ARTS, DRAMA AND MUSIC
INTRODUCTION
The poet Horace gives us an account of early Roman literature. It was a story of faithful old Roman farmers, when the harvest is over, making a sacrifice and enjoying a drink or two, and then watching boisterous, rollicking entertainments featuring lots of genial abuse. The abuse then turned nasty and laws were passed to control it. But, says Horace, ‘many traces have been left of our uncouth past’. Then come the famous lines ‘Captive Greece made her savage conqueror captive, and brought the arts to rustic Latium’ – Horace’s acknowledgement of the radical changes that knowledge of the ancient Greeks’ cultural achievement wrought in Rome.
Our first surviving complete works of Roman literature are the comedies of Plautus and Terence from the second century BC. These were in fact Greek comedies translated into Latin, Greek names and all, suitably adapted for the Roman audience. They were put on at festival times in the temporary wooden theatres typical of the day (Rome had no permanent stone-built theatres till the first century BC). Filled with tricky slaves, tyrannical fathers, young lovers, pimps and prostitutes, boastful soldiers and so on, these plays were boisterous affairs in more ways than one: Terence (born in Africa) made an actor complain in the prologue of one comedy that the first production had been called off because of all the shouting and women screaming at the rumours of a boxing match and a tightrope walker. The second attempt was aborted because of word about a gladiatorial show. Now he expressed the hope that the third performance would finally take place. So Roman drama was not acted with all the solemnity of a nativity play at a convent. Certainly the audience, to judge by the way they are addressed in the prologues, was very mixed: men and women, free and slaves, socially high and low, rich and poor, old and young, and so on.
There were writers of tragedy, too, in the second century BC – Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius to name some names – though none of their works survive. Perhaps they lived too much in the shadow of their Greek rivals 250 years earlier – Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. But though neither comedy nor tragedy as an active medium outlived the second century BC, the comedies in particular remained very popular and were regularly restaged well into the imperial period.
Farces were already being played alongside comedies in the second century BC – knock-about stuff with much horseplay, slapstick and general buffoonery – and this format continued alongside the newly developing mimes and pantomimes. Mime was a formless, varied entertainment featuring acrobats, conjuring, naked women, dancing and song, and other lewd material. Storylines were simple: kidnaps, shipwrecks, love affairs, and so on. There could be veiled political references. They were hugely popular.
Pantomime was essentially a dance medium. The dancers did not sing or speak but worked entirely by bodily movement. They were backed up by music and a chorus. Greek myth was a popular theme. Here the Greek satirical writer Lucian described how a performance should be:
In general, the dancer undertakes to present and enact characters and emotions, introducing now a lover and now an angry person, one man afflicted with madness, another with grief, and all this within fixed bounds… within the selfsame day at one moment we are shown Athamas in a frenzy, at another Ino in terror; presently the same person is Atreus, and after a little, Thyestes; then Aegisthus, or Aerope; yet they all are but a single man… The dancer should be perfect in every point, so as to be wholly rhythmical, graceful, symmetrical, consistent, unexceptionable, impeccable, not wanting in anyway, blended of the highest qualities, keen in his ideas, profound in his culture, and above all, human in his sentiments.
The most famous, or perhaps rather notorious, actor was the emperor Nero. Nero regarded himself primarily as a great supporter and performer of the arts. He put on an immense variety of entertainments, compelling the great and good to take part as well (one rode an elephant down a sloping tightrope, others fought in the arena). He staged a naval battle complete with sea monsters, and a ballet of Daedalus and Icarus in which Icarus fell rather too realistically, spattering Nero with blood. His Great Play Festival once featured a burning house, from which the actors were allowed to keep the furniture they rescued. Throughout the festival, gifts were distributed to the populace, including vouchers for corn, clothes, gold, silver, paintings, slaves, wild beasts, and even ships, tenements and farms. No wonder the populace adored him.
Nero was passionate about music, took lyre and singing lessons, and kept his weight down with enemas and emetics. His singing debut was in Naples, where he disregarded an earthquake to complete the performance (the theatre collapsed soon afterwards). In another competition, he performed the whole of the opera Niobe. This took till nearly dusk and left no time for anyone else to perform. He regularly toured musical competitions in Greek cities (they sent him in advance every prize they could lay their hands on, which convinced him Greeks really understood about music), and protected his vocal chords by getting others to read out his speeches. He kept a voice trainer constantly by his side. He performed in tragedies, taking the roles of gods and heroes, and even goddesses and heroines, wearing masks modelled on his own face or that of his current mistress. One story is that he fiddled while Rome burned (during the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64). But the fiddle had not been invented then. Another story had him returning from his palace in Antium to Rome to coordinate action against the blaze; another had him watching Rome burn while he played the lyre and sang of the destruction of Troy.
All these entertainments were accompanied by music and song, which was a staple of Roman life – from theatre (song and dance during the intervals in comedies) and buskers in the streets to the military (the brass sounded retreat, advance, etc.) and the games (chariot-racing and gladiatorial combat, the latter started and accompanied by a range of instruments); and from religious rituals and all civic celebrations to the warbling Nero.
But ‘cultured’ it was not. Most Romans, unlike Greeks, did not regard music as a means of shaping the soul or elevating the mind: it was good, honest noise to march to, sing with and generally enjoy at a very basic level. That said, to be taught to sing or play an instrument was expected of the children of the elite, probably as a nod to Greek ways of doings thing. Poetry was not automatically accompanied by the lyre, as Greek poetry seems to have been, though it was enjoyed on private occasions. Pliny the Younger talked of lyre- or pipe-playing or even a comedy after dinner.
But fancy singing always carried the risk of the accusation of degeneracy or mockery. Horace said of the famous singer Tigellius that he was one of those who ‘among friends can never bring themselves to sing when requested; but fail to make a request, and they’ll never stop’; and went on to describe him as a real prima donna, whose next move or demand one could never hope to anticipate.
Musical instruments were of three varieties: wind (pipes, panpipes, bagpipes, trumpets, horns); string (plucked or struck with a plectrum; lyres and harps were the only two basic types); and percussion (drums, cymbals, clappers, and the sistrum, which was shaken). One oddity was the hydraulis, a form of organ whose air supply was powered by a water pump, and later by a bellows. Famed for its loudness, the hydraulis became even louder with this development. It was very popular indeed in Rome. One, we are told, had a wind chest made of two elephant hides, fed by twelve bellows, and could be heard a mile away. It was the forerunner of the modern organ.
However that may be, of all the cultural achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans that have been so influential down the millennia in the West, their music is the one exception. Though Greek musical theory was keenly studied in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, ancient music was not harmonized in the way we understand harmony, and it was impossible to relate it to contemporary developments in polyphony. As a result, ancient musical practice has had no influence on Western music.
As for art, the Greek satirist Lucian talked amusingly of his efforts to find a trade. His uncle suggested sculptor. His initial efforts were not a success, but that night he was visited by a dream in the shape of Sculpture herself, taking the form not of a beautiful, elegant Muse but of a blokeish, calloused workman, covered in dust. She was followed in the dream by Education, and the two tried to persuade Lucian to take their option. Education offered this account of the sculptor’s lot:
This woman has told you what profit you will get from becoming a sculptor: you will be nothing but a workman, putting all your hopes of a livelihood in hard physical labour. You will be personally insignificant, getting meagre and demeaning returns, feeble-minded, a figure of no importance in public life. No friends will court you; no enemies fear you; no citizens envy you. You will be nothing but a labourer, just one of the mob, always cringing before your superiors and sucking up to the well-educated, leading a dog’s [the Greek says ‘hare’s’!] life, and a pawn in the hand of anyone stronger. Even if you became a Phidias or a Polycleitus and created many marvellous works, everyone would certainly praise your craftsmanship, but no sensible man would ever pray to be like you. For whatever sort of person you actually might be, you will be regarded simply as a mechanic, a handyman, a manual worker.
The interest of the passage is that there is no mention of aesthetics (aisthêtika [αἰσθητικα], ‘things perceived by the senses’, rather than the mind), let alone inspiration with respect to this (to us) creative art. The word translated as ‘mechanic’ here sums it up: banausos (βαναυσος), our ‘banausic’, also meaning in Greek ‘vulgar, in low taste’.
That did not mean that the ancients had no feeling about their art. They made judgements about quality and value, as we do, but did not write about what art ‘was’ or agonize about ‘artistry’ or in what sense it engaged the emotions (all essentially eighteenth-century concerns). Those stories that were told about ancient artists (in Pliny the Elder, for example) often concentrated on the extent to which art did or did not imitate real life. Zeuxis, Pliny tells us, painted a picture of grapes so realistic that birds flew up at them. His rival Parrhasius then painted a picture of a curtain so realistic that Zeuxis asked for it to be drawn aside so that he could see the picture. When he saw how he had been deceived, he confessed that Parrhasius was the better painter. Realism was the artist’s priority.
Romans were as committed to realism (or ‘naturalism’) as the Greeks were, and always held Greek art and sculpture in high regard. One aspect of this, perhaps encouraged by their habit of making death-masks, was the Roman portrait, which regularly showed creases, wrinkles and warts in abundance. Romans ruthlessly plundered statues from Greece during their military forays there in the second century BC, and Greek artists flooded into Rome to meet the demand from Roman collectors. Greek work in precious metals, bronze and marble was very highly valued; decorated garden furniture became popular. Copying Greek statues became common (which is why most of the surviving ‘Greek’ statues are Roman copies), as did designing buildings to show off collections of statues and busts. Luxury interior decorations, featuring elegant wall-painting of the sort found in wealthy Greek homes, became all the rage. In all this, Romans were doing what they did across their culture: taking what Greeks did and adapting it to their own tastes.
MUSES AND MUSEUMS
Ancient gods were invented to cover every aspect of life, including the arts, especially poetry, music and dance, and all were regularly coordinated: Greek poetry was sung; dance was performed to music; and the chorus in a Greek tragedy sang and danced to music during the choral passages.
The goddesses of the arts were called by the Greeks Mousai (Μουσαι, singular Μουσα); the Romans took them over directly as Musai (Musa). Traditionally there were nine of them, covering epic poetry, lyric poetry, pipe-playing, dancing, tragedy, comedy, hymns/ pantomime (all these with strong musical elements), and history and astronomy. The Mous- stem seems to be connected with a root meaning ‘think, remember’ in Greek. The arts require thought and memory; and if one was going to sing of the deep past, especially about the deeds of the gods, one needed secure information about it, to which only the Muses could give access.
The Muses lived on Mounts Olympus and Helicon, and a shrine to the Muses was called in Greek Mouseion (Μουσειον), in Latin museum. In both cultures the word also came to embrace a place set apart for intellectual and cultural study, whence our ‘museum’.*
ARTS AND CRAFTS
Today, ‘artists’ are treated by many with an almost awed reverence. But the Latin ars (art-) meant basically ‘craftsmanship’ – a learned skill, developed by practice, applied to anything requiring technical ability (see here). Inspiration did not come into it. Sweat did. Virgil composed his Aeneid at a rate of three lines a day, ‘like a bear licking its cubs into shape’.
Cicero, talking of statesmanship and making a comparison with navigation, said that ‘it is good ars to run before the gale, even if the ship cannot make harbour’; Ovid encouraged the lover to sing arte (‘expertly’), if he sings, and to drink arte, if he drinks. Dentists, surgeons, plumbers and car mechanics are today’s true artists.
Ars comes from a root meaning ‘fit together, join’ and also provides Latin with artus, ‘limb’.
SCULPTURE
Latin scalpo meant ‘I draw the nails across, scratch’. Possibly because no Great Sculptor would want to be known as a scratcher, sculpo (sculpt-) was formed as if it were a completely unconnected verb. Sculpo meant ‘I work on any material by carving or engraving’, whether a statue, ornament or inscription. The educvationalist Quintilian even used it as an image of literary production, advising a would-be orator to ‘deliver only what he has written and, if circumstances permit, what he has carved into shape, as Demosthenes [the great Greek orator] said’.
PAINTING
‘Paint’ (via French), ‘picture’, ‘pigment’ and ‘Pict’ all derive from one Latin word: pingo (pict-), ‘I adorn with colours’, and ‘I paint, decorate, draw’. The Latin probably derives from a root meaning ‘cut’. Cicero wrote to his wealthy friend Atticus to say how pleased he was with the way his men had painted his library and bookshelves; Lucretius reflected on the life of early man, with the weather ‘smiling upon them, and the seasons painting the green grass with flowers’; Cicero again had no time for poetry or prose which, however brilliantly coloured, just banged on, lacking variety or relief.
Pigmentum was Latin for ‘colouring matter, dye’ – Pliny the Elder commented how useful dyed wax was ‘for the innumerable purposes of mankind’. A Pict was, of course, a painted barbarian living in northern Scotland with the short-sighted habit of attacking the Romans down south.
DYEING FOR ARSENIC
Arsenic derives from the Greek arsenikon (ἀρσενικον). It refers to arsenic tripsulphide. In its mineral form, it had a golden tinge and was used as a dye in the ancient world by artists and cosmeticians. Pliny the Elder said that it was
dug up in Syria for use by painters. It is found on the surface, and easily broken. The emperor Caligula, with his unbounded passion for gold, gave orders for vast quantities to be smelted. It did indeed produce excellent gold,* but in such small quantities that he found himself the loser from an experiment prompted by avarice… no one else has repeated it.
This was seen as a very precious and powerful substance, so naturally the Greeks derived it from the Greek arrh/ars-, ‘male, manly’. The Greeks were wrong. As Pliny showed, the substance came from Syria, where its name was al zarniqa, the zarn- stem meaning ‘golden’.
TABULA
While modern artists tend to paint on canvas, ancients painted on wooden panels (see below). The Latin for ‘panel’ was tabula (whence our ‘table’, etc.), a word which had many uses. It covered a games board, a noticeboard, a public tablet of metal or stone for laws and inscriptions, a writing tablet (see here), account books (p. 114) and a document, especially a will.
A tabula rasa is not a classical idea. It means (literally) ‘scraped tablet’ (Latin rado [ras-], ‘I shave, scrape’, → ‘razor’), alluding to the ease with which a wax tablet can have its writing smoothed out. It is the equivalent of our image of a ‘blank slate’ (slates used to be used in schools for pupils to write on), and psychologically refers to the theory that everyone is born with a mind entirely free of content. As Aristotle said:
The intellect is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though it is actually nothing until it has thought. What it thinks must be in it, just as characters may be said potentially to be on a writing tablet, on which as yet nothing stands written.
EASEL
Artists traditionally prop their paintings up on an easel. Romans propped them up on a machina, a multipurpose word for ‘platform’, ‘scaffolding’, ‘crane’ and much else (see here).
Pliny the Elder – is there anything he did not write about? – told a wonderful story about the famous fourth-century BC Greek painter Apelles. He wanted to see the paintings of one Protogenes, who lived on Rhodes, but did not find him in his studio. He did, however, find there an old woman ‘guarding a very large tabula already set up on the machina’. Apelles drew a fine line on the panel and told the old woman to say that that was the ‘signature’ of the caller. When Protogenes returned, he knew at once who had drawn the line and drew an even finer one on top. He then left, and when Apelles came back and saw what Protogenes had done, he drew an even finer line on top of that one. Protogenes admitted he had met his match, and the abstract painting with its increasingly fine lines became a much acclaimed masterpiece.
Modern artists do not use ‘machines’ – at least not for propping up their canvasses – but rather easels. ‘Easel’ derives (via Dutch) from Latin asinus, ‘ass, beast of burden’, also used for carrying heavy, unwieldy objects to market.
ICONIC
The Greek eikôn (εἰκων) meant ‘likeness, image; statue; phantom’. Romans produced an adjective based on the Greek, iconicus. It meant ‘giving an exact image’, used of a work of art. Pliny the Elder, for example, praised Panaenus, brother of the Athenian sculptor Phidias, for painting the battle of Marathon between the Athenians and Persians (490 BC) in colour, with such perfection that he produced exact portraits of the generals involved on both the Athenian and the Persian sides. Statues that gave exact representations of personal likenesses were called iconicae.
To a Greek or Roman, therefore, ‘an iconic building’ would be a building that looked exactly like another building. Today it seems to mean ‘famous, popular, very significant’.
PERSPECTIVE
Used today of drawing an object to give an appearance of distance and depth, the term ‘perspective’ derives from Latin perspicio (perspect-), ‘I inspect, see through, become aware of ’ (hence the see-through plastic ‘Perspex’). But this is surely the wrong verb. The Latin prospicio (prospect-) – whence ‘prospect’ – meant ‘I see before me, look ahead’, and of tall buildings ‘I give a view of ’ as from a vantage point. The poet Horace mocked the man who built in the city, but filled his courtyard with trees to make it feel like the country and so could (absurdly) ‘praise the house which gives a prospect over fields far into the distance’.* But nature would get him in the end: ‘You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it will soon be back, breaking through everything you in your stupidity have built.’ So it should be ‘prospective’, not ‘perspective’. The Italians got it right: prospettiva.
CANON
Not to be confused with a cannon (the weapon),† Greek kanôn (κανων, Latin canon) originally meant a rod or bar, to keep a thing straight (see here), and then a straight edge of a ruler. The word developed over time to mean both ‘rule, standard’, and ‘model, standard’ for the artist.
Pliny the Elder tells us that the Greek artist Polykleitos ‘made what artists call a canon; they draw their outlines from it as from a sort of standard’. Pliny was referring here to Polykleitos’ treatise on art, which he called Kanôn, and the statue he made to illustrate its principles, the Doruphoros (‘Spear-carrier’). He called that Kanôn too.
Church clerics known as ‘canons’ are so called because they are supposed to live according to rules; ‘canon law’ is a decree of the church. Today the term is also used to mean ‘official status as a model or standard’. So we might argue about who should make up a contemporary poetic canon: W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, E. J. Thribb…?
PORNOGRAPHY
In Athenaeus’ account of a lengthy feast entitled The Learned Banqueters,* one of the diners was accused of being mad about prostitutes, and his accuser went on: ‘One wouldn’t go wrong in calling you a pornographos (πορνογραφος), like the painters Aristides, Pausias and Nicophanes.’ The root meaning of porn- is ‘sell’, and was used of the male pornos (πορνος, ‘catamite, sodomite’) as well as the female pornê (πορνη, ‘whore’), all for sale. So a pornographos was ‘one who paints pictures of prostitutes’. It is the only time the word appears in ancient literature. It entered the English language via French in the nineteenth century meaning a depiction or (less often) description of sexual subject matter aimed at arousing the user.
How far the average Roman was ‘aroused’ by the acres of pornography spread across the walls of inns, brothels and private homes of a town such as Pompeii is difficult to say. Male nudity was normal in the public baths, in gymnasia and at athletic competitions; nude statues of heroic figures, mythical or otherwise (for instance, emperors), were commonplace; nude images of Aphrodites (Greek) and Venuses (Roman) survive in their thousands. On the other hand, males in particular have been genetically designed to be aroused by what they see, and in the absence of photography and film, the ancients may well have appreciated the sensuality of art and sculpture more than their modern counterparts.
THEATRE
Our word ‘theatre’ derives from the Greek theatron (θεατρον), Latin theatrum. It meant literally ‘viewing place’, and because of its acoustic properties, was used in the Greek world both for dramatic performances and for meetings of political assemblies.
‘Scene’ derives from the Greek skênê (σκηνη), Latin scaena, the stage building on, or in front of which, the action took place. Dancing and singing played a large part in such performances. The derivation of ‘obscene’ (Latin obscenus, meaning much the same as the English) is unknown. Some try to connect it with the stage. What is the case is that Graeco-Latin obscenities did not feature in exclamations, as they do so tediously in English today. The ancients sensibly preferred to exclaim in the name of gods, who might actually do something about the problem, rather than of the sexual or excretory organs, whose potential for problem-solving has always been limited.
Our ‘chorus’ derives from Greek khoros (χορος), Latin chorus, ‘dance’, especially to music. Greek tragedies, for example, featured a ‘chorus’ that was twelve strong. The khoros danced and sang as well as spoke. Its function in relation to the individual actors was to act as an alternative, group voice of the less empowered.
Our ‘orchestra’ derives from Greek orhkêstra (ὀρχηστρα), Latin orchestra. This was the circular area in front of the stage where in Greek drama the chorus danced and sang – nothing to do with the musical unit that we think of as an orchestra.
Romans never quite took to Greek tragedy or the conventions of Greek theatre. They much preferred broad humour – comedy and slapstick (see here, here).
ODEON CINEMA
See the sign ‘Odeon’ on a high street today and it will be a cinema. The modern name strikes a neat balance between the Greek and the Latin version. The Greek Ôideion (Ὠιδειον, based on ôidê, ᾠδη, ‘song’→ ‘ode’) became Latin Odeum. It was a small theatre for musical performances, usually looking like a small version of an ancient Greek theatre, the ‘platform’ facing a semicircle of seats rising up a slope. It could be used as a law court, lecture hall, distribution centre, and so on.
The original Ôideion was built in Athens by Pericles in 435 BC; it was probably square, with a roof supported by ninety internal pillars. Pericles, who fancied himself as an impresario, made himself manager of the musical contests there and drew up the rules for singing and pipe- and lyre-playing.
‘Cinema’ comes from Greek kinêma (κινημα) meaning ‘movement’ – hence ‘the movies’.
ECHO CHAMBERS
In order to amplify and clarify the actors’ speech or song, some architects placed bronze vessels called ‘echoes’ (named after the nymph Echo of Greek myth) at certain points around theatres. One reason why Vitruvius wanted architects to understand mathematics and music was so that they could accurately position these vessels to best effect. Whether they made the slightest difference is open to debate.
According to myth, Zeus was always trying to cheat on his wife Hera, and the nymph Echo (Greek Êkhô, Ἠχω) aided and abetted him. Every time Zeus’ wife Hera was about to catch him out, Echo distracted her with long conversations, enabling Zeus to leap out of the relevant bedroom window. When Hera worked out what was going on, she placed a curse on Echo which meant that she could speak only by ‘echoing’ the last words she had heard. As a result, when Echo fell madly in love with the handsome young Narcissus, all she could do was secretly follow him. When he heard a noise and said ‘Anyone here?’, she replied ‘Here!’. When finally he said ‘Let’s get it on!’, she took the word for the deed and leapt out on him. He was not impressed and bolted.
AGONIZING ACTORS
The Latin actor derives from ago (act-), ‘I drive, perform, do, act’ (whence ‘action’, ‘activity’ and so on). So it meant everything from a herdsman driving his cattle, to an agent, an advocate, an imperial official and, indeed, an actor in a play. The Greek word for ‘actor’ had gone down a quite different route: hupokritês (ὑποκριτης), whence our ‘hypocrite’! What was going on?
The Greek for debate between competing parties to a dispute was agôn (ἀγων), whence our ‘agony’. Indeed, that is essentially what Greek drama (δραμα, ‘something done’) was: not so much physical as verbal action in the form of intense arguments between antagonists on stage. Debate was at the heart of Greek drama.
Hupokritês meant in fact ‘a responder, one who answers’. It derived from a verb meaning ‘I reply’; and the noun hupokrisis meant ‘a reply’, ‘playing a part’, and ‘verbal delivery’, whether on the stage or (for example) in political debate.
The great orator Demosthenes (fourth century BC) once performed so badly in a debate that he was hissed off the platform. The actor Andronikos told him that, while the content of his speech was good, his hupokrisis was rubbish, and illustrated it by repeating his speech, with appropriate action, intonation and so on, from memory. Demosthenes was convinced and asked Andronikos to teach him how to deliver or act out a speech persuasively. When someone much later asked Demosthenes what was the essence of successful oratory, he replied, ‘Delivery’; and what next? ‘Delivery’; and what finally? ‘Delivery’.
In the light of these meanings − everything from simply ‘replying’ to ‘acting’ and ‘playing a part’ − it is no surprise that hupokritês also came to mean ‘pretender, sham’, and that is the meaning of the Greek that English has taken on board.
PERSONAL OVERACTING
We are used to footballers throwing themselves histrionically about like pantomime dames in efforts to win penalties. Little do they know that they are pantomime dames – or rather were.
The Roman historian Livy tells us that in 364 BC Rome was wracked by a plague. Among other measures to try to ward it off, they invented ‘play-acting entertainments’ (‘a novel departure for a warlike people’, Livy commented drily), getting the idea came from the Etruscans, a people living just over the Tiber.
The Etruscan for ‘actor’ was hister, which Romans turned into histrio, whence ‘histrionics’. At the same time, the Etruscans seem to have provided the Romans with the word persona, source of our ‘person’. In Latin it originally meant ‘theatrical mask’, ‘character in a play’ (as in our ‘dramatis personae’); then ‘part played by someone in real life’, ‘individual’, etc.
These early entertainments developed from dances to the pipe and exchanges of insults in verse, to musical medleys and farces with plots and songs and plenty of abuse. Just like football, in fact.*
MIME, PANTOMIME AND DILDO
Some Greek forms of entertainment may also have played a part in early Latin theatre. Pantomime (Greek pantomimos [παντομιμος], Latin pantomimus) consisted of a dancer acting in a dumbshow, supported by a chorus and music; mime, from the Greek mimos (μιμος), Latin mimus, was a licentious type of farce. The plots were parodies of myths, adventure stories in historical settings, romances and tales of everyday life. In one, a woman discusses the dildo she has bought from a man pretending to be a shoemaker:
As for his work, what work it is! You could be looking at something Athena herself had made… He came with two, and when I saw them, well, my eyes almost popped out of my head. No man has a prick that straight! And so soft, as soft as sleep, and its little straps were made of wool!
This is the sort of thing Romans enjoyed. The mim- root is the source of our ‘mimic’. As for dildo (c. 1590), it may be derived from Italian deletto, ‘delight’, Latin diligo (dilect-), ‘I adore’.
EXPLOSIVE APPLAUSE
Our ‘plaudit’, a round of applause, derives from Latin plaudite!, ‘Applaud!’, the instruction with which Roman actors finished their plays. The verb is plaudo (plaus-), ‘I strike with the flat of the hand, beat (with wings)’. ‘Plausible’ once meant ‘worthy of applause’, but now it means only ‘possible to applaud’, while ‘implausible’ means ‘impossible to applaud’.*
‘Explode’ comes from the same source, though differently spelled: Latin explodo, ‘I drive off the stage by making a noise, including a clapping noise, reject’. Cicero told of the hapless comedian Eros ‘driven off the stage with hisses [sibilus, whence our ‘sibilant’] and abuse, and having to take refuge at an altar [in someone’s house]’.
There is a wider point to be made here. In the ancient world, in the absence of polls, Twitter, Facebook, TV audience numbers (etc.), how did you determine your (un)popularity? Only by coming face to face with audiences or crowds, or by rumour. So for politicians, big public occasions were an important form of crude opinion poll. An emperor attending the games that he had staged would soon find out if he was doing a good job or not. The following happened to the emperor Claudius:
When there was a scarcity of grain because of long-continued droughts, he was once stopped in the middle of the forum by a mob and so pelted with abuse and pieces of bread, that he was barely able to make his escape to the Palatium [his abode: whence our ‘palace’] by a backdoor; and after this experience he resorted to every possible means to bring grain to Rome, even in the winter season.
But such mob behaviour was not intended to foment revolution (see here). The people rioted in the certainty that the emperor would respond. And he did. He had little option.
GREEK V. ROMAN MUSIC
Lucius Anicius (second century BC) had just been celebrating a triumph over the Illyrians. Hiring four of Greece’s finest pipe-players, he put them on stage with a chorus (singing and dancing). But it was all far too graceful, balletic and polite for the bored Roman military. So Anicius told the performers to jazz it up a bit, bringing in lots of action and preferably violence. So the pipe-players and chorus split off into teams and enacted mock attacks on each other, charging and retreating, then pretending to box. Four prizefighters came on stage with trumpet and bugle (good Roman instruments) and complete chaos descended.* The audience absolutely adored it.
This story is telling, because it contrasts the exquisite high musical attainments of the Greek world, which Romans were just coming into contact with in the second century BC, and the general tastes of the Roman public at big civic displays. They preferred good old-fashioned Roman music, all drums and trumpets and a hell of a racket, to this rather refined stuff from Greece.
PLASMA
It may not be absolutely clear what a ‘plasma TV screen’ actually is, but in Latin plasma, from the same stem as plasticus, ‘to do with modelling’, meant ‘fancy, affected singing’. What?
Plasma (πλασμα) in Greek meant ‘anything formed or moulded’, and is used today (from 1928) as a general term for anything that is not gas, solid or liquid. The sun and stars are forms of plasma. So too are neon lights: the pressure of the neon gas in the tube is lowered to a level at which it will accept an electric current; this changes its nature and it lights up.† Plasma TV screens too use electrically charge gases. But Greeks associated the word with anything made up or invented; so it came to mean ‘counterfeit, forgery’, and in music ‘fancy, affected singing’, with trills, falsetto and so on.
‘Stereo’, incidentally, derives from ancient Greek. The Roman surveyor Balbus defined Latin solidus (see. here) as ‘what the Greeks call stereos (στερεος) and we call “cubic feet” whose length, breadth and width we can measure’. We would call it ‘three-dimensional’.
HARMONY
Pythagoras is credited with discovering the relationship between music and mathematics. Stretch a string tight over a bridge. Move the bridge so that the two segments produce notes in the basic relation of an octave; then a fifth; and finally a fourth. Measure where the bridge is for each, and the ratio of lengths either side of the bridge comes out at 2 to 1, 3 to 2, and 4 to 3. Pythagoras concluded that all music could be understood on clear mathematical principles.
Our ‘harmony’ derives from Greek (and Latin) harmonia (ἁρμονια), whose basic sense was a ‘means of joining or fastening’. Note that ‘harmony’ was not used in our sense of simultaneous interacting pitches and chords, or counterpoint. Ancient music was melodic – made up of a single tune – and harmonia referred to the structure of the tune.
THEORETICAL MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
The Pythagoreans extended the notion of mathematical and musical harmony across the whole ordered universe (the kosmos [κοσμος], ‘order’, the very opposite of its earliest form, thought to be ‘chaos’ [χαος]). Plato imagined the spheres (sphaira [σφαιρα]) producing their own perfect harmony across the universe.
This is well in line with Professor Stephen Hawking. He theorizes that ‘strings’ of minute particles (a ‘string’ particle is to an atom as an atom is to the universe) create the world’s energy by vibrating. And what happens when a string vibrates? Why, it creates music – no other music, surely, than the music of the spheres.*
SOME MUSICAL TERMS
Chord: khordê (χορδη), ‘guts; string; musical note’.
Chromatic: khrôma (χρωμα), ‘colour, chromatic scale’.
Diapason: the full range of an instrument or voice. Greek dia pasôn (δια πασων), ‘through all’ − but all what? Chords? Notes? We do not know.
Dirge: from the Latin command Dirige, ‘Direct (O Lord, my way…)’, the opening of a funeral service.
Hydraulis: hudraulis (ὑδραυλις), ‘water organ’ – hudr-, ‘water’ + aulos, ‘pipe’. Compare ‘hydraulics’, the mechanics of liquids being drawn through pipes.
Hyphen: huphen (ὑφ’ ἑν), literally ‘in one’, a sign linking two notes as one.
Lyre: lura (λυρα), ‘stringed instrument’, with four to seven strings. All such instruments were plucked or struck with a plêktron (πληκτρον), Latin plectrum. Bows were a later invention.
Melody: melôidia (μελῳδια), ‘singing, chanting, choral song’.
Paean: paian (παιαν), ‘chant, song, song of triumph’, usually in honour of Apollo or Artemis.
Rhythm: rhuthmos (ῥυθμος), ‘any regular, measured motion or time’.
Threnody: thrênôidia (θρηνῳδια), ‘lamentation’.
Tonic, tone: tonos (τονος), ‘key; tone, pitch’.
Tympany: tumpanon (τυμπανον), ‘shallow frame drum’.
* ‘To muse’ is a word of Germanic origin meaning ‘muzzle, snout’, and via French muser meant ‘dream, waste time’, perhaps ‘sniff about’ like a dog. For English-speakers, ‘muse’ may have shifted its meaning through the influence of the classical usage.
* This is obvious nonsense. It may have produced a sort of golden powder. One thing is certain: the smelting process would not have done the workmen any good at all.
* ‘Absurd’ derives from Latin surdus, ‘deaf, unhearing’, which, combined with ab- to produce absurdus, meant ‘completely deaf ’. It signified ‘discordant’ with reference to music, then in general ‘preposterous, inappropriate’.
† ‘Cannon’ – a large tube through which cannonballs are delivered – derives from Greek kanna (καννα), Latin canna, ‘reed, pipe’. The medical ‘cannula’, direct from Latin cannula, is a small tube inserted into the body to feed in or extract fluid.
* Deipnosophistai (Δειπνοσοφισται), literally ‘Dinner-sophists’.
* ‘Farce’ is from Latin farcio, ‘I stuff, cram’, used in Latin of fattening birds for table and from the fourteenth century of force-meat (stuffing) and low comedy (see farrago, here).
* Latin speciosus and English ‘specious’ underwent the same sort of change: originally meaning ‘attractive, spectacular’, they both edged into meaning ‘showy, fine-sounding’, with suggestions of bogusness. The noun, too, from which it derives, species, meaning ‘spectacle, sight’, also morphed into ‘splendour, pomp’, and then mere ‘outward appearance’; its meaning ‘subdivision of any class or kind’ is the sense in which English uses it. Latin specialis meant ‘individual, particular’ – as opposed to the general class or kind – and hence ‘special’.
* ‘Bugle’ derives from Latin buculus, ‘young ox, bull’ (Greek bous [βους], ‘bull’]. A bucina was a curved trumpet or horn, and a bucinus a trumpeter.
† The noble gas neon takes its name from Greek neos [νεος], ‘new’.
* ‘Theory’ derives from Greek theôria (θεωρια), ‘spectacle, contemplation’. ‘Cosmetic’ derives from kosmos. Cosmetics too create order out of chaos.