Mercury’s Wings

ANCIENT HELLENIC MUSIC was a broader cultural field than music nowadays tends to be. Most importantly, musical sound did not occupy a realm separate from poetry.¹ Rather, both were integral components of mousikê, the art or craft of the Muses, the tutelary divinities of music-making and poetry. Virtually all poets were also musicians and composers. Indeed, while Greeks did make and appreciate instrumental music, music’s default setting was some type of song. Certain kinds of verse—those classified as lyric or, more generally and more accurately, melic (from melos, “melody, tune”)—were sung to the accompaniment of a reed or stringed instrument (often the lyre, whence the adjective “lyric”). The texts of Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar, and other melic poets were originally set to musical scores that, because of deficiencies in notation, were mostly forgotten by the end of the Hellenistic period and now are lost. Other kinds of verse, most notably the dactylic hexameters of the Homeric epics, were intoned with minimal articulation beyond the natural pitch of the language, and without the use of instruments. Yet this type of performance, which may not seem musical to us, was as much mousikê as melic performance was. Furthermore, dancing commonly accompanied song, particularly the songs performed by choral ensembles during religious festivals.

Mousikê encompassed a wider range of communicative contexts and functions than does music today. Early Greece was, to use John Herington’s phrase, a “song culture” in which poetry set to music affected practically all aspects of life.² In the largely pre- and para-literate Archaic and Classical polis, song was the main vehicle of cultural transmission—significantly, the mother of the Muses is Mnemosyne, “Memory.”³ Cosmogonies, theogonies, sagas of war, dynastic struggle, and civic foundations—all were preserved by the Muses, who notionally disclosed them to bards such as Homer and Hesiod, who in turn communicated this material to their fellow mortals. The prefatory invocations of the Muse or Muses in their songs served to guarantee the authority of their contents.

We should distinguish between private and public contexts of musical communication. A well-documented example of the former is the symposium, the ritualized party at which men, primarily (but not solely) of the aristocracy, gathered to drink wine and sing songs accompanied by the lyre or reed pipes called auloi (which sounded somewhat like the modern-day oboe).⁴ The texts of sympotic songs—both anonymous ditties and works attributed to famous poets such as Anacreon and Theognis—articulated and preserved, through constant performance, the beliefs and moral codes shared by the group. As the preserved lyrics of Alcaeus attest, drinking songs also commented on current political events. Song, rather than speech, was accordingly the foremost kind of communication during symposia.

In this context, music was also a means of non-verbal, symbolic communication. Since musical connoisseurship and competence were badges of social distinction, the act of taking up the lyre and skillfully singing a traditional tune was an opportunity for each symposiast to display to his companions his savoir faire, and thus to affirm his membership in their circle. A well-educated, culturally refined gentleman could in fact simply be called mousikos, “musical.” In Classical Athens (as in other cities, though evidence beyond Athens is slim), boys of well-to-do families underwent primary education with a kitharistês, a lyre teacher and music-master. The schoolroom was a sort of conservatory, where students learned the basics of lyre-playing and a repertoire of canonical lyric songs as well as poems for recitation.⁵ These lessons in mousikê instilled traditional moral and aesthetic values. More profoundly, the experience of learning and performing dignified melodies and rhythms was thought to shape the student cognitively and emotionally, making him not only musically competent in the symposium, but also conspicuous in the civic realm for his speech and comportment. As a fifth-century sophist much concerned with musical education, Damon of Oa, is said to have remarked, “A boy singing and playing the lyre should exhibit not only his manliness and self-control, but also his sense of justice.”⁶

Much less is known about the role of music among private groups of women and girls as well as of lower- and middle-class Greeks of both sexes. We do know, however, from the lyric poetry of Sappho (late seventh century) and from Athenian vase paintings of the Classical period that some aristocratic women, at least, were trained in mousikê and made music with one another at gatherings in homes and religious sanctuaries (Figure 7.1).⁷ Sappho’s lyrics, which record the feelings and experiences of her circle of friends in the Lesbian city of Mytilene, suggest that song-making served much the same functions for them as it did for male symposiasts.⁸

FIGURE 7.1 Two women, one playing a lyre: Red-figure pelike, Polygnotos group, fifth century BCE.

Musée du Louvre, G 543. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, ART53620)

As for public contexts, regular and occasional festivals featured new and old songs by solo singers and citizen choruses. Besides transmitting myths, legends, and genealogies, these performances maintained religious beliefs and social values important for collective identity and civic ideology.⁹ Two examples are illustrative. First, in Plato’s Timaeus, one of the interlocutors, Critias, relates a childhood memory of the Apatouria festival in Athens, the occasion when boys were enrolled in phratries.¹⁰ They competed in a contest in rhapsody, the chant-like recitation of verses. (Professional rhapsodes intoned the Homeric epics at festivals.) Many of the boys “sang” (aeidein)—the slippage between recitation and singing is telling—the poetry of Solon, the sixth-century Athenian lawgiver and poet-composer. Since Solon composed his verses in the first person, the young Athenians singing these songs were publicly—and, true to the Greek agonistic spirit, competitively—imitating this Athenian founding father. Moreover, because the songs defended Solon’s social and political program, the boys were communicating Solonian wisdom to their contemporaries and, through this civic display of their musicianship, demonstrating their own readiness to become leading citizens and stewards of traditional culture.¹¹

As at the Apatouria, then, mousikê was the medium through which Spartan society witnessed the ritual initiation of its youth. But this performance communicated a complex set of messages. The girls sang for the pleasure and edification of their audience while showing their fitness as future wives and mothers of citizens.¹⁴ Their choral display was itself socially exemplary, a visual and sonic model of collective order.¹⁵ The girls also sang to one another, expressing their collective identity, mutual affinities, and group hierarchy. Finally, they sang for the divinity at whose festival they performed and to whose local cult they were devoted. Toward the end of the partheneion, the chorus asserts, “I desire most of all to please Aotis,” Aotis being a dawn goddess that scholars have variously identified with Artemis, Aphrodite, or the locally divinized Helen.¹⁶

The performance of a chorus such as Alcman’s was a spectacular form of cultic worship, an appeal delivered on behalf of the entire community to a god or gods, in whom it was meant to produce pleasure and goodwill. The first book of the Iliad contains a paradigm of such choral communication with the divine. In an effort to persuade Apollo to lift the plague sent upon the Greeks at Troy, a chorus of Achaean youths “went about propitiating the god with song and dance, singing beautifully”; for his part, Apollo “felt delight in his heart as he listened.”¹⁷

Early Greek culture recognized the persuasive force of music as a whole. “Persuasion (peithô),” Plutarch says, was regarded as “something musical (mousikon) and dear to the Muses.”¹⁸ Greek authors routinely speak of music as persuasion caused by enchantment.¹⁹ The fourth-century historian Ephorus of Cyme said that music was introduced into human society “for the purpose of beguilement (apatê) and spellcasting (goêteia).”²⁰

Instrumental sound and the singing voice were both regarded as sweeter and more moving than the speaking voice.²¹ By the same token, musicality was an asset for an orator.²² A Roman authority on rhetorical training, Quintilian, advises would-be orators to study music, citing the legendary lyre-singer Orpheus as a model for the effective public speaker.²³ The theme is an old one. Plato says of Protagoras, the itinerant sophist whose lectures amazed fifth-century Greek audiences, “like Orpheus, he charms with his voice, and those charmed by his voice follow him about.” Perhaps thinking of Orpheus, the sophist Gorgias of Leontini compares persuasive speeches to epôidai, “incantations,” that bewitch the soul.²⁴ It probably came as no great surprise to his audience when an orator of the Second Sophistic, Dio Chrysostom, confessed that he listened with greater pleasure to expert singers than to orators.²⁵

The persuasive speaker could also resemble a piper. Alcibiades tells Socrates, “Indeed, you’re a far more wondrous piper than Marsyas. He entranced people by means of his instrument… . But you differ from him only in that without an instrument you accomplish the same thing, by means of bare words.”²⁶ The comparison of Socrates to Marsyas, the master piper of myth, points up the irresistibility of the philosopher’s speech: the force exerted by the plangent, penetrating tones of well-played auloi over mind, body, and soul was legendary.²⁷

The musical enchanter par excellence, however, was Orpheus, whose lyre songs animated rocks and trees, calmed savage Thracians and wild animals, and even swayed the will of the gods. His sung appeal to Hades and Persephone to release his wife Eurydice from the Underworld remains still, alongside the captivating song of the Sirens, the paradigm of musical persuasion in the Western tradition. But other mythical lyre-singers commanded similar powers: Hermes’s lyre persuaded Apollo to relinquish his anger, and his cattle, while Amphion’s charmed stones into arranging themselves into the city-walls of Thebes.²⁸

Music as a medium of persuasion, and especially as an influence on politics, is the subject of the rest of this chapter. Two texts—one Archaic from Solon, the other Classical from Pindar—illustrate these themes. Whereas the examples of musical communication reviewed above were consensual and conservative, these texts present song-making as an agent of change, even disruption. Following the discussion of these texts, we turn to Athenian khorêgoi, who manipulated the institutions of civic musical culture to burnish their public images and advance their political self-interest.

Solon’s Protest Song

Let us begin with a short fragment from the Salamis elegy of Solon. The interpretation of the fragment must depend to some extent on the intriguing yet problematic testimony about its performance supplied by Plutarch.³¹ He reports that the Athenians, tired of fighting the Megarians for control of the island of Salamis, passed a law that no citizen should agitate for Athens to take the contested territory. Solon disagreed with the decision to abandon Salamis, as did many young, hawkish Athenians, and he decided to reignite the city’s passion for war with a ruse. He first circulated a rumor that he had gone mad, then:

Plutarch’s contention that with his elegy Solon intended to reverse public policy, or at least popular opinion, must be accurate; the remaining three couplets preserved from the song indicate as much.³³ Most scholars today, however, reject much of the rest of his account—the law against advocating war in writing or speech (but not song), the feigned madness, and the theatrics. They hold that Solon’s statements in his initial couplet were rhetorical rather than literal. Over the past few decades, a consensus has emerged that this elegy, like others of the time, was performed in symposia. Its premiere performance took place amid symposiasts who were intimates. (In Plutarch’s account, these are the enthusiastic friends in the agora, including Solon’s young relative Peisistratus, who would seize tyrannical rule in 561.) From there Solon would have expected it to be communicated across the city at large through re-performances.³⁴

In the song culture of Solon’s time, new songs, even relatively long ones such as the Salamis, would in all probability have been transmitted from one drinking-party to the next via symposiasts, and then, in some cases, from sympotic milieux to the whole polis. Already in the Odyssey, banqueters desired “the newest song to reach their ears,” in this case the bard Phemius’ tale of the recent travails of Achaean heroes returning from Troy.³⁵ Solon himself plays a leading role in an anecdotal account of the sympotic transmission of a song. At a symposium, he hears his nephew performing a song by Sappho, his contemporary; enraptured, he demands to be taught it on the spot. The story, related by an author of the Roman imperial period, Aelian, is most likely apocryphal, yet it surely captures the vogue for new songs at Archaic symposia.³⁶

The lyric poetry of Sappho’s compatriot, Alcaeus, offers a parallel to the Salamis. His songs attack the leaders of rival factions (hetaireiai) in Mytilene, above all the demagogue Pittacus, who had won power there around 600. In these works, the poet-singer addressed himself primarily to members of his own, aristocratic faction. But it is difficult to believe that Alcaeus was content merely to preach to the choir, as it were. He may well have intended his songs to propagate his views among other aristocratic Mytileneans hostile toward leaders like Pittacus, and sufficiently cultured—mousikos—to sing his compositions at their own symposia.³⁷ Alcaeus was, after all, a consistent loser in the struggle for power. According to both the biographical tradition and his own verses, he was driven into exile, where, cut off from civic life, he “longed to hear the Assembly summoned and the Council.”³⁸ “Protest music” may have given Alcaeus a political voice that he would have lacked otherwise.

Solon was never the political outsider Alcaeus was, but he too used mousikê as an alternative to official modes of civic discourse, and his Salamis was in its own way a protest song. In the initial couplet, Solon dramatizes the elegy’s performance as the authoritative public announcement of a herald, but speaks of an ôidê, or “song,” instead of an agorê, the prosaic “speech” that a herald would use, or that speakers would use in an assembly.³⁹ The appositional phrase kosmos epeôn suggests, however, that an ôidê is in fact more suitable than an agorê in times of political crisis such as the Salamis affair.⁴⁰ The melodic and rhythmic structure of music—here, not only the singing voice, but probably also the aulos, which regularly accompanied Archaic elegy—confers kosmos, an aesthetically satisfying arrangement or ordering.⁴¹ Solon implies that the beautiful kosmos of song can achieve what mere speech cannot: to persuade listeners to take up arms.⁴²

Kosmos also denotes political, social, and moral order.⁴³ We saw above that musical training and practice were thought to instill ethics and proper comportment—in a word, a kind of kosmos.⁴⁴ If we link these ideas, we may say that Solon’s “cosmic song,” besides being a harmonious composition, offered Athens a model of the sociopolitical and moral kosmos that the city had lost because of its unseemly neglect of Salamis. The phrase kosmos epeôn might even recall the epic use of the verb kosmein to describe the marshaling of troops for battle.⁴⁵ Music “marshals” the words intended to mobilize Athenians for war against Megara.⁴⁶

The notion that music could model and even bring about social order is well attested for Archaic Sparta. Plutarch reports the story that the lawgiver Lycurgus prepared the then-fractious Spartans to accept his constitutional reform, which was actually called kosmos, by bringing to them Thaletas (also known as Thales), a Cretan composer of lyric and choral mousikê.⁴⁷ Thaletas, Plutarch writes, was himself an expert lawgiver of a kind, who, instead of persuasive speeches (logoi) composed songs that were “exhortations to obedience and concord, since their melodies and rhythms possessed much that was orderly (kosmion) and calming.”⁴⁸ Similar stories feature Terpander, a lyre-singer brought from Lesbos to Sparta on the advice of the Delphic oracle to dispel civil strife and restore unanimity; one variant has Terpander actually setting to music the laws (nomoi) of Sparta.⁴⁹ These semi-legendary accounts surely reflect an authentic Spartan belief (and related practices) according to which musical communication possessed an “Orphic” power to create kosmos. The prominent role played in Spartan society by Tyrtaeus, an elegist of the seventh century, confirms such a belief.⁵⁰

The Salamis elegy probably represents Solon’s poetic and political “début on the public scene.”⁵¹ If mousikê initially offered the young Solon a strategic backchannel for protest and persuasion, however, he would not abandon it for some more “official” form of communication as he matured into Athens’ leading statesman. In fact, song remained fundamentally integrated into Solon’s political activity throughout his career, as a primary medium for publicizing and defending his reformist agenda. The singer was inextricable from the politician and legislator.

Pindar’s Diplomatic Muse

Two other, more or less contemporary, inscriptions from the city of Mylasa in Asia Minor attest to a Mylasan envoy’s performance of works by the Cretan composer Thaletas while visiting Crete.⁵³ Indeed, “musical diplomacy” of one sort or another was probably common, especially in the later Classical and Hellenistic periods, when musicians traveled international circuits for concerts and festival contests. Polyaenus tells of the leading part played by a “star” citharode of the mid-fourth century, Aristonicus of Olynthus, in a mission dispatched to the Bosporus by the general Memnon of Rhodes.⁵⁴ Memnon was plotting to invade the region; the massive crowds drawn to the concerts put on by his “goodwill ambassador” allowed him to gauge the size of the local population. Polyaenus’ account is surely embellished, but it cannot be altogether wrong for him to report that musicians could be exploited in inter-state relations.⁵⁵

Pythian 4, an epinikion or “victory song” composed by Pindar, ostensibly to celebrate the chariot victory of Arcesilas IV, king of Cyrene, in 462, constitutes a different kind of musical-diplomatic intervention, aimed at solving some problems of the Cyrenean élite. The song is remarkable among Pindar’s preserved epinikia not only for its extraordinary length—at 299 verses, it is more than twice as long as any other—but still more for its epilogue (lines 263–299), which is mostly occupied with a plea to Arcesilas for the restoration of an exiled aristocrat, Damophilus, whom Pindar explicitly names (281). We are not told the reason for Damophilus’ exile, but we may presume that he was punished for his involvement in the factional strife (or perhaps insurrection) alluded to in lines 271–276.⁵⁶

Since Pindar places the plea prominently at the conclusion of this ode, it has been thought that Damophilus commissioned Pythian 4 in hopes that its performance in Cyrene would succeed in persuading Arcesilas to pardon him.⁵⁷ A more likely scenario, however, is that a reconciliation was arranged in advance, and that Damophilus or Arcesilas commissioned the ode after these negotiations. The performance would celebrate Damophilus’ recall—and, of course, the clemency of Arcesilas (cf. 270)—before an audience of Cyrene’s leading citizens.⁵⁸ Even if Pindar is only reprising a successful appeal to the king, he maintains the fiction that Arcesilas needs persuading. And this would not have been merely for show. Some in the initial audience of Pythian 4 had to be convinced of Damophilus’ contrition, while others wanted to be assured that the king would publicly forgive an enemy. Pindar thus styles his “Muse”—his song—as a peace-broker bearing a “true message” (279): first, a sterling recommendation for Damophilus (280–292), and second, a report of the exile’s prayer for restoration, which takes up the final lines of the song (293–299):⁵⁹

But he prays that, when he has endured to the end his ruinous affliction, he will someday see his home, and that joining in symposia at the fountain of Apollo he will often give up his heart to youthful joy, and that holding the richly ornamented lyre (phorminx) among his sophisticated (sophoi) fellow citizens he will attain peace, neither bringing pain to anyone, nor himself suffering harm at the hands of the townsmen (astoi). And he would recount, Arcesilas, what a spring of ambrosial verses he found, when recently he was hosted at Thebes.

In this passage, the climactic image of symposia convened near Apollo’s fountain, a Cyrene landmark, does symbolic (and rhetorical) double duty. On the one hand, it is a poignant condensation of the comforts of home and fellowship Damophilus longs for; on the other, it is a harbinger of the political health that will be restored on his return. The theme of the orderly symposium as a reflection of a peaceful polis is common in early Greek poetry. As Pindar puts it in another epinikion, “Peace loves the symposium.”⁶⁰ Here, however, it is convivial music-making in particular that signifies sociopolitical reconciliation. Pindar imagines a “harmless” Damophilus playing the lyre at a symposium of his fellow citizens, who are, as he must also be, sophoi, an adjective here synonymous with mousikos: they are skilled in performing as well as evaluating song. The scene is one of musico-political harmony—we might say kosmos—appropriately set at the fountain of Apollo, god of lyric music and civic order.⁶¹ The lyre held by Damophilus is notionally an instrument of the peace he longs to attain, but also of peace that will reign in Cyrene once Arcesilas welcomes him home.⁶²

Pindar may have sought to deepen this notion through an intertextual reference that the Cyrenean sophoi would surely have appreciated. At the time of composition, in 462, the typical Greek symposiast would play a tortoise-shell lyre (lyra or khelys), yet Pindar calls Damophilus’ instrument a phorminx, the name for a lyre constructed with a sound-box of wood rather than of tortoise-shell.⁶³ This is the stringed instrument played by singers in the Homeric epics. Although the phorminx had largely fallen out of use by the fifth century, Pindar sometimes retains the word for the sake of its ennobling, epic tone.⁶⁴

What is remarkable about the use of phorminx in Pythian 4 is the epithet attached to it, daidaleos, “richly ornamented.”⁶⁵ The wording cannot but recall another such daedalic phorminx, the one played by Achilles in Iliad 9. In this scene, envoys are sent by Agamemnon to persuade Achilles to return to battle. They find him sitting in his tent with Patroclus, singing of heroes and “delighting his heart in a clear-sounding, fine, richly ornamented (daidaleos) phorminx” (186–187). Achilles listens to the envoys, but refuses to end his self-imposed exile. Here, the normal socializing tendency of music-making is inverted in such a way as to highlight his destructive isolation. Pindar’s allusion to this scene pointedly revises the Homeric script. As opposed to the anti-social music of Achilles, Damophilus’ singing to the “richly ornamented phorminx” marks his peaceful reintegration into society and reconciliation with his king.

Pindar understood the musical sound of his victory odes to be an integral part of their essential communicative function, to praise the victor and create consensus around that praise. He routinely has his choruses sing about the very music they are singing—its melodic modes, rhythms, and instrumental accompaniment—as well as about their own voices and dance movements, often emphasizing the opulent beauty, refined craftsmanship, and creative originality of these elements.⁶⁸ Illustrative is the synaesthetically glamorous Nemean 8.15: the chorus sings of “bearing a Lydian headband wrought with sonic intricacy.”⁶⁹ In Olympian 10, a boxing victory calls for music in which “luxuriant song and dance (molpa) will answer to the reed [of the aulos]” (84), and the “pleasant-voiced lyre and the sweet aulos sprinkle grace” upon the victor (93–94). On the one hand, the expertly composed music and beautifully executed performance reflect the excellence of the victor—“glorious songs” as a “mirror of fine deeds.”⁷⁰ On the other hand, this reflection or echo induces the audience to accept the excellence of both victor and music. The metamusical references have a partly persuasive purpose.

Musical enchantment is explicitly foregrounded in the beginning of Pythian 1, an ode composed for the Syracusan tyrant Hieron. Pindar evokes an image of Apollo leading the Muses with his lyre. Their choral music pacifies all who hear it, making the world tranquil and orderly; its “shafts [of sound] enchant even the minds of the gods” (12). There can be no doubt that this divine chorus is a paradigm for the epinician chorus and its own capacity for persuasion.

Embedded in the narrative in the middle of Pythian 4 is another model of musical persuasion. Pindar recounts the quest for the Golden Fleece by Jason and the Argonauts. As is often the case in the epinikia, a myth of heroic struggle and success serves to magnify the athletic achievement of the victor.⁷¹ In telling the story of the quest here, however, Pindar includes an episode that would seem to reflect the compelling power of his own music. In an effort to help him win the Fleece from the Colchian king Aeëtes, Aphrodite contrives for Jason to seduce Medea, the king’s daughter:

The Cyprian goddess first brought to mortals from Olympus the varicolored iunx, having yoked it with four spokes to an irresistible wheel, the maddening bird. And prayers and incantations (epaôidai) she taught the skilled (sophos) son of Aeson, that he might take away Medea’s respect for her parents, and that desirable Hellas, the longed-for, might drive her, burning in her mind, with the whip of Persuasion.⁷²

The strange device that Aphrodite invents for Jason, a wheel with a bird splayed over the top, is an historically attested musical instrument called the iunx, after the name of the bird, a wryneck.⁷³ When briskly revolved, the iunx hummed, and thus enchanted listeners. As this passage indicates, it was typically used, along with incantations, in casting amatory spells.⁷⁴ Jason’s love magic has the intended effect: he seduces Medea and with her assistance wins the Fleece.

Since Jason goes on to betray Medea and to be ruined by her in turn, it has been argued that this episode serves as a negative foil: Pindaric persuasion is founded on truth, not deceptive magic.⁷⁵ Yet Jason’s divinely inspired music—something mentioned in no other version of Jason and Medea’s encounter—arguably sounds a more exemplary note, suggesting that the epinician song might likewise charm its listeners.

Paramusical Communication and Political “Optics”

Pericles was thus off to an auspicious start in public life with his khorêgia of Aeschylus’ prize-winning Persians in 472.⁷⁷ Four years earlier, Themistocles had sponsored the victorious production of Phoenician Women by Phrynichus, a tragedy that glorified Themistocles’ naval triumph at the recent battle of Salamis.⁷⁸ We may speculate that his choregic success had the intended effect of reviving his popularity, which was at that point beginning to wane, and of inspiring support for his controversial diplomacy and naval expenditures. Plutarch says that Themistocles commemorated his choregic victory with an inscribed plaque (pinax), and indeed it was common for dramatic and dithyrambic khorêgoi to advertise—and immortalize—their victories with inscribed monuments erected in well-trafficked locations throughout the city.⁷⁹

Such monuments formed one part of a program of paramusical mass communication.⁸⁰ In another part of it, khorêgoi accompanied their choruses at the public events surrounding the dramatic and dithyrambic contests. Costumed in splendid crowns and garments, they led them in the procession for the City Dionysia festival.⁸¹ Some contrived to make a spectacle of themselves in the theater itself before or after the performance, broadcasting their magnificence to the assembled citizens.⁸² Plutarch recounts an illustrative story about the khorêgia of the wealthy general and statesman Nicias. To the great delight of the audience, a handsome young slave of his appeared in the guise of Dionysus during one of his choral performances. After the applause continued for some time, “Nicias stood up and said he thought it unholy that one whose body had been dedicated to a god should remain a slave, and he declared the young man free.”⁸³ With this theatrical turn, the khorêgos was able to convey his common touch, piety, generosity, and power.⁸⁴

According to Plutarch, Nicias—who lacked Pericles’ oratorical flair, not to mention the demagogue Cleon’s talent for pandering—aimed to win over the Athenians through his lavish spending on several khorêgiai, all successful, which he commemorated with impressive monuments. His grandest khorêgia, however, took place, not in Athens, but on Delos. This island, site of a major sanctuary of Apollo, hosted a festival to which many cities sent theôriai, sacred delegations that featured choruses. In 417, as part of his sponsorship of the Athenian delegation there, he presented his city’s theoric choral performance in characteristic style, with an eye as much to glorifying his city and himself as to delighting the god:

Nicias is remembered too for his ambitious displays on Delos, how brilliant and worthy of the god they were. The choruses that the cities used to send there to sing for Apollo would sail up to the island in a haphazard manner, and immediately the crowd meeting the ship would call on them to sing in no proper order at all, but while they were disembarking in haste and confusion and still putting on their crowns and costumes. But Nicias, when he led the theôria, first disembarked on the [neighboring island of] Rheneia with his chorus, sacrificial offerings, and the rest of his equipment, and he brought along a bridge he had made to measure in Athens, which was conspicuously arrayed with golden adornments, colored dyes, garlands, and tapestries. During the night, he spanned with the bridge the narrow strait between Rheneia and Delos. Then, at daybreak, leading the procession for the god he brought across his chorus, splendidly outfitted and singing as it went.⁸⁵

The surprising procession from the small satellite island of Rheneia to Delos is more than a coup de théâtre. About a century earlier, the Samian tyrant Polycrates, whose naval empire anticipated that of Athens, had captured and then dedicated Rheneia to Apollo, linking it to Delos with a chain.⁸⁶ As it processes over the bridge, Nicias’ chorus repeats but humanizes Polycrates’ gesture, displaying both piety and imperial domination. And at its head walks Nicias, conducting, as it were, this musical rendition of Athenian power and prestige.

Nicias’ rival Alcibiades also undertook several khorêgiai in typically colorful fashion. As he marched in processions to the theater, conspicuous in purple finery, he awed the gathered spectators. Craving international recognition, he entered seven chariots in the race at the Olympic games (probably in 416), winning first, second, and third (or fourth) place. He then commissioned Euripides, the most famous living poet-composer, not only in Athens, but also probably in the entire Greek world, to celebrate his achievement in an epinician song. It may have been performed before a large Panhellenic audience at the lavish victory party thrown by Alcibiades at Olympia.⁸⁷

Duris of Samos, a historian of the later fourth century who claimed descent from Alcibiades, tells of another public relations coup involving famous musicians.⁸⁸ In 408 (or perhaps 407), Alcibiades made his first return to Athens since 415, when he was forced into exile. Though he was coming home after being appointed to a naval command and leading the Athenian fleet to several critical victories in the eastern Aegean, he could not be sure of the reception he would encounter.⁸⁹ A grand entrance was in order, one that would consolidate popular support for him by advertising his recent military successes and by recalling the magnificence that had made him an icon in happier times. Accordingly, Alcibiades entered the Piraeus leading triremes adorned with spoils and trophies of war. Duris adds that on Alcibiades’ own ship, which had been fitted with purple sails, two musical celebrities were employed to perform menial tasks. Callippides, a popular actor-singer of tragedy, served as boatswain, while Chrysogonus of Athens, a virtuoso aulete and winner of the Pythian aulos contest (the most prestigious in the Greek world), piped a melody for the rowers to keep time.⁹⁰ To complete the effect, each wore the sumptuous stage costume associated with his art. Duris claims that Alcibiades gave the impression of a drunken reveler (the role he plays in Plato’s Symposium, where he also makes a grand entrance accompanied by an aulete). But his display must have been intended to communicate another message: the prodigal had returned in all the glory of his splendid khorêgiai. The welcoming crowd’s reaction, which expressed both nostalgia and renewed optimism, shows that this bit of political theater had the desired effect.

Conclusion

In his Laws, Plato envisions a conservative society where it is compulsory for “every adult and child, free and slave, male and female, and indeed the entire city never to cease singing incantations (epaidein) to itself.”⁹¹ Plato is using “incantations” figuratively; what he means are pleasurable—and accordingly persuasive—musical performances vetted for moral and political fitness by civic officials. By singing these salutary songs together for one another, the inhabitants of Plato’s ideal city maintain ideological conformity.⁹² Although this sort of state-controlled music sounds suspiciously like mass brainwashing (in line with the authoritarian tenor of the Laws), it nevertheless derives from the culture of the early Greek polis, where music affirmed traditional values and reinforced communal identities.

But if mousikê was often a force for sociopolitical conservatism, its powers of persuasion, both sonic and visual, could also be deployed to change minds in more localized circumstances and for more selective ends. We saw this in the cases of Solon’s elegiac redirection of the Athenian position on Salamis, Pindar’s application of choral and sympotic music to the restoration of Damophilus, and the paramusical grandstanding of Nicias and Alcibiades.

6. D–K 37 B 4. Cf. Pl. Prot. 326a–b. On Damon, see Wallace (2004), (2015). All dates are BCE.

15. For the chorus as an ideal of social order, note Xen. Oec. 8.3–4. In the utopian city of his Laws, Plato greatly expands the historical function of choral performance for maintaining sociopolitical equilibrium: Prauscello (2012); Kowalzig (2013).

17. Il. 1.472–474. Choral song as akin to offering or sacrifice: Svenbro (1984); Wilson (2000), 11–12. As an element of sacrifice: Naiden (2012), 22, 59–62, 151–153. Furley (1995) discusses the persuasive language of cultic hymns.

19. On musical enchantment and responses to mousikê more generally, see Peponi (2012). For the incantatory effects of early Greek sung language, Segal (1974).

22. As Demosthenes (3.288) complained, it was for his rival Aeschines, who had the advantage of having been a tragic actor-singer: see E. Hall (1999), (2002).

25. Dio Chrys. 19.4. Some writers on rhetoric and oratory argue that eloquence is more persuasive than music; their defensiveness is telling. According to the author of On the Sublime, the sounds of the aulos and lyre, while moving, are merely “images and spurious imitations of persuasion” compared to the artful arrangement of words (39.1–3). See also Cic. De Or. 2.34; Quint. Inst. 9.4.10–13.

27. See, for example, Soph. Trach. 217; Dio Chrys. 1.1–2; Quint. Inst. 1.10.32.

28. Hymn. Hom. Merc. 420–23; Hes. fr. 182 M–W. Note too the story of Arion in Hdt.

32. Polyaen. 1.20.1. A later, somewhat different account: Diog. Laert. 1.46. In the fourth century, Demosthenes seems to allude to the story in a speech (19.252, 255). Cf. Noussia-Fantuzzi (2010), 203–207, on the likely early date for the story.

34. Sympotic performance: Bowie (1986), 18–22; Irwin (2005), 41–42. Public performance: Herington (1985), 34. Battle exhortation occurs elsewhere in Archaic elegy composed for sympotic (note Callinus fr. 1 West) and quasi-sympotic occasions (such as the military banquets that were probably the setting for the elegies of Tyrtaeus); see Bowie (1990).

37. Rösler (1980) argues that Alcaeus composed only for his restricted sympotic group, since the fragmentarily preserved texts do not directly address the wider citizenry of Mytilene, but the argument is needlessly limiting. Cf. Parker (1981); Walker (2000), 215–216.

39. Cf. Anhalt (1993), 122. The word agorê is the Ionic dialect equivalent of Attic agora. In Homer, agorê may denote either a “speech in prose”—as Solon clearly means it—or “(place of) assembly.” Semantic confusion may have contributed to the belief that the elegy was sung in the Athenian agora. Cf. Noussia-Fantuzzi (2010), 205, 213.

42. The lyric songs of Demodocus and Hermes that move audiences to tears and joy (respectively) are sung “according to kosmos” (Od. 8.489–491, Hymn. Hom. Merc. 433–435). However, musicians do not have a monopoly on such expression. Skilled orators are occasionally said to impart kosmos to spoken words (note Eur. Med. 576; Pl. Ap. 17b–c), although in these cases the poet-musician may in fact be the model for the (excessively) artful speaker. For the often negative connotations of oratorical kosmos as purely cosmetic trickery, see Worman (2002), 24–26. Poetic kosmos can also be suspected of deception: Parmenides fr. 8.52.

44. The sympotic elegy of Theognis evokes its own re-performance by young men singing to pipes, eukosmôs, “in good order” (242), an expression with both aesthetic and ethico-political resonance. As Ford (2002), 36–37, remarks: “The performances will no doubt be elegant, but they will also reinstate the essential moral orderliness of the singer, who elsewhere proposes to ‘adorn’ (kosmein), his city by moderation and justice [Theognis 947].”

46. See apposite comments in Mackie (1996), 17–20, on the poetic representation of military kosmos in Iliad Book 2.

49. Ps-Plut. De mus. 42.1146b; Clem. Strom. 1.16.78.5. The claim is probably derived from a semantic coincidence: nomos can mean “law” or “musical composition.” Yet rhythmic and even melodized laws are attested across Indo-European societies: Franklin (2004), 244.

57. Ancient commentators on Pindar already held this view (Schol. Pyth. 4.467).

59. At Pind. Pyth. 2.3–4, the song (melos) is figured as a message (angelia), but there the message relates, as expected, praise of the victor.

61. Cf. Pyth. 5.60–65 for Apollo’s role in the foundation of Cyrene, a passage that also

63. Scholars distinguish wooden “box lyres”—the phorminx and its larger descendant, the kithara—from tortoise-shell “bowl lyres”; see West (1992), 50–51.

65. For this sense of daidaleos, see Braswell (1988), 396. Nowhere else in the Pindaric corpus does this adjective or its cognates modify the word phorminx or other words for lyres.

67. On the virtual “double performance” of Pythian 4, see Felson (1999), 31. For the monodic re-performance of choral epinicia at symposia, see Morrison (2007), 15–19.

68. Examples: Anderson (1994), 94–101; Montiglio (2000), 82–115. For a striking claim to musical novelty, see Pind. Ol. 3.3–6. Prauscello (2012) discusses Pindar as a self-conscious musical innovator.

71. The Argonautic myth is indirectly connected to Cyrene and Arcesilas through the figure of the Argonaut Euphemus, claimed as an ancestor by the Battiad line of kings to which Arcesilas belonged: Carey (1980).

74. Schol. Opp. Hal. 1.565: “[The iunx] is a type of musical instrument, which sorceresses use for love.” Discussion and sources: Johnston (1995), 180–186.

76. See Wilson (2000) for a comprehensive study of the khorêgia. In the Archaic period, the khorêgos was the “chorus leader” who sang and danced with the chorus he led. In Classical Athens, the term referred to an off-stage choral financier (although it inevitably retained some of its performative connotations). There is some evidence, however, that khorêgoi on rare occasions did double duty as chorus leaders, or koryphaioi: Wilson (2000), 114–115, 130–136.

78. Plut. Them. 5.4. Pericles was attempting to position himself as an heir to Themistocles: Podlecki (1998), 11–16. Mosconi (2000) discusses the importance of mousikê to Pericles’ political program; cf. Wallace (2015).

79. See, for instance, what is likely to be an early fifth-century inscription commemorating a dithyrambic victory (Anth. Pal. 13.28), discussed by Wilson (2000), 120–123.

80. For this term describing “actions and activities that go with” musical phenomena, see Stige (2012).

81. Dem. 21.22, referring to the orator’s own khorêgia; Ath. 12.534c, on Alcibiades.

84. Cf. Wilson (2000), 138: “The khorêgia is here … a site of power for the individual who can reduce the gap between a god and a slave.”

88. Plutarch, who records Duris’ account (FGrH 76 F 70 = Alc. 32.2–3), is skeptical of it, but there is little reason to reject it altogether. For its likely veracity, see Gentili and Cerri (1988), 14–24; Munn (2000), 166; Verdegem (2010), 332. Cf. Wilson (2010), 204 n. 104.

89. Xen. Hell. 1.4.12, 17; Plut. Alc. 32.3, 34.1–2. Cf. Munn (2000), 166–167.

90. For Callippides, known for his innovatory dramatic realism, see Csapo (2010), 117–149. For aulêtai on triremes, see West (1992), 29.

94. See, for example, Ieranò (1992) on the introduction of dithyrambic choruses in Corinth under Periander (Hdt. 1.23); for the politicized establishment of “tragic choruses” and the intervention in epic recitations by Cleisthenes of Sicyon (Hdt. 5.67), see Herington (1985), 83–84 and Cingano (1985); for the arrangement by the Athenian Peisistratids of rhapsodic contests at the Panathenaea, which featured performance of the Iliad and Odyssey, Davison (1955), Aloni (2006); for the Samian tyrant Polycrates’ “imperial” manipulations of festival mousikê and rhapsodic epic, Burkert (1979), Aloni (1989).

7

Musical Persuasion in Early Greece

Solon’s Protest Song

Pindar’s Diplomatic Muse

Paramusical Communication and Political “Optics”

Conclusion