7.204 (ninth); Suda τ 620 (tenth and eleventh); Nicomachus 4 (p. 274 Jan) (eleventh); Pherecrates fr.155.25 K-A (twelfth). 40 Pherecrates fr.155.5 K-A, 25; Ion 32 W. Cf. West 1992b, 23–8. 41 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1135d–e, 1141c; Aristox. fr. 26 da Rios. 42 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1135d, 1137a–b; Plat. Rep. 399c–d.

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Timotheus vs. Sparta Democratic Athens was (rightly or wrongly) regarded as the Mecca of musical innovation. In reaction to the New Music, the ethically and politically reac- tionary music critics created an image of Sparta and Crete (sometimes even Egypt) as last bastions of traditional music, conservative utopias for the ears, where all violation of musical tradition was punished with the utmost severity of the law, and where music was thought to serve an exclusively military 49 function. The symbolic opposition between Sparta and New Music was soon incor- porated into the biography of Timotheus, and may have been known to Timotheus himself. From at least the second century BCE six ancient authors report that Timotheus competed at a Spartan festival but was charged by the Spartan authorities with an offence against music because he had four 50 more than the traditional seven strings. The result, variously told, is that Timotheus either successfully defended himself (by pointing to a statue of

43 Phercrates fr. 155.26 K-A. For the terms ‘mode’ and ‘genus’ see Battezzato, this vol., 143–4. 44 Dion. Hal. Comp. 131; Plat. Rep. 398d–9d. 45 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1132e; Heph. On Poems 3 Consbruch; Proclus apud Phot. Bibl. 320a; Dion. Hal. Comp. 131. 46 Pherecrates fr.155.23 K-A; Suda ϕ 103; Aristoph. Thesm. 100 (New Music of Agathon). 47 Dion. Hal. Comp. 131; Heph. On Poems 3 Consbruch. 48 Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1138c, 1142b, 1138b (referring to the style of Polyidus, who by the late fourth century seemed unstructured even by comparison with Timotheus). 49 Laws 660b; passages and discussion in Gostoli 1988; Csapo 2004a, 241–4. 50 Artemon of Cassandrea FHG 4.342 = Athen. 14.636e; Plut. Inst. Lac. 17. 238c, Ages. 10.799f–800a; Paus. 3.12.10; Dio Chr. 32.67, 33.57; Cic. Leg. 2.14.39; Boeth. Mus. 1.1.

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Apollo holding an eleven-stringed lyre), or, more usually, had the extra strings cut off his kithara either before or after the competition. The story is certainly ben trovato. It squares off the airy Timotheus, personification of musical innovation and poikilia, against unyielding Sparta, supreme champion of music’s primitive simplicity. It redresses mythi- cally what history could not reverse. But it is hard to believe, given the methods and predispositions of ancient biographers, that there is much historical basis to this encounter. Just possibly an actual performance or set of performances by Timotheus at one of Sparta’s major public festivals (like the Karneia) lies behind the passage of the Persians – performances at which his innovation came up against a degree of genuine Spartan cultural conser- vatism, and so helped feed the polarised ideological construction. Whatever happened, the cause of the stand-off, as reported, depends on the untenable belief that Timotheus invented extra strings for the kithara (see above). In any case, the earliest version has Timotheus playing an ordinary magadis (and its deus ex machina, the statue of Apollo, already carries a multi-stringed kithara!). The fact that the same anecdotes are told of Terpander and Phrynis inspires still less confidence in the historicity of the event, and even less the fact that Argos, too, out of concern for ‘the dignity and simplicity of ancient music … is said to have once laid down a penalty for breaches in the rules of music, and to have imposed a fine on the first man who tried to use more than seven strings’.51 Scholars are inclined to accept some version of the tale of Sparta’s legal prosecution of the poet, not only because of his mention of his ‘kithara with eleven-noted metres and rhythms’ in the Persians, but still more because of an earlier passage in the same poem where Timotheus speaks of Spartan hostility to his music (791.202–12 PMG).

Come Paian to my songs as an ally, you who swell the strength of my new- fashioned gold-kithara-bearing Muse. For the ‘noble, long-lived, great leader of Sparta’, ‘teaming with the flowers of youth’, blazing hostility, the host buffets me, assails me with the lurid reproach that I disgrace the very ancient Muse with new hymns. The language is far from precise and it offers little purchase to any who would reconstruct a history of legal prosecution. The terminology is predominantly military, not legal. The last section of the Persians effects a transition, from the image of the Greeks celebrating their victory over the Persians by dancing a paean, to Timotheus’ own paean invoking Apollo’s aid against an assault by

51 Plut. Apoph. Lac. 220c, Inst. Lac. 17.238c, Prof. Virt. 13, Agis 10. 799f–800a; Ps.-Plut. De mus. 1144f.

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Sparta on his songs (not his instrument). We would suggest, rather, that ‘Sparta’ in this passage refers less to a political and geographical entity than to an ideological construction by conservative critics. The language need refer to nothing more injurious than negative criticism from a source which is perhaps not Sparta itself, but one which invokes Sparta as a bastion of traditional music (hence the probably ironic praise). If this is so, then it may explain why Timotheus seems concerned to defend his ‘new hymns’ and at the same time deny that he or his contemporaries were the first to innovate. Timotheus argues that innovation was present from the beginning. He names Orpheus who invented the lyre, then (791.225–31 PMG):

After him Terpander yoked the Muse on ten notes … But now Timotheus, who opened the safe-stored many-songed treasury of the Muses, makes rise the kithara with eleven-noted metres and rhythms. Since we know that he was not the first to use an eleven-stringed kithara (see above), Timotheus is unlikely to be stressing technical innovation to his kithara. He refers rather to the polychordia of his songs (i.e. the use of many notes, metres and rhythms). It is the growth in variety and complexity of song that is at issue in Timotheus’ history of innovation: Orpheus ‘invented the poikilo- [= complex, ornamented] songed lyre’, even Terpander added many notes, but Timotheus added great variety in all aspects of music. The biographical tradition’s focus upon the number of strings comes from a careless and over-literal interpretation of this passage. Indeed, in Persians, immediately following the reference to ‘Sparta’, Timotheus sets the inclusiveness of his own musical practice against the purist tradition represented by ‘Sparta’ (791.213–20 PMG):

But I do not fence out anyone young, old or same-aged from these hymns, but the old-muse vandals, these defacers of song, who launch forth wailings of clear- far-voiced heralds, these I do keep off.

Unlike ‘Sparta’ Timotheus rejects nothing new or, for that matter, old. What he does reject is the ‘vandals’ and ‘defacers of music’. In this passage it is clear that his intervention in the dispute of new and old concerns, or at least extends to, the quality of vocalisation. He compares the critics’ vision of state-regulated ‘traditional’ song to the ponderous declamations of offi- cial heralds. This is an apt description of the style of song urged by the inventors of ‘tradition’, with ponderous repetitive rhythms, and minimal melodic variations which slavishly follow the natural rhythms and tonic accents of the spoken language.

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The New Musical style

As we are largely at the mercy of heavily biased critics for information about New Music, we can only surmise that there is a core of much abused truth behind the stark oppositions that they use to distinguish it from ‘tradition’. Above all one might freely doubt that the characteristics singled out by the following description were sudden or unprecedented innovations. But as a synchronic description of the tendencies of the style, they appear accurate and can be illustrated in the extant fragments. In the old style of song language governed music, but in the new style, so the critics said, music governed language. According to this account the musical qualities of archaic song were determined by the words. Rhythm was determined by the natural length of syllables, melody by the pitch accent of the words, and each note corre- sponded to a single syllable. There was no disparity between the instrumental and vocal lines, no harmony and no variation. In place of this mildly musified speech, New Music, as described by its critics, introduced nothing less than song as we know it, where rhythm and accent were moulded to the shape of the music, where any number of notes can be assigned to a syllable and vice versa, where voice and instrument complement each other in harmony or counterpoint. The Aristotelian Problems describes the reasons for the departure of the nomos and dithyramb from strophic form (918b):

It is because they were performed by professional artists whose song became long and varied since by that time they were capable of imitation (mimesis) and prolonged delivery. Just like the words, the music must always keep changing as it follows the imitation: in fact it is more important to imitate with music than with words. New Music not only liberated music from the constraints of natural language, but, as Plato complained, it reversed the traditional hierarchy and put the 52 music before the logos. Words were chosen for their musical and mimetic qualities. Syntax imitated the flow and volubility of music. The poetry addressed the senses and the emotions, not the intellect. The narrative pro- gressed through strings of arresting images or a succession of impassioned speeches. There was a preference for virtually paratactic syntax which avoided or suppressed the logical ordering of hypotaxis to create a more purely physical and sensual – a more music-like – flow of sounds and impres- sions. The language spoke, like musical signs, through juxtaposition and metaphor. Its expression was never clear or pointed; its outpourings, rather,

52 Plat. Rep. 398d.

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DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.149.52 University on Thu Oct Press, 23 18:57:08 2010 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521849449.016 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric were, like music, irreducibly suggestive and polyvalent. The clear articula- tions and hierarchical structures that permit the mind to grasp a ‘referential’ communication, were omitted, blurred or levelled to numb the intellect, excite the senses and awaken the emotions. Above all Timotheus’ verse is mimetic and dramatic. The Persians,ifwe can judge from the surviving final third of the poem, does not tell the story of the Greek victory at Salamis so much as mimic the visceral experience of sea-battle. In describing the collision of the lines of ships physical and emotional immediacy is created by the use of a sustained metaphor condensing the members of the ships with human anatomy, above all at the moment when, at the convergence of the opposed battle lines, these members are crushed and splintered: some part of the ships are ‘teeth’, the rams become ‘curved heads’, banks of oars are ‘firwood arms’, while rams shave off the ‘limbs’ of the ships and expose their ‘linen-bound ribs’ and the ships ‘redden’ the sea with their ‘drops’. These metaphors, though they may bring the description of Salamis more into line with the conventionally heroic hoplite battle, serve mainly to bewil- der the senses, imitating the confused carnage with a wild confusion of categories and images – at another moment the sinking ships ‘rear up’ like cavalry. The chaos of battle bears down upon our senses, as ‘the ship-borne barbarian army is carried hither and thither in confusion’. The imagery shifts and mixes as freely as the rhythm of the verse. Even the elements come into play, as the language confuses land and sea, while ‘the wind stops in one direction, and swoops down in another’: here a ‘man … ploughs the rainy ?flats’, there ‘the navigable plains’ are filled ‘with wandering sailors’. Most discussions of Timotheus’ use of language regard these metaphors as grotesque and compulsive, but it is worth considering the possibility of some method in the madness. The chaos of images, mixing bodies with boats and land with sea, is hardly inappropriate to the most important combined naval and hoplite action in Greek history. Traditional war poetry focused exclusively on the hoplite or cavalry experience. By assimilating naval to hoplite and cavalry warfare, Timotheus lent epic glory and dignity to the more demotic arm of the military. But the principal aim is to mimic the vicissitudes and emotional confusion of battle. Sometimes he does this by juxtaposing extreme reactions: as when ‘the war-cry [of the victor] mingled with shrieks [of the vanquished]’ or the description of the Persian defeat is followed immediately by the Greek triumph. Sometimes he creates an emotive counterpoint within a single metaphor: ‘The star-studded sea teemed with bodies ?emaciated by the desertion of breath’ blends the awesome beauty of the night sky and the repulsive horror of a corpse-littered seascape. The death agony of the Persians is described through the language of the symposion and Bacchic

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DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.149.52 University on Thu Oct Press, 23 18:57:08 2010 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521849449.016 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Timotheus the New Musician celebration in a metaphor drawn from the conventional imagery of life, joy and serenity. The sea becomes the ‘lap of Amphitrite, with gleaming folds, crowned with fishes’ (the language suggests the mixing bowl ‘crowned with ivy’), and as the drowning islander sinks ‘the unBacchic shower foamed up [i.e. like the wine it is not] and poured down into his nourishing vessel [i.e. stomach] and then the sea surging up out of his mouth raged like a bacchant’. Above all, Timotheus seeks immediacy. For the most part, the story of the Persian defeat is not narrated but acted. The section of Persians which falls between the description of the ramming of the ships and Timotheus’ defence of his poetry is organised around four monodies in direct speech. They are highly dramatic and comparable to the monodies of Euripides’ later tragedies. Like many of them they are highly emotional and suitably placed in the mouths of Orientals in extremis. The first (791.72–81 PMG) is by a drowning island nobleman, probably an Ionian, who spews his rage at the sea ‘in shrill-raving voice and with demented cast of mind’. The second (105–38)is by a Mysian addressing his native land, one of many ‘breast-beating wailers, with shouts and tearful wailing, gripped by mournful lamentation’. The third (150–61) is by a rich Celaenaean pleading for his life ‘smashing the piercing seal of his mouth with Asiatic voice as he hunts for the speech of the Yauna’. The fourth (178–95) presents the Persian king ‘heaving’ with despair at the sight of his panic-stricken army. The speeches exhibit widely different characters as Timotheus’ introductory words might lead one to expect. A dramatic style complements the dramatic form of these monodies and contrasts with the alternately epic and lyric style of the rest of the narrative. Metrically the speeches are largely iambo-trochaic mixed with runs of the distinctly tragic dochmiac. The language of the first, second and fourth speech is tragic, and contains direct quotations of Aeschylus. The third speech, however, is written in a comic barbarised Greek. There can be little doubt that Timotheus not only expressed the different emotions of his embedded monodists in his music, but also mimicked their very different characters with his voice, displaying with his musico-poetic virtuosity a skill and versatility in acting which was itself a recent art and (for the elite critics) almost as 53 controversial as the new virtuosity in music. Polyphonic, polymetric and polyeidic, the speeches offer a fine example of a type of performance which elicited Plato’s complaint about vulgar poets who did not know the proper limits of mimesis, but would imitate anything and anyone in direct speech, copying their pitch, rhythm and diction and therefore requiring ‘all modes and all rhythms if it is to be spoken in character, since it contains every manner of shifts’ (Rep. 397b–c). Musical, emotional, dramatic and wild,

53 See Csapo 2002.

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Timotheus’ poetry is the finest example we have of the kind of professional theatre music which Plato and Aristotle condemned as aiming at pleasure, not ethical or intellectual improvement. Musical poetry, like instrumental music, is best suited to a more purely aesthetic experience. Little wonder that it appeared vapid, silly or degenerate to those who wished to harness the persuasive powers of music to a programme of public indoctrination and social conditioning.

The social context

Democracy and class struggle Timotheus was not an Athenian, but it was the special political and social conditions of the city he may have dubbed ‘the Greece of Greece’ that made his career possible, as they made possible the whole ‘new wave’ on which he 54 rode. Timotheus grew up during the period when the progress of the democratic ‘adventure’ of Athens was at its most mercurial. Over the course of the fifth century a series of constitutional reforms had produced a polity that located ever greater powers with the demos – the citizenry of adult males over the age of thirty – rather than with a narrow elite of birth, wealth or title. Although many politicians continued to be drawn from the moneyed elite, their actions were now minutely scrutinised in the courts, and the very shape of the economic elite was in any case changing. Democratic governance instilled a greater sense of collective purpose and commitment in the citizenry, and this new purposefulness was important in enabling Athens to play a lead role in resisting the Persian invasions early in the fifth century. That success in turn infused the Athenians with a yet greater sense of their collective capabilities. The decision to invest in a large and costly navy was also hugely significant: this clinched the victory at Salamis – celebrated in Timotheus’ distinctive style some eighty years later in the Persians – enabled the subsequent growth of a powerful maritime empire and helped foster a greater sense of political entitlement from the lower socio-economic orders of society, who manned the warships. As political power was spread more widely across the citizenry, the economic and material basis on and over which that power was exercised increased exponentially. For the maritime empire that grew out of the defen- sive alliance against Persia not only brought large sums of tribute from ‘allied’ states, but also made of Athens ‘a magnet for people and trade’, and of the growing harbour town of Peiraieus, ‘the economic center of the Aegean and

54 Vita Euripidis p. 3 Schwartz.

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55 far beyond’. All of this fuelled a vigorous market economy and stimulated new manufacturing and financial activities. These created new sources of considerable wealth which in turn promoted socio-economic mobility, since the traditional elite whose wealth was based in the land tended to leave ‘commerce’ to others. A class of ‘new’ rich soon made their presence felt in 56 the political arena. Athens of the later fifth century was thus a place of new power, new wealth, ‘new’ politicians, new intellectual horizons – as well as ‘new’ music. These developments are all interrelated. While the upheavals of Athenian social and economic life have long been seen as a stimulus to the intellectual revolution of the fifth century, their equally significant impact on the cultural – especially the musical – sphere has only recently started to be explored. A distinctive but neglected feature of the new musical scene is the social, economic and cultural mobility that underlies it. Its practitioners – especially the aulos-players who fuelled the technical innovations – were drawn from different social strata from the traditional cultural elite. Whereas poets, actors and other high-level public performers had tended to come from the leisured elite, these new musicians came from diverse, and often lower-class, back- 57 grounds. This democratisation of performance explains much of the venom of the (elite) critics’ response. Having seen their political power systematically eroded by the progress of democracy, the old elite tried to hold on all the more tenaciously to their cultural supremacy. Even in the period of Periclean ascendancy (440s), Athens could be seen to have been an ideologically ‘aristocratic’ democracy, with elite cultural values unchallenged in many quarters. And yet the new conditions of performance were wresting this supremacy too from the elite, leaving their traditional musical resources looking decidedly thin and tired beside the explosive innovations of Timotheus and his kind. At the same time they were giving economic as well as cultural capital to a new breed of professionals. The result was a kind of cultural class conflict played out in theatres, concert halls and in the critical discourse surrounding them – a conflict that echoes the real violence of the two anti-democratic revolutions of the period (411, 403). One of the ways the elite responded was to politicise the innovations and freight critical discourse with a heavily ideological bias that represented the innovations as little less than the end of civilisation and the collapse of the social order. Timotheus and his peers seem to have responded in kind. Most or all of the central terms relating to the technical developments in music seem to have been the site of such ideological struggle: plurality, changeability, innovation, openness, liberation, inclusiveness and mixing. All of these were

55 56 57 Raaflaub 1998, 24. Connor 1971. Wilson 2002, Csapo 2004a.

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Theatre The distinctive material conditions of Athenian performance in Timotheus’ day enabled and encouraged the growth of a professionalism and virtuosic experimentalism of a kind unknown elsewhere or before. The realm of theatrical and musical performance had, like much else in Athens, become a significant economic enterprise: leading musicians and actors commanded high fees; the festival infrastructure within Athens was lavishly supported by a combination of private and public funding; and the growing popularity of theatrical and musical performance within and outside Attica increased 59 demand and so gave further impetus to the creation of a ‘star’ system. The contexts of Athenian performance had been developing for nearly a century. By the end of the fifth century, there were at least six annual festivals in Attica that showcased theatre and dithyramb, and more than twice that 60 number by the mid-fourth century. In Timotheus’ heyday there were in addition three or four major musical contests that included his specialty, kitharôidia. Those of the Panathenaea were the most prestigious, and had a panhellenic status on a par with the Olympics for athletics. The construction or elaboration, under Pericles’ leadership, of the large Odeion adjacent to the theatre of Dionysus was probably driven in part by a desire to provide the city with a concert hall that allowed a mass audience to appreciate these musical events in all-weather conditions. Timotheus is likely to have carried off first prize in kitharôidia at the Panathenaea on more than one occasion: that consisted of an olive wreath made of solid gold (worth 1,000 drachmas), plus five hundred more drachmas in cash – a huge sum that might be as much 61 as five years’ wages for a skilled worker. These conditions meant that by the middle of the century Athenian audiences had grown up on a rich diet of competitive performance from the best

58 59 See Csapo 2004a, plus Plut. Mor. 827b. Taplin 1999, Dearden 1999, Csapo 2004b. 60 61 2 Csapo 2004a, especially 207–9. IG II 2311.

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FURTHER READING Serious scholarly study of Timotheus, his fellow musical innovators and the broader cultural context in which they lived and worked is in its infancy. Bibliography useful to further study is thus limited and, as we have tried to stress, almost all of it does little more than translate the hostile responses of elite ancient critics into a modern idiom. The editions of Timotheus by Hordern and Janssen contain valuable introductory essays (for details, and for translations, see pp. 388–95). Barker 1984–9, vol. I, includes discussion of New Music’s history, style and reception. The best reference work for information on the strictly musical side is West 1992a. Recent approaches to the New Music have seen more positive evaluations: above all, see Csapo 2004a, who takes the New Music as an expression of, among other things, the egalitarian ethos of Athenian democracy. In this connection see also Wilson 2004.Herington1985 was among the first to give a sympathetic account of the performance aspects of Timotheus and the New Musicians. The publication of a book-length study of kitharôidia (Power 2009) challenges the undeserved neglect and maltreatment of this important performance type. Rosenbloom 2006, 148–54 has a valuable discussion of the historical context of the first performance of Timotheus’ Persians.

62 Thuc. 1.70.2, 3.38.5; Csapo and Miller 1998, 101. 63 Plato Laws 701; cf. Gorgias 501–2, Aristot. Pol. 1341b15–18.

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