Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece 9780823269679

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DISSONANCE

DISSONANCE AUDITORY AESTHETICS IN ANCIENT GREECE

SEAN ALEXANDER GURD

Fordham University Press New York 2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

CONTENTS

Note on Sources and Citations Prologue Capo

vii 1 5

1.

Figures

27

2.

Affect

58

3.

Music

97

Coda

133

Acknowledgments

141

Notes

143

Bibliography

213

Index

237

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NOTE ON SOURCES AND CITATIONS

References to ancient sources are abbreviated according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition). Sources of ancient texts are noted the first time they are cited. Translations are my own. I use the following abbreviations: Campbell DK FGrH IEG LIMC LP LSJ PCG PMG TrGF

Campbell, D. A., ed. and trans. Greek Lyric. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–1993. Kranz, W., and H. Diels, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Zürich: Weidmann, 1966. Jacoby, F., ed. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin: Weidmann, 1923–1959. West, M., ed. Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989–1992. Ackermann, H. C., J. -R. Gisler, and L. Kahil, eds. Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae. Zürich: Artemis, 1981. Lobel, E., and D. L. Page, eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, and H. S. Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Kassel, R., and C. Austin, eds. Poetae comici Graeci. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983–. D. L. Page, ed. Poetae Melici Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. R. Kannicht, S. Radt, and B. Snell, eds. Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2004.

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DISSONANCE

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PROLOGUE

It is only silent at night.1 The rising sun sets the air popping and sizzling,2 and other voices rise in chorus with the ambient hum. Goats and sheep bleat,3 cows raise a clamor,4 bulls bellow,5 horses’ hooves thud6 and their nostrils snort,7 wild boars gnash their teeth and squeal,8 dogs bark9 and growl10 and whine,11 pigs raise a ruckus.12 Deer,13 lions,14 serpents,15 and bees16 make themselves heard. Cicadas sing,17 as do birds18: you can hear the cries of eagles,19 the song of the nightingale,20 and the singing, shouting, and noise of cranes,21 herons,22 hawks,23 crows,24 falcons,25 swallows,26 owls,27 cocks,28 swans,29 cuckoos,30 quails,31 starlings, and jackdaws.32 Water murmurs,33 chatters,34 and roars.35 The ocean’s36 waves crash against the shore37 and reverberate.38 Rivers rush together and rumble;39 streams shout out40 and their banks resound.41 The wind42 speaks43 shrilly.44 A rock crashes down a slope and through the forest.45 The earth is split by thunder.46 Where there is sound, there is danger, disruption, agony, or worse. You can hear war.47 Armies on the march resound like the sea48 or make the earth groan,49 their voices rising like the din of flocks,50 birds, or flies,51 or like the shout of a god.52 Led by the war trumpet,53 they thunder together like waves54 or rivers55 or rolling stones56 or fire57 or wind;58 they shout59 like birds of prey.60 Bowstrings whine and sing.61 Hand-to-hand combat sounds like the thud of woodcutters felling trees in the forest.62 Soldiers fight gnashing their teeth like boars.63 Armor crashes and clatters as weapons strike out and soldiers fall.64 Captured cities shout with the mixed voices of victors and vanquished;65 their towers crash to the earth,66 and the babies of slaughtered mothers wail.67 Bodies thud68 to the ground and groan.69 Backs creak.70 Bones bark.71 The ghosts of the slain gibber and whine.72 What terrifies does so with an open mouth and a strong voice.73 One of the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhaon is a canine creature called Orthos (“Shrill”);74 Cerberus, a second product of the same coupling, is “bronzevoiced.”75 A serpent killed by Apollo gasps and hisses as it dies.76 The sisters of Medusa lament her death, their voices rising in serpentine cacophony.77 The 1

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PROLOGUE

cyclops Polyphemus, a savage78 and irreligious79 creature whose name means “he of many voices,” enters the Odyssey with a crash, throwing his bundle of firewood onto the floor of his cave with a thunderous din;80 after milking his goats (who bleat as they are serviced),81 he addresses Odysseus and his crew in a terrifying voice.82 At dawn the next day, he leaves whistling loudly.83 Out beyond the edges of civilization, Odysseus hears other terrifying sounds. The courtyard of the house of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, resounds;84 the murderous Laestrygonians raise themselves against Odysseus with a shout that runs through the town,85 and the rain of rocks they send down on his ships causes a din.86 The singing of Circe87 is juxtaposed with the voices of swine;88 later, when Odysseus compels her to release his crewmen from her spell, they crowd about him lamenting, and the house echoes.89 The spirits in the underworld throng noisily about him,90 while around the shade of Heracles a clamor arises, as of terrified birds.91 The clashing rocks roar with the surf they churn up,92 as does the sea around Charybdis;93 the sea groans in the vicinity of Scylla,94 who barks in reply.95 When his comrades kill and cook the cattle of the sun in contravention of sacred law and Odysseus’s command, the meat bellows on its spits;96 their immediate punishment is a shrieking gale from the west.97 Sound indicates that a body has fallen ill.98 The throat can hiss,99 make a rough scratching noise,100 or croak;101 sometimes these attributes are combined and a hoarse whistling can be heard.102 Breathing can become perceptible, as though the patient were choking.103 Many respiratory noises are caused by an obstruction in the lung or windpipe due to unexpectorated pus104 or a growth.105 Coughing clears the lungs; when it fails to do so, the upper cavity becomes congested and begins to make more morbid sounds.106 An inflamed lung brings pain, together with a gurgling sound not unlike what one might expect from a stomach.107 A certain Bilus was wounded in the back; breath escaped noisily from the wound.108 When the lung is phlegmatic, the chest seems to sing.109 When it falls against the rib, there is a sound like that of leather.110 When water collects in it, “if you apply your ear for a long time and listen to the sides, it seethes inside like vinegar.”111 Pus rolls and splashes around. One medical author describes what happens when a large amount of phlegm runs out of the head into the upper cavity: as it grows infected, it flows down onto the diaphragm and makes a splashing sound against the ribs.112 Chest and abdomen alike rattle113 and rumble.114 From the lower cavity, we hear noise,115 dins,116 bellowing,117 roaring,118 and gurgling.119 Eating and drinking cause sound in the chest and intestines;120 beneath that, there are the rumblings caused by bowel movements121 and flatulence during sex.122 Even the voice is a result of violence.123 For Anaxagoras, it comes into being

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“when the breath falls against the solid air and travels to the hearing from the resounding of the blow.”124 Other theorists have similar ideas. Democritus claims that “the air is broken into similar-shaped bodies and rolled along by the strikings of the voice.”125 These are healthy voices; sick ones learn a different type of music. They are muffled,126 hoarse,127 rough (“as though there were fat in it”),128 a lower pitch than normal,129 shrill130 or high-pitched,131 broken,132 soft,133 weak,134 tremulous,135 or choked.136 Raving and talking nonsense, especially with fever, indicate phrenitis or melancholia and, in more than a few cases, death.137 For one doctor, “an uncharacteristically bold reply in a high-pitched voice” is an indication that the hypochondrium is drawn tight; the prognosis is not good.138 “It is possible to recognize things that are not equally clear among the healthy,” writes another, “by listening to the voice and the breath with your ears.” 139 Tragic voices, coming from psychic as well as physical agony, warp out beyond language, producing uncanny, overwhelming cries: ἂ ἄ,140 ἒ ἔ,141 αἰαῖ,142 ἀταταῖ,143 ἐλελεῦ,144 ἠέ,145 ἠή,146 ἰού,147 ἰώ,148 ὄ,149 ὀᾶ,150 οἴ, οἰοί (the syllable can be repeated freely),151 ὀτοτοτοῖ (again with a syllable that can occur any number of times),152 παπαῖ (also repeatable),153 ποποῖ,154 τοτοῖ,155 τοτοτοῖ,156 φεῦ,157 ὤμοι, and ὤ.158 At the outer limits of speech, the voice can imitate the sounds of animals: the lamentatory, ever-repeating and yet ever-varying “Ἰτῦς Ἰτῦς” of the nightingale;159 the “ἐποποποῖ ποποποποῖ ποποῖ, ἰὼ ἰὼ ἰτὼ ἰτὼ ἰτὼ ἰτώ”;160 “τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιὸ τιό”;161 “τριοτὸ τριοτὸ τοτοθρίξ”;162 “οροτοροτοροτοροτίξ”; “κικκαβαῦ κικκαβαῦ”; “τοροτοροτοροτορολιλιλίξ”163 of Aristophanes’s city of birds. Likewise the outlandish sounds of foreign speech, especially Persian melding with Greek.164 As the voice, so the soul. Penelope compares her aggrieved mind to the music of the nightingale.165 Odysseus, debating whether to kill his maidservants right away or bide his time and kill them later, has thoughts similar to a dog standing over her pups and growling;166 Nestor’s thoughts roar like the heaving sea with the shrill winds above it.167 A woman maddened by infatuation hears the bellowing of a deer in her heart.168 Natural sounds, too, come from the violent unsettling of otherwise placid physical configurations. Anaxagoras explains thunder as the result of the descent of hot ether into wetter, moister clouds; the result is a flash of lighting followed by a sizzle (σίξις).169 (The earliest use of the verb σίζω [“sizzle”] is in the Odyssey, where it is used to describe the sound of the Cyclops’s eye receiving Odysseus’s burning stake.)170 Or else thunder comes from violent quasi-bodily sounds: in a parodic theory attributed to Socrates by Aristophanes, when the clouds are full of water they roll around, snore (ῥήγνυνται), and make loud

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PROLOGUE

noises (παταγοῦσιν), just like a body that has eaten too much: παππὰξ παππάξ· παπαπαππάξ· παπαπαππάξ.171 In the midst of all this din, there is the sound of song. Κλεός, the poetic glory of heroes, is loud.172 Poets describe the thud of dancing feet173 and the sound of singing,174 as well as the auditory characteristics of song genres such as the paean,175 hymns,176 the ololuge,177 bacchic song,178 and lamentation.179 Musical instruments have distinctive sounds; we hear castanets,180 horns,181 auloi,182 lyres,183 the many-stringed magadis,184 and the syrinx.185 They well up, these sounds, and resonate in every corner of Greek culture, coloring narratives and structuring enunciations, blooming within stories and songs. And yet they are only partly desired—or, better, they are both desired and not, desired because they are not desired. In Greek auditory aesthetics, sound is summoned as the antithesis and disruption of the order that summons it. And where sound is, there will be the work of art.

CAPO

In the four centuries leading up to the death of Euripides in 406 BCE, Greek poets, singers, and theorists tracked sound’s movement over wide expanses of space and time, contemplated its use as a communicator of information, calculated its power to express and cause extreme emotion, and explored its possibilities as a plastic material. Their Greece was loud—and hence radically estranged from what I suspect are widely held but rarely acknowledged assumptions. Only theology offers fantasies of purity and permanence as powerful as the classics. The classical age seems to be a frozen world, a world we can contemplate as though we were the enchanted speaker in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for whom the silent stillness of an ancient vase symbolizes the survival of truths more lasting than the generations of humankind. Critiques of such dreams have never been lacking.1 One thinks especially of Nietzsche, with whom my argument has much in common,2 although rather than opposing Dionysus to Apollo or irrational experience to the logos, I set the sonorities of Greek song against any longing for “silent forms” that might “tease us out of thought / as does eternity.”3 During these more or less four hundred years of early European cultural history, a link was made between noise and art that has also been made, with increasing insistence, in the music and sound art of the last century or so. Just as contemporary music involves noise at a fundamental level of its operations,4 so, too, did musicians in the early centuries of Greek culture make a consistent effort to incorporate sound in their works. Like that of their modern counterparts, again, their work often disturbed widely held beliefs about the relationship between sound and culture. Because of their commitment to creating sensuous artistic presences through the disruption of shared cultural expectations, something more than the everyday protocols of making meaning are demanded when we turn our ear to their works, and in the research for this book I therefore proposed to listen, that is, to pause in the midst of aesthetic experience and take the time to feel.5 But I had the sense that to do this was hardly to revel in blissful, beautiful experience and that any aesthetic pause would be more like a mode of 5

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openness to turbulence than a form of stillness and peace. My suspicions were confirmed: Greek auditory artworks clear an unsettling space for the vibrations that we call “sound” but that are, at base, one front along which human bodies interface passionately with the world. Psychologists who study perception insist that hearing serves as a point of transition between physical vibrations and cognitive identifications—between a presensual material field and a postsensual world of noetic objects. “Noetic” is not usually used in the psychology of perception, but contemporary neuropsychology is residually Kantian, and it is generally accepted that the experience of sound is a cognitive event related to, but different from, the physical vibrations that stimulate the sense. As Michael Levine puts it, Perception refers to the way in which we interpret the information that is gathered (and processed) by the senses. In short, you sense the stimulus but you perceive what it is. Here you enter the realm of another branch of psychology: cognitive psychology. . . . Perception includes the more cognitive processing by which you develop an internal model of what is “out there” in the world beyond your body.6

In the service of perception, cognition suppresses sensation, which resides as an independent neuro-physical system of interactions beneath the threshold of awareness.7 A similar process takes place in the cognition of speech. When I speak, my vocal folds vibrate and shift in length and tension, and my jaw, tongue, teeth, and lips are in continuous motion. I move my vocal tract to articulate phonemes and words—but stable sounds are not what I make. Consonants and vowels overlap and interact, each running into the next and influencing its articulation. Acoustically, no two utterances of the same phoneme are alike, even when they come from the same speaker. This perpetually fluctuating stream of sound occurs physically as a complex series of pressure waves.8 We do not perceive these waves; we convert, segment, and abstract from the series of their impacts until the illusion of an ordered sequence of linguistically significant sound units emerges. Speech, in other words, is the consequence of an act of interpretation in which both the complex physical base and its equally complex processing are suppressed. What psychologists and psycholinguists track in the emergence of perception can also be followed in the humanities, where sound has become a social value, an entity with a history inseparable from its techno-political contexts. One of the founding documents of the current sensual turn, Marx’s much-cited 1844 statement that “the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history,”9

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sets the tone. Such an insistence on the historicity of the senses required a bracingly radical perspective on human self-awareness. To have insisted that perception was not merely a transparent, naive, or mechanical communication from an inert outside to a passively perceiving inside but, rather, was determined by interactions between an active consciousness and historical social environments historicized even intuitive certainty—a move many historicisms still hesitate to make, at least explicitly. Mistrust of the senses is an inheritance of Platonic metaphysics, firmly enshrined in modern thought thanks to the self-interrogations of Descartes. But unlike his predecessors, Marx did not turn away from, bracket, or seek to transcend perception; rather, he turned toward it, seeing it as thoroughly steeped in its historical moment and playing a role in the still-to-come self-fulfillment of humanity. This was radical because, in the end, it is not the cogito that grounds certainty for most of us but the percipio—usually we feel our existence because we feel, not because we think. Historicizing the senses meant questioning a level of experience where questioning barely seems possible. Marx’s point was that our being is less important than our becoming. On his account, the senses were not simple “sensors” responsible for communicating brute or material facts to thought. “Mere sensation,” for example the smell of bread to a starving man, communicates only the most abstract meanings. Marx thought the senses could be made concrete in so far as both they and their objects became human. The socio-technological self-realization of humanity so central to Marxist thought progressed in two directions at once: toward the refinement of the cognitive realizations of sense and toward the deployment of sensible objects in a more fully humanized social environment—so that the smell of bread is not simply the smell of offered or refused nourishment but the smell of a social system of food manufacture and distribution, of yeast and grain and ovens, capable of being enjoyed because it speaks of a collectivized and just society. Note, however, that this is all about perception, not sensation: Marx’s basic thesis, after all, is that what matters happens in social and economic history, not at the neuro-physical interface. When literary scholars approach the problem of sound, the results are similar. Consider Paul Valéry’s much-repeated description of poetry as an “eternal hesitation between sound and sense [‘sense’ means ‘meaning’ in this context].”10 Roman Jakobson thought this hesitation was a consequence of what he called the “poetic function”: the ability of some language-use to draw attention to the communication itself.11 It did this, Jakobson thought, by “projecting the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.”12 When I speak, he maintained, I select my words from horizontal stacks of (quasi-)syno-

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nyms; this is the axis of selection. Selection assumes a semantic near-identity between the words I have to choose from (the “principle of equivalence”). Once I have picked my words, I combine them in a syntactical sentence; this is the axis of combination. In poetry, the axis of combination is subjected to the principle of equivalence usually only prevalent on the axis of selection. So, for example, in a line of quantitative verse all long syllables are treated as metrically identical, and as a result, a rhythm emerges in the line. Jakobson extended his analysis beyond structuring features like meter, identifying further examples in figures of speech like paronomasia. As a result, poetic language use could be said to foreground or emphasize sound as a constitutive element: “the relevance of the sound-meaning nexus is a simple corollary of the superposition of similarity on contiguity.”13 But the projection of the principle of equivalence onto the axis of combination occurs at the level of syllables or phonemes, which are linguistic and objects of perception rather than sensation. Thus, for example, [t]he reiterative figure of sound, which Hopkins saw to be the constitutive principle of verse, can be further specified. Such a figure always utilizes at least one (or more than one) binary contrast of a relatively high and relatively low prominence effected by the different sections of the phonemic sequence. Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear, syllabic part, constituting the peak of the syllable, is opposed to the less prominent, marginal, nonsyllabic phoneme. Any syllable contains a syllabic phoneme, and the interval between two successive syllables is in some languages always and in others overwhelmingly carried out by marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes.14

All this talk of binary contrasts, of syllabic and nonsyllabic phonemes contributes to the definition of poetic language as the result of procedures of linguistic cognition (at least as structuralism understands it). The “sound” of poetic language in Jakobson’s discussion is mediated, in other words, by linguistic circuitry. Indeed, Jakobson’s goal was not, in the end, to explore the sensual presence of sound in a poem. It was, rather, to draw attention to the functioning of language as such, that is, to construct the object of linguistic science. The relationship between (cognitively constructed linguistic) “sound” and (cognitively constructed linguistic) meaning facilitated an archeology of the linguistic object, not a phenomenology of sensation and still less an aesthetic. It is, indeed, extremely difficult not to refer sensation to some other field; just as one interprets a loud roaring sound to be thunder, so is one inclined to understand hearing as a function of technique, society, economics, or ecology. Thus, for example, we understand that it is because they have learned to do so

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that modern city dwellers habitually ignore sounds with amplitudes so great that humans living before the Industrial Revolution would have associated them only with catastrophic environmental disasters;15 because it is learned, tolerance of such noises can be explained as an expression of cultural causes. Claims that the experience of sound is determined by sociocultural factors effectively suppress sensation and replace it with other causes. Such acts of suppression are well grounded in the sense that they are analogous to, and perhaps even modeled on, the distinction between sensation and perception fundamental to our everyday being in the world. But they are not exhaustive. It is true that I perceive sound objects at the expense of the sensory stimuli themselves. But there is a level of experience at which, in perceiving such things, I also sense them. I do not want to argue that I have access to immediate sensation. But I do want to acknowledge that there is a stratum of awareness within consciousness, and a vocabulary within language, that can communicate about sensation, and I want to draw the inference that the enclosure within which perception takes place is porous, at best; an absolute and closed system of perception would place me in a world of objects without awareness of the mediation of sense—just as a closed system of social meanings would allow me a plenitude of significance and a minimum of disruptive presences.16 That sensual awareness seeps into consciousness through almost every seam is what makes it possible for me to get lost in the play of light on the side of a building, the luxurious grain of a wooden table, the overwhelming power of late Coltrane. These things cannot be experienced without cognition and culture, but neither cognition nor culture determines them completely. I seek, then, to steer a middle course between unreflective realism and overachieving constructivism by locating the auditory neither in physical reality nor in cognitive or cultural constructions, but in the disruptive backflow between these two regions.17 I think sound happens when the material order percolates through the sociocultural order and, vice versa, when the sociocultural opens itself to disruption by the material. And I think this takes place especially in works of art. It is no accident that most of the best writing on sound has been engaged with sound art, noise music, and cognate practices; art plays a crucial role in articulating sensation for culture.18 This is probably to be expected from all forms of technical production that are not totally constrained by preexisting patterns and imposed teleologies: in such contexts a maker, lacking a goal at the outset, has no choice but to seek out a final form by feel, and it might come as no surprise that the consequence should give a form to feeling.19 But ancient Greek auditory art seems exemplary. Songs in this tradition repeatedly made sound perceptible,

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not merely forming it but drawing attention to it, not merely manipulating it but also proffering it as a presence. Indeed, for the period I study here, song performed a vital service in doing this work, because no other construction existed to house auditory experience. To be sure, there were multiple words for it, each of which captured a fragment, large or small, of the broader field. But no single idea stabilized the realm of sound or metabolized it into a coherent and clearly defined field. It was not a matter of consensus how the ear worked or what its relationship was to the soul. And while gradual agreement did emerge over some of the more crucial points of acoustic theory (e.g., that sounds are caused by some sort of percussive event, and that they are propagated and heard by something like resonation or reverberation), a unified concept may not have existed before the mid-fifth century and a widely accepted account only emerged, gradually, in the fourth.20 It is arguable, in fact, that nothing had a concept before whoever it was first posited universals and linked these to intellection—Plato, probably, if not Socrates or Pythagoras. The imperative to grasp things together (to produce a con-ceptum) or to be able to address them head on as one thing (καταγορεύειν, to accuse, to address under the censure of law, and, thus, to categorize), was institutionalized and fiercely propagandized in the philosophical schools of the fourth century BCE and later. If conceptualization happened before then, it did so in a way that left little mark in Greek writing: it was either beyond the horizon of the durable material we have to work with or beneath the threshold of consciousness. These reflections make it immediately clear why it will not do to substitute some putatively ancient category for the modern one of “sound.” When we listen to what was happening on the other side of the curtain dropped by Western metaphysics we hear a world resistant to the procedures of categorization—any categorization, regardless of its familiarity or historical provenance. I do not want to say, exactly, that the absence of a single category for auditory phenomena means that before the work of metaphysics there were nothing but singular perceptual events, an unreduced multiplicity of physico-neural encounters untamed by any category or concept. In important ways, nothing could be more false. Prephilosophical thought was able both to gather the auditory as a group of related events and to make links between objects and subjects. But it did so nonconceptually, through highly elaborate auditory art, which took the form of sung poetry, or, more simply, song. It has long been argued that poetry plays a role in forming, recommending, and discarding words, metaphors, and syntactical formations—from Horace through Shelley and Mallarmé the creation and maintenance of language has been a not-so-unacknowledged mandate of the poet.21 But art can also find, frame, stage, and sound out new forms of sensual

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experience, and it can push old ones to their limits. It is along this avenue that I approach the ancient auditory—not as a history of concepts or ideas but as a history of the sensations produced and explored in technical media. Songs played the role of lab reports or dispatches from liminal regions where sense was actively explored and created. A song was a claim: “I heard (it) this way.”22 This worked, paradoxically, because the culture in which Greek poets and composers operated consistently aligned the presence of sound with the overturning of order. In Hesiod’s mythico-social imaginary, for example, corrupt judges caused the goddess Justice to raise a loud noise,23 and this tendency to take sound as an indicator that something had gone terribly wrong, that peace and contentment were endangered, was entirely typical. Most of the sounds in texts composed between the eighth and fourth centuries emanate from places or events associated with violence and disruption; we hear from nonhuman animals, monsters, violent upheavals of nature or war, and corrupt political leaders. An anthropological or aesthetically naïve reading of the database of sounds stored in the texts of this period would be hard-pressed not to conclude that in Greek culture there was an opposition to make Lévi-Strauss smile; society, culture, and peace were on the side of silence (or at least of radically controlled, “cooked” sound), while monsters, the wilds, and war roared with raw noise.24 But song violated this opposition in a fundamental way, countering social expectation with auditory disruption and creating a vital dissonance, thanks to which sound itself became almost impossible to ignore. Dissonance—the Greek word is διαϕωνια, its antonym συμφωνία, consonance—names the palpable presence of an enduring difference. Two notes are musically consonant if their sound waves combine to produce a single wave of nonfluctuating amplitude, a consequence of the fact that their fundamental and lower overtone frequencies are in simple harmonic ratios. Notes in a dissonant relationship produce a combined wave with sensible variations in amplitude: neither their fundamentals nor their partials coincide, and the result is extra audible information in the form of “beats” or “roughness,” a richer, grainier, less-polished sound. Supervenient on conflict, dissonance could be called an enhancement of the audible: it is a perception whose subject is sense itself. Similarly, Greek auditory art consistently performed the self-contradictory gesture of equating itself with social order and resonating with the sounds of social disorder. One result was to raise the amplitude of auditory sensation to the point where it, too, proved perceptible.25 The orientation to sound found in the premetaphysical period might seem similar to the auditory art of the last century or so, where one tendency has been toward what Schoenberg called the conquest of dissonance. There are differences,

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to be sure. For example, twentieth-century European art music “conquered” dissonance by eliminating or reformulating the distinction between consonant and dissonant intervals and creating compositional procedures that did not rely on European diatonicism and its strong tendency to resolve; in contrast, Greek auditory art exploited the distinction between good and bad sound, amplifying it to the point where it became a central aesthetic theme. Nonetheless, the similarities between the ancient and the contemporary are palpable, not least in the fact that the absence of a rigorously policed, “rational” subject position which the demise of metaphysics brought about has led to a renewed opening on the transitory flows and complex vibrations that constitute both physical and cultural existence and that were very much the concern of premetaphysical Greek art. The end of humanism has made us more corporeal and more subject to affective resonances (for good and ill)—in short, we are more ancient than we have been in a long time. In turn, the works I write about here have a way of staying present—not because they are canonical or because they achieve sheer ideality or transcend their time but because they channeled sound much as some recent avant-gardes sought to incorporate noise. Paul Hegarty argues that avant-garde work is not subject to the same chronology as other kinds of work; because its existence depends on contesting the system of culture as a whole, its temporality can be characterized as a set of radically discontinuous irruptions: a set of “nows” that have in common only their commitment to radical forms of singularity.26 The same holds for the artifacts I study here. Falsely packaged as “classical” or (worse) “canonical,” they exist for us today as the fragmentary remains of the earliest tradition of avant-gardism in Europe. But their capacity to continue to have an impact on us depends on our ability to tune our ears to their disruptive frequencies. My treatment of sound in Greek auditory art sorts the evidence into three sets of thematically related material; arranged chronologically, these sets furnish the architecture of the chapters that follow. They concern (1) the emergence of sound within artworks through figures, (2) the centrality of auditory affect in the Greek imagination, and (3) the role of dissonant auditory poetics in the history of Greek musical melody.

FIGURES When Greek auditory artworks open themselves to the sonorities they themselves characterize as noisy and disruptive, they seem to hijack perception and begin to function as figures of sensation. Figures, according to Donna Haraway,

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are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings cohabit one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all the force of lived reality.27

A figure gives definable contours to experience without reducing it to a concept or an abstract representation. It creates an opportunity for the bodily inhabitation of irreducible difference. To put this another way, a figure is an eddy in the stream of becoming.28 One stream within which auditory artworks produce an eddy is the sequence of vibrations that begin in the air, encounter an ear, are converted into neurological signals, then emerge as linguistic awareness. Without stilling or stopping this stream, figures give it contour or shape, making auditory awareness audible. In referring to auditory figures, I have in mind something very similar to the echolalias that drew Daniel Heller-Roazen’s attention in 2005: Do the languages of the adult retain anything of the infinitely varied babble from which they emerged? If they did, then it would be only an echo, since where there are languages, the infant’s babble has long ago vanished, at least in the form it once had in the mouth of the child who could not yet speak. It would only be an echo, of another speech, and of something other than speech: an echolalia, which guarded the memory of the indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be.29

Heller-Roazen means to speak of the unlanguaged before language in a strongly chronological sense; the infant’s prelinguistic babble rhymes, not at all accidentally, with Babel, that place and time in which the languages of humanity were born, and in which the truth of language as a plurality of languages was disclosed. In distinction to Heller-Roazen, I turn to echoes not of what happened during the evolution of language in history or the life of the individual but to the emergence of language as a cognitive artifact, asking how and in what circumstances Greek song resonated with the vibrations that strike the ear before the mind hears words. But like Heller-Roazen, I seek to maintain a heightened sensitivity to the role of technique in the conjuring or the production of these resonances: the invocation of sensation can only be made by levels of mediation whose existence depends on its having been forgotten. As a preliminary example of the figuration of sound in Greek auditory art, consider Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite, written perhaps in the early sixth century BCE: Δεῦρυ μ’ ἐκ Κρήτας ἐπ[ὶ τόνδ]ε ναῦον ἄγνον, ὄππ[ᾳ τοι] χάριεν μὲν ἄλσος

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μαλί[αν], βῶμοι δὲ τεθυμιάμενοι [λι]βανώτῳ, ἐν δ’ ὔδωρ ψῦχρον κελάδει δι’ ὔσδων μαλίνων, βρόδοισι δὲ παῖς ὀ χῶρος ἐσκίαστ’, αἰθυσσομένων δὲ φύλλων κῶμα κατέρρει, ἐν δὲ λείμων ἰππόβοτος τέθαλεν ἠρίνοισιν ἄνθεσιν, αἰ δ’ ἄηται μέλλιχα πνέοισιν [ ] [ ] ἔνθα δὴ σὺ στέμ ἔλοισα Κύπρι χρυσίαισιν ἐν κυλίκεσσιν ἄβρως ὀμμείχμενον θαλίαισι νέκταρ οἰνοχόαισον. Here to me from Crete to this holy temple, where is a lovely grove of apples and altars smoking with incense; cool water murmurs through the branches, the whole place is shaded with roses, and sleep flows down from the flashing leaves. There is a meadow which nourishes horses and blooms with spring flowers. Sweet leaves breathe there . . . there, Aphrodite, take your garland, and gracefully pour nectar mixed with festivities into golden cups.30

Sappho’s song is a moment of verbal and musical calm wrested from the noisome wilderness of everyday speech, not unlike the grove of Aphrodite it describes. But this enclosure is also an opening into and through which flows the auditory physis that language forgets. Although it is cool and green and set out of the sun, the grove of Aphrodite is not a natural space (much of it, however, seems that way to the eyes and ears of mechanized modernity). The operative contrast is not between a garden and urban life but between a garden and the natural landscape. True, most of its delights are organic. But the grove is intensely cultivated: culture makes this place. Nonetheless, the formative power of culture is not absolute, nor can it be. Sappho’s brook is the one element in the garden that is not fully the product of artful cultivation. It was there first, and its location determined that of the grove. Water can be guided but not formed: you can shape a stream, line its banks, even change its bed—but you cannot make the water go uphill or make a dry bed flow. It is an integral part of the garden, but it also exceeds the garden: it comes from outside and continues beyond. The symbol of its wild primacy is its sound, which summons the audible much as a garden summons a stream and a love song summons desire. The description of babbling water in the fifth line thus brings the poem’s subject into intimate contact with its status as auditory

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art. As though to emphasize this analogy, the verse describing the brook’s sound is itself richly sonorous. The sequence of vowels ε—υ—ω is a structuring motif, occurring in ἐν δ’ ὔδωρ and then in κελάδει δι’ ὔσδων—interrupted, this time, by -άδει δι-, which creates an alliterative chain of δ- sounds. Like all lines of poetry, that line is constructed from the phonological elements of the language in which it is composed. But the language’s phonology is orchestrated into patterns figuring the irreducibly complex materiality of its utterance. If the auditory system extracts multiple periodic vibrations from the sequence of impacts that enters the ear, then samples and interprets some of these for processing as speech, the song takes speech and deploys it as plastic material, producing higher orders of nonperiodicity and recalling its acoustic origin in the noise beneath language, the grain of the voice.31 Consider the poem’s final stanza, which is given integrity by the persistent expression of σ (three times in line 13, four times in line 14, once in line 15, once in line 16). A pattern of glottal plosives counterpoints the sigmas (κ and χ; Κύπρι / χρυσιαίσιν ἐν κυλίκεσσιν . . . / ὀμμειχμενον . . . νέκταρ / οἰνοχόαισιν), and the -νθ- of ἔνθα is repeated across the word juncture -ον θαλι- in line 15. Lines 13 and 14 pulse with υ- sounds. These sequences are irregular: they could not be called “structuring principles” or be reduced to a grammar. No two patterns are alike, and no pattern becomes a stable or structuring unit. But they are the framework for an audible presence without which the poem could not, fairly, be considered a concrete singularity. Like sound itself, in other words, the poem unfolds in an inexorably temporal way. Change, or what we might call variable frequency, is fundamental. Like nearly all ancient Greek songs, this one is composed in a regularly recurring metrical pattern (in this case, it is called the “Sapphic stanza”). For most of the four-hundred-year history I cover here, the repetition of some pattern of short and long syllables gave songs of all kinds their rhythmic coherence. But meter was more than merely a structuring device, more than just a reliable grid imposed, as it were, over the unstable fluxions of vocal sound. Repeating metrical patterns provided a stable reference by means of which choral singers, dancers, and instrumentalists could synchronize themselves; for audience members, the meter provided a matrix that established, fulfilled, and created tension through the manipulation of expectations. Meter, in other words, linked word, melody, dance, voice, instrumental accompaniment, and audience reaction in a single coordinated performance, and it did so precisely by setting up repeating patterns. This may be the single most important reason for song’s ability to serve as a model of social order and even as a leading form of socialization: as the chorus moved in sync, so, too (at least ideally), did the city or court. By contrast, the

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irregular vocal arabesques I am interested in here are minimally repeating and unpredictable and could be called the idiosyncratic or idiomatic element in Greek auditory art. I am drawn to them because it is there that the irreducibility of the sound wave finds figuration. For the same reason, although there can be little doubt that the history of Greek musical rhythm has much to say about song’s social signification, its involvement in a tradition, and its ability to engage in complex forms of meaning production through nonverbal structures, I turn to meter only when composers begin to explore forms whose complexity approximates the open-ended unfoldings frequently identifiable in the phonetics of a poem.32 In the pages to come, I describe the sounds of poems at moments when the poems themselves begin to speak of sound. These descriptions are intended to indicate my texts’ irreducible sonic materiality, to catch in the subtle patterns that cannot but be present in a linguistic artifact the figure of a deeper, less-evident sonority—that wave of impacts from which we sample and extract the idea of speech and which would be entirely lost to us without such figurative evocations. My description of these patterns is in no case offered as a claim about the intention of the songs’ composers (although, in truth, I cannot imagine how an author could have not intended the sounds of the words he or she chose); nor, indeed, do I want to read them as reflecting any cultural expectation except the one, widespread and easily documented, that associated sound with disturbance and song with the technical channeling of sound. We should not speak of the relationship between sound and meaning as mimetic. Nor should we say that the auditory presence of art is a self-presence of the type crucial for Western metaphysics. Rather, in describing and working with sound, a song such as Sappho’s reduces the space between signifier and signified to an interval optimal for allowing the mutual interferences of sound and meaning to produce dissonant overtones all their own. Derek Attridge argues that such moments of intensified auditory awareness are catastrophic for “normal” linguistic cognition, which presumes unmediated contact between language and reality. He takes onomatopoeia as a leading example: If onomatopoeia is to be judged in terms of the accuracy with which it enables the sound of language to reproduce the sounds and other physical characteristics of the non-linguistic world, then the more successful it is . . . the more it is bound to come into conflict with the necessarily abstract nature of the language system, foregrounding the physical properties of speech (and writing), and drawing attention to itself as a rhetorical device, instead of melting away in a presentation of unmediated reality. The more it succeeds, that is, the more it fails.33

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When the intensity of auditory reference increases together with an increase in the audibility of language, language itself goes haywire, emphasizing things it normally needs to suppress and drawing attention to another order of experience. I can think of no better figure for this than Aphrodite, laughter-loving goddess and governess of procreation and of a desire that loosens the limbs, steals the lungs, drives us from the shelter of acceptable behavior, and robs us of our shame. When Sappho summons Aphrodite, she summons a force that at once gives and disrupts form, a force defined both by sensual delight and by a terror that energizes this delight from within. Sound participates in this uncanny poetics. Indeed, Sappho’s poem returns it to us as sensation.

AFFECT Figures are better described as passages than as objects. In a figure, sound is transmitted; in a figure, language opens to sound. To identify figures, I needed to open myself as well. What Paul Stoller called “sensuous scholarship” was inevitable. Remarking that the “bodily” turn in the humanities had taken place through writing and analytical practices that continued to rely on the subject position of a disembodied observer, Stoller argued that “discussions of the sensuous body require sensuous scholarship in which writers tack between the analytical and the sensible, in which embodied form as well as disembodied logic constitute scholarly argument.”34 The core of his claim can be captured through a meditation on the word presence, which designates both a concrete mode of appearance and a subjective comportment: we must be present with what presents itself to us. The material that makes up the pages to come is, then, the result of a series of acts of hearing that I offered to my texts and that, reciprocally, they demanded of me. This book could be called the response to an imperative to listen, to get the sense of Greek song.35 How do I listen? With my tongue. The vibratory frequencies experienced as sound occur in a limited range on a spectrum much wider than what can be converted by the sense of hearing: lower frequencies, for example, enter consciousness through touch and proprioception.36 This broader spectrum becomes evident to us when we sense simultaneous flows through different sensory modalities—when, for example, I read aloud, attending to emergent sensory patterns not only aurally but also kinesthetically through the intimate physicality of my vocal tract, and visually, since the songs I approach come to me through writing. That the Greeks developed an alphabetic writing system is fundamental to my

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method of proceeding (although nothing in what follows could not have been done if the writing system were a syllabary or a system of ideograms): listening, I read. Ear, throat, lips, tongue, and eye are all involved in my attention, which is itself shot through with forms of sentience deeply rooted in my body and only faintly and with difficulty brought to discursive self-consciousness. Such synesthetic constellations of awareness provide hints of a sphere not directly accessible to perception. Brian Massumi has called this sphere “affective.”37 Massumi follows Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who follow Spinoza in understanding affect as an essentially transitive capacity to change and be changed. If in the physical realm this would point to the transitional nature of all points in a system and the dominance of chains of causation, change, and flux (the radiating movement of the sound wave caused by my speech might be an example), affect in art occurs as the transformation of perceived objects into sensuous presences. A writer, for example, works in such a way that the language starts to “stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing.”38 This becoming-auditory of language shepherds into existence a “foreign language within language”39 or a “minor literature,” an eddy within language’s main stream.40 Deleuze and Guattari refer to this process as “the nonhuman becoming of man.”41 Their sense that affect in a work of art has to do with the becoming-other of language is confirmed by the aesthetics of sound in Greek song, where we encounter literal becomings–foreign of language within language, actual stutterings and cries.42 But it is a curious fact that for thinkers so closely associated with a philosophy of immanent becoming, Deleuze and Guattari are surprisingly reticent when it comes to dealing with affectivity in art as a transitive process. Outside of aesthetics, Deleuzianism reads affect as flow, contagion, epidemiological circulation. Thus, for example, when Massumi characterizes affect as a level of causality “embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things,”43 he is thinking of examples like terror at loud noises: I jump out of the road when I hear a siren— and only then do I look to see where it is coming from or if it is even coming in my direction. In their aesthetics, however, Deleuze and Guattari redefine affect as an artistic reduction or capture of affect.44 Thus, they distinguish between affect, which can be found in artworks, and affections, which are points and moments of interface between subjects and environments. Nothing circulates in a work of art: a work of art is a “bloc,” solid state and perduring (“the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the status of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections or the transition from one state to another; to extract a bloc of sensations”).45 But aesthetic affect is not only a bloc. It also is

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a transitive flow, a process of causation, not least in its ability to occur to me, to happen as an event in my hearing. Sappho provides a paradigmatic scene of auditory affect. In the following song, she traces the movement and consequences of sound from the hearing of a sound source through its devastating subjective results and into the production of the poem itself: φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνείσας ὐπακούει καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν, ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ’ ἴδω βρόχε’ ὤς με φώναισ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ἔτ’ εἴκει, ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε† λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν, ὀππάτεσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμβεισι δ’ ἄκουαι, †έκαδε μ’ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέεται†, τρόμος δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ’πιδεύης φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτᾳ· ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα† He seems to me to be like the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing lovely—which shakes the heart in my chest. For when I look at you I tremble so that I have no voice left but my tongue goes mute and slender fire runs beneath my skin and there is no more sight in my eyes and my ears rumble and cold sweat pours over me and my whole body trembles and I am greener than grass and I seem just a little short of dead. But all must be dared, since even poverty . . .46

The piece moves from the observation of a scene so happy as to seem immortal to an act of self-observation on the part of an utterly devastated sufferer of erotic desire. In between are a series of physiological responses whose force is so extreme that the speaker loses her ability to communicate with, and eventually even to sense, the outside world. She becomes a passionate vibration. This is an affective process, closely linked to sonic and auditory flows and impacts. Its result is the poem itself. The stimulus occurs in verses 2 through 5. “He” sits opposite “you,” listening to “you” “speaking sweetly” and “laughing in a lovely way” (3– 5).47 The rest of the

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song describes the speaker’s response. Her first reaction, a loss of voice, matches exactly the voicefulness of the beloved in the first stanza. Indeed, both occur in the same metrical position. But the contrasts are more striking. The end of the first stanza runs its five syllables through two words without elision or hiatus and manages an extreme economy of vocalic means, repeating the vowel sequence -α-υ- twice before concluding with ει. This smooth, carefully patterned line fits well with the calm, almost ambrosial scene it describes. The end of the second stanza begins with the same word but quickly moves in a different direction: its five syllables are run through five words and three elisions—only two words (ἔν and εἴκει) are complete. The result is a fracturing of speech at exactly the point where the poem begins to describe the same process, a linguistic enactment of the breaking up of the tongue described in the first line of the next stanza. We can reconstruct what happens in the relationship between sound and sense in these lines. The elisions remove the terminal syllable from three of five words. Because Greek relies heavily on terminal syllables to produce syntactic coherence, a reader or a hearer who wants to reconstruct meaning needs to actively supplement what he or she reads or hears. This is not difficult: elision rules are limited, and a competent reader can come up with the right terminal syllables pretty easily. Still, there remains a radical disjunction between the line’s sense and its sound. These words do not quite express what they say but, rather, constitute a fragment of what the reader needs to make sense. More sound than meaningful utterance, the poem stutters as she would. The speaker’s linguistic crisis is symptomatic of an ongoing process of chaotic inwardness. The third stanza details the effects of her discombobulation on two other senses—fire under her skin (touch) and darkness in her eyes—then turns to her hearing, which is overcome by humming. We might say that the hum impedes her ears’ ability to sense the outside world by increasing the volume of the inside world. Just as her broken tongue prevents her from communicating, her humming ears turn her toward an internal environment undergoing sudden and catastrophic collapse. The climactic position of auditory pathology at the final line of the third stanza draws attention to the fact that this inward humming is an intensification or amplification of the sound of “you” laughing in the first stanza. Sappho is configuring erotic agony as a cataclysmic resonance circuit. The final stanza shifts its focus from the speaker’s imploding sensorium to an inwardly felt somatic pathology: she sweats, shakes, and changes color. The terminus of this process is that she seems to herself to be practically dead. This “I seem to myself ” closes the circle that began at the beginning of the poem with “He seems to me . . .” The contrast is strong and eloquent: if he seemed like a

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god, I seem just a little short of dead, proximal to mortality and thus the extreme opposite of a god. But she also becomes like him in her condition of passionate extremity, because she has attained a state in which she has no subjectivity, no self-presence, but only seems, even to herself. Beginning as a third-person observer of other people’s experience (she watched someone else listening, heard the performance of the beloved as though it were a musical concert with an audience which only partially included her), she ends as a third person to herself. The subjective catastrophe narrated in this poem is not only auditory. The other senses are implicated as well. Sappho’s “affective sensorium . . . becomes a rhythmic transducer composed of not just the five exteroceptive channels that open onto the external environment, but also the viscerality of interoception, which is sensitive to intensity minus quality and in a sense preempts exteroception in that it makes decisions before the consciousness of extensive sensory objects fully emerges”—to hijack a sentence written by Steve Goodman about not-so-different contemporary realities.48 The passionate becoming-other of the speaker has a consequence: the poem itself, which might be called a secondary affect. Charles Segal offered a compelling catalogue of the sonorities in the last two stanzas: A strong alliteration of k and g in line 9 seems fairly probable . . . It is strengthened by the k alliteration of αὔτικα χρῷ (at once beneath my skin) in the next line. The d sound at the beginning of that line (10, δ’) continues in the impressive drumming d’s of ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν (has run beneath), which follows up the chiasmic pu / up pattern in πῦρ ὐπαδρεδρόμηκεν (fire has fun beneath). A similar, but more complex pattern recurs in the next line (11) in the or-m- / -rom- sequence of ὄρρημμ’ ἐπιρρομ- (I see . . . are humming). The drumming d beat of line 10 is taken up again in line 13, reading Page’s emendation: κὰδ’ δέ μ’ ἴδρως ψῦχρος ἔχει (a cold sweat covers me). Here, as also in line 10, the alliteration of k sounds accompanies the d’s. Vowel patterns also reinforce the repetitive effect, especially the strongly marked sequence of open o-sounds in line 11 and the a sounds of line 14: παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας (a trembling seizes me, and I am paler than grass).49

Segal interprets these sounds as the embodiment of what he calls an “incantatory” poetics grounded in the fact that oral performance, the main medium of Sappho’s poetry in its original context, is a social, face-to-face event: in a poem such as this one, the effect “is to lift the daimonic power of eros out of the realm of the formless and the terrible, bring it into the light of form, make it visible to the individual poet and, by extension, to his or her society.”50 Segal seems to mean that the song and its sound patterns represent a kind of control or for-

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malization of the formless effects of eros. I would hesitate there. Without doubt, this poem descends into eros as the negation of social form. But I am not sure it comes all the way back. The effects of alliteration that Segal so gracefully charts represent the poetic equivalent of the humming that overwhelms the speaker’s ears: the poem’s noticeable sonorousness is the material correlate of its theme. As the speaker becomes other, the poem emerges, affect of affect.

MELODY Language stabilizes combinations of “overtone” frequencies, together with their temporal envelopes; the result of the stabilizing process, the phoneme, can then be combined into the higher-order organizations that constitute words, sentences, or texts.51 Melody, which works with pitch, is built on the stabilization of the fundamental frequency of a sound. Like words, pitches are cognitive constructs, “cleaned-up” versions of physical vibrations that are basic to sense but not cognized as sensed. In hearing a musical pitch, I sample a very specific bandwidth of information. It seems banal to observe that I do not cognize as pitch the other sounds in the room; their status as “other sounds” is itself a cognitive achievement. More impressively, when I hear a pitch, I do not hear the fact that it is extrapolated from a series of pressure waves impacting my ear.52 Pitch, in other words, is the detemporalized abstraction of a fundamentally temporal series of events. We could call the difference between language’s work on the overtone series and melody’s work on the fundamental frequency a distinction between timbre and tone. This distinction, however, is not absolute; there are languages (Greek is one of them) in which pitch differences are significant, and no music exists that does not also work with timbre.53 Indeed, music theorists since the eighteenth century have sought to derive the material of Western music from the overtone series, effectively justifying systems of pitches with reference to the components of timbre.54 The interpenetration between tone and timbre is reflected in song, which could be described as the artful combination of both systems. Indeed, having intimated that poetry’s manipulation of language produces figures of auditory sensation in the form of assonantal and alliterative patterns, I want to also suggest that the manipulation of pitch has an analogous result, this time in the form of melody, which in its own way figures the temporality and complexity of sensed but unperceived sound. Sappho, again, offers a preliminary example, though we cannot be as detailed as before. The melodies to her songs may have been improvised anew at each

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performance—and are lost, in any case. But one known constraint on melodic expression allows us to identify a crucial detail. It is likely that in normal conditions melodies obeyed the Greek pitch accent, going up when the accentuation pattern called for a rise in pitch (indicated in our texts with an acute accent, /´/), going up and down in obedience to what modern texts annotate with a circumflex accent (/ˆ/), and going down immediately after an acute accent (grave accents are not musically significant). This is a relatively weak constraint—the nature of Greek prosody means that obligatory rises and falls in pitch are comparatively rare within the sentence, and no constraint seems to have prevailed other than in the vicinity of the accents just noted. Nonetheless, even such a weak constraint makes it significant that although each stanza in a Sapphic song is metrically identical to the rest, none repeats the same accentuation pattern. The most likely conclusion is that Greek melodies were through-composed: in obeying the pitch accent of the words, they abandoned the possibility of repeating with the repeating metrical structure.55 The melody of Sappho’s song, in other words, unfolded the same way the auditory presence of the words unfolded: singular and minimally repeating, but nonetheless possessing an internal logic to be found nowhere else, it was an irreducibly temporal form, distinct from pitch and in a definitive figural relationship with the sonic materiality pitch forgets, like the sound patterns that emerge from a song’s words. A melody or a melodic phrase might seem to have a unity and an internal coherence that belies this idea: Proust’s “little phrase” from Vinteul’s sonata has such extraordinary effects not because of its temporality but because of its unity; it is an object in its own right, a discrete duration, the means by which we track time. But the identity of a melody depends fundamentally on internal temporal succession. Changing the order of notes destroys a melody and replaces it with a different one. If the force and impetus of a tune derives to a great extent from the same post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy that according to Roland Barthes underwrites narrative, it must be the case that there is a level at which the “unity” of the melodic line is no more than a sequence of components.56 A musical phrase is rife with difference: its identity is imposed, we might say, on discontinuity. But—as good listeners are surely reminding me at this very moment—even through-composed music is not irreducibly temporal, a pure, unrepeating flow. Something repeats in a melody; a phrase contains within it a recurring rhythmic or melodic idea.57 (And now the readers of my discussion of sound patterns in Sappho’s poetry are chiming in too: assonances and alliterations depend on the repetition of sounds.) No argument here, but I would specify that while motifs repeat in a melodic phrase (as do letters in an example of alliteration), they do

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not repeat in a predictable manner. By definition, in fact, they must be ordered in a nonrepeating sequence. A musical phrase gets its identity from a succession of motifs that is unique and not periodic—if the succession repeated, we would identify two instances of the same phrase. We could, consequently, describe a song as a nested series of stabilized durations, with each duration made from the minimally repetitive composition of its constituent elements: a motif is made from pitches; a phrase, from motifs; a melody, from phrases; a piece from melodies. In these necessarily nonrepeating combinations of finite sets of elements lies the figure of the open-ended series of pressure waves that we call the material of sound. This description of a melody inverts Plato’s claim in Timaeus that time was an imitation of eternity, an ever-changing copy of never-altering ideas: I am claiming to the contrary that minimally repeating melodies are figures of time, reminders within a basic durational framework of the succession that undergirds and disrupts it. Over the course of about 150 years (from the early sixth century to the end of the fifth), Greek music unfolded in a historical progression that was itself a discernable unity subtended by relentless movement. A series of innovations, including the development of increasingly complex rhythmic techniques and an ever-expanding palette of harmonic systems and opportunities for modulation, created a tradition that never seemed to stand still. Supporting this movement was a commitment to the same auditory poetics identifiable in figures of sound and in auditory affect. This music used highly refined technical means to unsettle the link between technique and social order and, in the process, to bring sound within the enclosure of perception. Three chapters, then, each aimed at capturing a different modality of Greek sound art’s endeavor to conjure with sensation, to produce the semblance of sound within technically mediated material. In chapter 1, I collect auditory figures, moments in which song describes and opens itself to the uncanny resonances of which it is itself constituted. I read a sequence of poets here, covering a span of several centuries. In Homer, Hesiod, Alcaeus, Bacchylides, and Aristophanes, I listen for the metapoetic implications of auditory figures; that is, I try to hear song working with sound and commenting on the meaning of this work at the same time. In chapter 2, I attend to auditory affect as a transitive flow. A close reading of Aeschylus’s tragedies reveals the argument that auditory affect should be central to tragedy and the polis. In an example of sensual synesthesia, auditory affect also made a contribution to the conceptualization of drama as a visual genre. But

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tragedy was not alone: auditory affect was also explored in Homeric epic and in fifth-century theories of perception, where the practice of art found a counterpart in the philosophy of sensation. In chapter 3, I offer a discussion of Greek music in which melody is defined as the production of auditory figures. I argue that Greek music sought to include within its ordered manipulations of pitch sounds of the uncanny outside by pursuing ever-expanding melodic complexity. Although we lack any scores from this period, we have important and informative descriptions of music that allow us to hear the noise even in these unheard melodies. Reactions to musical developments, particularly in the fifth century, could be extreme, and point to the importance of affect in the history of Greek music. Tracing this across just under two centuries, I argue that as they figured sound through ever-new melodic means, Greek songs also built up increasingly potent affective payloads. The aim was to maximize sensual disruption, to let the auditory outside in. Each chapter treats its theme in more or less chronological order. As a result, the book passes over the same historical period three times, though I attempt to provide an overall sense of chronological movement by emphasizing earlier texts in chapter 1, middle-period texts in chapter 2, and later texts in chapter 3. In chapter 3, I also aim to sum up the stories of the previous two chapters by treating melody as both auditory figure and affective force. Throughout, however, I seek to be sensitive to the unique and irregular historical unfolding that the chronological perspective makes available. I have made an effort, in other words, to treat each theme as enduring over the course of several centuries but defined by an ever-renewing process of historical change.

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Years into a (so far) fruitless siege and just recovering from a devastating plague, the Achaean army at the beginning of the Iliad is discontented, eager for home, and resentful of its generals. This gives them to uproar. They swarm together in assembly like bees from a hive, rife with rumor and making a din. Nine heralds try to shout them into silence, and only with difficulty cause them to cease their clamor.1 When Agamemnon deceitfully commands them to load the ships and flee Troy, their shout rises to the sky; they are like the sea or a field of grain moved by the wind.2 When Odysseus drives them back to the assembly, they shout again, like the ocean thundering on the shore.3 Their restlessness is given voice by Thersites, a commoner who has “many disordered words in his chest” and lacks “measure of voice.”4 He shouts a bitter and satirical speech, and it clangs out shrilly.5 He is answered by Odysseus and is beaten for his trouble.6 Odysseus’s combination of oratory and physical intimidation works; the Argives shout in response to his harangue and make the ships resound.7 As their morale returns, they clamor for war like a wave against the headland8 and muster on the plain like cranes filling a meadow with their cries or like buzzing flies (the image of flies closes a ring: they had initially gathered with the sound of bees).9 The only thematic preparation for this sequence of sounds comes at the beginning of the Iliad’s first book, where the epic describes Apollo bringing plague to the Achaeans: the arrows with which he makes them sick clang in his quiver and ring out when they fly from his bow.10 We can infer, perhaps, that in the Iliad 27

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there is a link between noise and disorder.11 If so, then the conclusion of the army’s progression toward fighting form does not end in book two, but in book four, when after a number of delays, the Greeks and Trojans finally join in battle: now the Greek host is silent. “You would not have said that they had a voice in their breasts,” says the poet, “so silent did they keep out of fear of their leaders.”12 But only their voices are still. Their feet and armor thunder over the plain, like waves driving against the beach.13 When the Greek and Trojan armies clash, they are compared to two mountain rivers, swollen with melted snow, joining in a gorge and producing a roar audible from a long way off: Οἳ δ’ ὅτε δή ῥ’ ἐς χῶρον ἕνα ξυνιόντες ἵκοντο, σύν ῥ’ ἔβαλον ῥινούς, σὺν δ’ ἔγχεα καὶ μένε’ ἀνδρῶν χαλκεοθωρήκων· ἀτὰρ ἀσπίδες ὀμφαλόεσσαι ἔπληντ’ ἀλλήλῃσι, πολὺς δ’ ὀρυμαγδὸς ὀρώρει. ἔνθα δ’ ἅμ’ οἰμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων, ῥέε δ’ αἵματι γαῖα. ὡς δ’ ὅτε χείμαρροι ποταμοὶ κατ’ ὄρεσφι ῥέοντες ἐς μισγάγκειαν συμβάλλετον ὄβριμον ὕδωρ κρουνῶν ἐκ μεγάλων κοίλης ἔντοσθε χαράδρης, τῶν δέ τε τηλόσε δοῦπον ἐν οὔρεσιν ἔκλυε ποιμήν· ὣς τῶν μισγομένων γένετο ἰαχή τε πόνος τε. They came together into one place, and threw together shields and spears and the wrathful might of bronze-armored men. The embossed shields closed with each other, and a great din arose. Then there were the groans and boasts of men killing and being killed, and the earth flowed with blood. As when two mountain rivers, swollen with melted snow, throw together their mighty water in a gorge where two valleys meet, and a shepherd in the mountain hears the thunder from a long way off; so was the shouting and agony of those mingling armies.14

If the Greek army had been subdued into the kind of silence indicative of good order, this only shifts the disorder it represents to a civilizational scale. The movement from the marshaling of the Greek host in book two to the clash of armies in book four is, in other words, something like a modulation, a shifting of the locus of chaos from the morale of the troops to the mass physical event of a military clash. It is typical of the Iliad that a cataclysmic event like this should be described using a vivid auditory likeness. Sound mediates between the violence and power of the natural world and the violence of human war and human destruction, with the former serving as an objective correlative for the latter. The association between natural sound and martial uproar is a significant

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motif in the Iliad. Indeed, it does more than furnish a thematic commentary on the narrative: at a crucial and climactic moment, it provides the material from which the narrative is constructed. In a sequence rife with auditory imagery, book twenty-three collapses the distinction between natural violence and war by bringing the river Scamander into the fray and, in turn, transforming combat into something elemental. That climactic sequence begins when Achilles wades into the river, killing Trojans as he advances: ἐν δ’ ἔπεσον μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ’ αἰπὰ ῥέεθρα, ὄχθαι δ’ ἀμφὶ περὶ μεγάλ’ ἴαχον· οἳ δ’ ἀλαλητῷ ἔννεον ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα, ἑλισσόμενοι περὶ δίνας. ὡς δ’ ὅθ’ ὑπὸ ῥιπῆς πυρὸς ἀκρίδες ἠερέθονται φευγέμεναι ποταμόνδε· τὸ δὲ φλέγει ἀκάματον πῦρ ὄρμενον ἐξαίφνης, ταὶ δὲ πτώσσουσι καθ’ ὕδωρ· ὣς ὑπ’ Ἀχιλλῆος Χάνθου βαθυδινήεντος πλῆτο ῥόος κελάδων ἐπιμὶξ ἵππων τε καὶ ἀνδρῶν. Αὐτὰρ ὃ διογενὴς δόρυ μὲν λίπεν αὐτοῦ ἐπ’ ὄχθῃ κεκλιμένον μυρίκῃσιν, ὃ δ’ ἔσθορε δαίμονι ἶσος, φάσγανον οἶον ἔχων, κακὰ δὲ φρεσὶ μήδετο ἔργα, τύπτε δ’ ἐπιστροφάδην· τῶν δὲ στόνος ὄρνυτ’ ἀεικὴς ἄορι θεινομένων, ἐρυθαίνετο δ’ αἵματι ὕδωρ. They fell into the river with a great noise. The steep stream resounded and the surrounding banks shouted. Whirled about in the eddies, they swam here and there with a din. As with the onslaught of fire locusts rise into the air and flee towards the river, but the tireless flames surge and burn them, and they drop into the water, so was the stream of deep-eddying Scamander filled with the confused noise of horses and men beneath Achilles’ advance. But the god-sprung one left his spear leaning on a tamarisk bush by the bank and leapt down holding only his sword like a divine spirit. He intended terrible things. He turned to all sides to strike out. A hideous groaning arose from the ones who were struck by his blade. The water rushed red with blood.15

Note the homoioteleuton of sound words in the ninth and tenth lines of this passage (μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, ἀλαλητῷ), accompanied by alliteration on χ (βράχε . . . ὄχθαι . . . ἴαχον), which emphasizes the thundering and shouting of the riverbanks. A heavy assonance on α links all the sonic descriptions (μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ’ αἰπὰ ῥέεθρα, / ὄχθαι δ’ ἀμφὶ περὶ μεγάλ’ ἴαχον· οἳ δ’ ἀλαλητῷ). In the eleventh line, a remarkable rhyme on ἐν, coupled with the vivid phrase ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα, gives sonic emphasis to the terror and confusion of Achilles’s victims. At the end of the passage, the groans of the dying rise with booming assonance on ο and ω (τῶν δὲ στόνος ὄρνυτ’ ἀεικὴς / ἄορι θεινομένων, ἐρυθαίνετο δ’ αἵματι

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ὕδωρ), accompanied, as though in the relative minor key, by repetition of υ (ὄρνυτ’, ἐρυθαίνετο, ὕδωρ). Keeping with the logic that links sound with war, the auditory description contributes to our impression that this is a terrible event. Indeed, the scene is part of a sequence of sounds that begins in book eighteen, when Achilles stands on the ramparts of the Achaean fort and shouts and Athena mingles her voice with his; the consequent sound strikes immediate terror into the hearts of those who hear it, causing a panic that costs twelve lives. A sustained build follows: in book nineteen, the gods enter the battle with a shouting match that quickly escalates to the shaking and rumbling of earth and heaven. First, Athena appears on the side of the Achaeans and shouts; then, Ares shouts back from the top of the Trojan citadel in a high pitch.16 Then Zeus thunders, and Poseidon shakes the earth with such a great noise that it causes Hades to cry out, fearing that the noise of the warring gods will crack open the earth and reveal the underworld to the light.17 Shortly after the passage describing the clogging of Scamander with corpses, this crescendo of noises leads to an even more extraordinary sound. Enraged at Achilles’s violence (and provoked by a few stunningly arrogant words),18 the river rises against him: Πηλεΐδης δ᾽ ἀπόρουσεν ὅσον τ᾽ ἐπὶ δουρὸς ἐρωή, αἰετοῦ οἴματ᾽ ἔχων μέλανος, τοῦ θηρητῆρος, ὅς θ᾽ ἅμα κάρτιστός τε καὶ ὤκιστος πετεηνῶν· τῷ ἐϊκὼς ἤϊξεν, ἐπὶ στήθεσσι δὲ χαλκὸς σμερδαλέον κονάβιζεν· ὕπαιθα δὲ τοῖο λιασθεὶς φεῦγ᾽, ὃ δ᾽ ὄπισθε ῥέων ἕπετο μεγάλῳ ὀρυμαγδῷ. ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἀνὴρ ὀχετηγὸς ἀπὸ κρήνης μελανύδρου ἂμ φυτὰ καὶ κήπους ὕδατι ῥόον ἡγεμονεύῃ χερσὶ μάκελλαν ἔχων, ἀμάρης ἐξ ἔχματα βάλλων· τοῦ μέν τε προρέοντος ὑπὸ ψηφῖδες ἅπασαι ὀχλεῦνται· τὸ δέ τ᾽ ὦκα κατειβόμενον κελαρύζει χώρῳ ἔνι προαλεῖ, φθάνει δέ τε καὶ τὸν ἄγοντα· ὣς αἰεὶ Ἀχιλῆα κιχήσατο κῦμα ῥόοιο καὶ λαιψηρὸν ἐόντα· θεοὶ δέ τε φέρτεροι ἀνδρῶν. The son of Peleus leapt back the length of a spear’s throw, his body swooping like a black eagle, a hunter, the strongest and fastest of winged creatures. So did he dart back, and the bronze on his chest rang out terribly. He fled, withdrawing from under the river, and it flowed after him with a huge din. As a man leads a stream of water away from a black spring between his plants and pots with a hoe, removing blockages from the channel, and the pebbles are swept away before its flow, and it murmurs as it runs

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quickly along downhill, overtaking even the one who leads it on; so did the wave of the river ever catch up with Achilles, even though he was fast. Gods are more powerful than men.19

Up to this point, water sounds occur only in similes describing the roar of armies.20 But with the rise of the Scamander the wave enters the narrative as itself, and with that the epic begins to scramble the division between human and natural, narrative and simile, on which it had relied so far: as Achilles’s battle with the river continues, the distinction between natural violence and war gradually disappears. Shortly before it ends, Scamander summons a second river, Simois, who also rises and joins in the attack on the Myrmidon leader. As the rivers roar together, the levee separating narrative and simile finally breaks: what in book four was a likeness used to describe clashing armies has now become literal, the very flesh (as it were) of war. The sequence comes to an end only when Hera sends fire and wind to oppose the roar of the rivers, turning the battlefield into a scene of elemental struggle, one far more majestic and terrifying even than the clashing of human hosts. The strangeness and novelty of Scamander’s rise is indicated by a curiously discordant simile: Scamander is like an irrigation trench in which the water gently murmurs (κελαρύζει) as it runs down the slope. The murmuring of an irrigation trench hardly seems to befit the great violence of Scamander’s rise.21 The discordant relationship between the event and its sonorous simile mirrors the terrible becoming of Achilles himself. Like the river, which rises up with supernatural violence and yet is compared to a gentle irrigation trench, Achilles is at one and the same time the highest expression of the epic ideal and its terrifying excess; he at once defines, exemplifies and proves its impossibility. He is order and noise: order in the sense that there is no clearer delineation of Homeric heroism than Achilles and noise in the sense that in embodying this ideal Achilles produces so much terror that he seems transfigured beyond the sphere of the human. The tragic force of the Iliad comes from its programmed failure to exemplify precisely the ideal it depicts and celebrates: Achilles rises up through the epic like the wave rising against him, replete with terrible thunder.22 In this, he resonates with the poetics of the Iliad itself. An extraordinary summa of the culture that produced it and an exemplification of social order in the form of art, the epic is also a terrible work, an unsettling exploration of human capacities for destruction and of the conditions of civilizational demise. This fundamental conflict is reflected in the fact that the Iliad is a soundful poem that strongly associates sound with war, destruction, terror, and death. Like Achilles, it seems to both

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exemplify and exceed an ideal of order. As Achilles rises terribly beyond his ethical model, so does the epic’s sound rise up beyond the containment of its language. The Iliad was not alone. Hesiod: αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ Τιτῆνας ἀπ’ οὐρανοῦ ἐξέλασε Ζεύς, ὁπλότατον τέκε παῖδα Τυφωέα Γαῖα πελώρη Ταρτάρου ἐν φιλότητι διὰ χρυσῆν Ἀφροδίτην· ... ἐκ δέ οἱ ὤμων ἦν ἑκατὸν κεφαλαὶ ὄφιος δεινοῖο δράκοντος, γλώσσῃσι δνοφερῇσι λελιχμότες· ἐν δέ οἱ ὄσσε θεσπεσίῃς κεφαλῇσιν ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι πῦρ ἀμάρυσσεν· [πασέων δ’ ἐκ κεφαλέων πῦρ καίετο δερκομένοιο·] φωναὶ δ’ ἐν πάσῃσιν ἔσαν δεινῇς κεφαλῇσι, παντοίην ὄπ’ ἰεῖσαι ἀθέσφατον· ἄλλοτε μὲν γὰρ φθέγγονθ’ ὥς τε θεοῖσι συνιέμεν, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε ταύρου ἐριβρύχεω μένος ἀσχέτου ὄσσαν ἀγαύρου, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε λέοντος ἀναιδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντος, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ σκυλάκεσσιν ἐοικότα, θαύματ’ ἀκοῦσαι, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ ῥοίζεσχ’, ὑπὸ δ’ ἤχεεν οὔρεα μακρά. But after Zeus drove the Titans from heaven, monstrous earth mingled in love with Tartarus through the offices of golden Aphrodite, and bore a most dangerous child: Typhoeus. ... Growing from his shoulders were the hundred heads of snakes, terrible serpents, flicking dark tongues; in in each of those marvelous heads fire darted beneath the eyebrows [and it shot out when they looked around]. There were voices in every terrible head, and they emitted all kinds of unspeakable sounds. Sometimes they spoke in ways the gods could understand, but at other times it was the voice of a bellowing bull, proud of its unmanageable power; at other times again of a lion with an arrogant heart; at other times again a voice like a puppy, marvelous to hear; at other times again he would whistle, and the mountains would resound loudly in accompaniment.23

Typhoeus, according to Hesiod, was Earth’s last great threat to Zeus and the Olympian regime. The verses themselves reverberate with the creature’s noisiness. Lines 825 through 830 ring their changes around the single consonantal sound φ (κεφαλαὶ, δνοφερῇσι, κεφαλῇσιν, ὀφρύσι, κεφαλέων, φωναὶ, κεφαλῇσι, ἀθέσφατον, φθέγγονθ’; note that the first seven occurrences alternate between a form of κεφαλός and another word and that the last two words also

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play on θ) while 831 through 835 repeat ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ . . . (at other times again) with insistence. Local patterns fluoresce in the lattices of these larger sequences. Lines 825 and 826 alliterate on δ and ρ (δεινοῖο δράκοντος . . . δνοφερῇσι . . . ὀφρύσι πῦρ ἀμάρυσσεν) and 828 on κ (ἐκ κεφαλέων πῦρ καίετο δερκομένοιο; note the reversal in ἐκ κε-). Lines 829 and 830 unfold an assonantal pattern with η, α, and ει (φωναὶ δ’ ἐν πάσῃσιν ἔσαν δεινῇς κεφαλῇσι / παντοίην ὄπ’ ἰεῖσαι ἀθέσφατον). The first ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε in 831 continues the repetition of τε which began earlier in the line (ὥς τε); the final two feet of 833 share a phonetic structure with the metrically identical end of 834 (θυμὸν ἔχοντος, θαύματ’ ἀκοῦσαι). Lines 834 and 835 contains an extended alliteration on glottal stops (ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ σκυλάκεσσιν ἐοικότα, θαύματ’ ἀκοῦσαι, / ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖ ῥοίζεσχ’, ὑπὸ δ’ ἤχεεν οὔρεα μακρά). Typhoeus’s noisiness is not surprising. Monsters make sound;24 so too, in the archaic cosmo-ethical sound map, do the unjust and opponents of Zeus’s regime.25 Slightly more surprising is the sonorousness of Hesiod’s song. Greek singers claimed to preserve communal memories, and in a culture where law and long habit were inextricably tangled, the remembrancer of a community had a critical role to play—indeed, the word νόμος meant “law,” “traditional custom,” and “musical composition.”26 Singing and dancing in choral performances played such a central role in socialization that Greece has been termed a “choral culture.”27 Musicians were occasionally given weighty civic responsibilities based on their musical skills: in a fragment of Archilochus, the son of Peisistratus is said to have brought musicians to Thasos to serve administrative functions.28 The Muses patronize both poets and kings.29 Singers, then, are the opposite of monsters: they should not be noisy. And yet here we are, with the description of a noisy opponent of Zeus that shares in the sonorousness of its object. Come to think of it, there are other disturbances to the idea that a song should minimize its noise; Zeus’s response to Typhoeus is one. He meets decibel with decibel, thundering so terribly that earth and heaven and ocean and even the underworld rumble.30 Indeed, for a poem that seems unambiguously to celebrate the regime of Zeus and the Olympian gods as the just and final model of cosmic governance,31 the poem revels in graphic descriptions of moments of crisis. Less than half the poem is given to the generation of the Olympians themselves,32 and the story culminates with a series of cataclysmic battles in which their grasp on power is critically challenged. In these battles, Hesiod increases the density and intensity of sound. During the Olympians’ clash with the Titans the sea cries out uncannily,33 the earth crashes,34 the heaven groans,35 the sound of the combatants’ feet reaches Tartarus,36 missiles groan,37 battle cries

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reach heaven,38 and a huge din is raised.39 Under Zeus’s thunderbolts, the earth crashes with the sound of fire, and burning trees cry out.40 The sound is so great that it seems as though earth and heaven are collapsing into one another.41 The conflict provokes a near reversion to that primal chaos with which the world began—chaos, the formless void from which all emerges, is cognate with χαίνω, “gape,” and so figures the cry of an open mouth.42 And what about the Muses themselves, about as obvious a model for the just and ordered form of song as one could find? Not exactly an unambiguous entrance for them, here. Catching sight of Hesiod (who boasts that they endow him with a staff of authority and teach the truth about the universe),43 they begin by calling him “a rusticated rube, badly put together, really little more than a belly,”44 then go on to announce that they are very good at telling lies that seem like truth and tell actually true things only when they feel like it.45 And there is the matter of what happened when they went to Olympus for the first time: αἳ τότ’ ἴσαν πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀγαλλόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ, ἀμβροσίῃ μολπῇ· περὶ δ’ ἴαχε γαῖα μέλαινα ὑμνεύσαις, ἐρατὸς δὲ ποδῶν ὕπο δοῦπος ὀρώρει νισομένων πατέρ’ εἰς ὅν. They went to Olympus delighting in their beautiful voice and their ambrosial melody. The black earth shouted around them as they sang, and a lovely thud arose from their feet as they went toward their father.46

This description is not unambiguous. To be sure, the Muses’ “beautiful voice,” and the fact that the sound of their dancing feet is “lovely,” seem to befit goddesses who govern music and stand for the ideal entertainment at Olympus. But other auditory cues suggest otherwise. In archaic hexameter verse the verb δουπέω (thud), here used of the maidens’ dancing feet, is elsewhere limited to bodies falling in the dust,47 while the noun δοῦπος describes waterfalls48 and the sea,49 running feet,50 battle,51 and armor.52 Hesiod uses δοῦπος three times: once in this passage and twice to describe the terrific sounds raised during the Titanomachy.53 Rarely does the earth cry out in anything other than terror or under the pressure of battle.54 The terrible shouting designated by the verb ἰάχω, here used to describe earth resounding to the Muses’ song, is literally applied to battle,55 armies,56 heroes and gods in combat,57 and grief;58 it is said metaphorically of bowstrings,59 rivers,60 fire,61 and bronze being tempered in water.62 These are not euphonious sounds: their associations are violent, hors société. The most illuminating parallel to the Muses’ approach to Olympus is a description of the birth of Athena in one of her Homeric Hymns. When she springs

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forth, fully armed, from the head of Zeus, Olympus trembles before her and the earth cries out terribly.63 The scene is, to put it mildly, tense—until Zeus smiles and recognizes his daughter.64 Athena’s is a scene of “averted succession.” She comes to Zeus, momentarily, in the same way Zeus came to his father Kronos: as a child set on challenging paternal authority. Zeus responds differently from Kronos: he acknowledges his offspring and thus preserves his own position. A similar moment occurs at the beginning of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where Apollo’s first appearance at Olympus is also greeted with awe and fearfulness— until Leto disarms her son and his father grants him a place.65 This section of Hesiod’s Theogony places the Muses within a similar narrative configuration: like Apollo, they are born far from Olympus to a goddess who is not Hera; like Apollo, they come to Olympus only after having acquired their primary characteristics. Perhaps the soundfulness of their approach indicates the threat to the order of Zeus implied by the advent of many new deities.66 In this sense, the Muses are the sonorous obverse of Typhoeus. We might note that the sonic diversity of the monster is not unparalleled among singers: the chorus of Delian maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, for example, knows how to imitate all the dialects of men so that each would say that they speak in his language.67 Homer, too, momentarily imagines the poetic possibilities of having ten mouths and tongues.68 Unlike Typhoeus, such singers receive the imprimatur (as it were) of the father of gods and men and thus become legitimate voices. But they also seem to raise their voices in a manner implying something other than the peaceful order of the cosmos idealized in Olympian religion. With Typhoeus and the battles over universal power in whose sounds Hesiod revels, song becomes a vibrant sensuous presence even as it disturbs desires for stillness and peace. After the Titans are defeated, they are confined deep below the lowest edges of the earth in Tartarus, locked behind iron gates and hated by gods and men. And yet they are never truly gone. Indeed, the case could be made that they are the figurative embodiment of the sound of the poem. Tartarus is a nine-day fall from earth,69 a great chasm70 ringed with walls and guarded by dread monsters.71 This topography seems to trace out the form of a singer’s throat: the Titans are placed beyond the yawning mouth of Chaos72 and encircled by night, which is described as a “neck.”73 Hesiod derives the Titans’ name from τιταίνω, “stretch,” on the grounds that they stretched out for things they should not take.74 This is most clearly a recollection of the Titan hegemon Kronos, stretching out his hand to castrate his father, Ouranos. But it is also suggestive of the stretching necessary to tune the strings of a lyre.75 The Titans are the tension that gives a lyre pitch and presence, the sound of song echoing in the throat, and the tenor

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and tone of speech.76 Their defeat is, perhaps, necessary according to the logic of Hesiod’s social imaginary. But the artwork demands their continued presence. Theogony, ultimately, is not merely a story of the successive divine orders in the universe or an ideological machine using religion to justify political hierarchy. It is a song, a vibration in the throat. Hesiod’s treatment of sound in Theogony brings me close to contemplating a dehiscence between sociopolitical expectations and the work of art’s demand to be a sensual presence. This will prove a recurring motif: admixing sounds defined as noise according to social matrices, the work comes into conflict with the context it projects for itself. In a troublesome passage of Works and Days, Hesiod engages with the problems this motif poses: Νῦν δ’ αἶνον βασιλεῦσιν ἐρέω φρονέουσι καὶ αὐτοῖς· ὧδ’ ἴρηξ προσέειπεν ἀηδόνα ποικιλόδειρον ὕψι μάλ’ ἐν νεφέεσσι φέρων ὀνύχεσσι μεμαρπώς· ἣ δ’ ἐλεόν, γναμπτοῖσι πεπαρμένη ἀμφ’ ὀνύχεσσι, μύρετο· τὴν ὅ γ’ ἐπικρατέως πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν· “δαιμονίη, τί λέληκας; ἔχει νύ σε πολλὸν ἀρείων· τῇ δ’ εἶς ᾗ σ’ ἂν ἐγώ περ ἄγω καὶ ἀοιδὸν ἐοῦσαν· δεῖπνον δ’, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλω, ποιήσομαι ἠὲ μεθήσω. ἄφρων δ’, ὅς κ’ ἐθέλῃ πρὸς κρείσσονας ἀντιφερίζειν· νίκης τε στέρεται πρός τ’ αἴσχεσιν ἄλγεα πάσχει.” ὣς ἔφατ’ ὠκυπέτης ἴρηξ, τανυσίπτερος ὄρνις. Ὦ Πέρση, σὺ δ’ ἄκουε δίκης μηδ’ ὕβριν ὄφελλε· Here is a riddle for kings who can understand: A hawk addressed a shimmering-throated nightingale, carrying it high in the clouds after seizing it with its talons; and it lamented pitiably, pierced by those curved claws. But the hawk spoke mightily to the bird: Wretched one, why do you chatter? One much more powerful holds you now. You will go where I take you, even if you are a singer. I will make a meal of you or let you go. It depends on what I want. He is witless who struggles with the stronger. Such creatures lose, and suffer in the bargain. So spoke the swift-winged hawk, the fast-feathered bird. Perses: listen to justice and do not assist hubris.77

This comes in the middle of what seems like an explicitly ethico-political disquisition on the nature of justice and the need for upright kings. Presented as a fable for rulers, it seems to comment on the relations between power and legitimacy.

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But readers have been troubled by what seems an awkward, if not impossible, application of the fable’s most obvious meaning to its context. Since antiquity, it has been assumed that the nightingale, frequently a metaphor for human singers,78 stands for Hesiod, while the hawk is the kind of corrupt king whose crooked judgments he criticizes.79 But the moral of the fable seems to be that the weak should not stand up to the strong. This is exactly the opposite of the point Hesiod appears to want to make, which is that justice rather than power should be served. Aristarchus sought to emend the hawk’s speech away.80 Martin West concluded that Hesiod simply mishandled his material.81 One thing cannot be doubted: something sounds off here. Perhaps a different interpretation of the fable is possible. Usually when noise is associated with social disruption, it is attached to the disrupters. On a straightforward reading, the fact that the sound of shrieking is attached to the nightingale should mean that the nightingale is a force of social disruption—a conclusion suggesting that it stands not for the poet but for the crooked king, who only a few lines later is said to provoke loud noises through his corrupt judgments.82 The hawk could then be Zeus, admonishing the unjust king to stop making a ruckus and do the right thing, because in the end, Zeus will do what he wants with the king anyway. Support for such a reading is provided by the fact that the hawk’s expression of sovereignty resembles the freedom Hesiod normally attributes to gods.83 This would alleviate the awkward fit between the fable and its context: though the “might is right” message sits uncomfortably with Hesiod’s argument about kings, it goes easily with his notion of Zeus, in whom might and right are closely allied. The poet connects himself to the hawk and Zeus; the crooked king’s complaints are a negative reaction to a divinely sanctioned moral discourse that asserts the authority of the Olympian régime.84 In the lines immediately following the fable, Hesiod concludes with advice to his brother Perses: “given that Zeus will enforce justice, don’t get yourself on the wrong side.” Alas, many of the text’s details speak against this reading. No matter how difficult the consequences, an accumulation of verbal reminiscences seems to support equating the nightingale with Hesiod. The hawk, objecting to the nightingale’s noise, observes that it will do her no good, even though she is a singer (ἀοιδός, 208). The use of ἀοιδός may invoke a folk etymology linking it to the word for nightingale (ἀηδών).85 The adjective ποικιλόδειρος, “with a shimmering neck,” seems, as Deborah Steiner observes, to use a popular term for complex, carefully crafted artifacts to describe the part of the body most closely associated with the voice.86 The hawk’s curved talons (205) find an analogy in the crooked judgments (221) of corrupt kings.87 And, after all, it is the hawk who thinks the

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nightingale is noisy, a perspective that fits with its own sense of sovereignty and power; the corrupt kings Hesiod chastises might react to Hesiod’s song in the same way.88 We could conclude that the passage suffers from a resolution-based disjunction. At a broad, general level, the fable presents little difficulty if the auditory cues are taken into account and the nightingale is associated with crooked kings. But at a higher level of resolution, the details of the text suggest linking the nightingale with Hesiod and song, an interpretation that sits ill with its general context. One thing seems certain: the nightingale and its raucous and complex music have a lot in common with the text itself, whose figural dissonance frustrates whatever fantasies of interpretive mastery might be entertained by those who hold it in their claws. We could take the nightingale as representing the disruptive sound not of a poet speaking the truth to power but of a song which allows no easy discovery of its truth, which remains resolutely on the surface, stuttering and seeming to say nothing or everything all at once. And that raises the level of sheer sonority in the nightingale’s song. Birdsong, after all, does not actually say anything: it just sounds out. What the fable defends is the song’s ungraspability simply as meaning, its insistence on staying at the surface of sense. Indeed, the very fact that Hesiod calls his fable an αἶνος supports such a conclusion. The word has a curious set of etymological links. On one hand, as Gregory Nagy has indicated, its derivation from αἰνέω makes it authoritative speech.89 On the other hand, it is cognate with a set of words, like αἰνίγμα and αἰνιττέσθαι, which suggests that it has a riddling or even incomprehensible character.90 The ability to seem both authoritative and enigmatic might be characteristic of song as an aesthetic object. Writing of another discursive form known both for its enigmatical character and its ability to separate the unlearned from the learned, Paul de Man once described allegory as being about the ultimate illegibility of all figural instances.91 The same could be said of the Hesiodic riddle. If its social role depends on forcing readers to make choices about its meaning, its auditory sensuality refuses to be mastered by any one of these choices. On the island of Lesbos sometime before 590 BCE, the singer Alcaeus was driven by political considerations to the borders of Mytilene, dangerously close to the wilds and the “awesome noise of women”:92 ὁ τάλαις ἔγω ζώω μοῖραν ἔχων ἀγροϊωτίκαν ἰμέρρων ἀγόρας ἄκουσαι

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καρυ[ζο]μένας ὦγεσιλαΐδα καὶ β̣[ό]λ̣λ̣ας· ... οἴκημι κ[ά]κων ἔκτος ἔχων πόδας, ὄππᾷ Λ[εσβί]αδες κριννόμεναι φύαν πώλεντ’ ἐλκεσίπεπλοι, περὶ δὲ βρέμει ἄχω θεσπεσία γυναίκων ἴρα[ς ὀ]λολύγας ἐνιαυσίας. Wretched, I live with a savage lot, longing to hear the assembly being summoned by the herald—Oh Agesilaos—and the council . . . I live keeping my feet out of trouble, where the Lesbian women with trailing robes came to be judged for beauty, and the uncanny echo of their sacred yearly ololuge roars around me.93

After establishing that he no longer lives in the city, the speaker reports his longing to hear the sounds of civic politics. He contrasts these with the suburban feminine sounds his exile forces him to hear. Alcaeus describes his situation as an ordeal, and although the sounds of the women’s festival are the ones we would expect,94 his presence near them is not, and so we are licensed to take the auditory description as expressing the strong emotional response of the symposiast and city dweller in exile.95 That exile resonates in the sound of his words. The first and second stanzas of our passage evince assonance on ω and α, with an undercurrent of glottal stops sustaining it (ζώω μοῖραν ἔχων ἀγροϊωτίκαν / ἰμέρρων ἀγόρας ἄκουσαι / καρ̣υ̣[ζο]μένας ὦγεσιλαΐδα / . . . / οἴκημι κ[ά]κων ἔκτος ἔχων πόδας). In the first line, the two syllables of μοῖραν become the framework around which the modifying adjective ἀγροϊωτίκαν is built (οϊ is not the same sound as οῖ, but it is very close); this word’s consonantal cluster γρ is then separated and redeployed in the next line’s ἀγόρας (a figure that links the wilds and the city in an almost-explicit thematization of the disruptive autonomy of the song). The first two lines of the final stanza of the passage are peppered with πand λ-sounds (ὄππαι Λ[εσβί]αδες κριννόμεναι φύαν / πώλεντ’ ἐλκεσίπεπλοι), with the final syllable of the sequence bringing them together in a gesture of closure (ἐλκεσίπεπλοι). περὶ δὲ βρέμει, in turn, is structured around a crescendo along a single frontier of articulation—from the unvoiced labial π, the phrase proceeds to a voiced β before concluding with the nasal μ. As though to emphasize this progression the vocalic expression is limited to ε, ι, and their combination (ει). ἄχω θεσπεσία γυναίκων is framed by the sequence α(ι)-glottal stop-ω (ἄχω / -αίκων). The phonetic structure of the song draws attention to the sound of the poem at the same time as the words draw attention to “uncanny sounds.”

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Despite its setting, however, this is not a song from exile. It is a song of exile, composed and performed in an urban setting. That is, it invokes and imagines the sounds and the auditory condition of expulsion from within a space configured by belonging. To be exact, the song belongs to the setting of the symposium, a formalized drinking event attended primarily by politically sympatico men (and the slaves and entertainers of both sexes who attended on them).96 Songs performed in this context were self-conscious about the behavioral norms to which attendees should adhere. A symposium at which the drinkers were well behaved was seen as an embodiment of good order (εὐκοσμία),97 while disorder caused noise. So, for example, Anacreon deploys ethnic codes to draw a distinction between “Scythian” drinking, which is exceedingly noisy, and “good” drinking. His contrast is stark: “we” are to drink to the accompaniment of “beautiful hymns,” rather than care for a “Scythian cup” with a clamor and a din.98 In another Anacreontic passage, someone is told not to drink her drink all at once with “noisy Gastrodora,” or chatter like the wave of the sea.99 The name Gastrodora—“gift of the stomach”—induces laughter: who drinks as she does ends up belching (and probably making other sounds, too).100 Other texts create a link between the content of what is said or sung and the overall decorum of the symposium. “I do not love the one who drinks from a full cup and speaks of strife and tearful war,” writes Anacreon.101 The iconoclastic poet and philosopher Xenophanes instructs that at symposia the gods must be “hymned with euphemic tales and pure words.”102 Specifically, Xenophanes continues, at the symposium one should not speak of politics or sing epics. His refusal to countenance such content was widespread.103 Solon claims that leaders who cannot “hold down their uproar” or ornament their proceedings with silence produce nothing but pain for a city and its people.104 In Theognis, we find the observation that “bad people do not want to stay silent, but babble bad things”—he goes on to specify that “bad things” are political commentary, which is immoderate, and should be avoided. Praising or blaming the people (τὸν πλησίον), he says, is easy but unpolished.105 But noise flows, even through this rigorously policed enclosure of musical and behavioral order. Despite the interdictions, sympotic verse does speak of politics and strife, sometimes very directly and even aggressively, invoking the noise it claims to want to eliminate by accusing others of making it. Archilochus somewhere called somebody “chatty” (βαβάξ),106 an onomatopoeic word that describes speech as empty sound—and makes the noise it criticizes. Hipponax described one group of people as “chattering to each other” (ἀλλήλοισιν ἐμβαβάξαντες; βαβάξ, again, in a heavily alliterative line that juxtaposes liquids and the plosive β)107 and someone else as “hissing like a viper” (ὡς ἔχιδνα

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συρίζει);108 the implication would hardly have been complementary. Similarly, one group of symposiasts could accuse another group of not knowing how to drink well. Such an accusation was especially liable to be raised when a city’s elite was divided between strongly opposed and mutually incomprehensible parties in situations of civil strife.109 Here is Alcaeus again: λάβρως δὲ συν στεί[.]..[..]ε̣ι α̣ π̣.. πίμπλεισιν ἀκράτω [. . . ἐ]π’ ἀμέρᾳ καὶ νύκτι παφλάσδει . . . αχθεν, ἔνθα νόμος θάμ’ ἐν.[.].[.].νην. κῆνος δὲ τούτων οὐκ ἐπελάθετο ὤνηρ ἐπεὶ δὴ πρῶτον ὀνέτροπε, παίσαις γὰρ ὀννώρινε νύκτας, τὼ δὲ πίθω πατάγεσκ’ ὀ πύθμην. σὺ δὴ τεαύτας ἐκγεγόνων ἔχῃς τὰν δόξαν οἴαν ἄνδρες ἐλεύθεροι ἔσλων ἔοντες ἐκ τοκήων. . . . And violently with . . . they fill unmixed by (?) day . . .; and by night he (?) splutters . . . where law together in . . . but that man was not unmindful of these things when he first went off the rails. He stirred things up all night long and the bottom of his cup made a clamor. But may you have the kind of reputation that free men have who are from good parents; you were born from a mother of this nature . . .110

The passage associates overconsumption with the production of noise; it contrasts this with the reputation enjoyed by someone who is free and of good family. The narrative context is obscure, although I suspect that the invective should be associated with the troublesome political situation at Alcaeus’s Mytilene, where his party was in and out of power and Alcaeus himself in and out of exile.111 The language gleefully enacts the sounds it describes. Indeed, the contrast between the noisy and disruptive drinker and the well-born and well-behaved addressee of the final three lines has a sonic texture. “His” noise is embodied through extended play on ο and ω, punctuated by an extended alliteration on π (ὤνηρ ἐπεὶ δὴ πρῶτον ὀνέτροπε, / παίσαις γὰρ ὀννώρινε νύκτας, / τὼ δὲ πίθω πατάγεσκ’ ὀ πύθμην). Local repetitions give individual lines coherence and identity, as in the repetition of ον in πρῶτον ὀνέτροπε, picked up again in ὀννώρινε, which spins out the ν as well, or in the repetition of π—θ in πίθω . . . πύθμην. The tonic sounds—ο, ω, π—disappear almost completely from the next three lines, where Alcaeus asks “you” to be noble in demeanor and reputation. These lines are held together by extended assonantal emphases on ε and α (σὺ δὴ τεαύτας ἐκγεγόνων ἔχῃς / τὰν

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δόξαν οἴαν ἄνδρες ἐλεύθεροι / ἔσλων ἔοντες ἐκ τοκήων). Alcaeus’s song about the sound of drinking performs an uncanny disruption of its own normative categories, clattering away joyfully like some ill-bred, uncouth drunk.112 In or close to 468, Bacchylides referred to himself as “the honey-tongued nightingale of Ceos.”113 This was in a song composed to celebrate Hieron, the Syracusan tyrant who had just won the four-horse chariot race at Olympia, his greatest and last victory at a Panhellenic competition. If Heiron’s court was not the most fabulous Greek center of the century, it was certainly in the running.114 The Syracusan dynasty prevented encroachments on the Greek west from Carthage to the south and Etruria to the north, at a time when the rest of the Greek world was struggling to hold Persian expansion to the limits of Asia; indeed, Syracuse refused to take part in the war against Persia on the reasonable grounds that the size of its armament entitled it to military hegemony in the campaign, which the Spartans (among others) were unwilling to grant.115 As at the end of the fifth century, Philip of Macedon’s court was to become a haven for poets and intellectuals fleeing the uncertain and sometimes hostile environment of Athens, Heiron’s court served this purpose in the early part of the century. In the space of just over a decade, the palace was graced by the presence of the poets Simonides, Bacchylides (Simonides’s nephew), Pindar, and the Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, who visited Sicily in the 470s and produced at least one tragedy, the Aetnaean Women, as part of the celebrations marking Heiron’s founding of Aetna (Aeschylus also retired to Syracuse shortly after the succès de scandale of the Oresteia in 458).116 A major platform for the presence, competition, and remuneration of poets was Hieron’s series of Panhellenic victories in equestrian events. Pindar and Bacchylides wrote odes celebrating these victories in 476117 and 470;118 Bacchylides alone got the commission—the poem in which he compared himself to a nightingale—for 468.119 This brilliant assembly of poets at the court coincided with a highly significant and illuminating sequence of metapoetic bird images. The author of a scholion to Pindar’s second Olympian ode, written in 476 for Theron of Acragas (a Sicilian city closely affiliated with Hieron’s Syracuse) suspected that the crows in the following passage referred darkly to Simonides and Bacchylides, the latter of whom had composed odes for Hieron in the same year: σοφὸς ὁ πολλὰ εἰδὼς φυᾷ· μαθόντες δὲ λάβροι παγγλωσσίᾳ κόρακες ὣς ἄκραντα γαρυέτων Διὸς πρὸς ὄρνιχα θεῖον·

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Wise is he who knows many things by nature. Those who learn chatter pointlessly, like crows, boisterous with all tongues, against the divine bird of Zeus.120

The contrast associates the victor and what are supposed to be his inborn talents with the wise singer who also knows “by nature,” contrasting these with those who “merely learn”; the latter are then compared to garrulous crows and contrasted with the eagle of Zeus, who again stands both for the victor and for the singer. The scholia may be engaged in little more than garrulous gossip of their own when they transform this passage into an example of interpoetic sniping,121 but the image was used by Bacchylides as well, also in 476, in his epinician for Hieron: βαθὺν δ’ αἰθέρα ξουθαῖσι τάμνων ὑψοῦ πτερύγεσσι ταχείαις αἰετὸς εὐρυάνακτος ἄγγελος Ζηνὸς ἐρισφαράγου θαρσεῖ κρατερᾷ πίσυνος ἰσχύϊ, πτάσσοντι δ’ ὄρνιχες λιγύφθογγοι φόβῳ· The swift eagle, cutting the deep air with his blond wings, the messenger of wideruling Zeus, takes heart and trusts in his mighty strength, and the shrill-voiced birds cower in fear.122

Bacchylides goes on to connect himself to the eagle of Zeus: just as the eagle plies the infinite expanse, so too does the poet have infinite ways to sing Hieron’s excellence (27–30). This associates both victor and singer with the eagle, denigrating “the rest” (whoever they are) as “shrill-voiced birds”; they are “shrill” exactly to the degree that they are not the embodiments of excellence Bacchylides means to celebrate. Both poets, in other words, associate sound with something less than ideally grand, something lacking in natural knowledge and the blessings of Zeus. The poems for Hieron are notoriously difficult to interpret, not least because of what many critics have identified as a pervasive pessimism.123 As early as 476 Pindar felt the need to insist that Hieron’s win in the single-horse race was not the greatest victory for which Hieron could have hoped.124 Then he enjoined Hieron not to long for anything more125 —the good that comes on any given day is the greatest a mortal can expect.126 This exquisitely melancholy conclusion is probably not the reflection of a gloomy court or an attempt to teach the king a lesson in ethics: it is, rather, a carefully staged celebration of victory in a

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context where the metaphysical boundaries between human and divine, individual and community, needed to be carefully policed.127 The song’s mythical exemplum makes the same point by contrasting the way Tantalus overreached his mortal station with the way Pelops successfully negotiated his. So, too, does the ode’s opening, declaring water to be best, gold next, and victory at Olympia only third.128 Nonetheless, something is thrillingly risky about all this: Pindar was rarely as explicit with other victors as he is with Hieron about the limits of human success. Pythian 1, performed for Hieron in 470, concludes with a long string of instructions for the victorious tyrant, warning against unjust gain and the envy of his fellow citizens;129 Pythian 2, with the advice that the god sometimes gives us great good fortune and sometimes takes it away;130 Pythian 3, with the reflection that happiness does not come for long but changes like the changing winds.131 Although his poems for Hieron have also been felt to be pessimistic,132 Bacchylides was more circumspect. He was also the only poet to receive the commission for Hieron’s victory in 468.133 Still, that song finds him exploring the tyrant’s victories in surprisingly dark tones.134 The poem marks Hieron’s victory at Olympia with a shout from the crowd of onlookers as his horse Pherenicus wins the race.135 These shouts find uneasy echoes in what follows. The song’s mythical narrative, meant to comment obliquely on the victor, tells of the death of Croesus of Lydia. Croesus lost Sardis to the Medes, and when his defeat was clear, he set himself and his wife and daughter upon a funeral pyre, choosing to die rather than see his city taken. At this moment, the shouts marking Hieron’s victory are echoed by the sounds of his wife and his “beautiful-haired daughters, weeping without cease”:136 τὸσ’ εἶπε, καὶ ἁβ[ρο]βάταν κ[έλε]υσεν ἅπτειν ξύλινον δόμον. ἔκ̣[λα]γον δὲ παρθένοι, φίλας τ’ ἀνὰ ματρὶ χεῖρας ἔβαλλον· ὁ γὰρ προφανὴς θνατοῖσιν ἔχθιστος φόνων· ἀλλ’ ἐπεὶ δεινο[ῦ π]υρὸς λαμπρὸν διάι[σσεν μέ]ν̣ο̣ς, Ζεὺς ἐπιστάσας [μελαγκευ]θὲς νέφος σβέννυεν ξανθὰ[ν φλόγα.] . . . So he spoke, and commanded the eastern attendant to light the wooden structure. The maidens cried out, and they threw their hands around their mother—for the death that we see coming is the most hateful of all. But when the bright might of terrible fire

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began to dart through the pyre, Zeus set a black cloud over it and quenched the blond flame.137

The maidens cry out (ἔκλαγον). This is both emotionally powerful and ritually inappropriate—sacrifices were to be accompanied by silence, and lamentation was certainly not to be associated with Apollo, the nominal patron of this immolation.138 The suggestion of sacrifice is not frivolous: Bacchylides’s description of the fire spreading through the kindled wood in line 54 recalls earlier scenes of sacrificial celebration marking Heiron’s victory, where there flashed not fire but gold.139 Transforming gold into fire and shouting into lamentation, Bacchylides has fashioned his portrait of Croesus’s would-be suicide as a dark inversion of the victory at Olympia. The myth means to compare Croesus’s munificence with that of Hieron. Just as Croesus broke records with his gifts to the oracle at Delphi, so has no Greek been as generous as the Syracusan tyrant.140 In the myth, Apollo’s quenching of the funeral pyre answers Croesus’s question, “Where is the Grace of the gods?” Pherenicus’s victory at Olympia answers the same question for Hieron. But Croesus asked his question at the moment of death, after a catastrophic military defeat. Why did Hieron ask his? After commenting on the mortality of men (Apollo once told Admetus that mortals had to accept the possibility of dying tomorrow or living another fifty years),141 Bacchylides goes on to reflect that while men die, it is the nature of good actions, when combined with the Muse, to survive after the body fails.142 He returns to the visual register to articulate this theme: the light of virtue, like the gold of the victor’s offerings, shines with the Muse’s assistance. This starts to close the ring that the whole poem instantiates; the poem began with the Muse Kleio and with the shining of altars and gifts. But the final stanza turns Bacchylides avian: . . . πράξα[ντι] δ’ εὖ οὐ φέρει κόσμ[ον σι]ωπά· σὺν δ’ ἀλαθ[είᾳ] κ̣αλῶν καὶ μελιγλώσσου τις ὑμνήσει χάριν Κηΐας ἀηδόνος. For a man who does well the ornament is not silence—but with the truth of good deeds someone will sing the grace of the honey-tongued Cean nightingale.143

The comparison is not, on the face of it, particularly surprising.144 Birdsong is tonal and complex: so is music. Birdsong causes delight: so does music. But in antiquity there were other associations, and Bacchylides’s self-description has a

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melancholic undercurrent that goes well with the rest of the song. Nightingales are not garrulous crows, but they are also not eagles soaring majestically in the firmament. They are musical, but they are also strange, sad, precarious creatures. The interspecies image presented song as something strange and indigestible, associating it with time, exile, mortality, and imperfection. Frequently birdsong signaled time in the form of seasonal change, as in Alcaeus, who “heard the blooming spring approaching.”145 Birdsong was a common seasonal sound mark. In Hesiod’s Works and Days the plowing season was indicated, in part, by the cry of the crane (449), early spring resounded with the “dawn-groaning” swallow,146 and late spring was marked by the cuckoo, a pleasurable sound because it signaled the end of winter.147 It was in the context of a broad meditation on seasonality, temporality, and human ethics that Hesiod linked auditory attention to practical virtue: τάων εὐδαίμων τε καὶ ὄλβιος ὃς τάδε πάντα εἰδὼς ἐργάζηται ἀναίτιος ἀθανάτοισιν, ὄρνιθας κρίνων καὶ ὑπερβασίας ἀλεείνων. He is happy who knows all these things and works blameless in the eyes of the gods, discriminating between birds and avoiding overstep.148

But Hesiod was hardly blissed out on the simple joys of the farmer’s life. In fact, he saw human work as a punishment for Prometheus’s gift of fire, a resource Zeus meant to keep from us.149 For Hesiod, Prometheus allegorized our status as creatures who take what is not given to us; we are punished for this by having to take what is not given to us, that is, by having to work. The song of birds tells us that life is always already hidden and begrudged.150 Similarly, the elegaics of Theognis connected birdsong to the pathos of political strife: Ὄρνιθος φωνήν, Πολυπαΐδη, ὀξὺ βοώσης ἤκουσ’, ἥτε βροτοῖσ’ ἄγγελος ἦλθ’ ἀρότου ὡραίου· καί μοι κραδίην ἐπάταξε μέλαιναν, ὅττι μοι εὐανθεῖς ἄλλοι ἔχουσιν ἀγρούς, οὐδέ μοι ἡμίονοι κυφὸν ἕλκουσιν ἄροτρον τῆς ἄλλης † μνηστῆς † εἵνεκα ναυτιλίης. Oh Polypaides: I hear the voice of the shrilly shouting bird who comes to mortals as herald of the season of the plough. And it strikes a blow at my black heart that others hold my flowering fields and that my mules pull no plough [. . .] because of seafaring.151

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The final lines are textually problematic: reference to seafaring points to travel and probably exile, while some commentators have thought of the “political shipwreck” that plays a role in Alcaeus’s stasis poetry.152 The poem, in other words, uses the melancholic sound of birds to link exile and time.153 Comparable associations are often implicit in descriptions of the song of swans. The brief Homeric Hymn XXI (to Apollo) draws an explicit link between the singing of the swan and that of the singer: Φοῖβε σὲ μὲν καὶ κύκνος ὑπὸ πτερύγων λίγ’ ἀείδει ὄχθῃ ἐπιθρώσκων ποταμὸν πάρα δινήεντα Πηνειόν· σὲ δ’ ἀοιδὸς ἔχων φόρμιγγα λίγειαν ἡδυεπὴς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδει. Phoebus, even the swan sings of you, in a shrill voice to the accompaniment of its wings, leaping onto the bank by the eddying river Peneius; and the sweet-tongued minstrel always sings of you first and last as he holds his shrill lyre.154

Ancient scholars debated who first associated the swan with song. Aristarchus thought it was Terpander;155 Euphronius thought it was Ion; another, unnamed commentator ascribed the innovation to Alcman.156 Timothy Power, observing that the link is at least Mycenaean in origin, suggests that it was a traditional element in the introductory song or prooimion (which is what the Homeric hymns themselves seem to have been).157 In the proomion the poet invokes the divine through prayer and song, before moving on—with, presumably, the assistive presence of the invoked god or gods—to the main part of the performance. If Power is right, it is at least intriguing that bird song should appear in the part of the musical performance that establishes contact with the divine. This is a context where the singer’s voice is still predominantly human: the prooimion invokes the god as not yet present. In this context, at least, the use of the swan’s voice as a metaphor for poetic song emphasizes the not- or not-yet-fully-inspired character of musical beginning. At that risky moment when a singer’s mouth opens for the first time, the voice is unprotected by the ideologeme of divine tutelage: it stands insecure, in a state of disconnection. Similar overtones can just be heard when Alcman’s chorus of young women compares one among their number to a swan:158 ἁ δὲ τᾶν Σηρηνίδων ἀοιδοτέρα μ[ὲν οὐχί, σιαὶ γάρ, ἀντ[ὶ δ’ ἕ̣ν̣δ̣εκ̣ ̣α̣

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παίδων δεκ̣[ὰς ἁ δ’ ἀείδ]ει· φθέγγεται δ’[ἄρ’] ὥ[τ’ ἐπὶ] Ξάνθω ῥοαῖσι ̣ κύκνος. . . . She is [not] more musical than the Sirens—for they are gods—but [she sings] as well as eleven girls, [like] a swan on the waters of Xanthus.159

Young women undergoing an initiation probably performed the song from which this passage is drawn. Undergoing an initiation means not fully initiated; the chorus thus occupied a liminal position, like the singer of a prooimion. It was at the verge of social fusion but was not yet fully embedded. That is why they are not like the Sirens, who according to Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi stand for the full immersion of audience and performer in the song.160 It is a curious fact about Sirens that in Greek song the immersion they offer is never realized. Indeed, the Odyssey actively avoids it: Odysseus must resist the Sirens’ song, hear it but pass by in a state of artistically sanctioned distraction. In comparing themselves to swans and refusing the analogy with Sirens, Alcman’s chorus accomplishes a similar task. Earlier, they described their singing as “pointless screeching,” likening themselves to an owl.161 Owls figure in Greek verse exclusively as loud, inauspicious, even foolish birds.162 The swan simile has the same implications: it denigrates human singing. Unlike that of the Sirens,163 the chorus’s voice is contaminated with worldliness, not unadulterated euphony but a raucous, noisy beauty, the only kind possible for mortals.164 Nightingales had similar implications, and they were strongly present when Bacchylides called himself the “nightingale of Ceos.” We have seen Hesiod put one in the talons of a hawk. Stesichorus was closely associated with them,165 and not without reason: his music pursued previously unknown levels of rhythmic complexity, his narratives were dark, and his soundscapes were vivid.166 Nightingales are also birds of lament. In the Odyssey, Penelope expresses her grief by comparing herself to the nightingale, the “daughter of Pandareus,” who killed her son, Itylos, and now sits in the branches lamenting his death.167 In later sources, the father’s name is Pandion: his two daughters are Procne and Philomela. Procne married Tereus (in the Odyssey he is called Zethus) and bore him a son, Itys (Itylos in the Odyssey). Tereus raped Philomela and cut out her tongue to prevent her from revealing the crime, so Philomela wove the story into a robe. Procne took revenge by killing Itys. Transformed into a nightingale, she sings an endless and endlessly varied lament for her murdered son.168 The myth makes the nightingale song into a weird echo of human speech: she

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speaks, and yet she does not, endlessly repeating a single syllable in ever-varying melodic variations. Shortly after Bacchylides called himself a nightingale, Aeschylus had a chorus of Egyptian women, running to Greece from unwanted suitors, compare their outlandish speech to the nightingale’s song: εἰ δὲ κυρεῖ τις πέλας οἰωνοπόλων ἔγγαιος οἶκτον ἀίων, δοξάσει τιν’ ἀκούειν ὄπα τᾶς Τηρεΐας †μήτιδος† οἰκτρᾶς ἀλόχου, κιρκηλάτου γ’ ἀηδόνος, ἅ τ’ ἀπὸ χώρων ποταμῶν τ’ ἐργομένα πενθεῖ μὲν οἶκτον ἠθέων, ξυντίθησι δὲ παιδὸς μόρον, ὡς αὐτοφόνως ὤλετο πρὸς χειρὸς ἕθεν δυσμάτορος κότου τυχών· τὼς καὶ ἐγὼ φιλόδυρτος Ἰαονίοισι νομοῖσι δάπτω τὰν ἁπαλὰν Νειλοθερῆ παρειὰν ἀπειρόδακρύν τε καρδίαν, γοεδνὰ δ’ ἀνθεμίζομαι δειμαίνουσα, φίλος τᾶσδε φυγᾶς Ἀερίας ἀπὸ γᾶς εἴ τις ἐστὶ κηδεμών. And if a native who knows about birds is nearby and hears our pitiable sound, he will think he hears the voice of the lamentable wife of Tereus, the hawk-chased nightingale, who, driven from her native home, pitifully laments the places she is used to and composes songs about the fate of her child, how he died killed by her own hand, colliding with the wrath of his ill-fated mother. So am I a lover of lamentation in Ionian melodies; I tear at my tender Nile-burnt cheeks and my ever-crying heart, and I bloom with groans in fear, a friend of flight from Aerian earth hoping for some guardian in this place.169

Their invocation of the bird is part of a vacillation between their genealogical contacts with Argos (they are descendants of Epaphos, the son of Io by Zeus and thus Greek) and their radical otherness (they are black-skinned,170 and they speak a “foreign tongue”).171 Their status as genealogically but not apparently Greek puts them both inside and outside the ethnic system, and leads to a metamusical comparison: although they sing an Ionian melody, their inflections mark their foreignness. Their allusion to the Hesiodic image of the hawk chasing the

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nightingale shows them able to deploy Greek cultural material. And yet they are exiles driven from their native groves (63–64, 69–76). Here, too, in other words, the nightingale gives voice to an outlandish song. The presence of the daughters of Danaus on Argive soil marks what could be called a breakdown in the ethnic imagination, and their sound—at once a recognizable form of lamentation and an indication that their voice comes across as unlanguaged—embodies this fact.172 Describing himself by analogy with this singularly melancholy and uncanny bird, Bacchylides concludes the poem with the same gesture that informed his myth: both are dark, even mournful, inversions of the victory celebration that was the poem’s occasion. To be sure, calling to mind a bird who emblematizes musical artfulness and complexity but is also associated with lament puts the victory in its proper place—no hubris here. But in nudging epinician toward threnody, Bacchylides also forces the listener to lend a more attentive ear to his song as he chatters at the border between meaning and sensation. The Athenian comic poet Aristophanes associated democratic politics with uproarious noise. A character in the Birds, for example, compared Athenians unfavorably to cicadas; the latter sing for one or two months, but Athenians sing from the courts their whole life long.173 Just under halfway through the Acharnians, Aristophanes offers a mock-Herodotean tale of the origins of the Peloponnesian War in which the general Pericles is described as a kind of thundering Zeus;174 the consequence of his losing his favorite prostitute is the din of shields.175 Ruminating on Sparta’s response to Athens’s international policies, the passage continues: καὶ κάρτα μέντἂν εὐθέως καθείλκετε τριακοσίας ναῦς, ἦν δ’ ἂν ἡ πόλις πλέα θορύβου στρατιωτῶν, περὶ τριηράρχου βοῆς, μισθοῦ διδομένου, παλλαδίων χρυσουμένων, στοᾶς στεναχούσης, σιτίων μετρουμένων, ἀσκῶν, τροπωτήρων, κάδους ὠνουμένων, σκορόδων, ἐλαῶν, κρομμύων ἐν δικτύοις, στεφάνων, τριχίδων, αὐλητρίδων, ὑπωπίων· τὸ νεώριον δ’ αὖ κωπέων πλατουμένων, τύλων ψοφούντων, θαλαμιῶν τροπουμένων, αὐλῶν, κελευστῶν, νιγλάρων, συριγμάτων. [If they had provoked you as you provoked them] You would have launched 300 ships without hesitation, and the city would be full of the uproar of soldiers, of shouting about the trierarchy, of payment being given, of the palladium being gilded, of the porticoes groaning, of grain being measured, of skins, leather and jars being bought, of

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garlic, olives and onions in nets, of garlands, anchovies, aulos-girls and black eyes. And the dockyard would be full of oars being planed, of leather resounding, of oar holes being bored, of auloi, commanders, whistles and hisses.176

Military preparations lead to a rising density of sounds: shouting soldiers and sailors, the groaning of a market, the sounds of ships being prepared in the dockyard, the aulos played onboard a ship to coordinate rowing, commands shouted to a ship’s crew, and whistles and hisses in the heat of war. Although presented as counterfactual history, the passage probably describes what Athens did sound like during the early phases of the Peloponnesian War. In using auditory cues to describe a democratic city, Aristophanes was drawing from a popular stream of imagery. Many other writers characterized the mass of men, the demos, as cacophonous.177 Aeschylus’s characters worried about its sounds.178 For Plato a century later, noisy crowds were a sign of the people’s lack of self-control.179 The similarity to Aristophanes, however, is only superficial. Aeschylus’s characters, like Plato, can be suspected of antidemocratic sentiment, but the sound of populist politics in Aristophanes is a reflex of his comedies’ drive to become works of art. His democratic politicians are artists, and his artists are as noisy as the politicians.180 Consider his portrayal of democratic leaders. In Wasps, he offers a description of the general Cleon, an important populist politician in the early years of Athens’s war with Sparta. Cleon screeches at the assembly like a scalded pig;181 his many monstrous traits include “the ruinous voice of a mountain torrent.”182 When a mock trial is staged between two dogs disguised as Cleon and Labes, the Cleon dog is described as “good at barking” (ἀγαθὸς γ’ ὑλακτεῖν)—and barks on cue to prove it (αὖ αὖ).183 A similar auditory physiognomy is used in Knights, where Aristophanes has Athens governed by Paphlagon, a leather worker turned politician who has cornered the attention of a personified Demos. Paphlagon is corrupt, rapacious, sycophantic, and committed to war for reasons that show no indication of anything other than self-interest.184 Seeing in the narrative of the Knights numerous parallels with Hesiod’s Theogony, A. M. Bowie sees Paphlagon as a comic version of Typhoeus,185 and like Typhoeus, Paphlagon is full of noise. He farts and snores,186 and carries a seal on which is inscribed a screeching seagull hunting for tunny fish.187 Everywhere in this play, politics—at least the kind of politics practiced by people like Paphlagon—involves the production of loud and unpleasant sound. When Demos’s two slaves recruit a sausage seller to topple Paphlagon from power, they observe that he has many advantages for a career in democratic politics, including a “polluted” or “disgusting” voice.188

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It is probably not incorrect to hear an implicit association between vocal quality and class;189 the sausage seller’s voice is “disgusting” just because he is a sausage seller.190 The same Cleon who appeared in Wasps lurks behind all this: the author of the Constitution of Athens claims that Cleon, the first to “act the demagogue,” was also the first to shout in the assembly.191 Although this may be influenced by Aristophanes, it illustrates that for at least one fourth-century reader the figure of Cleon combined demagoguery and a specific vocal style. All this looks pretty straightforward: Aristophanes criticizes the democracy and its leaders by calling them noisy. But things are more complicated. To start with, Paphlagon describes his sound as good: it is a technique that nourishes the city.192 In the contest of oracles toward the play’s end, Paphlagon reminds Demos that he protects the city like a barking guard dog, linking this to Demos’s enrichment.193 Those who hate him, on the other hand, are noisy crows.194 In fact, Paphlagon has every right to say these things: he is an elected strategos with a democratic mandate and, therefore, has good reasons to put himself on the side of order against the noisiness of his detractors. In the thematic system of Aristophanes’s play, in other words, his noise is the thunder of Zeus and the cacophony of Typhoeus, all at once. One way to make sense of this ambivalence is to attend to the impact of the art of rhetoric on late-fifth-century democratic politics. Three years before the composition of the Knights the sophist and rhetorician Gorgias had come to Athens on an embassy from Leontini.195 His appearance in Athens has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in the history of rhetoric.196 Gorgias had students among the politically active classes at Athens, and he may well have had them early—part of the product he was selling was the ability to speak well on any topic, a skill with immediate and clear applications within polis life. Among the things that made Gorgias so quickly notorious was a style that invited comparisons to poetry for its attention to balanced clauses, symmetrical word order, and sound effects. The “Gorgianic figures,” as they have come to be called, quickly made their way into the standard toolbox of professional rhetors. I think it is an intriguing possibility that Aristophanes’s characterization of Paphlagon as a noisy speaker was responding to an increased attention to sound in post-Gorgianic oratory. A politician who used the assembly as heavily as Cleon apparently did may well have altered his style to be more sonorous once he heard Gorgias.197 Aristophanes’s diagnosis of the noisiness of populist politicians, in other words, may not be simply a conservative attack on democratic politics, but an acknowledgment of the auditory investments of rhetorical craft. Cleon and Paphlagon are noisy not because they are unscrupulous leaders of the demos but because they are artists.198

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This becomes explicit in a scene in Knights during which the sausage seller and Paphlagon engage in a shouting contest: Πα. ὦ πόλις καὶ δῆμ’ ὑφ’ οἵων θηρίων γαστρίζομαι. Δη. καὶ κέκραγας, ὥσπερ ἀεὶ τὴν πόλιν καταστρέφει; Πα. ἀλλ’ ἐγώ σε τῇ βοῇ ταύτῃ γε πρῶτα τρέψομαι. Χο. ἀλλ’ ἐὰν μέντοι νικᾷς τῇ βοῇ, τήνελλος εἶ· ... Αλ. τριπλάσιον κεκράξομαί σου. Πα. καταβοήσομαι βοῶν σε. Αλ. κατακεκράξομαί σε κράζων. Paphlagon: Oh city and people, I am gut-punched by terrible beasts! Sausage-Seller: Are you bawling as you always do to overturn the city? Paph.: First I will turn you back with this shout of mine. Chorus: If you win with your shout, you’ll get to cry out victory! ... S.S.: I’ll bawl three times as loud as you. Paph.: I’ll shout you down shouting. S.S.: And I’ll bawl you out with my bawling.199

The highly repetitive final two lines, in which the combatants pile up cognate verbs and participles, recall Gorgianic style. The chorus’s comment (“if you win with your shout, you’ll get to cry out victory”) emphasizes the role of artistry in the scene. The scholia offer two different but related explanations of the word τήνελλος, which I have translated “cry out victory.” Either it designates the harmony of the lyre (ἁρμονία λύρας), in which case the chorus is saying that whoever wins the contest in shouting will be “most musical” (ἐὰν τοίνυν ὑπερακοντίσῃς αὐτόν, μουσικώτατος εἶ); or it is the sound of victory strumming on the lyre (κρούματιον ἐπινίκιον).200 Both glosses contain truth. The cry τήνελλα καλλίνικε was a victory cry, traditionally explained as invented by Archilochus on an occasion when he did not have an instrument: the word τήνελλα was meant to imitate the sound of the lyre.201 τήνελλος is, therefore, correctly glossed as a victory strum (the lexicographers confirm this gloss).202 But it is also true that, assuming the strings are not muted when the instrument is strummed, such a strum would voice the entire tuning of the lyre simultaneously rather than in sequence—a sound that would be full of non-consonant intervals. The chorus thus indicates the condition of being victorious via an imitation of dissonant musical artistry. Such a view of the relationship between democratic politics, sound, and art helps make sense of Aristophanes’s own uneasy position between the noise of

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power and the noise of critique. At once a sophisticated form of abuse and a partisan form of advocacy for peace and the polis, Aristophanic comedy might be said to both thunder in the name of Olympian order and to caw like crows at its opponents. This possibility is developed in the Knights’ parabasis, the first section of which offers a justification of Aristophanes’s having produced his first plays pseudonymously; the Athenian audience, he claims, is fickle and quickly abandons authors it had once loved (518). So, for example, the poet Magnes, who had “sent forth all the voices for you,” lost the audience’s favor in his old age (525); Cratinus, too, was once like a rushing river but now sings out of tune and is neglected by his audience (526–36). Aristophanes continues: εἶτα Κρατίνου μεμνημένος, ὃς πολλῷ ῥεύσας ποτ’ ἐπαίνῳ διὰ τῶν ἀφελῶν πεδίων ἔρρει, καὶ τῆς στάσεως παρασύρων ἐφόρει τὰς δρῦς καὶ τὰς πλατάνους καὶ τοὺς ἐχθροὺς προθελύμνους· ᾆσαι δ’ οὐκ ἦν ἐν συμποσίῳ πλὴν “Δωροῖ συκοπέδιλε,” καὶ “τέκτονες εὐπαλάμων ὕμνων·” οὕτως ἤνθησεν ἐκεῖνος. νυνὶ δ’ ὑμεῖς αὐτὸν ὁρῶντες παραληροῦντ’ οὐκ ἐλεεῖτε, ἐκπιπτουσῶν τῶν ἠλέκτρων καὶ τοῦ τόνου οὐκέτ’ ἐνόντος τῶν θ’ ἁρμονιῶν διαχασκουσῶν· ἀλλὰ γέρων ὢν περιέρρει, ὥσπερ Κοννᾶς, στέφανον μὲν ἔχων αὖον δίψῃ δ’ ἀπολωλώς, ὃν χρῆν διὰ τὰς προτέρας νίκας πίνειν ἐν τῷ πρυτανείῳ, καὶ μὴ ληρεῖν ἀλλὰ θεᾶσθαι λιπαρὸν παρὰ τῷ Διονύσῳ. Think of Cratinus, who used to flow with much praise over the smooth plains. In the contest he tore up oaks and plane trees and his enemies and carried them off. There was nothing to sing at symposia except “Duro, falsely shod,” and “builders of skillful hymns,” so did he bloom. But now when you see him talking nonsense you show no mercy, though all the pegs of his lyre have fallen out and there is no more tension in his strings, and his tunings gape. He’s an old man, he flows all over the place like Konnas, holding a dried-up garland and dying of thirst. Because of his earlier victories he should be drinking in the prytaneion, not wasting breath in the show but watching it, all glistening and fat next to the altar of Dionysus.203

It is said that, in response to this not especially complementary description, the aged Cratinus wrote and produced Wineflask in the next year, beating Aristophanes’s own Clouds.204 But Cratinus’s actual poetic capabilities are not really the center of Aristophanes’s attention. Rather, he is schematizing the history of Attic comedy as a generational transition, with the “older” poets falling on hard times and being replaced by the “new” Aristophanes. When Cratinus is compared to a rushing torrent carrying everything before it, we are almost certainly meant to think of the battle of Achilles and Scamander, with Cratinus filling the role of the

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river.205 One reason to suspect that auditory thinking lies behind the figure is the fact that Cratinus’s dotage is described as a kind of detuning; all the strings have fallen from his lyre, and his voice shakes with old age. If the older poet is being compared to a river on auditory grounds, then he bears a surprising resemblance to Paphlagon. The surface difference is that Paphlagon is a corrupt demagogue whose replacement is configured as the city’s most pressing priority, while Cratinus’s neglect is represented as a failing of the people. But this difference is perhaps less extreme than appears at first: it is made clear in the course of the Knights that Demos only acts dumb, allowing his “leaders” to steal from him with the intention of recovering everything he is owed in a final accounting.206 From this perspective, the transition of power from Paphlagon to the sausage seller and the shift in dramatic success from Cratinus to Aristophanes both seem like the consequences of a dangerous and perhaps self-interested changeability in the democratic audience. At the very least we may conclude that Aristophanes’s selfcontextualization at the beginning of the parabasis shapes his own career and the history of his genre in the terms of the narrative of the play. The appearance of an auditory description of Cratinus linking him to Paphlagon puts the playwright in the uneasy position of being both new orthodoxy and upstart critique, both the thunder of Zeus and the screeching of minor birds, democratic rabble-monger and elite despiser of the mass all at once. Indeed, Aristophanes himself was an enthusiastic exploiter of non-human noises. Consider the first parodos of the Frogs, in which a chorus of frogs initiates a song at whose musical core are the onomatopoeic syllables βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ. Rhythmically, the cry states the basic structures of the rest of the song, especially the iambic metron of κοὰξ κοάξ but also in the resolved cretic of βρεκεκεκέξ.207 It is also tightly integrated into the narrative, with Dionysus first trying to stop it and eventually starting to sing it himself: Dionysus and the chorus debate the merits of the cry and then compete in their ability to use it. βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ is by no means meaningless (no nonsense ever is). But it derives much of its significance from the fact that it comes from the outside of human language: it paradoxically embodies both a pure music and a pure sound or noise. Dionysus’ responses to the frogs emphasize this. Promised a beautiful melody by Charon (205–06), he is disappointed to hear “nothing but κοάξ” (227). He finds their croaking tedious and troublesome and urges them to stop (240–41), tells them, in effect, to go to hell (226), explains almost as soon as he hears it that the κοάξ is causing him pain (221), and equates it with the sounds of farting (236–39). And yet the frogs utter what they call a “shout of hymns” (212), a “well-uttered cry,” (213); they are cultivated by the Muses,

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Pan, and Apollo because they nourish in their marsh the reed used to make the aulos (229–34). Another example of Aristophanes’ ability to amplify and channel noise can be found at the beginning of Thesmophoriazeusae. The play begins with a portrait of Agathon’s music that fits with Aristophanic characterizations of the “new” (even as, in Thesmophoriazeusae itself, it is reconfigured along the axis of gender representations, which is the comedy’s primary thematic concern). Agathon’s music, which is so gentle and feminine that it gives Mnesilochus ticklings of pleasure (130–33), is played on an “Asian lyre” (which by 411 was firmly associated with the Phrygian mode and with “effeminate” music)208 and is tonally sophisticated. Recalling other comedic descriptions of fifth-century art music,209 Aristophanes refers to “ant wanderings” (μύρμικος ἀτραπούς) and “warbling” (100). Agathon’s compositional process requires silence—it is not a noisy, bombastic process. But it is interrupted by the expostulations of Mnesilochus, who, in his good-natured stupidity, does not get what is going on: ΘΕΡΑΠΩΝ. εὔφημος πᾶς ἔστω λαός, στόμα συγκλῄσας· ἐπιδημεῖ γὰρ θίασος Μουσῶν ἔνδον μελάθρων τῶν δεσποσύνων μελοποιῶν. ἐχέτω δὲ πνοὰς νήνεμος αἰθήρ, κῦμά τε πόντου μὴ κελαδείτω γλαυκόν· ΜΝΗΣΙΛΟΧΟΣ. βομβάξ. ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΗΣ. σίγα. Μν. τί λέγει; Θε. πτηνῶν τε γένη κατακοιμάσθω, θηρῶν τ’ ἀγρίων πόδες ὑλοδρόμων μὴ λυέσθων. Μν. βομβαλοβομβάξ. Θε. μέλλει γὰρ ὁ καλλιεπὴς Ἀγάθων πρόμος ἡμέτερος—Μν. μῶν βινεῖσθαι; Θε. τίς ὁ φωνήσας; Μν. νήνεμος αἰθήρ. Servant: Let the whole host be silent, closing their mouth: for the thiasus of the Muses is in the music-making master’s house. Let the windless air hold its breath! Let the barren wave of the sea not make a sound. Mnesilochus: Bombax. Euripides: Silence! Mn: What is he talking about? Serv: And let the race of winged things alight, and the feet of wild running beasts not be released . . . Mn: Bombalobombax! Serv: For our leader Agathon, he of the beautiful words, intends—

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Mn: To get fucked? Serv: Who speaks? Mn: The windless air.210

Mnesilochus is imitating thunder (and maybe also farting), and in doing so he interrupts Agathon’s compositional process. Mnesilochus is also the figure of comedy in the play, cross-dressing and carrying quite a lot of the metatheatrical burden as the plot develops. To have him noisily interrupting the serious work of tragedy with Bombalobombax speaks volumes about the role of the comic in the festival of Dionysus and, more specifically, about Aristophanes’ own art, which represents, if I can put it this way, a kind of studied nonsense, a theatrically controlled noise. That is, both Aristophanes and his demagogic targets evince the same uneasy ability to seem both the safeguards of civic order and a dangerous, destabilizing force. Noise occurs on both sides of this “opposition”—which is not an opposition at all, or a commentary, or a reflection on politics, but part of a dissonant dislodging of music and poetry from their social context. The noise of the demos is represented in the play as part of the same resonant circuitry as Aristophanes’s own work: it is the auditory penumbra, the dissonant grain, of aesthetic form.

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The fourth book of the Odyssey finds Menelaus reminiscing about a wooden horse and an acoustic event that nearly killed the men concealed inside it. When the horse was brought within the walls of the Trojan citadel, he says, Helen suspected that armed Greeks were hidden inside. She tested her theory by walking around the device and speaking in the voices of all the Greek generals’ wives. Menelaus’s description of Helen’s remarkable vocal abilities invites a curious set of comparisons. On one hand, her virtuosity recalls the mastery of melody and dialect attributed to the chorus of maidens on the island of Delos in the Homeric hymn to Apollo; these maidens can imitate the many dialects of Greek with such skill that “each man thinks he himself is talking” when they sing.1 But even as Helen evokes poetry’s capacity to create PanHellenic unities of speech, she also recalls the chaotic forces that threaten it, like Theogony’s noisy Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and extraordinary vocal polyphony—or, indeed, like the Odyssey’s own Polyphemus, “he of many voices,” who threatens Odysseus and his crew with destruction. These less optimistic affiliations are motivated: in Menelaus’s tale, Helen was an important adversary during the war. But that is Menelaus’s take; an epic singer might have had another view. Like the bard, Helen shows an uncanny combination of high artfulness and disconcerting, even oppositional noisiness. In addition to participating in the characteristically dissonant auditory poetics of Greek song, Menelaus’s story contains another element that is widespread in the 58

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Greek auditory imagination: a recognition of sound’s ability to link separate spaces and through this to facilitate the contagion of affect. In Menelaus’s tale, Helen (outside the wooden horse) and the Achaeans (inside it) are in two different spaces, separated by a barrier that blocks sight but allows the transmission of sound. Her vocal imitations seek to draw forth an answering shout from within the wooden horse, an answer that would betray the device. She nearly succeeds: the longing for the women whose voices the concealed soldiers think they hear is so great that in one case a hero’s voice must be forcefully suppressed.2 In a movement frequent in Greek art and fundamental to auditory theory, sound begets sound, moving along what could be called epidemiological channels or resonance circuits. Helen’s test of the wooden horse is not the only moment when the Odyssey uses sound to join disparate spaces and communicate affect. The smoke and thunder caused by the Symplegades (or “Clashing Rocks”) makes Odysseus’s crew drop their oars in terror; the oars clatter (βόμβησαν) into the sea.3 A similar process is described at the end of Odysseus’s long sea voyage from Calypso’s island: when he is as far away from land as a voice travels if one shouts, the thunder of the surf against the rugged shoreline reaches him, and he realizes that his landing will not be easy. He reacts with a groan, providing a human echo to the ocean’s sound.4 Here sound spreads from outside Odysseus’s soul, into it, then out again through his agonized voice. His subsequent speech to his spirit (thumos) may be the earliest example of a character speaking to himself in the Greek tradition. But if there is a “birth of subjectivity” here, an impression of solitude and inwardness in Odysseus’s soliloquy, it comes about as the consequence of an auditory and affective resonance circuit. The Iliad shows comparable interests. This is especially the case in book ten, where Odysseus and Diomedes undertake a nocturnal spying mission into the Trojan camp. A spying mission, at least, is the plan. By the end of the book, they have instead slaughtered a newly arrived Trojan ally in his sleep, stolen a train of horses and a richly ornamented chariot, and left a trail of corpses in their wake. The story is punctuated with descriptions of auditory movement: Agamemnon hears the Trojans in their camp and marvels at their singing;5 Nestor’s voice moves into Odysseus’s tent (and then into his soul) to awaken him;6 the generals are compared to dogs who hear the sound of a beast threatening their flocks at night;7 omens are heard from afar;8 the thud of pursuing footsteps moves through the darkness;9 Odysseus and Diomedes whistle to each other to communicate;10 the Trojans are alerted to the Greeks’ bloody incursion by groaning and shouting;11 Nestor hears the thunder of horses’ hooves as Odysseus and Diomedes return at speed to the Achaean camp.12

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All of this arises naturally from the fact that Iliad 10 is a nocturnal book, its actions carried out in darkness: information has no other way to be transferred. But sound in this book is also connected to the representation of heightened affect. Iliad 10 opens with Agamemnon groaning to himself in anguish over the army’s position;13 the Trojan spy Dolon, caught by Diomedes and Odysseus, clatters his teeth together in fear;14 the Trojans react with a terrible din to the sight of their slain allies.15 It is surely no coincidence that Iliad 10 is also a powerfully atmospheric book, a book with a distinctive affective tone. An oppressive gloom seems to color everything from the first line to the last. It begins with a nocturnal council of Achaean generals, the leaders of whom have been kept awake by overwhelming anxiety about the course of the war, goes on to describe the camp at night (a setting that becomes important again in the epic’s last book, when Priam begs Achilles for the body of his son in a nocturnal visit), and portrays its two heroes in less than heroic colors. A nighttime battlefield strewn with corpses and blood defines the topography through which Odysseus and Diomedes travel,16 and their murderous actions only make the landscape more horrific. Indeed, the nexus of sound, space, and affect was exploited in many different ways by the epic tradition—although on this topic, the Odyssey proves richer, perhaps, than the Iliad. One device was to exploit not the contagion but the juxtaposition of sounds occurring simultaneously in distinct regions. Close to the beginning of the Odyssey, for example, Telemachus welcomes the disguised Athena into his house and seats her apart from the suitors, “lest the stranger, disturbed by their din (ὀρυμαγδῷ), should be displeased by the meal.”17 While Phemius sings for Penelope’s suitors, Telemachus lowers his head and speaks with Athena in such a way that the rest cannot hear.18 The scene is crucial for the atmospherics at Ithaca. The creation of two acoustic territories within the same hall corresponds to and dramatizes the fact that this house is divided; over and against the raucous and more or less implicitly hostile suitors, the epic sets Telemachus and his divine guest. The device is used again when Penelope learns that Telemachus has gone to Argos to seek news of his father and that, in their turn, the suitors are plotting against him. She prays for the return of Odysseus and the safety of Telemachus. But as she raises the sacred ololuge, the suitors make a din of their own, thinking that she will have to take a husband soon.19 In this scene, the speeches of Penelope and the suitors take place at more or less the same time but in different spaces: the act of narration brings them together. The resulting juxtaposition is stark. Hers is the utterance of a specific character; theirs the sort of thing that any one of the suitors might have been saying (τις ἔιπεσκε). She prays; they gamble. She wants Odysseus home; they do not. An

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auditory characterization encapsulates these differences: Penelope raises the ololuge; the suitors, by contrast, create a din (ὁμάδησαν).20 A second device was to create affective atmosphere through the exploitation of acoustic barriers. After Penelope’s suitors have been killed, for example, Odysseus commands the poet Phemius to sing and the maidservants of the house to dress and dance: the result is that “the house resounded (περιστεναχίζετο) with the tread of dancing men and well-dressed women.”21 Odysseus’s plan is to use the sounds of merriment to prevent anyone within earshot of the house from suspecting that he has returned and the suitors have been killed. Those who know how this story is going to end will surely find an extraordinary kind of barbarity in Odysseus’s making the maidservants dance—shortly they will be hung from the rafters as punishment for their friendliness to the suitors. One indication that this is not a true celebration is the verb—resounded, περιστεναχίζετο, is, in fact, formed from a word meaning “groan” (στενάχος), a word of lamentation, grief, and death. The halls “groan about” with song and dance: it is a funereal and chilling metaphor. The Odyssey can use such devices with extraordinary subtlety and power. When Penelope bids Odysseus’s old nurse Eurycleia wash her disguised husband, for example, Eurycleia feels the scar on his inner thigh, received from a run-in with a boar: she knows at once who he is. In joy and surprise, she drops the water basin she was holding and seems about to cry out, but Odysseus seizes her by the neck and forcibly silences her.22 Everything takes place without the exchange of visual information. When Eurycleia sat down before the disguised Odysseus and remarked his similarities to her mistress’s husband, Odysseus’s response had been to turn toward the darkness for fear that when Eurycleia touched him she would recognize the scar and make the affair manifest.23 Closing the visual channel leads to the intensification of others. In fact, the darkness to which Odysseus turns is more notional than real—when Eurycleia recognizes him, she wants and, it seems, can signal what she knows to Penelope, who is nearby, because Athena turns Penelope’s thoughts aside so their eyes do not meet (477–78). But the darkness, and the consequent enhancement of the other senses, sets the tone here. Eurycleia recognizes the scar of Odysseus by feel, not by sight. The long analepsis in which we learn the origin of the scar is itself more densely populated with auditory imagery than is usual: the thud of feet in the hunt and the bellowing (μακών) of the boar as he dies occur within ten lines of each other and give the narrative a sonorous richness.24 And in a context where darkness is emphasized and secrecy is desired, the clanging of Eurycleia’s basin when she drops it seems unusually threatening—an alarm to anyone with the ears to hear

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what it means.25 Odysseus enforces silence by grasping Eurycleia by the throat—a gesture that communicates threat, causes pain, and closes or puts pressure on the part of the body through which vocal sound is emitted. The effect is eerie: Odysseus is saved but through an act of unsettling violence. Such concerns with sound’s movement and emotional resonance were widespread. In epic and elsewhere, they bespoke a sensitivity to the centrality of affect in human becoming—indeed, they suggested an understanding of the nature of human becoming as affect, as a capacity to change and be changed by external flows and forces. As sound moved between apparently separate spaces and produced extreme feelings, it made evident humanity’s fundamental attunement to the world, its liability to resonate with what is “outside” and to make that outside resonate in turn. These intuitions about transitivity and affect became the basis for the earliest theories of hearing in antiquity. But first, they were the material for art, and for tragedy especially, which installed auditory affect close to the core of its theatrical poetics. In tragedy, affect was not only associated with sound: the causal chain, if amplified enough, could lead from sound, through feeling, and into other sensory modalities. Indeed, from a certain perspective the very visuality of the tragic theater appears a consequence of a heightened intensity of initially auditory affect. Thanks, perhaps, to the fact that auditory affect was a central concern of tragedy, it also became an important paradigm for the theorization of sound and hearing in natural philosophy as well. After my discussion of tragic auditory aesthetics, I address the physical theorists who exploited auditory contagion and resonance to explain the sense of hearing. Tragedy channeled sound through the opening of the actor’s voice, setting theaters resonating with wracked, tortured, and terrified humanity. Frequently this was done with cries and vocalizations that, while constrained by the phonology of Greek, were presented as nonverbal.26 In such cries language strained toward its own limits, inventing words for the condition of having no words, figuring its own failure and fracture through overflows of sonority.27 Often, the tragic cry became a song without words, transforming the open, agonized mouth into a channel for liberated melodies. It was, in other words, both a form of high vocal control and a representation of the voice out of control. In the cry, we do not seem to hear the manipulation of musical and linguistic structures; instead, we seem exposed to a nonlinguistic expression of agony welling up from a subject’s invisible interior.28 We seem exposed. Such figurations were always mediated by language, by the phonetic structure of Greek and the conventional and pragmatic expectations

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that accompanied different cries. But these openings onto the sonorous beyond also transformed the language that followed them. As singers use meaningless syllables to place their voices into the regions of the throat, mouth, or head where they want it to resonate, so, too, did the cry summon and concentrate the voice within a specific range of amplitundinal and timbral possibilities. The same word would sound different after ἰώ or αἰαί, for the simple reason that these cries altered the shape of the mouth and the overtone structure of the voice.29 The cry’s capacity to link a subjective interior with a social exterior could serve as a paradigm for the tragic use of sound in general. Topographically, tragedy unfolded within a theatrical space bounded by barriers to vision; both the backdrop (skene) and the masks worn by actors and chorus created invisible spaces from which emanated powerful sounds.30 The consequent layering of auditory and visual topologies was crucial to tragic poetics. Despite being an art form whose primary mode was daytime production in an outdoor theater before thousands of spectators, tragedy had a remarkably consistent interest in the failings of sight and visual modalities of knowledge. “Darkness hides the fact that there is something dearer than life,” remarks the nurse in Euripides’s Hippolytus. “[W]e prove unhappy lovers of what shines here because this is all we know. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us.”31 Her sentiment could be taken as a symbol for the problem of vision in tragedy as a whole: sight has limits against which we constantly butt and as a result of which our broader condition is ultimately one of blindness. Ignorance coupled with the constant shock of unmanageable noises from invisible spaces: that was tragedy’s dominant key.32 So dominant, in fact, that the genre could be characterized as a century-long attempt to work out its implications. All of the major playwrights from whom we have substantial remains were profoundly concerned with it, but the statements of Sophocles and Euripides were conditioned in a fundamental way by those of Aeschylus, for whom auditory affect was a central theme in the self-reflexive poetics of the genre. He liked to stage an overwhelming presence of terrible sound in juxtaposition to vociferous desires for silence, and he could develop entire tragedies out of this basic situation. He aimed, writes the Hellenistic author of one biographical notice, not for imitation but for stunned awe in his audience.33 “Never banish the uncanny (τὸ δεινόν) from the city,” he wrote in the Eumenides;34 the sentence could be taken as a formula for his work with sound. His auditory investments were noticed. At the end of the Clouds, Aristophanes wrote a scene in which the newly sophisticated Pheidippides and his most unsophisticated father Strepsiades came to blows about the appropriate music to sing over wine. Strepsiades was offended by the immoral content of his son’s beloved

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Euripides, but the latter found the older Aeschylus “full of noise, unpolished, a ranter, a crag maker.”35 Aristophanes used more or less the same characterizations in the Frogs, where Dionysus compared Aeschylus’s shouting to the sound of a burning oak (859), and the chorus imagined him “bellowing” (βρυχώμενος), shooting “riveted words,” and “tearing [Euripides] apart with his giant breath.”36 By contrast, he portrayed Euripides as subtle, careful, quibbling (826–29), and attached no auditory images to him at all. Aristophanes had Aeschylus criticize Euripides for monotony in his prologues, ending a series of the latter poet’s lines with the phrase ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν, “he lost his little oil jar”;37 then, he had Euripides respond by doing the same thing to Aeschylus’s anapests, ending a series of his phrases with an expression that begins with a cry and then names a sound: “hey crash, don’t you come to help?”38 Asked by Dionysus not to add any more crashes, Euripides offered a parody of Aeschylus’s lyric verses, giving as every second line the nonsense phlattothrattoplattothrat.39 This is usually heard as an imitation of the lyre being strummed40 and, again, suggests an empty sonorousness in Aeschylean composition.41 But the sonorousness of Aeschylean tragedy was anything but empty. To the contrary, it was a central pillar of his poetics, and in time, it came to link his storytelling, his aesthetics, and his sense of tragedy’s political value. In Persians (480 BCE) he staged the affective power of sound through a portrait of the reaction of the Persian court to news of the outcome of the naval battle at Salamis. Scholars tend to agree that Aeschylus’s choice of material for the play was overdetermined: the battle at Salamis and its lead-up constituted a moment of the highest trauma and pride for the Athenian demos, one that could be accommodated to a well-known narrative framework (that of great pride followed by a great fall) and exploited as an exploration of the relations between (Athenian) Greek and Persian other.42 But these geopolitical themes also served the fashioning of a powerful aesthetic presence: the barbarian setting and the strong lamentatory strains throughout the play allowed Aeschylus to explore a model of affective contagion in which sound and its passionate implications were central. From the Athenian fleet to the court at Sousa, and from there to the Theatre of Dionysus, sound carried affect—which generated more sound. The process was semiotic as well as spatial; in this play, Aeschylus arranged things so that sound feeds up through narratological levels, from the most deeply nested narrative of the report of the battle at Salamis, through the performed scene at Sousa, and onto the auditory surface of the theatrical text. I follow this trajectory from reported activity to actualized sound. The battle of Salamis is not the center of the play—the play is resolutely fo-

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cused on reactions to the battle rather than on the battle itself. Nonetheless, the speech that tells the story of the battle articulates Aeschylus’s auditory theme.43 The battle begins just as day is breaking over the Persian lines. Misled by a false report that the Greeks plan to retreat at dawn, Xerxes has ordered his ships to draw in tight across the narrow straits and to destroy the Greek ships as they try to slip away. But the Greeks are not intending a silent retreat. ἐπεί γε μέντοι λευκόπωλος ἡμέρα πᾶσαν κατέσχε γαῖαν εὐφεγγὴς ἰδεῖν, πρῶτον μὲν ἠχῇ κέλαδος Ἑλλήνων πάρα μολπηδὸν εὐφήμησεν, ὄρθιον δ’ ἅμα ἀντηλάλαξε νησιώτιδος πέτρας ἠχώ, φόβος δὲ πᾶσι βαρβάροις παρῆν γνώμης ἀποσφαλεῖσιν· οὐ γὰρ ὡς φυγῇ παιᾶν’ ἐφύμνουν σεμνὸν Ἕλληνες τότε, ἀλλ’ ἐς μάχην ὁρμῶντες εὐψύχῳ θράσει. σάλπιγξ δ’ ἀυτῇ πάντ’ ἐκεῖν’ ἐπέφλεγεν· εὐθὺς δὲ κώπης ῥοθιάδος ξυνεμβολῇ ἔπαισαν ἅλμην βρύχιον ἐκ κελεύματος. θοῶς δὲ πάντες ἦσαν ἐκφανεῖς ἰδεῖν· When white-horsed dawn shone on the whole earth—radiant to behold—first a din resounded from the Greeks as they sang out auspiciously, and the echo of the island rocks shouted shrilly in reply. Then fear came over all the barbarians, whose hopes were dashed; for the Greeks were not singing an austere paean in preparation to flee, but were urging themselves into battle with strong hearts and brave. And then the salpinx kindled everything there with its shout, and straightway, on command, they struck the deep sea with concerted dashing of the oars. Swiftly they came into view.44

Initial Persian optimism is suggested by εὐφεγγὴς ἰδεῖν (radiant to behold): the beauty of daybreak reflects their hope for a quick victory. Just as the passage begins with the visual invocation of dawn, it ends with the sighting of the advancing Greek fleet. In between, however, the messenger focuses on what can be heard. The Greeks make a din (κέλαδος, a common sound word in descriptions of mustering or charging armies),45 which resonates (ἠχῇ) in the strait. Persian morale starts to crumble when the Greek song echoes back to them from the rocks of the island. This echo is made the subject of the verb ἀνταλαλάζω, which is compounded from a root that typically designates the war cry. Echo shouts belligerently back from the resounding rocks. The powerful emotional impact of the Greeks’ sound is expressed by the fact that the words for echo and fear abut in 391 (. . . ἠχώ, φόβος δε . . .). Aeschy-

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lus’s reversal of the “normal” Athenian perspective on Salamis—he narrates it from the viewpoint of the Persian invaders—also includes a reversal of the usual significance of sound. The Greeks are not making bad noises but good ones; they sing auspiciously (μολπηδὸν εὐφήμησεν), not a panicked cry but a solemn paian (παιᾶν’ ἐφύμνουν σεμνὸν, 393). But to the Persians these good sounds sound bad. Perhaps one indication of this is the remarkable alliterative play on φ.46 Beginning at line 387, the passage sounds this consonant repeatedly, at first every two lines (387, 389, and 391), then four times (391–93), then one more time after another two lines. The recurrence of φ tracks the changing affect of the Persian fleet, from Persian optimism (εὐφεγγής) through the first signs that this is misguided (εὐφήμησεν), in the process ironically linking two εὐ- compounds with strongly different implications (the first, implying good fortune for the Persians, the second, for the Greeks), to the Persian fleet that realizes its error (φόβος, ἀποσφαλεῖσιν), then back to the sounds of the advancing Greek fleet (ἐφύμνουν, ἐπέφλεγεν). The last φ- word is used synesthetically of the sound of the war trumpet, which “sets fire” to everything with its “shout”47—a strong metaphor that transforms sound into the visual image of fire—and closes a ring, since the sequence of φ-sounds started with a vision of the burning dawn. The messenger’s story continues. The Greek fleet advanced in order (κόσμῳ), and as they did, “it was possible for all alike to hear a great shout:”48 a summons to free Attica from occupation (402–405). The shout is attributed to no individual speaker. This gives it a diffused presence and a mysterious origin, reinforcing the messenger’s supposition that the Persian defeat was due as much to divine forces as to human ones.49 Now the messenger turns to the sounds of his side: a din (ῥόθος) of the Persian tongue rises against the Greek. Homeric echoes are strong: in book two of the Iliad, the Greeks and Trojans advanced against each other, with the Greeks marching in silence, hearing only the voices of their commanders urging them on, while the Trojans, a polyglot host, raised a din of many voices.50 The assimilation of Trojan to Persian would, in later tragedy, become commonplace, even a cliché; Edith Hall has written eloquently on how such iconographical assimilations gave the Persian war mythic stature even in the years immediately after its end.51 The emphasis in Persians, however, is on panic and despair. Thus, as the military disaster unfolds and the sea fills with wrecks and corpses (418– 21), the Persian fleet falls into disarray (422–23), and the sea is filled with lamentation (427–28). Aeschylus pauses to describe some Greek sounds: the massacre on Psyttaleia ended with the Greeks rushing on Persian sailors with a din (ῥόθος, 462) and hacking them to bits. This leads immediately to a description of the lamentation of Xerxes (465–70). The story of the battle is thus framed by contrasting song genres: the Greeks

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sang paians, the Persians utter lamentations. The joy of the one side engenders the despair of the other. The movement of sound from one space into another continues, this time from the story of Salamis to the Persian court. In response to the messenger’s catastrophic news, voices become increasingly audible at the expense of articulate language. Nonverbal cries gradually take over, starting at the margins of discourse and, in time, moving into the core. Here is the first occurrence in the tragedy of a nonverbal cry: ταῦτά μου μελαγχίτων φρὴν ἀμύσσεται φόβῳ, ὀᾶ, Περσικοῦ στρατεύματος, τοῦδε μὴ πόλις πύθηται κένανδρον μέγ’ ἄστυ Σουσίδος· καὶ τὸ Κισσίων πόλισμ’ ἀντίδουπον ἄισεται, ὀᾶ, τοῦτ’ ἔπος γυναικοπληθὴς ὅμιλος ἀπύων, βυσσίνοις δ’ ἐν πέπλοις πέσῃ λακίς. At these things my dark-garbed heart is wracked with fear—oa for the Persian army— that the city might hear from such a cry that the great city of Sousa was empty of men, and that the Cissian citadel will sing in resounding reply—oa—as the crowd filled with women calls out this word and falls, rending their fine linen robes.52

The chorus fears that the city of Sousa might learn from the cry “oa for the Persian army” that the army has been lost and then sing the second “oa” in reply. This is a simple model of auditory transmission: the second ὀᾶ echoes and responds to the first. The reply is designated with ἀντίδουπον (“thud in response”), a word with strongly physical connotations. The process is analogous to the auditory description of the battle of Salamis, where the Greek paian echoes back from the rocks and causes new cries in the Persian fleet. The syntax of the first strophe is misleading: nothing until τοῦδε (118) suggests that ὀᾶ Περσικοῦ στρατεύματος is only an imagined cry. This misdirection is repeated in the second strophe, when ὀᾶ is again permitted to stand outside the run of the sentence until it is integrated after the fact by τοῦτ’ ἔπος. Indeed, the strong rhythmic punctuation given to the previous pair of lecythia by ὀᾶ suggests a vivid and sincere cry of grief and fear. Metrically, the cry introduces a kind of fractured symmetry within the strophe, which shows the overall pattern –⏑–⏑–⏑– / –⏑–⏑–⏑– / ⏑ – [ὀᾶ] / –⏑–⏑–⏑– / –⏑–⏑–⏑– / – ⏑ – / –⏑–⏑–⏑–. ὀᾶ punctuates the first half of the strophe and gets emphasis from its strong rhythmical position. Musically, in other words, what the chorus wishes would not happen is much stronger than their wish—the cry already has a powerful presence. As the play develops, cries will move from this strong but “outsider” position to the center of expression. An early indication of this movement is given in the

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remarkable sound effects of the following passage, where a single syllable ramifies across several lines of verse: ΧΟΡΟΣ. †ἄνι’ ἄνια κακὰ† νεόκοτα καὶ δάι’· αἰαῖ, διαίνεσθε Πέρσαι τόδ’ ἄχος κλύοντες. ΑΓΓΕΛΟΣ. ὡς πάντα γ’ ἔστ’ ἐκεῖνα διαπεπραγμένα, καὐτὸς δ’ ἀέλπτως νόστιμον βλέπω φάος. Χο. ἦ μακροβίοτος ὅδε γέ τις αἰὼν ἐφάνθη γεραιοῖς, ἀκούειν τόδε πῆμ’ ἄελπτον. Αγγ. καὶ μὴν παρών γε κοὐ λόγους ἄλλων κλύων, Πέρσαι, φράσαιμ’ ἂν οἷ’ ἐπορσύνθη κακά. Chorus. Grievous, grievous evil, new and terrible; aiai. Weep, Persians, when you hear this agony. Messenger. It’s all over. I never thought I’d make it home. Cho. I’ve lived too long. To hear this unexpected agony . . . Mes. I was there. I did not hear it from others. I can tell you the evils we were served.53

A sustained assonance on αἰαῖ (257) carries the cry throughout the passage. Indeed, if the first and metrically problematic line is emended to αἰν’ αἰνα κακά . . . (“terrible, terrible evils . . . ,” so Pauw reported in Page),54 the line begins with two αἰ-sounds. In any case, a string of four nearly uninterrupted αἰ- syllables transforms the beginning into a sustained cry of grief: καὶ / δάι’· αἰαῖ, διαίνεσθε; this effectively makes real the imperative διαίνεσθε, “weep” (δάι’ is not the same syllable, but very close indeed, perhaps chosen for its proximity to the tonic sound). In the following lines αἰ becomes a kind of leitmotif, with the antistrophe rhyming on it in line 262, and repeating it in γεραιοῖς; even the messenger repeats it with his Πέρσαι, φρασαιμ’ ἂν (267). The movement of αἰαῖ into the substance of these lines is a strong premonition of what will occur at the end of the play. But, at least in the short term, it will be “extra-metric” or, better, emphatic cries that dominate: the chorus’s ὀτοτοτοῖ (268 = 274) at the beginning of the next strophe is much more characteristic.55 But the appearance of Xerxes ends this segregation; just as the defeated general, thus far offstage, comes to the center of the playing space, so do the vocalizations his defeat has inspired move to the center of language. In the last thirty-nine lines of the play, a rich palette of sounds is used: there are syllabic echoes, selfreflexive descriptions of vocal performance, nonverbal cries, and an extremely high degree of repetition:

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ΞΕΡΞΗΣ. δίαινε δίαινε πῆμα, πρὸς δόμους δ’ ἴθι. ΧΟΡΟΣ. αἰαῖ αἰαῖ δύα δύα. Ξε. βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά μοι. Χο. δόσιν κακὰν κακῶν κακοῖς. Ξε. ἴυζε μέλος ὁμοῦ τιθείς. Χο. ὀτοτοτοτοῖ· βαρεῖά γ’ ἅδε συμφορά· οἲ μάλα καὶ τόδ’ ἀλγῶ. Ξε. ἔρεσσ’ ἔρεσσε καὶ στέναζ’ ἐμὰν χάριν. Χο. διαίνομαι γοεδνὸς ὤν. Ξε. βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά μοι. Χο. μέλειν πάρεστι, δέσποτα. Ξε. ἐπορθίαζέ νυν γόοις. Χο. ὀτοτοτοτοῖ· μέλαινα δ’ αὖ μεμείξεται οἲ στονόεσσα πλαγά. Xerxes. Weep, Weep for this pain, and go towards your home. Chorus. aiai aiai, misery misery. Xe. Shout now in thudding reply to me. Cho. A ruined gift from the ruined to the ruined. Xe. Cry out, creating a melody like mine. Cho. ototototoi. These are grave misfortunes. I suffer them too. Xe. Beat, beat your breast, and groan. Cho. I weep, I lament. Xe. Shout now in thudding reply to me. Cho. I can sing, lord. Xe. Raise high your groans. Cho. ototototoi. And blackening, groanful blows will be mixed in.56

The antiphonal lament, generically signaled by ἀντιδουπά (thudding reply), a word that also connects the song to the story of the battle at Salamis (discussed earlier), allows for the alternation between solo singer and chorus to represent the major form of musical expression. Both strophe and antistrophe begin with verbal repetition (δίαινε δίαινε and ἔρεσσ’ ἔρεσσε). That the repetition is thematic is enforced by the second line of the strophe (1039), αἰαῖ αἰαῖ δύα δύα: δύα here means “misery,” but it recalls by rhyme the adjective two, δυάς. It is by no means accidental that the αἰ-sound lies at the center of the repeated δίαινε and διαίνομαι in 1047, which responds with 1039. This aureole of αι sounds occurs within a strophic context that is extremely repetitive: βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά

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μοι (1040) is repeated in the corresponding 1048, as is the chorus’s ὀτοτοτοτοῖ (1043 = 1050); responsion of sense occurs between 1042 (ἴυζε μέλος ὁμοῦ τιθείς) and 1050 (ἐπορθίαζέ νυν γόοις). Similar effects prevail in the next strophic pair: Ξε. καὶ στέρν’ ἄρασσε κἀπιβόα τὸ Μύσιον. Χο. ἀνία ἀνία. Ξε. καί μοι γενείου πέρθε λευκήρη τρίχα. Χο. ἄπριγδ’ ἄπριγδα μάλα γοεδνά. Ξε. ἀύτει δ’ ὀξύ. Χο. καὶ τάδ’ ἔρξω. Ξε. πέπλον δ’ ἔρεικε κολπίαν ἀκμᾷ χερῶν. Χο. ἀνία ἀνία. Ξε. καὶ ψάλλ’ ἔθειραν καὶ κατοίκτισαι στρατόν. Χο. ἄπριγδ’ ἄπριγδα μάλα γοεδνά. Ξε. διαίνου δ’ ὄσσε. Χο. τέγγομαί τοι. Xe. Beat your breast and shout the Mysian lament. Cho. Terrible terrible. Xe. Tear the white hair from your beard. Cho. With clenched hands, clenched, and loud laments. Xe. Shout shrilly. Cho. I will. Xe. Tear the folded robes with the edges of your hands. Cho. Terrible terrible. Xe. Tear at your hair and lament the army. Cho. With clenched hands, clenched, and loud laments. Xe. Moisten your eyes. Cho. I will.57

The chorus’s role is reduced to the repetition of two lines, ἀνία ἀνία and ἄπριγδ’ ἄπριγδα μάλα γοεδνά. Note the verbal repetitions. Note as well that Xerxes’s ἄρασσε (1054) echoes ἔρεσσε from the previous antistrophe (1046) and is, in turn, echoed by ἔρεικε (in metrically identical position) in the responding line 1060. In 1059, the sharing of the line between Xerxes and the chorus increases the frequency of exchange and provides a kind of formal closure: the two parts are remarkably alike sonically, particularly with the repetition of ξ in the final syllable. Such repetition empties even signifying language of its semantic reference and raises the level of sound in the mix. The epode, and the last stanza of the tragedy, is accordingly well prepared for: Ξε. βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά μοι. Χο. οἰοῖ οἰοῖ. Ξε. αἰακτὸς ἐς δόμους κίε.

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Χο. ἰὼ ἰὼ Περσὶς αἶα δύσβατος. Ξε. ἰωὰ δὴ κατ’ ἄστυ. Χο. ἰωὰ δῆτα, ναὶ ναί. Ξε. γοᾶσθ’ ἁβροβάται. Χο. ἰὼ ἰὼ Περσὶς αἶα δύσβατος. Ξε. ἠὴ ἠὴ τρισκάλμοισιν ἠὴ ἠὴ βάρισιν ὀλόμενοι. Χο. πέμψω τοί σε δυσθρόοις γόοις. Xe. Shout now in thudding reply to me. Cho. oioi oioi. Xe. Weeping go to your home. Cho. Io Io ill-trod land. Xe. Ioa through the city. Cho. Ioa indeed, indeed. Xe. Groan. Step lightly. Cho. Io Io Persian ill-trod land. Xe. EE EE in the three-tiered EE EE boats destroyed Cho. I will escort you with ill-resounding groans.58

The epode begins with the third repetition of βόα νυν ἀντίδουπά μοι (1066 = 1039 = 1048), then proceeds to a series of antiphonal lines that are practically overwhelmed by the nonverbal. The change from the first occurrence of a nonverbal cry in the play (117) is striking. There ὀᾶ was incorporated within an imagined scene of lamentation, the cry subordinate to a broader sentence. Here, the verbal locutions are syntactically dependent on the cries themselves, which motivate their grammatical cases and allow them to stand without verbs. In 1075 and 1076, a single phrase is literally cut through with cries—ἠὴ ἠὴ appear at the beginning and in the middle of the phrase. Persians follows sound from the Athenian ships to the Persian fleet and, from there, to the Persian court. It would be inconsistent for us not to follow the sound all the way to its terminus, which is not, of course, the Persian court but the Theater of Dionysus at Athens, where this story appeared as text and music. Just as the sound of the Athenian paian causes despair in the Persian fleet and the sound of the battle of Salamis causes lamentation in the Persian court, so, perhaps, are we to imagine the sound of lamentation in the Persian court reverberating and amplifying on the Athenian tragic stage. The text evinces a sustained effort to underscore its own auditory materiality, to transform language into sound. The play is studded with foreign names (and with the occasional foreign word).59 In their linguistic opacity, these words encroach on the limits of language, toying with the possibility of becoming sheer

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sound. The sixty-five anapestic lines with which the play begins contain eighteen Persian proper names (one of which, Xerxes, was probably not very alienating or foreign to Aeschylus’s original audience). One indication of their opacity is how they morph in the textual tradition, unregulated by Greek linguistic protocols. Ἀμίστρης appears in the manuscripts also as Ἄμιστρις, and once as Ἀμνίστρης; Ἀρταφρένης as Ἀρταφέρνης; Μεγαβάτης as Μεγαβάζης and Μεταβάτης; Ἀσπάσπης as Ἀσπάπης.60 These are minor textual variations but important nonetheless; they register the foreignness of the names to later epochs, their ability to function as a kind of noise. They surely appeared equally foreign in 472, and they give the whole parodos an uncanny eloquence, naming men never seen but surely intensely feared in combinations of syllables that ring ill against the demands of a Greek ear. Later lists increasingly abandon narrative and even syntax. The messenger speech, for example, begins with a lengthy catalogue of Persian or quasi-Persian names, taking care to locate the generals on the field (302– 33).61 This passage reads like a series of almost funerary epigrams that associate a name with a death and give Aeschylus space to explore the poetry of a general’s demise. More intense again are the catalogues of names in the kommos at the end. A few exemplary lines: Ξε. Ἰάων γὰρ ἀπηύρα, Ἰάων ναύφαρκτος Ἄρης ἑτεραλκὴς νυχίαν πλάκα κερσάμενος δυσδαίμονά τ’ ἀκτάν. Χο. οἰοιοῖ βόα καὶ πάντ’ ἐκπεύθου. ποῦ δὲ φίλων ἄλλος ὄχλος; ποῦ δέ σοι παραστάται οἷος ἦν Φαρανδάκης, Σούσας, Πελάγων ἠδ’ Ἀγαβάτας, Δοτάμας, Ψάμμις, Σουσισκάνης τ’ Ἀγβάτανα λιπών; Xe. The Ionian has swept it all away—the Ionian Ares, with a palisade of ships, strengthening our foe, ravaging the dark sea and the wretched headland. Cho. Oioi shout and learn of everything; where is the rest of the crowd of friends? Where are those who stood beside you: Pharandakes, Sousas, Pelagon and Agabatas, Dotamas, Psammis, and Sousiskanes, leaving Ecbatana?62

Xerxes names the military disaster with reference to Athens, effectively “othering” his own tale by invoking its foreign location: Ares and the Ionians in the first strophe, Salamis in the second. The chorus, on the other hand, invokes the

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names of Persian generals who are no more, asking Xerxes insistently what has become of his host: the simple question ποῦ allows the catalogue of names to be given paratactically, with minimal intervening semantic elements. The names of the dead are coupled to the cry of grief οἰοιοῖ; this pushes the whole passage closer to nonverbality, making it more musical and noisier at the same time. Even Xerxes’s Ἰάων sounds like a cry, an ironic and powerful transformation of the ethnonym designating Aeschylus’s home territory into a vocal sob.63 (Conversely, many of the “Persian” names sound suspiciously like toponyms, as though there is a systematic confusion of place, name, and vocal presence and the linguistic text is transforming itself into the concreteness of a topography.) The strangeness of Persian names creates a kind of screen that interferes with “normal” signifying language. Deprived of every concrete or familiar reference, such utterances approximate the status of nonsignifying voice. Persians’ push toward the sheer presence of sound correlates with preSocratic materialism—the belief that perception was grounded in a kind of material reality.64 Aeschylus would be linked, however ludically, to such views in Aristophanes’s Frogs, where his words are weighed (and found to be very heavy indeed) and are compared to huge theriomorphic creatures.65 Persians’ exploration of sound connects, in other words, with a broader interest in auditory experience as a matter of matter. But we have seen that there is also an implicitly vectoral poetics of affect in his emphasis on what might be called the heteronym as a way of alienating language. It may be that Aeschylus’s engagement with sound was striking, even polemical. A number of fragmentary but suggestive indications point to the existence of anxiety over music’s power to transmit emotion. Such nervousness could be reflected in the apparent abandonment among some portion of the Athenian aristocracy of the aulos, an instrument recognized from early on as highly emotional (much more so than the lyre, which needed extensive ideological buttressing to compete on this front; see chapter 3).66 At least one celebrated seizure of panic over musical affect occurred during Aeschylus’s career. A tragedy by Phrynichus, performed in the late 490s or early 480s, brought to the tragic stage the story of the sack of Miletus, a close ally of Athens and a leader in the revolt of Ionian Greek cities within the Persian Empire. The tragedy, which was probably dominated by lamentatory music, caused such extreme distress in its Athenian audience that the author was fined and the play banned from reperformance.67 Capture of Miletus is one of only three tragedies on historical topics known to us (the other two told of the Persian defeat at the battle of Salamis; one was by Phrynichus, and the

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other was Aeschylus’s Persians). The very least we can conclude from its fate at the hands of the city was that it was perceived to be too upsetting for an Athens itself increasingly likely of clashing with the great king. For his part, Aeschylus seems to have felt the connection of musical sound and disruptive emotion to be essential to tragic aesthetics.68 If Persians relied on it, Seven against Thebes (467 BCE) could be said to have advocated for it against those who worried about tragedy’s passionate form. Aeschylus was now exploring more than the tragic cry’s capacity to infect language; he was thinking, as well, about how unsettling sounds could invade and disrupt civic space and order. He used a setting that allowed for explorations of auditory affect similar to those in Persians: the army of Polyneices, massed outside of the walls of the city, produced sounds that, when heard within the walls, caused a rising tide of grief and panic. But in Seven the process that transformed the sounds of war into the sounds of lament was contested, not merely portrayed: Aeschylus gave his protagonist Eteocles a strongly negative, highly gendered take on sound and made him attempt to counteract its effects. Building opposition to the progress of sound into the play allowed him to state sound’s role as negative, cacophonous, and disruptive much more emphatically than he could in Persians; because Eteocles is not simply wrong (very few characters in tragedy are), Aeschylus’s portrayal and embodiment of this auditory stratum was much more palpably unsettling.69 Eteocles is the first character on stage, and his initial declaration seems modest, even pious. If Thebes should be spared in the military clash that is to come, he says, then god will be the cause, but if disaster follows, it will be his fault entirely. This is couched in terms expressing an attitude toward sound that will become a recurring theme: εἰ μὲν γὰρ εὖ πράξαιμεν, αἰτία θεοῦ· εἰ δ’ αὖθ’, ὃ μὴ γένοιτο, συμφορὰ τύχοι, Ἐτεοκλέης ἂν εἷς πολὺς κατὰ πτόλιν ὑμνοῖθ’ ὑπ’ ἀστῶν φροιμίοις πολυρρόθοις οἰμώγμασίν θ’, ὧν Ζεὺς ἀλεξητήριος ἐπώνυμος γένοιτο Καδμείων πόλει. If we succeed, god is the reason. But if it is a catastrophe—may it not be—then let Eteocles alone be much hymned by the townspeople throughout the city with great and loud lamentation. But may Zeus ward these things off from the city of Cadmus.70

Eteocles’s responsibility for any possible military failure is expressed as a sonorous result: his name will be hymned in songs filled with din, an oxymoronic periphrasis designating lamentation, which, being filled with nonverbal cries,

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shifts attention from the semantic aspects of the voice and toward the materiality of sound. To have his name combined with lament, Eteocles suggests, would mark his final failure as a leader. Sounds stemming from the populous masses are a repeated concern in Aeschylean tragedy. The chorus of Persian elders fears, for example, that the defeat at Salamis would leave the people free to speak; at the opening of that play, too, the whole of Asia was described as shouting for its king.71 In Agamemnon, the chorus, contemplating a royal house with a less-than-spotless history, worries repeatedly about the noises of the people. “Someone shouts in silence,” they remark, that the war at Troy involved many deaths for a “foreign woman.”72 They also associate the uproar of the people with anarchy73 and acknowledge to Cassandra that the whole city shouts about Atreus’s murder of Thyestes’s children.74 Such sounds are not, from their standpoint, good things: the uproar of the people indicates the loss of law and order, the failure of the legitimate regime of kings. Eteocles is thus towing an auditory line that is quite orthodox—at least for those who speak on the side of power.75 Whatever Eteocles thinks about the relationship between civic noise and civic order, he is at war, and war is noisy. Eteocles’s watchman, warning him to take action against the advancing Argive host, uses a Homeric metaphor: “the wave of infantry shouts.”76 This recalls and installs within the thematics of Seven the epic association of natural sound with the noise of war;77 it carries ominous warnings to readers fresh from Persians. The entrance of the chorus of Theban women confirms these warnings. Their first verb (in the extant text, though something is missing before it)78 is θρέομαι, a verb invoking threnody and denoting a high shriek.79 Although they first describe the sight of the dust above the advancing army,80 they turn quickly to the sounds that army makes. The plain, struck by arms, sends a shout to their ears and reminds them of a rushing river in the mountains.81 The Homeric recollection is very strong indeed here, and strong too is the implicit invocation of space: Homer compared the advance of armies to a river crashing through the mountains as heard from afar.82 In their description of the roar of the approaching army, plosive consonants proliferate, as though in imitation of the thudding of hooves and armed men on the plain outside the walls: π thunders through the first two lines, as does the unvoiced τ. And, once the auditory image is completed, the chorus cries out, “Io Io gods and goddesses.”83 Sound begets sound, amplifying into the nonverbal cries of a fearful populace.84 Turning to the gods in supplication, they ask whether the sounds of war have penetrated to their sphere: “[D]o you hear the thud of shields or not?”85 The noise is so powerful that it provokes a synesthetic metaphor: “I see a thud.”86

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Again working with Homeric language, they describe the advance of the army as a wave crashing around the city.87 These sounds soon bleed into sounds of the chorus’s own: φεῦ φεῦ, they exclaim,88 then—at the sound of the din (ὄτοβος) of chariots surrounding the city, the air trembling with the shaking of spears89 and the tumult of shields90 —ἒ ἒ ἒ ἔ.91 In the final strophic pair of the parodos, the stanzas begin with ἰώ.92 Offstage sounds have generated nonverbal cries. Eteocles, to put it mildly, is unimpressed by this chorus and its sensitivities to the dynamics of auditory affect.93 Entering brusquely, he asks them if it is not the case that lamentations (θρέμματα) are to be restrained in this time of crisis94 or if “barking and braying, things that prudent men hate” are what will save the city.95 This extraordinarily sarcastic set of questions is tied to an equally extraordinary antifeminism; “the female race can provide no pleasant dwelling-mate in either good or bad fortune,” he spits.96 Eteocles perfectly understands the process of acoustic contagion: he fears that their lamentations will weaken the entire city.97 He acknowledges their account of the cause of their cries—that they heard the army surrounding the city and the thunder of stones at the gate98 —but he insists that it is their role to be silent while the men conduct ritual prayer to the gods.99 Otherwise, he claims, the sound of war will modulate, through them, into fearfulness.100 What Eteocles asks for is not merely silence at a time when terrifying sounds are coming over the walls but a vocal performance that will deny and negate what they hear: he wants “the holy ololygmos, a kindly paian, the customary Greek sacrificial cry, giving courage to friends and letting fear loose among the enemy.”101 This will strengthen the city and discourage its foes—an auditory stratagem like that of the Athenian fleet in the Persians. His attempt at noise abatement does not work. Instead of the joyful songs he asks for, the chorus sings a panicked lament rife with auditory trauma. They hear the city “shouting while the host perishes with mixed tumult,”102 and the nearly untranslatable βλαχαὶ δ’ αἱματόεσσαι τῶν ἐπιμαστιδίων ἀρτιτρεφεῖς βρέμονται. The just-reared bloody bleatings of children at the breast roar.103

Sounds run rampant here, bleeding from beyond the walls into their imagined future in a captive city and back into frenzied, terrified language. Βρέμω is normally used to describe low-pitched, loud noises. Its use here to describe the cries of bloodied babies assimilates the sounds of the victims of war to those of the

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perpetrators. In short: the chorus, enjoined by Eteocles not to hear the sounds they hear,104 hears them only too well; they have infected even the future. Polyneices’s army’s noisiness is noticed as well by the messenger in what has been named the “shield scene:”105 in several cases, the individual heroes who attack each of Thebes’s seven gates are given auditory descriptions. Eteocles’s responses to the messenger’s visual descriptions, especially of their shield decorations, are canny and even virtuosic,106 but his responses to their sounds are either dismissive or nonexistent. Tydeus, for example, roars107 and shouts like a serpent;108 under his shield, he has bells that “ring forth fear.”109 Of the messenger’s twenty-one-line description, only four lines offer a visual description of the σῆμα on his shield:110 sound surrounds that brief moment and dominates the speech. Eteocles responds tartly: “words and bells have no bite without a spear.”111 Eteoclus, the third hero, rides horses that snort and whose “bridles whistle a barbarous roar, filled with breath from their nostrils.”112 Eteocles sends Megareus, “who does not fear the mad roar of horses’ breaths.”113 Eteocles does not just fail to silence the chorus; he also fails to immure himself against sound’s baleful influence. The last of the seven generals who attack Thebes is Eteocles’s brother Polyneices. The messenger awards due attention to the sight of Polyneices’s shield, but it is the man’s sound that predominates in the description. He prays to cry out a shout of victory;114 he is, in fact, already shouting.115 His shield, a representation of Justice leading an armed man (Hesiod would say that this Justice must have been making a din),116 has a written legend whose letters speak.117 Eteocles’s response is troubling: he volunteers to stand against his brother. No indication is offered that Eteocles has no other heroes to send: indeed, the chorus begs him not to go.118 But he seems carried away by a destructive madness and an excessive passion.119 What sets him off? Aeschylus does not say—but we can guess. The messenger’s sonorous description provokes from Eteocles three lines that are both deeply impassioned and almost ostentatiously noisy: ὦ θεομανές τε καὶ θεῶν μέγα στύγος, ὦ πανδάκρυτον ἁμὸν Οἰδίπου γένος· ὤμοι, πατρὸς δὴ νῦν ἀραὶ τελεσφόροι. O god-maddened greatly hated by the gods; O our clan of Oedipus, lamented by all; Omoi, now do the curses of my father come to fulfillment.120

Repetition of roots (θεο-, twice in 654), homoioteleuton of στύγος and γένος, which comments on Eteocles’ situation by rhyming family and hatred (654–55);

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syllabic compression from πανδάκρυτον to ἁμὸν (655); and, finally, the cries of ὦ that begin each of this triad of lines: these are sonorous words. Aeschylus’s trick in this passage is to make the transfer of affect through sound happen quickly (like a flash of fire) and then to silence it as quickly as he gave it voice. Immediately after these lines, Eteocles insists that he will not lament or cry out, for fear that once he begins such groans will deepen and worsen.121 Indeed, although his anger is palpable, it is cool and controlled: his eyes are dry and his voice calm.122 In moments such as these, when a character goes to his death, other tragedians give the character sung lines, matching the poetry with melodic and rhythmic passion. Here, to the contrary, Eteocles speaks, while the chorus seeks to dissuade him from his impassioned impulse in increasingly frenetic song. Plutarch reports that Aeschylus admired boxers because when they were struck, they remained silent while the audience cried out.123 That is the effect here: Eteocles clamps down on his passion, which amplifies that of the chorus. But Eteocles’s apparent calm is contrasted with what happens within him: the curse, now resident in his heart, speaks to him of profit and of death—tells him, in other words, to kill and be killed by his brother.124 What destroys him, I suggest, is auditory affect: a maddened rage provoked by the sound of his brother’s martial boasts, carried out beneath an apparently unmoved exterior. Seven and Persians share a conceit: in both plays, one military force awaits the advance of another; in both plays, the sound of that second force dominates attention. In both plays, again, Aeschylus exploits the contrast between offstage sounds and onstage responses and associates these with discursive levels—offstage sounds are also narrated sounds, while the onstage responses cause ripples in the fabric of the narration.125 When Eteocles imperiously (and fruitlessly) commands the chorus to stop lamenting, he might be a refraction of the men of the state who punished Phrynichus for amplifying Athenian anxiety about the Persian threat. We might observe that Eteocles’s antipathy to sound is precisely the point: he appears, in this context, as a resister of auditory affect, and that would mean a resister of tragic aesthetics. And yet it kills him.126 Aeschylus brought the argument home in Oresteia, produced in Athens in 458—his last production there. Sounds transfer from place to place in each of the plays of the trilogy, not only offering a metamusical metaphoric system but also providing a template for the narrative’s mythical and metaphysical argument. The result, in the final moments, is that tragic dissonance is offered as the basis for secure political life: at Eumenides’ end the terrible (and terrible-sounding) Erinyes are installed at the heart of the city, in a rocky cleft just below the meeting place of Athens’ senior council and murder court.

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Oresteia features a curse that works its way through several generations of the royal family at Argos. In Aeschylus’s telling, it was kicked off by Atreus’s murder of his brother Thyestes’s children. Its earliest manifestation occurs when Atreus’s son Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis on the verge of the Trojan War; this leads to Agamemnon being killed by his wife Clytemnestra, then to Clytemnestra being killed by their son Orestes, and finally to the terrible affliction of Orestes by the Erinyes (or Furies). The curse is at last laid to rest when Orestes is acquitted by a jury of Athenians and the Erinyes are renamed Eumenides (Kindly Ones) and settled in Athenian space. This curse is an acoustic phenomenon, an application of the logic of the miasma or stain to the sonosphere. When the Trojan prophet Cassandra describes it, she does so in auditory terms. She first hears the cries of children lamenting their slaughter (Ag. 1097), and imagines an “inexhaustible stasis raising the ololugmos for the family of Atreus.”127 A little later on, she elaborates this musical image: the house of Atreus is infested with a chorus128 of Erinyes, who revel in singing an ill-sounding song.129 The sounds Cassandra hears in prophecy will be actualized in the death cries of Agamemnon and in the sound of Clytemnestra boasting over his corpse, described by the chorus as “crazy barking”130 and the cawing of a crow.131 Clytemnestra describes herself as the embodiment of Atreus’s curse, but she becomes its victim in Choephori, the second play of the trilogy, when Orestes kills her. Clytemnestra has a prophetic dream in which she nursed a poisonous snake wrapped in swaddling bands; the dream leads to a piercing scream that echoes throughout the women’s quarters, waking the house and leading to the lighting of lanterns.132 This is exactly analogous to the beginning of Agamemnon: a nocturnal vision (here, a dream; there, the sight of a beacon fire by a sleepless guard) leads to a loud cry (here, κέκλαγγεν; there, the watchman’s ἰοὺ ἰού), and then to the dissemination of fire (here, lamps throughout the house; there, sacrificial fires on every altar).133 Both moments are also, surely not accidentally, good examples of the communication of sound across space: here, auditory affect is structuring the story and the space within which it transpires. After Orestes’s death has been fraudulently announced to Clytemnestra, the boy’s old nurse is brought onstage; it will be she who summons Aegisthus back to the house and to death. In the belief that her old charge has been killed, the nurse offers a vivid description of her duties in raising him. She often interpreted the child’s inarticulate wails incorrectly, she says, and, in consequence, had to wash his linens—she failed to transfer him to the potty in time.134 Orestes’s infant cries ominously remind us of the cries of the children of Thyestes, which Cassandra had described at the moment of their deaths—deaths that began the

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sequence of killings that is about to culminate in matricide and, after that, in the offstage death scream of Aegisthus, who meets with a very quick demise shortly after entering the house. Aegisthus’s cry, however, has ironic implications; ἒ ἒ ὀτοτοτοῖ, he says (869), recalling not the death of Agamemnon but the prophetic cries of Cassandra.135 Just as one crime leads to the next, so, too, do the sounds associated with each crime reverberate through different spaces and voices, insidiously echoing one another. In the third play of the trilogy, the Erinyes, embodiment of the curse on the house, appear on stage. But first they bellow something fierce: ΧΟΡΟΣ. (μυγμός) ΚΛΥΤΑΙΜΗΣΤΡΑΣ ΕΙΔΩΛΟΝ. μύζοιτ’ ἄν· ἁνὴρ δ’ οἴχεται φεύγων πρόσω· †φίλοις γάρ εἰσιν οὐκ ἐμοῖς† προσίκτορες. Χο. (μυγμός) Κλ. ἄγαν ὑπνώσσεις, κοὐ κατοικτίζεις πάθος· φονεὺς δ’ Ὀρέστης τῆσδε μητρὸς οἴχεται. Χο. (ὠγμός) Κλ. ὤζεις, ὑπνώσσεις· οὐκ ἀναστήσῃ τάχος; τί σοι πέπρωται πρᾶγμα πλὴν τεύχειν κακά; Χο. (ὠγμός) Κλ. ὕπνος πόνος τε κύριοι συνωμόται δεινῆς δρακαίνης ἐξεκήραναν μένος. Χο. (μυγμὸς διπλοῦς ὀξύς) λαβὲ λαβὲ λαβὲ λαβέ· φράζου. Chorus: (Bellowing) Clytemntestra: Bellow—the man is gone in headlong flight. †Those who are not my friends have suppliants.†136 Ch: (Bellowing) Clyt: You sleep instead of pitying your own disaster. The matricide Orestes is gone. Ch: (Roaring) Clyt: Yes, roar: you’re asleep! Wake! What job do you have except to work evil? Ch: (Roaring) Clyt: A terrible serpent you are: worn out by sleep and work and powerful oaths! Ch: (bellowing twice as high) Take take take take—look!137

The Erinyes are still offstage: the ghost of Clytemnestra is speaking to the door of the skene. The script does not attempt to imitate alphabetically the sounds of the Erinyes; their outlandish, terrifying sounds are at the far limits of what a human voice can accomplish. The scene makes literally present the ill-sounding chorus

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Cassandra hallucinated in Agamemnon, and thus continues the sonic stream begun with the death-cries of Agamemnon.138 But these cries come at the beginning of Eumenides, not toward the end (as in the first two plays). Eumenides progressively tempers and controls such uncanny sounds, not to do away with them but to find a new site for them: Orestes and the Erinyes will seek the resolution of their dispute before a new judicial body, the Areopagus, instituted at Athens by Athena for the purpose. With the resolution of the curse and the institution of the murder court, the Erinyes are renamed Eumenides, “Kindly Ones,” and given a cult at the base of the Areopagus’s hill. But even when noise is tamed, renamed, and located at the heart of the city, it is not truly silenced, and while the newly citified Eumenides leave the stage singing, “[L]et all be ritually silent,”139 they retain their terror and are meant to. The resolution of the curse on the house of Argos, which is also, in Oresteia’s mythical agenda, the establishment of a democratic Athens, goes by way of the constitution of dissonance.140 When it associates the dread Erinyes with sound, Oresteia projects the paradigm of auditory affect onto a grand mythico-political scale and restates the argument developed in Seven. Here, too, there are those who seek to resist auditory affect. In Agamemnon, the chorus of old men envisage their uneasy premonitions about Agamemnon’s future in terms of an internal topography that mimics the space of the theater itself: fear “hovers like a guard” in front of their heart, singing an uncommissioned song (976–78), and a lyreless threnody of the Erinys sings within their thumos (990–93). Indeed, only a sense of the separate responsibilities of heart and tongue prevents the former from uttering aloud what it senses (1027–28), and as a result it only rumbles in darkness (1030). William Thalmann summarizes the physiology adumbrated in this passage: An immediate and unthinking emotion is aroused in the thumos (fear, anger, desire, and so forth). This feeling is then communicated to the kardia [heart], which reacts by throbbing and whirling. The kardia shares the thumos’ instinctive insight into the situation, and is just as passionately aroused. But now, with the activity of the kardia, the emotion has taken firm hold within the person. From the kardia the emotion affects the phren to a greater or lesser degree, and the phren may also be able to think rationally about the situation.141

The chorus’s inner situation, in which truths are held at bay at the perimeters of knowledge, is mirrored in the dramaturgy of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra herself, who might well be said to hover about the door of the royal house—certainly she controls it—and who by the end of the play is making some unwelcomed

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sounds of her own (as we have seen). Their attempt to suppress their own fears proves futile, even counterproductive: by the end of Agamemnon the insides of the house will cry out when the returning general is struck down (1343–45). The chorus themselves respond to this auditory signal with confusion, aporia, and deadlock (1346–71), much as they responded to their prophetic fear in the third ode. The refusal of sound and affect evinced by the chorus of old men in Agamemnon is corrected at the trilogy’s end when the Erinyes are installed at the heart of the Athenian polis. This comes with an explicit endorsement of the fear the chorus of the Agamemnon rejected: the Eumenides will enforce their injunction that the key to piety is the maintenance of fear not at the doors of feeling but within its core: ἔσθ᾽ ὅπου τὸ δεινὸν εὖ καὶ φρενῶν ἐπίσκοπον δεῖ μένειν καθήμενον· ξυμφέρει σωφρονεῖν ὑπὸ στένει. τίς δὲ μηδὲν ἐν δέει καρδίαν ἀνατρέφων ἢ πόλις βροτός θ᾽ ὁμοίως ἔτ᾽ ἂν σέβοι Δίκαν; There are situations where the uncanny (τὸ δεινόν) is good, and should remain, sitting like a guard over the mind. It is a fortune to reach wisdom through hardship. And what city or mortal that never raised his heart in fear would be able to act piously towards justice?142

Thalmann observes that the Eumenides “represent the presence of fear in the collective kardia of the city . . . This settled fear will preserve the proper orientation of the citizens’ phrenes and will thus ensure fulfillment of the chorus’ prayer.”143 Scholars have long wondered how strongly Aeschylus meant the Eumenides as a political statement.144 I am more intrigued by the possibility that it is a statement of tragic aesthetics: in the installation of the renamed Erinyes at the center of Athens we face, more than anything else, an argument for the uncanniness of tragedy as a perceptual form. The Erinyes are, to be sure, terrible to look at: but they are also terrible to hear, and their progression from offstage to on and from there to the city’s core repeats the narrative he explored in Persians and developed in Seven against Thebes. This is the tale of tragedy: terrible sounds invade

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and almost overcome—almost—dramatic form, resonating uncannily within the curved space of the theater. In Aeschylus’s Persians, the sound of a war horn is represented metaphorically as fire.145 In a similar mode, the chorus of his Seven against Thebes, panicked by the sounds of the Argive army drawing up outside the gates, declares that they “see a noise.”146 Synesthetic metaphors such as these, in which sound suddenly converts into an experience in another sensual modality, were not uncommon. One commentator explains them as follows: “the perceptions of the eye seem clearer and more vivid than those of the ear: hence the language of sight is graphically employed.”147 This explanation, however, depends on a hierarchy of the senses that does not prevail in the archaic or early classical period. Indeed, ancient natural philosophy suspected a plane of consistency at which the senses were interlinked and mutually communicable. In Greek Metaphor, Stanford proposed that synesthesia was easily explained by the atomic theory, since all sensations were accidents of the movements and confirmations of material particles—their equations of sight and touch were inevitable . . . Atomic theories of sound would suggest similar equivalences.148

Because it posited a common material substrate to all phenomena (and to all sense procedures and events of consciousness), atomism was in an excellent position to be able to emphasize the translatability between senses, rather than their hierarchical relations. Recent reflections on synesthesia have returned us to something like this materialist baseline, thanks in large part to the insights of post-Spinozist affect theory, where the links between affect, intensity, and synesthesia are profound. Brian Massumi describes affect as virtual; the “senses” are particularized moments of capture in which this virtuality is stabilized, its multiple potentialities reduced in the production of an “actual” perception.149 The points of contact between synesthesia and art are equally close. Indeed, Gilles Deleuze suggests that synesthesia takes place when a single sensual modality is intensified through art. If I seem to hear the hooves of the bulls represented in Francis Bacon’s paintings of bullfights, the reason is that Bacon’s use of line and color intensifies visuality to the point that it becomes synesthetic, drawing us into a multimedia world.150 For Deleuze, synesthesia has to do less with a realm of objects that transcend the division of the senses than with a realm in which the distinction between modalities has not yet taken place. Jean-Luc Nancy likewise identifies synesthe-

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sia as the result of sensual intensification through art, but he insists that there is no “unity” of the senses. Rather, art makes the senses touch one another. Touch is at once an intimacy and an exteriority (when I touch another person I am as close to their limits as I can possibly come; my experience of their edges induces, from the sensation of absolute separation, an impression of extraordinary closeness): the senses are always discrete and yet always rubbing up against each other. But touch also designates an uncanny kind of communication, as when we say someone is “touched” by madness or inspiration; that the senses touch one other means that they are distinct and yet they communicate.151 Riffing on a well-known passage by Baudelaire, Nancy characterizes this intersensual affectivity as a process of responsion: each sense responds to another as one responds to a demand or an appeal.152 When the technical intensification of one sensual modality brings about this synesthetic correspondence between distinct but touching senses, the result divides very distinct, incommunicable qualities (visual, sonorous, etc.) and. . . shares out among these qualities other qualities (or the same ones), which one might name with “metaphors” (such as the dark, the brilliant, the thick, the soft, the strident, etc., but also, through a generalized metaphorical circulation, taste or flavor, odor, tone, color, flesh, etc.), but which are in the final analysis metaphors in the proper sense, effective transports or communication across the incommunicable itself.153

Synesthetic metaphor would be less the reflection of a purported hierarchy of the senses or the expression of an “objective” and multisensory world than it would be a metapoetic symptom of perceptive intensities achieved through the agency of art. When auditory experience becomes powerful enough, it deterritorializes across the sensorium, emerging in other senses and thus becoming susceptible to description via “synesthetic metaphor.” In tragedy, too, synesthesia was actualized by moments of intensity: extreme experience provoked transitions between hearing and sight.154 And a pervasive association was made between synesthesia and the intensities brought about through technique. So much is this the case that the link between affect and synesthesia might be read as a template for the genre’s characteristic status as at once musical (i.e., auditory), theatrical (i.e., visual), and powerfully affective. It was a scenic commonplace to preface entrances, particularly spectacular ones, with a crescendo of passionate cries. In Aeschylus’s Persians, for example, the chorus summons the ghost of Darius with a series of musical groans.155 Their “badsounding speech” is given as the right way to invoke the dead,156 and their song is punctuated by the responding cries ἠέ and οἴ.157 At the climax of their necro-

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mantic utterance, the late great king’s specter emerges from the ground as though it were the visualization of their voices. A similar scheme underlies the entrance of the Erinyes in Eumenides. They make a series of offstage noises that culminate in their onstage epiphany, their physical presence the very body of their sound. Indeed, the Erinyes are the embodied principle of contagious violence, which has been metaphorically associated with sound since Agamemnon, and their entrance in Eumenides repeats the climactic scenes in both Agamemnon and Choephori when the corpses of victims are rolled out through the door of the skene after the audience has heard their terrible death cries. That offstage cries should preface moments of spectacular visuality in Oresteia, the earliest extant tragedy to rely on the skene as an integral part of its story, is suggestive: could the spatial arrangement of the playing space in the trilogy be a synesthetic application of auditory affect? Perhaps it is part of the genre’s constitution that what enters the orchestra from backstage is the visualization of terrible sound. A tragic cry, painted in light. In Sophocles’s Ajax, the synesthetic links between vision and audition are exploited in ways that are sometimes palpably metatheatrical. The play begins with an extraordinary reminder of the artificiality of theatrical space: Athena (onstage, presumably standing on the roof of the skene) speaks to Odysseus, who hears her voice but cannot see her form (14–17). Shortly thereafter, she calls Ajax onto the stage, reassuring Odysseus that the protagonist’s eyes are darkened by madness (83–85). The result, once Ajax enters, is a scene in which Odysseus can see Ajax but not Athena (whom he can only hear), and Ajax can hear Athena but see no one.158 Only Athena and the audience can see all the characters on the stage, and the audience must, in addition, imagine a surplus of sensory barriers, of mutual blindnesses, across which only sound is able to move. Here, madness is associated with the blockage of the passage between eye and ear, the failure to see what one can hear; Ajax’s return to sanity coincides with the return of his normal vision so that he is able to recognize the corpses that surround him as the bodies of livestock, not Achaean generals.159 Later, sound will provoke a series of entrances. The chorus appears in response to the noise of malevolent rumors, which accuse Ajax of slaughtering cattle (137–47, 164–71), and Teucer enters, propelled by the rumor of Ajax’s demise (998). Synesthetic metaphor occurs when half the chorus, returning to the stage after an unfruitful search for the play’s title character, hears the other half of the chorus returning. Excitedly, they cry out, “[L]ook, look! I hear some kind of thud!”160 The metaphor is motivated by their agitated state of mind as they search for Ajax, whom they increasingly fear to be dead. Shortly thereafter, they

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hear the lamentations of Teucer (again before they see him), which synesthetically “look over” Ajax’s ruin (βοῶντος ἀτῆς τῆςδ’ ἐπίσκοπον μέλος, 976). As the play progresses through the dramatization of its truth that there is an agony in heroic excess, it also increases its engagement with the truth of tragedy as a multisensory experience brought about by affective intensity. In the same playwright’s Philoctetes, the chorus hears Philoctetes’s cries of pain nearby; these are not indicated in the script, but a producer may well have inserted them him- or herself. The sound of the stricken hero leads to an auditory ecphrasis, which plays on the interplay of sound and light: ΧΟΡΟΣ. εὔστομ’ ἔχε, παῖ. ΝΕΟΠΤΟΛΕΜΟΣ. τί τόδε; Χο. προὐφάνη κτύπος, φωτὸς σύντροφος ὡς τειρομένου , ἤ που τᾷδ’ ἢ τᾷδε τόπων. βάλλει βάλλει μ’ ἐτύμα φθογγά του στίβον κατ’ ἀνάγκαν ἕρποντος, οὐδέ με λάθει βαρεῖα τηλόθεν αὐδὰ τρυσάνωρ· διάσημα θρηνεῖ. ἀλλ’ ἔχε, τέκνον—Νε. λέγ’ ὅ τι. Χο. φροντίδας νέας· ὡς οὐκ ἔξεδρος, ἀλλ’ ἔντοπος ἁνήρ, οὐ μολπὰν σύριγγος ἔχων, ὡς ποιμὴν ἀγροβάτας, ἀλλ’ ἤ που πταίων ὑπ’ ἀνάγκας βοᾷ τηλωπὸν ἰωάν, ἢ ναὸς ἄξενον αὐγάζων ὅρμον· προβοᾷ τι δεινόν. Chorus: Hold your tongue, child. Neoptolemus: Why? Cho: A sound appears, the habitual one of a man worn down by pain. Maybe it is coming from over there—or over there. A true voice . . . it strikes me . . . of one walking his path under compulsion. The inescapable deep voice of a weary man. He laments loud and clear. But hold, child— Ne. What? Cho. New thoughts. He is not a foreigner, but a man who lives here, without the melody of a syrinx, as a field-walking shepherd might have. Instead, he shouts a cry seen from afar as he is forced to stumble, or scans an anchorage unvisited by any ship. He cries out something terrible.161

That they hear a voice is emphasized over and over again: it is a “deep voice” (βαρεῖα αὐδά), a cry (ἰωά), shouted aloud (βοᾷ, προβοᾷ). The nature of the

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sound tells them all they need to know about the condition of its maker: he walks (or crawls; ἔρποντος), is worn down (τρυσάνωρ), stumbles (πταίων), and is hard-pressed by necessity. The passage almost systematically conflates visual and auditory imagery. Philoctetes’s noise (κτύπος) shines forth (προὐφάνη)—a crossing of sensory modalities reinforced by the fact that the compound verb shine forth (προφαίνω) in the first line of the strophic pair is answered, in the last line of the antistrophe, with the compound verb shout forth (προβοάω). Stumbling, he cries out with a cry (ἰωά) that is “seen from afar” (τηλωπὸν). The systematic mingling of the auditory and the visual is indicated by another responsion effect: the second last lines of both strophe and antistrophe end in αὐ, but this syllable begins an auditory word (αὐδά) in one stanza and a visual one (αὐγάζων) in the other. This elegantly constructed passage embodies its own truth, not least in the uneasy assemblage of eye and ear. Shortly thereafter, the wounded hero emerges onto the stage, an apparition to answer the chorus’s impassioned interpretation of his agonized voice. Scenes such as this, in which offstage sounds preceded entrances, were the most common deployment of the sound–vision nexus on the stage. Indeed, the conventional Aeschylean death scene, in which death cries from backstage are followed by a tableau or ekkuklema revealing the gory consequences, became an endemic formula in the theater of Dionysus. But the polarity could be reversed: the sounds could be onstage and have their effect offstage. In Euripides’ Hecuba, the cries of the recently blinded Polymestor receive an elaborate mythico-physical description from Agamemnon as he rushes in: κραυγῆς ἀκούσας ἦλθον· οὐ γὰρ ἥσυχος πέτρας ὀρείας παῖς λέλακ’ ἀνὰ στρατὸν Ἠχὼ διδοῦσα θόρυβον· εἰ δὲ μὴ Φρυγῶν πύργους πεσόντας ᾖσμεν Ἑλλήνων δορί, φόβον παρέσχ’ ἂν οὐ μέσως ὅδε κτύπος. I came because I heard a din: the child of the high rock did not stay silent but barked through the army—Echo, I mean, causing a racket. If we had not seen the Phrygian towers falling under the Greek spear, that noise would have provided no small fear.162

Agamemnon’s words are practically a compendium of the dramatic auditory lexicon: he heard a “clamor” (κραυγή), which is later called a “tumult” (θόρυβος) and, finally, just a “loud noise” (κτύπος). Perhaps the most informative word is θόρυβος, which nearly always refers sounds produced by a multitude of human voices—language in origin but inarticulate in its cumulative effect.163 Only Agamemnon’s knowledge that Troy has fallen prevents him from drawing the

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conclusion that the Greek army is under attack again: the noise produces fear (φόβος). There are no synesthetic metaphors here. But there do not need to be: supporting the narrative logic of the play (which requires a motive for Agamemnon’s entrance) is an aesthetic logic, or, rather, a synesthetic logic, which weaves the auditory and the visual together as a measure of heightened emotional tone. Agamemnon’s presence is a response to, one might say it is even an embodiment of, the agonized cries of Polymestor. A final example of the synesthetic conversion of intense sound into sight—in the ancient context it is most pervasive—is dance. When a chorus sang, it also danced—a usual accompaniment to the music, to be sure, but also the result of a kind of bodily infection as the music occupied the choreut’s body and transformed itself into movements, which, in turn, were experienced as visual spectacle by the audience. Tragedy took this pervasive experience and elaborated it, extending the poetics of dance into a narrative and theatrical form. The extreme experience of sound within a radically finite horizon led to an impassioned synesthetic theatrical space, in which gods can appear and even sounds seem to flash before the eyes. Thus did tragic theatricality, which began as the delimitation of a visual space by means of the mask and the skene, become spectacular: it was the consequence of this delimitation’s failure before the insistent movement of sound. Prometheus Bound, dated by most contemporary scholars to the second half of the fifth century,164 shows a tragic poet extending the affective resonance of sound across huge expanses of geographical space. Close to the play’s beginning, Prometheus is driven into a paroxysm of fear at the sounds moving through the air: ἆ ἆ ἔα ἔα· τίς ἀχώ, τίς ὀδμὰ προσέπτα μ’ ἀφεγγής; θεόσυτος ἢ βρότειος ἢ κεκραμένη τερμόνιον ἵκετ’ ἐπὶ πάγον; πόνων ἐμῶν θεωρός, ἢ τί δὴ θέλων; ὁρᾶτε δεσμώτην με δύσποτμον θεόν, τὸν Διὸς ἐχθρόν, τὸν πᾶσι θεοῖς δι’ ἀπεχθείας ἐλθόνθ’, ὁπόσοι τὴν Διὸς αὐλὴν εἰσοιχνεῦσιν, διὰ τὴν λίαν φιλότητα βροτῶν. φεῦ φεῦ τί ποτ’ αὖ κινάθισμα κλύω πέλας οἰωνῶν; αἰθὴρ δ’ ἐλαφραῖς

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πτερύγων ῥιπαῖς ὑποσυρίζει· πᾶν μοι φοβερὸν τὸ προσέρπον. A a ea ea—what echo, what obscure scent approaches me? Is it god-sent or mortal or mixed, that comes to this rock at the edges of things? To watch my pain, or to ask for something? Behold the bound and ill-fated god, the enemy of Zeus, who came to be hated by all who live in the palace of Zeus, because of his too-great friendship with mortals. Pheu Pheu what movement of birds do I hear nearby? The air hisses with the buoyant fluttering of wings. Everything that approaches me is fearful.165

What Prometheus hears is the approaching chorus of Nereids, who come on winged chariots to see the Titan in pain. Although he says “everything that approaches [him] is fearful,” it is a reflex of his prophetic insight that the sound of wings should cause him fear; Zeus’s final escalation will be to send an eagle to feast on the Titan’s liver.166 When the chorus of Nereids appears in the next line, we learn that the sound of his being bound reached them in their undersea dwelling: κτύπου γὰρ ἀχὼ χάλυβος διῇξεν ἄντρων μυχόν, ἐκ δ’ ἔπληξέ μου τὰν θεμερῶπιν αἰδῶ· The echo of the striking of steel came to the depths of the cave, and it struck the grave shame out of me.167

Indeed, Prometheus’s agony has begun to resound on a nearly universal scale. Asians, Amazons, Scythians, and Arabians have heard his cries and groan in harmony with him.168 Here and in the parodos, sound moves across vast and separate spaces, penetrating into areas that sight cannot go and amplifying through ever-widening circuits of grief. Prometheus Bound turns the cosmos into a giant affective resonating chamber. That such an image should occur in the early moments of a tragedy about the tutelary deity of technical skill is hardly coincidence. Resonance was a sophisticated concept indeed, a cutting-edge procedural paradigm strongly associated with physical theory. It had been a concern to acoustics since at least the moment, during or shortly after the life of Pythagoras, when it was discovered that the “concords,” that is, the consonant intervals of octave, fifth, and fourth, could be expressed by the ratios 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (fifth), 4:3 (fourth). Unfortunately, most of the legends about how the discovery was made are out of touch with

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physical reality. Pythagoras is said to have realized after a chance encounter in a smithy that hammers striking metal objects produce pitches a fourth, a fifth, and an octave apart if the objects’ weights are in the ratio of 4:3:2:1. This does not work.169 He is also said to have attached weights to strings; the weights were in the ratio of 4:3:2:1 to each other, and the strings produced the musical intervals of an octave, a fourth, and a fifth. This experiment, too, does not work. But two other experiments, conducted in the later sixth century, could have confirmed the numerical concords. The first, attributed to Hippasus, involved creating four bronze disks with equal diameters but thicknesses such that “one was 4/3 that of the second, 3/2 that of the third, and twice that of the fourth”: if these were hung from a rope and struck, they would make the required intervals.170 Hippasus is associated with another experiment that is even more telling: filling vessels with water such that one was 1/2 full, one 3/2 full, and so on will not produce the needed intervals if the vessel is struck—but it will produce them if the air within the vessels is set resonating.171 Perhaps provoked by such experiments, musicians began to manipulate the process they depended on.172 The citharist Lysander of Sicyon, for example, is said to have increased the sonic weight and volume of his lyre;173 the easiest way to have done this would have been to experiment with the sound box and resonating board.174 Resonance was associated with hearing, as well. Alcmaeon of Kroton, who has Pythagorean associations,175 made a connection between the behavior of sound in enclosed spaces and the anatomical structure of the ear; just as one could create an echo in a cave, a canyon, or a temple, so too will a sound create an echo upon entering the ear.176 Such theories rapidly became mainstream. Modeling the transmission of sound in terms of affect, and envisaging not only particularized, finite events of affective transmission but also large-scale, open-ended processes of dissemination, pre-Socratic philosophers developed theories of auditory experience that have much in common with recent critiques of the affective ecology of urban fear. “The body,” writes Goodman in Sonic Warfare, “is rendered as a multi fx-unit, a transducer of vibration as opposed to a detached listening subject isolated from its sonic objects.”177 Thus, according to the mid-fifth-century poet and natural philosopher Empedocles, hearing happened when sound fell onto the hard parts of the ear, causing it to resonate like a bell.178 More than a century later, Aristotle’s student and successor, Theophrastus, would object: if external sounds produce internal sounds, what hears the internal sounds?179 It seems a telling objection. But Empedocles would not have granted the assumption that there had to be a “what” to hear the internal sounds: that is an Aristotelian conclusion, rooted in the idea that the soul, in sensing, must also sense itself

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sensing.180 For Empedocles, it was enough to define hearing as internal sound. He held that perception came about through the encounter of “like things with like” (as Theophrastus put it); the cognitive part of the soul, which Empedocles identified with the blood, contained elements capable of resonating with the resonation in the ear: this resonation was the sensation of sound.181 A cognate theory was endorsed a few decades later by Diogenes of Apollonia. Diogenes’s fundamental physical hypothesis was that air was the only element; the challenge of his cosmology was to show how air brought all things into being.182 He argued that hearing comes about when the air inside the ears is set in motion by the air outside them; the motion of the ear air is then communicated to the head air, which is, in fact, the soul air.183 We are “conscious” of sound because our head resonates with our ears, and our ears with the world.184 “Conscious,” however, is clearly the wrong word: in a model such as this one, the listener becomes the sound he or she hears. Theories in which thought was essentially continuous with the senses and thence with what was sensed were not uncontested.185 But they were important and mainstream, united by a radical and unblinking materialism. The most wellknown materialism is that of Democritus. Theophrastus claimed that Democritus’s theory of hearing was the same as everybody else’s “except that [sound] enters the body everywhere, but especially at the ears, where it passes through the empty space and doesn’t wait around there.”186 In other words, the ear does not operate as a resonating chamber but as a line of flight; sound falls on the whole body, but it is stopped everywhere else. An explanation of why different people have better or worse senses of hearing follows; a person hears well (ὀξύτατον) if his or her ear is dense (πύκνος) and his or her vessels (φλαβία) are empty, moisture free, and well bored (εὐτρήτα) in the whole body. It helps, too, if a person’s bones are dense, his or her brain is temperate (εὐκράτος), and everything around it is as dry as possible. Democritus’s explanation is connected to his view that the mind is material and everywhere in the body. For a sense to be sensed it needs to be able to disperse to the whole soul.187 There is a physical contagion of atomic configurations, from the sound source to the medium, through the ears, and into the body and the soul. Successful hearing, then, depends not on the ear resonating but on something like resonance in the whole body. Hippocratic writers, too, posited material connections between sensual stimuli and states of soul and theorized hearing as affect. The Hippocratic corpus, although not unified, shows strong affinities with natural philosophical theory, and develops models analogous with the paradigm I have traced. Both On the Places in a Human Being (henceforth, Places) and On Flesh agreed that hear-

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ing was accomplished through the organ of the ear. But the two works differed on how and why the ear allowed us to hear. According to Places, the membrane around the brain was pierced at a point corresponding with the ear and only there: only sounds that go through the ear and into the cranial region could be heard distinctly (διαφραδέως). Those that struck the “emptiness all around the ear” were heard less clearly, requiring a much higher volume and intensity to be sensed.188 Because the only hole in the meningus was at the ear, the sense of hearing was much more acute and far ranging than the sense of smell, which had no direct access to the brain. In Places, the brain heard. In On Flesh, by contrast, it was the ear. Sound penetrated through the ear canal to “a bone that is hard and dry like a stone, and beside this there is a cavernous hollow”;189 the hardness of the bone, the hollow cavity next to it, and the fact that the skin next to the bone was drier and thinner than other skin together created the best conditions for resonance (“there are many proofs that what is driest echoes best”); maximal resonance led to maximal hearing.190 Although Places is the later text, its theory that hearing takes place in the brain would appear to be earlier, because the author On Flesh criticized it: the brain could not be where the resonance takes place, argued the author of On Flesh, because the brain was moist, surrounded by a moist membrane and thick bones, and resonance was assisted by dryness. Resonance could also be a pathological sign. The Hippocratic corpus described several clinical situations in which the head or ear rang or was liable to ring or be full of noise. In Diseases II, a series of head illnesses caused ringing in the ears.191 The filling of the smaller vessels around the brain with phlegm led to a throbbing of the vessels in the vicinity of the ear; this throbbing combined with swelling could cause difficulty of hearing (βαρυηκοεῖ).192 Diseases II also emphasized the importance of resonance to normal hearing: when the amount of air in the empty areas in the ear was reduced, the resonance (ἦχον) was also reduced, and as a result, hearing might be impaired.193 The Hippocratic Regimen emphasized the physicality of the soul, in the process transforming auditory affect into a major mode of psychological conditioning. After expounding the theory that human beings are by nature composed of heat and liquid (or “the hot” and “the moist”), the author went on to show how different combinations of these elemental materials led to different psychological states. Those in whom liquid predominated tended to be slower and duller, while those in whom heat predominated were smarter and quicker—but too much heat would result in madness.194 In book two of Regimen, exercises are prescribed to dry the soul and increase its heat:

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Εἰσὶ γὰρ οἱ μὲν κατὰ φύσιν, οἱ δὲ διὰ βίης· οἱ μὲν οὖν κατὰ φύσιν αὐτῶν εἰσιν ὄψιος πόνος, ἀκοῆς, φωνῆς, μερίμνης. Ὄψιος μὲν οὖν δύναμις τοιαύτη· προσέχουσα ἡ ψυχὴ τῷ ὁρεομένῳ κινέεται καὶ θερμαίνεται· θερμαινομένη δὲ ξηραίνεται, κεκενωμένου τοῦ ὑγροῦ. Διὰ δὲ τῆς ἀκοῆς ἐσπίπτοντος τοῦ ψόφου σείεται ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ πονέει, πονέουσα δὲ θερμαίνεται καὶ ξηραίνεται. Ὁκόσα μεριμνᾷ ἄνθρωπος, κινέεται ἡ ψυχὴ ὑπὸ τουτέων καὶ θερμαίνεται καὶ ξηραίνεται, καὶ τὸ ὑγρὸν καταναλίσκουσα πονέει, καὶ κενοῖ τὰς σάρκας, καὶ λεπτύνει τὸν ἄνθρωπον. Ὁκόσοι δὲ πόνοι φωνῆς, οἷον λέξις ἢ ἀνάγνωσις ἢ ᾠδὴ, πάντες οὗτοι κινέουσι τὴν ψυχήν· κινεομένη δὲ ξηραίνεται καὶ θερμαίνεται, καὶ τὸ ἐν τῷ σώματι ὑγρὸν καταναλίσκει. Some [exercises] are natural, and some are not. Those which are natural include the exercise of sight, hearing, speech, and thought. This is the power of sight: when the soul applies itself to what it sees, it is moved and warmed, and when it is warmed it becomes dry, and the moisture is eliminated. When a sound falls on the hearing the soul is shaken and exercised, and exercising it is warmed and dried. Whatever a man reflects on, his soul is moved by these things and is warmed and dried, and consuming the moisture it exercises and it empties the flesh and makes the man more slender. All exercises of the voice, as in speaking or reading or singing, move the soul—and when it is moved it is dried and warmed and it consumes the moisture in the body.195

Here cognitive procedures are connected with perceptions without marking a change of nature. The unstated implication is that the exercises outlined in this passage will make you smarter because hotter and drier souls tend to be cognitively more adept than wet and cold ones. In fact what is being offered, under cover of a set of prescriptions for “regimen” or way of life, is a materialist theory of learning: seeing, hearing, thinking (or at least worrying), and singing each agitate, warm, and dry the soul. Regimen is not primarily a text about the care of the sick: it is, more broadly, about the human organism and its maintenance and so is, at least potentially, about the body and the soul of the physician. That reflection puts the comments just cited about the “natural” exercise of eyes and ear and mind in a different light. In addition to being a set of prescriptions about how a patient may be kept in psychological health, they are also a description of medical practice modulated into materialist talk: looking, listening, thinking, and speaking literally dry and heat the doctor’s soul, thus making him more likely to be able to discern the causes and prognosis of the patient’s symptoms. Natural-philosophical theories of sound and hearing made claims about auditory affect at the level of physical contagion and sensation. Cultural theory extended these claims to explore the way poetry and music produced emotional and ethical changes in their hearers, identifying auditory affect at the level of art.196 Around the middle of the fifth century, Damon of Oa sought to associ-

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ate musical forms and states of soul.197 Melodies played in different modes or scales, he argued, produced different states of mind in their hearers. Seeing the participants at a symposium getting a little out of hand as the auletris played in the Phrygian mode, he ordered the mode changed to the Dorian—and everyone suddenly sobered up (so at least went the story).198 According to a late compendium of the theory and philosophy of music by Aristides Quintilianus, Damon’s followers claimed that the communication of a state of mind from a melody to a soul came about “through sameness”: ὅτι γὰρ δι’ ὁμοιότητος οἱ φθόγγοι συνεχοῦς μελωιδίας πλάττουσί τε οὐκ ὂν ἦθος ἔν τε παισὶ καὶ τοῖς ἤδη προβεβηκόσι καὶ ἐνδομυχοῦν ἐξάγουσιν, ἐδήλουν καὶ οἱ περὶ Δάμωνα. The fact that the notes of a continuous melody form a previously absent state of character in both children and older men, and draw out a state of character that is already there because of the melody’s sameness [to these states], was made clear by Damon’s followers.199

Implied is a contagion of structure across media (air, ear, soul . . .).200 Damon’s claim that melodies work an ethical condition in children “through sameness” (δι’ ὁμοιότητος) suggests that his approach depended on a “perception-by-sames” theory, like those of Empedocles or Diogenes, in which the senses act as conduits or resonance chambers for physical impulses in the external air that are then communicated to the soul, producing an identical or at least isologous structure there. This is made more certain by the report in Athenaeus that “the students of the Athenian Damon do not badly say that songs and dances must come into being when the soul is moved, and that beautiful and free songs and dances cause the same, and the opposite the opposite.”201 The interesting detail here is the relationship between the movements of dancing and singing and the movement of the soul: transmission of structure causes the typical affects of music. Gorgias of Leontini, whose intellectual genealogy links him with Empedocles, made emotional response a central function of auditory transmission in the Encomium of Helen. Developing the thesis that if Helen were persuaded to leave Sparta for Troy she should not be held accountable for her actions, this text offered a theory of how language works; a “powerful ruler” (δυνάστης μέγας), it accomplishes divine things with “the smallest and most invisible body” (σμικροτάτῳ σώματι καὶ ἀφανεστάτῳ) (10). Persuasion (πειθώ) “strikes” or “imprints” (ἐτυπώσατο) the soul (13), thereby producing what it wants in the hearer’s consciousness. In doing this it operates in much the same way as love, which enters the eyes and strikes or imprints (τυπεῖ) the soul. Indeed, a logos affects the “order”

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or arrangement (τάξις) of the soul much as medicine affects the arrangement of the body (14). Gorgias’s famous equation of language with pharmaceuticals was possible not because he saw language as a quasi-magical force, but because he saw pharmaceuticals as material causes working on a material soul.202 Gorgias’s theory is remarkably similar to Democritus’s, at least as Theophrastus reports it. For Democritus, too, sensation comes about when forms strike or imprint our sensory capabilities. Democritus’s theories of art are regrettably badly documented (our main source, Porphyry, was reading in Democritus’s physical or psychological books), but they must have depended on similarly materialist postulates. It is impossible, given the silence of the sources, to do anything but speculate. But it is a worthy speculation that his opinions about music and poetry might have reflected his theory of sound production and hearing. Just as in the production, transmission, and experience of sound, the most important moment is the creation of atomic assemblages that move through the air, so, too, we might suggest, is signifying speech a similar kind of formation, an imposition of what Democritus would probably have called ῥυσμός or “form” on the inarticulate and meaningless cries with which the human species began. It is also possible that ῥυσμός, which can mean “rhythm” as well as “form,” united its technical sense and its musical sense in the lost works on music. Music’s impact on the body and the soul must have been regular and metered, and it would not be a bad guess that Democritus drew conclusions about the characteristic affects it brought about. Gorgias attributes the semantic effects of persuasion to the material logos, and it is unclear by this whether he means “language” or “discourse”—the latter being the artfully arranged speech whose goal is persuasion. I incline to think he means the latter: his goal in the Encomium of Helen is to exemplify, theorize, and recommend the almost-poetic oratory for which he was to become famous. When Gorgias links materialism and affect in his account of hearing, in other words, I think he does so in the context of an account of artful speech. Not long after his words on the power of logos, he goes on to remark that poetry can make an audience experience great pleasure even in listening to a character in extreme agony. He gives no examples, but I imagine he is thinking of those moments in tragedy when a character’s grief, fear, or pain carries him or her toward song and, at the greatest extremes, into the unlanguaged cry. Indeed, in the tragic cry the poet literally works with the form and arrangement of elements of words (even the term for element, στοιχεῖον, covers both “letters” and “atoms.”) A figure of extreme affect, the tragic cry thus seems also to be a figure of matter, where matter is conceived in Democritean fashion as a field of recombinant particles.

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A tantalizing fragment of Democritus suggests that he saw in auditory affect a bridge linking the primitive origins of human vocal communication with the most deliberate and sophisticated artful manipulations of the voice. In the early days of humankind, he argued, “the voice was at first meaningless and confused, but bit by bit words were articulated out of it, and making symbols at each other about each of the things they wanted to signify, they made their expressions clear to each other on every subject.”203 Language emerged slowly from an initial condition in which the voice was inarticulate and unsignifying. Music, by contrast, was a late invention that responded to no need. It came into being only after a level of security and stability had been achieved, and it was ethically useless.204 This is a striking claim, a total reversal of the idea that musicians were also city builders and lawgivers (usually promulgated by musicians themselves). For Democritus, in distinction to this common notion, music was socially useless and incapable of communication and, thus, the symmetrical opposite of the inarticulate human voice. Both music and prelinguistic vocalization are on the outside of language: one, an expression of unmediated need and desire and, the other, a purposeless expression of the plastic possibilities inherent in sound. And both are major vectors of affect.

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While writing the Laws, an aging Plato turned his ears to the musical sounds of the theater. He did not like what he heard. It seemed to him that modern music disobeyed ancient laws (νόμοι) that assigned a specific melodic form (μελοῦς εἶδος) to each kind of song and prohibited hybrid or mixed-genre compositions. In the past, Plato imagined, experts who listened in silence judged music—and nonexperts were compelled to be silent too, threatened with violent punishment if they vocally expressed their uninformed opinions. Nowadays, however, unscrupulous musicians listened only to the demands made by popular pleasure, and they mixed things up, combining genres with no regard for the old laws and fostering a theatocracy in which the audience shouted out pleasure at what they heard. He thought the result was both morally and aesthetically dubious—a thundering cacophony echoing the turpitude of a city given over to pleasure.1 Plato was reacting to a musical style that had become mainstream in the fifth century BCE. Typified in the work of artists like Timotheus, Euripides, and Agathon, it was a sophisticated system with an extensive palette of resources both tonal and nontonal.2 Although some recent scholars have called it “new music,” its roots lie as far back as the mid-sixth century,3 and it had a long-lived but not conservative tradition.4 In fact, the style’s very longevity may be due to its support of sounds that challenged the expectations of listeners and performers alike.5 The idea was not to push the musical envelope but to break it, to steer a melody into uncharted auditory regions, and to exploit the energies produced 97

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by the transition between inside (traditional, vernacular, recognized) and outside (new, unfamiliar, illegitimate according to older standards). The resulting works of art often diverged from the normative statements of theoretical, technical, and traditional voices attempting to canonize “music” as a form of culture, and as a consequence they generated a peculiar species of pleasure among their admirers and strong negative responses in others.6 The music’s earliest identifiable traces are in the aulos music of Sacadas, who introduced timbral effects into compositions otherwise composed primarily of sequences of musical pitches. The influence of Sacadas can be felt in the sixthcentury rethinking of some aspects of the lyre’s ethical significance, and was palpable in the music designed for the reorganized festival of Dionysus at Athens at the end of the century; from this point on, choral music sought melodic complexity as a figure of sound. After tracing the legacy of Sacadas through the musical engagements of Pindar, I turn to some of the music’s critics, then delineate the statements of Timotheus and Euripides, two proponents from the end of the fifth century. In the late 580s, a musician named Sacadas won the competition at Delphi for solo performance on the aulos, a double-reed “woodwind” instrument usually played in pairs by a single performer.7 The piece he played would come to be known as the Pythian nome; its theme was Apollo’s occupation of his Delphic cult site.8 The story went that Delphi originally belonged to a serpent (later called Python); Apollo’s first act on taking the place over was to kill the creature. The Pythian nome’s climax was a representation of this battle and the serpent’s death.9 The Homeric hymn to Apollo, probably composed in the later part of the sixth century,10 tells the story in terms that may recall Sacadas’s composition. ὃς τῇ γ᾽ ἀντιάσειε, φέρεσκέ μιν αἴσιμον ἦμαρ πρίν γέ οἱ ἰὸν ἐφῆκε ἄναξ ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων καρτερόν· ἡ δ᾽ ὀδύνῃσιν ἐρεχθομένη χαλεπῇσι κεῖτο μέγ᾽ ἀσθμαίνουσα κυλινδομένη κατὰ χῶρον. θεσπεσίη δ᾽ ἐνοπὴ γένετ᾽ ἄσπετος· Whoever came against [the serpent], his fated day would take him off—until the lord Apollo, the distant archer, sent a mighty arrow after her. And she, broken by bitter pains, lay rolling about in the place and gasping loudly. That was an uncanny and unspeakable voice that arose.11

The use of sound in this scene is familiar from archaic Greek sound culture in general: a sound is associated with the other and the outside and then is imported

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into the representation to juxtapose euphony with cacophony, order with noise. That the sounds of the dying serpent had an affective force are confirmed by the way it is described: as the beast writhes on the ground, it lets out an “uncanny and unspeakable voice.” Sacadas told the same story wordlessly, imitating the death of the monster with a technique called the syrigmos. Reed instruments make lots of sounds other than stable tones or pitches—they can squeak, honk, and roar, as well—and the syrigmos exploited one part of this timbral range by making a “hissing” sound, probably when the player overblew or adjusted the mouthpieces of the auloi.12 Another auletic nome that entered the repertoire at about the same time, the “Many-Headed” (πολυκεφαλός) nome, told the story of the death of the gorgon Medusa and again used the syrigmos to imitate the sound of the surviving Gorgons’ lamentations for their slain sister.13 In both these pieces, the aulos’s wide auditory range was explored so that the defeat of monsters could be represented with sounds not based in the stabilization of pitch. The syrigmos moved the aulos to the center of the sixth-century universe of art music. It might have been predicted that the aulos would explore such sounds: the instrument had long-standing associations with the uncanny. It was ritually linked to the divine (the aulos was played at sacrifices) and with states of mind such as those inspired by Dionysus (dithyramb and tragedy were accompanied by the aulos).14 Even its sound aroused such associations, if there is any value in the fact that Aristophanes imitated it with the onomatopoeic μυμῦ μυμῦ μυμῦ μυμῦ μυμῦ μυμῦ.15 This sound bears a revealing resemblance to the cries of the Erinyes at the beginning of the Eumenides (called, in the text, a μυγμός).16 The syrigmos enhanced these resonances, enriching the aulos’s sonorousness in a manner analogous to the way poets used the noise of monsters to turn poetry into a meeting point of artful order and disruptive disorder.17 The lyre, with its limited number of tightened strings, was capable of a lesscomplex palette of sounds. Nonetheless, lyre players took up the aulos’s challenge. On the ideological plane, the lyre got new associations, making it seem more open to the disruptive outside. This happened most notably in the Homeric hymn to Hermes,18 a song for solo singer accompanied by the lyre. The hymn told of the lyre’s invention by the eponymous god of thieves and tricksters. This did nothing to change the instrument’s sound, but it did change its affiliations, ideationally assimilating it to aulos music by linking it with a god who regularly transgressed the border between lawful and unlawful. Although he is the son of Zeus, Hermes is born in obscure circumstances, in the cave of his mother far from Olympus. The central problem of the first day of his life is how to win the recognition of his father and, with that, to enter

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Olympian society. But first, he invents the lyre, and because a god still on the verge of legitimacy creates it, the lyre starts as an outsider instrument. It makes sounds to match. αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ τεῦξε φέρων ἐρατεινὸν ἄθυρμα πλήκτρῳ ἐπειρήτιζε κατὰ μέλος, ἡ δ’ ὑπὸ χειρὸς σμερδαλέον κονάβησε· θεὸς δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδεν ἐξ αὐτοσχεδίης πειρώμενος, ἠΰτε κοῦροι ἡβηταὶ θαλίῃσι παραιβόλα κερτομέουσιν, ἀμφὶ Δία Κρονίδην καὶ Μαιάδα καλλιπέδιλον † ὃν πάρος ὠρίζεσκον † ἑταιρείῃ φιλότητι, ἥν τ’ αὐτοῦ γενεὴν ὀνομακλυτὸν ἐξονομάζων· ἀμφιπόλους τε γέραιρε καὶ ἀγλαὰ δώματα νύμφης, καὶ τρίποδας κατὰ οἶκον ἐπηετανούς τε λέβητας. καὶ τὰ μὲν οὖν ἤειδε, τὰ δὲ φρεσὶν ἄλλα μενοίνα. But when he had constructed it he held the lovely toy and tested it with the plectrum according to the demands of song, and it rang out marvelously beneath his hands. The god sang beautifully to its accompaniment, testing it out with an improvisation just as young men contest with traded insults at festivals. He sang of Zeus the son of Kronos and of beautifully-sandaled Maia, †and of how they once conversed† in love, naming his own glorious genesis. He celebrated the nymph’s servants and bright home, the tripods and many cauldrons throughout the house. He sang these things—but his mind was intent on other things.19

The instrument “rings out terribly” (σμερδαλέον κονάβησε). Setting this example aside, the adverb σμερδαλέον is used to describe serpents,20 the bedraggled and near-death appearance of Odysseus as he washes up on Phaecia,21 and the flashing appearance of armor.22 It is often applied to sound with similar implications: it describes the shouting of Diomedes in the heat of battle,23 the roar of a lion,24 the echoing house of Circe as Odysseus’s theriomorphed companions lament their bestial fate,25 and the thunder of Zeus.26 Κοναβέω is similarly unlikely as the description of a musical instrument.27 These are inauspicious sounds, associated with the lyre because at this point, it and Hermes remain outside the ordering context of the Olympian regime.28 The Homeric hymn to Hermes consistently uses sound to signal its subject’s status as an outsider. When Apollo picks up the infant god, he farts and sneezes— bodily sounds that immediately make the son of Leto put him down.29 As Apollo speaks, Hermes wiggles his eyebrows and whistles.30 The verb for whistle is ὑποσυρίζω. Cognate with συριγμός (the word associated with Sacadas’s piece),

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it designates an airy hissing characterized by the sound s and explicitly associates the young god with the python of the Pythian nome.31 When a musical instrument accompanies a singer, Greek designates this with compound verbs whose first element is ὑπο-:32 Hermes’s “whistling” here, in other words, is a quasi-auletic accompaniment to Apolline speech. All of this establishes auletic associations not only for the god but also for his invention. The next time Hermes plays his instrument, Zeus has recognized his son. The young god’s new legitimacy is reflected in the description of the performance he gives. The first time he sang, the song was raw, unsanctioned, an “outsider” performance. An essay or an attempt (πειρώμενος), it was compared to the “deceitful” (παραιβόλα) songs made up at festivals by competing young men—not, in other words, the commanding performance of a bard but the playful, fromthe-hip riffing of an aggressive young man. It was also very local in significance: he sang the story of his own birth, and of the household and possessions of his mother—a song of self-interest that contrasted with the generalized, diffused poetics of Panhellenic song.33 Finally, he sang without the assistance of the Muses, even without paying particular attention to his own performance, in a state of distraction very different from the presence typical of the inspired epos. This time, the lyre rings out terribly at first, as it had at the beginning—an indication that it remains new and mysterious.34 But what follows is more collected, concentrated, and careful. He is not just testing; he is confident,35 and he does not sing of his immediate context but of the global order of Olympus.36 The order of his material is similar to that of Theogony; he begins with Mnemosyne and the Muses, then turns to each of the gods in order of birth. This song is, in effect, a cosmogony. He has become a singer in contact with the Olympian wells of song. His recognized status is also indicated by the advice he offers Apollo along with the gift of the lyre. Whoever treats the instrument with ignorance and violence, he says, will make sounds that are no more than empty chatter.37 But it will speak softly to whoever questions it with art (τέχνη) and wisdom (σοφίη).38 The lyre would seem like the ideal “amateur instrument” (it was so embraced by the Athenian upper class in the fifth century):39 an instrument with a limited number of strings, it is played by simply plucking or striking them. No complicated finger work is needed, and knowledge of a melody only requires knowing which string to play in what order and in what rhythm. But it is much more difficult to recognize and deploy the entire system of tonal, rhythmical, and melodic differences that constitute a song culture in the technical sense. This certainly would require skill and wisdom, and could be seen as another analogue to the Olympian concept of order in which everything has a place and stays in it: it is the latter, I sug-

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gest, that is being pointed to in Hermes’s instructions to Apollo. It is not enough just to pluck out a melody; one has to know how the tune fits with the tuning. By the end of the hymn, then, Hermes has found his way into the society of the gods, established a friendship with Apollo, and shown himself knowledgeable of and committed to the kinds of order endorsed by the Olympians. But even the accepted Hermes is a patron of thieves and tricksters, a traveler, a crosser of boundaries. Apollo recognizes this and fears that his stepbrother will find a way to steal the instrument back. So he elicits an oath and seeks to bind him with a series of countergifts, including the messenger’s staff and some curious “bee maidens”: σεμναὶ γάρ τινες εἰσὶ κασίγνηται γεγαυῖαι παρθένοι ὠκείῃσιν ἀγαλλόμεναι πτερύγεσσι τρεῖς· κατὰ δὲ κρατὸς πεπαλαγμέναι ἄλφιτα λευκὰ οἰκία ναιετάουσιν ὑπὸ πτυχὶ Παρνησοῖο μαντείης ἀπάνευθε διδάσκαλοι ἣν ἐπὶ βουσὶ παῖς ἔτ’ ἐὼν μελέτησα· πατὴρ δ’ ἐμὸς οὐκ ἀλέγιζεν. ἐντεῦθεν δὴ ἔπειτα ποτώμεναι ἄλλοτε ἄλλῃ κηρία βόσκονται καί τε κραίνουσιν ἕκαστα. αἱ δ’ ὅτε μὲν θυίωσιν ἐδηδυῖαι μέλι χλωρὸν προφρονέως ἐθέλουσιν ἀληθείην ἀγορεύειν· ἢν δ’ ἀπονοσφισθῶσι θεῶν ἡδεῖαν ἐδωδὴν ψεύδονται δὴ ἔπειτα δι’ ἀλλήλων δονέουσαι. τάς τοι ἔπειτα δίδωμι. For there are certain august sisters, maidens delighting in swift wings, three of them: their heads are sprinkled with white grain and they live on a fold of Parnassus. They are independent teachers of prophecy, which I cared for even when I was a child—though my father did not trouble himself. They fly here and there, grazing on honeycomb and bringing things to fulfillment. When they are inspired, having eaten the golden honey, they happily want to speak the truth. But if they are separated from the sweet food of the gods, they lie and just buzz around in a cloud. I give them to you.40

There will probably always be mystery about who these “bee maidens” are and why they came to be associated with Hermes.41 In the economy of the hymn, however, they represent perfect reciprocity with the gift of the lyre. Just as the latter was a creation of Hermes’s extreme youth, so, too, were the bee maidens a care to Apollo when he was a child. Indeed, Apollo’s (bitter?) quip that when he cared for the bee maidens his father did not care for him suggests that his association with them occurred at a time when he was still outside the order

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of the Olympians, as Hermes was when he invented the lyre.42 They also show the same relationship to divine inspiration and sound as does the lyre. Just as Apollo receives a lyre that must be treated with skill and wisdom if it is to sing, so, too, must the bees be properly cultivated; when they are not in contact with the divine, they merely buzz (δονέουσαι), producing a sound that has no truth. In the case of both the lyre and the bee maidens, unwelcome sound is associated with an insufficient amount of care or skill. The clear demarcation between how both sound when well used and how they sound otherwise could be treated as a consequence of their association with the gods’ youth, when they remained outside their father’s order. Because of these associations, they retain a high potential for noise. And despite the apparent endorsement of unambiguous, euphonious musical technique in Hermes’s advice, this potential never dissipates. After all, mythical time is not just an older, archaic time of origins: it is a narrative refraction of the present. The stories the Homeric Hymns tell took place before “now,” to be sure, but they also signify realities that continue to prevail. Both the lyre and the bee maidens are subject to this logic: like Hermes, who will always be a trickster, the lyre will always resonate with its erstwhile noisiness. Indeed, it resonates with the tale of Hermes’s punk phase, which occupies the bulk of the hymn. The Hymn to Hermes, in other words, affirms for the lyre a poetics similar to what had been central to the aulos since at least the time of Sacadas (and had been central to poetry since the earliest traces). One indication of the success of this ideological assimilation of aulos and lyre can be gathered from Sophocles’s Ichneutae (Trackers), a satyr play, now fragmentary, which adapted the story of the hymn to Hermes for the Athenian stage (adding, for good measure, a few not very sober ithyphallic theriomorphs). In Sophocles’s telling, the task of finding Apollo’s stolen cattle is given to the chorus of satyrs. When they eventually find Maia’s cave, the doors are shut, and the sound of the lyre emerges from behind them. The satyrs respond with terror to this new and unaccustomed sound.43 The result is a scene of auditory affect of the kind pioneered in the theatre of Dionysus by Aeschylus (see chapter 2), but in a tragico-comedic mode. The innovation in Sophocles’s scene is that the sounds they hear are not cries of murder but the tones of a newly made lyre. Tragedy and satyr play are normally associated with the aulos, which was an obligatory part of the instrumentation, and stringed instruments are rare. Usually, a lyre appears on stage because the story demands it or because the iconography of a character would be incomplete without it;44 here, in contrast, the focus is squarely on the instrument’s sound and its affective power. Indeed, although it might seem perverse to point this out, we have no reason to assume that the music at this moment was not actually

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played by an aulos, as would have been conventional for the genre. If it were, the ideological assimilation of lyre and aulos would have been underscored by an aural transposition. Attempts to translate this ideological assimilation into actual sound seem to have occurred at about the same time as the hymn to Hermes.45 A passage in Athenaeus describes a Sicyonian who developed techniques on the cithara that explicitly imitated the sonorities typical of aulos music: Λύσανδρος . . . ὁ Σικυώνιος κιθαριστὴς πρῶτος μετέστησε τὴν ψιλοκιθαριστικήν, μακροὺς τοὺς τόνους ἐκτείνας καὶ τὴν φωνὴν εὔογκον ποιήσας, καὶ τὴν ἔναυλον κιθάρισιν, ᾗ πρῶτοι οἱ περὶ Ἐπίγονον ἐχρήσαντο. καὶ περιελὼν τὴν συντομίαν τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν ἐν τοῖς ψιλοῖς κιθαρισταῖς χρώματά τε εὔχροα πρῶτος ἐκιθάρισε καὶ ἰάμβους καὶ μάγαδιν, τὸν καλούμενον συριγμόν, καὶ ὄργανον μετέλαβεν μόνος τῶν πρὸ αὐτοῦ, καὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα αὐξήσας χορὸν περιεστήσατο πρῶτος. Lysander the Sicyonian citharist . . . first changed solo cithara-playing, stretching out notes to make them bigger and bulking out the sound—and he also developed ‘auletic cithara playing,’ which those around Epigonus first used. And putting an end to the brevity which was prevalent among solo citharists, he first played shades and colors and iambics and the magadis which is called the syrigmos, and he changed the instrument, and making the whole performance bigger he first set the chorus around him.46

Some of Lysander’s innovations are clearly timbral in focus: “stretching out bigger notes and making the sound bulkier” (μακροὺς τοὺς τόνους ἐκτείνας καὶ τὴν φωνὴν εὔογκον ποιήσας) seems to indicate an attempt to increase what we would call the “sustain” and resonance of the instrument.47 The second set of innovations, however, look tonal: Athenaeus lists “shades” and “colors,” which at the time his source was writing referred to microtonal variations in scale species as they were grouped by genera.48 The last innovation on the list is “the magadis called the syrigmos” (μάγαδιν, τὸν καλούμενον συριγμόν). “Magadising” was singing or playing melodies an octave apart.49 The easiest inference is that Lysander imitated the auletic syrigmos by producing pitches an octave higher than usual. This could be done by taking the harmonics of a string at the octave; harmonics might also have been taken at the octave plus a fifth with little difficulty, and if the lyre was tuned to the right kind of scale, simple melodies could be played in two voices spaced one or two octaves apart. Notes of very high pitch were the goal here: “hissing” ceased to be a hiss and became, on the lyre, a pitch change. (This may itself have been suggested, at least in part, by auletic technique: squeaks and hisses probably occupied a frequency range considerably higher than the instrument’s accustomed pitches.50) As will be shown in the next

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section, it was typical that when nonaulos players imitated the syrigmos, they did not attempt to shift from tonal to timbral sound: instead, they used predominantly tonal techniques to produce the same effect. We are told by an ancient source that Lasus of Hermione, a songwriter and music theorist thought to have reformed the dithyrambic competitions at Athens around 508,51 “made the earlier music change” by altering the rhythms of the dithyramb and by “imitating the polyphonia of auloi by using more and more scattered notes.”52 What was the “polyphony” of the auloi that Lasus supposedly imitated, and how, exactly, did he imitate it? The idea of a music with many sounds was not uncommon in Greek lyric; Pindar, working after Lasus, is the richest vein.53 But the most telling parallels come from authors working before or at about the same time. Archilochus calls a lion πολυκλαύτος;54 Anacreon, in a reference to bodily sounds, uses πολυκρότος;55 and Simonides calls the nightingale πολυκώτιλος.56 All of these mean “making many sounds,” albeit with different shades of nuance; their application to animals suggests that the deep background to the idea of polyphony is an association between multiplicity and human sounds. It seems possible and even likely in this context that the “polyphony” of the aulos referred to in “Plutarch” had as its original reference not tonal multiplicity but the instrument’s capacity to roar like a lion, rumble like a belly, or chatter like a nightingale: its ability to wander, in other words, into the nonhuman, the bestial, the other of song.57 In the Pythian nome of Sacadas, the aulos did just this, invoking the hiss of the serpent who occupied Delphi before Apollo. Our source (the dialogue On Music attributed to Plutarch) says that Lasus imitated the polyphony of the aulos by using “many and scattered notes.” Perhaps we should think of a wider gamut and larger intervallic jumps, of melodies that covered more tonal space.58 We are told that Lasus did this in his dithyrambs specifically. The dithyramb was accompanied by the aulos. Could Lasus not simply have incorporated some of the techniques of the auletic nome? But adopting the syrigmos may not have seemed practical. No matter how complex the aulos was timbrally, it was less so than the human voice; it is timbre—the manipulation of the overtone series by the vocal tract—which constructs the material of spoken language.59 The difference between τ and δ, between ε and η, and so on is a timbral difference, and if the aulos was capable of four or five such sounds, Greek regularly used many more. It would be almost laughably easy for a singer to produce the noises of the death of the serpent at Delphi; for the voice, the syrigmos was just σ. But singers must sing words—and their timbres are therefore constrained by the demands of language. One would either have to abandon

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linguistic expression in singing, or increase melodic complexity. Aeschylus, in the next generation, did the former (see chapter 2). Lasus could have done the latter so that the position of noise was no longer occupied by hissing but by the polyphonic tonal complexity identified in On Music.60 Lasus’s other famous poetic innovation, the composition of odes containing no sigmas, belongs in the same context. Athenaeus notes the existence of an asigmatic poem called Centaurs (whose authenticity was disputed)61 and cites three lines from an asigmatic hymn to Demeter.62 Later writers interpreted poetic asigmatism as a response to the supposed cacophony of the letter’s sound: as James Porter puts it, Aristoxenus claimed that some musicians rejected the sigma because it was ‘difficult to pronounce’ or ‘harsh-sounding and illsuited to the aulos.’63 Aristoxenus is echoed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who in On the Composition of Words finds the s-sound to be ‘neither charming nor pleasant.’ It can even ‘cause pain’ when used excessively, for it produces a ‘hiss,’ a syrigmos, like that of ‘an irrational beast.’64

According to Porter, Lasus suppressed the sigma in these compositions not because it sounded bad, but as a quasi-oulipan form of constraint writing meant “to unleash sound through the suppression of sound.”65 I like Porter’s thesis, but I do not want to throw out Dionysius’s and Aristoxenus’s comments either. It seems relevant that Dionysius associates the syrigmos with the hissing of “an irrational beast.” It is not the sound of the sigma but its symbolic associations that make the sigma “bad”; sigmas recall the serpent that Apollo defeats. But the Sacadan nome hardly eliminated such sounds. Was Lasus’s suppression of the sigma an attempt at a kind of auditory purity in which no noise would be cited, in which pure euphony finally emerged? Surely not. Lasus did not suppress the noise of the serpent. Rather, he expressed it melodically. The sigma was the timbral mark of noise, and to have used it might have confused his auditory system too far. In these poems, Lasus suppressed one noise to emphasize another—that of melody, which was doing the work of the auletic “hiss.” Lasus’s own words reinforce this suggestion. Here is the beginning of the asigmatic hymn to Demeter: Δάματρα μέλπω Κόραν τε Κλυμένοι’ ἄλοχον μελιβόαν ὕμνον ἀναγνέων Αἰολίδ’ ἄμ βαρύβρομον ἁρμονίαν. I sing Demeter and Kore the bride of Klymenos, lifting up a sweet-shouting hymn in a deep-roaring Aeolian tuning.66

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These lines are almost perversely innovative. Usually, singing is described as honey-voiced.67 To find musical shouting in texts before Lasus is very rare; shouts usually occur in contexts of war or describe the melancholy sound of a bird.68 βρόμος and βαρυβρόμος both describe auloi,69 which figure here as the source of sounds that are at once eliminated and preserved through a process of musical translation and verbal recollection; the auloi are both the other and the source, the internal outside of Lasus’s new music. Lasus’s expression Αἰολίδα ἁρμονία, which is, in fact, the earliest extant mention of an “Aeolian tuning,” feels suspiciously like a pun. Melody types, tunings, or modes were known by ethnonyms (the canonical ones were the Dorian, the Ionian, and the Phrygian); it would make sense that if he was introducing a new pitch system here, he would use another ethnonym to do it, such as “Aeolian.” But I think it must be relevant that αἰόλος means “changing” or “variegated” and is practically a synonym for ποικιλός, a term of art referring to complexity in melody.70 Listen a little wrong, and you can hear Lasus saying that his asigmatic hymn to Demeter is written in a changeable, complex tuning.71 Not everything that is variegated and complex recalls a snake, but a song sung in a “changing harmony,” which also happens to suppress the hissing sound of the sigma in its words, could well have been ostentatiously pointing to its melodic complexity as a new kind of “syrigmos.” Lasus’s asigmatic experiments did not stick—not even in his own work.72 What did stick was an interest in developing and celebrating melodic complexity. Echoes of this interest can be discerned in an important fragment of early Athenian satyr play by another transplant onto the Athenian scene, Pratinas of Phlius, a younger contemporary of Lasus and an older one of Aeschylus.73 Very little of his work survives, most of it thanks to Athenaeus’s interest in the early history of music. The following passage dwells at some length on the aulos: τίς ὁ θόρυβος ὅδε; τί τάδε τὰ χορεύματα; τίς ὕβρις ἔμολεν ἐπὶ Διονυσιάδα πολυπάταγα θυμέλαν; ἐμὸς ἐμὸς ὁ Βρόμιος, ἐμὲ δεῖ κελαδεῖν, ἐμὲ δεῖ παταγεῖν ἀν’ ὄρεα σύμενον μετὰ Ναϊάδων οἷά τε κύκνον ἄγοντα ποικιλόπτερον μέλος. τὰν ἀοιδὰν κατέστασε Πιερὶς βασίλειαν· ὁ δ’ αὐλὸς ὕστερον χορευέτω·

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καὶ γάρ ἐσθ’ ὑπηρέτας. κώμῳ μόνον θυραμάχοις τε πυγμαχίαισι νέων θέλοι παροίνων ἔμμεναι στρατηλάτας. παῖε τὸν φρυνεοῦ ποικίλου πνοὰν ἔχοντα, φλέγε τὸν ὀλεσιαλοκάλαμον, λαλοβαρύοπα ραμελορυθμοβάταν †θυπα τρυπάνῳ δέμας πεπλασμένον. What is this uproar? What kind of dancing is this? What arrogance moves against the much-clattering altar of Dionysus? Bromios is mine, mine! I must make noise, I must clamor in the mountain with the Naiads, like a complexly-winged swan leading the song. The Muse made the singing king. The aulos must dance behind—for it is the attendant. It should want to be leader only of revels and fist-fights in front of the doors of drunken young men. Strike the thing with the breath of a dappled frog, burn the spitwasting reed, the deep-voiced-chatterer, walking with a step that violates both melody and rhythm, its body formed by the bore.74

When he cites this passage, Athenaeus claims that Pratinas was objecting to the eclipsing of singing by virtuosic aulos performers.75 There is little doubt that the speaker of these lines does criticize an aulos. The aulos is to be the accompaniment; it only leads in the context of “revels and fist-fights before the doors of drunken young men” (8–9). It has the breath of a “dappled” (ποικιλός) frog, and, in a culminating series of abusive compounds, is a spit-wasting-reed, “chatteringdeep-voiced,” a “perverter-of-melody-and-the-rhythm-of-the-dance-step.” It is, in other words, bestial, noisy, and antithetical to the vocal song. But I’m not alone in doubting that the rise of professional auletrism is really the issue here.76 The aulos does make a lot of noise, but so does the chorus, which insists on its right not only to be the center of attention but also to make a racket of its own. Using Dionysus’s cult-appellation Bromios (“the Roarer”), they exclaim, “Bromios is mine, mine! I must make noise, I must clamor.” This emphatically asserts their prerogative to be associated with the noise of Dionysian celebration (note that the rites of Dionysius are called “much clattering,” πολυπάταγα). What seems to be taking place here is not a criticism of the aulos in opposition to the controlled and conservative song of the chorus, but an assertion of the chorus’s right to be soundful like, but instead of, the aulos. To insist that noise was the prerogative of vocal song is to do the same thing Lasus did when he imitated the “polyphony” of the aulos in his vocal music. It may be, in fact, that Pratinas thought about vocal “noise” as Lasus did, as an increase in tonal sophistication and complexity. Ποικιλός is repeated twice in

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the passage, linking the song of the aulos and the song of the chorus. Elsewhere, Pratinas advocated the innovative Aeolian harmonia just as Lasus did.77 Pratinas’s slightly younger contemporary Pindar went further.78 Pindar, who called his hymns and his instruments “all speaking” (παμφώνων)79 or “much saying” (πολύφατος),80 also emphasized the novelty and complexity of his melodies, referring almost as a matter of course to the modes or tunings in which he composed.81 In the third Olympian, he offered a celebration of the sound of his song: Μοῖσα δ’ οὕτω ποι παρέστα μοι νεοσίγαλον εὑρόντι τρόπον Δωρίῳ φωνὰν ἐναρμόξαι πεδίλῳ ἀγλαόκωμον· ἐπεὶ χαίταισι μὲν ζευχθέντες ἔπι στέφανοι πράσσοντί με τοῦτο θεόδματον χρέος, φόρμιγγά τε ποικιλόγαρυν καὶ βοὰν αὐλῶν ἐπέων τε θέσιν Αἰνησιδάμου παιδὶ συμμεῖξαι πρεπόντως, ἅ τε Πίσα με γεγωνεῖν. So was the Muse present to me as I sought out a new way to fit the voice, splendor of the revel, to the Dorian sandal, and to mix correctly the complexly-speaking lyre and the shout of the auloi and the arrangement of words for the son of Aenedisamus, as Pisa proclaimed to me to do—the garlands yoked to his hair demand this godestablished duty from me.82

Here he combines rhythmic indices (the “Dorian sandal,” a reference to the dactylo-epitrite meter of the song) with auditory images (the shout of the lyre), references to poetic technique (the setting of words) and invocations of tonal complexity (“Complexly speaking lyre,” φόρμιγγα . . . ποικιλόγαρυν).83 New, perhaps, is Pindar’s interest in the way words, lyre and aulos can be blended to create a joyful noise; Lasus’s disciplined approach to language no longer seems necessary, and all auditory tracks sound out together. The song’s melody is lost, but the poem is rich with other kinds of sound; assonance on οι and α in lines 1 and 2, then on -ον- in 2, on αι in the last two lines, played off against a running alliteration on π. The description of the lyre as ποικιλόγαρυν is the highpoint of this remarkable sequence; in the adjective that describes the complexity of the lyre’s music, no two vowel sounds are the same, while the first four consonants alternate between the front and the back of the mouth (π-κ-λ-γ). No mistake that the adjective describes the lyre as speaking (-γαρυν): here, auditory complexities of melody and speech coincide.

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Pindar’s second dithyramb offered an explosive celebration of musical sonority in terms that evoked Lasus’s musico-poetic experiments as well as the Sacadan syrigmos: Π̣⌊ρὶν μὲν ἕρπε σχοινοτένειά τ’ ἀοιδὰ δ̣ι ̣θ̣⌊υράμβων καὶ τὸ σ̣ὰ̣⌊ν κίβδηλον ἀνθρώποισιν ἀπὸ στομάτων διαπέπ̣[τ]α̣[νται. . . . . . .]. . . . [ κλοισι νέαι ̣ [. . . . ε]ἰδότες οἵαν Βρομίου̣ [τελε]τάν καὶ παρὰ σκᾶ[πτ]ον Διὸς Οὐρανίδαι ἐν μεγάροις ἵ⌊στα⌋ντι. σεμνᾷ μὲν κατάρχει Ματέρι πὰρ μ⌊εγ⌋άλᾳ ῥόμβοι τυπάνων, ἐν δὲ κέχλαδ[εν] κρόταλ’ αἰθομένα τε δαῒς ὑπὸ ξαν⌊θα⌋ῖ ̣σι πεύκαις· ἐν δὲ Ναΐδων̣ ἐ̣ρίγδουποι στοναχαί μανίαι τ’ ἀλαλ̣⌊αί⌋ τ’ ὀρίνεται ῥιψαύχενι σὺν κλόνῳ. ἐν δ’ ὁ παγκρατὴς κεραυνὸς ἀμπνέων πῦρ κεκίν̣η̣[ται τό τ’] Ἐ̣ν̣υαλί ̣ου ἔγχος, ἀλκάεσσά [τ]ε̣ Παλλάδο[ς] αἰγίς μυρίων φθογγάζεται κλαγγαῖς δρακόντων. ῥίμφα δ’ εἶσιν Ἄρτεμις οἰοπολὰς ζεύξαισ’ ἐν ὀργαῖς Βακχίαις φῦλον λεόντων α[⏑⏑–⏑⏑– ὁ δὲ κηλεῖται χορευοίσαισι κα[ὶ θηρῶν ἀγέλαις. ἐμὲ δ’ ἐξαίρετο[ν κάρυκα σοφῶν ἐπέων Μοῖσ’ ἀνέστασ’ Ἑλλάδι κα[λ]λ̣[ιχόρῳ εὐχόμενον βρισαρμάτοις ο̣[–⏑ Θήβαις, ἔνθα ποθ’ Ἁρμονίαν̣ [φ]ά̣μα γ̣α̣[μετάν Κάδμον ὑψη[λαῖ]ς πραπίδεσ[σι λαχεῖν κεδνάν· Δ[ιὸ]ς δ’ ἄκ[ουσεν ὀ]μφάν, καὶ τέκ’ εὔδοξο[ν παρ’] ἀνθρώπο[ις γενεάν. Earlier the song of dithyrambs crept stretched out straight, and a counterfeit σ flew from the mouths of men . . . knowing . . . what kind of rituals of Bromios the children of Ouranos establish in the house beside the scepter of Zeus. The roar of drums starts up by the august great mother; castanets clatter there, and the altar flashes under blonde torch-wood. The wide-thudding groans of Naiads and mad alalai are stirred up there, and heads are tossed back in agitation. The all-powerful fire-breathing thunder-

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bolt is moved there, and the shaft of Enyalus too, and the warlike aegis of Pallas burns with the shriek of many snakes. Solitary Artemis goes swiftly, yoking the race of lions in bacchic rites . . . He is delighted by the dancing and the herd of beasts. The Muse established me as a chosen herald of wise words for Greece with her beautiful choruses, boasting of chariot-rich Thebes, where there is a tale that Cadmus acquired Harmony as his wife by using his high wits. She heard the voice of Zeus, and produced a race famous among men.84

Dionysius of Halicarnassus cited the beginning of this passage in connection with Lasus’s asigmatic odes.85 The second line suggests something like a celebration of asigmatism—but is itself rife with sigmas. In line 2, the sigma is described as adulterated or counterfeit (κίβδηλον). The implication is not that sigmas are bad; rather, Pindar says that “formerly” the sound of “s” was fake or fraudulent.86 We should expect not that s be eliminated but that it be replaced with the true s. An adulterated sigma would be one that has not been authorized or aesthetically transfigured. Such a transfiguration is what happens in the Homeric hymn to Apollo and in Sacadas: the story of the death of the serpent relocates the serpent’s noise within a formal structure and a performance context that makes it “true” or genuine. Once the Python has been defeated, its noises can be deployed as the symbol of the other. The “true” sigma would then be incorporated into aesthetic form—but according to the logic of dissonance.87 The poem “opens the floodgates of sound in an absolute torrent.”88 Pindar’s celebration of Dionysus comes with the roar of drums (9), the resounding of castanets (10), the wide-thudding groans and manic cries of Naiads tossing their heads in the traditional maenad dance (12–14), and the Aegis of Athena “flaming with the clamor of a thousand serpents” (19). The fragmentary reference to lions in line 21 could well have mentioned their roar. As I have noted, the suppression of timbre to let pitch sing forth more clearly, still needed in Lasus’s work, was no longer required in Pindar, and he revels in timbral sounds like the cries of maenads and the sounds of percussion. S sounds are no longer counterfeit. Pindar’s auditory poetics have (re)authenticated them. The serpent at Delphi was not the only creature whose defeat stood for the establishment of order; killing a dragon was a central element in the founding of poetic and cosmic peace in many contexts and places, and probably has Indo-European roots.89 Pindar makes reference to at least two other serpentine adversaries in the dithyramb. The first is a brief allusion to Athena’s aegis, with its “clamor of a thousand serpents”: the aegis is Medusa’s head, which Athena acquired after she assisted Perseus in killing her. The musical reference here is not to the Delphic but to the Many-Headed nome.90 In portraying the lamentation

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of a defeated other, this piece celebrated the victory of Athena and Perseus—but in citing the lamentation, it incorporated these otherworldly sounds within the self-representation of art. A third “dragon-killing” moment is Pindar’s allusion to the marriage of Harmonia and Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes: in founding Thebes, Cadmus had killed a serpent whose teeth provided the seeds of the autochthonous Theban “sewn men.” Pindar may have been drifting in the direction of praising the city as “noisy,” mythologically speaking at least. The dithyramb went on to tell of Herakles’s descent to Hades to collect Cerberus.91 Pindar’s exact words are lost, but it is tempting to expect that he would have enhanced or emphasized the sounds coming from this polycephalic creature whom Hesiod had called “bronze-voiced”:92 this, in effect, would have established a symbolic resonance between Heracles’s great act, Cadmus’s killing of the serpent and founding of Thebes, and Pindar’s incorporation of “legitimate” noise in the dithyramb. Although we have no way to reconstruct Pindar’s melody (other than the minimal guidance of his pitch accents), his meter evinces the same investment in complexity proclaimed in his words. Likely composed in triadic form, this song’s epode has not survived, but the extant text comprises a complete strophe and just over half of its corresponding antistrophe. The rhythm, composed out of an extremely economical set of metrical building blocks (this particular set is known by the general term “dactylo-epitrite”), nonetheless achieves an extraordinary level of variety.93 In the widely accepted analysis of Snell-Mahler’s edition, the strophe is built from single, complex metrical units (known as “periods”) of varying length, and although the basic (and quite conventional) pattern is to alternate an iambo-trochaic idea (–⏑–) with a dactylic idea (–⏑⏑), the exact sequence of metrical units never repeats: –⏑–×–⏑⏑–⏑⏑–––⏑–– –⏑–×–⏑–––⏑⏑–⏑⏑– ⏑⏑––⏑–×–⏑–––⏑⏑–⏑⏑––⏑–∙ ––⏑⏑–⏑⏑– –⏑–––⏑⏑–⏑⏑–∙ –⏑⏑––⏑–×–⏑–– –⏑⏑–⏑⏑–––⏑⏑– –⏑–×–⏑⏑–⏑⏑–×⏑⏑–⏑–×–⏑–– –⏑–×–⏑–––⏑⏑– ⏑⏑–⏑⏑–––⏑–×–⏑–∙ –⏑–∙ –⏑–×–⏑–⏑–⏑–

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–⏑–––⏑⏑–⏑⏑–∙ –⏑–––⏑⏑–⏑⏑–– –⏑–×–⏑–––⏑––∙ (1–15, which would have been repeated in 16–30)

Such a constantly unfolding sequence of metrical forms creates a cumulative impression of extraordinary complexity congruent with Pindar’s endorsement of rich auditory presences on the timbral and melodic planes. I can think of no better way to describe the effect of Pindar’s endlessly shifting rhythm than to say that it moves forward in a fashion not at all unlike the undulatory and yet linear motion of a snake.94 The older auletic techniques associated with Sacadas were hardly abandoned. Pindar alludes to them in a victory ode for the Acragantine aulete Midas, who won the competition for solo aulos at Delphi in 494 and 490 BCE (we do not know which victory is celebrated in the surviving ode).95 Although Alcaeus attributed the invention of the aulos to Apollo,96 Pindar makes Athena invent it to imitate the lamentation of Medusa’s surviving sisters at her death.97 If the scholia are to be believed, this story has special appropriateness in the context of a victory ode for Midas. At one of the competitions Midas won, his mouthpiece is said to have broken during the performance.98 The scholia do not say what piece Midas was playing when his aulos broke, but it does tell us that he completed the performance playing on the pipe alone—and doing so “in the manner of the syrinx.” This should mean that he blew across the top of the instrument, playing it like a panpipe.99 But I wonder whether the etymological connection between syrinx and syrigmos is lurking in the background and whether this late note does not, in fact, deform an older tradition in which what Midas did was squeak and hiss his way to the end of the piece, winning the competition by modulating into nontonal music and convincingly invoking the sounds of the lost other which auletic nomes characteristically imitated. The tale of Midas’s success would, in this case, be a kind of expression in extremis of the auletic nome’s auditory poetics: unable to use the mouthpiece to produce sound effects, he does a better job with a broken pipe.100 Tastes for auletic noise never faded. By the end of the fifth century, there had arisen a formal technique that allowed auletic timbral expression and vocal tonal expression, previously incompatible, to coexist within the musical piece: the instrumental interlude, when the singing would stop and the aulete would play (and sometimes dance) in imitation of scenes from the narrative.101 The citharode and composer Timotheus of Miletus may have especially exploited this

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opportunity: in the Nauplius he imitated the sounds of a storm,102 and in the Birth Pangs of Semele the aulete imitated the cries of Semele as she was struck by thunder and gave birth to Dionysus.103 One scholar has linked these moments to the tradition of the syrigmos,104 and this is surely correct. But none of the (very tenuous) information about either the Nauplius or the Birth Pangs tells us much about how the sound effects were made: were they timbral (as in the old nomes) or tonal (as in the post-Lasus dithyramb)? Certainly auletes were not only squeaking and hissing. The aulete Pythocleides is said to have “invented” (presumably this means he advocated or theorized) the Mixolydian mode.105 The aulete Lamprocles proposed a reform in the relationship between tetrachords (he is said to have discovered that the disjunctive tone separating two tetrachords in many standard scales was not where everyone thought it was).106 The aulete Pronomos developed collars that could be rotated to open or close holes on his instrument, allowing him access to an expanded tonal range and, presumably, greater modulatory freedom.107 Even on the instrument that pioneered the use of irregular and mainly timbral sounds, music was channeling noise through the melodic manipulation of pitch. Greek art music provoked some unsettled responses. The Cheiron of Pherecrates, for example, featured a Muse who catalogued all the indignities perpetrated on her by a series of musicians active on the Athenian scene in the last decades of the fifth century:108 Melanippides109 used “twelve strings” to make music “slacker” (“twelve strings” suggests that Melanippides was working with an expanded tonal range, perhaps with melodies whose gamut was more than a full octave).110 “The accursed Kinesias”111 made “exharmonic bends in his strophes.”112 The result is a general disorientation: the right looks like the left, and the left looks like the right.113 Phrynis threw his own kind of whirlwind at music, bending and turning it so that it was completely destroyed.114 But Timotheus of Miletus committed the gravest indignities. He led the Muse off over “perverse anthills” (an expressive enough metaphor for a music whose melodies had become so complex as to be difficult to follow; it might also mean that Timotheus was composing melodies that did not observe the pitch accent in the words, and so might be said to meander perversely); then, he undressed and slackened her.115 “Plutarch,” who cites these lines, cites a further three in which unholy, very high and “out of key” notes are produced, with the result that she is bent out of shape like a cabbage.116 These indignities can be described as the consequence of a progressive widening of melodic vocabulary, including multiple pitch systems within single pieces of music. Pherecrates makes it clear that such an expansion could be taken, even

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in the fifth century, as an affront. This is more than just the voice of an outraged conservative critic: it is a thick description of a progressive art music. Originally developed to occupy the structural position of the auletic syrigmos, melodic complexity existed to incorporate the excluded other, and the rhetoric of “destruction” was thus programmed by its organic trajectory. Pherecrates was not alone. Indeed, his crack about Kinesias’s “exharmonic” melodies may resonate with the normative claims—and possibly the criticisms— emanating from a group of music theorists known to later authors as “harmonicists,” ἁρμονικοί.117 Only a few names are left,118 but what can be gathered about them suggests that although they formed no identifiable school, they shared a profession: they were nearly all working musicians living between the middle of the fifth century and the first few decades of the fourth.119 Writing in the late fourth century, the philosopher of music Aristoxenus attributed several results to them, including the identification of the quarter tone as an intervallic minimum usable as a measure for tonal spaces,120 and, arising from this, “diagrams” that were, in principle, capable of explaining the entire system of melody as Aristoxenus knew it.121 Aristoxenus also identified an illuminating shortcoming: the harmonicists’ range of interest was remarkably constrained. Aristoxenus recognized three kinds or genera of tonal systems, usually translated as the “enharmonic,” the “chromatic,” and the “diatonic.” These genera were distinguished by the size of the sum of the bottom two intervals in a tetrachord. A tetrachord is a perfect fourth sung in four steps: in modern notation, E–F–G–A is a tetrachord. In certain contexts, the bottom two notes together were called by Aristoxenus a “compression” or a puknon. In general terms, the enharmonic tetrachord had a puknon of more or less a semitone (so that the intervals in an enharmonic tetrachord would be more or less quarter tone–quarter tone–ditone), while in the chromatic genus it was more or less a tone (so the intervals in the tetrachord were more or less semitone–semitone–tone and a half ). The diatonic, strictly speaking, did not have a puknon; the sequence of intervals in a diatonic tetrachord was, more or less, semitone–tone–tone.122 The harmonicists’ failing, according to Aristoxenus, lay in their neglect of the chromatic and diatonic genera. They were “concerned to be truly ‘harmonicists’ and no more,” he writes, “since they dealt only with the enharmonic (τῆς ἁρμονίας) and never gave a thought to the other genera.”123 Aristoxenus and everyone else called the “enharmonic” simply “the harmonia”; thus, the “harmonikoi,” in focusing only on the harmonia at the expense of the other genera, earned their name. But—despite Aristoxenus—they did not neglect genera other than the enharmonic out of methodological sloppiness or scholarly

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laziness. They did it on principle: they were not analyzing but advocating for a particular kind of tonal system. This brought them into conflict with the tradition I am following. They were guided by the notion of harmony, ἁρμονία. Harmony had been an active concern for musicians since at least the late sixth century, when Lasus of Hermione wrote a technical treatise on music apparently called περὶ ἁρμονίας.124 In musical contexts, the word meant “pattern of attunement” or, as Aristoxenus would have preferred, “tonal system”; Pindar, for one, habitually refers to the ἁρμονία, that is, the attunement, of his songs. But it was by no means exclusively, or even primarily, a musical concept. Cognate with ἀραρίσκω, ἁρμονία’s primary connotations have to do with “fitting together.”125 Words in this family tend to describe irregular but very tight fastenings between things that are different, such as a mass of Homeric soldiers on the march or the stones in a wall;126 in the sense found in Homer, the idea is probably Indo-European. But between the sixth and the fifth century, ἁρμονία became a crucial term in cosmology, medicine, psychology, and politics, where it began to designate the coexistence of maximal differences. Heraclitus, for example, insisted that the harmony of being was necessarily a harmony of opposites.127 Empedocles similarly identified ἁρμονία as a crucial element in the coherence of things—and ensured that difference was a precondition for its existence by positing “roots,” which combined into elements, which then, in turn, combined into what is evident to us as phenomenal reality:128 this is a cosmology positing differentiated stuff, in other words, organized through what he called the “marvelous fastenings of harmony.”129 Pythagorean harmonic theory operated with similar conceptual tools. Philolaus, working at the very end of the fifth century, argued that “the nature of the universe is harmonized out of the infinite and the definite,”130 defining harmony as “the unity of things that are mixed together and the unanimity of those who think differently.”131 Medical theorists saw harmony as a valuable concept for the articulation of health in the human body. The fifth-century author of the Hippocratic Regimen argues that health arises from the correct harmonic attunement (ἁρμονίη ὀρθή) of elements in the body and soul.132 Again, the elements to be harmonized are maximally different: they are fire and water, food (which gives) and exercise (which takes). This was the context in which the musical harmonicists might have mounted an opposition to art music. If harmony depends on the coexistence of maximally different things, then tonal systems of the “enharmonic” type best fit the general concept: it is there that the difference between intervals is maximized. Recall that a tetrachord was always a perfect fourth divided into four notes; the smaller the first two intervals were, the larger the third would be. The two inter-

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vals at the bottom of “enharmonic” systems are the smallest, and therefore, the interval at the top is the greatest.133 In medicine, and probably in psychology and political theory as well, harmony was a normative concept. The Hippocratic Regimen describes the harmony of the body as a goal to work toward through correct nutrition and exercise and assumes that people who are out of harmony need both theoretical and practical assistance to know what harmony is and how to attain it. It is possible that the harmonikoi were engaged in a similar advocacy regarding a “harmonic,” that is, enharmonic, intonation. Indeed, the idea that the enharmonic was the best attunement did have long-term currency. Aristoxenus insisted as much (though he also reported that by his time it was almost never used);134 centuries later, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Philo of Alexandria express similar sentiments.135 It is not unrealistic to suppose that the theorists who neglected all the other intonations might have made a similar claim. The anonymous author of a screed critical of certain harmonikoi, possibly composed around 380, gives an indication that they did indeed defend the enharmonic against other temperaments.136 They are said in this text to claim that “the χρῶμα” (the “shade”) makes men cowardly, while “the ἁρμονία” makes them brave. The “χρῶμα” must be an attunement different from the ἁρμονία: presumably, it bears some resemblance to what later theory called the “chromatic genus” of scales, which have a larger set of intervals in the puknon and are, therefore, by the standard outlined earlier, less harmonic than the enharmonic. Because they are less harmonic, it would be no surprise that they should produce less praiseworthy results. This is almost “Damonian” ethical theory, aimed not at traditional ethnonymic modes (Dorian, Lydian, etc.), but at the contrast between something called the harmony, and something else called the color or shade. A harmonikos advocating a single intonation or scale structure against all others would have been forced to oppose the tendencies of mainstream music, where new scales, new intonations, and new blends and mixtures had been de rigeur since at least the time of Lasus. Even tragedy, which was once the stronghold of “enharmonic” intonations, had begun to include just the chromatic shadings criticized by the harmonikoi.137 Indeed, even though some of the concrete results I have outlined may, in fact, have come from “harmonicists” working in the decades after Euripides’s death, it is nonetheless highly probable that normative criticisms of innovative art music were already using concepts of harmony in the mid- to later fifth century. Inevitably, the music’s partisans acknowledged the existence of critics such as these. But they tended not to mount head-on defenses—after all, unsettling innovation had been the music’s goal for many

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years. Rather, they appropriated the normative statements of their critics, in effect stipulating to their detractor’s claims—and then making all the “exharmonic” sounds the latter criticized.138 This was just what Timotheus did at the end of his Persians, a song for solo singer with lyre whose subject was the Persian defeat at the Battle of Salamis, probably first performed in Miletus in the late fifth century BCE.139 It is believable that there were objections to Timotheus’s music: it aimed to be unsettling. He was known for compositions that reveled in ostentatious sonority, was attracted, in Timothy Power’s words, to sensationalistic mythical and historical material, involving markedly “othered,” exotic, violently irrational, emotionally extreme subjects and characters—storms, gruesome monsters, distraught and dying barbarians and women—whose musical depiction demanded the tonal poikilia, sonic and affective intensities, and mimetic pyrotechnics, both audible and visual, that were the hallmarks of the new music.140

Sure enough, the Persians reports that its composer’s music was criticized—specifically, we are told, by the people of Sparta.141 Surprisingly, however, Timotheus describes his critics as the noisy ones. So, for example, the people of Sparta drive him forward (δονεῖ . . . ἐλᾷ τε). Δονέω, which in the Iliad is most commonly used of winds driving clouds across the sky, also means “make a buzzing or murmuring noise,” especially of bees (as in the Homeric hymn to Hermes) but also, in Pindar, of loud music.142 In a song about the Battle of Salamis, it is hard not to conclude that Timotheus is characterizing his foes as Greeks: since Aeschylus, the Greek victory at Salamis was associated with the militarization of musical sound. It is also hard to dismiss the recollection that Aeschylus’s Persians reacted with terror to the Athenian war horn, which burst into synesthetic flame using ἐπιφλέγω, the same verb used in Timotheus for the kindling to which he is subjected by his critics.143 To make matters stranger, Timotheus also describes his Persians as having a rain of fire fall on them.144 That makes Timotheus a “Persian” victim of his “Greek” opponents’ noisy assault. Not that his Persians are silent: to the contrary, they are driven to cacophonous lamentation by their Greek attackers. As Timotheus’s description of the Persian defeat unfolds, “shouting mixed with screaming prevailed” (κρ]α̣υγᾷ βοὰ δὲ [πα]μμι[γ]ὴς κατεῖχεν, 34). The description quickly changes into something considerably more harrowing, as the story zooms in on a single sailor, cast overboard and flailing at the water with hands and feet, looking for some escape (45–48). The churning water pours over him, and he swallows then coughs it up again (60–65) until, in an explosion of desperate madness, he shrieks at the water that oppresses him:

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ὀξυπαραυδήτῷ φωνᾷ παρακόπῷ τε δόξαι φρενῶν κατακορὴς ἀπείλει γόμφους ἐμπρίων †μιμούμενος† λυμεῶνι σώματος θαλάσ‹σ›ᾳ· “ἤδη θρασεῖα καὶ πάρος λάβρον αὐχέν’ ἔσχες ἐμ πέδαι καταζευχθεῖσα λινοδέτῷ τεόν· νῦν δέ σ’ ἀναταράξει ἐμὸς ἄναξ ἐμὸς πεύκαισιν ὀριγόνοισιν, ἐγκλῄσει δὲ πεδία πλόϊμα νομ{μ}άσι ναύταις· οἰστρομανὲς παλεομίσημ’ ἄπιστόν τ’ ἀγκάλισμα κλυσιδρομάδος αὔρας.” φάτ’ ἄ‹σ›θματι στρευγόμενος, βλοσυρὰν δ’ ἐξέβαλλεν ἄχναν ἐπανερευγόμενος στόματι βρύχιον ἅλμαν. With high-pitched screaming voice and blasted wits he was carried beyond moderation, grinding his jaws and . . . the sea that destroyed his body—“though bold, you have already had your fierce neck restrained, yoked to the land bound with flax switches. Now my lord—mine—will confound you with mountain-born pines; and he will enclose your sailing field with roaming sailors; you raging untrusted ancient enemy.” He spoke, object of the dashing running air’s embrace, exhausted with panting, and he brought out bristling froth, vomiting ocean brine from his mouth.145

The moral character of the drowning sailor’s speech—an exemplification of the clichéd Persian hubris which led to the bridging of the Hellespont—is eloquently echoed in the fact that it is surrounded by sounds that evoke something morphing into the bestial. We hear a “shrill and distorted voice” (ὀξυπαραυδήτῳ φωνᾷ), an unbalanced mind, the grinding of teeth (this is what boars do when they are about to be killed in the Iliad)146 and, finally, the sound of the sailor panting and vomiting sea foam as the water engulfs him. Timotheus arranges his words so that their sonorous presence accompanies and amplifies the noise of the description. He relies heavily on short alliterative sequences (on ξ and φ in 66–67; on π in 68–69 and 78–79; on χ in 73–74 and 84–85; on σ-glottal combinations [σχ and ξ] in 73–76) and assonantal and syllabic repetition (παρ- in 66–67; ε in 73–74; α in 74–76 and 80–83; ι in 80–81; αν in 84–85). One has the impression not of a

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grand acoustic design but of a consistent effort to foreground the sonority of the passage through short-term local effects. Certainly it was a central part of Timotheus’s compositional technique to combine a finite set molecular structures in endlessly varying patterns: Persians freely mixes different kinds of meters in open-ended lines not constrained by any large-scale strophic repetitions (here, e.g., iambo-trochaic shapes are mixed with dochmiacs).147 The drive toward rhythmic complexity begun (perhaps) in Stesichorus and continued in Pindar and Bacchylides finds its most expansive form in songs like this.148 New and equally chilling noises arise from a Persian who has been cast ashore amid the corpses. Freezing and naked and without hope, ἀϋτᾷ τε καὶ δακρυσταγεῖ [γ]όῳ στερνοκτύπῳ γοητᾲ θρηνώδει κατείχοντ’ ὀδυρμῷ· with shouting and a tear-dropping groan and chest striking moans he laments, held down by pain.149

Note the extended distribution of glottal stops (κ and γ), as well as the repetition of the sequence / dental—α—glottal / in δακρυσταγεῖ (a chiastic figure, because in the first instance we have a voiced dental followed by an unvoiced glottal [δακ-] and in the second an unvoiced dental followed by a voiced glottal [-ταγ-]). Timotheus reduces the Persian host to something just short of humanity and amplifies its auditory presence at the same time. If the poem was written and first performed in the 410s, as the second act of the Peloponnesian War festered and the Mediterranean world witnessed an extended series of horrors, lines like these may have been considerably more than artistically impressive; they could have carried the force of trauma.150 Timotheus uses the foreign accent of his speakers to defamiliarize and aestheticize the sound of language.151 He presents us with a captured Kelaenian who beseeches his Greek captor in a mutilated, barely articulated Greek: ὁ δ’ ἀμφὶ γόνασι περιπλεκεὶς ἐλίσσετ’, Ἑλλάδ’ ἐμπλέκων Ἀσιάδι φωνᾷ διάτορον σφραγῖδα θραύων στόματος, Ἰάονα γλῶσσαν ἐξιχνεύων· †”ἔγ̣ω μοί σοι ̣ † κῶς καὶ τί πρᾶγμα; αὖτις οὐδάμ’ ἔλθω· καὶ νῦν ἐμὸς δεσπότης δεῦρό μ’ ἐνθάδ’ ἤξει·

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τὰ λοιπὰ δ’ οὐκέτι, πάτερ, οὐκέτι μαχέσ’ αὖτις ἐνθ⟨ά⟩δ’ ἔρχω, ἀλλὰ κάθω· ἐγώ σοι μὲν δεῦρ,’ ἐγὼ κεῖσε παρὰ Σάρδι, παρὰ Σοῦσ’, Ἀγβάτανα ναίων· Ἄρτιμις ἐμὸς μέγας θεὸς παρ’ Ἔφεσον φυλάξει.” He embraced him around his knees and begged, weaving Greek with his Asian voice and shattering the seal of his mouth with a piercing cry, tracing out an Ionic tongue— †“I me you † how and what business? Again I come never. And now my master brought me here from there, but for the rest of time, never, father, never do I come to fight fore here again, but I sit down. I here for you I lie there by Sardis, by Sousa, dwelling in Ecbatana. Artimis my great god will guard me by Ephesus.”152

The captured soldier “traces out an Ionian tongue” as though he were only able to make the barest outline of the language. His attempt to speak takes on the attributes of an aulos; in speaking, he breaks the seal of his “pierced mouth”— διατόρον has the capacity to describe the auditory quality of the voice,153 but also implies that it has been “bored through,” just as the body of the aulos was. The quasi-Greek that follows deforms language, crumpling, folding, and breaking it in a metaphorical imitation of the instrument most associated with the terrifying sounds of the other. In keeping with his use of the limits of Greek to expand awareness of linguistic sonority, Timotheus intensifies his manipulation of phonetic material. Sequences of sounds are longer and more elaborate here: lines 145 and 146 play a complex game, contrasting α and ε (ὁ δ’ ἀμφὶ γόνασι περιπλεκεὶς / ἐλίσσετ’, Ἑλλάδ’ ἐμπλέκων). The couplet is held in place by repetition of the root -πλεκ-. Lines 147 and 148 are built around a spectacular repetition of the sequence α–ι, which unfolds into a repeating α–ι–α (Ἀσιάδι φωνᾷ διάτορον / σφραγῖδα); the sequence is reversed in the yawning Ἰάονα (149). The chiastic sequence ω–οι–οι–ω in 150 establishes ω as a tonic sound for the next nine lines, where it occurs in emphatic position no less than eight times (150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 159). Line 155, begun with a repeated οὐκέτι, proceeds with four two-syllable words, the first and third of which are in fact elided threesyllable words; an assonantal inversion has μάχεσ’ αὖ mirrored in ἐνθάδ’ ἐρ-. Line 158 sounds out alphas and sigmas as though contrasting drones and hisses. Although Timotheus does not use the auletic techniques of the many-headed or the Delphic nome, he does use their poetics, radically transforming the voice into the carrier of sonic effects. Just how radical Timotheus’s transformation of the voice is can be gathered from a comparison with the song of an escap-

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ing Phrygian slave in Euripides’s Orestes (1368–1502), composed at almost the same time, and another piece of music that links innovative artistry with Persian otherness. Musically Euripides’s song may have been quite similar—it is astrophic monody, like the Persians (although it was accompanied by the aulos, whereas the Persians used the lyre), and very likely modulated wildly like Timotheus’s nome. But Euripides’s Phrygian’s language is rhetorically rich (it is studded with repetitions and hyperbaton), whereas Timotheus’s Persians’ language is almost not Greek at all.154 Finally, Timotheus turns to the circle of generals around Xerxes, where σύντονος δ’ ἁρμόζετ’ Ἀσιὰς οἰμωγὰ †πολυστόνῷ. κτυπεῖ δὲ πᾶσα Βασιλέως πανήγυρις φόβῷ τὸ μέλλον εἰσορώμενοι πάθος. a tense lament of Asia is harmonized with much groaning. And the whole gathering around the king is struck by fear when they see the coming pain.155

Musical language plays an important role here; high-pitched (σύντονος)156 lamentation (οἰμωγὰ) is fastened to or harmonized with (ἁρμόζεται) groaning of a less-musical, less-linguistic sort (πολυστόνῳ). This echoes Timotheus’s earlier auditory description of the battle, in which shouting was mingled with screaming (34), bringing the same combination of sounds to the high-and-dry Persian command center. Timotheus’s use of ἁρμόζω suggests the mingling of normally exclusive musical forms and thus comes into conflict with those theorists who advocated for the strict use of a single “harmonic” tuning.157 In the response to his critics at the end of the song, as we have seen, Timotheus identifies himself with these noisy and defeated Persians. In effect, he concedes to his critics the role of “pure,” “traditional,” and “Greek,” appropriating for himself and his song the loud disruptions of a non-Greek other. And yet this is a Greek song by a composer who presents himself as a master of his tradition. But, after all, part of the heritage of Greek song was just this kind of confusion of categories. After the Persians retreat, the Greeks sing a paean of victory: Ο`ἳʹ δὲ τροπαῖα στησάμενοι Διὸς ἁγνότατον τέμενος, Παιᾶν’ ἐκελάδησαν ἰήϊον· ἄνακτα, σύμμετροι δ’ ἐπεκτύπεον ποδῶν ὑψικρότοις χορείαις.

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And after setting up trophies and a most sacred sanctuary of Zeus, they cried out the ie to Paian. And, Lord, in measured order they thudded down with high-sounding dances of feet.158

Timotheus’s choice of words articulates an identity between Greek celebration and Persian lament: as the Persians were struck (κτυπεῖ, 171) with fear, the Greeks strike out (ἐπεκτύπεον) a rhythm in high-sounding dances. ὑψικρότοις in 201 establishes a verbal link with the sounds of the warships’ oars as they shatter against the headland (12) and thus associates the auditory imagery in the poem with the sound of the poem itself. As Aeschylus had done long before, Timotheus channels the Persians to offer a sonorous disruption in the lineations of culture and order. The Persians’ final lines establish an elaborate connection between musical and political history. He cites Orpheus as the first inventor of the lyre (221–24); then Terpander, who “yoked the Muse in songs” with ten strings (225–28); then himself, upping Terpander’s ten with his own “eleven-sounding” meters and rhythms (230).159 Having located Orpheus at Pieria and Terpander on Lesbos, he now places himself at Miletus and, in the process, continues his numerical escalation, calling Miletus “the twelve-walled host, first among the Achaeans” (ἁ δυωδεκατειχέος / λαοῦ πρωτέος ἐξ Ἀχαιῶν; 235–36). This shift in numerical imagery from lyre strings to walls connects citharody to city founding, music, and law—a connection on which singers had long insisted. Now Timotheus turns again to Apollo, entreating the god to come so that Miletus might enjoy “peace flowering with εὐνομία” (“lawfulness,” 239–40). This word is surely to be associated with civic virtue but, in a citharodic nome, must also recall musical melody (also described as nomos). And yet these invocations of legitimacy are disturbed by the fact that Timotheus’s characterization of his own role in this musico-legal history is notable for its sonority: his “eleven-struck meters and rhythms” suggests a thudding sound—a description that emphasizes not the tonal but the timbral material of the song, that hard-and-fast attack followed by a slow decay that is so typical of a plectrum hitting a string.160 These gestures are reminiscent of Aeschylus’s advocacy of auditory affect: what makes the city strong is not silence but noise. Timotheus enlivens the sensual presence of his song by acting as a conduit for sounds expelled from the sociolinguistic enclosure, creating a space for the outside to reverberate within. Euripides’s approach was similar to Timotheus’s. His characterizations of music exploited connections between sound, affect, and melody to produce a bracing aesthetic. Against ideals that emphasized music’s healing capabilities, Euripides

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entertained a pessimistic vision in which music had no positive effects and could even destroy; against associations among song, social integration, and peace, he connected music with madness and ruin. Close to the beginning of the Medea, in lines reminiscent of Democritus’s arguments against the social function of music,161 the nurse of Medea’s children remarks: σκαιοὺς δὲ λέγων κοὐδέν τι σοφοὺς τοὺς πρόσθε βροτοὺς οὐκ ἂν ἁμάρτοις, οἵτινες ὕμνους ἐπὶ μὲν θαλίαις ἐπί τ’ εἰλαπίναις καὶ παρὰ δείπνοις ηὕροντο βίῷ τερπνὰς ἀκοάς· στυγίους δὲ βροτῶν οὐδεὶς λύπας ηὕρετο μούσῃ καὶ πολυχόρδοις ᾠδαῖς παύειν, ἐξ ὧν θάνατοι δειναί τε τύχαι σφάλλουσι δόμους. καίτοι τάδε μὲν κέρδος ἀκεῖσθαι μολπαῖσι βροτούς· ἵνα δ’ εὔδειπνοι δαῖτες, τί μάτην τείνουσι βοήν; τὸ παρὸν γὰρ ἔχει τέρψιν ἀφ’ αὑτοῦ δαιτὸς πλήρωμα βροτοῖσιν. You wouldn’t go wrong if you called them clumsy and utterly unwise—I mean those people, whoever they were, who devised hymns for festivities, feasts and meals. My, aren’t hymns delightful things to hear in a life?—But not one of music’s inventors found a way to use it to stop the pains we hate so much. But it’s from these pains that death and ill luck come to destroy houses. It would have been a real benefit if we could sing them away: why do people vainly stretch out their shout where there are well-supplied feasts? The fullness of the meal gives pleasure all by itself.162

Her sentiment is a direct rebuke to medical, philosophical, and musical theorists who did assert that music had the capacity to heal a wounded soul.163 Indeed, it is a rebuke to the spatial organization of the theater of Dionysus at Athens, where a temple to the healing god Asclepius had been constructed behind the theatron and within sight of the stage. Asclepius’s connections with tragedy would only grow in the centuries to come, despite the nurse’s protestations here.164 But music in Euripides’s world does not heal, and its futility in the face of real ills makes all music a kind of titanic noise (τείνουσι βοήν, 201; see the earlier discussion). This is more than just a pessimistic comment from a minor character close to the beginning of the play: it sets the stage for the musical drama itself, which as music thus begins to seem somehow contrary, an affront to our longing for

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peace and health. In contrast to those who equated music with order through the word νόμος, Euripides espoused a music whose poetics could best be summed up by another lexical coincidence: the fact that μέλος (“melody”) in its oblique cases bears an uncanny resemblance to μελέος (“wretched”).165 Medea itself offers an excellent example of Euripides’s way with song. Its title character is a terrible assemblage of social types normally understood to be far removed from the normative model of male citizen agency: a foreigner, a witch, a woman, and the embodiment of a furious grief.166 But she is also a figure for the music Euripides makes in telling her story. Indeed, if music in the later fifth century was marked by a high degree of modulation and genre mixing, as later critics such as Plato seem to have believed, Euripides’ Medea is placed in a narrative situation perfectly calibrated to continually provoke such mixtures of emotions. Informed that her children have been spared and will not be sent into exile, she laments—a reaction described by her interlocutor as “not singing together” with his news.167 Told slightly later by a different messenger that Creousa and Creon are dead and that she must flee quickly, she exalts, utterly confounding the informant with her discordant response.168 She is an embodiment of the “double music” so central to Euripidean art.169 Her language enforces this impression. Consider, for example, her first extended speech to Jason: ὦ παγκάκιστε, τοῦτο γάρ σ᾽ εἰπεῖν ἔχω γλώσσῃ μέγιστον εἰς ἀνανδρίαν κακόν· ἦλθες πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ἦλθες ἔχθιστος γεγώς [θεοῖς τε κἀμοὶ παντί τ’ ἀνθρώπων γένει]; οὔτοι θράσος τόδ᾽ ἐστὶν οὐδ᾽ εὐτολμία, φίλους κακῶς δράσαντ᾽ ἐναντίον βλέπειν, ἀλλ᾽ ἡ μεγίστη τῶν ἐν ἀνθρώποις νόσων πασῶν, ἀναίδει᾽. εὖ δ᾽ ἐποίησας μολών· ἐγώ τε γὰρ λέξασα κουφισθήσομαι ψυχὴν κακῶς σὲ καὶ σὺ λυπήσῃ κλύων. ἐκ τῶν δὲ πρώτων πρῶτον ἄρξομαι λέγειν· ἔσωσά σ᾽, ὡς ἴσασιν Ἑλλήνων ὅσοι ταὐτὸν συνεισέβησαν Ἀργῷον σκάφος, πεμφθέντα ταύρων πυρπνόων ἐπιστάτην ζεύγλαισι καὶ σπεροῦντα θανάσιμον γύην· δράκοντά θ᾽, ὃς πάγχρυσον ἀμπέχων δέρος σπείραις ἔσῳζε πολυπλόκοις ἄυπνος ὤν, κτείνασ᾽ ἀνέσχον σοὶ φάος σωτήριον.

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Oh most evil one—this is what I have to call you, the greatest ill a tongue has against unmanliness—do you come to me? You, here? Hateful [to me, and the gods, and every human clan]! To look your friends in the eye after you have done them wrong: it isn’t daring or courage. It’s shamelessness, the greatest human disease of all. Wait. I’ve changed my mind. You did well to come. I will speak evilly of you; and it will lighten my soul and pain you to hear it. From the beginning, then: All the Greeks who came with you in the Argo know that I saved you when you were sent to master the fire-breathing bull with a yoke and to sew that mortal field. That sleepless serpent, which protected the golden fleece by wrapping it in its tightly woven coils? I slaughtered it, holding the light of safety up for you.170

The line ἔσωσά σ᾽, ὡς ἴσασιν Ἑλλήνων ὅσοι (I saved you, as know all the Greeks who . . .) gave Euripides a reputation for being a “philosigmatist,” that is, for loving the sound of the sigma rather too much.171 Indeed, it is not only this line: the whole passage seems to hiss. From its opening παγκάκιστε (most evil one) through to the very end, σ- sounds come thick and fast. It is hard to overlook the fact that such exuberant sigmatism (perhaps we should call it syrigmatism) should occur in the passage where Medea describes the death of the serpent that guarded the Golden Fleece. Her hissing seems to suggest an identity between Jason’s first great mythic foe and Medea. A second and more elaborately developed animal affiliation deepens Medea’s associations with music. Close to the beginning of the play, Medea laments what she describes as the condition of women, forced to marry and then learn to live with men whose natures they can neither predict nor control.172 The passage is strikingly similar to a speech attributed to Procne in Sophocles’s Tereus (which survives today only in fragments).173 Sophocles’s play told the story of Procne and Philomela, the tale of infanticide and the origin myth of the nightingale’s song discussed at length in chapter 1. In tragedy, as in earlier song, the nightingale became an important— and ambiguous—metapoetic image,174 beautifully summed up by Aara Suksi: The divinely wrought mythical metamorphosis which rescued Procne from a violent death at her husband’s hands and changed her, shrieking in horror and bloody with her son’s murder, into a bird dedicated to melodic lamentation in leafy groves, is parallel to the tragedian’s transformation of chaotic horror and grief into an ordered dramatic and musical composition for performance during a religious festival.175

I would only add that this process of transmutation is never complete, that in the nightingale’s voice there is always something off-key, and that this dissonance is fundamental to the bird’s music and the human song it symbolizes.176 The analogies between Medea and Procne are strong. Both married into fami-

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lies and moved far from their birth home; both are betrayed by their husbands, and both commit infanticide to avenge a husband’s infidelity. Medea’s remarkable speech thus invokes the sentiments of a character who went on to transform herself into a mainstream avian figure for the sound of song, not merely an image of melodic complexity and beauty, but one full of dark overtones.177 Her quasiornithological becoming is signaled not only by this allusive speech but also by her final exit, which takes place in a winged chariot from the roof of the skene. The immediate mythological reference in this case is to the chariot of her grandfather Helios, but one might also see in a flying Medea a recollection of the flight of Procne and Philomela in Sophocles’s play.178 In Medea, Procne is part of a complex web of connections linking Medea with harmony, nightingales, and Athenian order. When she escapes Thebes at the end of the play, she flies to Athens, where she has secured asylum from the Athenian king Aegeus. Aegeus, as Euripides is sure to have Medea observe, is the son of Pandion, the namesake of an earlier Athenian king who was himself the father of Procne and Philomela. Euripides imagines the intersection of Medea and Athens in the third ode, where the city is described as a blooming grove: Ἐρεχθεΐδαι τὸ παλαιὸν ὄλβιοι καὶ θεῶν παῖδες μακάρων, ἱερᾶς χώρας ἀπορθήτου τ᾽ ἄπο, φερβόμενοι κλεινοτάταν σοφίαν, αἰεὶ διὰ λαμπροτάτου βαίνοντες ἁβρῶς αἰθέρος, ἔνθα ποθ᾽ ἁγνὰς ἐννέα Πιερίδας Μούσας λέγουσι ξανθὰν Ἁρμονίαν φυτεῦσαι· τοῦ καλλινάου τ᾽ ἐπὶ Κηφισοῦ ῥοαῖς τὰν Κύπριν κλῄζουσιν ἀφυσσαμέναν χώρας καταπνεῦσαι μετρίας ἀνέμων ἡδυπνόους αὔρας· αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἐπιβαλλομέναν χαίταισιν εὐώδη ῥοδέων πλόκον ἀνθέων τᾷ Σοφίᾳ παρέδρους πέμπειν Ἔρωτας, παντοίας ἀρετᾶς ξυνεργούς. The descendants of Erechtheus have long been happy: children of the blessed gods, from a sacred land that has never been sacked, nourished on the most glorious wisdom, always walking lightly through the clearest air, in the land where, they say, the nine holy Muses of Pieria gave birth to blond Harmony. They tell the story that Cypris, after drawing water from the streams of beautifullyflowing Cephisus, breathed temperate and sweet breaths of wind over the place. And always putting a fragrant wreath of flowering roses in her hair, she sends Erotes to sit beside Wisdom and work with her on all kinds of excellence.179

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Reminiscences of Sappho’s grove of Aphrodite are strong here.180 Breezes, the fine scent of roses, and Erotes characterize Athens, where, Euripides has the chorus say, the Muses once raised “blonde Harmony.” As is so frequent in tragedy, the chorus’s words speak against its sentiment. It means to imagine Athens as a lovely, peaceful, happy place, and the chorus invokes it here to attempt to dissuade Medea from committing her ghastly infanticide. “[H]ow could this city of holy rivers,” it asks in the immediately succeeding lines, “that walks with the gods, receive you fresh from the death of your children?”181 But the chorus’s attempt to juxtapose a fantastically beautiful Athens with Medea’s horrific intention is undercut by its choice of words, which, in fact, reveals a continuity between Medea and her future city of refuge. When it imagines Athens as harboring Harmony, it means that the city is characterized by peace and order. But when it makes Harmony “blonde,” Euripides invites us to imagine her as a nightingale.182 This is more than just a reference to what Medea will disrupt: it is a reference to Medea herself. Her presence in the garden of Erechtheus is an eerie advance glimpse of Medea’s own presence in the city after the death of her children—but also, inevitably, of the presence of tragedy within the city. Like Aeschylus’s Erinyes, she helps to “never banish the uncanny from the city.” Elsewhere in Euripides, too, upbeat articulations of the role and meaning of music prove catastrophically wrong. The chorus of Heracles, for example, is committed to musical poetics that are unrealistically optimistic.183 Describing themselves as “aged singer[s] of laments, like some grey bird, no more than words, an opinion born of nocturnal visions,”184 the chorus members defend a music that seems conservative, at least compared to the mainstream of Greek art music. Faced, in the first half of the play, with a Thebes ruled by a murderous tyrant and with Heracles seemingly permanently lost to the shades below, they declare their commitment to Apolline song as a music of healing. But even Apollo sings a more complicated tune. In lines reminiscent of the later Platonic complaint that the music of the late fifth century shamelessly mixed genres, Apollo is described as “shouting forth the lament for Linos in a happy melody”185—but Apollo is not the god of lamentation,186 and no lament is well described as “a happy melody.” What Apollo sings, here, exemplifies the complexity and polyformity typical of fifth-century art song. The chorus’s own intended vocal performance is different: in contrast to Apollo,187 it will hymn praise for Heracles.188 And so it does, celebrating the hero’s labors as civilizing acts.189 It is tempting to read the description of his acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides as a tendentious refusal of the auditory poetics we have already traced in earlier music:190 the Hesperides are described as “hymn-singing maidens,”

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and Heracles simply kills the serpent that protects the apples, while the serpent itself is afforded no presence, auditory or otherwise, within the text—there is no syrigmos here. But the chorus’s attempt to sing an unambiguous and univocal song unravels when at the end of the ode it faces Heracles’s descent into the underworld and contemplates the fact that he has not returned. From that point on, its words turn increasingly gloomy. The next ode sees their optimistic musicology seemingly vindicated. Heracles has returned from the underworld, and a plan is hatched to conquer Lycos and save the family. Returning to the theme of their age and their function as singers, they assert in the second strophic pair that they will “never cease to mix together the Graces and the Muses.”191 The expression acknowledges the increasing cultural value that the mixing of musical genres was taking on in the fifth century— and then refuses it by conjoining the Muses and the Graces, a conjunction that was hardly innovative.192 Again they return to their role as traditional remembrancers, longing to be never separated from the Muses and those who love them and promising that they will continue to remember in song the victorious deeds of Heracles.193 And yet their commitment to musical euphony is betrayed by their very words—for they describe their singing with the verb κελαδέω (make a din),194 and they invoke Dionysus in his cult name as the “Roarer” (βρόμιος).195 Here again the euphony of the chorus is penetrated and subverted by reminiscences of the same dark harmonies it seeks to avert and deny.196 Indeed, they are not actually as committed to unambiguously optimistic, healthful music as they admit. Lycos’s death cries are a “melody dear to me to hear,”197 and with his passing, they rouse themselves in a triumphal dance.198 Their song turns noisy—the rocks of Delphi and the Heliconian homes of the Muses magnify Thebes with a “joyful clamour.”199 No doubt this is sincere, but a consideration of the broader context of Greek auditory culture leads me to suspect that this clamorous joy masks other unsettling currents. Indeed, the situation is about to deteriorate—and when it does the music will become much more fearful. The chorus’s triumphal dance is interrupted by the appearance of the goddesses Iris and Lyssa on the roof of the skene. They are there at Hera’s command: their intent is to drive Heracles into a delusional frenzy, the result of which will be the murder of his wife and children. Seeing them the chorus falls into sudden panic, crying out its longing to escape and praying (still) to Apollo the healer for safety.200 Just before descending into the house, Lyssa, a personification of madness, describes her effects in richly auditory terms: she will follow Heracles howling like a dog, and she will be more powerful than the groaning sea, the earth-

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quake, or the thunderbolt when she rushes on him.201 Of these natural forces only the sea is described in auditory terms, but both thunder and earthquakes are well remarked in Greek sources as full of sound.202 Heracles will roll his head with eyes like that of a gorgon and then bellow terribly like a bull.203 These are auditory images familiar from the traditional thesaurus of Greek poetry. Lyssa drives the point home in musical terms: she will “play the aulos all over him.”204 Lyssa’s description of her effects on Heracles is corroborated by the messenger’s report of the events within the house.205 The scene starts with ritual silence, as Heracles prepares to purify the house of the slaughter of Lycos, and has Heracles gradually becoming louder as the delusion comes over him: he rumbles at a hallucinated Euristheus, then cries out a fearful alalage as he falls on his children in the belief that he is killing his Mycenaean tormentors. Heracles’s rampage causes Megara to shout out in anguish and fear, and Amphitryon’s terrified expostulations can be heard from outside the house.206 Hearing these, the chorus interprets the slaughter as a terrible dance begun without the Dionysiac sounds of drum or the thyrsus,207 a melody played on the aulos.208 Things fall back toward silence only when Athena strikes Heracles unconscious. The chorus has been deeply wrong about their situation and the role of music within it: the happy, euphonic song of triumph they fantasized about before the appearance of Iris and Lyssa has been transformed into lament, one which leaves them grasping for options: driven to aporia by the size of the catastrophe, they ask, “[W]hat groan of sob or song for the dead or chorus of Hades should I start up?”209 Their earlier description of themselves as gray birds now finds an echo in their description of Amphytrion as an old man who groans over the agonies of his child like some wingless bird.210 A quiet—but nonetheless terrible—dissonance is articulated: Heracles sleeps, and Amphytrion and the chorus, although longing to lament, must stay silent for fear of waking him.211 As a result, their antiphonal lament alternates between groaning212 and injunctions not to groan.213 The chorus’s earlier espousal of an unambiguously optimistic music is now reprised ironically in the need to suppress lamentation precisely at the moment when it is most needed.214 Such a paradoxical combination of a near-silent voice and an extreme pathos performs, in yet another mode, the same mixture, generic dissonance, or impurity that had been central to Greek music for at least a century and to which Plato would object decades later. It may also have contradicted at least one acoustic theory. According to Archytas, some acousticians correlated pitch and amplitude, assuming, in other words, that high-pitched sounds were also loud sounds.215 It seems, however, that lamentation was associated with high-pitched melody.216

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Euripides, in other words, may have scored this section in a high pitch range and then set the dynamic level very low, thus engineering a form of musical expression whose possibility was denied by some theorists. A sound that counters expectations demands attention as sound. Even quietly—indeed, because it is quiet—sound rings out clearly here.

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CODA

Let me recapitulate. A survey of the kinds of sounds represented in song and other writing makes it clear that sound was strongly (if not exclusively) associated with disruptive forces and presences. It is tempting to identify in this fact a clear structural opposition between noise and socially tempered sound, between the “raw” and the “cooked” in Lévi-Strauss’s formulation.1 But the opposition is problematized by the evidence from which it is drawn, that is, by song itself, a “cooked” sound that revels in “raw” noise. Ancient auditory art was a profoundly social thing: it demanded teachers, time in the form of freedom from other kinds of work, and the investment of an audience or supportive community of fellow performers.2 For most of the archaic and early classical period, music was not only implicitly social: it was explicitly so, with musicians claiming a special role as interpreters or promoters of social order. It is surprising that an art form with so strong a social charge should also be calibrated to resonate with just the sounds apparently configured as antisocial. We could interpret this dissonance in a poststructuralist mode: sound functions as an internal outside, a built-in specification by song of what it is not. But that interpretation is insufficiently sensitive to sound’s status as the substrate of the media from which song is built—words and pitches are auditory objects, so when song names its other, it also names its own mode of sensual appeal. In this it resembles the relationship between speech and the voice: as a tradition of scholars since at least Roland Barthes have insisted, the voice is the potential for a felt relationship to what sustains and supports our efforts at communication, an uncanny resonance that constitutes and yet exceeds speech.3 There is an outside to speech and song, but it is foreclosed by the procedures that make speech and song recognizable objects. Nonetheless, the closure of the world of sensation does not mean its loss: the technical manipulation of perceptual forms, what we call art, summons or creates a figure for experiences precluded by a comprehensible social world. In this sense, Greek auditory art functioned very much as early acoustic ecologists like R. Murray Schafer imagined 133

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future music could work—they were engaged in the resuscitation and artful design of acoustic environments, reminding us of what are ears are for.4 In the end, I am inclined to understand the characteristic dissonance of Greek auditory art not in terms of structure and opposition at all, but rather as the result of a nascently ecological impulse. When song evokes sound, it becomes one means by which the enclosure of a society resonates with its environment, developing sensitivities to ambient entities and influences.5 Such an ecology, however, should not be taken to support a realist interpretation of language and culture (in which the ultimate reference of all symbolic activity is the independent reality of things as they are) nor a constructivist interpretation of things (in which the latter have meaning and being only thanks to the operations of culture and language), but rather to bespeak complex interactions between cultures and things. After all, most things—even “natural” things—are the product of cultural activity, yet once made, they can resist culture, even overwhelm it (just as our man-made climate threatens to do to us). I have tried to capture three modalities of the sonority of Greek auditory art. As a self-reflexive process invoking audition’s conditions of possibility, it can be described as a figure. As a relation of causality and of movement through space, it is well characterized as affect. And projected onto a temporal axis, it is most easy to identify as melody, as an aperiodic unfolding of patterns; in Greek art music, this is especially associated with an adventurous pursuit of novelty and complexity. We can exemplify each of these modes of auditory experience in Bacchae, Euripides’s posthumously produced tale of Pentheus’s disastrous resistance to the god Dionysus. It is popularly intimated that this tragedy is about mortals’ exposure to primal forces capable of overwhelming the fragile structures of rationality.6 No doubt, but Dionysus is not a wild and uncivilized savage any more than he is a commune-movement hippie. To the contrary: by the late fifth century, the god of tragedy and dithyramb was the tutelary deity of art forms of extraordinary technical sophistication, long in intense dialogue with philosophical theory and sophistic rhetoric. In Bacchae, he has toured cities of Asia Minor famous for their overdeveloped refinement,7 and Pentheus remarks on his fine hair, clothes, and pale skin (an achievement that implies carefully staying out of the sun),8 accurately assessing the god’s ambiguous speech as containing high sophistry.9 Indeed, Bacchae gives the cleverest thoughts not to the “atheist” Pentheus but to believers: the prophet Tiresias reads Dionysus allegorically as the wet element, matching him in a quasi-Anaxagorean cosmological fable with Demeter, figure of the dry, and etymologizes the myth of the god’s birth from Zeus’s thigh as the

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result of a process of language change.10 Cadmus, for his part, argues that Dionysus should be worshiped, even if he is not a god, because belief in his divinity augments the family reputation.11 These arguments do not unmask Cadmus and Tiresias as charlatans, unbelievers mimicking the attitudes of faith. Rather, their artful manipulations of language and perception mark them as Dionysian. What overwhelms Pentheus in this tragedy comes through the medium of refined art. This art entails the full panoply of sound.12 Dionysus is persistently invoked as βρομίος, the Roarer. Bringing his cult to Thebes, he raises the city with an ololuge.13 Summoning the chorus of Bacchants, he bids them seize and strike drums,14 and they enter crying evoi15 and celebrate the drum16 and the “sweet shouts” of the auloi,17 singing “Phrygian” melodies,18 roaring, and making a fine clamor.19 Their melodies are “barbarian,”20 an onomatopoeic adjective that draws attention to non-Greek speech as sheer sonority. When the chorus describes the aulos as “sweet-shouting,”21 the affiliation between Dionysiac song and art music is made explicit through recollection of the coinage μελιβόαν in Lasus’s hymn to Demeter, where the word was a deliberate oxymoron intended to express the complex auditory, formal, and affective affiliations of the new “auletic” vocal music in the late sixth century. It is hard not to read the presence of the Roarer in Thebes as a figure of sound in auditory art. Dionysus comes to the city not simply as an outsider but as a presence that had been there all along; he is both a new god, a foreigner, and a scion of the royal house, son of Semele and Zeus, his mother’s tomb placed prominently close to the palace. Indeed, although Dionysus in Bacchae (and not only there) is the new god, the denied one who must integrate himself, often forcefully, into the religious fabric of an already-established Olympianism, Dionysus was actually a very old god, attested in Linear B tablets from Pylos and Crete. His condition of being always there and yet always in advent repeats the relationship between sense and perception I have been tracing. The advent of the sensual substrate of auditory perception is the process identified by Donna Haraway as figure: the opening through which our entanglement in the world comes over and into us as felt experience. Taken another way, Dionysus can be understood as a god of auditory affect. At the heart of the play, when Pentheus is on the cusp of gathering an army to march against the bacchants on Cithaeron, Dionysus stops him with a single, overwhelming syllable:22 ἆ Ah

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From this moment forward, the Theban king is utterly compliant with the god’s will. The dynamics of the scene suggest that the ἆ itself brings this about, as though what had emerged from the Roarer’s mouth was a form of enchantment. But the Roarer’s utterance may be magic only in so far as it is an example of rhetoric. Ever since Gorgias had applied pre-Socratic materialist theories to the art of speech, rhetoric had been a self-consciously auditory form.23 Dionysus’s cry, in other words, embodies a rhetorical power closely affiliated with sound and capable of extraordinary transformations in those who hear it. From it emerges Pentheus’s shameful and comic transformation into a woman, in which form he is marched through the city (a sight to all) and onto Cithaeron, where he will meet his death—which is also brought about by Dionysus’s voice because it is a cry uttered twice within an enchanted silence that summons the women of Thebes to destroy him.24 The scene recaptures the almost-primal depiction of auditory affect in Aeschylus’s Persians, where a similarly hard-to-locate voice had cried out in a fashion that spelled doom for the Persian fleet.25 Like the cries of the women Alcaeus complains of having to listen to in his suburban exile, these women’s cries of triumph cause nothing but terror. But where Aeschylus’s Persians feel panic at the sound of the Greeks, Dionysius’s voice generates hallucinations: the women believe they tear apart a wild beast rather than the king of Thebes.26 Indeed, in Bacchae, auditory affect has synesthetic consequences. If the god is associated with sound, the man who denies him inevitably becomes a resister of sound, not unlike Eteocles in Aeschylus’s Seven. Pentheus interprets the thudding of Bacchanalian drums as noise,27 associates what he imagines to be the women’s immoral Aphrodisiac behavior with the sound of the aulos28 and proves intensely oculo-centric, even scopophilic. Having heard of new ritual practices among the women at Thebes, his impulse and strategy is to capture their leader and bring him before his eyes;29 he is both offended and obsessed by what he imagines are the invisible orgies encouraged by the emergent cult.30 He questions the disguised Dionysus about the new god in strongly visualist terms—What does he look like? Have you seen him?—and gets answers in kind.31 For his agents and allies, vision is the primary mode of access to the new religion’s mysteries,32 which they describe as an “uncanny sight to behold.”33 And, of course, it is Pentheus’s desire to process Dionysian experience through his eyes rather than his ears that leads to his downfall. His overwhelming need to see puts him in the god’s hands,34 and he marches out, a spectacle to the city, to see what he should not.35 His watching of the Bacchants is a kind of theory,36 attempted in the absence of sound.37 Even the god’s status as the Roarer is concealed before the king: the word βρόμιος is almost never said in Pentheus’s hearing.

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These reflections suggest a contest between the auditory and the visual within the sensory dynamics of the Bacchae, a difficult relationship between the two sensual tracks of this multimedia art form. If so, the contest is decided from the beginning, for vision and visual spectacle are presented as affects of sound. So, for example, Dionysus’s voice facilitates a transition from intense sound to vision in the following lines: ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΣ. ἰώ, κλύετ’ ἐμᾶς κλύετ’ αὐδᾶς, ἰὼ βάκχαι, ἰὼ βάκχαι. ΧΟΡΟΣ. τίς ὅδε, τίς πόθεν ὁ κέλαδος ἀνά μ’ ἐκάλεσεν Εὐίου; Δι. ἰὼ ἰώ, πάλιν αὐδῶ, ὁ Σεμέλας, ὁ Διὸς παῖς. Χο. ἰὼ ἰώ, δέσποτα δέσποτα, μόλε νυν ἁμέτερον ἐς θίασον, ὦ Βρόμιε Βρόμιε. Δι. πέδον χθονός, Ἔννοσι πότνια. Χο. ἆ ἆ, τάχα τὰ Πενθέως μέλαθρα διατι‑ νάξεται πεσήμασιν. ὁ Διόνυσος ἀνὰ μέλαθρα· σέβετέ νιν.—σέβομεν ὤ. —εἴδετε λάϊνα κίοσιν ἔμβολα τάδε διάδρομα; Βρόμιος ἀλα‑ λάζεται στέγας ἔσω. Δι. ἅπτε κεραύνιον αἴθοπα λαμπάδα, σύμφλεγε σύμφλεγε δώματα Πενθέος. Χο. ἆ ἆ, πῦρ οὐ λεύσσεις, οὐδ’ αὐγάζῃ Σεμέλας ἱερὸν ἀμφὶ τάφον ἅν ποτε κεραυνοβόλος ἔλιπε φλόγα Δῖος βροντά; δίκετε πεδόσε δίκετε τρομερὰ σώματα, μαινάδες· ὁ γὰρ ἄναξ ἄνω κάτω τιθεὶς ἔπεισι μέλαθρα τάδε Διὸς γόνος. Dionysus: Io. Hear, hear my voice, io Bacchae! Chorus: Who is that? What and from where did that din of Euaios summon me? Dion.: Io Io. I speak again, the son of Semele and Zeus. Ch.: Io Io. Master, master, come now to our sacred gathering. Oh Roarer, Roarer.

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Dion. Shake the plane of earth, mistress Earthquake. Ch.: A a. Swiftly will the halls of Pentheus be shaken to the ground. Dionysus is there. Honor him. –We honor him. –Do you see the stone lintels on the columns collapsing? The Roarer raises the alalage inside the house. Dion.: Light the flashing light of lightning, burn, burn the house of Pentheus. Ch.: A a. Don’t you see the fire, don’t you behold the flame which the lightningthrower left around the sacred tomb of Semele, the bolt of Zeus? Throw your trembling bodies to the ground, maenads: for the lord, the offspring of Zeus, is coming to this palace to upend all.38

The scene innovates on an element of tragic stagecraft that had become almost cliché: death cries from behind the skene, uttered in uneasy duet with the chorus. Here, however, no one is dying; instead, in what might be read as a kind of mythical abstraction, a reduction of tragic storytelling to the zero degree, a God shouts out triumphant mastery over his increasingly delusional victim. The cries from backstage strongly emphasize auditory experience: Dionysus calls the chorus to hear his voice (577) and the chorus refers to it as a din (κέλαδος), adding that the Roarer raises the alalage inside the house (592–93). These auditory intensities rapidly begin to produce visions: they see the house begin to collapse (587–93), then flash with fire (594–601). The passage can be profitably set beside the messenger’s description of the advance of the Athenian fleet in the Persians, where again intense sound translates not only into vision but also into fire. I do not know what stage effects the first production used,39 but I do think that if no special effects dramatized what the chorus relates, then this intensely musical passage might be said to have had the same effect on the imagination of the audience: sound produced visions, transfiguring the theatrical space into Dionysian fantasy. Bacchae thus celebrates the ascendency of an elaborate, even ostentatiously artistic form defined by its ability to produce sounds so powerful that they induce visions. Music plays a central role in this auditory poetics. Euripides makes this clear in the play’s final lines, in the process emphasizing his endorsement of a form of melody that diverges from conservative models of harmony. Here, Dionysus prophesies about the future of Cadmus and his wife, Harmonia: they are destined to be transformed into serpents. Euripides repeats Harmonia’s name three times in twenty-five lines—there has been no mention of her before this point—as though he wants to remind us of the allegorical significance of the name. The becoming-serpentine of Cadmus and Harmonia is strongly motivated

MUSIC

within the context of Bacchae, of course: Thebes is the land of the sewn men, produced from the teeth of a serpent slain by Cadmus at the founding of the city; Dionysus is crowned with serpents;40 and Pentheus is hostilely characterized as a serpent to be overcome by the new god.41 Cadmus and Harmonia’s transformation into snakes could perhaps be read as the symbolic reconciliation of the new god and the city hostile to him. But Thebes was also a city famous for its auletes, and it is hard not to hear a musical argument at work as well. The ophidianization of Harmony invokes the original scene of Greek musical complexity: the syrigmos of Sacadas’s Pythian Nome. In this late statement, written at the time of the most expansive style of musical expression the Greek world had yet heard, Euripides allegorized the primal gesture of the musical tradition—and thus joined head to tail, linking the tradition’s end with its beginning and asserting one last time the importance of dissonance for the sensual presence of the musical work of art.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began writing in the early spring of 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, finished a first draft in Qala on the Maltese island of Gozo, then revised and completed the book in Columbia, Missouri. Indispensable research was conducted at the superb facilities of the Fondation Hardt in Geneva and at the American Academy in Rome. I am grateful to colleagues and friends at these institutions but especially to those at my new home at the University of Missouri– Columbia: Michael Barnes, Jim Crozier, Matt Farmer, Rich Foley, Dan Hooley, Darcy Krasne, Ray Marks, Anatole Mori, Naomi Kaloudis, David Schenker, Dennis Trout, and Barbara Wallace have contributed so much more than they can imagine to the completion of this book and my happiness as I did so. Andrew Buchheim provided invaluable research assistance at a critical moment. Victoria Wohl and Lynn Kozak kept me going when I was ready to quit. Sean Franzel saved the capo. Paul North asked for the book—a gesture of faith I still can barely believe. Richard Morrison was more than patient with an occasionally extremely neurotic author. Anne Carson wrote the first and still the best piece of writing on sound in Greek antiquity; for that, and for teaching me Greek, many thanks. The manuscript’s readers have made innumerable contributions to its final form: this is, truly, a collective work. So many of those in my bibliography provoked and excited me to do this work: your work is cherished, as hard as it is for me to communicate this in endnotes and references. An earlier version of part of chapter 2 was published as “Resonance: Aeschylus’ Persae and the Poetics of Sound,” Ramus 42 (2013): 122–37. I could do nothing without my wife, Julija Šukys, and my son, Sebastian Šukys Gurd. No gratitude could ever seem adequate.

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NOTES

PROLOGUE 1. But even then, there is the chatter of bats: Od. 20.6–9. Explicit mentions of the silence of the night are common in Vergil (see G. 1.247, 4.189; Aen. 4.527, 7.87, 7.102, 9.190), but I can find nothing so explicit in early Greek literature. See H. Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 262, for modern explorations of the same theme. 2. Anaxagoras A 74 DK. 3. Il. 4.435; Od. 9.167, 439. 4. Il. 18.530. 5. Il. 18.580, 20.404, 21.237; Soph. Aj. 322. 6. Il. 10.532–35. 7. Aesch. Sept. 245, 461–64, 475. 8. Il. 11.417, 12.149; Bacchyl. 5.116. 9. Il. 10.185–86, 21.575; Od. 14.29–30; Stesichorus 255 PMG; compare Semon. 7.15 IEG; Sappho 158.2 LP. 10. Od. 20.13–18. 11. Od. 16.163. 12. Od. 14.412, 10.239. 13. Alc. 10B LP. 14. Pind. Pyth. 5.57. 15. Hom. Hymn Ap. 359–60; Pind. Ol. 8.40; Hipponax 79.11 IEG; Aesch. Sept. 381. 16. Hom. Hymn Herm. 563; Bacchyl. 10.10. 17. Il. 3.151–52; Alc. 307(c), 347(a).3 LP; Pratinas 709 PMG; Ar. Av. 39–41. 18. Il. 14.290; Od. 11.605, 16.216–18; Alc. 40 PMG; Stesichorus 209.5 PMG; Thgn. 1197; Bacchyl. 5.23; Soph. El. 17–19, Aj. 168, Ant. 423–24, 1206. Eur. Hel. 747, Tro. 827, IT 1090–93; Ar. Av. 1379–80. 19. Il. 12.207; Aesch. Ag. 48–54; Soph. Ant. 112. 20. Od. 19.518–23; Sappho 30, 136; Alc. test. 9 (Campbell), fr. 253, 307 (c) LP; Thgn. 939–42; Stesichorus test. 40 (Campbell); Ibyc. 303(b) PMG; Bacchyl. 3.98; Simon. 586 PMG; Aesch. Supp. 62, Ag. 1144–46; Soph. Aj. 629, El. 107–8, 147–48, Trach. 963, OC 17, 672–73; Eur. Hel. 1107–114, Rh. 547–50; Ar. Av 1379–80. 143

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21. Il. 2.459–65, 3.3–5. 22. Il. 10.273–76. 23. Il. 22.141. 24. Od. 5.66–67; Stesichorus 209 PMG; Pind. Ol. 2.87; Hes. Op. 747; Aesch. Ag. 1472–74. 25. Il. 19.350. 26. Od. 21.411; Anacr. 394 (a), 453 PMG; Alc. 307(c) LP; Stesichorus 211 PMG; Simon. 597, 606 PMG; Anacreonta 10 (Campbell); Aesch. Ag. 1050–52. 27. Carmina Popularia 859 PMG; Hipponax 54 IEG. 28. Ion of Chios 746 PMG; Bacchyl. 4.7; Simon. 583 PMG. 29. Alcm. 1.100–101 PMG; Aesch. Ag. 1444–46; Eur. El. 151–53, IT 1105. 30. Alc. 416 LP; Hes. Op 486; Ar. Av. 504–5. 31. Pratinas 711 PMG. 32. Il. 17.755–56; Pind. Nem. 3.82. 33. Sappho 2.5–6 LP. Compare Il. 21.161. 34. Λάσκω. Anac. 427 PMG. 35. Simon. 571 PMG. 36. Il. 2.209–10, 394, 4.425, 18.403. 37. Il. 14.394; Od. 5.401–4, 12.60. 38. Il. 4.422–23, 20.50; Aesch. PV 431–32; Eur. Hip. 756, Hel. 1305; Soph. Phil. 688. 39. Il. 4.455, 21.255, 21.313–14. 40. Il. 21.9. 41. Il. 21.10. 42. Sappho 71.7 LP (conjectural). 43. Simon. 543.15–16 PMG. 44. Il. 13.590, 14.17, 14.398–99, 15.620, 23.208–18. 45. Il. 13.137–41. 46. Il. 7.478–79, 8.75, 11.45, 15.377, 17.595, 20.56; Od. 20.103, 21.413; Corinna 680 PMG; Anon. Lyr. f. 929c PMG; Bacchyl. 7.4; Semon. 1.1 IEG; Pind. Ol. 2.25–26, Pyth. 4.23; Archil. 94 IEG; Eur. Phoen. 183–84. Usually thunder comes from Zeus, but it can be made by Poseidon as well; then it is earthquake (Pind. Ol. 1.73; Anon. Lyr. 929(a) PMG; Eur. Hip. 1201–2, Phoen. 1181). Thunder causes fear when it is heard (Eur. Hip. 1202, 1216). In the Prometheus Bound, it is the sound of Olympian rage against the intransigent Titan (PV 923, 1062, 1082–83). Dionysius too roars, as his epithet ἐρίβρομος (see, e.g. Anac. 365 PMG) suggests he should. 47. In epic, war is “ill-resounding” (δυσήχος; Il. 2.686, 7.376, 7.395, 16.442, with G. Autenreith, A Homeric Dictionary, trans. R. P. Keep (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), and LSJ [s.v.]. R. J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), etymologizes it improbably as δυσ-άχος, i.e., “causing a bad pain”). “Battle” goes with “din” (Il. 12.35, 16.246). Eris, the goddess of

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strife, is “filled with much groaning” (Il. 4.440–45, 11.73), and Ares, the god of war, is loud-voiced (Il. 13.52). A typical example comes from the pseudo-Hesiodic Shield (Hes. Sc. 156–60). See also Il. 11.500, 12.251, 12.289, 12.471, 13.169, 13.837, 14.1, 17.424, 19.363, 20.66; Bacchyl. 2.12, 14.15–16, 18.59; Tyrtaeus 19.20 IEG; Simonides 14.2 IEG ( West, conjecturally); Archil. 112.3 IEG; Aesch. Pers. 462, Sept. 104, 151–53, 239, 249; Soph. Ant. 112; Eur. Rh. 290; Ar. Pax 233–35, 254–55, 991. 48. Il. 4.422–28; Aesch. Sept. 114–15. 49. Il. 2.465–66, 2.780–85, 21.387; Aesch. Sept. 83–86, 247, 902 (compare Pers. 548, 683). The earth groans synecdochically for those who stand on it at Il. 16.635; Eur. Hel. 1434. 50. Il. 4.432–38. 51. Il. 2.459–73, 3.2–3. 52. Il. 14.147–52. 53. Archil. 214 IEG; Simonides 7.4 PMG; Bacchyl. Paean 4; Aesch. Pers. 395; Eur. Phoen. 1102–3. 54. Il. 14.392–95. 55. Il. 4.446–56. 56. Il. 13.136–42. 57. Il. 14.396–97, 17.735–39. 58. Il. 14.398–99. 59. Il. 4.328, 6.65, 11.10, 11.500, 12.377, 13.169, 13.755, 14.60, 14.147–52, 14.400–11, 15.321, 16.267, 16.277, 16.565–66, 17.87–89, 17.723–24, 17.755–59, 18.160, 18.217, 19.40, 20.49–54, 20.364–65; Od. 10.118, 17.434; Aesch. Pers. 388– 94, 402. 60. Il. 22.139–43; Aesch. Ag. 47–59; Soph. Ant. 110–16. 61. Il. 1.46–49, 4.125 (compare 15.590); Od. 21.411; Pind. Isthm. 6.36; Bacchyl. 5.73 (not martial). 62. Il. 16.633–37. 63. Il. 11.414–20, 12.150. 64. Il. 4.420–21, 4.504, 5.42, 5.58, 5.294, 7.267, 8.260, 12.151–52, 13.409–10, 13.442, 13.498, 14.420, 16.566, 16.635–38, 16.794–95, 17.311, 19.13, 20.277, 21.254–55, 21.408. 65. Aesch. Sept. 329–31; Eur. Tro. 28–29. 66. Eur. Tro. 1325. 67. Aesch. Sept. 348–51. 68. Il. 13.444, 15.421, 16.401, 16.599, 16.822, 17.311, 20.388. 69. Il. 10.483, 20.403, 20.417, 21.20–21; Od. 22.94, 24.525. 70. Il. 23.714–15. 71. Il. 13.616. 72. Il. 23.101; Od. 11.42–43, 11.632–33, 24.5–10. 73. Il. 18.217–24.

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74. Hes. Theog. 309. 75. Hes. Theog. 311. 76. Hom. Hymn Apollo 359–60. 77. Pind. Pyth. 12.8–10; cf. “Plutarch,” On Music 7. 78. Od. 9.105–15. 79. Od. 9.275–78. 80. Od. 9.233–35. 81. Od. 9.244. 82. Od. 9.257. 83. Od. 9.315–16. 84. Od. 10.10. 85. Od. 10.118. 86. Od. 10.122. 87. Od. 10.221, 227. 88. Od. 10.239. 89. Od. 10.398–99, 454. 90. Od. 11.43, 633. 91. Od. 11.605–6. 92. Od. 12.60, 12.201–2. 93. Od. 12.241–42. 94. Od. 12.97. 95. Od. 12.85–87. 96. Od. 12.395–96. 97. Od. 12.408. 98. In addition to the sounds catalogued below, see Hippoc. Epid. 1.3.10, 3.2.12, Coan Prenotions 288, 332, 554, Aphorisms 5.3, 5.4, 6.13, 6.39, Morb. 3.16 (hiccupping); Epid. 1.2.9, 2.5.1, 2.5.2, 2.6.1, Aphorisms 6.32 (stuttering), Epid. 5.1.14, 5.1.40, 7.1.48, Morb. 1.12, 1.15, 1.32, 2.21, 2.26, 2.33, 3.16, Regimen in Acute Diseases 5 (snoring; see also Aesch. Eum. 53, Ar. Nub. 5). 99. Usually (ὑπο-)συρίζω; Hippoc. Morb. 2.48, Epid. 7.7, 7.25, 7.26. 100. κέρχνομαι; Hippoc. Morb. 2.53, Internal Affections 40, Epid. 7.12. 101. κρέκω; Hippoc. Internal Affections 23. 102. ὑπεσύριζε κερχναλέον, Hippoc. Epid. 7.7, 7.26. 103. Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.25. 104. Hippoc. Morb. 1.15. 105. Hippoc. Morb. 2.33. 106. Hippoc. Morb. 3.16. In the clinical model shared by most contributors to the Hippocratic corpus, cough was not primarily an auditory phenomenon at all (though it is very hard for us, today, to think of it otherwise). Rather, it was a physiological one associated with the expulsion of maleficent factors through the mouth. A cough led the medical observer to ask: What sputum did it produce? Was it bilious? Phlegmatic?

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Concocted or unconcocted? Only when a cough was unproductive, that is, when nothing was expelled by the spasm, did the cough begin to seem like a sound; even then, the typical description of such coughs as “dry” (ξηρή) refers primarily to whether it is helping in the expulsion of material from the cavity. 107. Hippoc. Internal Affections 6. 108. Hippoc. Epid. 5.96. 109. Hippoc. Morb. 3.7. 110. Hippoc. Morb. 2.59. 111. Hippoc. Morb. 2.61. 112. Hippoc. Morb. 1.15. Such suppuration cannot always be heard: it is possible for there to be so much pus in the body that it has no room to move. The physician must then attend to other symptoms (Morb. 3.16). This situation is highly dangerous (Prorrhetic 2.424). 113. See, for example, ὑποκαρχάλεον, Hippoc. Epid. 7.12, 7.26 (where it is accompanied with whistling). 114. (ὑπο-)βορβορύζω; Hippoc. Epid. 4.45, 4.56. Compare 7.10. 115. ψόφος; Hippoc. VM 22, Morb. 2.69, Regimen in Acute Diseases 51, Coan Prenotions 138, Epid. 7.10. 116. παταγός; Hippoc. VM 22. 117. μύζω, nearly always with σπλάγχνα; Hippoc. Morb. 2.55, 2.66, 2.73, Internal Affections 6, 34 (of the spleen lying against the σπλάγχνα), 35. 118. βρέμω; Hippoc. Internal Affections 6. 119. βορβορύζω and derivatives; Hippoc. Internal Affections 6, Regimen in Acute Diseases (appendix) 27. In explaining bodily sounds, doctors focused on anatomical, physiological, and environmental causes. Noises were held to be produced by movements of something (air or fluid) through a channel or empty space (Hippoc. VM 23). They could come into being when a patient had eaten, when he had not eaten, when he had drunk or not drunk, during a bowel movement or not, when he was palpitated (Hippoc. Epid. 4.45, 56), or when he moved of his own accord (Epid. 7.10). These factors were to be considered in a complicated differential analysis. Thus, for example, the Coan Prenotions specified that “in patients with a mild trembling and greenish vomit who are already in a fatal condition, to have faint bowel sounds when they drink and faint rumblings when they are dry, and to have difficulty swallowing food because their breath is interrupted by coughing, indicates death” (62; translated in Hippocrates, Coan Prenotions: Anatomical and Minor Clinical Writings, ed. P. Potter [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010]). But “new swellings in the hypochondrium, if they are without inflammation, have their pains resolved by intestinal rumbling” (βορβορυγμὸς γενόμενος ἐν ὑποχονδρίῳ, Hippoc. Coan Prenotions, 276). Although bowel movements and flatulence are always better if they are silent (Prognostics XI), it is preferable that they be noisy than absent altogether (Prognostics XI., cf. Coan Prenotions, 485).

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In most of these cases, the sounds are “naturally occurring”; that is, they are heard by the physician or reported by the patient or his caregivers. But from time to time, a physician sought to elicit a sound in order to help his diagnosis or treatment. Suppuration in the side is often indicated by a visible sign, but when this does not occur the author of Morb. 3 recommends directed listening (auscultation; 3.1g. See also Internal Affections 23). The same procedure is recommended for dropsy in the lung (Morb. 2.61). Once, the author of Morb. notes that a polyp can form in the cartilage of the nose that looks like flesh but, if touched, “makes a sound like a stone” (ψοφέει οἷον λίθος; Morb. 2.36). Prorrhetic II suggests a procedure to determine if the skull has been fractured: the doctor should knead the bone, and if the patient hears a sound, it is broken (cf. Hippoc. Coan Prenotions, 491). The importance of the Hippocratic tradition to what in the nineteenth century became the prestige technique of medicine—listening—should not be exaggerated; auscultation happened from time to time, but it was almost never mediate (as it was in the nineteenth century), and the auditory was only one of a number of sensory modalities in the diagnosis and prediction of disease. See Hippoc. De offic. 1 and compare Ep. 6.8.17, 4.43. 120. Hippoc. Epid. 7.10. 121. Hippoc. Epid. 4.56. 122. Hippoc. Epid. 6.3.5, 6.3.14. 123. On the voice in antiquity, see M. Bettini, Voci: antropologia sonora del mondo antico (Torino: G. Einaudi, 2008); G. Lachenaud, Les routes de la voix: l’antiquité grecque et le mystère de la voix (Paris: Belles lettres, 2013). On the voice in general, see D. Rabaté, Poétique de la Voix (Paris: José Corti, 1999); A. Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); M. Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 124. πνεύματος ἀντιπεσόντος μὲν στερεμνίῳ ἀέρι, τῇ δ’ ὑποστροφῇ τῆς πλήξεως μέχρι τῶν ἀκοῶν προσενεχθέντος, Anaxagoras A 106 DK. 125. τὸν ἀέρα φησὶν εἰς ὁμοιοσχήμονα θρύπτεσθαι σώματα καὶ συγκαλινδεῖσθαι τοῖς ἐκ τῆς φωνῆς θραύσμασι, Democritus A 128 DK. Democritus is not talking about the production of the voice but its transmission; the voice itself, whatever it is, has already been produced and is thus able to strike the air and produce “similarly shaped” bodies. Compare Anaxagoras’s explication of the voice as a collision of the breath (πνεύμα) with the air; there it is reasonable to conclude that Anaxagoras is talking about the cause of the voice. Aetius reports an objection to Democritus, possibly Stoic in origin (he seems to be cribbing from Posidonius): “How could a few strikings of the breath (θραύσματα πνεύματος) fill a whole theatre, full of many men” (A 128 DK)? This suggests that the over-fine distinction between what the voice does to the air and what a breath might do to the air was missed in later antiquity. The objection clearly leads to the Stoic position: air is a continuous body, and when it is struck by the breath the sound emanates in circular pattern like a wave, and it

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does this infinitely, or at least until it has filled its space (Diog. Laert. 7.1.158; on early wave theories of acoustics, see F. G. Kilgour, “Vitruvius and the Early History of Wave Theory,” Technology and Culture 4 [1963]: 282–86). Democritus was talking about the transmission of audible sound that had already been generated. How was the audible sound itself generated? Presumably by an impact in the air on the throat (or close to the impact) that produced a fragmenting and reshuffling of atoms. 126. Hippoc. Epid. 3.2, 3.5. 127. βραγχώδης; Hippoc. Morb. 2.50, Prorrhetic 2.408, Epid. 7.7, 7.11 (in this case caused by shouting). 128. Hippoc. Morb. 2.53. 129. Hippoc. Morb. 2.48, 3.16. 130. κλαγγώδης; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.17, Coan Prenotions 550. 131. ὀξείη; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.45, 2.51, 252. 132. κλαυθμώδης; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.41, 2.246, 252. 133. λεπτή; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 2.208. 134. ἀσθενής; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 2.208. 135. τρομώδης; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.19. 136. πνιγμώδης; Hippoc. Prorrhetic 1.87. 137. Hippoc. Internal Affections 29 (διαλέγεται ἀσύνετα). 138. Hippoc. Coan Prenotions, 51. A person’s normal state of voice provided a baseline and indicated the patient’s healthy constitution and liability to disease. Noting a particularly severe epidemic, the author of Epidemics I reports that it felled all kinds of people, including those with weak and rough voices (19). While rougher throats produced rougher voices (and the opposite), it is harder to determine why there is variation in the baseline roughness of certain voices. The author of Epid. 2 notes that some people have naturally rough voices, while others get this only from a disease (2.1.8). In On Dentition, ulcers that spread from the tonsils to the uvula “alter the voice of those that recover” (31). Where disease is not a cause, there are often environmental factors. In Aer., the author notes that cities facing east tend to have citizens who are “clear voiced” (λαμπρόφωνοι); the cause was that the early sun clarified the waters in the morning (5.19–21). By contrast, cities facing west had water that was not clear (οὐ λαμπρόν); people in these cities tended to be “deep voiced” (βαρυφώνοι) and “hoarse” (βραγχώδεες). Of the inhabitants of the Phasis, a wet, marshy area with much rain, he writes: “They speak with the deepest voices of all men” (φθέγγονταί τε βαρύτατον ἀνθρώπων; 15). In Epid. 6, it is suggested that “those with most heat have very big voices (μεγαλοφωνότατα)” (6.4.19). 139. Ἔπειτα τοῖς ὠσὶ τῆς φωνῆς ἀκούσαντα καὶ τοῦ πνεύματος, ἔστι διαγινώσκειν, ἃ ἐν τοῖσιν ἰσχύουσιν οὐχ ὁμοίως ἐστὶ δῆλα. Hippoc. Prorrhetic 2.3. (I cite from Hippocrates, Oeuvres complètes, ed. E. Littré [Paris: Ballière, 1849]). 140. Aesch. Supp. 825 (3x, chorus)—text is suspect. Hesychios (s.v.) calls this a σχετλιαστικὸν ἐπιφώνημα.

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141. Aesch. Sept. 150, 157, 327, 339, Pers. 977, Supp. 142, 152, Ag. 1114, Cho. 790, 870, PV 566, 579, 598, 742; Soph. El. 826, 840, Trach. 1003, 1022, 1014, 1031, 1025; Eur. Alc. 873, 891, Hip. 595, 1354, Supp. 77, 85, 1073, El. 150, Tro. 168, 277, 1302, 1317. 142. Aesch. Pers. 331, 433, 673, 928, 1039, Sept. 787, 893, 894, Supp. 866, Cho. 1007–8, 1020, PV 66, 136; Soph. Aj. 370, 430, El. 136, 152, 826, 1404, OT 754, 1308, Trach. 1081, 1082, Phil. 1106, 1186; Eur. Cyc. 347, Alc. 214, 224, 863, 872, 889, Med. 111, 143, 277, 1008, 1042, Hip. 208, 569, 595, 806, 830, 848, 881, 1070, 1255, 1346, 1370, Andr. 829, 1175, Hec. 182, 229, 685, 702, 1089, Supp. 806, 819, Her. 898, 900, 913, 1066, Tro. 105, 130, 193, 197, 241, 579, 628, 629, 722, 1226, 1229, IT 146, 217, 652, Ion 756, 766, 1477, Hel. 125, 166, 211, 453, Or. 316, 1375, 1397, IA 137, 467. 143. Soph. Phil. 743, 790. 144. PV 877. Hesychius (s.v.): ἐπιφώνημα πολεμικόν. οἱ δὲ προαναφώνησις παιανισμοῦ. τίθηεσι δὲ αὐτὸ Αἰσχύλος ἐπὶ σχετλιασμοῦ ἐν Προμηθεῖ δεσμώτῃ. (Hesychius, Hesychii Alexandrini Lexicon, ed. K. Latte [Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1953]). 145. Aesch. Pers. 570, 577, 652, 657; Sept. 967, 978; Supp. 833. 146. Aesch. Pers. 1075, 1076. 147. Aesch. Ag. 25, 1214, Cho. 881, Eum. 142; Soph. Aj. 737, OT 1071, 1182, Trach. 1143, OC 220; Eur. Cyc. 576, Hip. 777. 148. Aesch. Pers. 908, 974, 1004, 1005, 1070, 1074, Sept. 87, 97, 167, 168, 174, 481, 845, 875, 881, 969, 975, 986, 994, 997, 1000, 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, Supp. 125, Ag. 410, 411, 503, 518, 1100, 1107, 1136, 1146, 1156, 1157, 1167, 1168, 1305, 1315, 1327, 1454, Cho. 45, 49, 50, 429, 462, 469, 470, Eum. 777, 808, PV 576, 694, 742; Soph. Aj. 333, 336, 339, 348, 356, 379, 385, 393, 412, 694, 891, 893, 937, 939, 974, El. 77, 840, 1232, 1404, OT 1186, 1311, 1313, 1321, Trach. 221, 856, 1026, 1031, Phil. 219, 759, OC 198, 224, 536, 834, 876, 884, 1491; Eur. Cyc. 656, Alc. 213, 393, 861, 863, 876, Med. 96, 98, 115, 1251, 1270a, 1274, Hip. 365, 569, 811, 1147, 1384, Andr. 825, 1175, Hec. 175, 1091, Supp. 275, 805, 828, 918, 1072, 1077, 1113, 1127, 1133, El. 114, 129, 159, 1167, 1177, 1185, 1190, 1198, 1208, Her. 738, 750, 886, 889, 891, 1031, Tro. 164, 187, 281, 1117, 1237, 1251, 1312, 1315, 1328, IT 143, 157, 845, Ion 752, 754, 912, Phoen. 109, 182, 296, 304, 310, 317, 680, 1290, 1492, 1508, 1723, 1725, Or. 976, 1296, 1353, 1465, 1537, Bacch. 576, 578, 580, 582, IA 1491, 1505, 1510, Rh. 380, 454, 727, 731, 733, 820. 149. Aesch. Supp. 835, in the middle of a highly problematic run of text. 150. Aesch. Pers. 117, 122, 570, 574, 579, 581, Sept. 89. 151. Aesch. Pers. 664, 671, 955, 966, 1068, Sept. 808, Supp. 876, 885, Eum. 841, 874. 152. Aesch. Pers. 268, 274, 917, 1043, 1051, Supp. 889, Ag. 1072, 1076, 1257, Cho. 159, 869; Soph. El. 1245; Eur. Her. 875, Ion 790, Or. 1389, Tro. 1287, 1294. 153. Aesch. Pers. 1031, Ag. 1114, 1256, Eum. 262; Soph. El. 866, Phil. 745–46, 754, 785, 786, 792, 793; Eur. Cyc. 110, 153 (παππαιάξ), 503, 572, Alc. 226.

NOTES TO PAGES 3–4

154. Aesch. Pers. 550, 560, 852, Ag. 1072, 1076, Cho. 405, PV 576; Soph. OT 168. 155. Aesch. Pers. 551, 561. 156. Soph. Trach. 1009. 157. Aesch. Pers. 285, 568, 576, Sept. 135, 1054, Ag. 1143, 1307, 1448, Cho. 194, Eum. 837, 839, 871, 873, PV 98, 124, 687; Soph. Aj. 958, El. 764, 830, 845, 845, 920, 1021, 1161, 1174, 1183, OT 316, 964, 1303, 1324, Trach 987, 1016, Phil. 234, 785, OC 519; Eur. Alc. 1102, Med. 292, 330, 358, 1040, 1393, Heracl. 552, Hip. 242, 344, 365, 431, 680, 778, 866, 870, 1077, 1358, Andr. 183, Hec. 785, 864, El. 120, 244, 262, 282, 367, Her. 217, 459, 1027, 1397, Tro. 190, 584, 618, IT 156, 472, 559, 576, 627, 651, 861, Ion 329, 960, 1311, 1369, 1516, Hel. 229, 777, Or. 327, 1154, Bacch. 1259, Rh. 728. 158. Aesch. Pers. 985, Ag. 1214; Soph. OC 220, 224. 159. Aesch. Ag. 1140–49. 160. Ar. Av. 227–29. 161. Ar. Av. 237. 162. Ar. Av. 241. 163. Ar. Av. 259–62. 164. Ar. Ach. 100–104; Timoth. Pers. 150–61. Not Eur. Or. 1368–502. 165. Od. 19.518–23. 166. Od. 20.10–17. 167. Il. 14.16–21. 168. Alc. 10B PMG. 169. Anaxagoras A 84 DK, A 42 DK. Diogenes Laertius says, in contrast, that he held it to be the result of clouds crashing together (A 1.9 DK), but this is a less likely attribution. Other explanations of thunder include that of Diogenes of Apollonia (A 16 DK) and Democritus (A 39 DK). 170. Od. 9.391–96. 171. Ar. Nub. 389–91. 172. “If κλέος is not acoustic, it is not κλέος. This sonority of κλέος is confirmed by etymology. In the Germanic languages, we find the following cognates of the word: the Icelandic hljoth, the Swedish ljud, the Danish lyd, and the German Laut, all meaning ‘sound.’ In English, the adjective ‘loud’ is another significant relative of κλέος”; J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 14–15. 173. Hes. Thgn. 70; Eur. Heracl. 783; Timotheus 791.199. 174. Sapph. 44.25, 44.31, 70, 73 (?), 153 (?); Alcm. 130.33–35 PMG; Ibycus 282C PMG; Bacchyl. 14.14; Pind. Ol. 6.21, Paean 2 (D2 in Pindar, Paeans, ed. I. Rutherford [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]); Timotheus 791.196–201 PMG. 175. Sapph. 44.33 LP; Thgn. 778–79; Bacchyl. 60.37; Timotheus 791.198 PMG; Aesch. Pers. 383–95, Sept. 635, Ag. 146; Eur. Alc. 423, Phoen. 1102, Cycl. 664, Her. 687–95.

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176. Pind. Ol. 1.8, 3.3; Aesch. Sept. 868, Eum. 329. 177. Aesch. Sept. 268–69, Ag. 28–29, 595–96, Cho. 387; Soph. Trach. 205–15; Eur. Hel. 1111, Med. 1175–76, Bacch. 689–91, 1133. 178. Eur. Bacch. 67, 126–29, 156–65, 1056–57, Hel. 1357–65. 179. Eur. Alc. 86–87, Suppl. 87–89, 604–5. 180. Sappho fr. 44.25, 214C.7 LP; Pind. fr. 70b. 181. Arch. 214 IEG; Simonides 7.4 IEG; Bacch. Paean 4.75. 182. Especially Pind. Pyth. 10.39, Paean 3 (D3 Pindar, Paeans) 94; Bacchyl. 2.12; see chapter 3. 183. See chapter 3. 184. Anacr. fr. 374 PMG; Telestes 808.1–2 PMG. 185. Soph. 737 (i).4 PMG. I assume this is a syrinx, but it could also be the hissing of an aulos (see chapter 3). CAPO 1. See D. S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), for one cogent critique of this fantasy in English romanticism. 2. “The pleasure engendered by the tragic myth comes from the same homeland as our pleasurable sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with the primal pleasure it perceives even in pain, is the common womb from which both music and the tragic age are born.” F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114. 3. See J. Keats, John Keats, ed. E. Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 288–89 (vv. 11–14, 44–45). J. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), is a fundamental influence on this book, though I gravitate toward emphasizing the centrality of the uncanny (τὸ δεινόν) where Porter looks to the sublime (τὸ ὕψος). 4. See especially J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); D. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); A. G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); P. Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2007); S. Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non- Cochlear Sonic Art (London: Continuum, 2009); S. Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); M. Goddard, B. Halligan, and P. Hegarty, eds. Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (London: Continuum, 2012); G. Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 5. For discussions of listening as an alternative to interpretation, see J. -L. Nancy, Listening, trans. C. Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

NOTES TO PAGES 6–9

6. M. W. Levine, Levine & Shefner’s Fundamentals of Sensation and Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1. In the realm of psychoacoustics specifically, Yost et al. put the general view well: “The sounds from individual sources do not arrive at the auditory periphery as separate acoustic events but rather as one complex sound field. . . . The auditory periphery first resolves the vibrations of that complex sound field into its spectral components represented by a spectro-temporal response pattern. This response pattern has to be further processed by the auditory system for the information available in the spectro-temporal code to reveal the source of the sounds. To many, this constitutes auditory perception. . . . Since we do not have direct access to the sound sources, the sources are deduced from our perceptions” (Human Psychophysics [New York: Springer, 1993], 193–94). For psycho-acoustics and the psychology of perception, I have relied on B. C. J. Moore, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing (Bingley: Emerald, 2012). 7. See M. Serres, The Parasite, trans. L. R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); S. Handel, Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); B. R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3–9; N. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. E. M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 6–7; B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 8. “A given speech-sound is not represented by a fixed acoustic pattern in the speech wave: instead, the speech sound’s acoustic pattern varies in a complex manner according to the proceeding and following sounds” (Moore, An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 315). “The same [phonetic phenomenon] can be cued in different contexts by acoustic patterns that are vastly different” (325). 9. K. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings. Translated by R. Livingstone and G. Benton (Harmondsworth: Pelikan and the New Left Review, 1975), 353. 10. L. Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 2.637. 11. R. Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, edited by T. Sebeok, 350–77 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 12. Ibid., 358. 13. Ibid., 372. 14. Ibid., 359. 15. See R. M. Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994); Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England; B. Truax, Acoustic Communication ( Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001); B. R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 16. That there are such sensual presences is not today a thesis needing much debate. See J. -L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); H. U. Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); S. Gurd, “Meaning and Material

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Presence: Four Epigrams on Timomachus’ Unfinished Medea,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137 (2007): 305–31. 17. I agree, in other words, more or less with J. Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),10, who locates “the phenomenon of sound and the history of sound” at “the in-between point of culture and nature,” understanding that neither nature nor culture are stable entities; indeed, the negotiation of both will, as we will see, depend in some quite fundamental ways on the negotiation of the meaning and use of sound. 18. By “art” I mean τέχνη, the ancient Greek word meaning “technique.” Τέχνη includes but is not limited to music, poetry, drama, painting, and sculpture. The linkage between art and technics, implied by Greek linguistic categories, is fundamental as well to contemporary thinking on art: see especially J. -L. Nancy, The Muses, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). When art and technics are taken together, the resulting theme proves central in nearly all recent work in sound studies, though it is often combined with reflections on the politics, history, ecology, and topography of sound. Hegarty, Noise/Music, 3–19, contains an especially valuable discussion of the relationship between noise and music, and I owe much to its many insights. Particularly useful and important from a vast bibliography discussing the relations between sound, art, and technics are R. M. Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977); Attali, Noise; S. Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Schafer, The Soundscape; J. H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat; F. A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England; Truax, Acoustic Communication; A. S. Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); M. Bull and L. Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003); J. Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); J.-F. Augoyard and H. Torgue, Auditory Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, translated by A. McCartney (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); A. Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Weheliye, Phonographies; Nancy, Listening; P. Szendy, Listen: A History of our Ears, trans. C. Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear; V. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010) (on science and philosophy); Goodman, Sonic Warfare; B. LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010); D. Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (London: Continuum, 2010); Schwartz, Making Noise (an epic exploration of sound in the modern era);

NOTES TO PAGES 9–11

Goddard et al., Reverberations; T. J. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); J. Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012); S. Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012); D. Cecchetto, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Hainge, Noise Matters; M. Thompson and I. Biddle, eds., Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 19. See S. Gurd, Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); S. Gurd, “Revision in Greek Literary Papyri,” in Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought, ed. V. Wohl, 160–84 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20. On Greek harmonics and acoustics, see A. Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); A. Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); D. E. Creese, The Monochord in Ancient Greek Harmonic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 21. See Horace, Epistles 2.1.126; P. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D. H. Reiman and N. Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 535; E. Mallarmé, Oeuvres completes, ed. B. Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 2.727. That art has as one of its fundamental roles the communication of sensation is a basic thesis of Luhmann, Art as a Social System. J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), emphasizes the role of art in forging and communicating perceptions (in fact, Dewey would probably want to contest my distinction between sensation and perception, arguing for the wholesale artifactuality of experience). 22. I am strongly influenced by Dewey, Art as Experience (although not without disagreement). S. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), offers a luminous approach to the same ideas. 23. τῆς δὲ Δίκης ῥόθος ἑλκομένης ᾗ κ’ ἄνδρες ἄγωσι / δωροφάγοι, σκολιῇς δὲ δίκῃς κρίνωσι θέμιστας. Hes. Erg. 220–21. See also Aesch. Sept. 646–48, Ag. 48. 24. See C. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). I have hesitations about structuralist or poststructuralist interpretations of this aspect of Greek auditory culture; see my comments in the coda. 25. This book shares common cause with a number of recent and important books by figures more closely associated with the mainstream in classical studies. In The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Classical Greece, James Porter showed in great detail that art in all sensory modalities was a crucial locus for the intense communication of sensation as a material force and fact: after this work, there can be no questioning of the importance of aesthetic modes of experience in antiquity, nor of the centrality of embodiment in this experience, however embodiment is understood. Porter also laid the groundwork for a more precise understanding of the relationship between sixth-century and fifth-century melodic form, and I rely on him especially heavily in

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chapter 3. Anne Peponi’s Frontiers of Pleasure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) has excavated a suite of aesthetic responses that she believes to be modeled within archaic song and that emphasize embodied sensual relations in their own way. Sarah Nooter’s When Heroes Sing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) is an exemplary example of the critical consequences of attending to aesthetic materialities in tragedy: her readings of Sophocles mix a sensitivity to meter and poetic device and a sense of the way these once decidedly unfashionable or “technical” details contribute to the fabric and meaning of the plays. I differ from each of these excellent studies in ways that will, I hope, become clear over the course of the book. I am not going to flag every point of similarity or disagreement, but the divergences can perhaps be encapsulated with the observation that all of these studies, in as much as they turn to sound, turn to a level of experience (often named “voice”) that is certainly less ideal (and idealized) than the semantics and grammar of language but remains firmly within the realm of cognitive and cultural control; these resuscitations of aesthetics (and of matter), in other words, remain firmly culturalist in grounding. I am looking for a bridge between the cultural valence of sound and its inorganic, a- or anti-cultural presence, and I seek, in what might be called a more concrete mode, to track the dissonances that emerge from their turbulent confluence. Perhaps more troubled, and ultimately more important, is the relationship between what follows and the arguments of T. Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), which among other things is an important intervention in sound studies. Morton identifies and critiques a kind of writing, ecomimesis, which depends on a set of procedures (rendering, the medial, the timbral, the Aeolian, tone, and the re-mark) that elide or erase the distinction between “inside” and “outside,” culture and nature. Morton’s critical categories are powerful and important, and attentive readers will detect his notion of the Aeolian resonating uncannily throughout my text. But they will also wonder whether what I attempt here isn’t in fact a species of the ecomimesis Morton critiques; or is it, perhaps, archaic Greek auditory art that engages in ecomimesis? I suspect the answer to this question is that my text and my Greek sources both are and are not ecomimetic, and at exactly the same time; they cannot not be, and yet they aren’t. I do think, however, that the Greek material differs from the post- or crypto-Romantic texts Morton critiques in their tendency not to elide but to amplify the distinction between inside and outside—even if they emphasize it only in order to increase the dissonant shock that emerges when it is violated. Though Morton shows that modern ecomimesis cannot avoid doing this as well, my sense is that the Greek texts do it much more palpably—so much so, in fact, that at times it becomes possible to suspect they may have done it by design. 26. Hegarty, Noise/Music. 27. D. J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 13–18

28. See W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: Verso, 1985). 29. D. Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone, 2005), 12. 30. Sappho 2 LP (for Sappho, I cite from D. L. Page, ed., Lyrica Graeca selecta [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968]). 31. See R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1984); Cavarero, For More than One Voice. 32. This choice, though motivated by the theoretical considerations outlined here, harmonizes well with Dewey’s description of aesthetic rhythm: “When there is a uniformly even flow, with no variations of intensity or speed,” he writes, “there is no rhythm. There is stagnation even though it be the stagnation of unvarying motion. Equally there is no rhythm when variations are not placed. . . . There is no rhythm of any kind, no matter how delicate and no matter how extensive, where variation of pulse and rest do not occur. But these variations of intensity are not, in any complex rhythm, the whole of the matter. They serve to define variations in number, in extent, in velocity, and in intrinsic qualitative differences, as of hue, tone, etc. That is, variations of intensity are relative to the subject-matter directly experienced. Each beat, in differentiating a part within the whole, adds to the force of what went before while creating a suspense that is a demand for something to come. It is not variation of a single feature but a modulation of the entire pervasive and unifying qualitative substratum” (Dewey, Art as Experience, 160–61). Nancy’s The Muses radicalizes this argument, claiming that “rhythm does not appear: it is the beat of appearing insofar as appearing consists simultaneously and indissociably in the movement of coming and going of forms of presence in general, and in the heterogeneity that spaces out sensitive or sensuous plurality” (24). 33. D. Attridge, “Language as Imitation: Jakobson, Joyce, and the Art of Onomatopoeia,” Modern Language Notes 99 (1984): 1135. 34. P. Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xv. 35. On listening as an imperative and a task, see G. Corradi-Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London: Routledge, 1995); Nancy, Listening; Szendy, Listen. 36. See especially (but not exclusively) Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; C. O’Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Goodman, Sonic Warfare; C. Cox, “Beyond Representation and Signification,” Journal of Visual Culture 10 (2011): 145–61. 37. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Affect theory is now a major component in the contemporary humanities (though “theory” is, rigorously speaking, the wrong word). From the very large number of excellent discussions of affect, I have learned in particular from E. K. Sedgwick and A. Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Per-

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formativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Goodman, Sonic Warfare; Thompson and Biddle, Sound, Music, Affect. On affect in art, see especially M. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Dufrenne’s work demonstrates that phenomenology was a significant precursor to more recent sonic turns. When Don Ihde proposed a phenomenology of sound in the 1970s, for example, he did so not to contest the primacy of vision within modern epistemic practice but to question the idea that any sense could have even momentary hegemony within human knowing (D. Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007]). More recently, Jean-Luc Nancy proposed a turn to listening that also discovered through sound not a single sense but a field of difference, which, while remaining the condition of possibility for the senses, is not perception (Nancy, Listening). 38. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 176; cf. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. B. Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); G. Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by M. Smith and D. Greco, 107–14 (London: Verso, 1998). 39. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 176. 40. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. 41. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 169. 42. See chapter 2. 43. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25. 44. The idea is Deleuzian, the language taken from Massumi: “Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage,” writes Massumi, “are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always escaped.” Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35. 45. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 167. Cf.: “What is preserved—the thing or the work of art—is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (164; emphasis original). 46. Sappho fr. 31 LP (the text is that of Page, Lyrica Graeca selecta). On this frequently discussed poem, see A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 10–17; P. DuBois, Sappho is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64–77; G. Lanata, “Sappho’s Amatory Language,” in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. E. Greene (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 22–25; J. Winkler, “Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho’s Lyrics,” in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. E. Greene (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 98–101; C. Segal, Aglaia: The Poetry of Alcman, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 43–62.

NOTES TO PAGES 19–27

47. The terminology used to describe the beloved’s speech and laughter—ἀδὺ φονεῖσα and ἰμέροεν—suggests an association with song. When applied to the description of vocal sound, ἡδύς and its compounds are frequent (see Sapph. 156, 44.25 LP). A metaphor drawn from the sense of taste, “sweetness” has close figurative cognates in descriptions of voices as γλυκύς, or honeyed (Sapph. 71.2, 185 LP). The connection between the sweetness of maidens’ voices and the sweetness of song becomes more common later (Pratinas 711 PMG; Bacchyl. 3.97; 4.7; Paean fr. 4.63; Pind. Nem. 1.4–5, Paean 2.96–102, 8.114, Ol. 6.21, 10.93–94). Likewise, ἰμέροεν: Sapph. 136 LP; Simonides 583 PMG, 22.17 IEG; Alcman 27.2–3 PMG; Theognis 532. 48. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 48. 49. Segal, Aglaia, 50. 50. Ibid., 54. 51. See P. Lagefoged, “The Sounds of Speech,” in Sound, ed. P. Kruth and H. Stobart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112–13; T. D. Rossing, Springer Handbook of Acoustics (New York: Springer, 2007), 483. 52. For an introductory bibliography on the perception of musical tones, see n.6 in this chapter. 53. See Lagefoged, “The Sounds of Speech,” 118; E. I. Dolan, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 54. See J. -P. Rameau, Treatise on Harmony, trans. P. Gossett (New York: Dover, 1971); A. Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. R. E. Carter (London: Faber and Faber in association with Faber Music, 1978), 23–31. 55. This is, in fact, a somewhat controversial conclusion, argued for most recently by A. D’Angour, “The New Music: So What’s New?” in Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece, ed. S. Goldhill and S. Osborne, 264–83 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) (which contains copious earlier bibliography); see also W. D. Anderson, “Word-Accent and Melody in Ancient Greek Musical Texts,” Journal of Music Theory 17 (1973): 186–202; M. West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 198–200 ( West acknowledges “little repetition of phrases” in astrophic composition [194]). 56. R. Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History 6 (1975): 237–72. 57. For motivic composition in melody, see M. L.West, Ancient Greek Music, 194; on motivic composition even in the most complex of rhythmic structures, see M. L. West, Greek Metre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 58–59. 1. FIGURES 1. Il. 2.87–100. 2. Il. 2.143–53. 3. Il. 2.188–210.

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4. Il. 2.212–13. 5. Il. 2.222–24. 6. Il. 2.246–66. 7. Il. 2.333–34, 394–95. 8. Il. 2.394–96. 9. Il. 2.459. 10. Il. 1.46–49. 11. See the prologue to this volume. 12. Il. 4.429–31. 13. Il. 4.422–29. By contrast, the Trojan army raises a din of voices like the bleating of lambs; Il. 4.433–38. 14. Il. 4.446–56. For Homer, I cite from Homer, Opera, ed. D. Munro and T. W. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920). In Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes, the Argive army outside the gates roars like a wave (115); later the image recurs as waves of misfortune around the city’s stern (720). The sound of horses becomes the din of a river at Seven 86. 15. Il. 21.9–21. 16. Il. 20.48–53. 17. Il. 20.56–66. 18. Il. 21.184–99. 19. Il. 21.251–64. 20. See H. Fränkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1921), 101; J. M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 186–92. A. Purves, “Wind and Time in Homeric Epic,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 140 (2010): 323–50, makes related observations. 21. See G. S. Kirk, M. W. Edwards, R. Janko, J. B. Hainsworth, and N. J. Richardson, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) ad Il. 21.261 for ancient commentators who noted the contrast between the simile and what it describes. 22. The epic nods toward Achilles’s hyperbolic status as he runs from the river: his armor clangs, and he swoops like an eagle. The combination of sound and ornithological likeness will recur in the mortal race around the walls of Troy, when Achilles pursues Hector shrieking shrilly like a hawk pursuing a wood pigeon. 23. Hes. Theog. 820–35. I cite from Hesiod, Theogony, ed. M. A. West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). On sound in Hesiod’s work, see O. Goslin, “Hesiod’s Typhonomachy and the Ordering of Sound,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 140 (2010): 351–73 (an analysis with which I very much agree). 24. See prologue 25. See prologue and elsewhere in this chapter. 26. The synonymy is noted in Arist. [Pr.] 19.28 (920a.1). For νόμος as “custom,” see Hes. Theog. 66. As “law,” see Arist. Ath. Pol. 7.1. As “melody,” see Pind. Nem. 5.25.

NOTES TO PAGES 33–34

27. See W. D. Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1–110; C. Carey, “The Victory Ode in Performance: The Case for the Chorus,” Classical Philology 86 (1991): 192–200; Y. L. Too, “Alcman’s ‘Partheneion’: The Maidens Dance the City,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 56 (1997): 7–29; W. B. Ingalls, “Ritual Performance as Training for Daughters in Archaic Greece,” Phoenix 54 (2000): 1–20; C. Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Function, trans. D. Collins and J. Orion (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 222–244; B. Kowalzig, “Changing Choral Worlds: Song-Dance and Society in Athens and Beyond,” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Murray and P. Wilson, 39–65 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); P. Christesen, “Athletics and Social Order in Sparta in the Classical Period,” Classical Antiquity 31 (2012): 200–201, 204, 217–20 (with further bibliography). 28. This fact is indicated by their being roundly criticized for taking gifts—one does not accuse men of corruption unless they have roles that can be corrupted. See Arch. 93a IEG, with T. C. Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010), 220. 29. Hes. Thgn. 80–90. 30. Hes. Thgn. 839–47. 31. See J. S. Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12–30, on the Theogony as an allegorized map of being. On the ethics of Hesiod’s work, see D. R. Blickman, “Styx and the Justice of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony,” Phoenix 41 (1987): 341–55; E. F. Beall, “Hesiod’s Treatise on Justice: Works and Days 109–380,” Classical Journal 101 (2005): 161–82; E. F. Beall, “An Artistic and Optimistic Passage in Hesiod: Works and Days 564–614,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 135 (2005): 231–47. 32. Hes. Theog. 337–510, 886–1020. 33. Hes. Theog. 677. 34. Hes. Theog. 678. 35. Hes. Theog. 678. 36. Hes. Theog. 682–83. 37. Hes. Theog. 683. 38. Hes. Theog. 685. 39. Hes. Theog. 686. 40. Hes. Theog. 693–94. 41. Hes. Theog. 702–703. 42. See J. Bussanich, “A Theoretical Interpretation of Hesiod’s Chaos,” Classical Philology 78 (1983): 213. 43. Hes. Theog. 30–34. 44. Hes. Theog. 26. 45. Hes. Theog. 27–28.

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46. Hes. Theog. 68–71. 47. Il. 4.504, 5.42, 13.444, 15.421, 16.401, 16.599, 16.822, 17.311, 20.388; Od. 22.94, 24.525. 48. Il. 4.455. 49. Od. 5.401, 12.202. 50. Il. 10.354; Od. 16.10. 51. Il. 12.289; Archil. 139.6 IEG (of javelins). 52. Il. 16.635. It is used to describe dancing at Eur. Heracl. 783 and Timotheus 791.199 PMG, both in contexts associated with advanced art music. Each reflects, in his own way, the auditory poetics already developing in Hesiod. See chapter 3. 53. Hes. Theog. 703, 705. 54. See prologue. 55. ἰαχή: Il. 4.456, 14.1. 56. Il. 2.323, 2.394, 17.723–24. 57. Il. 5.302, 18.160, 19.40, 20.62, 20.285, 20.388. 58. Il. 18.29. 59. Il. 4.125. 60. Il. 21.11. 61. Il. 23.216. 62. Od. 9.392. 63. Hom. Hymn Ath. (28) 10–11; ἀμφὶ δὲ γαῖα/σμερδαλέον ἰάχησεν. 64. Hom. Hymn Ath. (28) 16. 65. Hom. Hymn Ap. 1–13. 66. A similar association of averted succession and noise is used to describe the invention of the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which I discuss in chapter 3. 67. Hom. Hymn Ap. 162–64. 68. Il. 2.489. 69. Hes. Theog. 720–25. 70. Hes. Theog. 740. 71. Hes. Theog. 730–35. 72. Hes. Theog. 814. 73. Hes. Theog. 726–28. 74. Hes. Theog. 209–10. 75. LSJ gives Orph. A. 251 codd. for tuning a lyre and Ar. Fr. 671 ( J. M. Edmonds, ed., The Fragments of Attic Comedy after Meineke, Bergk and Kock [Leiden: Brill, 1957]) for playing the lyre. 76. “Tenor” is cognate with τιταίνω (and, of course, with “tone”). See P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 947–48. 77. Hes. Erg. 202–13 (I cite from Hesiod, Theogonia opera et dies scutum, ed. F. Solmsen [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970]). See, in addition to the other

NOTES TO PAGES 36–38

literature cited, G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 235–41, 281–83, 313–16; A. Bonnafé, “Le rossignol et la justice en pleurs (Hésiode, Travaux 203–12),” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé (1983): 260–64; J. U. Schmidt, “Hesiods Ainos von Habicht un Nachtigall,” Wort und Dienst 17 (1983): 55–76; W. J. Verdenius, A Commentary on Hesiod: Works and Days, vv. 1–382 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985); G. -J. van Dijk, Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi: Fables in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 127–34. 78. See later in this chapter. 79. See Sch. ad 202; Hesiod, Works & Days, ed. M. L. West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), ad loc.. 80. See Sch. ad 207. 81. See West in Hesiod, Works & Days, ad loc. 82. See Hes. Erg. 220–21. 83. See Hes. Erg. 5ff, Thgn. 28, 442–43, West in Hesiod, Works & Days, 209. 84. See M. Skafte Jensen, “Tradition and Individuality in Hesiod’s Works and Days,” Classica et Medievalia 27 (1966): 1–21; S. Nelson, “The Justice of Zeus in Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale,” Classical Journal 92 (1997): 235–47; M. J. Mordine, “Speaking to Kings: Hesiod’s Ainos and the Rhetoric of Allusion in the Works and Days,” Classical Quarterly 56 (2006): 363–73; A. T. Zanker, “A Dove and a Nightingale: Mahabharata 3.130.18–3.131.32 and Hesiod, Works and Days 202–213,” Philologus 153 (2009): 10–25. 85. See Puelma, “Sänger und König,” Museum Helveticum 29 (1972): 90n21; L. Isebaert, “Le rossignol et l’épervier,” Les études classiques 56 (1988): 370; Et. Gud. p. 29 Steph. 86. D. Steiner, “Feathers Flying: Avian Poetics in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus,” American Journal of Philology 128 (2007): 180–81, 198; see also P. Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 77n5; for ποικιλία, see, for example, Il 5.735, 18.590, 22.441; Od. 18.293. 87. Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry, 72. 88. Supporters of this reading include L. W. Daly, “Hesiod’s Fable,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 92 (1961): 45–51; S. H. Lonsdale, “Hesiod’s Hawk and Nightingale (Op. 202–12): Fable or Omen?” Hermes 117 (1989): 403–12; T. K. Hubbard, “Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale Reconsidered,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 36 (1995): 161–71 (for whom the nightingale represents Perses); Steiner, “Feathers Flying.” 89. G. Nagy, “Mythe et prose en Grèce archaïque: l’ainos,” in Métamorphose du mythe en Grèce antique, ed. C. Calame (Geneva: Droz, 1989), 32. 90. See West in Hesiod, Works & Days, ad loc. 91. P. De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

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92. See D. A. Campbell, The Golden Lyre: The Themes of the Greek Lyric Poets (London: Duckworth, 1983), 100–107, for Alcaeus’s political engagements. 93. Alc. 130.16–20, 31–35 LP (I cite from Page, Lyra Graeca selecta). This poem has been brilliantly discussed by A. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” in Glass, Irony and God, 119–142 (New York: New Directions, 1995). 94. Musical performances in general, especially at weddings and in processions, were considerably more sonically diverse than the voice-lyre pairing typical of the symposium and of citharodic or choral performance: castanets (Pind. Dith. 2.8), horns (Arch. 214 IEG; Simonides 7.4 IEG; Bacch. Paean 4.75), auloi (especially Pind. Pyth. 10.39, Paean 3.94; Bacchyl. 2.12), the many-stringed magadis, shouts of iache (Pind. Pyth. 3.17; Thgn. 779), ie (Bacchyl. fr. 60.37; Sappho 44.32 LP; Timotheus 791.198 PMG), and the like were characteristic not only of Dionysiac ritual but of the Apollonian paean as well. The ololuge has nothing inherently inauspicious about it either (see Sapph. 44.31 LP; Hom. Hymn Apollo 119. On the beauty contests associated with the Lesbian cult of Hera, see C. Cary, “Epideictic Oratory,” in A Companion to Greek Rhetoric, ed. I. Worthington [Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007], 122–23). Alcaeus’s brief description of women’s festivals bears comparison with the normative descriptions of ritual music that we find, for example, in the Homeric hymn to the Mother of the Gods (3–5). 95. βρέμω associates easily with the music of the aulos (see Hom. Hymn Hermes 452), and Pindar uses a related adjective to describe his lyre (Pind. Nem. 9.8–9); but both of these are meant to invoke their instruments as sonically ambiguous, if not downright uncanny (see chapter 3). Sappho uses θεσπεσία for the sound of women singing at the marriage of Hector and Andromache (Sappho 44.27 LP); my line of argument implies that we should hear complex overtones in that description. 96. See especially M. L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974), 11–12; O. Murray, “The Greek Symposium in History,” in Tria Corda: Scritti in Onore di Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. E. Gabba, 257–72 (Como: Edizioni New Press, 1983); E. L. Bowie, “Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 13–35; O. Murray, ed., Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); A. M. Bowie, “Thinking with Drinking: Wine and the Symposium in Aristophanes,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997): 1–21; L. Kurke, “Inventing the ‘Hetaira’: Sex, Politics, and Discursive Conflict in Archaic Greece,” Classical Antiquity 16 (1997): 106–50; H. Fisher, “Symposiasts, Fish-eaters and Flatterers: Social Mobility and Moral Concerns,” in The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy, ed. D. Harvey and J. Wilkins, 355–96 (London: Duckworth and the Classical Press of Wales, 2000); S. R. Slings, Symposium, Speech and Ideology: Two Hermeneutical Issues in Early Greek Lyric, with Special Reference to Mimnermus (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2000); M. Noussia, “Solon’s Symposium (frs. 32–4 and 36 Gentili-Prato2 = 38–40 and 41 West2),” Classical Quarterly 51 (2001): 353–59; O. Murray, “Sympotica:

NOTES TO PAGES 40–41

Twenty Years On,” Pallas 61 (2003): 13–21; D. Hammer, “Ideology, the Symposium, and Archaic Politics,” The American Journal of Philology 125 (2004): 479–512; B. Pütz, The Symposium and Komos in Aristophanes (Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2007); K. Topper, “Primitive Life and the Construction of the Sympotic Past in Athenian Vase Painting,” American Journal of Archaeology 113 (2009): 3–26. 97. See, for example, Thgn. 236–54. 98. Anacr. 356b PMG. 99. Anacr. 427 PMG. 100. See N. Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for an extended engagement with the connections between bellies and voices. 101. Anacr. 2 IEG. A. L. Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25–46, contains an excellent overview discussion of the poetics and ethics of sympotic performance. 102. Xenophanes 1.13 IEG. 103. Similar claims are made about different genres in different contexts, a particularly important one being that lamentation belongs to Hades and is abhorrent to Apollo (Stesichorus 232 PMG; Sappho 150 LP). See also Thgn. 761–64 and 776–79, 491–96; Adesp. eleg. 27 IEG, with the comments of Ford, The Origins of Criticism, 33. 104. Solon 4.7–10 IEG. 105. Thgn. 611–14. See Stesichorus 255 PMG; Sappho 158 LP. The long-term stability of these expectations can be no better illustrated than by casting our glance ahead a century or so to Aristophanes’s Peace. When Tyrgaeus, trying to celebrate peace with a banquet, asks the son of Lamachus to rehearse for him the songs he intends to sing, the boy apparently has nothing but Iliadic war scenes in his head, and especially those passages in which the noises of war are particularly audible, which offends Tyrgaeus to no end (Ar. Pax. 1270–89). 106. Arch. 297 IEG. 107. Hipponax 53 IEG. Sappho used the negated cognate ἀβακή to praise someone for being gentle (Sappho 120 LP). 108. Hipponax 79.11 IEG. See chapter 3 for further discussion of the hissing sound. 109. See Thuc. Hist. 3.82.4–6. 110. Alc. 72.3–13 LP. 111. See Bowie, “Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival”; E. Robbins, “Alcaeus,” in Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Canick and H. Schneider, 1:435–38 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). In Alc. 70 PMG, the lyre marks a sympotic context, but the guests, who are described as “empty braggarts,” indicate that we are dealing with a situation where the musicality of the lyre is perverted, if not destroyed, by the unmusicality of the participants. Compare Sappho’s invective against the woman who has “no share of the

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Muses” (Sappho 55 LP). According to a story told in Lucian of Samothrace, Neanthus, the son of the Lesbian tyrant Pittacus and “a youth without musical technique or talent,” acquired the lyre of Orpheus through unscrupulous means. Practicing it clandestinely at night and on the edge of town, he utterly failed to produce anything resembling music; his noisy performance instead summoned a pack of dogs who tore him to shreds on the spot (Adv. Indoct. 12). 112. W. G. Thalmann, Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 17, makes a similar point about the ambiguities of song in the context of table fellowship. Discussing the simile comparing Odysseus’s stringing of the bow to a poet’s stringing of the lyre in the Odyssey (Od. 21.406–408), he remarks: “Song and battle should properly be kept distinct. Their mixture characterizes the ensuing action as well. Song typically accompanies the meal; but now while the suitors eat, the bow will replace the phorminx.” The ambiguities of this scene are supported by auditory symbolism: when Odysseus has strung his bow (and just before he starts killing suitors) it sings out like a swallow (Od. 411). 113. Bacchyl. 3.97–98. On Bacchylides 3, see L. Woodbury, “Truth and the Song: Bacchylides 3.96–98,” Phoenix 23 (1969): 331–35; A. Carson, “The Burners: A Reading of Bacchylides’ Third Epinician Ode,” Phoenix 38 (1984): 111–19; C. Segal, Aglaia, 281–93. 114. See L. -M. Gunther, “Syracuse,” in Brill’s New Pauly, edited by H. Canick and H. Schneider, 14.39–55 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), for a good overview of the city’s history and importance. 115. Hdt. 7.157–58. 116. See R. Stoneman, “The ‘Theban Eagle,’ ” Classical Quarterly 26 (1976): 188– 97, with earlier bibliography in n10. 117. Pind. Ol. 1, Bacchyl. 5. 118. Pind. Pyth. 1, Bacchyl. 4. 119. Two other Pindaric songs are dedicated to Heiron (Pyth. 2, 3), though the contexts and occasions for these are less clear (see C. M. Bowra, “Pindar, Pythian II,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 48 [1937]: 1–28; J. F. Oates, “Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode,” American Journal of Philology 84 [1963]: 377–89; C. Cowherd, “Pindar, Pythia 2: κατὰ ϕοίνισσαν ὲμπολάν,” Classical Journal 68 [1973]: 376–77; D. C. Young, “Pindar Pythians 2 and 3: Inscriptional ποτέ and the ‘Poetic Epistle,’ ” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 87 [1983]: 31–48; R. Stoneman, “The Ideal Courtier: Pindar and Hieron in Pythian 2,” Classical Quarterly 34 [1984]: 43–49; E. Robbins, “The Gifts of the Gods: Pindar’s Third Pythian,” Classical Quarterly 40 [1990]: 307– 318). On Hieron’s relations with poets, see D. A. Svarlien, “Hieron and the Poets,” PhD dissertation, The University of Texas, Austin, 1991; G. Schade, “Die Oden von Pindar und Bakchylides auf Hieron,” Hermes 134 (2006): 373–78; M. F. Cummins, “Sicilian Tyrants and Their Victorious Brothers I: The Emmenids,” Classical Journal

NOTES TO PAGES 42–44

105 (2010): 321–39. On Heiron in general, see D. Bonanno, “Heures et malheurs d’un tyran: le cas de Hiéron de Syracuse,” Pallas 79 (2009): 81–103. 120. Pind. Ol. 2.86–88. I cite from Pindar, Carmina cum fragmentis, ed. B. Snell and H. Maehler (Leipzig: Teubner, 1975). Helpful discussions in W. H. Race, “The End of ‘Olympia’ 2: Pindar and the ‘Vulgus,’ ” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (1979): 251–67; Young, “Pindar Pythians 2 and 3”; G. W. Most, “Pindar, O. 2.83–90,” Classical Quarterly 36 (1986): 304–16; D. Steiner, The Crown of Song: Metaphor in Pindar (London: Duckworth, 1986), 105–106; Steiner, “Feathers Flying,” 189–94. 121. Woodbury, “Truth and the Song,” 331, finds a series of strong parallels between the end of Bacchyl. 3 and Pind. Ol. 1, 2, Pyth. 1; a dialogue is at least possible. 122. Bacchyl. 5.16–23. I cite from Bacchylides, Dithyrambes, épinicies, fragments, ed. J. Irigoin (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1993). 123. See especially Robbins, “The Gifts of the Gods”; Bonanno, “Heures et malheurs d’un tyran.” 124. Pind. Ol. 1.108–12. 125. Pind. Ol. 1.114. 126. See also Pind. Ol. 1.99–100. 127. See E. L. Bundy, Studia Pindarica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 128. Pind. Ol. 1.1–7. 129. Pind. Pyth. 1.81–100. 130. Pind. Pyth. 2.86–97. 131. Pind. Pyth. 3.103–6. 132. See J. Stern, “The Imagery of Bacchylides Ode 5,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 8 (1967): 35–43; M. R. Lefkowitz, “Bacchylides’ Ode 5: Imitation and Originality,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969): 45–96; S. Goldhill, “Narrative Structure in Bacchylides 5,” Eranos 81 (1983): 65–81; C. Segal, “Sacrifice and Violence in the Myth of Meleager and Heracles: Homer, Bacchylides, Sophocles,” Helios 17 (1990): 7–24. 133. A fact that has led to a great deal of speculation. See Bacchylides, The Poems and Fragments, ed. R. C. Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 13–24; Stoneman, “The ‘Theban Eagle,’ ” 75. On Bacchylides 3 in particular, see Carson, “The Burners.” 134. Hieron would die in the subsequent year; perhaps Bacchylides could foresee the tyrant’s death and chose to reflect on it. It is equally possible that Bacchylides was going about the usual epicinician business of praising a victor while warding off hybris, adding some darkness to the picture to avoid the envy of the rest of the city and the anger of the gods. 135. Bacchyl. 3.9. Bacchylides likes to mark victories with cries: in a poem for Automedes of Phlius, Automedes’s hurling of the javelin “arouses the shout of the

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people.” There, the shout is converted into quickly spreading fame for the victor and his family. Bacchyl. 9.35, 40–52. 136. Bacchyl. 3.34–35. 137. Bacchyl. 3.48–56. 138. See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. E. Fraenkel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); Aesch. Ag. 1075. 139. Bacchyl. 3.17. 140. See G. Crane, “The Prosperity of Tyrants: Bacchylides, Herodotus, and the Contest for Legitimacy,” Arethusa 29 (1996): 57–85. 141. Bacchyl. 3.76–84. 142. Bacchyl. 3.85–92. 143. Bacchyl. 3.94–98. 144. See M. Payne, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 88–99; I. Forbes, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 233–60; Bettini, Voci, for general reflections on avian metamorphosis in ancient culture. Aelian (writing long after our period) called nightingales the “most clear-toned and most musical” of birds; Ael. NA 1.43. 145. Alc. 367 PMG. See J. Pollard, Birds in Greek Life and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 14 (with further references), 32, 110–15. 146. Hes. Op. 568. The swallow sings (κελαδῇ) in spring, according to Stesichorus in the Oresteia (Stesichorus 211 PMG). Simonides called the same bird a “glorious messenger of the fragrant spring” (ἄγγελε κλυτὰ ἔαρος ἁδυόμου, Simonides 597.1 PMG; see also Simonides 586 PMG; Thgn. 825–30, 1197). M. Blomberg, “The Meaning of Χελιδών in Hesiod,” Opuscula Atheniensia 19 (1992): 49–57, argues that this is a reference to a star, not to the bird. 147. Hes. Op. 486–87. The cicada marks summer: Hes. Op. 582–84. Cf. Alc. 347(a).3 PMG, Archilochus 223 IEG and Pratinas 709 PMG, where the cicada is a symbol for music. Alcaeus’s paean raised a symphony of summer sounds in praise of Apollo, including the voices of nightingales, cicadas, and swallows; Alc. 307(c) PMG. On a shorter temporal cycle, birdsong can also indicate morning. In Ibycus, the nightingales are woken by “sleepless glorious daybreak” (303[b] PMG). The text is ἆμος ἄυπνος κλυτὸς ὄρθρος ἐγείρησιν ἀηδόνας. Difficulty has been found in ἄυπνος, which has been variously emended to ἀύπνους or ἀύπνος (acc.), to agree with ἀηδόνας (see PMG ad loc.). See also Eur. Phaethon (TrGF V.1 773.23–24, 33–34); Anacreonta 10 Campbell, Hellenistic in date. 148. Hes. Op. 826–28. . 149. Hes. Op. 50–105. 150. See Hes. Op. 42, which articulates a natural fact as a narrative result. 151. Thgn. 1196–1201 (I cite from Theognis, Opera, ed. D. Young [Leipzig: Teubner, 1971]).

NOTES TO PAGES 47–48

152. See D. Young in the Teubner edition and compare Alcaeus 6, 208 LP; Heraclitus, Homeric Allegories 5; Campbell, The Golden Lyre, 100–102. 153. Elsewhere, the singer will suggest that it is not possible even to sing in the condition of exile: Thgn. 1.824–29. 154. Hom. Hymn Apollo (21) 1–4. I cite from Homer, Opera. This encapsulates many of the more popular ways of describing song. Not only does the swan sing (ἀείδει), but it does so to the accompaniment of its wings; ὑπὸ πτερύγων repurposes the commonplace ὑπ’ αὐλητῆρος, used to describe singing to the accompaniment of the aulos (see Thgn. 533, 825; Terpander 1 [Campbell]). The swan’s song is λίγυς, an accurate description of the bird, perhaps (see Bacchyl. 5.23; Sappho 30, 58 LP; Corinna 655.5 PMG), but also a common description of human song (see Sappho 70.1 LP; Alcm 30 PMG; Thgn. 939; Stesichorus 222 PMG; Simonides 22.13 IEG; Pind. Paean 140b [fragment G9 in Pindar, Paeans ed. Rutherford]; Bacchyl. 14.14, Paean 4.56). 155. Terpander 1 (Campbell). 156. Alcm. test. 12B (Campbell). 157. See Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia, 187–200, with further bibliography. 158. On Alcman and birds, see W. D. Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 68–69. On the first Partheneion, see E. Egger, “Un fragment inédit du poète Alcman,” in Mémoires d’histoire ancienne et de philologie, 159–75 (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1863); H. Diels, “Alkmans Partheneion,” Hermes 31 (1896): 339–74; C. M. Bowra, “The Occasion of Alcman’s Partheneion,” Classical Quarterly 28 (1934): 35–44; A. P. Burnett, “The Race with the Pleiades,” Classical Philology 59 (1964): 30–34; Gianotti, “Le Pleiadi di Alcmane (Alcm. fr. 1, 60–63 P.),” Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica 106 (1978): 257– 71; T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Art of Aeschylus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); C. Segal, “Sirius and the Pleiades in Alcman’s Louvre Partheneion,” Mnemosyne 36 (1983): 260–75; D. Clay, “Alcman’s ‘Partheneion,’ ” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 39 (1991): 47–67; B. Gentili, “Addendum: A proposito del Partenio di Alcmane,” Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 39 (1991): 69–70; C. O. Pavese, Il grande Partenio di Alcmane (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1992); E. Robbins, “Alcman’s Partheneion: Legend and Choral Ceremony,” Classical Quarterly 44 (1994): 7–16; M. S. Cyrino, “The Identity of the Goddess in Alcman’s Louvre ‘Partheneion’ (PMG 1),” Classical Journal 100 (2004): 25–38; A.-E. Peponi, “Initiating the Viewer: Deixis and Visual Perception in Alcman’s Lyric Drama,” Arethusa 37 (2004): 295–316; G. Ferrari, Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 159. Alcm. fr 1.95–101 PMG (I cite from G. O. Hutchinson, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]). 160. See Peponi, Frontiers of Pleasure, 70–94. 161. Alcm. 1.85–87 PMG. Both owls and swans are appropriate birds for nighttime or early morning, when, in the chorus’ narration, the ritual performance is taking place (39–43, 61). For swans at daybreak, see Eur. Phaethon (TrGF 5.2 F 773.33–34).

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162. Carmina Popularia 859 PMG; Hipponax 54 IEG (a messenger of the dead). 163. Alcm 30 PMG. M. L. West, “Alcman and Pythagoras,” Classical Quarterly 17 (1967): 1–15, tries to associate these Sirens closely with Pythagoreanism. 164. If Gloria Ferrari is right that the lost portion of the Partheneion contained a reference to the myth of Phaethon, then the swan may have added significance. Noting that “in Hellenistic and Roman tradition, both literary and visual, we find the swan firmly entrenched in the Phaethon myth” (Ferrari 2008: 57), she suspects that its role—as, ultimately, lamenting the fate of Phaethon—may be at work in the Partheneion as well. 165. Dion. Hal. De Comp. 19, Plin. NH 10.82 (281e PMG). On Stesichorus, see Bowra, “Stesichorus in the Peloponnese,” Classical Quarterly 28 (1934): 115–19; M. L. West, “Stesichorus Redivivus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 4 (1969): 135–49; M. L. West, “Stesichorus,” Classical Quarterly 21 (1971): 302–14; D. L. Page, “Stesichorus: The Geryoneïs,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 (1973): 138–54; P. J. Parsons, “The Lille Stesichorus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 26 (1977): 7–36; M. Haslam, “The Versification of the New Stesichorus (P. Lille 76abc),” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 19 (1978): 29–57; M. L. West, “Stesichorus at Lille,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 29 (1978): 1–4; J. M. Bremer, “Stesichorus,” Lampas 13 (1980): 355–71; W. G. Thalmann, “The Lille Stesichorus and the ‘Seven against Thebes,’ ” Hermes 110 (1982): 385–91; E. Tsitsibakou-Vasalos, Stesichorus and his Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); A. P. Burnett, “Jocasta in the West: The Lille Stesichorus,” Classical Antiquity 7 (1988): 107–54; A. D. Maingon, “Form and Content in the Lille Stesichorus,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 31 (1989): 31–56; D. Sider, “The Blinding of Stesichorus,” Hermes 117 (1989): 423–31; D. MacInnes, “Gainsaying the Prophet: Jocasta, Tiresias, and the Lille Stesichorus,” Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica 86 (2007): 95–108; C. Franzen, “Sympathizing with the Monster: Making Sense of Colonization in Stesichorus’ ‘Geryoneis,’ ” Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 92 (2009): 55–72; A. Rozokoki, “Some New Thoughts on Stesichorus’ ‘Geryoneis,’ ” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 168 (2009): 3–18. 166. See POxy 2617 fr. 4+5 col. 1.15–16; S88.18–21 (in D. L. Page and E. Lobel, Supplementum lyricis Graecis [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974]); 209. 3–9. 167. Od. 19.518–23. See N. Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 228– 29; E. K. Anhalt, “A Matter of Perspective: Penelope and the Nightingale in Odyssey 19.512–534,” Classical Journal 97 (2001): 145–59. 168. This is the version canonized by Sophocles in Tereus (TrGF IV frr. 581–95B). Other dramatic versions are Philocles’s Pandion (TrGF I.141), Cantharus’s Tereus (PCG IV frr. 5–9), and Anaxandrides’s Tereus (PCG II frr. 46–48). Related variants are recorded in Paus. 1.41.8–9, Apollod. 3.194–95. See LIMC 7.1: 527ff. 169. Aesch. Supp. 58–76. For Aeschylus, I cite from Aeschylus, Opera, ed. D. L. Page (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

NOTES TO PAGES 49–52

170. Aesch. Supp. 159–60. 171. Aesch. Supp. 129. 172. Aeschylus, who may have been a visitor to Hieron’s court in the 470s or 460s, could well have been involved in the conversations that seeded Bacchylides’s song and the sequence of bird images that preceded it. 173. Ar. Av. 39–41. Midway between the din of war and the din of the courts is the noisy dispute between Aeschylus and Euripides in the Frogs (757–58); sheer conflict at first, it will become a quasi-judicial procedure, with Dionysus as judge. 174. Ar. Achar. 530–31. 175. Ar. Achar. 539. 176. Ar. Achar. 544–54. I cite from Aristophanes, Aristophanis comoediae, ed. F. W. Hall and W. M. Geldart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). 177. See Il. 2.97, 333, 394–97. A similar use of this strain of imagery may be present in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Telphusa, who does not want an Olympian on her turf, encourages Apollo to move off with words that seem to imply a strong opposition between Apollo and noise: her waters are the site of a bustling marketplace, the sound of which would disturb his cult (Hom. Hymn Apollo 261–71). 178. Aesch. Pers. 591–97, Ag. 445–50. 179. See especially Plato, Apology 17d, 20e, 21a, 27b, 30c; Laws 700C. 180. It is because I see Aristophanes connecting the artfulness of the demagogic politician to his noisiness that I am wary of inferring from the fact that Aristophanes portrays Aeschylus as noisy in the Frogs that he means the tragedian to seem a demagogue (compare E. W. Scharffenberger, “Deinon Eribremetas: The Sound and Sense of Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ Frogs,” Classical World 100 [2007]: 229–49). Rather, he means him to seem an artist of a particular stripe. 181. Ar. Vesp. 36. 182. Ar. Vesp. 1034. 183. Ar. Vesp. 902. 184. On his taking of bribes, see in particular Ar. Eq. 985–95, which combines music theory and political commentary (he only learns the Dorian mode because it is δοροδοκιστί, “gift-giving.” On the modes and their relevance to music theory in the fourth century, see chapter 2). 185. A. M. Bowie, “Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” Classical Quarterly 43 (1993): 59. 186. Ar. Eq. 104. 187. Ar. Eq. 956. 188. Ar. Eq. 218–20. 189. The best evidence for this is in the Demosthenic corpus; see N. Worman, “Insult and Oral Excess in the Disputes between Aeschines and Demosthenes,” The American Journal of Philology 125 (2004): 1–25. Vocal quality is connected to gender in the Thesmophoriazeusae when the cross-dressing Mnesilochus is instructed

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to make sure his voice sounds like a woman (267–68); in the same play, Agathon is called γυναικόφωνος (192). 190. A parodic distortion of a hyper-high-class tone of voice might be implied by the parody of Alcibiades at Wasps 45. 191. Κλέων ὁ Κλεαινέτου, ὃς δοκεῖ μάλιστα διαφθεῖραι τὸν δῆμον ταῖς ὁρμαῖς, καὶ πρῶτος ἐπὶ τοῦ βήματος ἀνέκραγε καὶ ἐλοιδορήσατο, καὶ περιζωσάμενος ἐδημηγόρησε, τῶν ἄλλων ἐν κόσμῳ λεγόντων. Arist. Ath. Pol. 28.3. I cite from Aristotle, Aristotelis Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία, ed. H. Oppermann (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928). 192. Ar. Eq. 255–57. 193. Ar. Eq. 1018. 194. Ar. Eq. 1020. The image is repeated, with similar significance, at 1051. 195. The embassy of the Leontinians to Athens was in 427 (Diodorus Siculus 12.53); the Knights was produced in 424. 196. On Gorgias, see M. Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. K. Freeman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), 140–74; T. G. Rosenmeyer, “Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Apate,” The American Journal of Philology 76 (1955): 225–60; C. Segal, “Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 66 (1962): 99–155; B. Granbeck, “Gorgias on Rhetoric and Poetic: A Rehabilitation,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 38 (1972): 27–31; J. Robinson, “On Gorgias,” in Phronesis Supplementary Volume 1, edited by A. Mourelatos, E. Lee, and R. Rorty, 49–60 (Assen, Van Gorcum, 1973); R. L. Enos, “The Epistemology of Gorgias’ Rhetoric: A Reexamination,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 42 (1976): 35–51; Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 17–21; J. D. Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3–22; S. Consigny, “The Styles of Gorgias,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22 (1992): 43–53; J. Porter, “The Seductions of Gorgias,” Classical Antiquity 12 (1993): 267–99; N. Worman, The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 154–85; P. S. Horky, “The Imprint of the Soul: Psychosomatic Affection in Plato, Gorgias and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets,” Mouseion 6 (2006): 371–86; Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 261–97. 197. Indeed, resorting to the assembly as frequently as late fifth-century demagogues seem to have done may itself be a tactic associated with innovative or unconventional political agents: for many, speaking in a law court or in the assembly was a last resort. In both the courts and the political sphere, other procedures, including appearance before a magistrate or the boule, could lead to decisions and make appeals to the demos unnecessary. See A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), volume II, for the judicial procedures, especially 94–105. 198. The proximity of Cleon and Gorgias was noted by Worman, Abusive Mouths, 84. 199. Ar. Eq. 273–76, 285–87. 200. D. M. Jones, N. G. Wilson, D. Holwerda, and W. J. W. Koster, eds., Scholia in Aristophanem (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1969), 276a-b (69).

NOTES TO PAGES 53–60

201. See Sch. Pind. Ol. 9.1. 202. See Suda, s.v., Et. Magn. s.v. 203. Ar. Eq. 526–36. 204. Arg. V to Ar. Nub. (= Cratinus Test 7[c] PCG). 205. The metaphor of the poet as a raging river, here connected to sound and the Iliad, would become a central metapoetic image in Alexandrian and Roman poetry: see Callimachus, Ep. 28; Hor. Sat. 1.4.11–12, 1.10.50–51; and M. C. Farmer, “Rivers and Rivalry in Petronius, Horace, Callimachus, and Aristophanes,” American Journal of Philology 134 (2013): 481–506. 206. See Ar. Eq. 1121–50. 207. See Aristophanes, Frogs, ed. K. J. Dover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 221, for metrical analysis. 208. Ar. Thesm. 120–26. 209. See chapter 3. 210. Ar. Thesm. 39–51. 2. AFFECT 1. Hom. Hymn Apollo 162–64. On the Delian maidens, see A.-E. Peponi, “Choreia and Aesthetics in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: The Performance of the Delian Maidens (Lines 156–164),” Classical Antiquity 28 (2009): 39–70. 2. Od. 4.277–89. 3. Od. 12.201–205. 4. Od. 5.400–406. A similar scene occurs in book one of the Odyssey, when the song of Phemius, though performed in the main hall, penetrates to the upper reaches of the house, where Penelope hears it; Phemius’s tales of the heroes of the Trojan war cause her to lament by reminding her of her own still-lost husband (Od. 1.341–44). 5. Il. 10.12–13. 6. Il. 10.137–39. 7. Il. 10.182–86. 8. Il. 10.273–76. 9. Il. 10.354. 10. Il. 10.502. 11. Il. 10.520–25. 12. Il. 10.532. 13. Il. 10.5–10. 14. Il. 10.375. 15. Il. 10.523–25. Sound symbolizes affect also at Il. 14.17ff; Od. 20.10–17; Alcaeus fr. 10B.5 LP. 16. Il. 10.469. 17. Od. 1.133–34. 18. Od. 1.157.

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19. Od. 4.762–72. 20. Book five of the Odyssey again notates simultaneous sounds in separate spaces. When Hermes comes to the island of Calypso, he finds her “sitting inside singing with a beautiful voice, moving before her loom, and weaving with a golden shuttle” (ἡ δ’ ἔνδον ἀοιδιάουσ’ ὀπὶ καλῇ / ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένη χρυσίῃ κερκίδ’ ὕφαινεν; 5.61–62). Birds sing outside her cave (65–67) and two streams mingle nearby. Odysseus, on the other hand, sits at the shore of the island groaning (Od. 5.82–83). The juxtaposition of these two auditory environments indicates that Circe’s domestic bliss is less than perfect; Odysseus has somewhere else to be. A different but equally evocative atmosphere is created through the juxtaposition of sounds in Odyssey 8. The poet Demodocus sings twice in this book, first of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, then of Troy and the Trojan horse. As Odysseus listens to these tales, he laments (Od. 8.83–92, 521–31). But he covers his head as he does so, which, the poem says, allows his groans to escape the notice of all but king Alkinoos, who interrupts Demodocus’s song when he realizes the song’s effect on his guest. Here the juxtaposition of spaces is combined with a portrayal of the movement of sound. 21. Od. 23.146–47. 22. Od. 19.467–90. 23. Od. 19.389–91. 24. Od. 19.444–54. 25. κανάχησε δὲ χαλκός, Od. 19.469. 26. The vocabulary of cries available to a tragic poet was extensive, but there were two main classes. The first comprised a set of interjections associated with cultic or musical genres that could mark a musical section as notionally belonging to a certain form of ritual performance (see A. Henrichs, “Why Should I Dance? Choral SelfReferentiality in Greek Tragedy,” Arion 3 [1994]: 56–111; A. Henrichs, “Dancing in Athens, Dancing on Delos: Some Patters of Choral Projection in Euripides,” Philologus 140 [1996]: 48–62). Such were the ὀλολυγή, the ἀλαλαγή, the paianic cry ἰή ἰή παῖαν, and the Dionysiac εὐοῖ and ἰαχώ. The second class of cries belonged to lamentation (θρῆνος), where the range of possibilities was much greater. On lamentation as a song-tradition, see M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); C. Dué, The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); A. Suter, ed., Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The cries are catalogued in the capo. 27. Most cries in tragedy are constructed from reduplicated syllables—a fact indicating language plays a strong mediating role (reduplication was an old Indo-European device, not without parallels in other languages, for producing onomatopoeia; see A. J. Carnoy, “Apophony and Rhyme Words in Vulgar Latin Onomatopoeias,” The American Journal of Philology 38 [1917]: 265–84; M. B. Emeneau,

NOTES TO PAGES 62–64

“Onomatopoetics in the Indian Linguistic Area,” Language 45 [1969]: 274–99; H. Bredin, “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle,” New Literary History 27 [1996]: 555–69). 28. See Nooter, When Heroes Sing, 14; M. Payne, “The Understanding Ear: Synesthesia, Paraesthesia and Talking Animals,” in Synesthesia and the Ancient Senses, ed. S. Butler and A. Purves, 43–52 (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2013). On glossolalia and nonverbal vocal expression in general, M. De Certeau, “Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias,” trans. D. Rosenberg, Representations 56 (1996): 29–47, remains indispensable. 29. Compare J. T. Katz, “Gods and Vowels,” in Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome, ed. J. Virgilio Garcia and A. Ruiz, 2–28 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013) and J. T. Katz, “The Hymnic Long Alpha: Μούσας ἀείδω and Related Incipits in Archaic Greek Poetry,” in Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. S. W. Jamisone, H. C. Melchert, and B. Vine, 87–102 (Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2013). 30. On masks, see J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 189–206; D. Wiles, Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy: From Ancient Festival to Modern Experimentation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); C. Chaston, Tragic Props and Cognitive Function: Aspects of the Function of Images in Thinking (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 179–238; P. Meineck, “The Neuroscience of the Tragic Mask,” Arion 19 (2011): 113–58, with further bibliography. On the skene, see O. Taplin, “Sophocles in his Theatre,” in Sophocles, ed. J. de Romilly, 155–83 ( Vandoeuvres: Fondation Hardt, 1982); R. Hamilton, “Cries Within and the Tragic Skene,” American Journal of Philology 108 (1987): 585–99; G. Ley, “Agatharchos, Aeschylus, and the Construction of a Skene,” Maia 41 (1989): 35–38; D. J. Mastronarde, “Actors on High: The Skene Roof, the Crane, and the Gods in Attic Drama,” Classical Antiquity 9 (1990): 247–94; H. -J. Newiger, “Ekkyklema und Mechané in der Inszenierung des griechischen Dramas,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 16 (1990): 33–42; D. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–75. 31. Eur, Hip. 191–97. 32. See also, in particular, Soph. OC 1604–28; Eur. Hip. 1201–17, Androm. 1148. 33. Aesch. T1.7 (TrGF II), with S. Gurd, “Aeschylus Terrorist,” Journal of Human Rights 3 (2003): 99–114; [Longinus] Subl. 1.4, 12.5, 15.4. 34. Aesch. Eum. 698. 35. Ar. Nub. 1363–67. 36. Ar. Ran. 822–25. See O’Sullivan, Alcidamas, Aristophanes, and the Beginnings of Greek Stylistic Theory, 106–29; L. P. E. Parker, The Songs of Aristophanes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 500–503; Scharffenberger, “Deinon Eribremetas,” 229–49. 37. Ar. Ran. 1195–1245. 38. ἰὴ κόπον οὐ πελάθεις ἐπ’ ἀρωγάν; Ar. Ran. 1266, 1271, 1275, 1277.

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39. Ar. Ran. 1285–95. 40. See Dover’s comment in Aristophanes, Frogs., ad loc. 41. See also Ar. Ran. 917–30. Discussions of Aeschylean sound can be found in Aeschylus, Die attische Tragoedie, ed. W. Porzig (Leipzig: E. Wiegandt, 1926), 73–94; W. B. Stanford, Aeschylus in his Style: A Study in Language and Personality (Dublin: The University Press, 1942), 80–85. 42. On divine retribution (it is a critical commonplace), see R. P. WinningtonIngram, Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–15; M. Gagarin, Aeschylean Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 46–50; S. Saïd, “Tragédie et renversement: l’exemple des Perses,” Métis 3 (1988): 321–41. On the construction of the non-Greek other (another critical commonplace), the fundamental texts remain E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); F. Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. J. Lloyd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Also very valuable are H. C. Avery, “Dramatic Devices in Aeschylus’ Persians,” American Journal of Philology 85 (1964): 173–84; B. Lincoln, “Death by Water: Strange Events at the Strymon (Persae 492–507) and the Categorical Opposition of East and West,” Classical Philology 95 (2000): 12– 20; A. Favorini, “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus’ ‘The Persians,’ ” Theatre Journal 55 (2003): 99–111; M. Hopman, “Chorus, Conflict, and Closure in Aeschylus’ Persians,” in Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy, ed. R. Gagné and M. Hopman, 58– 77 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). S. Goldhill, “Battle Narrative and Politics in Aeschylus’ Persae,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988): 189–93, offers a different approach, still centered on the politico-historical. 43. On the messenger speech, see J. Barrett, “Narrative and the Messenger in Aeschylus’ Persians,” American Journal of Philology 116 (1995): 539–57. 44. Aesch. Pers. 386–98. The passage is discussed in M. Anderson, “The Imagery of the Persians,” Greece and Rome 19 (1972): 172–73 (briefly, and in a very different context). 45. κελαδέω is used of armies shouting at Il. 8.542, 18.310, 23.869; for the din of battle, the noun appears at Il. 9.547, 18.530, 18.576, 21.16. 46. This was noted by Garvie in Aeschylus, Persae, ed. A. F. Garvie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 47. For parallels, see Garvie in Aeschylus, Persae, ad loc.; the closest are in Pindar (e.g., Ol. 9.21–22; cf. Isth. 7. 23, Nem. 10.2; see also Euripides Phoen. 1377). 48. καὶ παρῆν ὁμοῦ κλύειν / πολλὴν βοήν, 401–402. Homoioteleuton on -ην/-ειν makes the phrase especially vivid. 49. See, for example, 353–54, 362. Compare Soph. OC 1610 and Eur. Bacch. 1078–79, where a divine voice rings out in the same way. 50. Il. 2.459–73. 51. See Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 68–69.

NOTES TO PAGES 62–74

52. Aesch. Pers. 115–23. 53. Aesch. Pers. 256–67. 54. See Aeschylus, Opera. 55. Thus, the choral ode at 531–97 punctuates its lamentatory content with line-final or hypermetric cries like ποποί, τοτοῖ, φεῦ, ἠέ, and ὀᾶ (550–53, 560– 63, 568–75, 576–83). See J. A. Haldane, “Barbarian Cries (Aesch. Pers. 633–639),” Classical Quarterly 66 (1972): 42–50. 56. Aesch. Pers. 1038–53. 57. Aesch. Pers. 1054–65. 58. Aesch. Pers. 1066–77. 59. See Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 76–80. 60. See Garvie’s apparatus criticus in Aeschylus, Persae. 61. Aeschylus is playing with the Athenian rhetoric of listing the war dead: see M. Ebbott, “The List of the War Dead in Aeschylus’ ‘Persians,’ ” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000): 83–96. 62. Aesch. Pers. 950–61; cf. 962–1001. 63. I am thinking of words like ἰά (Aesch. Pers. 936; Eur. Hip. 585), ἰαλέμος (Aesch. Supp. 115; Eur. Her. 110; Eur. Phoen. 1033–34), ἰαχέω (Eur. Her. 349, Tro. 515, 827, Or. 826, 965), and ἰαχή (Aesch. Pers. 940; Eur. Ion. 499, Or. 1474, IA 1039). 64. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, throughout; the belief is commonplace in the pre-Socratics. 65. Ar. Ran. 1378–1413. 66. See P. Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens,” in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, ed. S. Goldhill and S. Osborne, 58–95 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); R. W. Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101 (2003): 73–92; P. LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths: Athenaeus’ Reading of the Aulos Revolution,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010): 35–47. 67. See TrGF 3 T 2, with D. Rosenbloom, “Shouting ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater: Phrynichos’s Capture of Miletos and the Politics of Fear in Early Attic Tragedy,” Philologus 137 (1993): 159–96. 68. W. G. Thalmann, “Aeschylus’s Physiology of the Emotions,” American Journal of Philology 107 (1986): 489–511, shows that he holds a consistent and strong physiology of the emotions that has a great deal in common with the affect theories of presocratic natural philosophy. On Aeschylean cognitive models, see also D. Sansone, Aeschylean Metaphors for Intellectual Activity ( Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975). 69. On Seven and the senses, see L. Edmunds, “Sounds off Stage and on Stage in Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes,” in I setti a Tebe. Dal mito alla letteratura, ed. A. Aloni, E. Berardi, G. Besso, and S. Cecchin, 105–15 (Bari: Pàtron Editore, 2002); J. Porter, “Why Are There Nine Muses?” in Synesthesia and the Ancient Senses, ed. S. Butler and A. Purves, 9–26 (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2013).

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70. Aesch. Sept. 4–9. 71. Aesch. Pers. 13. 72. Aesch. Ag. 448–49. 73. Aesch. Ag. 887. 74. Aesch. Ag. 1106. 75. And see also Eur. Hec. 553, where ἐπιρροθέω is used of the people. 76. Aesch. Sept. 64. 77. See chapter 1. 78. See Aeschylus, Aeschyli tragoediae cum incerti poetae Prometheo, ed. M. L. West (Stuttgard: Teubner, 1990). 79. Aesch. Sept. 78. 80. Aesch. Sept. 81–82. Compare Aesch. Ag. 494–95. 81. Aesch. Sept. 84–86. 82. Il. 4.446–56. 83. ἰὼ ἰώ θεοὶ θεαί τ’; Aesch. Sept. 87. 84. West emended ὀᾶ in 89 to βοᾷ (M. L. West, Studies in Aeschylus [Stuttgart: Teubner, 1990] ad loc.). 85. Aesch. Sept. 100. 86. κτύπον δέδορκα, Aesch. Sept. 103. 87. Aesch. Sept. 114–15. See Il. 14.394–401 and compare Il. 2.394–97. 88. Aesch. Sept. 135. 89. Aesch. Sept. 151–55. 90. Aesch. Sept. 160. 91. Aesch. Sept. 150, 158. 92. Aesch. Sept. 166, 167, 174. 93. For the relationship between Eteocles and the chorus, see A. L. Brown, “Eteocles and the Chorus in the ‘Seven against Thebes,’ ” Phoenix 31 (1977): 300–18 (with older bibliography). 94. Aesch. Sept. 181. 95. αὔειν, λακάζειν, σωφρόνων μισήματα; Aesch. Sept. 186. 96. Aesch. Sept. 187–88. 97. Aesch. Sept. 190–93. 98. Aesch. Sept. 203–207, 211–13, 239–41, 245. 99. Aesch. Sept. 230–32, 246, 250, 252. 100. Aesch. Sept. 242–44; cf. 279–80. 101. Aesch. Sept. 268–70. 102. Aesch. Sept. 331. 103. Aesch. Sept. 348–50. 104. μή νυν ἀκούουσ’ ἐμφανῶς ἄκου’ ἄγαν, Aesch. Sept. 246. 105. See especially M. Ryzman, “The Departure of the Champions in Aeschylus’ Septem,” Hermes 115 (1987): 116–19; D. W. Berman, Myth and Culture in Aeschylus’

NOTES TO PAGES 77–79

Seven against Thebes (Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2007); S. Lawrence, “Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea,” Hermes 125 (1997): 49–55; F. I. Zeitlin, Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Chaston, Tragic Props and Cognitive Function, 67–130, for older bibliography. 106. See Zeitlin, Under the Sign of the Shield. 107. Βρέμει; Aesch. Sept. 378. 108. μεσημβριναῖς κλαγγαῖσιν ὡς δράκω βοᾷ, Aesch. Sept. 381. 109. χαλκήλατοι κλάζουσι κώδωνες φόβον, Aesch. Sept. 386; note the heavy alliteration on glottal stops combined with assonance on ο/ω. 110. Aesch. Sept. 387–90. 111. λόγοι δὲ κώδων τ’ οὐ δάκνουσ’ ἄνευ δορός, Aesch. Sept. 399. 112. Aesch. Sept. 461–64. 113. Aesch. Sept. 475–76. 114. Aesch. Sept. 635. 115. Aesch. Sept. 637. 116. Hes. Erg. 220–21. 117. Aesch. Sept. 645–47; compare 434. 118. Aesch. Sept. 685–714. 119. Aesch. Sept. 687, 692. 120. Aesch. Sept. 654–56. 121. Aesch. Sept. 657–58. 122. Aesch. Sept. 696. 123. Plut. De aud. Poet. 10.29f; TrGF II T.149. 124. Aesch. Sept. 696. 125. A discussion of sound and space in Seven can be found in Edmunds, “Sounds off Stage and on Stage in Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes.” 126. Assessments of Eteocles’s character can be found in K. V. Fritz, “Die Danaidentrilogie des Aeschylus,” Philologus 91 (1936): 121–36, 249–69; A. Lesky, “Eteokles in den Sieben gegen Theben,” Wiener Studien 74 (1961): 5–17; L. Golden, “The Character of Eteocles and the Meaning of the Septem,” Classical Philology 59 (1964): 79–89; A. J. Podlecki, “The Character of Eteocles in Aeschylus’ Septem,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 95 (1964): 283–99. 127. Aesch. Ag. 1118–19. 128. Aesch. Ag. 1186. 129. Aesch. Ag. 1187–92. 130. περίφρονα ἔλακες, Aesch. Ag. 1427. 131. ἐπὶ δὲ σώματος δίκαν / κόρακος ἐχθροῦ σταθεῖσ’ ἐκνόμως / ὕμνον ὑμνεῖν ἐπεύχεται ⟨ ⟩, Aesch. Ag. 1472–75. On musical imagery in Oresteia, see T. J. Fleming, “The Musical Nomos in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” Classical Journal 72 (1977): 222–33, with further bibliography.

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132. Aesch. Cho. 523–25. 133. Aesch. Ag. 89–95. 134. Aesch. Cho. 748–80. 135. Aesch. Ag. 1072, 1076. 136. The text is challenging here. See West in Aeschylus, Aeschyli tragoediae cum incerti poetae Prometheo, ad loc. for solutions. 137. Aesch. Eum. 116–38. 138. Aesch. Ag. 1343–45 (Agamemnon’s death), Cho. 869 (Aegisthus’s death). 139. Aesch. Eum. 1035, 1039. 140. Indeed, when Athena summons the jury of citizens to judge the case, she does so with the loud noise of the salpinx and an onomatopoeic assonance; Eum. 568–71. See R. B. Egan, “The Assonance of Athena and the Sound of the Salpinx: ‘Eumenides’ 566–571,” Classical Journal 74 (1979): 203–12. 141. Thalmann, “Aeschylus’s Physiology of the Emotions,” 506. See also T. B. L. Webster, “Some Psychological Terms in Greek Tragedy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957): 149–54; Sansone, Aeschylean Metaphors for Intellectual Activity. 142. Aesch. Eum. 517–25. Δέει in 522 follows Casaubon apud Page (Aeschylus, Opera [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], ad loc.). 143. Thalmann, “Aeschylus’s Physiology of the Emotions,” 508. 144. See especially P. B. R. Forbes, “Law and Politics in the Oresteia,” Classical Review 62 (1948): 99–104; C. W. MacLeod, “Politics and the Oresteia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982): 124–44; Bowie, “Religion and Politics in Aeschylus’ Oresteia”; M. Griffith, “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia,” Classical Antiquity 14 (1995): 62–129. 145. See Pind. Pyth. 9.22, Isth. 7.23, Nem. 10.2; Soph. OT 192, 473–76. Euripides may have been responding to Aeschylus’s metaphor at Phoen. 1377. 146. κτύπον δέδορκα; Aesch. Sept. 103. 147. Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, 103. 148. W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 49. Examples of synesthetic metaphor from before tragedy can be found, for example, in Hom. Il. 3.151–52, Hes. Theog. 41. On synesthesia in ancient culture generally, see the essays collected in S. Butler and A. C. Purves, eds., Synesthesia and the Ancient Senses (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2013). Lachenaud, Les routes de la voix, 50–51, discusses later synesthesias associating voice and light. 149. See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 13–17, 140, 177–207. Important discussions of synesthesia that I do not engage with here can be found in M. MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 265–66, and M. Dufrenne, L’oeil et l’oreille (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1991), 111–36, 189–200. 150. G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2005), 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 84–90

151. Nancy, The Muses, 21–27. On touch and its relation to synesthesia, see J. Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); D. Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (Boston: Zone, 2007) is only tangentially related. 152. Nancy, The Muses, 23. 153. Ibid., 24. 154. James Porter has argued that aesthetic experience is almost unavoidably synesthetic (Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece; Porter, “Why Are There Nine Muses?”). I agree but would identify affective intensity as the efficient cause of this perceptual drift. Soph. OT 185–89 is another instance of synesthesia provoked by extreme affect. 155. Aesch. Pers. 683, 687, 697, 705, 727. 156. δύσθροα βάγματα, Aesch. Pers. 635. 157. Aesch. Pers. 652, 657, 663, 671. 158. The first scene in the Ajax is a famous instance of metatheatricality; see D. Rosenbloom, “Sophocles: Ajax,” in The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy, edited by H. Roisman, 1255–64 (London: Wiley, 2013), 1259, with abundant earlier bibliography. 159. Compare Soph. OT 371 (τυφλὸς τά τ’ὦτα τόν τε νοῦν τά τ’ ὄμματ’ εἶ). 160. ἰδοὺ ἰδού· / δοῦπον αὖ κλύω τινά. Soph. Aj. 870–71. 161. Soph. Phil. 201–18. Discussed in C. Segal, “Synesthesia in Sophocles,” Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977): 88–96. Compare Trach. 693–94, El. 1410, OC 1463. 162. Eur., Hec. 1109–13 163. Compare Soph. Aj. 142, 164; Eur. Supp. 160, IA. 317, Rh. 15, 45. 164. See M. Griffith, The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) (with older bibliography); C. J. Herington, The Author of the Prometheus Bound (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); M. L. West, “The Prometheus Trilogy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979): 130–48; West, Studies in Aeschylus, 51–76; M. L. West, “Iliad and Aethiopis on the Stage: Aeschylus and Son,” Classical Quarterly 50 (2000): 338–52. 165. Aesch. PV 114–27. 166. These wings seem to him to make a hissing noise. ὑποσυρίζω recalls the συριγμός of the serpent that Apollo kills in taking possession at Delphi. See chapter 3. 167. Aesch. PV 133–34. 168. Aesch. PV 406–414; see also 431–35. 169. W. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. E. L. Minar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 375n23. 170. Hippasus, A 12 DK. 171. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, 378; cf. G. Comotti, “Pitagora, Ippaso, Laso e il metodo sperimentale,” in Harmonia mundi: musica e filosofia nell’antichità, ed. B. Wallace and B. McLaughlin, 20–29 (Rome: Ateneo, 1991). It is not impossible that the numerical laws “governing” the concords were postulated

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NOTES TO PAGES 90–91

purely on numerological grounds (2:1 is, as later digesters of Pythagoreanism would excitedly announce, the closest to unity; it makes sense, then, that the octave, the interval closest to unison, should be linked to it, with 3:2 and 4:3 getting attached to the next perfect concords in turn) and demonstrated later, perhaps by trial and error. 172. By the time of the Aristotelian Problems, resonance had become a frequent topic of speculation. See Arist. Prob. 11.8–9, 19.50, 19.42. On resonance more generally, see Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 16–19; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. 173. Philochorus, FGrH 328 F 23 = Athen. 14.42 637F–38A. See West, Ancient Greek Music, 341. 174. Similar experiments may have been undertaken by Epigonus of Sicyon: see West, Ancient Greek Music, 341. 175. According to Diogenes Laertius Alcmaeon was credited the first to write a φυσικὸν λόγον; A 1 DK. Aristotle says he was young when Pythagoras was old and worked in a Pythagorean mode without locking himself into the Pythagorean fetishism of the pentad (A3 DK = Arist. Metaph. 1.5, 986a.22ff.). 176. A5 DK = Theophr. Sens. 25f, A6 DK = Aet. IV. 16.d; D 406. 177. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 46. 178. Theophr. Sens. 9 (Emped. A 86 DK). 179. Theophr. Sens 21 (Emped. A 86 DK). 180. Arist. De an. 3.2.425b12ff. 181. In Empedocles’s own terms: γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ’ ὕδωρ, αἰθέρι δ’ αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον, στοργὴν δὲ στοργῇ, νεῖκος δέ τε νείκεϊ λυγρῷ. We see earth with earth, and water with water, and divine air with air, but destructive fire with fire, and love with love, and strife with doleful strife. (Emped. B 109 DK)

The most salient difference between the senses is that they are differently calibrated so as to receive different kinds of messages (Theophr. Sens. 7; Emped. A 86 DK). We can imagine each sense as a kind of receptor that picks up information of only one frequency; different percepts are only able to interface with the sense that they are well fitted to. What experiences the sensations, or at least what converts them into thought, is just another sense, in its most important details the same as the others. Thinking differs from perception primarily in being multimedia; it is a combination of all the senses. Empedocles asserts that blood is the principle of consciousness (B 105 DK), adding its recipe: it is the product of an equal mixture of the four roots or basic elements (B 98 DK). Being composite, blood is commensurate with more than one kind of sense and can consequently recognize like with like in every case. His specification “equal mixture” is an idealization. There are variations in different people, such that some are more responsive to fire (sight) or air (sound).

NOTES TO PAGES 91–92

Empedocles attributes different talents and cognitive dispositions to different mixtures of the elements—in the blood, it influences intelligence, and in other parts of the body, it influences different technical talents (Theophr. Sens. 11; A 86 DK). That thought is a material process of a kind with the senses is made clear not only from the passage Theophrastus cites but by passages in which Empedocles imagines persuasion flowing into the phren (B 114 DK) or being cut up in the listener’s gut (B 4.3 DK), with the result that knowledge grows (B 17.4 DK) or flies away (B 106 DK). 182. The simple solution to this no doubt rather involving problem was that the nature of things was a consequence of variations in the density of the air. See, for example, Diogenes A 5 DK. 183. Democritus A 20 DK. 184. This helps to explain why some people hear better than others. To hear well, you need a good echo chamber, in the form of short, straight, and fine ear canals, coupled with large ears and delicate veins (Theophr. Sens. 41: Democritus A 19.24 DK). Otherwise, your ears are liable to ring. Tintinnitis was well known to medical writers: the symptom appears in the Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease, where it is said that those in whom the phlegm has not been properly burned off when they were children end up with ringing in their ears (Hippoc. Morb. sacr. 5, Morb. 2.17). Aristotle knew of anatomical works on the veins by Diogenes: the ear ducts were commonly associated with the body’s “channels,” of which the veins were an example, so he may have developed these claims in concert with empirical research (Arist. Hist an. 3.2.511b 30, Diogenes B 6 DK). 185. For the “dualist” position, see Alcmaeon A5 DK, Anaxagoras A 101, A 101a, A 102, A 55, A 56; A 57; A 58; A 100, A5, A11, A1, A12 DK. 186. τὴν δ’ ἀκοὴν παραπλησίως ποιεῖ τοῖς ἄλλοις. εἰς γὰρ τὸ κενὸν ἐμπιπτοντα τὸν ἀέρα κίνησιν ἐμποιεῖν, πλὴν ὅτι κατὰ πᾶν μὲν ὁμοίως τὸ σῶμα εἰσέναι, μάλιστα δὲ καὶ πλεῖστον διὰ τῶν ὤτων, ὅτι διὰ πλείστου τε κενοῦ διέρχεται καὶ ἥκιστα διαμίμνει (Theophr. Sens. 55, A 135 DK). According to Porphyry, Democritus defined the sense of hearing as a receptacle that awaits the sound like a vase (ἀγγείος; Proph. in Ptol Herm 32.6, A 126 DK). 187. Thus, Theophrastus: “when something perceptible enters the body, it is scattered quickly—and voice is a dense bit of air entering the body by force” (ὅταν δὲ ἐντὸς γένηται, σκίδνασθαι διὰ τὸ τάχος· τὴν γὰρ φωνὴν εἶναι πυκνομένου τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ μετὰ βίας εἰσιόντος). De sens. 55 (A 135 DK). 188. Places 2. 189. Hippoc. On Fleshes 15. 190. “When a thing echoes loudest (μέγιστον ἠχήσῃ) we hear best”; Hippoc. On Fleshes 15. 191. Hippoc. Morb. 2.4, 2.17. Diseases 2 may, in fact, be a product of the rival Cnidian school rather than the Hippocratic context at Cos. See J. Jouanna, Hippocrates (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 383.

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192. Hippoc. Morb. 2.4. 193. Hippoc. Morb. 2 remarks similar symptoms when fluid forms on the brain (2.15) and when the “small blood-vessels around the brain fill with blood” (2.17) (this has to mean “fill with phlegm”—2.4 had already protested against the expression “fill with blood”). In other works, too, ringing in the ears is provoked by maladies in the head. Regimen in Acute Diseases threatens that an incorrect change of régime, drawing off matter from the head, can lead to flashes in the eyes and ringing in the ears; Regimen in Acute diseases 42. Hippoc. Morb. sacr., arguing that epilepsy is dependent primarily on heredity and begins in the womb, claims that phlegmatic fetuses that purge too many impurities from their brains can end up with a general overheating and melting of the material in the brain. As a consequence, the child “has a pathology of the head when he grows up, and it is full of echoes” (11.17). Though in this case the description is of a chronic condition that underlies and can transform into epilepsy, in cases of acute disease the appearance of ringing in the ears is taken as a very serious sign, leading with some rapidity to death. See Prorrhetic II.72, 136, 190, 189, Morb. 3.1. 194. Hippoc. Regimen 1.35. Regimen 1 goes on to specify that not all personality traits are determined simply by the composition of the soul. In fact, a great many are determined by the nature of the passages (ἡ φύσις τῶν πόρων) through which the soul travels (Regimen 1.36). 195. Hippoc. Regimen 2.61. I cite from Hippocrates, Oeuvres complètes. 196. Porter, Origins of Aesthetic Thought 179–307 covers the “rise” of aesthetic thought in fifth-century physical theory. Affect is not an explicit theme. 197. On Damon, see Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music, 134–36; R. W. Wallace, “Damone de Oa ed i suoi successori: un’ analisi delle fonti,” in Harmonia Mundi, ed. R. W. Wallace and B. MacLachlan, 30–53 (Rome: Ateneo, 1991); West, Ancient Greek Music, 243–49; R. W. Wallace, “Damon of Oa: A Music Theorist Ostracized?” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Wilson and P. Murray, 249–68 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); R. W. Wallace, “Performing Damon’s Harmoniai,” in Ancient Greek Music in Performance, ed. S. Hagel and C. Harrauer, 147–57 ( Wein: Weiner Studien Beiheft 30, 2005). 198. Damon A 8 DK (a similar story was told about Pythagoras: see West Ancient Greek Music: 31n. It is very likely that Damonian ethical theory developed “Pythagorean” influences, particularly if resonance was a factor). Asked if music encouraged all the virtues or just some of them, he replied “that music concerned all of them: he said that a boy who sang and played the lyre displayed not only courage and wisdom, but also justice” (τὸν μουσικὸν [εἰς πάσα]ς σχεδὸν οἴεσθαι· λέ[γειν γὰ]ρ αὐτον, προσήκειν [ἀίδον]τα καὶ κιθαρίζον[τα τὸν παῖ]δα μὴ μόνον ἀνδρε[ίαν ἐμφαί]νεσθαι καὶ σω[φροσύνη]ν, ἀλλὰ καὶ δι[καιοσύνην]; Damon B 4 DK). This looks like a claim about the number and nature of the virtues as much as about the force of music, and

NOTES TO PAGES 94–96

it isn’t clear, on a closer inspection, whether the virtues come from music or whether they precede it. But at the very least, it establishes grosso modo connections between music and ethical condition. These connections are also implied by his claim, reported in Plato, that “the modes of music are in no way changed without also changing the political laws”; οὐδαμοῦ γὰρ κινοῦνται μουσικῆς τρόποι ἄνευ πολιτικῶν νόμων τῶν μεγίστων (B 10 DK = Pl. Resp. 4.242C). There is a pun here that should not be overlooked: νόμος, as we have seen, means both “law” and “melody.” Damon was not alone: see PHib. 1.13, most easily accessible in A. Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1.183–85. 199. Damon B 7 DK (Aristid. Quint. II 14). 200. If this is true, Damon’s account might be an important precursor to Aristotelian psychology. According to Aristotle, perception results from the transmission of a form across different media. What distinguishes Aristotle’s from the affect theories of perception in the fifth century is the fact that he posits the sharing of form as the basis of perception; an innovation, or at least a theoretically rigorous specification, that is probably attributable to Aristotle alone. 201. οὐ κακῶς δ’ ἔλεγον οἱ περὶ Δάμωνα τὸν Ἀθηναῖον ὅτι καὶ τὰς ᾠδὰς καὶ τὰς ὀρχήσεις ἀνάγκη γίνεσθαι κινουμένης πως τῆς ψυχῆς, καὶ αἱ μὲν ἐλευθέριοι καὶ καλαὶ ποιοῦσι τοιαύτας, αἱ δ’ ἐναντίαι τὰς ἐναντίας; B 6 DK = Athenaeus 628C. 202. Are logos and poetry auditory phenomena? Gorgias is not explicit. But the parallel between persuasion and love is compelling. The latter is vision given emotive force, and it is not difficult to imagine that persuasion and language operate in a similar way; parasitic on the medium of hearing, they enter the soul through the ear. Gorgias’s intellectual connections with Empedocles might be relevant here (see A 2, 3, 10, 14 DK). Empedocles promulgated what has been called a “two-tiered” ontology, in which an infinite number of very small versions of phenomenally available things like bone or flesh combine into larger masses or “elements” that then combine into what is actually evident to the senses. See J. Mourelatos, “Quality, Structure and Emergence in Later Presocratic Philosophy,” in Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, ed. J. Cleary, 127–94 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 163–94; B. Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 32–42. There is a loose analogy between this and what seems to be the Gorgianic model, in which the “smallest and most invisible body” enters the soul and imprints it; the gross result would be persuasion, while the cause would be the sound in which logos is carried. In any case, logos has powerful emotional effects—it stops fear and takes away pain, works delight and increases pity (8); it can create shivers of fear and tearful pity and painful longing, even when hearing of things far away (9); by a kind of incantation it can change a mind (10–11). 203. Diod. Sic. 1.8.3 (B5 DK). 204. Democritus B 144 DK.

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3. MUSIC 1. Plat. Leg. 3.700a–701b. 2. See West, Ancient Greek Music, 205–7, for a summary; I give more detail in chapter 3. 3. On “new” music, see especially E. Csapo, “Later Euripidean Music,” ICS 24–25 (2000): 399–426; E. Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Murray and P. Wilson, 207–48 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); D’Angour, “The New Music: So What’s New?”; E. Csapo and P. Wilson, “Timotheus the New Musician,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, ed. F. Budelman, 277–93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); P. LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The existence of a “new” music in the late fifth century is not universally accepted. Hordern in Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, ed. J. H. Hordern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), remarks that “it is not clear, for instance, how coherent a group these musicians felt themselves to be. . . . The ‘New Music’ could well be to some extent an invention of later scholarship” (2). LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths,” is even more skeptical. L. Prauscello, “Epinician Sounds: Pindar and Musical Innovation,” in Reading the Victory Ode, ed. P. Agócs, C. Carey, and R. Rawles, 58–82 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59, sets the diachronic context accurately. 4. See LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse, 81–82 (with earlier bibliography). Plato’s description is as accurate for Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes as it is for anything composed at the end of the century. At the end of the Seven, the chorus—faced with a bewildering circumstance in which their city has been liberated from siege and yet, at the same time, their leader has been killed—contemplates a correspondingly mixed music: πότερον χαίρω κἀπολολύξω πόλεως ἀσινεῖ σωτῆρι < > ἢ τοὺς μογεροὺς καὶ δυσδαίμονας ἀτέκνους κλαύσω πολεμάρχους . . . Should I rejoice and raise the ololuge for the safety of the city, or lament the wretched and unhappy childless leaders . . . (825–28)

Aeschylus’s point is that they must do both: the generically dissonant is as crucial to musical expression as are the Erinyes to a functioning city (see chapter 2). 5. Positive valuations of novelty are consistent in Greek song from the Odyssey (1.351–2) through Timotheus. See LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse, 87–90 and 97–101, and the superb A. D’Angour, The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

NOTES TO PAGES 97–98

Older accounts of the Greek notion of progress can be found in J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan, 1920); L. Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); and E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). C. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. D. McLintock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 186–221, has proved influential, especially on E. Csapo and M. Miller, “Towards a Politics of Time and Narrative,” in Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth- Century Athens, ed. D. Boedeker and K. Raaflaub, 87–126 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). On the supposed conservatism of Greek culture, see B. A. V. Groningen, In the Grip of the Past: Essay on an Aspect of Greek Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1953). 6. Overviews of Greek music and music theory from the earliest evidence through the end of the fifth century can be found in R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Mode in Ancient Greek Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); Anderson, Ethos and Education in Greek Music; Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I; G. Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); West, Ancient Greek Music; Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece; T. J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); J. C. Franklin, “Diatonic Music in Greece: A Reassessment of its Antiquity,” Mnemosyne 55 (2002): 669–702; J. C. Franklin, “Hearing Greek Microtones,” in Ancient Greek Music in Performance, ed. S. Hagel and C. Harrauer, 9–50 ( Wein: Weiner Studien Beiheft 30, 2005); Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece; S. Hagel, Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia; LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse. The surviving “scores”—really hopelessly mutilated fragments, for the most part—are collected in E. Pöhlmann and M. L. West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). D’Angour’s work is consistently illuminating, especially A. D’Angour, “How the Dithyrhamb Got its Shape,” Classical Quarterly 47 (1997): 331–51; and A. D’Angour, “The New Music: So What’s New?” 7. J. Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S,” Classical Quarterly 57 (2007): 1–21, identified the centrality of Sacadas to much of what followed; see also Porter, Origins of Aesthetic Thought, 365–404. It is unlikely that any history of music will be able to ignore Porter’s insights; mine depend on them heavily. 8. For Sacadas’s victories at Delphi (in 582, 578, and 574), see Pausanias 10.7.4–5. For the Pythian nome, see Pollux 4.78, Pausanias 2.22.9. On the musical nome (nomos) in general, see H. Grieser, Nomos: ein Beitrag zur griechischen Musikgeschichte (Heidelberg: Bilabel, 1937); E. Laroche, Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien (Paris: Klincksieck, 1949), 166–71; Fleming, “The Musical Nomos in Aeschylus’ Oresteia”; Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 249–55; West, Ancient Greek Music,

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215–17; Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 25–33; Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia, 224–33. On the aulos, see J. G. Landels, “The Reconstruction of Ancient Greek auloi,” World Archaeology 12 (1981): 298–302; Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens”; M. Byrne, “Understanding the Aulos I,” in Studien zur Musikarchäologie 2, ed. E. Hickmann, I. Laufs, and R. Eichmann, Orient-Archäologie 7 (2000): 279– 85 ; M. Byrne, “Understanding the Aulos II: Extended Pipes and Drone,” in Studien zur Musikarchäologie 3, ed. E. Hickmann, A. D. Kilmer, and R. Eichmann, OrientArchäologie 10 (2002): 322–33; Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music”; S. Hagel, “Twenty-four in Auloi. Aristotle, Met. 1093b, the Harmony of the Spheres, and the Formation of the Perfect System,” in Ancient Greek Music in Performance, ed. S. Hagel and C. Harrauer, 51–92 ( Wein: Weiner Studien Beiheft 30, 2005); LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths”; S. Hagel, “The Aulos Syrinx,” in Poesia, musica e agoni nella Grecia antica, ed. D. Castaldo and A. Manieri, 491–518 (Galatina: Congedo, 2012). 9. See Pollux 4.84, Strabo 9.3.10; E. Hiller, “Sakadas der Aulet,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 31 (1876): 76–88; West, Ancient Greek Music, 212–14; F. D’Alfonso, “Sacada, Xanto e Stesicoro,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 51 (1995): 49–61; A. Scheithauer, “Musik, musikalische Bildung und soziales Ansehen im fruhen Griechentum,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 53 (1996): 7–8; Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S,” 10–11. 10. For a date in the later sixth century, see Sch. Pind. Nem. 2.1; W. Burkert, “Kynaithos, Polycrates and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” in Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to B. M. W. Knox, ed. G. W. Bowerstock, W. Burkert, and M. Putnam, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), 53–62; R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 99–132. For an earlier bibliography, see K. Forstel, Untersuchungen zum Homerischen Apollonhymnos (Bochum: Studienverlag Brockmeyer, 1979), 20–59; M. L. West, “Cynaethus’ Hymn to Apollo,” Classical Quarterly 25 (1975): 161–70 ( West himself would put the Pythian portion of the hymn in the seventh century). See also M. Chappell, “Delphi and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” Classical Quarterly 56 (2006): 331–48 (a superb investigation). 11. Hom. Hymn Ap. 357–61. 12. See Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 52n17; and Hagel, “The Aulos Syrinx.” 13. Pindar tells us that the many-headed nome was composed by Athena moments after she invented the aulos, though we are also told that Athena rejected the instrument because it distorted her facial features when she played it—the satyr Marsias adopted it, to his downfall. 14. For the instrument’s cultural significance and ritual associations, see Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 115; West, Ancient Greek Music, 105–6; and Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens.”

NOTES TO PAGES 99–100

15. Ar. Eq. 10. By contrast, a strummed lyre was imitated with the onomatopoeic θρεταννελό (Ar. Plut. 290 and 296, with scholia) and φλαττοθραττοφλαττοθρατ (Ar. Ran. 1285–95). Auloi speak (Theognis 532, 761), shout (Pind. Ol. 3.8, Nem. 5.38; Soph. Trach. 640; Eur. Bacch. 127, IT 1125), bark (Eur. Alc. 346–47), and roar (Eur. Hel. 1351–52). They make a complex, modulating music (Pind. Isthm. 1.5.27–28, Anon. Lyr. 947[b] PMG), a ruckus (θόρυβος, Pratinas 708.1 PMG), a din (καναχή, Bacchyl. 2.12, Pind. Pyth. 10.37–39), a racket (κέλαδος, Eur. Bacch. 160, El. 716), or a sound (ψόφος; Eur. Bacch. 687). Their sound is beautiful (Soph. Trach. 640, Telestes fr. 805, 806 PMG), tender (τερένοι; Anac 375 PMG), or sweet (Eur. Bacch. 127). Many of the words listed here are compounded with adjectives designating fineness and beauty: all occur in the context of the fifth-century embrace of noise for aesthetic purposes. For general descriptions of or references to auloi, see Alc. 307(b) PMG; Arch. 58.12, 121, 269 IEG; Theognis 533, 825; Melanippides 758 PMG; Pind. Paean III 94; Soph. Trach. 212; Eur. Alc. 430, Hel. 171, Her. 684, 895, IT. 367, 1126, Ion. 493, Phoen. 787, Tro. 126, Bacch. 380, IA. 577, 1036. 16. Aesch. Eum. 117, 120, 129. 17. S. Perrot, “Le sifflement du serpent: du son inarticule à la mise en musique,” Anthropozoologica 47 (2012): 345–61, contains an excellent discussion of the relations between the musical syrigmos and the zoology of animal noises in antiquity. I diverge from his argument slightly, however, where he suggests that the problem of the syrigmos is incorporating a “nonmusical” sound within music, I would insist, rather, that the syrigmos represents the incorporation of nonpitched sounds within music. 18. For a dating for the hymn close to the end of the sixth century BCE, see Janko, Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns, 143. For discussion of its date, see also H. Görgemanns, “Rhetorik und Poetik im homerischen Hermeshymnus,” in Studien zum antiken Epos, 113–28 (Meisenheim am Glan: Beitr. zur klass. Philol. 72, 1976); A. Faulkner, ed., The Homeric Hymns: Interpretive Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12–13. For more extensive discussions of its content and implications, see N. O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1947), 66–101; J. S. Clay, The Politics of Olympus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 95–151; Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece, 54–57; S. I. Johnston, “Myth, Festival, and Poet: The Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Its Performative Context,” Classical Philology 97 (2002): 109–32; T. C. Power, “Ion of Chios and the Politics of Polychordia,” in The World of Ion of Chios, ed. V. Jennings and A. Katsaros, 179–205 (Leiden: Mnemosyne suppl. 288, 2007), 191; C. Bungard, “Lies, Lyres, and Laughter: Surplus Potential in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” Arethusa 44 (2011): 143–65. 19. Hom. Hymn Her. 52–62. I cite from Homer, Opera. 20. Il. 2.309.

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21. Od. 6.137. 22. Il. 20.260; Od.11.609. Compare Il. 21.401. 23. Il. 8.92. 24. Il. 5.302. 25. Od. 10.399. 26. Od. 7.479. 27. See Il. 2.334, 2.466, 16.277, 21.592, and compare κοναβίζω, Il. 13.498, 21.255; κόναβος, Od. 10.122; Aesch. Sept. 160. 28. Compare Hom. Hymn Ap. 184–85 and the subsequent lines. 29. Hom. Hymn Herm. 295–96. 30. Hom. Hymn Herm. 279–80. 31. Whistling is normally designated by ῥοίζω. 32. Alcm. 37b.1 PMG (ὑπαυλέω); Arch. 58.12 IEG; Theognis 533, 825. 33. See Clay, The Politics of Olympus, for the PanHellenism of the Homeric hymns. 34. Hom. Hymn. Herm. 419. 35. θαρσήσας, Hom. Hymn Herm. 423. 36. Hom. Hymn. Herm. 427, 430–31. 37. Hom. Hymn Herm. 488. 38. Hom. Hymn Herm. 483. 39. See P. Wilson, “Athenian Strings,” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Murray and P. Wilson, 269–306 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 40. Hom. Hymn Herm. 552–66. 41. See S. Scheinberg, “The Bee Maidens of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 83 (1979): 1–28; J. Larson, “The Corcyrian Nymphs and the Bee Maidens of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 36 (1995): 341–56; N. J. Richardson, Three Homeric Hymns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 219–20. 42. Thanks perhaps to Nietzsche’s widely misunderstood assessment of the history of tragedy, Apollo is commonly associated with principles of order, sweetness, and light that are so typical of a certain fetishized and unrealistic Hellenism. This is not at all the Apollo we know from the ancient sources. Impetuous, an unconvincing lover, capable of extraordinarily violent wrath, a prophet to men but curiously unconcerned about the implications of his advice and deeply focused on the protection of his ritually assigned prerogatives, Apollo has as much of a dark side as many of the younger Olympians, and in some respects more of one—indeed, a god associated both with the lyre, the instrument and symbol of peace and order, and with the warlike bow could hardly be more double-sided. The Homeric hymn to Apollo illustrates this ambiguity. On the one hand, he is Leto’s glorious son (Hom. Hymn Ap. 14), and his beautiful singing voice is linked to a divine perfume and radiant appearance (Hom. Hymn Ap. 201–3). But at the beginning of the Delian section of the hymn (Hom.

NOTES TO PAGES 103–4

Hymn Ap. 2–14), Apollo’s armed approach to Olympus causes the gods to tremble and leap from their chairs in fear; it takes Leto to disarm her son while Zeus recognizes and seats him. Though Apollo seems mollified by the end of the passage, its present tenses suggest that this is not a one-off occurrence but a standard entrance. Only the actions of Leto and Zeus are given in the past, with the rest taking place in a timeless mythological now. This is a residue of the same “averted succession” motif exploited in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and in the hymn to the Muses in Hesiod’s Theogony. In a sense, the exchange of sound-sources (lyre, bee maidens) in the latter hymn suggests a reciprocity between would-be revolutionaries, an acknowledgment on the part of the poet of the importance to song of confronting ideals of social order. 43. Soph. Ichn. (F 314 TrGF) 124–210. 44. For overviews of the use of strings in the theatre at Athens, see P. Wilson, “The Musicians among the Actors,” in Greek and Roman Actors, ed. E. Hall and P. Easterling, 39–69 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wilson, “Athenian Strings”; and Wilson, “Music,” in A Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. J. Gregory, 183– 93 (London: Blackwell, 2005). 45. A repertoire for solo lyre was developed—though it failed to become solidly institutionalized. See Plato Leg. 669e.1, Ath. 14.637f–38a, Paus. 10.7.7; A. Barker, “The Innovations of Lysander the Kitharist,” Classical Quarterly 32 (1982): 266–69; Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 300n205. 46. Philochorus FGrH 328 F 23 (=Ath. 637f–38b: text is from Athenaeus, Deipnosophistarum libri XV, ed. G. Kaibel [Leipzig: Teubner, 1890]). Discussion in Barker, “The Innovations of Lysander the Kitharist”; West, Ancient Greek Music, 342, 66. The date of Lysander is unclear. Barker places him in the second half of the sixth century; M. Maas and J. M. Snyder, Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 227n51, make him contemporary with Timotheus, with less probability. 47. On the acoustic problem of resonance, see chapter 2. 48. Barker, “The Innovations of Lysander the Kitharist,” 268–69, connects the whole phrase χρώματά τε εὔχροα πρῶτος ἐκιθάρισε καὶ ἰάμβους καὶ μάγαδιν, τὸν καλούμενον συριγμόν with the Pythian nome of Sacadas. χρώματά τε εὔχροα probably refers to experiments in intonation—changing the precise tuning of the strings so that new variants of recognized scales emerged. In post-Aristoxenian musicology, scales were divided into genera, species, and “shades,” with shades corresponding to microtonal fine-tunings (see Aristox. Harm. 2.49, Arist. Quint. 1.9; Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 2.418n108). Here Athenaeus is almost certainly not referring to the “chromatic” genus as opposed to the “enharmonic,” but he may well be referring to intonational variation. See Antiphanes’s description of Philoxenus: τὰ μέλη μεταβολαῖς καὶ χρώμασιν / ὡς εὖ κέκραται (Ath. 643d). This is probably not an example of “emotional coloring” but of modulation (μεταβολαῖς) and intonational variation (χρώμασιν). See Franklin, “Hearing Greek Microtones,” 2005.

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49. Arist. [Pr.] 19.39 (921a12). See A. Barker, “Telestes and the ‘Five-Rodded Joining of Strings,’ ” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 75–81. 50. See Hagel, “The Aulos Syrinx.” 51. See schol. Pind. Ol. 13.26b, schol. Ar. Av. 1403. Lasus is said to have been the author of the first book on music: Suda s.v. Lasus. He is also said to have been influenced by Pythagoreanism and to have engaged in physical experimentation (Theon of Smyrna, De utilitate mathematicae; Hiller, “Sakadas der Aulet,” 59). His starting point was to posit that notes had “breadth” or “width” (Aristox. Harm. 1.3.21; see Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 2.128n12). The easiest way to understand such a thesis is that giving them width lets him place notes on a continuum. It may also have helped him account for differences in intonation (see Aristox. Harm 1.22–27; for a general bibliography on Lasus, see G. A. Privitera, Laso di Ermione nella cultura ateniese e nella tradizione storiografica [Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1965]; Comotti, “Pitagora, Ippaso, Laso e il metodo sperimentale”; Lasus, Testimonianze e frammenti, ed. G. F. Brussich [Pisa: ETS, 2000]; D’Angour, “How the Dithyrhamb Got its Shape”; Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S”; J. C. Franklin, “Remembering Music in Early Greece,” in The Historiography of Music in Global Perspective, ed. S. Mirelman, 9–50 [Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010]; J. C. Franklin, “ ‘Songbenders of Circular Choruses’: Dithyramb and the ‘Demise of Music,’ ” in Dithyramb in Context, ed. B. Kowalzig and P. Wilson, 217–36 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]; West, Ancient Greek Music, 39–40, 225–26, 234, 246, 261, 340, 342–43). But Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S,” suggests compellingly that there are materialist implications as well; a note with width also has bulk, heft, and physical presence. Modulation, too, might have been a concern. Epigonus, another Sicyonian more or less contemporary with Lasus, is said to have invented a forty-stringed instrument, perhaps not for performance but for theoretical investigation. Its forty strings allowed the creation of tonal spaces onto which different modes could be plotted in order to establish their interrelations ( West, Ancient Greek Music, 225). 52. τῇ τῶν αὐλῶν πολυφωνίᾳ κατακολουθήσας, πλείοσί τε φθόγγοις καὶ διερριμένοις χρησάμενος, εἰς μετάθεσιν τὴν προυπάρχουσαν ἤγαγε μουσικήν. Plut. [de mus.] 29.1141c. Text is from Plutarch, Moralia, ed. K. Zeigler and M. Pohlenz (Leipzig: Teubner, 1966). See A. Barker, Euterpe: Ricerche sulla musica greca e romana, trans. E. Rocconi (Pisa: ETS, 2002), 54–59. 53. Lasus may have taught Pindar. See Vit. Pindari 1.4 (A. B. Drachmann, ed., Scholia vetera in Pindari carmina [Leipzig: Teubneri, 1903]). 54. Arch. 94.3 IEG. 55. Anacr. 427.2 PMG. 56. Simon. 586.1 PMG. 57. An archaic poet called the aulos many-stringed (πολύχορδος; Anon. Lyr. 947[b] PMG), an epithet that acknowledges the sonic variability of the aulos in terms

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of the tonal multiplicity of the lyre. This does not contradict my thesis—my claim is not that the aulos was not tonally multiple, but, rather, that it was also timbrally diverse. The word could be seen as an attempt on the part of a lyre-centered composer to think about the aulos through the categories of his instrument. 58. My suggestion is close to that of West, Ancient Greek Music, 343, though I see no reason to conclude that Lasus adopted auletic microtones to sung melody. 59. See earlier in this chapter. 60. Musical complexity was already being explored during Sacadas’s lifetime, but it was rhythmic rather than melodic. In the first half of the sixth century, the citharode Stesichorus began utilizing a far more elaborate rhythmic style. While song before Stesichorus was organized rhythmically into lines, couplets, or strophes, Stesichorus developed a system in which two identical strophes were followed by a third with a different metrical profile. The result was a rhythmic pattern in the form AAB, which could extend over tens of lines and be repeated as many times as needed (Stesichorus 275[b] PMG). The Augustan-era Greek literary theorist Dionysius of Halicarnassus would later claim that Stesichorus’s approach to rhythmic structure was guided by a desire for μεταβολή, which by his time meant “modulation” in musical contexts but here might be taken simply to refer to the comparatively more complex form of the Stesichorean triad (Dion. Hal. Comp. 19). It is no accident that Stesichorus’s poetry made a great many references to disturbing, dangerous, or bestial sounds, nor that he was later connected with that most ambiguous of songbirds, the nightingale; Stesichorean rhythmic complexity reflected the same auditory poetics expressed in Sacadas’s syrigmos. 61. Ath. 10.455c. 62. Ath. 14.624ef; cf. Ath. 10.455cd. 63. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 372, citing Aristox. in Ath. 11.467a (=fr. 87 Wehrli). 64. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 372, citing Dion. Hal. Comp. 14. 65. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 387. 66. Lasus 702(a) PMG. 67. μελιγάρυες (Alcm. 26.1 PMG; compare Pind. Pyth. 3.18, Ol. 11.4); μελίφωνοι (Sappho 185 LP); μελίφθογγος (Pind. Ol. 6.21 [of the Muses]); μελιγλώσσος (Bacchyl. 3.97, Paean fr. 4.63). 68. For example, Theognis 1197. Someone, possibly Cydias of Hermione (the scholiast who reports the fragment calls him Cydidas: see Campbell, The Golden Lyre, 3:328n2), gives the lyre a βόαμα; this would be in the spirit of Lasus’s innovation. Bacchylides uses βοάω for human speech frequently. I cannot contextualize Simonides’s μιξοβοά . . . in 519A f. 1.5s (PMG). 69. Hom. Hymn Herm. 452. See Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S,” 12. 70. See Solon 11.7 IEG (in ap. crit.); Aesch. Pers. 661; Eur. Ion 409; LSJ, s.v. and

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Lachenaud, Les routes de la voix, 3. Differently, R. R. Dyer, “On Describing Some Homeric Glosses,” Glotta 42 (1964): 127–29. See Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” 230n101. Prauscello, “Epinician Sounds,” 64–77, discusses the early history of the Aeolian, with an emphasis on rhythmic factors in its emergence: she finds it “consistently linked with iambo-aeolic composite rhythm” (66), and notes “(1) the clear shift of rhythm from the dactyloepitrite start to a composite form made largely from iambic and / or aeolic kola, and (2) the coincidence of this rhythmical shift with the mention of the Aeolic mode defined here as βαρύβρομος” (69). 71. Perhaps the Aeolian tuning was a modulating tuning? Modulation, too, was adopted from aulos music—though in this case its meaning was radically changed. The earliest systematic approach to modulation occurred in a third auletic nome from about the same time as Sacadas, called the Trimeles, or “three melodied” nome (sometimes attributed to the aulete Klonas; Plut. [de mus] 1134ab, compare 1132d). It had three sections, each performed in one of the three traditional modes, which were probably already designated by ethnonyms. It is highly suggestive that the early nomes were performed at the newly influential festival at Delphi, a PanHellenic event drawing on and cementing a broader linguistic unity at a time of local political diversity. The trimeles nomos, in using modes associated with ethnic or dialectical variants of Greek all in the same piece, was a musical expression of the international unity represented by the festival. See G. Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 82–99. 72. See Lasus 703, 705, 706 PMG, where he seems to have used sigmas. 73. See TrGF 1.4 T1. 74. Pratinas 708 PMG (I cite from TrGF 1.4 F3). Dating has been a problem. LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths”; and Prauscello, “Epinician Sounds,” favors an early-fifthcentury date on linguistic grounds; most others favor a late-fifth-century date in order to accommodate an “aulos counter-revolution” more or less simultaneous with the flowering of the “new music.” See A. W. Pickard-Cambridge and T. B. L. Webster, Dithyramb Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 17−20; B. Zimmermann, “Überlegungen zum sogenannten Pratinasfragment,” Museum Helveticum 43 (1986): 145–54; B. Zimmermann, “Gattungsmischung, Manierismus, Archaismus: Tendenzen des griechischen Dramas und Dithyrambos am Ende des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr,” Lexis 13 (1989): 25–36; R. Hamilton, “The Pindaric Dithyramb,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 93 (1990): 211–22; G. Ieranò, Il ditirambo di Dioniso: le testimonianze antiche (Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1997), 219−26; M. Napolitano, “Note all’ iporchema di Pratina (PMG 708 = TrGF I, 4F 3),” in Sunaulia: Cultura Musicale in Grecie e contatti mediterranei, ed. A. C. Cassio and L. E. Rossi, 111–55 (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 2000); A. Barker, F. Perusino, and E. Rocconi, eds., Euterpe: ricerche sulla musica greca e romana (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2002), 56; Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” 243; Franklin, “ ’Songbenders of Circular Choruses.’ ”

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75. Athenaeus is followed by most. See Ieranò, Il ditirambo di Dioniso: le testimonianze antiche, 222–32; West, Ancient Greek Music, 343; Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens,”; Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music,” 88–92 (though Wallace knows that the instrument was only unpopular among a very small and very rich group); R. Martin, “The Pipes are Brawling: Conceptualizing Musical Performance in Athens,” in The Cultures within Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, 153–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), with valuable correction; Prauscello, “Epinician Sounds: Pindar and Musical Innovation,” 74, and LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse, 85n41, with older bibliography. 76. See LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths.” C. A. Shaw, Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), connects this passage to Lasus. 77. See Pratinas 712 (712[a] is probably not a reference to an “aeolian mode” but to pursuing a complex and new song), 713 PMG. Pindar is the other early adopter of the Aeolian, in contexts which W. Mullen, Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 23–24, has suggestively identified as sites of modulation. Pind. Ol. 1.17 refers to the Dorian lyre, but 102 to Aeolian melody. Compare Pyth. 2.69, Nem. 3.76–79. Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S,” 12, identifies the Aeolian as a “sonorous” mode. It is suggestive that in two of the three mentions of the Aeolian in Pindar, the context is the conclusion of a victory ode for Hieron; both Pyth. 2 and Ol. 1 end with advice to Hieron not to seek happiness beyond what he already has. Is the shift to the Aeolian linked to this change in tone? Or does the change in tone itself make the music Aeolian? 78. On Pindar’s musical investments, see L. Pearson, “The Dynamics of Pindar’s Music: Ninth Nemean and Third Olympian,” Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977): 54–69; Campbell, The Golden Lyre, 183–84; Comotti, Music in Greek and Roman Culture, 29–30; Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music,” 77–80. 79. Pind. Pyth. 3.18, Isthm. 5.27–28. 80. Pind. Ol. 1.8. 81. Pind. Ol. 5.19, Pyth. 8.68–69, Nem. 3.44–46, Paeans 140b.2–15. 82. Pind. Ol. 3.3–9. 83. Compare Pind. Ol. 4.2, ποικιλοφόρμιγγος. 84. Pind. Dith. 2.1–30. Text from Pindar, Carmina cum fragmentis. Discussed in D’Angour, “How the Dithyrhamb Got its Shape”; and Porter, “Lasus of Hermione, Pindar, and the Riddle of S.” 85. Dion. Hal. Comp. 14. See West, Ancient Greek Music, 343–44. 86. D’Angour, “How the Dithyrhamb Got its Shape,” suggested that the lines referred obscurely to Lasus’s reorganization of the choreography of the dithyrhamb into the shape of a circle, with the result that chorus members, now able to see one

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another better, could coordinate their singing more precisely and as a consequence reduce the sibilance produced by badly synched articulation. Without rejecting D’Angour’s suggestion, Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 397–98, noted that both ἕρπε and σχοινοτένεια suggested the characteristic movement and shape of a snake. This, coupled with the reference to sigmas and the “clamor of a thousand serpents” in the description of Athena’s aegis, suggested to him a reference to the Delphic myth of the serpent slain by Apollo. 87. A very different explanation in J. S. Sheldon, “Iranian Evidence for Pindar’s ‘Spurious San’?” Antichthon 37 (2003): 52–61. 88. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece, 379. 89. See J. E. Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and C. Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 90. See Pind. Pyth 12 with scholia, Pratinas PMG 713, Plut. [de mus] 1133de, and West, Ancient Greek Music, 214. Segal, Aglaia, 90, writes of the invention of aulos music by Athena: “Athena’s transformation of Medusas’s wail at death into the flutesong is a cultural act that domesticates the fearfulness and impurity of the woman in the act of birth. Instead of the child emerging from the bloody fluids of the birth canal and instead of the cry of pain coming out through that so vividly portrayed gorgonic mouth, a pleasing sound emerges from an artificial channel, whose constricted passage produces the ‘many-headed song’ at all-male contests of art and athletics. Athena thus neutralizes the cry of the woman in birth or the mournful wail of the woman in her familiar role of lamenting the dead.” I would only change “neutralizes” to “channels and enhances.” 91. See Dith. II in Pindar, Carmina cum fragmentis. 92. Hes. Theog. 311. 93. On Dactylo-Epitritic meter, see West, Greek Metre, 69–76; on Pindar’s use of it, see K. Itsumi, Pindaric Metre: The “Other Half ” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 94. It is perhaps worthy of a side remark that while choral composers were putting together triadic structures comprising extraordinarily complex rhythms, dramatic composers exploded the triadic form, constructing large-scale compositions based on patterns of responding strophes. In what may be one of the most elaborate pieces of choral music from antiquity, Aeschylus’s Choephori contained an extended musical sequence performed by Orestes, Electra, and the Chorus that wove together fourteen distinct strophic shapes (and five open anapestic strophes) in an interlacing pattern, then counterpointed that with a sequence of speaker changes. The result is a kind of large-scale polyrhythm (Cho. 306–478). 95. See Segal, Aglaia, 88–100, on the cultural poetics of sound in the ode. 96. Plut. [de mus] 14.1135ff (=Alc. 307[b]). 97. Pind. Pyth. 12.18–22.

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98. ἀγωνιζομένου γὰρ αὐτοῦ ἀνακλασθείσης τῆς γλωσσίδος ἀκουσίως καὶ προσκολληθείσης τῷ οὐρανίσκῳ, μόνοις τοῖς καλάμοις τρόπῳ σύριγγος αὐλῆσαι, τοὺς δὲ θεατὰς ξενισθέντας τῷ ἤχῳ τερφθῆναι, και οὕτω νικῆσαι αὐτόν. (Scholia vetera, praef. ad Pind. Pyth. 12; I cite from Drachmann, Scholia vetera in Pindari carmina). 99. In fact, “syrinx” is commonly used also of the aulos. See the index in West, Ancient Greek Music. 100. Three documents regularly cited in discussions of the reception of the aulos in fifth-century Athens can be quickly set aside. In or around the mid-fifth century, Melanippides portrayed Athena throwing away the newly invented aulos as a “harm to the body” (σώματι λύμα; 758 PMG). This is a reference to the story that Athena, recognizing that playing the aulos caused her to contort her face, threw it away as an insult to her beauty: it was then found by Marsyas, who mastered the instrument and challenged Apollo to a musical context, with the inevitable and well-known results— he lost and was flayed alive for his hubris. This and its companion piece, a defense of the aulos from the slightly later Telestes in which Telestes denies that the virgin goddess should have been so concerned with her looks (fr. 805 PMG), emphasize the instrument’s visual implications, not its auditory ones. 101. See Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 93; and West, Ancient Greek Music, 205–206. 102. Timotheus 785 PMG. 103. Timotheus 792 PMG. 104. Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” 214n28; he calls the Sacadan innovations “trivial forms of performative mimesis.” Less dismissive is Hordern in Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 38. 105. See Plato Alc. 1.118c; Plut. [de mus] 1136d, Per. 4. 106. Plut. [de mus] 1136d. See Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume I, 221n113, on what this probably means; and Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music,” for “aulos research.” 107. West, Ancient Greek Music, 87. For overview statements on the aulos in the fifth century, see Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens”; Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music”; and LeVen, “New Music and Its Myths” (this last an essential corrective). On the history and sound of the aulos, Hagel, Ancient Greek Music, 327–65, is now indispensable; it makes clear, for example, that the greater perfect system, which was the basis of the musical vernacular from the fourth century on, is largely grounded in aulos music—but not in its timbral capabilities. 108. Pherecrates, Cheiron (155 PCG). The single most important contemporary source for the music of the fifth century, this passage has been frequently commented on. See J. Boardman, “Some Attic Fragments: Pot, Plaque, and Dithyramb,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76 (1956): 20 (brief but seminal mention); R. P. Winnington-Ingram, “The Pentatonic Tuning of the Greek Lyre: A Theory Examined,” Classical Quarterly

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6 (1956): 171; E. K. Borthwick, “Notes on the Plutarch de Musica and the Cheiron of Pherecrates,” Hermes 96 (1968): 60–73; M. L. West, “Analecta Musica,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 92 (1992): 28–29; West, Ancient Greek Music, 357–64; M. Maas, “Polychordia and the Fourth-Century Greek Lyre,” The Journal of Musicology 10 (1992): 75–77; Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece, 128–35; Franklin, “Diatonic Music in Greece,” 696; Wallace, “An Early Fifth-Century Athenian Revolution in Aulos Music,” 83; Franklin, “ ’Songbenders of Circular Choruses.’ ” 109. Which Melanippides? Suidas reports the existence of two: an older son of Criton, born 520–516 BCE, wrote “many books of dithyrhambs and epic poems, epigrams, and elegies, and many other things.” A second, also son of a Criton but the grandson of the elder, “innovated many things in the melodies of his dithyrhambs, and lived for time and eventually died at the court of king Perdicas.” The existence of the elder Melanippides is confirmed by the Parian Marble, which has a Melanippides winning a victory at Athens in 494/3. Dover, in his commentary on the Frogs, thinks our Melanippides was this older poet, in other words a contemporary of Pindar and Aeschylus (Aristophanes, Frogs, 216). His reasons are primarily chronographical: Pherecrates would be moving forward in time, and starting with the oldest. West, Ancient Greek Music, 357, on the other hand, thinks we are dealing with the younger Melanippides—a more popular choice among recent scholars because of his reputation for melodic innovation, which is the substance of the “new music.” (E. Rohde, “Γέγονε in den Biographica des Suidas [mit Nachträgen auf S. 638–639],” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 33 [1878]: 161–220, 638, argued that there was only one Melanippides—the younger.) But several considerations argue against the younger Melanippides. The elder Melanippides stands to have been a major poet—if the younger Melanippides “innovated much,” the elder wrote much, specifically many books of dithyrhambs. The younger, no matter how important as an innovator, is described by Suidas as living and dying in Macedonia—an important court, and certainly a good place from which to change the face of music, but not the right place to be if you are going to be the object of jokes in old comedy. (Euripides retired there only after an extended career in Athens.) Finally, Pherecrates has music conclude her discussion of Melanippides with the remark that he did nothing to her compared with what she has to endure “now,” which suggests an older poet, not a near contemporary of the later musicians on her list. Plut [de mus] 1141c-e speaks of Melanippides as “Lasus’ successor.” This fits the older Melanippides much better than the younger (who, we should recall, seems not to have been a major presence at Athens). In addition, the younger Melanippides is too late to have “introduced the Lydian mode” (Plut. [de mus] 15.1136c, pace West, Ancient Greek Music, 358n9), but the older Melanippides comes at exactly the right time, when the first generations of Athenian festival music were exploring new modalities in their music. Aristodemus in Xenophon’s Memorabilia lists his favorite artists as “Homer in epic, Melanippides in the Dithyramb, Sophocles in tragedy, Polycleitus in

NOTES TO PAGES 114–15

sculpture, Zeuxis in painting” (1.4.3 = Melanippides T 7 Campbell). This is a conservative list: the older Melanippides could well have been meant. See Boardman, “Some Attic Fragments,” for some possible receptions of the elder Melanippides. At the very least, some of the explanations for the “new” music may be permanently scuppered by this fundamental and probably irresolvable chronological quandary. 110. There may be a musicological basis to the word “slack.” Plato classified certain modes as “loose” or “slack” in the Republic—among them some Lydian modes (other Lydian moders were “high-strung” or “tight”); Plato Resp. 398e. 111. Kinesias appears in Strattis Ff 14–20 PCG; Ar. Av. 1372–1409, F 156 PCG. 112. ἐξαρμονίους καμπὰς . . . ἐν ταῖς στροφαῖς; Pherecrates, Cheiron (155 PCG) 9. On καμπή as “modulation,” see D. Restani, “Il Chirone di Ferecrate e la ‘nuova’ musica greca,” Revista italiana di musicologia 18 (1983): 156–66. The interpretation is not without its difficulties. Franklin, “ ‘Songbenders of Circular Choruses,’ ” makes the brilliant suggestion that in both Pherecrates and Clouds 333 the practice of auletic music modulating between strophes is what is being described. Clouds 961–72 is equally problematic, as it asks us to imagine a child in a chorus spontaneously modulating during a song; probably here it is a change of intonation that is being spoken of. None of the other “parallels” given in West, Ancient Greek Music, 356n2, easily describe modulation. The most common metapoetic use of the term is to describe the process of composition (Ar. Thesm. 52, 68, Pind. fr. 107a). Eupolis 366 PCG has a καμπ- word in a musical context, but the passage is too fragmentary to be of much use. The same goes for Ar. 753 K-A. Timotheus 802 PMG, in which he calls Phrynis an ἰωνοκάμπαν, is not obviously musical at all (but see Hordern in Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus: he glosses as “Phrynis is twisting and turning and bending over backwards in his music in an Ionian manner,” where “Ionian” means “indecent”). Telestes 808.4 PMG is not a parallel; it probably refers to the movements of the hands while playing the magadis. See Barker, “Telestes and the ‘Five-Rodded Joining of Strings’ ”; and F. Berlinzani, “Teleste di Selinunte il ditirambografo,” Aristonothos 2 (2008): 109–40. 113. Borthwick, “Notes on the Plutarch de Musica and the Cheiron of Pherecrates,” makes a very good case that what is being described is a movement toward astrophic style, with auletic anabolae replacing strophes and antistrophes; the reference to the shield may be a cryptic allusion to the pyrric dance, for which Cinesias seems to have had some notoriety. See also West, Ancient Greek Music, 359. 114. Pherecrates, Cheiron (155 PCG) 14–16. See Schol. in Ar. Nub. 971; Aristophanes, Frogs, 216; West, Ancient Greek Music, 360–61. Mentioned in Ar. Nub. 979. 115. Pherecrates, Cheiron (155 PCG) 23–25. 116. Pherecrates, Cheiron (155 PCG) 26–28. On Timotheus’s music, see especially Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 33–35; Csapo and Wilson, “Timotheus the New Musician” (a light overview). 117. Aristox. Harm. 1.2.

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118. Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, 78. See also West, Ancient Greek Music, 218n. On late-fifth-century music theory, see also Franklin, “Hearing Greek Microtones”; Hagel, “Twenty-four in Auloi.” 119. Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, 88. Hagel, Ancient Greek Music, 375, thinks the harmonikoi who made diagrams did not go back earlier than the first half of the fourth century. 120. Aristox. Harm. 28. 121. Aristox. Harm. 6. 122. I keep writing “more or less” because there were multiple “shades” of each genus; these shades were distinguished by the exact size of the puknon. 123. Τοὺς μὲν οὖν ἔμπροσθεν ἁρμονικοὺς εἶναι βούλεσθαι μόνον, αὐτῆς γὰρ τῆς ἁρμονίας ἥπτοντο μόνον, τῶν δ’ ἄλλων γενῶν οὐδεμίαν πώποτ’ ἔννοιαν εἶχον. σημεῖον δέ· τὰ γὰρ διαγράμματα αὐτοῖς τῶν ἐναρμονίων ἔκκειται μόνον συστημάτων, διατόνων δ’ ἢ χρωματικῶν οὐδεὶς πώποθ’ ἑώρακεν. καί τοι τὰ διαγράμματά γ’ αὐτῶν ἐδήλου τὴν πᾶσαν τῆς μελῳδίας τάξιν, ἐν οἷς περὶ συστημάτων ὀκταχόρδων ἐναρμονίων μόνον ἔλεγον· Aristox. Harm. 1.1. I cite from Aristoxenos, ed. Da Rios (1954); the translation is from Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Volume II. 124. Pindar habitually uses it to mean “mode” or “scale.” Typical is Pindar’s injunction to his γλυκεῖα φόρμιγξ to “weave a beloved song” with a “Lydian attunement” (Λυδίᾳ σὺν ἁρμονίᾳ; Pind. Nem. 4.44–45). This might be a reference to a specific mode. It might also be no more than a reference to the fact that the φόρμιγξ is in tune and that the style of the melody is generally Lydian. Such generally musical uses of ἁρμονία are reasonably common in musical lyric. See, for example, Pind. Pyth. 8.68; Fr. 140b.2; Ar. Eq. 994, Nub. 969, Fr. 912 (PCG); Eur. Hip. 162, Phaethon fr. 68, fr. 244 (TrGF IV ); Ion 32.2 IEG. 125. For example, Od. 5.242–55. On ἁρμονίη in the Homeric texts, see Anderson, Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece, 49–50; his conclusions are similar to mine. On harmony in political contexts, see S. D. Bundrick, Music and Image in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 140–96. In presocratic thought, see J. -E. Pleines, Harmonia: Materialien Und Skizzen (Hildesheim: Olms, 2004). In a comparative perspective, see P. Ilievski, “The Origin and Semantic Development of the Term Harmony,” Illinois Classical Studies 18 (1993): 19–29; and J. C. Franklin, “Harmony in Greek and Indo-Iranian Cosmology,” Journal of Indo-European Studies 30 (2002): 1–25. L. Chang, “Articulation and the Origins of Proportion in Archaic and Classical Greece,” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2009, contains excellent material on harmony and its application to early architectural thought. 126. Il. 16.210–17.

NOTES TO PAGES 116–17

127. Heraclitus B 8 DK; Heraclitus B 51 DK (οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης). 128. See, for example, Empedocles A 33 DK. 129. ἁρμονίης κόλλῃσιν . . . θεσπεσιήθεν; Empedocles B 96 DK (θεσπεσίῃσιν Sider in Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles). 130. Philolaus B 1 DK (ἁ φύσις δ’ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἁρμόχηθ ἐξ ἀπείρων τε καὶ περαινόντων). See also Philolaus B 2 DK; Philolaus B 6 DK; and Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, 263–86. 131. πολυμιγέων ἕνωσις καὶ δίχα φρονεόντων συμφρόνησις, Philolaus B 10 DK. 132. Regimen 1.8. 133. A passage in Plato’s Republic, identified by Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, as describing the same theorists engaged by Aristoxenus, says that “they talk about something called ‘compressed bits’ (πυκνώματα) and they strain their ears as though they were listening in on their neighbors, and some say they can still hear some sound in the middle and that this is the smallest interval which can be used as a measurement, and others argue and say that the notes are already the same, and both put their ears ahead of their brains” (νὴ τοὺς θεούς, ἔφη, καὶ γελοίως γε, πυκνώματ᾽ ἄττα ὀνομάζοντες καὶ παραβάλλοντες τὰ ὦτα, οἷον ἐκ γειτόνων φωνὴν θηρευόμενοι, οἱ μέν φασιν ἔτι κατακούειν ἐν μέσῳ τινὰ ἠχὴν καὶ σμικρότατον εἶναι τοῦτο διάστημα, ᾧ μετρητέον, οἱ δὲ ἀμφισβητοῦντες ὡς ὅμοιον ἤδη φθεγγομένων, ἀμφότεροι ὦτα τοῦ νοῦ προστησάμενοι. Plat. Resp. 531a-b. I cite from Plato, Opera, ed. J. Burnet [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902]). That these theorists were interested in “compression”—here, πυκνώματα—is secured by Aristoxenus, who also criticizes them for building diagrams of tonal space out of καταπυκνώσεις (Aristox. Harm. 1.28). At the same time, Aristoxenus himself uses the word puknon to describe the two intervals at the bottom of the enharmonic tetrachord. Like harmony, compression was an important word in presocratic theory. It was characteristic to contrast dense compression with low-density “looseness” or “fineness,” and then to categorize phenomenal objects as the result of more or less of one or the other: we find this happening in Parmenides (Parm. A 43 DK.), Empedocles (Emp. A 86 DK [= Theophrastus de sens. 11]), Anaxagoras (e.g., Anaxag. A 70 DK), and Democritus, who interprets hardness and softness as the consequence of the density or looseness of atoms and sees density as playing a particularly important role in the formation and communication of sense objects to the senses: the objects of sight and hearing alike are the consequence of a certain densification of the air (Dem. A 135 DK [= Theophrastus sens. 54, 56, 55, 62ff]). In music, the fact that tonal systems were built around the fixed interval of the fourth meant that with every increase in density of the first two intervals, the third interval would become less dense, thus creating within the musical space of the tetrachord a contrast between density and looseness analogous to that found in cosmology and (perhaps) atomistic aesthetics.

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Πυκνώμα may thus have been the right word for a procedure in which the shrinking of two intervals produced a corresponding increase in the third. It is also true, however, that cognates of πυκνόω were intimately linked to the concept of harmony and had been for a long time. Homer, for example, links the close fitting typical of ἀραρίσκω to πυκινός: “As a man fits together (ἀράρῃ) the wall of a high house with close-fitting stones (πυκινοῖσιν λίθοισιν) . . ., so were their helmets and bossed shields fit together (ἄραρον)” (Il. 16.210–14). Empedocles, too, makes this link explicit: during the polar extreme of the dominance of love in his allegorical cosmic history, when everything sticks together and there is momentarily no drive to dissolution, the congealed sphere of being rejoices in its solitude “under the dense concealment of harmony” (ἁρμονίης πυκινῷ κρυφῷ; Emped. B 27 DK). In these passages, close-fitting harmony implies density: a regular density, not one alternating with looseness as previously discussed. Aristoxenus tells us that the harmonikoi used καταπυκνώσις to compress “28 dieses” (i.e., quartertones) into the space of a single attunement: the compression here, in other words, has become a matrix for the plotting out of scalar structures. The exploitation of the tiny intervals at the bottom of the enharmonic tetrachord as a unit of measurement may have come from the Homeric intuition that a harmony is where things are densely packed together; however, it ignored the equally Homeric intuition that what is harmonically set together is an assemblage of different things: according to this second idea, only a tetrachord with a dense puknon could be described as harmonic. Aristoxenus criticizes the procedure of dividing the octave into intervallic minims, claiming that no voice is capable of singing twenty-eight quartertones in a row but after singing two must jump to complete the interval of a fourth. This is a strange criticism to level at theorists who are also criticized by Plato for being excessively empiricist, because it amounts to saying that their theoretical results correspond with no sensible experience. But the harmonikoi’s was a strange empiricism in any case, as it was based on the search for the smallest audible interval, that is, the minutest difference between tones before difference itself fades out of earshot. Sense, here, is a criterion only as far as it brushes against its own limits. It must be relevant that in other fields of inquiry the best kinds of harmony tend to be inapparent—Heraclitus says as much when he claims that the best harmony is aphanes, for example, and Empedocles makes things cohere under the “dense concealment of Harmony,” as we’ve seen. I’m speculating, but it could be that the “diagrams” of which Aristoxenus speaks, which packed intervals occupying the extreme limits of the perceptible into an unsingable continuum, were in fact representations of a nonapparent harmony. If so, we are on the brink of fourth-century metaphysics (see the introduction). 134. Aristox. Harm. 1.23. 135. Dion. Hal. Dem. 22; Philo Sacr. Legum Allegoriae 1.5. Later comments emphasize only its difficulty. See West, Ancient Greek Music, 166. Franklin, “Diatonic Music in Greece,” rehabilitates Aristoxenus’s chronology of the “genera”: diatonic music was

NOTES TO PAGES 117-18

first, followed in the fifth century by chromatic and enharmonic tunings. Note also his comment that “Aristoxenus, in focusing on the new system he was forging, neglected an older, established θεωρία as not needing any redress, and saved his criticism for the architects of its change” (681). 136. PHib. 1.13. See Barker, The Science of Harmonics in Classical Greece, 68–73, who argues that these harmonikoi cannot be the same as those who worked with the enharmonic genus. His identification depends on the assumption that PHib’s description is of “sophists”—that is, intellectuals engaged in public displays and disputations—but this seems to have been a common element of late-fifth-century culture, and musicians with a theoretical bone to pick might easily have engaged in just this kind of activity. PHib also describes the harmonikoi as singing out of tune and failing to keep time; Barker takes this as an indication that they aren’t musicians. But they might just be principled musicians whose normative theory bent contemporary practice beyond recognition (and thus might have seemed to “sing badly”). 137. See M. Psell. De Trag. 5; Plut. Quaest. Conv. 645e. West, Ancient Greek Music, 164–65, gives an overview of the uses of the “genera” in different authors. There is an excellent discussion in Franklin, “Hearing Greek Microtones,” 28. 138. Observed by Csapo, “The Politics of the New Music,” 247. 139. Hordern in Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 15–17, is appropriately skeptical of attempts to date the Persians but thinks the nome must have been performed before 395. O. Hansen, “On the Place and Date of the First Performance of Timotheus’ Persae,” Philologus 128 (1984): 135–38, thinks it was around 410; U. V. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Timotheos, Die Perses (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903), 61, puts the first performance after 412 and perhaps close to 404. S. E. Bassett, “The Place and Date of the First Performance of the Persians of Timotheus,” Classical Philology 26 (1931): 153–65, thinks it may have very close ties to the Orestes of Euripides, performed in 408. On the Persians, see especially Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia, 516–48; and LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse. See also H. L. Ebeling, “The Persians of Timotheus,” The American Journal of Philology 46 (1925): 317–31. 140. Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia, 503–504. 141. Timoth. Pers. 206–12. See Hordern’s overview and discussion of this claim in Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 7–9. Sparta was the site of the oldest and most prestigious of citharodic festival contexts, and her links with Terpander, the legendary inventor of citharody, were consolidated through the story that Terpander not only introduced that form of song to the city but, on the strength of his musical success, was called upon to play a central role in the establishment of the traditional laws of the city. Musical innovation seems to have been legislated against and vehemently protested. See Timotheus T7, 8, 9 (Campbell); A. Gostoli, “Terpandro e la funzione etico-politica della cultura spartana del VII sec. a. C,” in La Musica in Grecia, ed. B. Gentili and R. Pretagostini, 231–37 (Naples: Bari, 1988); and Power, The Culture of Kitharôidia, 394–403.

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142. LSJ s.v. 143. Aesch. Pers. 395. 144. Timoth. Pers. 26–28, 183–85. Cf. LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse, 94. 145. Persians 65a–85. I cite from Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus. 146. Il. 11.417, 12.153. 147. See Timotheus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus, 155, for further comments on the meter in this passage. 148. Euripides, too, composed polymetric and astrophic arias in his later plays. Perhaps most relevant in this context is the song of the Persian slave in the Orestes of 408 BCE (Or. 1369–1502). On Euripidean rhythmic expansion, see especially Csapo, “Later Euripidean Music.” 149. Timoth. Pers. 100–103. 150. See J. Griffin, “The Social Function of Attic Tragedy,” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 56; and M. Revermann, “The Appeal of Dystopia: Latching onto Greek Drama in the Twentieth Century,” Arion 16 (2008): 114 (both writing of tragedy). 151. This had been done by Aeschylus earliest, in the Persians, then by Aristophanes in Acharnians (100–104). 152. Timoth. Pers. 145–61. 153. See Aesch. Eum. 567. In tragedy, τορ- roots are often used ambiguously in a way that exploits a semantic vacillation between “clear” and “piercing.” See Aesch. Ag. 26, 254, 269, 616, 632, 1062, Cho. 32, PV 605, 609, 699. 154. Only Aristophanes approaches such play with the limits of comprehensible language. See S. Colvin, Dialect in Aristophanes and the Politics of Language in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), for extensive analysis and commentary. 155. Timoth. Pers. 169–72. 156. See Pratinas 712a PMG. 157. If it contrasts with the harmonikoi, Timotheus’s invocation of harmony as complex and multiform music is consonant with another description of musical harmony, one to be found in the Hippocratic Regimen, which heard in the wild mixtures and modulations of art music examples of the interdisciplinary value of ἁρμονία. Μουσικῆς ὄργανον ὑπάρξαι δεῖ πρῶτον, ἐν ᾧ δηλώσει ἃ βούλεται ἁρμονίη· συντάξιες ἐκ τῶν αὐτῶν οὐχ αἱ αὐταὶ, ἐκ τοῦ ὀξέος, ἐκ τοῦ βαρέος, ὀνόματι μὲν ὁμοίων, φθόγγῳ δὲ οὐχ ὁμοίων· τὰ πλεῖστα διάφορα μάλιστα ξυμφέρει, καὶ τὰ ἐλάχιστα διάφορα ἥκιστα ξυμφέρει· εἰ δὲ ὅμοια πάντα ποιήσει τις, οὐκ ἔνι τέρψις· αἱ πλεῖσται μεταβολαὶ καὶ πολυειδέσταται μάλιστα τέρπουσιν. First, we should start with the instrument of music, in which it will be clear what harmony means. Compositions made out of the same notes are not the same. High and low notes have the same name but are not the same pitches. The greatest differences are especially

NOTES TO PAGES 122–25

useful, and the least differences are barely useful; if someone made [all the notes] the same, there would be no pleasure in it. The greatest modulations and the most diverse in form are especially pleasing. (Hippoc. Regimen 1.18)

Variety, the greatest possible, is the goal here. This would be in direct contradiction of the position of a theorist engaged in advocating for one scalar system at the expense of all others. 158. Timoth. Pers. 196–201. 159. See P. LeVen, “Timotheus’ Eleven Strings: A New Approach (PMG 791.229– 36),” Classical Philology 106 (2011): 245–54; LeVen, The Many-Headed Muse, 93–101, for a clear-sighted treatment of the issues in music history brought up by the invocation of eleven strings here. 160. See LSJ under κροῦμα. 161. See chapter 2. 162. Eur. Med. 190–203. For Euripides, I cite from Euripides, Fabulae, ed. J. Diggle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984-1994). 163. See, for example, the Hippocratic Regimen. 164. See Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 43; R. Mitchell-Boyask, “The Athenian Asklepieion and the End of the Philoctetes,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137 (2007): 85–114; and K. Hartigan, Performance and Cure: Drama and Healing in Ancient Greece and Contemporary America (London: Duckworth, 2009). 165. The link between song and agony is punningly invoked in the first choral ode when the chorus calls Phoebus (Apollo) leader of songs / pains (ἁγήτωρ μελέων); Eur. Med. 425. 166. I have learned much from T. V. Buttrey, “Accident and Design in Euripides’ Medea,” American Journal of Philology 79 (1958): 1–17; J. R. Dunkle, “The Aegeus Episode and the Theme of Euripides’ Medea,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 100 (1969): 97–107; A. P. Burnett, “Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge,” Classical Philology 68 (1973): 1–24; P. Pucci, “Euripides: The Monument and the Sacrifice,” Arethusa 10 (1977): 165–96; P. Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); B. Gredley, “The Place and Time of Victory: Euripides’ Medea,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 34 (1987): 27–39; S. A. Barlow, “Stereotype and Reversal in Euripides’ Medea,” Greece and Rome 36 (1989): 158–71; H. Foley, “Medea’s Divided Self,” Classical Antiquity 8 (1989): 61–85; R. Friedrich, “Medea Apolis: On Euripides’ Dramatization of the Crisis of the Polis,” in Tragedy, Comedy, and the Polis, ed. A. Sommerstein, 219–39 (Bari: Levante, 1993); Lawrence, “Audience Uncertainty and Euripides’ Medea”; D. Konstan, “Medea: A Hint of Divinity?” The Classical World 101 (2007): 93–94; M. Hopman, “Revenge and Mythopoiesis in Euripides’ Medea,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 138 (2008): 155–83.

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167. Eur. Med. 1002–10. 168. Eur. Med. 1121–31. 169. See Eur. Alc. 760. 170. Eur. Med. 465–82. 171. Plat. Com. fr. 29 PCG; compare Eur. Ion 386 with Mastronarde’s edition of the Medea. On sigmatism in Euripides (a largely inconclusive argument), see D. L. Clayman, “Sigmatism in Greek Poetry,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987): 69–84. 172. Eur. Med. 230–51. 173. TrGF 3 ff. 581–95b. Procne’s speech is F 583. On the Tereus, see G. Dobrov, “The Tragic and the Comic Tereus,” American Journal of Philology 114 (1993): 189– 234; D. Fitzpatrick, “Sophocles’ Tereus,” Classical Quarterly 51 (2001): 90–101; A. Suksi, “The Poet at Colonus: Nightingales in Sophocles,” Mnemosyne 54 (2001): 646– 58; J. March, “Vases and Tragic Drama: Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Lost Tereus,” in Word and Image in Ancient Greece, ed. N. K. Rutter and B. Sparkes, 119–39 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); J. March, “Sophocles’ Tereus and Euripides’ Medea,” in Shards from Kolonos, ed. A. Sommerstein, 139–61 (Bari: Levante, 2003). 174. See chapter 1. 175. Suksi, “The Poet at Colonus,” 652. 176. In tragedy, see Aesch. Ag. 1140–49, Supp. 58–76; Soph. Aj. 629, El. 107– 109, Trach. 963, OC 17, 672–73; Eur. Hel. 1107–14, Rh. 550. (On other birdsong, see Aesch. Ag. 1444; Soph. Ant. 423–24, repeated at 1206–207; Eur. Her. 110, Phoen. 1515ff, Tro. 827, IT 1090–93.) In Euripides’s Ion, the nightingale appears as a reminder of the ambiguity and danger of the principal character’s situation. When Creousa lets on that she lay together with Apollo at “nightingale rock” (1482), the tryst gets ominous overtones. Birds are a consistent presence in the Ion. When we first meet the eponymous protagonist cleaning the front of the temple to Apollo, a significant sequence of his introductory song is given to driving the birds away from the roof of the temple (153–83). It is birds, drinking the spilled poison, who reveal Creousa’s plot to kill her as yet unrecognized son (1196–1206). Mention of the rock of the nightingales as the site where she and the god lay together is, in other words, prepared for thematically. And it bears fruit: for the nightingale is the metamorph of Procne, who sings lamentations for the son she murdered—just the crime Creousa herself almost commits. So consistent are birdsong’s dissonant associations that their absence should provoke suspicion. What does it mean, for example, when Sophocles praises Colonus as rich with the nightingale’s song (Soph. O.C. 671–73)? This comes in the midst of a choral song in which the beauty of Colonus is praised and linked with the prosperity of Athens; it has all too often been read as uncomplicated patriotism. To be sure, nightingales belong in gardens (see, e.g., Eur. Hel. 1107–14): their song is concomitant with old trees and lush vegetation. But their presence here is perhaps not wholly

NOTES TO PAGES 126–27

devoid of the mournfulness suggested by their myth. Indeed, just as the nightingale transfigures the memory of traumatic deeds into beautiful (quasi-)song, so does the grove of the Eumenides feature as a site where the Erinyes, dread goddesses associated with the most horrific punishment of the most horrible crimes, are transmuted into benevolent protectors of Athens, complete with a new and euphemized name (Ag. Eum; Soph. OC; Eur. Orest.). 177. The date of Sophocles’s Tereus is unknown, but it was probably composed earlier than the Medea. See Dobrov, “The Tragic and the Comic Tereus,” 197–214. 178. Aristophanes caught the associations between music, nightingales, and Medea in the Birds. As a prelude to Euelpides and Peisthetairos being accepted into the avian community, Epops (the hoopoe) summons his wife, Procne (the nightingale), to sing for them. ἄγε σύννομέ μοι παῦσαι μὲν ὕπνου, λῦσον δὲ νόμους ἱερῶν ὕμνων, οὓς διὰ θείου στόματος θρηνεῖς τὸν ἐμὸν καὶ σὸν πολύδακρυν Ἴτυν· ἐλελιζομένης ἱεροῖς μέλεσιν γένυος ξουθῆς καθαρὰ χωρεῖ διὰ φυλλοκόμου μίλακος ἠχὼ πρὸς Διὸς ἕδρας, ἵν’ ὁ χρυσοκόμας Φοῖβος ἀκούων τοῖς σοῖς ἐλέγοις ἀντιψάλλων ἐλεφαντόδετον φόρμιγγα θεῶν ἵστησι χορούς· διὰ δ’ ἀθανάτων στομάτων χωρεῖ ξύμφωνος ὁμοῦ θεία μακάρων ὀλολυγή. (αὐλεῖ) Come, my song-partner, awake, and release melodies of holy hymns, with which you lament our much-cried-over Itys through your divine mouth, your blond jaw warbling liquid melodies. The pure echo rises through the leafy yew to the seat of Zeus, where goldenhaired Phoebus hears you and strikes his ivory lyre in accompaniment to your elegies, and starts up the divine chorus. A divine ololuge of the blessed ones moves through their immortal mouths, sounding together with you. (She plays the aulos.) (Ar. Av. 223–24; I cite from Aristophanes, Aristophanis comoediae)

Andrew Barker, “Transforming the Nightingale: Aspects of Athenian Musical Discourse in the Late Fifth Century,” in Music and the Muses: The Culture of “Mousike” in the Classical Athenian City, ed. P. Wilson and P. Murray, 185–204 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) has shown that this sequence is rich with references to latefifth-century musical practice. Epops’s description of the music he wants from the

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nightingale is generically confusing: is it a hymn (210), a lament (211), or an elegy (217)? Only a hymn should resonate as high as Olympus or be answered by Apollo and the gods (217–22). Pointing in particular to Plato’s complaint that theatre music in the late fifth century shamelessly mixed genres in its pursuit of sounds pleasurable to its audience (Plato Leges 700a-b), Barker concludes that the nightingale’s song here is being assimilated to the musical avant-garde. The song also emphasizes several of the themes typical of metapoetic invocations of birdsong. When the nightingale begins to sing at the end of this passage, what we hear is in fact the playing of the aulos (Ar. Av. 209–22); Procne’s song remains a wordless quasisong. Most crucial, however, is the fact that the nightingale sings from offstage, in a remarkable musical staging that involves an absent character “singing” with onstage prologue members and an entering chorus. The immediate referent in the staging here is the Medea, which also featured an extremely unusual parodos in which the chorus and the nurse sang with Medea, who lamented from offstage (Eur. Med. 96– 212). 179. Eur. Med. 824–65. 180. See the capo. 181. Eur. Med. 846–49. 182. The adjective is usually ξουθός; see, for example, Eur. Hel. 1111. 183. On the Herakles, see Euripides, Herakles, ed. U. V. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895); D. J. Conacher, “Theme, Plot, and Technique in the Heracles of Euripides,” Phoenix 9 (1955): 139–52; H. H. O. Chalk, “Apate and Bia in Euripides’ Herakles,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 82 (1962): 7–18; W. E. Higgins, “Deciphering Time in the Herakles of Euripides,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 18 (1984): 89–109; M. R. Halleran, “Rhetoric, Irony, and the Ending of Euripides’ ‘Herakles,’ ” Classical Antiquity 5 (1986): 171–81; K. Hartigan, “Euripidean Madness: Herakles and Orestes,” Greece and Rome 34 (1987): 126–35; S. Yoshitake, “Disgrace, Grief and Other Ills: Herakles’ Rejection of Suicide,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 114 (1994): 135–53; R. Rehm, “The Play of Space: Before, Behind, and Beyond in Euripides’ Heracles,” Illinois Classical Studies 24–25 (1999): 363–75; E. M. Griffiths, “Euripides’ Herakles and the Pursuit of Immortality,” Mnemosyne 55 (2002): 641–56. 184. Eur. Her. 110–13. 185. Eur. Her. 348–51. 186. See Aesch. Ag. 1075, with Fraenkel’s note (Aeschylus, Agamemnon), and 645; Wilamowitz in Euripides, Herakles, 3.84; Euripides, Heracles, ed. G. W. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) ad Her. 348. 187. This is the import of the men-de pair at 348–51. 188. Eur. Her. 351–58. 189. Eur. Her. 359–429. 190. Eur. Her. 394–99. 191. Eur. Her. 672–74.

NOTES TO PAGES 129–34

192. See especially Pind. Ol. 4.6–9, 7.11, 14, Pyth. 6.1–3. 193. Eur. Her. 676–81. 194. Eur. Her. 679. 195. Eur. Her. 682. 196. S. A. Barlow, “Structure and Dramatic Realism in Euripides’ Heracles,” Greece and Rome 29 (1982): 115–25, is particularly good on the contrasts between the chorus’ optimism in the first half of the play and the disasters in the second. 197. Eur. Her. 751. 198. Eur. Her. 765–67; 783. 199. Eur. Her. 792. 200. Eur. Her. 815–21. 201. Eur. Her. 860–63. 202. See Aesch. PV 923, 1062, 1082; Soph. OC. 1606; Eur. Phoen. 1181, Hip. 1201–15. 203. Eur. Her. 869–70. 204. Eur. Her. 871. 205. Eur. Her. 922–1015. 206. Eur. Her. 886, 888, 897, 906. 207. Eur. Her. 889–90. 208. Eur. Her. 894–95. See Wilson, “The Aulos in Athens.” 209. Eur. Her. 1025–27. 210. Eur. Her. 1039. 211. Compare Eur. Or. 139–210. Dramaturgical similarities can be found in Eur. Alc. 213–43, Hip. 176–361. 212. Eur. Her. 1045, 1064–66. 213. Eur. Her. 1047–50, 1053–54, 1060, 1067. 214. Eur. Her. 1042. 215. Archytas B 1 DK. 216. Compare Schol. ad Eur. Or. 176. CODA 1. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. 2. See H. S. Becker, R. R. Faulkner, and B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, eds., Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); H. S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 3. See Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 179–88; Rabaté, Poétique de la Voix; Cavarero, For More than One Voice; and Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More. 4. Here, clearly, I am influenced by Dewey, Art as Experience, as well as the closely cognate radical empiricism of William James. 5. I take it as understood that the romantic distinction between city and coun-

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try, or between industrial and pastoral, is not the only way to understand what an environment is: equally important are the relations between language and body or between sensation and perception. On the system-environment relation in general, see N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz and D. Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); in reference to ecology, see N. Luhmann, Ecological Communication, trans. J. Bednarz (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); in relation to art, see Luhmann, Art as a Social System. On ambience and the necessity of escaping romantic or pastoralist environmentalism, see Morton, Ecology without Nature. 6. See, for example, M. R. Glover, “The Bacchae,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 49 (1929): 82–88; E. R. Dodds, “Maenadism in the Bacchae,” Harvard Theological Review 3 (1940): 155–76; J. V. Hagopian, “Literary Aesthetics and Euripides’ Bacchae,” Classical Journal 50 (1954): 67–71; R. R. Dyer, “Image and Symbol: The Link between the Two Worlds of the Bacchae,” AUMLA 21 (1964): 15–26; and L. Macleod, “Marauding Maenads: The First Messenger Speech in the Bacchae,” Mnemosyne 59 (2006): 578–84. I have learned also from A. P. Burnett, “Pentheus and Dionysus: Host Guest,” Classical Philology 65 (1970): 15-29. 7. For Greek views of the east, see J. Jöthner, Hellenen und Barbaren: aus der Geschichte des Nationalbewusstseins (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1923); H. H. Bacon, Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Hall, Inventing the Barbarian; P. Georges, Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience: From the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus. 8. Eur. Bacch. 457–59. 9. Eur. Bacch. 475–508. 10. Eur. Bacch. 275–96. 11. Eur. Bacch. 330–41. 12. On music in the Bacchae, see B. K. Gold, “Εὐκοσμία in Euripides’ Bacchae,” American Journal of Philology 98 (1977): 3–15; W. C. Scott and K. Steyaert, “Musical Disorder in Euripides’ Bacchae,” Text and Presentation 14 (1993): 87–90. 13. Eur. Bacch. 24. 14. Eur. Bacch. 59–61. On the chorus, see M. Arthur, “The Choral Odes of the Bacchae of Euripides,” Yale Classical Studies 22 (1972): 145–79; and A. Bierl, “Maenadism as Self-Referential Chorality in Euripides’ Bacchae,” in Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy, ed. R. Gagné and M. Govers, 211–26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 15. Eur. Bacch. 67, 142. 16. Eur. Bacch. 122–25, 155–56. 17. Eur. Bacch. 126–29; cf. 380. 18. Eur. Bacch. 127, 159–60. 19. Eur. Bacch. 160–61. 20. Eur. Bacch. 1034.

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21. Eur. Bacch. 124. 22. Eur. Bacch. 810. 23. See chapter 1. 24. Eur. Bacch. 1077–94. 25. Aesch. Pers. 402–405; compare Soph. OC 1623–24, written at about the same time as the Bacchae. 26. See also Eur. Bacch. 1202–43. 27. Eur. Bacch. 240, 513–14. 28. Eur. Bacch. 687. The Bacchants outside the city raise the ololyge and kill and eat cattle who bellow (689–91, 737–38, 1056–57). This is presented as a wonder and as containing no obvious threat, but it offers an ominous symbol for the dismemberment of Pentheus at play’s end: torn down from his high perch with many groans (1112), Pentheus is destroyed amidst a terrible cacophony in which his cries of agony are mingled with shouts of triumph from the women (1131–33, 1147). 29. Eur. Bacch. 226–32. 30. Eur. Bacch. 222–25. 31. Eur. Bacch. 469–70, 476, 500–502. 32. Eur. Bacch. 664, 699–713. 33. δεινὸν θέαμα ἰδεῖν, Eur. Bacch. 760; cf. 693. 34. Eur. Bacch. 811–16. 35. Eur. Bacch. 913–27. 36. Eur. Bacch. 1047. 37. Eur. Bacch. 1050. Agave’s punishment, too, comes about through the alteration of her vision and the beholding of the terrible sight of her son’s severed head in her hands (1279–82ff ). 38. Eur. Bacch. 576–602. 39. See V. Castellani, “That Troubled House of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 106 (1976): 61–83; and R. K. Fisher, “The ‘Palace Miracles’ in Euripides’ Bacchae: A Reconsideration,” Acta classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis 27 (1991): 23–30. 40. Eur. Bacch. 101. 41. Eur. Bacch. 1155.

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INDEX

acoustic theory 10 Aeolian 107, 156 Aeschylus 42, 49, 51, 63–83, 84, 118 affect 17–22, 136 Agathon 56 Alcaeus 38–40, 41, 46, 47 Alcmaeon of Kroton 90 Alcman 47, 48 Anacreon 40 Anaxagoras 2, 3 animals 3 Archilochus 40, 53 Archytas 130 Aristophanes 3, 50–57, 63, 73, 99 Aristoxenus 106 art 5, 9, 154 Athena 34–35 Attridge, Derek 16 aulos 4, 73, 98–99, 107–8, 130 avant-garde, 12 Bacchylides 42–46, 50 Bacon, Francis 83 Barthes, Roland 23, 133 Baudelaire, Charles 84 bee maidens 102–3 birds 3, 42, 46 bodies 2, 147–48 breathing 2 castanets 4 cicadas 50 Cleon 51, 52 cognition 6, 13 compression 201–2 concepts 10, 13 coughing 2, 146–47 Cratinus 54–55

crows 43, 79 culture and sound 5, 11, 33 Damon 93–94 dance 4, 88 Deleuze, Giles 18, 83 De Man, Paul 38 democracy 51, 75 Democritus 3, 91, 95, 96, 124, 148–49 Descartes 7 Diogenes of Apollonia 91 dissonance, defined 11; conquered 12 eagle 43 ear, 90, 183–84 Empedocles 90–91, 116, 182–83 Euripides 63, 64, 87, 122, 123–31, 134–39 farting 51, 57, 100 figures 12–17 frogs 55 fundamental frequency 22 Goodman, Steve 21, 90 Gorgias 51, 94–95 Guattari, Félix 18 Hall, Edith 66 harmonicists 115–20 harmony 115–17, 122, 127, 128, 138–39 Harraway, Donna 12–13 Hegarty, Paul 12 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 13 Heraclitus 116 Hesiod 11, 32–38, 46, 48, 58 Hieron 42 Hippocratic corpus 91–93, 116–17 Hipponax 40

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238

INDEX

Homer 3, 27–32, 48, 58–62, 75, 118, 119 Homeric hymn to Apollo 35, 58, 98 Homeric hymn to Hermes 99–103 horns 4 Ion 47 Jakobson, Roman 7, 8 Keats, John 5 Lasus of Hermione 105–7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 11, 133 Lyre 4, 99–105 Lysander of Sicyon 90, 104 Magadis 4 Many-Headed nome 99, 111–12 Marx, Karl 6, 7 Massumi, Brian 18, 83 Melanippides 114, 197, 198 melody 22–24, 25 meter 15, 24, 112–13, 120, 193, 196 modulation 24, 194, 199 monsters 1–2, 33 Morton, Timothy 156 Muses 34, 35 Nagy, Gregory 38 Nancy, Jean-Luc 83–84 nature 11, 28 “new music” 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5 nightingale 3, 36–38, 42, 45–46, 48, 49, 126, 128, 206, 207–8 noise 5, 28 onomatopoeia 16 overtones 22 Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia 48 perception 6, 7, 8 Pherecrates 114–15 Philolaus 116 phlegm 2 phonetics 16 Phrynichus 73 Pindar 42, 43, 109–13 pitch accent 23 Plato 7, 51, 97, 125, 128

poetry, 7, 8, 10 politicians 11, 50 polyphony 105 Porter, James 106, 155–56 Power, Timothy 47, 118, 119 Pratinas 107–9 presence 17 Proust, Marcel 23 pus 2 Pythagoras 89 Pythian nome 98 resonance 89–91 Sacadas 98 Sappho 13–17, 19 Schafer, R. Murray 133–34 Schoenberg, Arnold 11 Segal, Charles 21 sensation 6, 7, 8, 9, 13 senses 7 sensuous scholarship 17 serpent 1 Simonides 42 Sirens 48 sneezing 100 Socrates 3 Solon 40 song 4, 11, 33 Sophocles 85–87, 103, 126, 127 speech 6, 15 Spinoza, Baruch 18 Steiner, Deborah 37 Stesichorus 48 Stoller, Paul 17 Suksi, Aara 126 swans 47 symposium 40 synesthesia 24, 83–88, 136 syrigmos 99, 113 syrinx 4 technique 13 Terpander 47 Thalmann, William 81–82 Theognis 40, 46–47 Theophrastus 90 through composition 23 thunder 144 timbre 22

239

INDEX

Timotheus 118, 113–114, 120–23 Titans 35 tone 22 tragedy 3, 62–63 Valéry, Paul 7 voice 2–3, 133, 148, 149

war 1, 11, 28, 75, 144–45 water 14, 15, 31 whistle 100 women 38 writing 17–18 Xenophanes 40

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