Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought 110714874X, 9781107148741

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Forest: On Surrounds
2. Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance
3. Cicadas: On the Voice
4. Echo: On Listening
5. Reeds: On Musical Objects
6. Nightingale: On Expression
7. Beetle: On Rhythm
References
Citations Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

MUSIC AND METAMORPHOSIS IN GRAECO-ROMAN THOUGHT

Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamor phosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with “contemporary” debates contemporary with debates in the Graeco Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the Posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.  .  is an associate professor of Classics at Yale University. She is the author of The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry (Cambridge, ), which received the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Yale College Prize for outstanding publication. She is also co editor, with Sean Gurd, of the first volume of A Cultural History of Western Music (forthcoming) and currently at work on two monographs one entitled Poetry and the Posthuman, the other devoted to music and mortality. A member of MOISA (the Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage), she has taken an active role in promoting and disseminating the study of ancient Greek and Roman musical culture.

MUSIC AND METAMORPHOSIS IN GRAECO-ROMAN THOUGHT PAULINE A. LEVEN Yale University, Connecticut

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.  ---- Hardback Cambridge 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.

To my son Hudson, for teaching me better than any posthuman glossary about the meaning of “connectedness,” and opening my ears to a new world of sounds

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

page viii xi

Introduction





Forest: On Surrounds





Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance





Cicadas: On the Voice





Echo: On Listening





Reeds: On Musical Objects





Nightingale: On Expression





Beetle: On Rhythm



References Citations Index Subject Index

  

vii

Acknowledgments

Like the myths it examines, this book has an origin story. It started with a conversation with Froma Zeitlin, after one of her seminars on the Greek novel. I was finishing my dissertation and considering the next project. “You like stories and you are a musician – why not work on musical myths?” said Froma, shrugging as if it were an evidence. She was of course right, but it took me some time to put this idea in motion, and the manuscript itself went through several metamorphoses. In its initial stages, it was shaped by inspiring conversations on myth with Jay Fisher and Lowell Edmunds; by exchanges with Mark Payne, who generously offered his guidance from afar and his thoughts on music and the posthuman; and by discussions with Bridget Murnaghan, Helene Foley, Barbara Kowalzig, Timothy Power, and other participants in our stimulating Epichoreia Saturdays at NYU. As the chapters took form, they benefited from feedback from the whole MOISA team, especially from Tosca Lynch, Donatella Restani, and Eleonora Rocconi; and from audiences at Penn, Trento, Riva del Garda, Oxford, University of Missouri, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Yale, CUNY, Rutgers, Urbino, Ravenna, Nanterre, EHESS, and KCL. I was also lucky to have conversation partners in the UK and the US always ready to talk about things musical and share their work and ideas (Armand D’Angour, Andrew Barker, Josh Billings, Felix Budelmann, Shane Butler, David Fearn, Sarah Nooter, and Tom Phillips), and to find engaged interlocutors who welcomed me (back) in Paris during a year of leave (Charles Delattre, Nadine Le Meur, Alexa Piqueux, and Evelyne Prioux). I am particularly grateful to Mark Griffith for his faithful support over the years. I have learned very much thanks to our many exchanges about our converging book projects. From his comments on the first draft of the first chapter to his final reading of the whole manuscript, he has lead me to enrich my interpretations, to correct missteps, and to enlarge my musical horizons. viii

Acknowledgments

ix

I also owe huge thanks to colleagues in the Yale Music Department, who opened up my intellectual horizons and challenged my thinking in numerous ways – especially Gundula Kreutzer, Brian Kane, Carmel Raz, and Gary Tomlinson, as well as the Sound Studiers, and musical fellows of the Whitney Humanities Center (Carolyn Abbate, Daniel Chua, and Jim Hepokoski). In my own departmental home, Emily Greenwood, Kirk Freudenburg, and Chris Kraus all supported me in numerous ways during their term chairing the department, and I have benefited from the expertise of every single one of my colleagues. Special thanks are due to Verity Harte, who took much time to walk me through some thorny philosophical concepts, as well as to Irene Peirano-Garrison and Milette Gaifman, for their constant moral support, camaraderie, and intellectual acumen. There are three friends and colleagues without whom this book would not have materialized: Melissa Mueller, who read most of the chapters in their early form, and workshopped them with me, sharing her deep literary insights and perspicuity; Victor Bers, who asked the right questions, read the final manuscript, and made it much less stylistically infelicitous; and Sean Gurd, who engaged with the book as an ideal reader would – with big demands and intellectual generosity. Without their contributions and their friendship, this book, and my life, would be a lot less rich. As in all metamorphoses, a lot went on unseen behind the scenes, and I am particularly grateful to my research assistants: Paul Eberwine, whose meticulous reading of the manuscript early on was instrumental in clarifying the argument, and Sam Katz, whose last-minute fact-checking saved me from some embarrassing blunders; to our Classics librarian Colin McCaffrey, who not only helped me find books, but also made me think about them in a different way; to the two anonymous readers who pushed me to refine the project’s initial form; to Kate Mertes, who compiled the index, and Alwyn Harrison, who copy edited the final typescript, and improved it in numerous ways, not least with some felicitous suggestions for translations; and to Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press, who trusted me again, and showed an ideal combination of patience and guidance. Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking my friends for their welcome interruptions, their faithfulness, and their sense of fun; my extended family for living with the project for six years and helping in small and big ways (not least with their babysitting and chauffeuring services); my mother, for

x

Acknowledgments

lovingly keeping me on track, and always listening; Thomas and Ox, for those long walks up East Rock during which we worked out insoluble questions, only to come up with new answers on the next walk; and my son Hudson, to whom this book is dedicated. The book entered the production process in the midst of the Covid- pandemic. For five months between March and August , we lived in a cabin in Vermont and experienced first-hand coexistence with the nonhuman – with an invisible virus, a very vocal menagerie (a seventeen-year-old cat, four hens, and a rooster), and the new virtual reality of online friends. I hope those months will remain in Hudson’s memory (as in mine) a moment full of new relationships rather than a time of isolation.

Abbreviations

Greek and Latin texts are quoted from their OCT, Teubner, or reference edition, with my own translations, except where otherwise noted. Abbreviations for ancient authors, works, and modern reference editions follow those used in fourth edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary (ed. Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, Oxford, ). Anth. Lat. CIG DK FGrH G&P () G&P () G&S

Kern Maehler PCG Perry

D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed.), Anthologia Latina, Vol. . (Stuttgart: ) Corpus Inscriptionum Graecorum, ed. A. Boeckh et al. (Berlin: –) H. Diels and W. Kranz (eds.), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, th ed. (Berlin: –) F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker,  vols (Berlin: –) A. S. F. Gow and D. Page (eds.), The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams,  vols. (Cambridge: ) A. S. F. Gow and D. Page (eds.), The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Phillip,  vols. (Cambridge: ) A. S. F. Gow and A. F. Scholfield (eds.), Nicander: The Poems and Poetical Fragments. Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Notes (London and Newburyport: ) O. Kern (ed.), Orphicorum Fragmenta (Berlin: ) H. Maehler (ed.), Bacchylides: Lieder und Fragmente. Griechisch und Deutsch (Berlin: ) R. Kassel and C. Austin (eds.), Poetae Comici Graeci,  vols. (Berlin: –) B. Perry (ed.), Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary xi

xii

PMG RE SEG TrGF Voigt Wehrli West West IE

List of Abbreviations Tradition that Bears His Name: Collected and Critically Edited, in Part Translated from Oriental Languages, with a Commentary and Historical Essay (new edition) (Urbana: ) D. Page (ed.), Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford: ) A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, et al. (eds.), Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: –) Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden and Boston: –) B. Snell, R. Kannicht, and S. Radt (eds.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,  vols. (Berlin: –) E.-M. Voigt (ed.), Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta (Amsterdam: ) F. Wehrli (ed.), Die Schule des Aristoteles,  vols and  supplements, nd ed. (Basel: –) M. L. West (ed.), Carmina Anacreontea (Leipzig: ) M. L. West (ed.), Iambi et Elegi, nd ed. (Oxford: –)

Introduction

Where does music come from? What is at the root of musical pleasure? What can a song do? Are musical instruments endowed with magical power? Can music die? These are some of the questions that the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Mythical narratives (which the Greeks variously called mythoi or logoi, and the Romans fabulae) are the earliest, longest-lasting, and most privileged place where the ancients engaged with such issues and suggested answers to these questions. Greek and Latin literature and iconography are replete with mythical figures who play music, sing, and dance: the gods Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Faunus; the Muses, the Sirens, the Camenae, a whole set of nymphs; the heroes Orpheus, Amphion, Marsyas, Linos, Thamyras, and Arion. But in the vast repertory of myths featuring melodious gods and music-making heroes, one type of scenario stands out: narratives recounting the metamorphosis of a human being into a musical animal (a bird or an insect), or into a feature of the acoustic landscape (an echo or the whisper of reeds). These are the narratives this book will focus on. One of them (the myth of the queen-turnednightingale) already appears in one of our earliest surviving epics – the Odyssey. But it is only after the fourth century BCE that myths of metamorphosis start multiplying; different narrative versions continue to be reworked and we find them in even greater numbers in Imperial literature, in texts written between the first and the third centuries CE. These myths of 



Throughout this book, I take “myth” in its ancient meaning of story, narrative. I am interested in individual retellings of mythical stories and how they endow mythical figures and scenarios with meaning, not in the category of “myths” as the object of “mythology” mobilized by anthropologists, historians of religion, and folklorists. On the understanding of the category of myth through time, see Delattre . The most complete collection of essays on “music and myths in ancient Greece” is Restani . For a transcultural perspective, see Schneider  and Wegner , and, for a more philosophical take, Rowell : –. For a musicological perspective on myths, music, and nature, see Mâche . On musical myths in ancient visual culture, see Laferrière in press.





Introduction

metamorphosis feature in a great variety of genres: not only in Greek and Latin prose or verse collections of “metamorphoses,” but also as learned passages inset into Imperial Greek romances. Both the Hellenistic age, when the metamorphosis myths originated, and the Imperial age, when they multiplied, specialized in reinventions and creative reuses of the past, and reinvention and reuse of myths was no exception. But the proliferation of narratives focusing on musical metamorphoses can seem surprising. By the fourth century BCE, the Greeks had had a full musical mythology for centuries already. Moreover, various other modes of thinking about music had developed: acoustics, harmonics, music historiography, and philosophy provided sophisticated models to conceptualize music, its essence, its role in society, and its power over the soul, the senses, and the state. So what intellectual background brought on the rise of these new myths about music and metamorphosis? What was different about them by comparison with earlier musical myths? And what was at stake in them – as a whole rather than individually? These questions have never been asked; answering them provides insights into the history of Graeco-Roman musical thought and aesthetics, and into the Greek and Roman cultures that produced them. This is what this book sets out to do, as it simultaneously pursues three interrelated goals. The first is to offer a reading of narratives of musical metamorphosis, and to examine the aesthetic questions that lie at their heart. All these stories about the sounds of animals and natural elements are aitiological: they provide an explanation (an aition) for how some feature of the nonhuman soundscape came about. But they explain much more than the origins of a particular feature of the music of nature: they provide a reflection on music’s nature. I therefore take myths about the origins of natural sounds as, essentially, places where the nature of music, of musicmaking, and interacting with music more generally – what Christopher Small has called “musicking” – are being discussed. Myths about the invention of musical creatures are loci where issues surrounding the power of music, responses to its beauty, and the essence of listening are discussed. The narratives explore how music affects the listener (as I discuss in Chapters  and ), how musicking shapes the performer (Chapters  and ), what music can do (Chapters  and ), what place musicking occupies 

Small  defines music not as a thing, but as an activity – as a verb, not a noun: “to music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (, emphasis in original). This is the understanding of “music” this book will propound.

Introduction



in the world (Chapters  and ), how music both defines and defies mortality (Chapters  and ) – in short, what music is. The study thus interprets important myths not simply in the context of the work that retells them, but as part of a body of ancient thought on music, performance, and aesthetics. The narratives selected for this book are not the only surviving ones involving animal or elemental music, but they offer representative rubrics for aesthetic reflections on sound and song. As an eclectic body, they constitute a window onto ancient thoughts about the relationship between music, the senses, and the soul; on the link between musicking, competition, ethics, and death; and on the connection between music, gods, human and nonhuman animals, and the world around them. Because metamorphosis is the central feature that all these stories share, my second goal is to take metamorphosis at face value and to reclaim its radical originality and significance for the history of ideas. The story of the mourning mother turned into a nightingale, for example, appears everywhere in Archaic and Classical Greek poetry, from lyric to tragedy: but in those texts, the mechanism of transformation from human mourner to avian singer is never described in detail, only alluded to. The mode of thought is essentially metaphorical, and the ontological boundaries between humans and animals are not explored for their own sake. By contrast, Hellenistic and Imperial mythical narratives involving metamorphosis linger at the cusp of the articulation between species, and invite the reader, much more than did myths told in earlier periods, to puzzle over issues of embodiment (bodies are not necessarily bound to a specific form or by the flesh), situatedness (bodies shape a place as much as a place shapes bodies), and connectedness between human animals and the world around them. These quandaries shed light on intellectual history and lead us to wonder about the place of metamorphic thought in the history of ideas: what epistemic function does metamorphosis play? Are these stories about humans turned musical animals about giving back something of the magic of music and the magic of the world, after ancient scientists (harmonicists, acousticians, and various specialists) had robbed them of the mystery that imbued older myths? Is it an effort (in keeping with the strong nostalgic streak of Hellenistic and Imperial literature in general and the pastoral genre in particular) to reendow music with a (super)natural force, once the Muses and other musical heroes populating Archaic thought stopped having exclusivity over musical thinking? A close



For a similar claim about modernity, see Chua .



Introduction

scrutiny of the function of metamorphosis within the narrative will provide insight into these questions. Seen another way, stories of metamorphosis are the narrative equivalent of duck-rabbit images, the kind of image where one can see either a rabbit or a duck, but not both simultaneously. Like these images, the narratives of transformation work by discerning and alternating between two shapes forming a whole. They make us see first the rabbit then the duck, or less metaphorically, first the human then the animal, in a form of enhanced perception, but they cannot, initially, make us see both simultaneously. Yet, like with the image, after the initial surprise, we are led to imagine them together. The beauty of the narrative is that it makes the reader focus on the image or narrative as a whole, on the coincidence of the two figures (human and nonhuman animal) and the larger configuration of which it is part. In the myth, one can see the two states diachronically (first, for example, a singing girl then a singing bird that the girl turned into), but one needs to read the myth diachronically as well to see what bigger question the girl-bird assemblage brings up. Just like the visual wonder of the duck-rabbit, a metamorphic narrative “is nothing if not a matter of perception.” The process of storytelling puts the emphasis on continuity of life through time but also on the changed relationship between the observer/listener and the new being. In fact, narratives of metamorphosis are not simply a window onto changes of bodily form: they are a way of approaching language and representation, as well as reality and being. My third, related, goal is thus to examine the strikingly singular vision of the world on which the myths of metamorphosis rely. These narratives about the origins of some forms of natural music bring up epistemological questions and rely on a specific understanding of the nature of the world itself, and where musicking fits within it. Most of the musical myths discussed are set in a pastoral world most familiar from the poems of the third-century BCE bucolic poet Theocritus and his successors Bion and Moschus in the second century BCE and beginning of the first. These poems stage shepherds, animals, Pan, and other countryside divinities. In their world, musicking is something shared by humans, gods, animals, and the environment at large. Yet this world very much sets human beings as its point of reference and human, nonhuman, and divine species have established hierarchical  

Buxton : . For a model for conceptualizing the relationships between musical thinking and natural order, see Clark and Rehding  (devoted to the period from the Renaissance to the twentieth century).

Introduction



relationships with each other. By contrast, the world of the metamorphic myths is one where the boundaries of human and nonhuman animals, gods, elements, and matter constantly shift. While the landscape and actors (shepherds, animals, nymphs, etc.) are the same as in bucolic poetry, the relationship between them is very different and betrays a different ontology. Narratives of metamorphosis equally belong to an ancient world where gods flirt with humans and humans become sticks, stones, and horseflies, and to a futuristic world populated by assemblages of organic and electronic matter, and enhanced animal capacities. The mythical stories examined in this book present a picture of a world in perpetual ontological flux, a world in which questions of interiority, subjectivity, voice, communication, and relationships with others take on new meaning because of the specific nature of the bodies they are rooted in. Given its focus on such questions, my project owes much to recent work in Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, New Materialism, and to the type of work that has come to be known more generally under the rubric of “the Posthumanities.” Many of the mythical narratives around which the book revolves have been studied in the past by scholars influenced by structuralism and relying on the dichotomies “nature/art” or “nature/culture”: nature, art, and culture are presented as essential categories structuring ancient thought and practices, and their representation in literature. “The human” occupies the choice place at the center of the universe thus imagined, constructed through a series of cultural practices establishing distance from animals (through the cooking of meat, for example) and a relationship with gods (through the act of animal sacrifice in particular). All these practices emphasize the social and cultural element in man and attempt to distance humans from their more bodily, animal side. By contrast, the “posthumanist” enterprise consists in an effort to dislodge the human from this central position in relation to other animals, the environment, and other forms of life. It is an invitation to find new ways of thinking about the relationship between human and nonhuman (a category that includes nonhuman animals and objects, and that could arguably be extended to the divine and the elemental). As I show throughout the book, an approach relying on the dichotomies nature/art or nature/ 



On the world of Theocritus’ bucolic poetry, Segal  is fundamental. See also Fantuzzi and Hunter : –. On pastoral as genre, mode, or tradition, see Perutelli ; Halperin ; Fantuzzi and Papanghelis ; Gutzwiller ; Skoie and Bjørnstad-Velásquez ; Payne . On Theocritus and the nonhuman, see Payne in press. Critics and theorists define “posthumanism” or “the posthuman” in different ways: see the titles of Hayles  (“how we became posthuman”), Wolfe  (“what is posthumanism?”), Braidotti



Introduction

culture is ill-equipped to shed light on narratives that present humansturned-nonhuman-animals, as each of the selected stories precisely reflects on the ontological fluidity between humans and other animals or other aspects of their environment. Instead, these ancient texts resonate with ideas about materialism, the relationship between humans and their animal others, between humans and objects, and with life, understood as a vitalistic force, more generally. Not only does the structuralist approach not account for some of these narratives’ tensions, it also obscures the fact that alternative modes of thinking existed in ancient reflections about music and the human in Antiquity. In turn, because of the particular view of the world that ancient narratives of myths afford, they have much to tell modern posthumanists and shed light on modern questions and on the history of posthumanist thought itself. Late twentieth-century theories such as the “Gaia hypothesis” provide us with a privileged vantage point to see how posthuman moments are not just modern reactions to rapidly changing times but have a long history, starting in Antiquity: they are not necessarily chronologically after or “post” (post-Enlightenment, post-structuralism, postmodern, etc.), nor merely modern responses to historical forces and natural phenomena. Instead, “posthuman moments” often lie right under the surface, as parallel responses to more dominant discourses on nature, matter, subjectivity, mortality, and other essential topics from Antiquity to modernity. One might wonder whether the participation in posthuman modes of inquiry is not anachronistic in relation to ancient myths. It is not. The book is grounded in an examination of the intellectual and cultural history in which myths of musical metamorphosis developed in the fourth century BCE and flourished in the Imperial period (this is the focus of Chapter , “Forest: On Surrounds”). To use the vocabulary of anthropologists, I provide both an etic and an emic interpretation of the corpus: on the one hand, I use the nonnative (etic) categories of “musical myth,”



 (“the posthuman”), Wennemann  (“posthuman personhood”), Roden  (“posthuman life”), Åsberg and Braidotti  (a “feminist companion to the posthumanities”). Related projects do not use the term “posthuman,” but explore the contested boundaries and relationships between human and nonhuman: Haraway  on “companion species”; Haraway  on “natureculture”; Haraway  on “making kin”; Braidotti  on a “materialist theory of becoming”; Braidotti  on “nomadic theory”; Bennett  on “vibrant materialism” and a “political ecology of things”; Latour  and Latour  on “actor network theory”; Morton  and Morton more generally on “object-oriented ontology.” Most of these projects acknowledge their debt to the thinking of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari. On the “Gaia hypothesis,” see Lovelock ; on the “after” of “posthumanities,” see Braidotti and Dolphijn . For ancient culture “beyond” classicism, see Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes .

Introduction



“aesthetic,” and “the posthuman” to examine some narratives that share structural and thematic features, even though “musical myth,” “aesthetic,” and “posthuman” were not concepts recognized as such by the ancients. On the other hand, I also rely on emic categories and examine how these myths are in dialogue with rich traditions and echo ancient ideas about matter, embodiment, and metamorphosis. The book examines the mythical narratives on the background of various poetic, scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas and practices that we find in authors ranging from Homer, Hesiod, and Pythagoras, to Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and the Peripatetic school, Epicurus, Lucretius, Plutarch, and Iamblichus, from the eighth century BCE to the third century CE. Chapter , “Forest: On Surrounds,” is in dialogue with recent work in Classics (in particular that by Jim Porter on ancient materialist thinking, and by the authors collected in Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes’ Antiquity beyond Humanism) and provides the necessary background to understand how the mythical experiments examined in the book echoed, continued in a different discursive mode, and sometimes resisted other forms of ancient thought. Many of the more modern terms and tools that I use (borrowed from Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, Sound Studies, Voice Studies, or continental philosophy) actually have roots in ancient terms or epistemic modes. My hope is that the use of modern terms to unpack ancient concepts (“expression,” for example, to do justice to one of the meanings of mimesis) recovers some of the vibrancy of Greek and Latin thought about music and sound. This combination of emic and etic approaches has three consequences: first, it allows us to deepen our overall understanding of ancient aesthetic thought, beyond the philosophical, literary critical, and poetic texts that are usually adduced. Mythical narratives, too, make a contribution to intellectual history, and they deserve to be studied with the same sophisticated approaches as philosophical or poetic texts. Secondly, and no less importantly, the fictional and fantastic form of the myths featuring humans-turned-nonhuman-animals provides a model for an experimental mode of thought about the human and the experience of embodied life that is being critically revisited today. In the age of the Anthropocene, the ancient myths make an intervention just as they did in their contemporary 

On what we understand by music and what was meant by mousike, see Chapter , pp. –. For a discussion of what is understood by “myth” (mythos) in Antiquity, see Chapter , pp. –. On whether Antiquity had “aesthetics,” the fundamental work is Kristeller  and Kristeller , with discussions by Porter a: – and Rosen and Sluiter . Fundamental, too, are Peponi ; Destrée and Murray ; Porter ; Creese and Destrée in press.



Introduction

context: they offer an arresting reflection on humans’ common belonging with other musicking beings and remind us that nature and culture, human animals and their nonhuman others cannot be understood as separate from each other. As a form of early ecosophy, these GraecoRoman myths are an urgent call extended through the centuries to put pressure on “rational” modes of thought that seal the human off from other forms of existence, and to reconsider features of the nonhuman world that have historically been “othered” and neglected. Finally, the myths contribute to our contemporary debates in a unique way, and this is perhaps their most significant impact: they illustrate not only how music is a manifestation of the connectedness between human and nonhuman, but most importantly, how music is an agent of metamorphosis, an engine of connectedness between species. The narratives thus have something fundamental to teach modern posthumanists about the notion of “becoming,” which is so central to current scholarship. The process of becoming, in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari and their followers use it, is understood as generative of a new way of being, which privileges relationships and influences between elements rather than fixed organization. Because the stories I examine feature music at their heart, and represent everchanging relationships between musicians and their environment, they provide us with fresh insights into a fundamental feature of becoming: music makes becoming. In sum, Music and Metamorphosis listens to the many questions raised by the natural orchestra, then and now. This is a book about aesthetics and ontology, about beauty and being. Each chapter opens with a text devoted to a musical metamorphosis and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with “contemporary” debates – contemporary with ancient debates in the ancient GraecoRoman culture that gave rise to the myths in their various retellings, and contemporary with modern debates in the Posthumanities. True to the metamorphic logic it reflects on, the book’s focus shifts between three main topics: music, metamorphosis, and what it means to be a musicking animal. In the course of the book, I make no attempt to unify the vocabulary or theories I borrow from various contemporary philosophers and cultural critics (between the “natureculture” of Donna Haraway, the 



For the term “Anthropocene,” see Crutzen and Stoermer . On listening to birds as intervention in the Anthropocene, Whitehouse . The plea for an “ecosophy” was first made by Guattari . See also Serres ; Latour ; and Latour .

Introduction



vibrant materiality of Jane Bennett, and the zoe of Rosi Braidotti, for example). My point instead is to do justice to the ancient texts, the ideas they bear, and the culture they reveal, and to read them in a new light, rather than to subscribe to one unified theory. In that spirit, the progression between and within chapters is not dictated by the chronology of the texts, but by the aesthetic questions tackled in the myths. After a chapter establishing the ancient intellectual “surrounds” of the myths, the study moves from the more obvious and sonorous manifestations of music in nature (birdsong in the woods in Chapter  and cicadas in the midday sun in Chapter ), to close attention to aural features of the landscape (echoes in Chapter  and the rustle of reeds in Chapter ), to more metaphorical, quiet, and disquieting forms of understanding “live music” (through the figures of the nightingale in Chapter  and the silent beetle in Chapter ).

 

Forest: On Surrounds

It was on a hot summer’s day that Beethoven sat upon a stile in the environs of Vienna, and caught from nature those imitative sounds in the Pastoral Sinfony. How admirably do the violins, in that extraordinary composition, represent the soft fluttering stir of the [honey bees] the hum in the noon tide warmth of a summer’s day!

So writes the British composer William Gardiner in his  book The Music of Nature or An Attempt To Prove That What Is Passionate and Pleasing in The Art of Singing, Speaking, and Performing Upon Musical Instruments, Is Derived From The Sounds of The Animated World – With Curious and Interesting Illustrations. Gardiner’s book is full of edifying remarks on the anatomy of the ear, on flies’ mechanics of sound production, on the musical key in which nature most often sounds (F major), and a thousand other “curious and interesting” facts. There is, in the end, no sustained thesis on the music of nature, as Gardiner’s critics bitterly observed. But what the scholar-composer meant in his title, and what we understand quite readily as the “music of nature” are bird vocalizations, frog duets, the whispers of winds, cicada symphonies, and the many other pleasing voices of the nonhuman world – the sort of auditory phenomena that constitute the focus of the myths examined in this book. Yet this idea of “nature” or the “animated world” producing lovely sounds understood by humans as “music” is anything but self-evident. Like Gardiner, we might understand it readily today, but this idea is the fruit both of a long history and of a particular moment in time – a long  

Gardiner : . The Musical Times review (in three parts), October , , September , , and March , , by Orlando A. Mansfield. The critic reminds us (Mansfield : ) that to represent the “sounds produced by the speech and emotions of mankind, and the various calls, cries, and canticles of birds and beasts” had been attempted by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia Universalis ().



Forest: On Surrounds



history of conceptualizing animal and elemental sounds (no matter how pleasant) metaphorically (and metaphorically only) as music, and a particular, very recent, moment of human composers, musicians, and scientists treating birdsongs and other natural sounds as music, even working with them compositionally, rather than representing or suggesting them through human musical means, or treating them as a source of inspiration or an object of intervention for humans. The expression “music of nature,” however, would probably have seemed quite strange to somebody in Antiquity, not least because both “music” and “nature” meant something quite different from what we mean by them now, and would definitely have seemed paradoxical for someone in the Middle Ages. From Augustine’s Christian writings onwards, birds’ songs were emphatically not considered music, because the birds’ activity was not based in their use of the intellect (ratio). It is not so much that people did not enjoy avian melodies: in the very same passage where Augustine denies that the nightingale’s song is music, he calls it suauissimus cantus (“most delightful song”) and to judge by the number of references to birds in medieval poetry and avian illustrations in musical scores, medieval ears seem to have been pleased by birds’ songs as much as modern ones. Yet medieval thinkers held a very specific idea of what constitutes “music” and how humans, other animals, and the divine relate to it. The Greeks and the Romans, too, were exquisitely sensitive to the sounds of animals, insects, winds, and waters, and they describe the natural soundscape in great detail throughout Greek and Latin literature. As the fourth-century CE Latin Ausonius writes in one of his letters, “nature has made nothing mute” (nil mutum natura dedit):







Leach  states that the practice of representing birdsongs in human music only began in the fourteenth century, but Aristophanes’ Birds (especially the aria invoking the nightingale, Ar. Av. –) provides a stunning example of musical imitation of birdsong – on which, see Dunbar  ad loc. and Nooter . We also have testimonies from the late fifth century BCE of so-called New Musicians imitating the barking of dogs and braying of donkeys in their quest for naturalism (see Pl. Resp. a). Rothenberg and Ulvaeus  provide a convenient point of entry into modern questions about “the many ways music can engage and define nature” (); see also Mundy  on animals specifically, and how “modern sonic culture is unthinkable without the lives of animals” (). Bohlman : – examines briefly but suggestively the issue of the ontology of music and the difference between “naturalness in music” and “music in nature.” For a history of the question of the relationship between music and nature, Clark and Rehding . Aug. De mus. ., –. On Augustine’s understanding of “music, sense, affect and voice,” Harrison .  Fritz ; Gallo ; Leach . Bettini ; Gurd .



Forest: On Surrounds respondent et saxa homini, et percussus ab antris sermo redit, redit et nemorum vocalis imago. litorei clamant scopuli, dant murmura rivi, Hyblaeis apibus saepes depasta susurrat. est et harundineis modulatio musica ripis cumque suis loquitur tremulum coma pinea ventis,  incubuit foliis quotiens levis eurus acutis,  nil mutum natura dedit. non aeris ales  quadrupedesve silent, habet et sua sibila serpens  et pecus aequoreum tenui vice vocis anhelat.

Even rocks respond to humans, and speech returns when it beats against a cavern wall, and the chatty echo in the woods returns too; the cliffs on the shore cry out, brooks let out a murmur, the bushes on which the Hyblaean bees feed whisper. There are also the musical melodies of the riverbank reeds, and the quivering pine’s hair converses with its beloved winds as often as the light south wind leans on its clear sounding leaves: nature has made nothing silent. The birds in the sky and the four footed beasts are not silent, and even the snake has its hissing sound and marine herds sigh with what seems like a thin voice. (Auson. Ep. ad Paulinum ,  )

But again, their ideas about the delight caused by frog duets, swan songs, and babbling brooks were informed by specific views of how these sounds in particular, and music in general, fit into a larger view of the sonic world, musical culture, and understanding of what it means to be human. My purpose in this first chapter is to contextualize the myths that the rest of this book examines, both synchronically, by examining aspects of the contemporary culture in which they flourished in the Imperial period (roughly speaking, the first–third centuries CE), and diachronically, by focusing on the history of some of the questions they engaged with. It is impossible to start interpreting our Greek and Latin mythical narratives in isolation from their intellectual and cultural background, and without taking into consideration the theoretical and representational tools with which music and performance, human and nonhuman animals, and the different ways in which modes of being in the world were understood, discussed, and represented in Antiquity. My point is not to track direct relationships of influence of these questions or practices onto the myths, or the contribution that the myths made to contemporary debates: this would be futile, not least because most of the mythical narratives examined in this book cannot be dated securely. Rather, I want to establish how the myths belong to a history and a culture (or rather, histories and cultures) that conceptualized music, the nonhuman, and their interface in distinct ways and resisted a more dominant view of the world that cut the human off

Forest: On Surrounds



from the nonhuman. In conversation with contemporary ancient debates about materiality and embodiment, about animals, and about the power of nonverbal forms of communication, our narratives of musical metamorphosis provide insights of their own into these questions. A comprehensive overview of these ancient debates would obviously be impossible within the scope of a chapter, hence, true to the spirit of Imperial knowledge gathering, my method here is “compilatory.” I propose to focus on three representative passages from the Imperial period that each crystalize a topic of contemporary debate, at the interface between music and the nonhuman. Together, these three passages give a good sense of the chronological span, the methodological range, and the intellectual sophistication of treatments of these questions. The combination of generic diversity and thematic focus in these texts speaks to the importance of questions of musical aesthetics in the Imperial period. Individually, each passage is a suggestive example of how some authors probed or contested what has come to be considered the dominant way of thinking about the world, and what it meant in the ancient world to be a musicking human animal. The first passage brings to the fore the question of metamorphosis itself and the debates it raises about the contact zone between the human and the nonhuman. It comes from the first-century CE Plutarchan dialogue Gryllus, in which one of the metamorphosed companions of Odysseus temporarily abandons his pig form to argue with Odysseus about the benefits of being animal. The second, an extract from Pliny the Elder’s first-century CE Natural History devoted to the song of the nightingale, specifically concentrates on the relationship between animal and human music and the way one can conceptualize ontological continuity and difference in the making of music. The last, a vignette of the late second-/early third-century CE Aelian about an interspecies orchestra of humans and swans, offers a fascinating case study of human/nonhuman musical collaboration and contests the idea that logos plays a crucial role in articulating the divide between species, and between music and language. It is best understood against a background where communication and representation through nonverbal media was a significant part of the cultural repertoire, namely in the art of pantomime. As such, all three passages provide entry points into important ideas discussed in Imperial culture, and that are at the heart of the myths explored in this book – ideas 

For the “compilatory aesthetics”’ of knowledge-ordering works in Imperial times, König and Whitmarsh : .



Forest: On Surrounds

about the voice, the body, and the performance of identity; ideas about language, rationality, and transcendence; ideas about matter and experience, mimesis and representation. The pages that follow will examine the three passages in turn and flag the important themes and representative questions that will be discussed in the rest of my study.

Plutarch’s Pig: Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics My point of departure is a remarkable dialogue from Plutarch, the Gryllus (probably composed around  CE). The Gryllus takes as its narrative premise the metamorphosis of Odysseus’ companions, turned into pigs by the witch Circe as narrated in Odyssey book , which had by Plutarch’s time become an object of philosophical speculation. Plutarch’s dialogue pits itself as an anti-Odyssey, as Circe turns one of the pigs back into a human to debate with Odysseus about the respective advantages of being a nonhuman rather than a human animal. The post-porcine companion (we are not told which one) is given the generic name “Gryllus” (literally “Grunter,” “Mr. Oink”). Plutarch’s dialogue is doubly provocative: first, because it contests some of the most firmly anchored patterns of ancient thought, and embraces a metamorphic logic rather than a belief in fixed ontological categories. Secondly, because its actual title, Beasts Are Rational, or more literally On Animals Having Logos, argues against one of the most fundamental ideas inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics: the term that Plutarch uses for animals (τὰ ἄλογα, literally the logos-less ones) uses the privative form of the noun logos, and the provocative title clearly takes a position against the idea that man is the only rational animal, categorically distinct and superior to the nonhuman world. These two ideas are symptomatic of a larger set of philosophical and ethical questions on humans and their animal others debated in the Imperial period, which constitute the intellectual background for the myths of musical metamorphosis examined in this book. Let me first tease out some of the most important ideas about metamorphosis as brought up by the dialogue and then focus on the issue of logos. 

 

It is one of three Plutarchan dialogues exclusively devoted to nonhuman animals, along with On the Cleverness of Animals and On the Eating of Flesh. For Plutarch’s positive appreciation of animals, Barigazzi ; de Fontenay ; Santese ; Ditadi ; Newmyer . On this point, Whitmarsh : –. For a thorough survey of the question of animal rationality, and its bearing on Western philosophy, Sorabji  is fundamental, as is Osborne . Gilhus : – provides a clear contextualization for Plutarch’s thinking about animals in Imperial culture.

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



Metamorphosis and Mythical Thinking As structuralists have meticulously shown, in early Greek mythological thought the ontological categories of human, animal, and god were conceptualized as both clearly demarcated from one another and in relation to one another. A Sophoclean fragment neatly captures this point: the goddess Aphrodite is described as having power over all creatures, “among wild beasts, among mortals, among the gods above” (ἐν θηρσίν, ἐν βροτοῖσιν, ἐν θεοῖς ἄνω, fr. .). The three realms are distinguished from one another yet linked in a rising tricolon. Every word in the line bears weight: θήρ describes wild animals, those who can eat or hurt humans and that men hunt; βροτοί are mortals as opposed to the deathless gods; and θεοί are characterized by their position “above” (ἄνω), illustrating the vertical orientation that is still important to think about human beings today. In this framework, mortals constantly strive to maintain their status of superiority in relation to nonhuman animals (with whom they share mortality and various aspects of embodied existence) and inferiority to the gods (whom they imagine in anthropomorphic form but also as endowed with superior abilities). Poised in this middling position, humans reinstate their status and place in the world on a daily basis through the practice of animal sacrifice and consumption of cooked food, and prayers to the gods. The many scenes of meat-cooking, prayers, and libations to the gods in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Prometheus episode in Hesiod’s Theogony (–) illustrate humans’ efforts to distance themselves from raw meat and carrion-eating animals and the nightmare of a corpse being eaten rather than buried, and from immortal gods not partaking in the consumption of perishable food. Several aspects of course complicate these overly neat demarcations, and in the imagined vertical system, top tends to join bottom. The familiar Homeric epics in particular can be reexamined to underline how the many animal similes signal continuity rather than rupture in the way humans and other animals are conceptualized in relation to each other. The similes 





On humans’ condition as bounded by the animal and the divine, Detienne ; Gordon ; Segal ; Vidal-Naquet : – are foundational. See also Wolff . For a comparative perspective (with ancient Mesopotamia), Mattila, Ito, and Fink . On the vertical metaphor and the conflict between the vocabulary of “rectitude” and “down-toearthness,” see Danta ; for a “critique of rectitude” and an altruistic model of the subject, Cavarero . On the Prometheus episode in the Theogony as explaining man’s condition, Vernant : – and Vernant ; also Clay .



Forest: On Surrounds

highlight the many ways in which humans share qualities with nonhuman animals – not only boldness or speed, for example, but also savagery, courage, or love for their children. They are a way of representing what might unite human and nonhuman animals both in their inherent characteristics and in their experience of life. These images and metaphorical ways of thinking the human through the nonhuman are juxtaposed with moments of anxiety about the potential of humans to turn into something close to a nonhuman animal by violating some taboo (Hecuba in the Iliad, for example, imagines sinking her teeth into Achilles’ heart and eating it raw, in a terrifying animal metamorphosis that should never take place). What is perhaps most unsettling for us moderns, but is not so strange if considered from a comparatist ethnographic perspective, is that in mythological thought, features of the nonhuman world are simultaneously conceptualized as divine and represented in anthropomorphic form. In Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, one of the earliest female deities in the creation of the cosmos, Gaia (Earth), is both represented with anthropomorphic features (she carries her children in her belly like a human mother) and described as a natural entity – the earth, on which animals walk. Features of what we would call “nature” (rivers, springs, trees, etc.) are thought of and worshipped as divinities (river gods, nymphs, dryads, etc.) but represented as young women. The god Pan himself, the “god of nature” is represented with partly human, partly goat features, but his influence is also understood in a more abstract way, and his power captures the numinosity of the landscape. His figure is a way to represent the mysterious forces of nature (both positive and frightening) that many cultures do their best to propitiate and keep in check through their worshipping of nature deities and Master/Mistress of Animals-type gods. 

 



See Lonsdale ; Lonsdale ; M. Clarke ; Gottschall ; Heath : –. Sometimes similes and transformation blend into each other (see the scholarly debate as documented in Buxton : –). I am only tracing the broad outlines of a complex question. The issue of the narrative perspective from which the simile is formulated would, among other aspects, need to be considered. Il. .–. On human violence in the Iliad, Andò : –. On Greek and Latin nature gods, Larson . On the relationship between myth and landscape in Greek thought, Buxton ; Larson ; and Hawes . For an anthropological and philosophical take on the sensuous world as dwelling place of the gods, see Abram . For a comparative ethnographic perspective on animism, Taylor ; on how the nonhuman world is a system of signification in itself, Kohn . On Pan, the fundamental study (in the structuralist tradition) is Borgeaud . For a different take, see Hillman  (who discusses how Pan is not in any specific environment, but a figure for humans’ perceptions of this environment). On Pan as a hybrid, or mixanthrope, Aston . The Romans worshipped Faunus, but Pan and Faunus were equated through interpretatio graeca.

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



This is not the place to examine all these complex questions in detail, but these powerful mythical dynamics need to be underlined to show how the tripartite schema that places man between animals and gods cannot be taken too strictly, and always coincided with a different type of understanding of the world, where humans did not necessarily occupy so central a place, and where the natural and material world was simultaneously conceptualized as divine. While the anthropocentric, tripartite framework dominated ancient discourse, and dominated modern criticism until the recent academic turn to the study of the nonhuman, a nonhumancentered alternative ontology existed all along and needs to be kept in mind when contextualizing our metamorphic myths. Yet these Archaic ways of conceptualizing and representing the closeness of humans and other animals are not the same as metamorphosis – which represents and imagines the continuity of human and animal within one single (transformed) body. Narratives of transformations of humans into animals or into features of the landscape are actually rare in Archaic poetry, and limited to specific cases: either metamorphosis is operated by witches such as Circe or divine shape-shifters like Proteus, or petrification is ordered by the gods as a punishment or warning to humans, in the case of Niobe for example. Gods themselves escape that treatment: Archaic poetry represents them occasionally changing into animals (for example, Athena transforms into a bird in Odyssey . and into a vulture in .–, the god Boreas transforms into a stallion in Iliad .–), as does early iconography (for example, Zeus taking the form of a bull to couple with Europa, and that of a swan to couple with Leda). Attic tragedy recounts some stories of transformation, but it is only after the fourth century BCE, in the Hellenistic period, that narratives

 



On this type of animism, see Abram . On anthropocentrism in Greek thought, Renehan ; Newmyer . For alternative ontologies in Antiquity, see Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes ; Chesi and Spiegel . Greek art is full of representations of animals that can stand in for the god him- or herself. See, for example, the , bull statuettes, some dating back to the seventh century BCE, found in the sanctuary of Olympia. Although the bull form is probably directly linked to the idea of the animal to be sacrificed to Zeus, the bull can also be taken for a representation of the god himself. On animals in ancient Greek dedications, Gaifman : –. On divine transformations into animals, and metonymy and metaphors as useful tools to understand them, McInerney : –; see also Buxton : – (about bird transformations in the Odyssey and the issue of theriomorphism) and –. I cannot examine here the case of hybrid creatures, like satyrs, centaurs, and the god Pan himself, that combine different categories, but Aston  is fundamental (for a more circumscribed approach, also Lissarague ). On the question of divine anthropomorphism in Homer: Gagné and Herrero de Jáuregui .



Forest: On Surrounds

of metamorphosis start emerging more regularly, and as a genre of narrative. Callimachus probably embedded some narratives of transformation in his Aetia, as did Eratosthenes and Aratus in their aetiological poems on stars and other natural phenomena. The first collections of myths that told of transformations of human beings into birds, plants, minerals, and other nonhuman beings or objects came from the Alexandrian Boeo and Nicander of Colophon, in (probably) the third and second century BCE respectively. By the beginning of the first century CE, metamorphosis had come into focus as a way of thinking through ontological, political, and ethical issues, and a number of Greek and Latin authors wrote stories (or compilations of stories) whose main narrative focus was the physical transformation of beings into other entities. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (probably composed in  CE) is undoubtedly the most famous of such works. In the proem, the poet describes his goal as singing “in a song of unbroken strain” (perpetuum carmen) about “forms changed into new bodies” (in noua . . . mutatas formas . . . corpora). The continuous narrative, where one transformation gives way to the next with no interruption in the flow of  body-swap episodes, encapsulates a vision of the world where matter itself is in flux, where beings are never set in one form but are always morphing, and where “new forms of life result from that flexibility.” Antoninus Liberalis’ second-century CE collection Metamorphoses is also a compilation of stories about beings changing form, but it does not present itself as a continuous narrative. It narrates forty-one discrete stories of transformation of human beings into other species (birds, animals, plants, and some natural 



 

On metamorphosis in the Homeric epics, Forbes Irving : –, who notes that there are no transformations at all in Hesiod’s Works and Days or Theogony but counts at least thirteen in the rest of the Hesiodic corpus (Catalogue of Women, Melampodia, and other pseudo-Hesiodic pieces); see also Buxton : –. In tragedy, Aeschylus has six, Sophocles five, and Euripides eleven stories of transformation (on which ibid., pp. –). On metamorphosis in early Greek art: Alexandridis . For a survey of Hellenistic collections of metamorphoses, Lafaye : –; Myers : –. On Boeo, Powell : –; RE ; Boeo is mentioned in Ath. Deipn. .e with a reference to Philochorus (who uses the feminine form “Boio,” FGrH  F . On Nicander: Gow and Scholfield . We also know of (but know very little about) the Hellenistic collections of metamorphoses by Theodorus (on which, see Gildenhard and Zissos : , with note), Parthenius (on which, see Lightfoot : – and –), Didymarchus, and Antigonus of Carystus. On the proem: Kenney  and Barchiesi, Segal, Tarrant, and Koch  ad loc. Barkan : . On metamorphosis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see Solodow : –; Feldherr ; Vial . For an intellectual history of metamorphosis, Skulsky  (who sees metamorphosis as a test case for the mind/body problem) and Bynum . For comparative material, Steel  (on medieval French literature) and Griffin .

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



phenomena), but the ordering of the stories is difficult to make sense of and the overall purpose of Antoninus Liberalis’ collection is unclear. The narratives appear mostly to have been inspired by Hellenistic sources: twenty-two stories are based on Nicander’s collection Heteroeumena (Metamorphoses), and ten on Boeo’s Ornithogonia (Creation of Birds). A few more Imperial texts deserve mention, as they take as their narrative premise a scenario where a human being turns into a nonhuman entity: Apuleius’ second-century CE Latin Metamorphosis or Golden Ass; the pseudo-Lucianic Greek Ass (first century CE?), on which Apuleius’ novel was partly modeled; and the original Greek narrative on which both authors (and probably others as well) modeled their text. These texts feature metamorphosis at the heart of the narrative but, with the exception of Apuleius, they limit their focus to one transformation. Apuleius’ novel, by contrast, embeds many stories of transformation (for example, the episodes devoted to the witch Pamphile’s transformation into an owl, to the change of a dead body into a living man, and to the metamorphosis of witches into weasels). The main metamorphosis is that of the hero Lucius, whose body is turned into that of a donkey through a mishap in magic practice. Much of the novel centers on his adventures, as the hero explores the world with changed perceptions afforded by his new asinine body, while retaining his human mental characteristics. From a historico-cultural perspective, the hero’s free circulation in donkey form from the center of Hypata to various rural spots, marketplaces, deserted mountain peaks, and remote villages provides a commentary on the pervasiveness of animal presence in the Imperial world, and the variety of situations in which humans would be dealing with their animal others (for transport, work, as spectacle, companions, food source, etc.) – and would have to think about these more or less comfortable zones of contact. But the pervasive theme of metamorphosis in Apuleius’ novel also raises interpretive queries and allows an examination of philosophical questions. The stories of transformations make good on the promise of entertainment made in the prologue and are a way of bringing up questions of poetics, with metamorphosis standing in for the many ways in which the text ever-changingly dazzles and surprises its reader. But the 

 

On Antoninus Liberalis, Papathomopoulos  and Celoria . For his relationship with Hellenistic and Imperial mythographers: Cameron ; and his relationship with Ovid, ForbesIrving : –. On the Ass as “text-network” devoted to the notion of metamorphosis, Whitmarsh : –. On interactions with real-world animals in the Imperial period, see Keller ; Gilhus : –; Dumont ; Campbell .



Forest: On Surrounds

final and most loaded transformation at the end of the novel invites us to read metamorphosis more seriously (and programmatically). In book , Lucius, returned to his human body, becomes an initiate of Isis. The physical transformation into a donkey and the preceding ten books spent in that form can be read as a preparation for this ultimate spiritual transformation of the protagonist, and as a more general discourse on the drama of the human soul. Similarly, the focus on the animal’s frustrated desire to speak throughout the novel (and what it means for the new Lucius) can be seen as announcing the challenges of the silent conversion to the cult of the goddess. Metamorphosis, Logos, and Anthropomorphism The issue of language (logos) as articulating the distinction between human and nonhuman animal, which Apuleius’ novel explores, reflects one of the most fundamental areas of debate on animals in Antiquity; it is also central to Plutarch’s Gryllus, with which I started and to which I now return. Like Ovid’s and Apuleius’ narratives of transformation, and like our myths of musical metamorphosis, Plutarch’s Gryllus takes as its narrative premise a transformation of human beings into nonhuman animals. At the beginning of the text, Odysseus asks Circe whether the companions she has transformed still have their animal shape, as he wants to have them turned back into human beings: : Because, by Zeus, it would bring me distinction among the Greeks I think, if your favor allowed me to restore these companions of mine to their original humanity and if I didn’t see them grow old in an unnatural beastly body [παρὰ φύσιν ἐν σώμασι θηρίων], leading such a pitiful and dishonorable life. : Here is a man who thinks it fine that his own eagerness for distinction should cause, through his stupidity, not only his own misfortune and that of his companions, but also that of total strangers. : This is another potion of words that you are mixing and adulterating for me, Circe, to literally make me a beast [ἀτεχνῶς ποιοῦσα θηρίον], if I am to believe you that changing from beast to man spells misfortune. (Plut. Mor. e f)





On metamorphosis in Apuleius, Tatum ; Shumate ; Gilhus : – (situating Apuleius against the background of other authors). Passages playing on the idea of limited speech: Apul. Met. . (imitating the Greek of Ass ), ., ., ., ..

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



Odysseus’ cheeky response to Circe, characteristic of heroic ideology and its thirst for kleos, captures the engrained hierarchy between humans, gods, and animals prevalent in epic and in Archaic culture more generally that I described above. The Homeric epics already explored the simple fact that humans are the only animals to have logos (language). But as John Heath puts it, in the Classical period these “basic differentiations uncovered in the epics . . . [were] more carefully and systematically applied, especially in Athens.” The speechlessness of animals is the “original metaphor that continued to fuel Greek ideas of difference . . . the various categories of Other [women, children, slaves, barbarians, nonhuman animals] are intimately linked by their cultural definition as non-speaking being.” One only has to consider the example of the tragic description of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra as nightingale, which encapsulates this sort of vision: female and foreign, enslaved and possessed by the god, human yet metaphorically animal, Cassandra is a perfect example of the way all categories of Other are collapsed into one and thought by opposition to the Greek-speaking male subject. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this simple observation. Even the title under which Plutarch’s dialogue is known (Gryllus – “Grunter”) captures a bias against nonhuman animals: what characterizes the transformed companion is that he does not speak, but grunts. And as clever as Gryllus is in the rest of the dialogue in making the case for animals having rationality, he still needs to argue for it in the form of a man, who has logos (speech) and can verbally present his arguments to Odysseus. Moreover, in the passage quoted above, the way Odysseus expresses his fear of relinquishing his conviction that man has a superior and preferable status is through two metaphors. The first presents Circe’s words (logoi) as a magic potion (κυκεῶνα λόγων). Her speech works as a sort of sneaky drug (ὑποφαρμάττεις) that will (and this is the second 





Heath :  (emphasis in original). Fögen  provides a good introduction to navigate the thorny debate of how animal communication was conceptualized in Antiquity. The modern literature on animal cognition and communication is vast. The most important volume is Fitch , especially –. See also Sebeok ; Tembrok ; Roitblat, Bever, and Terrace ; Diamond ; Vauclair ; Balda, Pepperberg, and Kamil . Heath : . Heath documents the numerous instances in which Classical sources from Herodotus to Aristotle group together and connect the various groups conceptualized as “other.” On Greece as the land of logos, Montiglio . See, for example, Aesch. Ag. – for a description of Cassandra that compares her to a bird. But again, things are far from simple, and Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae is an interesting case of a character crossing the man/beast, Greek/foreigner, male/non-male divides. On this point, Segal .



Forest: On Surrounds

metaphor) “literally make [him] into a beast” (ἀτεχνῶς ποιοῦσα θηρίον) if he believes that transforming from beast to human is not advantageous. In processing ideas about the possible benefits of being animal, Odysseus thus cannot help but use an image that reinforces the idea of the superiority of humans over animals. Metaphor and metamorphosis are here two sides of the same conceptual coin: imagining turning animal is processed through engrained ideas about what it means to be human. What is resisted as a physical alteration is actually achieved conceptually through the simile, and Odysseus makes himself animal in an imaginary linguistic scenario. The Gryllus is far from unique in Imperial literature in drawing attention to logos as a vantage point from which to examine the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Collections of fables, which represent an entire nonhuman universe endowed with logos, start appearing in the first century CE. Babrius (a Hellenized Italian living in Syria) set Aesopic fables in Greek iambics, Phaedrus (a freedman of the emperor Augustus) did the same in Latin senarii, and various other authors also used fables as part of their project. In their work, “not only beasts but also trees [and plants and stones] speak” (arbores loquantur, non tantum ferae, Phaedrus’ prologue, ). It might seem difficult to consider these fantasies of nonhuman logos as something more than an anthropomorphic attempt to make animals like humans. But stories of talking animals do more than attribute the most significant human characteristic (speech) to beasts and stones. As Jeremy Lefkowitz has shown, fables actually draw attention to what differentiates – or not – human from animal. Even if they are represented as speaking human language, animals preserve their specific characteristics and instincts. In the case of Phaedrus, Henderson notes that, as critters chatter, “the conversation that passes between . . . animals, people, gods, and trees is saturated with Latin buzzwords of politeness, business, friendship, kinship, compliment, complaint.” But rather than seeing the vocabulary of humans applied to the nonhuman world, one can interpret Phaedrus’ text as bringing to the fore the belief that in the nonhuman world, there are distinct (although nonverbal) ways of showing kinship, sympathy, competition, etc. Human vocabulary here does not trump 

 

On Babrius, Perry : xlvii. On Phaedrus, ibid., p. lxxiii; Henderson and Bewick . On the fable genre, Holzberg ; Dijk . On Imperial authors’ use of Greek fables, see Bieber  and van Dijk .  Lefkowitz . Henderson and Bewick : . Already in Antiquity, Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian document animal behaviors (especially in elephants) that make them comparable to humans (Ael. NA ., .) in the sophistication of

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



animal difference, but rather does justice to behaviors that are social and not reserved to human animals. The sheer volume of animals and the ecological diversity present in ancient fables attests to this attentiveness to animal ways. In all these cases, the fabular gimmick of speaking animals is only a narrative device used to investigate closely various nonhuman animals’ particular modes of being in the world. Giving language to animals is not so much a way of treating them as if they were human as a way to focus our attention on them and do justice to their individual behaviors, identities, and abilities, because the barrier of language is momentarily lifted. In particular, “in the hands of impeccable observers of animals the anthropomorphic perspective deserves serious attention, for it discloses the nature of animal life with the power and internal cohesion that real worlds possess.” Fables are indeed part and parcel of the Imperial exploration and questioning of any supposed fixed categorical boundaries between human and nonhuman animal. In the Greek romances in particular, embedded fables present visions of the natural world that work in counterpoint to (and often in parallel with) the work done by myths of metamorphosis and as commentary on the rest of the novel. In Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon, for example, animal fables (of the lion afraid of the cock, or of the gnat boasting to the lion before getting caught in a spiderweb) provide a commentary on power relationships between individuals and bear relevance to the threat faced by the protagonists in the main narrative. Importantly for my purposes in this book, fables can explicitly explore human exceptionalism in terms of music and dance: in a fable about fish (Perry , also Hdt. .), a fisherman plays the aulos to make fish dance and come out of the water. When they fail to do so, he







their display of ethical behavior (on which, see Fögen ). Recent scholarship and the popular press have thrown light on highly social behaviors in the nonhuman world, from chimps to trees and mushrooms: Tompkins and Bird ; Fowler ; Kohn ; Wohlleben . Crist : . In a similar vein of defense of anthropomorphism: Ingold a: –: “To understand elephants (say), we do not have to pretend that they are ‘just like humans’, let alone that they are just like th-century, Western, middle-class humans. But we may have to apply some of the interpretative methods common to the humanities and classically reserved for the study of human culture and history”; see also Danta . Contra: Clark : , who warns about the difficulty of doing justice to the representation of animals in a way that does justice to their own perceptions. For a different approach, see Fisher : , who argues for the need to reevaluate the charge of anthropomorphism “in a more open-minded and empirical manner” to include insights on animal cognition. See also Kennedy  for a “new anthropomorphism”; Horowitz ; Moore  on anthropocentric personification; Newmyer . For the bearing of these “digressions” on the interpretation of the text, see Morales ; Morales ; Morales . Ach. Tat. .–, on which, see Whitmarsh : –.



Forest: On Surrounds

uses his net. As he dumps the fish he has caught onto the shore and they begin to wriggle, he rebukes them for not dancing earlier when he played his music. As Jeremy Lefkowitz explains, in fables such as this one, humans are disappointed by their failure to elicit desired non verbal, human like communication (music, dance, mournful song) from animals, and . . . the animals end up dead. Stories like these highlight . . . the difficulties of human animal intercourse, drawing attention to the folly of anthropomorphizing and the potentially disastrous results of confusing animal and human behavior.

Even if animals are endowed with human speech, they are not deprived of their animal characteristics, and the joke is on whoever takes the fiction of speaking animals at face value and does not acknowledge animals’ specific ways of being in the world, in their singularity. Metamorphosis and Metaphysics One last alternative to the dominant narrative of human exceptionalism, and an important way of conceiving of the continuity between human and nonhuman species, needs to be considered: the first centuries of the Christian era see a renewed interest in the belief in metempsychosis, that is the transmigration of the soul (considered immortal) into a new animal or human body after the body’s death. At the beginning of this tradition we find the enigmatic figure of the sixth-century BCE Pythagoras. His most famous follower, the thirdcentury CE Greek philosopher Porphyry, summarizes Pythagorean beliefs under the following four points: () that the soul is immortal; () that it transmigrates into other species of living beings; () that, periodically, what once happened, happens again, nothing is absolutely new; and () that all living things should be consid ered of the same kind.

The influence that Pythagorean ideas about the nonhuman had on a number of later philosophers and thinkers is undeniable, but difficult to trace in its details. Natural philosophers active between the sixth and the beginning of the fourth century BCE (such as Empedocles, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Democritus) in particular were all in sympathy with various aspects of Pythagorean beliefs without being  

Lefkowitz : . Porph. Life of Pythagoras . For a discussion of the passage, see Cornelli : –.

Metamorphosis between Myth and Metaphysics



explicitly labeled as Pythagoreans. For these philosophers, the notion of a world-soul incarnated in different bodies and various forms of belief in metempsychosis were particularly important. A fragment of Xenophanes (fr.  DK) stages Pythagoras begging a friend not to beat a puppy, for “he used to be a friend in a different life” and Empedocles (fr.  DK) declares that he has been “a boy and a girl and a bush and a bird and a dumb fish of the sea.” In part because of these beliefs, Presocratic philosophers present a way of thinking about humans as connected with the rest of the cosmos (conceived itself as an animated whole) and with the material world, rather than radically separated from them. These new forms of intellectual inquiry into the nature of the world and where humans fit into it also constituted a rejection of traditional mythology. Both Xenophanes and Empedocles rejected traditional stories about the gods (Xenophanes frs. – DK; Empedocles fr.  DK) and the way they were represented in human form (Xenophanes frs. – DK). For Empedocles (fr.  DK), even though the four roots of the universe (fire, air, water, and earth) were connected with those of the gods (bright Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis), they were only so in name, and in an indeterminate way that mixed material and divine. The philosopher for whom Pythagorean beliefs in the transmigration of souls and the idea of a world-soul were most important was probably Plato: several dialogues explore the idea of the immortality of the soul, especially the Phaedo in a myth where Socrates compares himself to a swan, the Timaeus (which considers the idea of the world soul), and, most spectacularly, the myth of Er at the end of the Republic. In the latter, the usual dichotomies (human/nonhuman animal; life/death; body/soul; above/below) are uprooted, and nonhuman animals can choose the life of humans, and humans that of animals (Orpheus that of a swan and Thamyras that of a nightingale): In the context of the aliveness of the cosmos, within the vibrantly animated organism of the all, what is illuminated is the fluid interpenetration of human and other forms of life, well beyond continuity and contiguity, making definitions and contours, not to mention all humanistic/

 





Zhmud, Windle, and Ireland ; Zhmud . Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes : , who correlate this form of Empedoclean thinking with the vegetal figure of the rhizome, “one of the most persistent motifs of Deleuze and Guattari.” On Plato’s relationship with Pythagorean thought (illustrated through the well-known Aristotelian dictum Platon pythagorizei): Gregory . On Pythagoreanism in the Imperial age, Centrone ; Bonazzi, Lévy, and Steel ; and especially Boys-Stones . See Pl. Phd. e–b for the comparison with the swan. On the myth of Er (Resp. b–b), Baracchi  and Gonzalez .



Forest: On Surrounds anthropological privileges, tremble. The human and other animals share the deep syntax of aliveness and are embedded in the same conditions.

Imperial Greek and Latin literature continued to explore these Pythagorean ideas, most often transmitted in their Presocratic or Platonic form. Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular provides a prime example of the importance of Pythagorean thought. The poem explicitly acknowledges Pythagorean influence in book , half of which is composed of a speech by the wise man (Met. –). As the poem states explicitly: omnia mutantur, nihil interit (everything changes and nothing dies, Met. .). The speech has been interpreted in different ways, either as the delayed key to the whole Metamorphoses project, or as an example of tension between philosophical theory and mythological and poetic endeavor. Whatever might be the case, the idea of interconnected life and interpenetration between human and nonhuman worlds illustrated in the poem can more generally be traced to Presocratic (especially Empedoclean) ideas about a shared world-soul, and to the representation of the common physiology and psychology of different types of living beings. Besides Ovid, a variety of Imperial works attest to the continued importance of the idea of metempsychosis and the debates associated with it, especially in the writings of Neoplatonist philosophers (such as the third-century CE Porphyry and early fourth-century CE Iamblichus) and the Christian fathers (the late second- and third-century CE Tertullian or the fourth-century CE Gregory of Nazianzus). But one work of biographical fiction deserves particular mention: Philostratus’ third-century CE Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Philostratus describes the life of the firstcentury CE sophist, philosopher, and holy man Apollonius, who adopted Pythagoreanism and its principles in his lifestyle (abstaining from animal flesh and animal sacrifice, wearing linen garments, and believing in the transmigration of souls). The biography as a whole is concerned with many further aspects of Philostratus’ life besides his Pythagorean lifestyle, but a  





Baracchi : . On the importance of Pythagoras’ speech for the poem: Barkan : , –; Myers : –; Hardie ; Wheeler : –; Segal ; Setaioli . For the tension: Néraudau : ; Vial : –; Schmitz-Emans . Zatta . On the possible influence of Empedoclean ideas on Ovid’s predecessor and didactic model Lucretius, Campbell ; on the importance of plants in early philosophical thought, Repici . For other works displaying Pythagorean influence or beliefs in metensomatosis, Gilhus : –.

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



number of passages attest to the interest that a third-century author could take in the views about humans’ relationship with nonhuman animals and other forms of life held by an ascetic who had lived two hundred years before his time, as we’ll see in the next section. The text is an important document for the ways the Imperial age accommodated sophistic, philosophical, and Pythagorean ideas about the human: whether it corresponds to the life of the “historical” Apollonius or captures a third-century fantasy of what a first-century wise man was does not, ultimately, matter. More importantly, the Life shows how different views about the position of humans in the word coexisted, and how the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals were explored and probed, in fictional experiments (in poetic or novel form), and in different philosophical contexts. These various ideas about the ontological continuity between humans and the nonhuman world constituted some of the intellectual background on which the myths of musical metamorphosis flourished. Ideas about bodies changing form, about the soul entering different bodies, and about animals having as rich a set of relationships as humans despite lacking language, were explored in different genres – hexameter poetry, fables, biography, philosophical dialogue, and Christian treatises. All these thought experiments constituted alternatives to forms of discourse that placed logos-bearing man at the center of the universe and made it the term around which other categories were defined.

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism A second passage leads us to examine how the question of the relationship between human animals and their others was approached from a different perspective in the Imperial period. It comes from the first-century CE encyclopedic Natural History of Pliny the Elder and this time focuses squarely on animal song. The passage describes the voice and music of the nightingale: Primum tanta vox tam parvo in corpusculo, tam pertinax spiritus; deinde in una perfecta musicae scientia: modulatus editur sonus, et nunc continuo spiritu trahitur in longum, nunc variatur inflexo, nunc distinguitur conciso, copulatur intorto, promittitur revocato; infuscatur ex inopinato, interdum et secum ipse murmurat, plenus, gravis, acutus, creber, extentus, ubi visum 

My translation of the first half of the passage is heavily influenced by the analysis of Barker a, who (without proposing an English translation) explains how Pliny’s language echoes rhetorical terminology; the second half of my translation draws on the Loeb.



Forest: On Surrounds est vibrans summus, medius, imus; breviterque omnia tam parvulis in faucibus quae tot exquisitis tibiarum tormentis ars hominum excogitavit, ut non sit dubium hanc suavitatem praemonstratam efficaci auspicio cum in ore Stesichori cecinit infantis. ac ne quis dubitet artis esse, plures singulis sunt cantus, nec iidem omnibus, sed sui cuique. certant inter se, palamque animosa contentio est; victa morte finit saepe vitam, spiritu prius deficiente quam cantu. meditantur aliae iuveniores versusque quos imitentur acci piunt; audit discipula intentione magna et reddit, vicibusque reticent; intellegitur emendatae correctio [correptio?] et in docente quaedam reprehensio. In the first place, there is such a loud voice in such a small body, and so persevering a breath; then there is consummate knowledge of music in one single bird: the sound comes out tunefully, and sometimes a note is drawn out long, with continuous breath, sometimes it is varied with a curving breath; sometimes a phrase is made up of groups of notes separated by silences, or it builds up in a flurry of notes, joined with turns; or it is played and repeated, or it is suddenly darkened, or played pianissimo as if for oneself; it can be full, weighty, or thin; with rapid sequences of notes, long notes, with tremolo when this seems appropriate treble, alto, bass. And in brief, in such a tiny throat, it has everything that human science has devised in the many exquisite tortures of the tibiae, so that there is no doubt that this sweetness was foretold by a powerful omen when the bird sang on the lips of baby Stesichorus. And so that no one may doubt that it is a science, the birds each have several songs, not the same for every one, but each its own. They compete with each other and their spirited rivalry is manifest; the loser often ends its life with death, its breath giving out before its song. Other young birds practice their music and are given phrases to imitate; the student pays great attention when it listens and student and teacher take turns keeping silent; one can see progress in the one corrected and a certain form of criticism on the part of the instructress. (HN .)

There is much to consider in this rich and difficult passage, and the next paragraphs will examine in detail the different traditions to which thinking about the nightingale belong. Two issues in particular will occupy me: the relationship between music and order, and that between music and techne. Music between Nature and Mousike Pliny’s focus on the nightingale is not innocent. From Archaic poetry on, there is a long tradition of singling out this bird, along with the swan, for its superlative musicality. The elaborateness of its song is already referred to in the Odyssey and in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, which describes the

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



divine music of Pan as “not even surpassed by that bird that in flowery spring among the leaves pours forth her lament in honey-voiced song.” Lyric and elegiac poets alike also took the nightingale as an icon of musicality and used it as a metaphor for vocal virtuosity. It is not simply that the nightingale is the best of avian singers; rather, it represents an ideal of vocal skills that a human musician can only wish to attain. Theognis, for example, wishes he had the nightingale’s voice after a night of sympotic partying, Bacchylides claims the title Cean nightingale, and in Aristophanes’ Birds, the chorus invoking the nightingale calls it “dearest of birds, partner of all my songs.” And yet, the extreme musicality of the nightingale belongs, for the Greeks, to a conceptual category different from that of human music. Metaphor, the invocation of a musical animal in a human song, and the wish to be turned into a musicking animal all betray the idea that there is actually a distinction between the categories of human and nonhuman music. The Greeks were of course exquisitely attentive to the sounds of the natural environment and we find these represented in a variety of texts, from the Homeric epic and lyric poetry to Attic tragedy and historiography, down to the fourth-century CE letter of Ausonius quoted in the Introduction. The opening paragraph of Sean Gurd’s Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece makes this clear: It is only silent at night. The rising sun sets the air popping and sizzling, and other voices rise in chorus with the ambient hum. Goats and sheep bleat, cows raise a clamor, bulls bellow, horses’ hooves thud and their nostrils snort, wild boars gnash their teeth and squeal, dogs bark and growl and whine, pigs raise a ruckus. Deer, lions, serpents, and bees make themselves heard. Cicadas sing, as do birds: you can hear the cries of eagles, the song of the nightingale, and the singing, shouting, and noise of cranes, herons, hawks, crows, falcons, swallows, owls, cocks, swans, cuckoos, quails, starlings, and jackdaws. Water murmurs, chatters, and roars. The ocean’s waves crash against the shore and reverberate. Rivers rush together and rumble; streams shout out and their banks resound. The wind speaks shrilly. A rock crashes down a slope and through the forest. The earth is split by thunder.

Gurd documents each mention of a sound with a reference to Greek literature. His dazzling display continues for four pages: after natural clatter and thuds come representations of dangerous echoes, monstrous   

Od. .–; Hymn. Hom. Pan. –. Thgn. – West IE; Bacchyl. Ode .– Maehler; Ar. Av. –. Gurd : –.



Forest: On Surrounds

voices, divine noises, bodily groans and rasps, tragic cries, psychic resonances, and, finally, the sound of song. That song is included in a list that includes coughs, hisses, and grunts is justified by the fact that there is continuity in the vocabulary for sonic activities across species. In Greek, pleasing sounds of birds and human songs were represented as having the same timbral quality, encapsulated by the adjective liguros; human and nonhuman singers share a voice (phone), and passages describe the speech of the wind with the same vocabulary as that for humans. Continuity in the representation of human and nonhuman music is best illustrated by the opening of the programmatic first Idyll of the Hellenistic poet Theocritus: Ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς, αἰπόλε, τήνα, ἁ ποτὶ ταῖς παγαῖσι, μελίσδεται, ἁδὺ δὲ καὶ τύ συρίσδες· μετὰ Πᾶνα τὸ δεύτερον ἆθλον ἀποισῇ. αἴ κα τῆνος ἕλῃ κεραὸν τράγον, αἶγα τὺ λαψῇ· αἴ κα δ’ αἶγα λάβῃ τῆνος γέρας, ἐς τὲ καταρρεῖ ἁ χίμαρος· χιμάρω δὲ καλὸν κρέας, ἔστε κ’ ἀμέλξῃς. ΑΙΠΟΛΟΣ: ἅδιον, ὦ ποιμήν, τὸ τεὸν μέλος ἢ τὸ καταχές τῆν’ ἀπὸ τᾶς πέτρας καταλείβεται ὑψόθεν ὕδωρ. αἴ κα ταὶ Μοῖσαι τὰν οἴιδα δῶρον ἄγωνται, ἄρνα τὺ σακίταν λαψῇ γέρας· αἰ δέ κ’ ἀρέσκῃ τήναις ἄρνα λαβεῖν, τὺ δὲ τὰν ὄιν ὕστερον ἀξῇ. ΘΥΡΣΙΣ:

: Sweet is the whispered song that this pine sings, goatherd, the one by the springs, and sweet too is your piping. After Pan, you will take the second prize. If he takes the horned goat, you will get the goat; but if he takes the goat as his prize, the kid falls to you. Kid flesh is good until you milk it. : Sweeter is your song, O shepherd, than the cascading water poured from that rock up above. If the Muses take the sheep as their gift, you will get the lamb as your prize; but if it pleases them to get the lamb, you will be next and take the sheep.

Human and nonhuman music are described here in the same terms and presented as creating a similar response: the pine tree’s whisper (ψιθύρισμα) and the goatherd’s singing (μελίσδεται) are both sweet (ἁδύ), and so are the song (μέλος) of the shepherd and the resounding (καταχές) sound of the water. The murmur of water is paid as much attention as the piping of the divine shepherd, Pan. 



E.g., Simon. PMG :– (ἀνέμου/φθόγγον). On the vocabulary for sound and music, Barker b; Rocconi . See also Sappho fr. .– Voigt (ἐν δ᾽ ὕδωρ ψυχρον κελάδει δι᾽ ὔσδων/μαλίνων), with Gurd : – and Lather .

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



More generally in Theocritean poetry, insects (especially crickets and cicadas) are described as musicians accompanying shepherd songs and even taken as “the standard term of comparison both for the song itself and, in general, for the sounds of the world of nature.” In the world of bucolic poetry, the complete absorption of these animal singers in their song provides a model for the human musician. Their being means musicking, and their sweet, sonorous presence in the countryside is in itself an invitation for human song. The musical setting described in Idyll  makes the point clear: πολλαὶ δ’ ἄμμιν ὕπερθε κατὰ κρατὸς δονέοντο αἴγειροι πτελέαι τε· τὸ δ’ ἐγγύθεν ἱερὸν ὕδωρ Νυμφᾶν ἐξ ἄντροιο κατειβόμενον κελάρυζε. τοὶ δὲ ποτὶ σκιαραῖς ὀροδαμνίσιν αἰθαλίωνες τέττιγες λαλαγεῦντες ἔχον πόνον· ἁ δ’ ὀλολυγών τηλόθεν ἐν πυκιναῖσι βάτων τρύζεσκεν ἀκάνθαις· ἄειδον κόρυδοι καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών, πωτῶντο ξουθαὶ περὶ πίδακας ἀμφὶ μέλισσαι. Many poplars and elms rustled above our heads; pouring down from a cave of the nymphs, a sacred spring babbled nearby; on shady sprigs, dark cicadas were working hard at their chirrup; far away in the dense prickles of the brambles, the tree frog kept croaking; larks and goldfinches were singing, the turtle dove lamented, and bees flew humming around a spring. (Theoc. Id. . )

Yet it is not a coincidence that in Gurd’s description, human song is set apart and figures at the very end of the list. This is because song, and mousike (the arts of the Muses, understood as encompassing music, song, and dance) more generally, are conceptualized as essentially imposing order on sound. While other sounds – natural, somatic, elemental, etc. – are not formally controlled, and especially not controlled by a human being, song is. Song and mousike actually are not simply seen as ways to impose order on sound; they are more generally considered a way of creating order in the world. The chorus in particular is a powerful conceptual tool to represent, and enact, this ordering through sound. While events in tragic characters’ lives are chaotic and full of unexpected turns, the chorus dances these lives in order and gives a singable rhythm to the raw material of life.  

Fantuzzi and Hunter : , with references to Theoc. Id. ., .–, ., and .. See the important manifesto of Alcman, who claims to “put together” (or compose?) the voice of partridges as articulate (on which, see further pp. – in this chapter). Augustine marks an important break in the way song is conceptualized (see Harrison ).



Forest: On Surrounds

In this context, it is significant that many dramatic choruses invoke choruses of animal others, or even represent the chorus in animal form. In tragedy, the chorus imagines itself, in what has been called “choral projection,” as a group of singing and dancing animals (birds) or dancing stars, or even expresses the wish to be transformed into animal others. This escape fantasy is most often linked to the dramatic scenario of the play: the chorus wants to escape slavery, death, etc. The lack of control over fate felt by the tragic chorus is transformed into metaphorical control over the representation of animal others, and their acoustic domestication. The real force of these images comes from the fact that they impose a metaphorical order onto something that is otherwise not under the control of humans. Comedy often stages choruses of animals and provides a way for the human chorus to imagine itself in nonhuman form: the extant comedies of Aristophanes have a chorus of frogs and a chorus of birds, but we know of many other animal choruses (in particular of specific birds, cranes, nightingales, and storks, as well as fish, and ostrich- and dolphin-riders). In all these instances of humans singing animal noises, what matters is the fact that singers enact the mastering of natural sounds through meter. The force of the idea of the chorus of frogs in Aristophanes’ Frogs, to take a particularly striking example, comes from the fact that the batrachians are staged as making an ordered kind of music together, one that scans metrically as brekekekex coax coax. No group of frogs in nature is ever conceptualized as a chorus since the chorus means ordered sound. To put it simply: in the Greek imagination, order does not precede music – human song creates order. Moreover, what we call “music” and what the Greeks called mousike was essentially conceptualized as the product of a political animal. It was political in the sense that it was a way of relating to other humans, in the context of polis life, where most musical activities were performed. Imagining oneself in the guise of a chorus of birds or stars did not mean 



 

The classical article on choral projection is Henrichs . On star choruses, or animal choruses: Csapo ; Csapo ; Steiner ; Gagné . Bird images both provide a model for, and an alternative to, the human tragic chorus, standing in for vocal skill and musical expressiveness (on that feature, see Swift : –; Weiss a: –; and Weiss b). On the wish to be turned into a bird: Alcm. PMG  and Thgn. – West IE; on the wish to be turned into a musical object: PMG ; for choruses, e.g., Eur. Hel. –. On choral invocation of birds as partner for song: Eur. Hel. – (calling on the nightingale), IT – (calling on the halcyon). On animal choruses in comedy, Sifakis  and Rothwell . Most Greek musical activities and genres of song had a fundamentally social nature, political significance, and were performed in the city, not in a natural setting (except for the rare exceptions of the Bacchic worship of Dionysus and some initiation rituals). The ancient chorus in particular

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



relinquishing human form to attain an animal ideal of sound: rather, it means generating order over a nonhuman community and regaining a form of metaphorical control whose loss was caused by the dramatic circumstances of the play. Bucolic music (a prime example of which I have quoted above) is no exception: even though it sets humans in a solitary position, isolated from the city, and enmeshed with the nonhuman world, it still has a very strong anthropocentric focus. Even in the multispecies competition of Idyll , we find the same type of human exceptionalism. The first prize goes to a divinity – Pan or the Muses – but the reference point (and the last word in the series) is always the human. The natural orchestra described in the first lines of the idyll soon recedes in the background, and the sound of rushing stream, whispering pine, or bleating sheep is replaced by a human song about human sorrow. The same is true in another programmatic song: in Idyll  the shepherd Lycidas sings of how “the mountain lamented and the oak tree sang a dirge for Daphnis” (–). It is only insofar as they seem to relate to human suffering that the sounds of natural elements are evoked. The texture of Theocritus’ bucolic world is actually made of a mix of these realistic musical details (the chirping of cicadas and whispering of winds), a cast of mythical characters (Pan and the nymphs, near-invisible inhabitants of the Theocritean world), and the real focus of the poem: humans and their world of love, rustic toil, and musical competition. While many of the descriptions of the nonhuman world are realistic, the Theocritean countryside in general is idealized. As Fantuzzi and Hunter point out, “it is never a really wild countryside, a place of dangers and hardships, one quite inhospitable to humans; on the contrary, the Theocritean countryside is always peacefully under human control.” As such, song works as a paradigm for nature: human ordering of nature is reflected in the ordering of musical sound. Animal Music and Technique Let us return to Pliny’s presentation of the nightingale’s song. In the light of what I have outlined above, it is clear that the passage draws from





was an important tool for sociopolitical and religious cohesion. For studies of the chorus in this light: Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh ; Gagné and Hopman . The former in particular examines how the Greek idea of the chorus continues to be “diffused and refracted” in the history of music, through the chorus of Roman drama, liturgical choruses, the corps de ballet, and operatic choruses. Cusset  on the representation of nature in Theocritus and its “structuring function.” More generally, Elliger  on representations of nature in Greek poetry.   Segal . Id. , Id. , Id. , and Segal . Fantuzzi and Hunter : .



Forest: On Surrounds

traditional depictions of the virtuosity of animal song. Yet it also introduces a radical change: it analyzes the bird’s song along the same lines as one would human music, as if they were not ontologically different. The passage brings up conceptual questions (such as whether animals have ars and scientia, or techne in Greek) that had been debated for hundreds of years already before Pliny, and were still debated in contemporary culture and examined in a variety of Imperial texts. First, rather than describing the effects of avian music on the listener or praising the expressivity of its song, as do most texts devoted to the nightingale, Pliny lists in detail the characteristics of the bird’s voice and describes its song’s technique. He goes to great lengths to convey the variety of sound, inflection, timbre, and tessiture of the nightingale’s song and contrasts them with the small size of the bird. This makes the nightingale an acoustic (and mechanical) wonder: size of body and volume of sound do not correlate, to the point that the song might recall the supernatural qualities of some voices imagined by the poets. To describe the awesome characteristics of the bird’s song, Pliny draws from the vocabulary of rhetoric and aulos performance. As Andrew Barker has argued, on the one hand, the vocabulary used to describe the bird’s notes and phrases is reminiscent of that used, for example, by Cicero to describe the vocal gymnastics of orators. In the De oratore in particular, Cicero describes voices as taut strings that speak according to different touches, thus producing different pitches, articulation, and dynamics – high, low, quick, slow, forte, piano (nam voces ut chordae sunt intentae, quae ad quemque tactum respondeant, acuta gravis, cita tarda, magna parva). Vocal output also achieves other nuances, including different timbres, volume, phrasing: smooth or rough, limited or full in volume, tenuto or staccato, faint or harsh, diminuendo or crescendo (lene asperum, contractum diffusum, continenti spitiru intermisso, fractum scissum, flexo sono attenuatum inflatum). On the other hand, Pliny’s passage is also informed by ideas about instrumental music, especially that of the aulos and the effects that can be drawn out by a talented piper (as is made explicit in quae tot exquisitis tibiarum tormentis ars hominum excogitavit): the vocabulary is not only 

 

Compare Plut. Mor. a (Apoph. Lac.): “A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said: ‘You are just a voice and nothing more’.” The Pliny passage draws on classical Greek sources, especially from Aristotle’s History of Animals (a–b, b–, b–, b–). On Pliny’s sources, Capponi ; on the passage, Arbo and Arbo . E.g., Il. .–. Cic. De or. III..–, on which Rousselle . See also Melidis – and Melidis .

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



nuanced and precise – the voice is loud (tanta) and tuneful (modulatus), and “persevering [in breath]” (pertinax) – it also describes specific features of sonic production, and borrows from the vocabulary of wind instrument playing. Although the timbre of the nightingale’s voice and that of the auloi are not comparable, human technique is used to make sense of the bird’s, in particular to understand the length of musical phrases, dynamic contrasts, etc., and to convey the experience of the avian song to an audience who might be more familiar with the urban music of the pipes and the vocal histrionics of orators. The nightingale’s song is thus presented in the vocabulary used to describe two very human arts (rhetoric and aulos playing). This tendency to model animals and their practices onto human ones is a general feature of natural histories in Imperial times, illustrated also in Aelian’s and Oppian’s work. But the last third of Pliny’s passage takes a more radical turn and focuses this time on finding an explanation for the song’s sophistication. Pliny makes clear that the bird’s song is itself the product of an ars (science, theoretical knowledge), and, engaging with an issue that had a long history already in Greek thought, he heavily (but selectively) draws from his Greek predecessors to make the point. Aristotle in particular had described how birds can not only learn from others (including from humans – with the specific case of the parrot, b–) but also teach their offspring. This understanding of the sounds of the bird as an art that needs to be worked on, rather than something that comes instinctively, was inherently linked to a different idea that had to do with the specific mental and sensual faculties that nonhuman animals have to deal with the world, and their possession of rationality (logos). As already mentioned, Aristotle was the first philosopher to clearly deny reason to animals, and the Stoics followed suit; but both Aristotle and the Stoics attributed nonhuman animals other faculties that allowed them to operate in distinct ways in the world. Pliny’s views here, as he acknowledges the ability of nightingales to teach and learn, are indebted to both schools of thought. 

 



Barker a: –. Arbo and Arbo  take a different position on the interpretation of some of the terms in the Pliny passage. Cicero’s De oratore (III..) has an explicit reference to the flute (fistula) in connection with the training of the voice of the orator. Gilhus : –. Arist. Hist. an. b– for the nightingale teaching its young. See also Zirin  and Arnhart : . On Pliny’s intellectual background and method: Citroni Marchetti ; Beagon ; French : – ( for Pliny’s Stoic views); Naas ; Murphy ; Beagon . On the Stoics’ view of nature more generally: Osborne . On Pliny’s views of animal intuition, see Holmes .



Forest: On Surrounds

The question that Pliny introduces in the passage, whether animal artistic production is the product of an art or an instinct, was hotly debated in the Imperial period, by philosophers and fiction writers alike. Plutarch’s Gryllus (e–, a–, b–) for instance has his pig-turnedback-to-man character argue that I have heard that in Egypt everyone is a physician; and in the case of beasts each one is not only his own specialist in medicine, but also in the providing of food, in warfare and hunting as well as in self defense and music, in so far as any kind of animal has a natural gift for it [κατὰ φύσιν] . . . It is no uninstructed or untrained faculty, but rather self taught and self sufficient and not for lack of strength. Such animals, at any rate, as man for amusement or easy living induces to accept instruction and training and have understanding to grasp what they are taught even when it goes contrary to their physical endowment, so superior are their mental powers. I say nothing of puppies that are trained as hunters, or colts schooled to keep time in their gait, or crows that are taught to talk . . . If you are doubtful that we [animals] can learn arts, then let me tell you that we can even teach them . . . (Loeb trans., emphasis mine)

For Gryllus, animals can not only learn human arts but also teach their own techniques to their children – not only do they share in human pursuits for human benefits (their “good living” or their enjoyment) but they are also artists and teachers in their own right. While the first formulation clearly puts humans at the center of things, the second shows that humans and other animals share the same powers. Similarly, Aelian (.) reports an anecdote about nightingales that relies on the same type of vocabulary as Pliny and confirms his point about animal instinct. He describes how the nightingale is sensitive not only to music but also to glory: when he practices alone, he sings simple melodies, but when he knows he is being heard (as when he is captive), he uses more varied and more harmonious inflections. Philostratus provides another fascinating set of passages that feed into this controversy. At three points at least in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana he reflects on the question of animal learning. The first describes trained birds who express wishes like “good day,” “all the best,” and “god bless you” without knowing what they mean or feeling any goodwill for humans, simply because their tongues have been trained. And later in the work, he describes the philosopher as criticizing a youth who tried teaching his birds to speak human language, not only because he spoiled 

Other passages about nightingales in Aelian: NA ., ., ..

Pliny’s Nightingale: Mousike, Mimesis, and Materialism



the birds’ “own natural notes, which are so sweet that not even the best musical instruments could rival or imitate them,” but also because he teaches the birds “the vilest Greek dialects.” We are here given a quick glimpse into Apollonius’ views on the musical abilities of nonhuman animals and their ability to learn from humans. As in the Pliny passage, the birds are also compared to musical instruments, but their skills are thought superior. What matters here is the larger set of questions debated in contemporary culture (in various genres) with which the biography engages. Mimesis An additional, and even more fundamental, question underlies the Pliny passage: that of mimesis, understood here as imitation. The idea (which we have encountered in the Gryllus passage above) that some nonhuman animals imitate human ones in the making of music or in other arts, and the obverse idea, that human music originates from the imitation of animals, go back to our earliest texts. In two of the oldest surviving fragments of Greek song, the seventhcentury BCE Spartan poet Alcman describes his own poetic practice: ϝέπη τάδε καὶ μέλος Ἀλκμὰν εὗρε γεγλωσσαμέναν κακκαβίδων ὄπα συνθέμενος. These words and tune Alcman invented, by putting together the voice of partridges as articulate. (Alcm. PMG )

ϝοῖδα δ’ ὀρνίχων νόμως παντῶν. I know the tunes of all the birds. (Alcm. PMG )

Neither the original context nor the purpose of Alcman’s lines is known. But the poet describes his own poetic practice as dependent on a knowledge of, or familiarity with, birdsongs. His work consists literally in composing (συνθέμενος – putting together) the voice of partridges to make  

Philostr. VA ., ., .. The text of the fragments is uncertain (on textual establishment, see Gallavotti ). On the passage, Gentili ; Brillante ; Bettini : –; Martano, Matelli, and Mirhady .



Forest: On Surrounds

words (ϝέπη) and song (μέλος). What exactly Alcman means with the participle “tongued” (γεγλωσσαμέναν) is unclear. But, given the unmelodious yet highly rhythmical nature of partridges’ clucks, one can imagine Alcman referring to arranging the cries of birds into some sort of organized rhythmical pattern. If the fragment is indeed the metapoetic sphragis of a song, as has been argued, the manifesto simultaneously makes a claim about the superiority of human art and provides an embodiment of that claim in a metrical poetic statement. Even more interestingly, these lines have been preserved because the third-century CE Athenaeus quoted them, and glossed that Alcman “clearly shows that he learned how to sing from the partridges” (σαφῶς ἐμφανίζων ὅτι παρὰ τῶν περδίκων ᾄδειν ἐμάνθανε). This is actually not exactly what Alcman says, but the fact that Athenaeus chooses to interpret the words this way is telling, especially as he adds the following: This is why Chamaeleon of Pontus says [fr.  Wehrli] that “the ancients thought the invention of music came from birds singing in the wilderness.” From their imitation [κατὰ μίμησιν], came the establishment of music. (Ath. Deipn. .a)

With this, we have an insight into a long history of humans conceptualizing the origins of their musical art as the mimesis of birdsong. For Athenaeus, both Alcman and Chamaeleon are describing the same phenomenon: the fact that humans learned (or invented) song by mimesis (κατὰ μίμησιν) of birds. This idea of mimesis, as expressed by Athenaeus, is one of the fundamental ideas that guide materialist histories of music. The fifth- and early fourth-century BCE philosopher Democritus in particular held a specific view on the origins of music, which is reported by Plutarch: “Democritus showed how we are disciples of animals in all our most important activities: of the spider in the art of weaving and mending, of the swallow in house-building, of songbirds, the swan and nightingale, in song, by means of imitation [κατὰ μίμησιν].” In the Small Cosmology, in which he outlines the formation of the world, Democritus highlights the genesis of song: song relied on the ability of men to articulate sound. This distinct way of conceptualizing the origins of music persisted through the centuries. In the first century BC, the Epicurean Lucretius, following the same materialist tradition, describes how nature herself is creator of all things (ipsa rerum primum natura creatrix): 



On modern ideas about an evolutionary model for music: Cross ; Mithen ; Cross ; Morley . And for a different take: Tomlinson .  Plut. Mor. a (De soll. an. ) Democritus, fr.  DK. Brancacci : .

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body



At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore ante fuit multo quam levia carmina cantu concelebrare homines possent aurisque iuvare. et zephyri, cava per calamorum, sibila primum agrestis docuere cavas inflare cicutas. Imitating with the mouth the flowing voices of birds came long before men could make known their smooth verses through song and delight the ears. And the zephyrs, whistling through the hollow reeds, first taught peasants to blow into the hollow of hemlock stalks. (Lucr. De rerum natura ,  )

On this view, music, like other arts, originates from animals; human beings’ techne shapes the material provided by something they find in their natural environment. This sort of natural history of art, which starts with humans being attentive to the nonhuman world, opens a fascinating window onto the intersection between discourse on the nonhuman and discourse on music. As such, it proposes a perfect mirror (and perfect inversion) of the types of myths this book examines – narratives about the human origins of some natural musical phenomena. But while the myths of the “natural invention” of music suppose a relationship of imitation (and thus distinction and difference) between humans and other animals, myths of metamorphosis rely on a different ontological premise and different metaphysics. Their focus is on the continuity of both the experience of life and the experience of music in a body that changes external form and collapses the distinction between a listener attuned to the nonhuman world and a human performer. In our myths, the listener ends up himself turning nonhuman performer, telescoping music as a listening activity and music as a productive activity.

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, and the Body in Imperial Culture The two passages above outline areas of debate and thought in Imperial literature and philosophy, and some of the complex history of the questions they handled. Our last text here, a passage from Aelian’s third-century CE Characters of Animals, not only illuminates another area of debate in Imperial texts, but also resonates with important ancient sociocultural practices. Along with the passage from Plutarch and that from Pliny, it provides a good part of the background on which our myths of metamorphosis flourished. Aelian’s two-volume collection gathers fascinating anecdotes about animals – most of them real (like elephants, cicadas, or dolphins) and



Forest: On Surrounds

some fantastic (like the basilisk), the boundaries between the two categories never being clear. An armchair scientist, Aelian did not observe animals in the flesh but compiled facts second-hand, mostly knowledge he got from Pliny’s Natural History, but also anecdotes and stories gleaned from the entire Greek canon (from the lyric poets to now-lost historiographers) that he made available to the man of culture of his time, the pepaideumenos. A significant number of the animal vignettes selected by Aelian deal with music and fascinating aspects of the animal sonic world, including the songs of cicadas (.), dolphins’ love of music (.), the silence of some frogs (.), and the following on swans: Ἀνθρώπων Ὑπεβορέων γένος καὶ τιμὰς Ἀπόλλωνος τὰς ἐκεῖθι ᾄδουσι μὲν ποιηταί, ὑμνοῦσι δὲ καὶ συγγραφεῖς, ἐν δὲ τοῖς καὶ Ἑκαταῖος, οὐχ ὁ Μιλήσιος, ἀλλ᾿ ὁ Ἀβδηρίτης . . . ὅταν οὖν οὗτοι τὴν νενομισμένην ἱερουργίαν κατὰ τὸν συνήθη καιρὸν τῷ προειρημένῳ ἐπιτελῶσιν, ἐκ τῶν Ῥιπαίων οὕτω καλουμένων παρ᾿ αὐτοῖς ὀρῶν καταπέτεται κύκνων ἄμαχα τῷ πλήθει νέφη, καὶ περιελθόντες τὸν νεὼν καὶ οἱονεὶ καθήραντες αὐτὸν τῇ πτήσει, εἶτα μέντοι κατίασιν ἐς τὸν τοῦ νεὼ περίβολον, μέγιστόν τε τὸ μέγεθος καὶ τὸ κάλλος ὡραιότατον ὄντα. ὅταν οὖν οἵ τε ᾠδοὶ τῇ σφετέρᾳ μούσῃ τῷ θεῷ προσᾴδωσι καὶ μέντοι καὶ οἱ κιθαρισταὶ συγκρέκωσι τῷ χορῷ παναρμόνιον μέλος, ἐνταῦθά τοι καὶ οἱ κύκνοι συναναμέλπουσιν ὁμορροθοῦντες καὶ οὐδαμῶς οὐδαμῆ ἀπηχὲς καὶ ἀπῳδὸν ἐκεῖνοι μελῳδοῦντες, ἀλλὰ ὥσπερ οὖν ἐκ τοῦ χορολέκτου τὸ ἐνδόσιμον λαβόντες καὶ τοῖς σοφισταῖς τῶν ἱερῶν μελῶν τοῖς ἐπιχωρίοις συνᾴσαντες. The race of the Hyperboreans and the honors there paid to Apollo are sung of by poets and are celebrated by historians, among whom is Hecataeus, not of Miletus but of Abdera . . . When at the customary time [the priests] perform the established ritual of the aforesaid god there swoop down from what are called the Rhipaean mountains swans in clouds, beyond count, and after they have circled round the temple as though they were purifying it by their flight, they descend into the precinct of the temple, an area of immense size and of surpassing beauty. Now whenever the singers sing their hymns to the god and the kithara players accompany the chorus with their complex tunes, thereupon the swans also with one accord join in the chant and never once do they sing a discordant note or out of tune, but as though they had been given the key by the conductor they chant in unison with the natives who are skilled in the sacred melodies. (Ael. NA .; trans. Loeb, modified) 



On Aelian, see Zucker ; Zucker ; French : –. On the type of animals described by Aelian, see Wallace-Hadrill : . For a similar kind of mix between real and imagined animals as represented on mosaics in the Imperial period, see Dunbabin . On the dolphin episode (which draws in part on Hdt. Hist. .), see Williams . On crossspecies love more generally: Kindstrand : .

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body



Aelian focuses on swans more than any other creature in his work. This interest undoubtedly comes from the fact that swans, along with nightingales, were traditionally considered one of the most musical animals, starting in our earliest Greek texts. The shorter Homeric Hymn to Apollo describes the swan as “singing Apollo in clear tones” and Callimachus in his Hymn to Delos calls swans “the most musical of all that fly.” In the myth of Er that Socrates narrates in Plato’s Republic, poets and singers can choose to come back to life in the body of a swan, as Orpheus did – and in the Phaedo, Socrates describes himself as a swan. Perhaps most famously, Horace imagines his own poetic transformation into a swan. But in our passage, Aelian dwells on something more specific: he depicts the birds joining in with humans and instruments to collaborate spontaneously in the musical celebration of the god Apollo. The description of this impromptu performance is as touching as it is intriguing. Aelian here documents a singular view of music as a species-blind activity, and suggests how the making of music (and its simultaneous enjoyment) is all-inclusive and encompasses humans and nonhuman animals in a form of communion that goes beyond verbal communication. Each verb for music-making that applies to the birds includes the prefix συν- (συναναμέλπουσιν, συνᾴσαντες) and indicates the collaboration of avian and human singers. I see the description of this multispecies “flash mob” as making a strong argument for the power of music to bridge species boundaries, and to resist other ways of thinking of music as an exclusive human activity. What matters is less who does the singing and with what capacities, or what music is or is not than the notion of “musicking” I introduced earlier, that is, participating in the making of music in whatever capacity. The superfluity of articulate speech to communicate between human and nonhuman animals in musicking is a powerful statement about where the sense and ability for music resides. Aelian’s passage provides a profound discourse on the phenomenology of music and the connectedness of beings in their experience of life through music. The much older myths of three kitharodes – Orpheus charming wild beasts, trees, and rocks with his music; Arion being rescued by a dolphin; and Amphion building the walls of Thebes through the power of his instrument – all provide the mythical background to the phenomenon 



Swans in Aelian: NA ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., .; VH .. On swans more generally, Arnott  and Arnott : –; Mynott : . For the connection with Apollo, Ahl . Homeric Hymn to Apollo (); Callim. Hymn . (also Hymn .–); Pl. Resp. a–; Pl. Phd. e–b; Hor. Carm. ..



Forest: On Surrounds

Aelian describes in his passage. A playful extract of Lucian’s secondcentury CE True Stories (II.) similarly describes a multispecies concert in the Elysian Fields: when they [Eunomus of Locris, Arion of Lesbos, Anacreon, and Stesichorus] stop singing, another chorus appears, composed of swans and swallows and nightingales, and as they sing the whole wood renders the accompaniment, with the winds leading.

Here, mythical hero, historical musicians, animals, and elements are humorously imagined as each contributing to a divine concert program. But instead of a fable-like golden age fantasy of all animals, plants, and rocks being subjugated by the force of a hero’s music, or the fiction of two musical acts, one human, the other animal and elemental, Aelian centers his story on humans and real-world animal others and their communing in music to celebrate the god. Other passages of Aelian attest of this interest and illustrate how music can transcend species, in its production and enjoyment, to reach the divine. The anecdote also describes a form of communion in the practice of music, not just its enjoyment: human and nonhuman animals join the same orchestra and musick together. The story ultimately bypasses the question of whether humans are different from other animals, or special in their relationship to music, and focuses on the universal, entraining, power of music. In collecting these strange and interesting stories of musicking animals, Aelian fed into an interest for encyclopedic knowledge and paradoxography in the ancient world that started in the Hellenistic period, as the expansion of Alexander’s empire put the Greeks in contact with other people, cultures, geographies, and practices. Defined as “the obsessive cataloguing and writing of otherness,” paradoxography takes the form of the description of strange spectacles, exotic animals, and foreign customs. The interest in paradoxography remained strong in the Imperial period and was partly fueled by the geographic expansion of the Roman Empire and the correlating intellectual curiosity and thirst for allencompassing knowledge parallel to the ever-expanding imperial quest. Entire volumes were devoted to such curious stories – a model of which can be found in Antigonus Carystus’ third-century BCE Marvelous Stories, 

 

“Entrainment” is an important idea, documented for example in Clayton  and Krueger . I am using the term loosely here, to refer to the sense that hearing music creates the desire to join in. Bartley : . Beagon : . For a thorough examination of the politics of the “ordering of knowledge” in the imperial period, König and Whitmarsh : especially –, –. See also Miller and Reill ; Naas ; Murphy ; Murphy .

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body



for example, itself inspired by Callimachus’ lost Book of Marvels and parts of Aristotle’s History of Animals, or in the pseudo-Aristotelian third-century BCE (?) Marvellous Things Heard and in Apollonius’ second-century BCE Marvelous Stories. Paradoxographical passages also found a welcoming home in historiography, in periegetic literature, in works devoted to natural history (such as Lucretius’ and Pliny’s) and in the genre of the novel, which comprised an element of travel to faraway lands and dealings with non-Greek cultures. Other passages of paradoxography suggest ideas about interspecies collaboration reminiscent of Aelian’s vignette. An episode recounted by Timaeus and Strabo (also originally in Antigonus of Carystus) in particular describes how in a contest between two kithara players, Ariston of Rhegium and Eunomus of Locri, a cicada lighted on the broken string of one of the contestants’ instrument to sing the missing sound, giving him the victory. This type of anecdote speaks volume about the way animal music could be conceptualized as on a continuum with human musical activity, independently of scientific or philosophical pronouncements about the relative abilities of human and nonhuman animals and independently of ideas about the ontological continuity between human and nonhuman animals. A Culture of Pantomime and Nonverbal Performance The idea of a musicking collaboration that goes beyond verbal communication presented in Aelian’s anecdote was also reinforced and supported by contemporary musical practices. The most important, most popular, and most influential kind of spectacle in the Imperial period was pantomime, an artistic genre that did not primarily rely on words to create its aesthetic effects. A form of dance that enacted mythical narratives through the movements of the performer, to the accompaniment either of chorus and orchestra or that of a musical instrument and narrator or solo singer, pantomime did not primarily rely on verbal communication to tell a story and represent (and arouse) strong emotions. 

 

On paradoxographical passages in the novel, Bartsch ; Morales ; LeVen a. On the relevance of animal fables for the novel, van Dijk . On Achilles Tatius’ possible reliance on mythographical lists and catalogs: Trzaskoma . Westermann  and Giannini  collect the writing of paradoxographers. Timaeus FGrH  F a–b; Antig. Car. Hist. Mir. .–; Strabo ... On pantomime: Lada-Richards ; Hall and Wyles ; Webb , Schlapbach . To situate pantomime among the culture of spectacles in the Roman Empire, fundamental are Veyne  and Dunbabin . See also Péché and Vendries .



Forest: On Surrounds

The success of pantomime artists and the influence of the genre in the Imperial period are difficult to overestimate. A number of material and written sources, and foremost among them Lucian’s dialogue On Pantomime, provides an in-depth defense and discussion of the art form. For the purposes of this book, one of the most important sources is probably Daphnis and Chloe, as it puts pantomime in direct relationship with the myths of musical metamorphoses told in the novel: the two protagonists dance a version of the story of the transformation of Syrinx into a panpipe after the myth is told by one of the characters (.–). Most importantly for us, “at the heart of all pantomime performance was the notion that a story could be told through a dancer’s silent, rhythmical movements, poses and gestures. In the words of a late Latin poem, the pantomime artist had “as many tongues as limbs.” This bypassing of the verbal both to suggest emotions and to create a strong aesthetic experience precisely sets pantomime as a sort of parallel for the beautiful, evocative, yet nonverbal songs of animals and nonhuman actors. The fifth-century poet and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris describes how Vincentius, a famous dancer of pantomime, brought his audiences to peaks of emotion through “nod, leg, knee, hand, and spin” (Poem .). As Hall and Wyles explain: The rhetoric surrounding [pantomime], whether in the mouths of its advocates or denigrators, is always one of spellbinding pleasure: the highly trained, muscular dancer spoke eloquently to his audiences “through the enchanting (thelxiphrona) trembling of his palm” (Greek Anthology ., ). This dance idiom, with its elaborate gestures and detailed imitation of the passions, conditioned and reflected other types of cultural practice and discourse, from rhetorical declamation to epic poetry, from the visual and decorative arts to philosophy, love poetry, and prose fiction . . .

As Lucian himself suggests, the pleasure provided by pantomime is a pleasure that is close to the one provided by nonverbal animal song, and Quintilian makes much the same point by pointing out how “even speechless animals convey anger, joy, or fawning by means of the eye and other physical signs” (IO ..). It shows how narrative can bypass 

 

On Lucian’s On Pantomime, see Lada-Richards . Lucian’s dialogue was composed in response to his contemporary Aelius Aristides’ (now lost) treatise attacking pantomime. In the third century CE, Libanius wrote a “Reply to Aristides on Behalf of the Dancers” (Or. ). The dancer Pylades was also said to have written a treatise on the form (Ath. Deipn. .e) and another treatise on pantomime is attributed by Macrobius to Roscius (Sat. ..) (on which, Schlapbach : ).  Hall and Wyles : . Anth. Lat. .; trans. Hall and Wyles. Hall and Wyles : –; emphasis in original.

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body



words, and how sensual pleasure can trump the pleasure provided by rational understanding – it can even be a form of “sign language,” as Augustine called it. The practice of pantomime also reflects very straightforwardly on fundamental questions of aesthetics: that of the expression and representation of emotions through an artistic medium, and that of aesthetic response to an art form through various media (verbal, visual, musical, etc.). Expanding on Hall and Wyles’ analysis, we can say that the practice of pantomime and the discourse surrounding it conditioned both authors reflecting on nonverbal art (or rather art whose power did not mostly rely on words but on music, sound, and movement) and spectators’ responses to music. The discourse on pantomime provided a cultural backdrop to think about issues of nonhuman song explored by the myths discussed in the rest of this book. A further aspect to this cultural phenomenon is important for the purposes of this book. Because pantomime was the single most important form of performance in the Roman Empire, it made myth in general, and tragic myths in particular, available to very large audiences, thus creating a common culture – the background on which other myths (including myths of musical metamorphosis) could resonate and even be transmitted. Lucian gives some indication of the range of myths performed, stating that the actor needed to be able to represent mythological scenes “beginning with chaos and the origins of the world down to Cleopatra queen of Egypt.” Ovidian myths in particular were the topic of pantomime performance, as Plutarch attests in his discussion of two famous Augustan pantomime dancers: Pylades performed plots inspired by Greek tragedy, while Bathyllus danced the myths representing the dance of an







Aug. De mag. .. See also an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonike describing his contemporary the pantomime Pylades as “gifted with all-sounding hands” (παμφώνοις χερσὶ λοχευόμενος, G&P () ). On body language and dance, Lada-Richards : –; Schlapbach : –. On sign language and poetry: Sanchez . Myths were otherwise gathered in collections: on Hellenistic and Imperial mythographers, see Cameron ; Higbie ; Trzaskoma ; and the more ambitious presentation of Delattre . As Trzaskoma notes (): “Such a process [of rapid and wide diffusion and multiplication of mythographical sources and information] did not occur because myth had lost its importance after the Hellenistic period, but because myth’s role in imperial paideia at all levels was so great that it was natural for it to become available in more compact and easily digestible forms.” He shows in particular how myth was “integrated with education, oratory, and literary writing” during the Second Sophistic. For an example of the “integrated” use of a mythical allusion (to Orpheus) in oratorical writing, see Dio Or. .. Luc. Salt.  (with Garelli : –, who doubts the reliability of Lucian’s description). On episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as evocative topics of pantomimes: Galinsky : ; Hall : –; Dunbabin : –; Ingleheart .

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Forest: On Surrounds

Echo, a Pan, a satyr, or an Eros. Some particularly popular performances of pantomime had self-reflective aspects, such as the ones that involved the mythical singers Philomela or Orpheus, or the embedded pantomime on the myth of Syrinx we find in Daphnis and Chloe, and would allow the artist to deploy their art to the fullest. With their nonverbal mode of appeal and their subject matter that could include nonhuman music (or music involving the nonhuman), these performances provided a resonating background for the myths of musical metamorphosis discussed in this book. Musical myths were, as a matter of fact, so important in the Imperial age that they (and the myth of Orpheus in particular) constituted a frequent subject of visual representation, especially on floor mosaics. One of the settings in which pantomime was performed (private homes) would thus visually echo some of the musical themes of the performance. The culture of pantomime also provides a privileged entry point into the specific kind of aesthetic questions that some of our myths examine, in particular that of the power of ekphrasis (in its ancient sense). Ekphrasis, as Ruth Webb has shown in detail, consisted in the vivid verbal representation of a scene. Pantomime was a form of embodied ekphrasis: the expressive potential of the body was foregrounded on the stage while the words of the narrative constituted the background – if they were needed at all. If the words of the song gave something to the mind’s eye to see, the performer’s body provided a site on which the audience’s gaze could focus. In that regard, pantomime triangulates the discussion about representation (mimesis), the nonverbal, and aesthetic experience. Danced myths thus provide the cultural background to understanding why the narratives of musical metamorphosis examined in this book were also ways of reflecting on alternatives to the verbal: the case of a complex narrative of Achilles Tatius (examined in Chapter ) puzzling over a painting representing the myth of the origins of the nightingale, or that of the myth of the syrinx, told from the mouth of Lamon, piped by Philetas, and danced by Daphnis and Chloe in Longus’ novel, provides the full background to understand the relationship between representation, emotions, and other forms of art bypassing the verbal.  

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Plut. Mor. e–f (Quaest. conv. ..). For more on issues of mimesis (and deixis) in pantomime: Schlapbach : –. Also LadaRichards : : “dance simply eschews the possibility of a complete translation into the linguistic mode.” See also the scene of pantomime in Apuleius (.–), where the issue of metamorphosis and that of silent embodiment through dance are once again linked; on the pantomime scene in Apuleius, see Schlapbach : –.

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body



But pantomime was an emblematic product of its time and its correlated concerns about the body. As Karin Schlapbach notes, “the idea of a bodily medium that is independent from language and gives unmediated access to thoughts, emotions, and character was not confined to gestures; it is also the basis of ancient physiognomical theories.” Pantomime did indeed have theoretical underpinnings, and provided an echo chamber for (or a locus for implementation of ) various kinds of thought that connected a certain type of body with a certain way of being in the world. Perhaps even more programmatically, because of the multiple tableaux that the pantomime artist’s body could juxtapose in his performance, pantomime provided a discourse on metamorphosis itself. As Lada-Richards puts it, “the pantomime’s body . . . was an important tool for society’s many and tangled ways of drafting and redrafting the ever-shifting boundaries between the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ the high and the low, the cultivated and the boorish, the intellectual and the corporeal.” The pantomime actor could embody several identities and one of the attractions of the genre was linked to deviation. In that respect, the binaries described by Lada-Richards could be extended to two other sets: the male and the female, the human and the nonhuman. The body of the dancer itself became the site of exploration of otherness, of peering into what so titillated Imperial audiences (and what we find in the myths of metamorphosis themselves). As such, pantomime is only one of the forms of expression of the “body-as-spectacle” and one instance of nonverbal communication relevant to the larger culture of Imperial spectacles. Voice, Body, and Self in Imperial Culture More generally, Imperial texts reflect on the experience of the body, and what it means to live an embodied life. As Foucault’s volume on the “care of the self” has underlined, “it is the philosophers and physicians active in the Latin-speaking West, notably the younger Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch, Galen, and Marcus Aurelius, who dominate the ethical discourse of  

 

Ibid., p. . For a clear statement of the idea, see Arist. [Phgn.] a: “that mental dispositions follow body characteristics and are not in themselves unaffected by movements of the body, that is clear in the case of drunkenness and illness; and that conversely, the body suffers together with passions of the soul, is evident in love, fear, grief and pleasure.” On the physiognomists, Gilhus : –; Gleason : –. Lada-Richards : . Also Lada-Richards . On pantomime and gender blurring: Lada-Richards : –; Webb : –.

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Forest: On Surrounds

selfhood in the first three centuries CE.” Galen is a particularly illuminating case, as he connected the physical body with the politico-cultural construction of identity. In Rome in the second century CE, one would have been able to witness his public vivisections of animals (of monkeys and pigs); these performances in turn played the role of an open theater for understanding the internal human self. According to Judith Perkins: “Galen’s practice of his medical method was making visible the interior of the individual, opening space for an inner life – one that was not mental but physical . . . Galen’s method . . . allowed the body to be a signifier of internal depths.” This form of display “fused the intellectual competition of Second Sophistic performance with the violent manipulation of bodies characteristic of Roman spectacle.” But doctors and philosophers were not the only ones to discuss the physical body in relation to the cultural self. To this list, we must add the Greek sophists, learned men (pepaideumenoi), traveling professors, and paradigms of élite Greek culture, who both knew the philosophical canon and were familiar with the medical discourse of the time (including on physiognomics). Reflecting on the cultural work of the body, sophists also performed the (gendered) self to accord with, often tacit, norms of behavior. In that culture of display and performance, the voice played the crucial role of tool and sign. Being an educated man meant displaying some of that manliness through speech and words: saying the right things with the right words, but also with the right looks and bodily composure, the right sounds and the right gestures. The body was both the instrument and the goal of self-fashioning: the instrument insofar as it made possible the expression of some of these features (through the mouthing of the right words or the emphasis on the right volume of sound, by practicing what Maud Gleason has termed the “calisthenics of manhood”), but also the goal insofar as it was bodies in action that audiences watched perform. The second-century CE sophist Aelius Aristides is a case in point: in his Sacred Tales, which document a ten-year battle with chronic illness, Aristides often derives information about his health from dreams or visions, and these tend in turn to encode information about performance. The mouth, for   



 Connolly : , referring to Foucault . Gleason .  Perkins . On Galen, see also Siegel . Gleason : . Connolly , on the discourse on selfhood in the Second Sophistic. See also Goldhill ; Gleason ; Whitmarsh . Gleason : xxii. On the training of the voice, Rousselle ; Melidis –; Barker ; Melidis ; Melidis in press. See also Goldhill , who describes the role of voice in “the somatics of social exchange” (–).

Aelian’s Swans: Musicking, Performance, & the Body

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example, is not just a body part, the orifice for ingesting food and drink, eructing and vomiting; it is also the locus of speech and declamation: When Aristides analyzes these dreams for information on how best to treat his condition, he collapses the mouth’s multiple functions (speaking, eat ing, drinking, vomiting) into a single key that he hopes will unlock bodily health, a process that captures the flavor of the intimate relationship he and his contemporaries see at work between oral performance and the mainte nance of a sound self.

This question of the body and its relationship with selfhood is of crucial importance for the purposes of this book, as the narrative engine of all the stories examined is the transformation of a human animal body into a nonhuman one and some of the questions it brings up about the activities and ways of being in the world they share in common. In some of the narratives, the new body preserves some of its old capacities, and we find a story of continued musical abilities (song inhabits the body of a maiden or that of a bird). In others, the new body means either loss of abilities (the musical shepherd Kerambos, for example, turned into a beetle, loses his ability to sing) or enhancement of abilities (the nonmusical Procne becomes the most musical of birds, the nightingale). While these questions are not discussed explicitly in the myths studied in the book, the myths echo cultural concerns discussed in the Imperial period. The selffashioning that many sophists and elite men were obsessed with works as the counterpart to the metamorphosis operated by the gods in many of the myths: the narratives of bodily (and vocal) transformation in the myths tap into anxieties, fears, and fantasies about what it means to express one’s (manly) self through the voice. As a matter of fact, it is not a coincidence that most of the myths examined in this book are about female transformation (the only nonfemale transformations are those of men into insects: the cicada and the stag beetle). Many of the stories actually violate natural reality, since in most Northern Hemisphere (non-migratory) bird species it is the male and not the female that sings. This gender reversal reinforces the idea that there was real anxiety about the integrity of the (human) male body and the dangerous potential of the female one: it was easier to explore the transformation of a body that was already conceived of as other than to conceptualize the terrifying metamorphic potential of one’s own. Like the vivisections publicly performed on nonhuman animals for the edification of humans, stories of female metamorphosis can be seen as a space for 

Connolly : .

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Forest: On Surrounds

working out anxieties about manhood, while representing it through the connectedness of beings. These stories about female voices also exploit the older tropes of the dangerous female voice (that of the Sirens, of Circe and Calypso, even of Scylla) or the danger of females as encapsulated in their voice (Helen in particular) that we find in Archaic narratives. Reworking the tradition, our myths tap into a reservoir of aesthetic, metaphysical, and sociocultural concerns that were also explored in contemporary philosophical discourse and performance practice.

Conclusion To provide insights into the intellectual history and cultural practices that gave rise to the myths of musical metamorphosis studied in the rest of the book, this chapter has focused on three suggestive passages from Imperial texts that capture some important and representative issues that were discussed at the time: relationships between human beings and their animal others; relationships between human and nonhuman animal song; and relationships between self-fashioning and nonverbal performance. These were by no means the only questions examined in the period but, as a whole, they provide a matrix for understanding how the question of what it means to be a musicking human animal was approached from multiple angles, in a variety of media, and across several centuries. Nonhuman animals were of course everywhere in culture, literature, and everyday life in the Roman Empire. From dealings with animals in hunting, farming, transportation, and veterinary medicine to no less intimate but more uncomfortable moments of encounter with the animal other in vivisection, sacrifice, and divination, people shared daily life with their nonhuman others and had to negotiate relationships with them: sometimes of extreme closeness, sometimes of distancing. Most of what is associated with “ancient thought” (Homer, tragedy, Plato, and Aristotle) usually privileged the distancing between human and nonhuman species. But poets, philosophers, fiction writers, and scholars of various scientific disciplines reflected explicitly and in various genres on the human/nonhuman animal interface, and held a wide variety of opinions about their relationships with each other, more often than not emphasizing the continuity in the experience of life between human and nonhuman animals, and their many points of contact. 

I am less interested here in the way nonhuman animals are represented and mobilized to figure relationships of power. The scholarship on the topic is vast and varied. See, for example, Hall 

Conclusion



Rather than discussing animals as symbols of cultural power or disenfranchisement, my point in this chapter has been to highlight the variety of ways in which texts and authors offered alternatives to the dominant discourse that saw profound division between human and nonhuman (most often articulated around the issue of logos, as speech or rationality). In particular, the resurgence of Pythagoreanism in the first century CE and ideas about metempsychosis in Neoplatonician thought, as well as the rise of different religions (including Christianity, which put humans closer to gods than to beasts) all brought the possibility that the human was certainly not isolated and maybe even not as exceptional as thought. At the very least, there is a set of beliefs in the Roman Empire that is more varied than in Archaic and Classical times, and that results from accretion of many different beliefs and ways of representing where humans fit in the world. I have not argued for any relationship of direct influence, from specific philosophical beliefs on the myths, for example. Rather, I have outlined the contours of a culture in which anthropocentrism is not the only option, and where questioning the boundaries human/nonhuman is not only welcome but also part of showing one’s paideia: myths of metamorphosis find their place in a culture that welcomes new religions, new relationships between different types of people (slaves/non-slaves; Greeks/Romans; elite/non-elite) and where being a human animal is a question actively discussed in many forms. Metamorphosis is only one narrative mechanism among others that allow discussion of mobility between states of being, and the capacious genre of mythical narrative (with its visual echoes in decorative arts, and its pervasive presence in the form of pantomime performances) exploited this device to many productive effects. If the myths were thus “contemporary with” many different ways of thinking the human, they are also contemporary in another way – contemporary with modern ways of thinking, modern ways of conceptualizing the issues of embeddedness, connectedness, and matter, which the rest of the book will develop in detail.

on the Ass (where the ass is a “figure for the suffering and complicity enforced by Roman rule”); Swain :  n. ; Bloomer  on the “mixed” cultural identity constructed by Phaedrus in the representation of animals; Whitmarsh : – on a swan poem by Mesomedes (where the bird can figure the relationship with imperial power). In Philo, the human/animal relationship figures the relationship between Jews (and Jewish culture) and other peoples and cultures (on which, Gilhus ).

 

Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

ἔτερψεν αὐτούς ποτε φάττα βουκολικὸν ἐκ τῆς ὕλης φθεγξαμένη. καὶ τῆς Χλόης ζητούσης μαθεῖν ὅ τι λέγει, διδάσκει αὐτὴν ὁ Δάφνις μυθολογῶν τὰ θρυλούμενα· “ἦν παρθένος, παρθένε, οὕτω καλὴ καὶ ἔνεμε βοῦς πολλὰς οὕτως ἐν ὕλῃ. ἦν δὲ ἄρα καὶ ᾠδικὴ καὶ ἐτέρποντο αἱ βόες αὐτῆς τῇ μουσικῇ, καὶ ἔνεμεν οὔτε καλαύροπος πληγῇ οὔτε κέντρου προσβολῇ, ἀλλὰ καθίσασα ὑπὸ πίτυν καὶ στεφανωσαμένη πίτυϊ ᾖδε Πᾶνα καὶ τὴν Πίτυν, καὶ αἱ βόες τῇ φωνῇ παρέμενον. παῖς οὐ μακρὰν νέμων βοῦς, καὶ αὐτὸς καλὸς καὶ ᾠδικὸς ὡς ἡ παρθένος, φιλονεικήσας πρὸς τὴν μελῳδίαν, μείζονα ὡς ἀνήρ, ἡδεῖαν ὡς παῖς φωνὴν ἀντεπεδείξατο, καὶ τῶν βοῶν ὀκτὼ τὰς ἀρίστας ἐς τὴν ἰδίαν ἀγέλην θέλξας ἀπεβουκόλησεν. ἄχθεται ἡ παρθένος τῇ βλάβῃ τῆς ἀγέλης, τῇ ἥττῃ τῆς ᾠδῆς, καὶ εὔχεται τοῖς θεοῖς ὄρνις γενέσθαι πρὶν οἴκαδε ἀφικέσθαι. πείθονται οἱ θεοὶ καὶ ποιοῦσι τήνδε τὴν ὄρνιν, ὄρειον ὡς ἡ παρθένος, μουσικὴν ὡς ἐκείνη. καὶ ἔτι νῦν ᾄδουσα μηνύει τὴν συμφοράν, ὅτι βοῦς ζητεῖ πεπλανημένας.” Τοιάσδε τέρψεις αὐτοῖς τὸ θέρος παρεῖχε. One day, a ringdove delighted them with its bucolic vocalizations coming from the wood. As Chloe sought to know what it was saying, Daphnis taught her by telling her a well known myth. “There was once, young lady, a young lady, who was as beautiful as you, and who used to pasture her many cows in the wood too. It turns out that she was also a songster and the cows used to delight in her music, and she pastured them neither with the blows of a staff nor with the prick of a goad, but sitting under a pine tree and crowned with a pine wreath, she sang of Pan and Pitys, and the cows would stay near her voice. There was a boy who pastured his cows not far away, and he too was beautiful and a songster like the girl, and he competed with her in singing. He rivaled her song with a voice that was louder, because he was male, but sweet, because he was a child, and he beguiled her eight best cows to his own herd. The girl was distraught by the loss of her herd, and by her defeat in song, and she prayed to the gods to be turned into a bird before returning home. The gods granted her wish and turned her into this bird here, who lives in the hills as she used to, and who is musical as she had been. And she still now tells her misfortune in her song: she is looking for her stray cows.” Such were the delights that that summer brought them. (Longus D&C . ) 

Symptomatology of Music: Four Animal Responses to Song



There is no better place to start talking about music than Lesbos. The Aegean island is an echo chamber of musical myths. It resonates with the sounds of the lyre of Orpheus, the footsteps of Arion and Terpander, and the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus. But I want to start with a performance that is both more, and less, familiar: the cry of a ringdove (or wood pigeon, Gr. φάττα, Lat. columba palumbus) heard in the woods, in Longus’ Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe. The myth is not told anywhere else in extant Greek and Roman literature, but it introduces questions that will be examined throughout this book – questions about the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in the making of music, questions about metamorphosis and representation, and questions about music’s agency and power. In that regard, even if idiosyncratic, the myth is also programmatic for my purposes. Nothing is known about the author of Daphnis and Chloe and even the novel’s date is uncertain, although a second-century CE date seems likely. But nothing else need be known other than that Daphnis and Chloe takes its name from the main protagonists, two teenaged foundlings who grow up in the Lesbian countryside. The romance is the first of a long tradition of pastoral novels. Set in an indeterminate past, it features the typical ecology of pastoral literature: human characters who live in harmony with the landscape and other animals, and worship nature divinities (the Nymphs and Pan). Abandoned as babies by their rich parents, Daphnis and Chloe are first briefly nurtured by a goat and a sheep respectively, then rescued by a goatherd and a shepherd, and subsequently raised as members of rustic households. The novel describes how they grow up pasturing their flocks together, experience the first symptoms of love, discover love’s name, and, after many adventures, accomplish its deeds, in the last pages of the novel that culminates in their wedding night. The novel is structured in four books mapped onto the rhythm of the seasons, and our episode belongs to the first book – spring and summer. As this chapter will demonstrate, despite the omnipresence of the natural world, the myth is less concerned with animal songsters than with the uncanny power of musical performance.

Symptomatology of Music: Four Animal Responses to Song The myth of the ringdove captures a unique reflection on musical performance across the animal world and meticulously depicts different forms of 



The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website presents a collection of pictures of the bird and recordings of its song: https://ebird.org/species/cowpig. Hunter : – and Morgan :  provide overviews of the scholarly debate on the date.



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

response to vocal music. The opening word of the passage introduces the main subject of reflection of the episode: τέρψις – pleasure, delight. It characterizes Daphnis and Chloe’s reaction to the bird’s voice (ἔτερψεν αὐτούς ποτε φάττα βουκολικὸν φθεγξαμένη, “a ringdove delighted them with its bucolic vocalizations”) and from the first words cues the reader to think about questions of aesthetic response. But soon enough, the simple statement is complicated by the fact that it is also the type of response experienced by the cows, who “used to delight” in the girl’s music (ἐτέρποντο αἱ βόες αὐτῆς τῇ μουσικῇ). The verbal parallel suggests a form of continuity between the experience of humans and other animals. The cross-species gap is bridged twice, as both types of animal (human and bovine) listen to the sounds of another species in delight. This verbal echo raises a series of fundamental questions about the experience of beauty and responses associated with it: is the delight Daphnis and Chloe experience in listening to a bird really the same as the delight the cows experience in listening to a human voice? That is: is the reference to the cows’ pleasure a mere façon de parler or does it reflect a deep way of thinking about animal behavior and emotions? And whose perspective is captured in both statements: is the reference to bovine “pleasure” in the myth told by Daphnis a conscious echo of the narrator’s verb used for humans, or is Daphnis’ view of animals (or the view he reports in his telling of the “well-known myth”) different from that of the narrator? Finally, can our own modern critical language provide an appropriate way of describing phenomenological continuity or differences between species, and, more urgently maybe, how do any of these humans know what the cows are actually feeling? Already the myth shows us how its verbal texture intertwines questions of poetics, aesthetics, and ethology. From the aesthetic receptivity to song and vocal beauty that works as common denominator between human and nonhuman animals, four further attitudes are described in the course of the episode. First, the cows react to the performance of the girl, Phatta, with content stillness. As she sings the story of Pan and Pitys, her cows stay close to her voice (αἱ βόες τῇ φωνῇ παρέμενον). The girl’s voice quells their movement better than a herding implement. Phatta is here a humble, female embodiment of the mythical Orpheus, using song to domesticate the world and create a form



Stumpf : – provides a tentative answer as to the difference in the origins of the pleasure caused by music (absolute pitch for animals, relative pitch for humans), but says nothing about the difference, if any, in the nature of the pleasure.

Symptomatology of Music: Four Animal Responses to Song



of harmony. One could see in the cows’ attitude one of the models of aesthetic response that Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi has outlined in her suggestively titled Frontiers of Pleasure: there is, in the pleased stillness of the cows, something reminiscent of what she describes as tranquility, or, borrowing from Kant and Joyce, “restful contemplation,” and “silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure.” The narrative emphasizes the attention to the voice (φωνή), the same medium that charmed Daphnis and Chloe to start with (φάττα βουκολικὸν . . . φθεγξαμένη – “the bucolic vocalizations of the ringdove”), and the same medium as the boy will use to lure the cows (φωνὴν ἀντεπεδείξατο – “he rivaled her song with [his] voice”). The ubiquitous presence of the voice in the passage introduces a distinction between two features that might captivate one’s attention in all animal vocalizations. On the one hand, one’s listening can have a melocentric focus, that is a particular sensitivity to pitches, rhythms, contours, flow, or timbre, that allows the listener to be engulfed in sounds and the sensual pleasure of the voice. This is the type of listening illustrated both by Chloe’s initial response to the birdsong, when she is delighted without knowing what the vocalizations mean, and by the cows who listen to Phatta without understanding her words (or so the story is focalized). On the other hand, listening can have a logocentric focus, that is, a fascination with the meaning of the words. This is the type of response illustrated by the reader who focuses on the story that Phatta sings (the metamorphosis of Pitys into a tree and its ominous overtones for the heroine of the myth, Phatta, and that of the novel, Chloe) without being given access to the sounds of the song itself, and by Chloe’s fascination with the meaning of the bird’s vocalizations. This type of listening seeks something transcending the voluptuous qualities of song or voice, a form of intellectual stimulation that goes beyond the sensory overload one experiences. In the course of any performance, one’s attention can of course oscillate between melocentric and logocentric attention. One might be charmed sometimes by the mellifluous cascades of notes, sometimes by the meaning of the aural material – on the archetypal model of Odysseus’ 

 



On the power of Orpheus’ music over the nonhuman world, Simon. PMG ; Aesch. Ag. ; also T – Kern. Peponi : –. The verb used, φθέγγομαι (to make a sound), is used indiscriminately for human and nonhuman animals and instruments (Rocconi : ). For more on the vocabulary of the voice, see Chapter . I am using the adjective “logocentric” to mean what it refers to etymologically (a focus on logos), without reference to its later uses by Saussure, Derrida, etc. in literary theory.



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

mythical encounter with the Sirens, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter. This dual focus is at the heart of the history of sung drama, from Greek tragedy to modern opera, and the controversies it has created throughout the centuries. A second animal reaction is portrayed in the passage: when hearing the music produced by the boy, the same pleased cows – or rather, the eight best among them – are charmed and wander off to the boy’s herd (θέλξας ἀπεβουκόλησεν). The verb “charm” (θέλγειν) used to describe the boy’s sway over the animals (but not the girl’s) is the one traditionally used to describe the enchanting and beguiling power of divine musicians, such as the Sirens, the Muses, or Orpheus. It underlines the magical power of song, the craftiness of the singer, and the unhinging effect of listening. In this scenario, our shepherd boy, too, like the girl charming the cows, becomes an Orpheus figure. This time, however, another facet of the mythical musician is emphasized: the youth channels Orpheus’ disquieting power, through his song, to conquer the wild, to move the unmovable (such as rocks and the gods of the Underworld), and to transform the order of the world (by making savage beasts meek, and by leading the dead back to life). Beauty, in the music and in the boy’s appearance, creates movement, irresistible attraction of like to like, even a form of fusion between performer and listener. Musical beauty irradiates its surroundings, visually and aurally, and attracts more beauty, on the model of the eight best cows who follow the irresistible tune of the gorgeous lad. This second type of aesthetic response supersedes the first: peaceful contemplation is trumped by the urge to follow the tune and the domestic turns wild. At this point in the story, the reader is not given access to the content of the boy’s Orphic-like song – presumably because the narrative is framed from the perspective of Daphnis, who retains some exclusivity in matters of knowledge, or perhaps because the narrator cannot claim to reproduce or describe in words the kind of song that would charm eight cows and drive a girl to become a bird. However, while nothing is said about Phatta’s voice, we are this time given some criteria of judgment for phonic beauty: 







On the fascination throughout the centuries with the singing voice, poised between the linguistic and the extralinguistic, see Abbate ; Tomlinson ; Duncan ; Nooter . On the close connection between herding and music in Greece, see Duchemin  (with comparative evidence for Eastern civilizations, –); Giannisi ; and Chapter  below. For example, Od. . and  (the Sirens); Hymn. Hom. Ap.  (the Delian maidens, fabulous singers who can imitate and represent any voice they wish); Ap. Rhod. Argon . ( T  Kern) and Conon fr.  ( T  Kern), both on Orpheus’ voice. On the force of θέλγειν, see Peponi : –. On this form of attraction that might be called fusion, see Peponi : –.

Symptomatology of Music: Four Animal Responses to Song



what makes the song of the boy superior to that of Phatta is the hybrid quality of the performer’s voice. Being both louder (because of the former’s gender) and sweet (because of his age), it has that fleeting and transient quality that still arouses listeners’ sense of wonderment at the sound of boys’ choirs and countertenors. Fascinating and dangerous like the voice of monsters, it defies categories. It flouts gender divisions and challenges time, as it hovers musically over the precipice of adulthood and its firm gender divides. It is a vocal image for what Daphnis himself cannot remain forever and will soon abandon. The third type of aesthetic response is also the most spectacular. Defeated in the improvised competition, the girl, taking the gods as witness to the gravity of the situation, decides to change species. It is difficult to imagine a more radical response. Figuratively mortified, Phatta chooses to never go home again, to never again sing to her chorus of faithful cows, and to become a wild bird. This cosmic response to rapt cattle is reminiscent of a different myth involving another mischievous boy with extraordinary musical talent and a deep interest in cows: the baby god Hermes, who stole his brother Apollo’s cows and paid him back with a song, thus creating a new cosmic pattern in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Our myth inverts this narrative, as it is the song that causes the theft, and not the theft that is repaid by the song. But the result of the equation “cows for song” is the same: it introduces cosmic change – the introduction of a new species or a new god to the universe. Just as unexpected as the girl’s appeal to the gods is the gods’ sanction of her decision. They change her into a bird, silently validating her opinion about the significance of the musical competition and the appropriateness of her new feathery form. The metamorphosis vanquishes the girl and becomes a





Sweet and high yet powerful male voices have exercised a relentless fascination on Western audiences. From the middle of the sixteenth century on, this fascination was historically enacted in the institution of castrati: boys who were castrated before puberty and thus preserved their high voice in the body of a grown man, and who performed in particular in church choirs, where women were not allowed. On castrati: Barbier ; André ; Herr and Wessel ; Feldman . See also Barthes , who analyzes Balzac’s Sarrasine, the story of the castrato La Zambinella, and the question of physical transgressions of the voice. Although the last castrato died in , interest in high male voices survives in the fascination with countertenors (male singers covering the range of female contraltos or mezzo-sopranos). Mark Griffith reminded me, per litteras, that the phenomenon is not limited to European cathedral and operatic traditions but extends to pop music: the falsetto voice nowadays is praised in popular musical idioms: for example, Eddie Kendricks, Al Green, Earth Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson, Prince, Jeff Buckley, Gabby Pahinui, etc. Hymn. Hom. Merc. – (on which, Clay : – and Thomas ).



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

metaphor for a radical kind of aesthetic response – for Phatta, a lifechanging matinée at the opera. What might have prompted her to relinquish her human form? We are not given access to that part of her psyche, but her decision might derive from the same competitive drive (which is hinted at with the participle φιλονεικήσας) and youthful rashness as her male counterpart. The scene could also, like the Homeric Hymn to Hermes passage, be interpreted in socioeconomic terms: Phatta’s grief is a matter of loss of property, status, and even self-respect. The rapt cattle actually represent a form of rape, damage done to her musical person against her will. The scene is strongly polarized in terms of gender and illustrates a form of female silencing. In the fantasy of the myth, the metamorphosis and relinquishing of her human form is for Phatta a way to continue singing, without having to fear suffering such indignity in the future. Her choice of new identity suggests that only a bird can beat a boy with a marvelous voice, in a competition taken to the next level. But this time, the myth does not explain what might make the ringdove’s voice better than that of the youth: while the features of the boy’s exquisite voice are described, nothing is said of the birdsong, and we are simply invited to conclude that it is a fitting compensation for the lost competition, a superlative form of musicality that does not need description. And yet, despite her new avian form, the girl still looks for the cows that signify her old self – a singer and herder – and her defeat. The cows will not respond to the bird’s song, but the animal jury (the eight cows who decided in favor of the boy’s song) is replaced at the end of the story by a human panel of two (Daphnis and Chloe) that delights in the birdsong. One could add one more line to this competing duet between male and female voice: that of Daphnis, who tries to surpass, with mere words, the girl’s avian song by his retelling of a myth to a jury of one – Chloe. The last lines of Daphnis’ speech actually bring us back to the beginning of the episode, where the ringdove’s song is described with the same ambiguity between old and new self: although a bird, she utters a bucolic, literally 



I am indebted to Mark Griffith for this interpretation, which he pursues at greater length in the project he is currently working on, titled Music and Difference. The gender conflict is the feature of the myth what has been most discussed in scholarship: see Chalk ; Kestner ; Philippides ; MacQueen ; Kossaifi ; Montiglio ; Schlapbach . I will examine the connection between the female voice, the raped body, and trauma at greater length in Chapters  and . See Payne : – on metamorphosis as the trope used by ancients and moderns to work through the puzzlement felt over the emotional continuity between species, in works from Ovid to Kafka.

Framing Nature, Culture, and Art



“cow-herding” cry (βουκολικὸν . . . φθεγξαμένη) that is appropriate to her former identity. The adjective plays a metapoetic and self-referential function and refers to the bucolic ancestry of the novel itself; but it also relies on a specific understanding, and representation, of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals and their environment. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, these lines introduce a fourth model of response, which constitutes an alternative to delighted stillness, moved rapture, and cosmic metamorphosis. Listening to the sound of the ringdove brings for Chloe a quest for meaning and desire for interpretation: μαθεῖν ὅ τι λέγει – what does the bird’s song mean, or what is the song/bird saying (an issue of translation and interpretation that I will return to later in the chapter)? This question is the instinct that lies behind a certain type of aesthetic response: it reveals, as Alexander Nehamas has suggested, not simply an appreciation of beauty, but a process of valuation. That process of interpretation, and the focus on what the cry signifies, is quite different from the pleasurable reaction to the beauty of the song, based on the enjoyment of the voice’s timbre (sweet) and volume (loud). It participates in the initiatory quest of Daphnis and Chloe as a whole, a novel that is framed as a quest to discover the name and deeds of eros (passionate desire). The response to the question of the meaning of the cry in turn entails much more complex questions that involve, in Nehamas’ words, “knowledge, sensitivity, and effort” in conceptualizing the relationship between humans and other animals and their mutual relationship to language, communication, and vocal performance, issues to which I now turn.

Framing Nature, Culture, and Art The myth of Phatta’s metamorphosis is the first of three myths embedded in the novel and devoted to the origins of musical phenomena. The second (in book ) relates the invention of the syrinx (an instrument also known as panpipes made out of the reeds into which the nymph Syrinx transforms as she flees Pan’s forceful sexual advances). The third (in book ) describes the discovery of the echo (a natural phenomenon resulting from the dismemberment of the nymph Echo, killed by order of her frustrated 



On Daphnis and Chloe (henceforth D&C) and the idea of pastoral, see Chalk ; Mittelstadt ; Hunter ; Halperin ; Hubbard . On the term and on the “bucolic problem,” Gutzwiller .  Nehamas : –. Nehamas : .



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

musical lover, Pan). These aetiological myths of increasing violence against women have been read as a counterpoint, and warning, to the main story narrated in Daphnis and Chloe, that of the development of love between the two characters, and their education in matters of love and sex. They are ways of prefiguring the future silencing of Chloe, of delineating the sexual difference between the two characters, and of attributing to both their proper socially gendered roles as grown adults and their place in the world. Our myth of course might apply to Chloe as much as to Phatta. In his telling of the story, Daphnis heavy-handedly marks the equivalence between the two maidens: “there was once a young lady” (παρθένος) is echoed in the direct address to Chloe (“young lady” – παρθένε), and the adverb οὕτω (“thus”) connects the musical and pastoral activities of the maiden in the myth with those of the character of the novel. Other details not mentioned by Daphnis, yet present in the narrative, also link the Phatta of the myth and the Chloe of the novel: they both sit innocently under a pine tree and weave crowns of flowers, they both pray to the gods, and Pan is involved in both of their lives – all details bound to make us read one maiden in the light of the other. There is no ambiguity: Phatta, who does not realize she sings of her own fate in singing of Pitys (a girl turned into another species because of a male’s unwelcome advances), is ultimately silenced and feels the need to renounce her nature as girl under the threat of male domination. In the same way, Chloe listens, without realizing, to a tale of female musical silencing told in the voice of a male in a position of authority. By listening to the myth, we readers delight in Daphnis’ pastoral narrative of the origins of a species, and enjoy its extraordinary naïve features (including the fantastic logic of metamorphosis from human to bird). We, like Chloe, are the audience at whom the competitive song is aimed. But, unlike Chloe (whose immediate reaction to Daphnis’ myth is not described), we also catch the irony and the subversive overtones of Daphnis’ narrative, undoing Chloe just like the boy of the myth undid 



Most recently, De Temmerman :  summarizes, “it is commonly accepted that these three myths are best read as a series featuring close thematic connections with the main story.” See also MacQueen : –, –, –; Morgan : ; Cueva : –; Gillespie ; Kossaifi ; Montiglio ; Cueva  – who all argue for the connection with aesthetic issues (contra: Bowie : ). The most nuanced interpretation is Schlapbach : –, building on Schlapbach . For views on the myths as not related to the narrative: Philippides . On the mythos of Chloe: Chalk . I examine the panpipes myth in detail in Chapter  and Echo in Chapter . Konstan ; Montiglio .

Framing Nature, Culture, and Art



Phatta. On the one hand, we can enjoy for a moment the folk tale about the bird, and participate in this pastoral world in which rustics believe in the human origins of animals; on the other, we can capture the terrible irony that the characters do not see. This mode of reading specific to the novel is explained by Froma Zeitlin: The pleasures of the text are . . . doubled as the reader is asked to view through two lenses: that of the naive child whose primary learning provides the plot of the story, and that of the sophisticated voyeur who is permitted to participate in both domains of perception.

The paragraph immediately preceding our narrative is paradigmatic of this voyeuristic double take and deserves consideration. We are told that it is midafternoon, and that the two characters have spent the day shepherding their flocks in the summer heat; Chloe falls asleep under a tree. Daphnis is gazing at her beauty, voicing to himself the symptoms of his desire, and lamenting his powerlessness to act upon them, when a swallow pursuing a cicada brushes by Chloe’s cheek and drops the cicada in the girl’s bosom. Chloe wakes up in a fright, unaware of the insect’s presence. As “our friend the cicada” (τὸν βέλτιστον τέττιγα) lets out its song, begging to be released, Chloe screams again, and, to the delight of the scandalized reader, Daphnis, laughing, reaches between the girl’s breasts to retrieve the insect lodged in the folds of her garment. To bring this to a paroxysm of titillation, Chloe, now laughing as well, puts our cicada back where it fell. What is most important in this rich passage is the play with the reader’s expectations encapsulated in the expression “our friend the cicada.” These few words reveal the kind of camaraderie that the narrator assumes with his reader, an experienced adult aware of just how erotically charged Daphnis’ innocent fondling of the cicada inside Chloe’s bosom is, and just how sexy her putting the cicada back in is, with its invitation to repeat the caress. As both characters are still learning, their gestures are innocent in their world, but highly erotically charged in the adult world of the experienced reader. In this specific context, as in the novel more generally, the “learning” that Zeitlin refers to is often described as the slow detachment from animal nature and integration into cultured (gendered) society. As the novel tells us, the children have first learned by being imitators of the sights and sounds around them (μιμηταὶ τῶν ἀκουομένων καὶ βλεπομένων, .). This natural education makes, in the eyes of the reader, for delightful 

Zeitlin : , and – for education by mimesis of nature.



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

results, such as the rustic artifacts and melodies they imitate from animals, but also for more grotesquely comical ones, as when Daphnis tries to enact his sexual desire for Chloe by imitating the billy goats (μιμούμενος τοὺς τράγους, .) mounting the nanny goats from behind. Along with this process of learning from nature, the novel also explores some innate cultural instincts, as for example Chloe’s coy silence about a kiss received from a dying cowherd (D&C .) or her modesty at asking Daphnis why she should no longer take her clothes off once Daphnis has discovered the deeds of eros (D&C .). But in matters of human eros and sex, neither animal model nor innate instinct will do, and the novel introduces a human adult, praeceptor amoris, the old Philetas, who instructs the characters early in book  about the social norms of love, sex, and the body. Ultimately, the complexity of the learning experience, and the impossibility of reducing it to an opposition between animal nature and human acculturation, resurface in the scene of Daphnis’ actual initiation into sex: after Philetas’ veiled description of the nature of eros and recommendation of remedies for it (including “kissing and lying together naked”), Daphnis needs another human teacher, the adult Lycaenion (“Ms. Wolfette”), to initiate the process. Only after Lycaenion’s intervention does “nature herself” teach Daphnis “the rest of what needed to be done” (αὐτὴ γὰρ ἡ φύσις λοιπὸν ἐπαίδευε τὸ πρακτέον, D&C .). But there is another framework that the birdsong episode and the teaching of Chloe taps into. Chloe’s request for the explanation of an experience of beauty recalls the opening paragraph of the novel, where the narrator describes his encounter with the most delightful sight he has ever seen. His aesthetic experience takes place in a grove, the same woody environment as that of the birdsong, and is described with an adjective – τερπνοτέρα – derived from the same word as the term used for the delight provided by the song. Here, the object of the narrator’s delight is a painting, whose meaning requires exegesis: On Lesbos, as I was hunting, in a grove of the Nymphs I saw the most beautiful spectacle I have ever seen: it was a painted depiction, a testimony to love [εἰκόνα γραπτήν, ἱστορίαν ἔρωτος]. The grove too was beautiful, shady, flowery, and well irrigated. A single spring fed all, trees and flowers. But the painting was more delightful, its rendering exquisite, and its topic was the fortunes of eros [ἀλλ’ ἡ γραφὴ τερπνοτέρα καὶ τέχνην ἔχουσα περιττὴν καὶ τύχην ἐρωτικήν]. To the point that many strangers came because of its reputation, suppliants to the Nymphs, and spectators of the painting. On it, some women were giving birth, and others were wrapping infants in swaddling clothes, babies were being exposed, flock were

Framing Nature, Culture, and Art



nourishing them, shepherds were picking up the babies, young people were sworn together, there was also a descent of bandits and the beginning of a war, and many other events related to eros. As I was looking in admiration, a longing [πόθος] took hold of me to compose in response to the painted composition [ἀντιγράψαι τῇ γραφῇ). And having found an interpreter [ἐξηγητὴν] of the painting, I labored over [ἐξεπονησάμην] four books, a dedication to Love and the Nymphs and Pan, a delightful possession [κτῆμα τερπνὸν] for humankind, which will cure the one who is sick, and cheer up the one who is in pain, which will make the lover reminisce and teach the one who has not loved yet. (Longus D&C . .)

This opening paragraph of Daphnis and Chloe introduces an issue that will recur throughout the novel: that of mimesis as creative emulation in the realm of representation (rather than action) and responses to beauty in the visual and aural realms. The narrative of the novel as a whole is an “antigraphic” response to the beauty of a painting, a development of the initial ekphrasis of the painting, which was explained to the narrator by a learned exegete. The novel is the superlative response, in words, to the topic of the painting that was itself even more beautiful than the natural setting in which it appeared. In the rest of Daphnis and Chloe, the narrator continues to play a crucial role in navigating the different forms and levels of representation, and in bringing attention to the bridging of the gap between the bucolic world of the characters that he creates through his narrative fiction and the urban world to which he and his reader belong. To put it simply, our ringdove myth is enmeshed in this network of representations on three levels. First, the myth itself constitutes a form of ekphrasis and mirrors the novel as a whole: it is a verbal account of a delightful display, which itself resists immediate understanding. Daphnis plays the role of the main narrator, Chloe is the audience, and Phatta is a replica of the characters within the novel. Second, just like the painting described by the narrator, the nonverbal cry of the bird is a beautiful object that encapsulates a story, but also, just like the painting, it lacks an element of time and syntax and needs interpretation. Third, just like the scene represented in the painting, the cry is stilled in time and endlessly repeated beyond the moment of its immediate signification. What Daphnis does in telling the story is re-verbalize what had been lost in the urgency of the animal cry. 



On the relationship between the prologue of the novel and the inset tales, see Newlands ; Wouthers ; Morgan : –. On ekphrasis, mimesis, and the urge for interpretation: Fowler ; Goldhill ; Sharrock ; Elsner a; Elsner b; Bartsch and Elsner ; Goldhill ; Zeitlin .



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

The richest reading of the interplay between art, mimesis, and eros in the pastoral context of the story is provided by Froma Zeitlin’s examination of the “poetics of Eros.” She notes, in particular, that the myths “exemplify the mythopoetic capacities of [Daphnis and Chloe] which intends, as Pan tells us in the second book, to make a mythos out of Chloe through the agency of Eros.” Zeitlin focuses on the description of two gardens in the novel that mark important milestones in the narrative: the garden in which Philetas gives Daphnis and Chloe their first mythology lesson about Eros and practical advice on how to act upon their lovesickness, and the magnificent garden tended by Daphnis’ rustic parents, in which the denouement of the novel takes place. On Zeitlin’s subtle reading, “the narrator, himself a voyeur from the city, may represent the work of this book in the allegory of the paradeisos [garden] . . . and construct a viewing space that exemplifies the essential categories of nature and art.” If we extend Zeitlin’s reading to the aural realm, the wood, just like the garden, would invite us to interpret Daphnis’ explanation of the natural song of the ringdove as “constructing a hearing space” that exemplifies, in the aural realm, the essential categories of nature and art, which in turn can be used as paradigms to interpret the rest of the musical phenomena of the novel. Yet at the heart of this sophisticated and influential approach resides the construction of nature and art as “essential categories.” It is on this framework that the reading model described earlier hinges, a model in which the pepaideumenos (“learned”) reader of Daphnis and Chloe can derive pleasure from knowing more than the naïve children, and still derive voyeuristic delight in their discovery of eros. But this type of imagined ancient reader strangely resembles us modern urban creatures in our yearning to relate to the knowing narrator and feel empowered, in order to compensate for our belatedness, our “coming-after”: sharing the joke with the narrator is a way to participate in the culture of the past, and to belong to the small circle of elite pepaideumenoi (just as the Imperial reader yearns to relate to the Archaic and Classical past). Reading “nature” and “culture,” and “nature” and “art” as separate categories, on  



Zeitlin : . Ibid., p.  (my emphasis). On pastoral and the retreat to the city, Alpers . See also Williams . The narrator is (like the educated reader of the presumably intended audience) always the man from the city (like Socrates in the Phaedrus, as we will see in the next chapter). For a good summary on issues related to the readership of the ancient novels, see Hunter ; Whitmarsh : –; as well as Egger  and Haynes , who specifically consider a female readership. On the literary milieus of the Greek novel, Bowie ; Swain :  n.  for a more detailed bibliography. On the Second Sophistic as obsessed by the idea of “coming after,” see Whitmarsh .

Framing Nature, Culture, and Art



which rely the interpretation of the text and the bonding between reader and narrator, is also a way of projecting onto the urban reader of the novel a modern, humanist, post-Enlightenment, and structuralist understanding of humans’ relationship with the natural world and nonhuman animals. But this interpretation is unfair to Chloe, and does not do justice to the ecology of the pastoral novel as a whole – an artificial and unrealistic world for sure, but a world that portrays a specific kind of ecology and types of relationship between species. As a matter of fact, the narrative arc of the novel (modeled on the pattern of the seasons), and the narrative of the characters’ activities – in symbiosis with the landscape, the environment, and the rhythm and needs of the animals – shows that the “nature” we take for granted in the text as the background for human activities exists for our purposes more than anything else. So what happens if, straying from a reassuring relationship of identification with the narrator of the novel, we substitute a more dynamic interpretation for the comfortable reading of these fixed categories? I propose to enrich the modes of reading the novel provided by literary scholars that often rely on unhistoricized and rigid dichotomies of nature/ culture and nature/art with the “new ecological consciousness of the last two decades and the recognition that human culture is inextricably involved with, and ultimately subordinate to, the physical, natural world.” This ecocritical approach leads us to think about “categories” in their relating rather than as pure entities abstracted from their relationship. Instead of distancing ourselves from the characters and siding with the narrator, I suggest that we embrace our absence of knowledge and embark with Chloe, the curious student of nature and music, and the shepherd boy Daphnis, the willing teacher and arch-bucolic character, to explore the fantastic metamorphic logic of the myth. All of a sudden, the empowerment we thought we felt when catching the uncomfortable irony of Chloe as unaware listener of the Phatta tale (much like Phatta singing, unaware, the tale of Pitys), gives way to humility, as we realize that, unlike Chloe, we forget to ask the right questions. My intervention here is akin to stepping into unknown woods at daybreak, with a sense of thrill and trust that more light is going to emerge as we progress in our journey. We have always needed a Daphnis to reveal to us the mystery of the song of the 



Billault : “Longus serait le peintre d’une nature qui plonge ses racines dans les bibliothèques” (). Yet Billault also comments on the realism of the representation of the specific ecology of Lesbos (on which, see also Mason  – with thanks to Ewen Bowie for the reference). This is a repurposing of Glen Love’s definition of ecocriticism (Love : ).



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

bird, and enrich our own aesthetic and ontological experience. What his myth does is assert the existence of what Donna Haraway has called “companion species”: for her, “beings do not preexist their relating . . . Biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concreteness – i.e. the mistake, of, first, taking provisional and local category abstractions like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be pre-existing foundations.” I thus propose to introduce into Zeitlin’s garden, which “constructs a viewing space [exemplifying] the essential categories of nature and art,” some of the creatures that Haraway hosts in hers, a place “full of snakes, full of trellises, full of indirection.” This hybrid image of a cultivated space teeming with unruly critters (Haraway’s preferred term for animals, human and nonhuman alike) is a useful reading paradigm because of its dynamic character. It is an apt way to capture the messy entanglement of “nature,” “culture,” “nurture,” and “art,” the contamination of species, their layered relationship in what Haraway calls a “natureculture,” and to reflect on the aesthetic questions brought up by the relationship between companion species (human and nonhuman) in their language and music. Building on Chapter  of this book, the next section will show how Daphnis and Chloe engages with questions about the relationship between human and nonhuman that were at the heart of intense debates and controversies in Antiquity. Using Harawayan terminology is a way to do justice to the text in its ancient intellectual context, but also to see it as contributing to the history of some modern debates.

“Becoming with” the Ringdove: Daphnis and Chloe as Natureculture A simple focus on the two series of oppositions I have highlighted before – the protagonists’ process of acculturation and the reader’s learned relationship with the narrator – runs the risk of obscuring the richness of the representation of the pastoral world itself in the novel. The ringdove myth needs to be recontextualized, not only in relation to the erotic trajectory of the human characters, but also against the background of the animal (human and nonhuman) relationships within the novel. 

 

Haraway : . Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto explores “the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bounded in significant otherness” (ibid., p. ). Ibid., p. . See Ingold b:  for a representation of the small area of overlap between the two paradigms.

“Becoming with” the Ringdove: Daphnis and Chloe as Natureculture  In the pastoral world represented in Daphnis and Chloe, humans and other animals collaborate and shape each other in a sustainable coexisting, the sustainable “becoming with,” that Haraway has called “natureculture.” No passage captures this idea better than the narrative of Daphnis and Chloe’s abandonment and rescue. Abandoned by their aristocratic parents at birth and left in the woods dressed in rich garments and with some tokens of recognition, Daphnis and Chloe are rescued by a goat and an ewe, respectively. When Lamon first discovers a baby boy suckled by a goat, he initially “feels sorry for the baby goat that the goat had abandoned” (οἰκτείρας ἀμελούμενον τὸν ἔριφον, D&C .). His subsequent thought is to steal the clothes and tokens and abandon the baby boy. Then, ashamed at the thought that he would not even be imitating a goat’s example in compassion (μηδὲ αἰγὸς φιλανθρώπιαν μιμήσεται, D&C .), he rescues the boy. As for the other father, Dryas, finding a baby girl nurtured by a ewe, “thinking this discovery something divine, and taking a lesson from the ewe in pity and love for the child [διδασκόμενος παρὰ τῆς ὄιος ἐλεεῖν τε τὸ παιδίον καὶ φιλεῖν], picks up the baby to rear her as his own” (D&C .). The reaction of both human and nonhuman foster parents is interesting: goat and ewe showed pity and love for the young of another species, and they shamed, or taught, humans into showing compassion, love, and an ethical attitude by rescuing the babies. The passage makes us acutely aware of two ways of thinking about interspecies relationships: while animals show the way in terms of love and compassion, the vocabulary used in the text takes the human as its point of reference, as the goat’s care is described as φιλανθρώπια (philanthropia), literally a love-for-the-human-species, an attitude better translated by “compassion” than “philanthropy.” It is as if vocabulary were not able to do justice to the reality of the natureculture described. There are further forms of human-animal collaboration: at two crucial points at least in the narrative, animals come to the characters’ rescue, as a form of interspecies coexistence responsible for the other’s survival (some dogs, responding to a prompt, attack a wolf that has threatened Chloe, and 

 

Haraway . “Becoming with” is a keyword of When Species Meet (Haraway ). In encountering each other in a meaningful way, critters enter a process of sharing and mutual change, defined as “becoming with.” The vocabulary of becoming is itself borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari , and constitutes a key point of Rosi Braidotti’s thinking (see, for example, Braidotti , subtitled “towards a materialist theory of becoming”). On philanthropia, see de Fontenay . On anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, Boddice ; Cockburn ; Moore ; Newmyer . See also Chapter , pp.  and note .



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

cows obeying a signal jump from a ship that capsizes, thus saving the kidnapped Daphnis). As a matter of fact, animal training is just as important in the novel as it is for Haraway: the process of training is not seen as the domination of one species over the other, but rather as an exercise in mutual understanding and discipline, of pleasure in a joined performance. In the case of Haraway, it is the pleasure of training a dog in agility; in Daphnis and Chloe, it is that of training herds through music. The cows’ sensitivity to music in the myth of Phatta, and in the story of Dorcon (D&C .–), just like the behavior of Daphnis’ goats (who follow signals and even dance, D&C . and .) are the result of such training. This arrangement works and the only force that sometimes disperses animals is fear (except in the myth, where a supernaturally divine song charms them all away: but this only happens in the world of myth). Daphnis’ and Chloe’s entire lives, in turn, revolve around a working relationship with animals. There is real care, trust, and attention to animal needs and the reality of their otherness: animals need to be pastured, milked, protected, and sometimes rescued and tended to, and they are not thought of on the human model. Animals (and also plants – vines and gardens) come first, and their rhythms shape the rhythm of their human companions’ existence. From this mutual dependency in their mutual domestication derives love. Yet there is no sentimentality: the world of Daphnis and Chloe is no utopia, no golden age, nor a Disney animal fantasy – a world in which the lamb and the wolf would cohabit peacefully. Even in the pastoral world, hunting and fishing exist; wolves kill cattle, boars ravage the fields, and eagles killing geese are part of reality. We are faced with the savagery of the wilderness and the drives of domestic animals – there is not even leniency toward the family dog, that steals the roast from the dinner table (he remains a herding dog, not a lapdog or a substitute child). In the context of the novel, Daphnis, Chloe, and their animals are truly, again in Haraway’s words, “companion species,” literally com-panions, messmates who eat together rather than eat each other: “significantly other to each other, in specific difference, [they] signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is an historical aberration, and a

 

Chalk  on the role of the seasons. See D&C . for excited billy goats fighting; D&C . for a wolf killed by a bull guarding cows; D&C . for blackbird hunting; D&C . for the comic episode of the roast-stealing dog; D&C . for the (fake) story of an eagle killing geese.

Lost in Forest Paths: Anthropomorphism and Biomusicology



naturalcultural legacy.” This “historical aberration” described by Haraway is precisely what is already staged in the pastoral world of Lesbos (with its antecedents in the pastoral world of Theocritus and even in the episode of the Odyssey featuring the Cyclops Polyphemus and his beloved ram), and described as such, as a form of philia: ἐφίλουν – “they loved” the goats (D&C .). Theirs is a working relationship, first in the sense of a work relationship: the flocks that Daphnis and Chloe spend their time pasturing provide the milk that humans consume as cheese and the wool they wear as clothes. They are valued as property, and constitute the master’s wealth, of which Daphnis and Chloe are the stewards. But it is also a working relationship in the sense that it is a sustainable relationship that works, based on respect for each other’s differences. There is mutual respect and understanding of the animals’ needs in terms of food, exercise, play, and acknowledgment of their difference, mutual domestication, and a real concern for their well-being not as pets but as part of a system. And yet, although Haraway’s “natureculture” model allows us to productively complicate the relationship between nature and culture, and between humans and animals in a way that better does justice to the ecology of Daphnis and Chloe, two nagging questions remain: when Chloe asks “what is the bird saying?” using the verb λέγει, “it speaks,” which in Greek is exclusively used for humans, is it again a façon de parler, or does it reveal a specific way of thinking through the relationship between human and nonhuman in the performance of song? Second, what is the significance of metamorphosis in the representation of the relationship between human and nonhuman performing music?

Lost in Forest Paths: Anthropomorphism and Biomusicology On the one hand, if Chloe’s question “what is the bird saying?” is merely a way of speaking, it would be a kind of metaphor. The girl uses the verb λέγω for lack of a specific term describing animal communication. Just as with the noun φιλανθρώπια that we encountered earlier, Greek vocabulary is human-centered and does not have specific words for animals’ vocal activities: any word that is applied to the sound that animals make can also be used for humans – while some words are exclusively reserved for



Haraway seeks “to tell stories about relating in significant otherness, through which the partners come to be who they are in flesh and sign” (Haraway : ). See also Williams  for Greek and Romans stories featuring animal love of humans.



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

humans (such as words for the speaking human voice, aude). Yet it is a risky critical move to consider the metaphor a form of anthropomorphization, in the manner that Bowie considers the description of “garrulous cicadas” a metaphor anthropomorphizing animals, as it suggests that Chloe is making a category mistake, by extending to animals something that is properly human. From the natureculture stance of the novel, Chloe’s use of λέγει in reference to the bird is marked, and actually reveals her nonhuman-centered way of considering language and communication, and contributes to representing the continuity between human and nonhuman species. But Chloe’s question encapsulates another ambiguity: elsewhere in the novel, the song of birds is compared to (instrumental) music, that of the syrinx in particular, and animal sounds are compared to music – not speech. Here, however, Chloe’s focus is logocentric, Daphnis understands it as such, and the myth as a whole can be seen as interpreting the song as a fantastic form of animal language. In that respect, it is tempting to borrow from the new and quickly growing field of Biomusicology, since the question that Chloe asks (“what is the bird saying?” or, “what does the cry mean?”) is precisely the one that drives modern biomusicologists’ agenda. Also known as Evolutionary Musicology, Biomusicology is a discipline defined in part by its commitment to exploring the relevance of modern biological knowledge about the evolution and functions of animal behavior to the question of the origins of human music and dance, and this

 







More on this in chapters , pp. – and , pp. –. In modern critical vocabulary, “anthropomorphism” is considered a dirty word (Taylor : ). Used to describe the belief that animals are essentially like humans, it “is usually applied as a term of reproach, both intellectual and moral” (Daston and Mitman : ). See also Crist : ; Martinelli : , calling anthropomorphism the “original sin.” For a synthetic history of the term and practice, and arguments for and against it, see Horowitz . See also Chapter . This is a more careful rephrasing of Bowie’s remarks (Bowie : –) that “the text [constantly draws] the parallel between nature and humanity” and builds on a “network of terms linking the natural world with that of anthropomorphs.” D&C . and . (the sound of Daphnis’ syrinx compared to nightingale voice); D&C . (competition between syrinx sounds and nightingales). I should note here that an ingenious way to read the myth is to read human sounds in avian babble: Chalk’s suggestion that Daphnis hears the words pou-mou-bous-okto (ποῦ ᾽μου βοῦς ὀκτώ; or “where are my eight cows?”) in the song of the ringdove (Chalk :  n. ). This verbalization is still a mnenonic practice to identify bird sounds in terms of human words: Poorpoor-Sam-Peabody-Peabody-Peabody, or Ohhh-ohhh-sweet-Canada-Canada-Canada for the white-throated sparrow, for example (Kroodsma : –). While this might explain the folkloric origins of the story, it does not account for the sophisticated form that our myth takes, nor for the ethological questions underlying it.

Lost in Forest Paths: Anthropomorphism and Biomusicology



includes the rich treasure of theory and observation provided by behavioral biology on topics such as animal vocalization, communication, emotive expression, and display.

A biomusicological approach thus seems promising for the kind of questions we need to ask if we want to go beyond the dichotomies that structure our usual ways of thinking and ways of reading ancient accounts of listening to animal sounds. Peter Marler’s research on the “origins of music and speech” in musical animals (especially birds, monkeys, and whales) is representative of this type of work. Marler comments: Our present state of relative ignorance about animal communication some times forces us to simplify and to focus not on their highest, often idiosyn cratic achievements, that are among the most intriguing, but rather on the fundamental underlying principles. In the interest of science, I have adopted this reductionistic spirit, and pose three basic questions, drawing illustrations from the animals that I know best, birds and monkeys. The first question is what do animal sounds mean? are they just displays of emotion, or is there more? do some animal calls serve as symbols? Second, I will grapple with just one aspect of the central linguistic theme of syntax. Adopting once more a reductionist approach, I ask, do animals speak in sentences? Third, I offer some elementary speculations about a possible animal antecedent to that other distinctively human achievement, making music. Do animals create music?

Three features are important in the passage: first Marler’s acknowledgment, about two millennia after Daphnis and Chloe that our knowledge of animal communication is still inadequate. Second, the resurfacing of Chloe’s question “what does it mean?” at the heart of a scientific inquiry (both passages in italics): what we had dismissed as naïve, or a possible category mistake emerges here in modern scientific research. And, finally, the striking assumption in the penultimate sentence that music is “a distinctively human achievement” (an assumption that I will be returning to and examining later in this chapter). It is a freeing moment, where instead of walking the dizzying tightrope of anthropomorphism (with the  



Wallin, Merker, and Brown : . Marler : – (my emphasis). Rich and accessible studies of birdsongs include Thorpe ; Armstrong ; Hartshorne ; Rothenberg ; Kroodsma ; Catchpole and Slater ; and, probably the greatest compendium, Marler and Slabbekoorn . I discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Marler and his colleagues in the next pages. Crist  shows the difference between the kind of attitude, and language, that naturalists and sociobiologists adopt when considering animals, either as subjects or objects. For an analysis of the dangers of metaphorical use of language: Wennemann : . On the idea of language trapping us in our way of thinking about animals: Martinelli : .



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

dangers and thrills of metaphorically attributing language to animals), we realize that scientists might give us license to use the same vocabulary to examine all animal species with no apologies. Biomusicologists also provide us with some conceptual tools, precise vocabulary and specific questions, which literary criticism might not have when it deals with representations of nonhuman animals. So let us now return to Daphnis’ account, with Marler’s questions in mind. We cannot help Marler answer his own ornithological questions based on Daphnis’ mythological knowledge (presented as an account that is “well-known” [τὰ θρυλούμενα], not as a direct observation of nature), but we might hope to find in Marler’s questions ways to direct our interpretation of Daphnis’ story. In biologists’ terms, the ringdove’s cry might be a display of emotion, or a signaling call, or something else – a display for the sake of display. The last sentence of Daphnis’ myth explains the cry of the bird as a form of display of emotion: “singing, she indicates [μηνύει] her misfortune [τὴν συμφοράν], [which is that] she is looking for her cows that have wandered away.” Yet there is a difference: the bird’s emotion that Daphnis describes is one moment, frozen in time, endlessly repeated – not an emotion brought up by a present event every time it is repeated. It is also isolated from its context: the bird does not communicate to other members of the species, or other animals. It is expressive of, or maybe even expressing, emotions, but, in its representation, it is also more complex: it is not a display for the sake of achieving something (“get away from my chicks!” “pick me as mate!”), or communicating something to someone (“abundant food southwest of the pine tree”), in the way animal cries and signals usually function. It is a display for the sake of the display itself: it expresses distress at the memory of the event, it is a re-verbalization of an emotion. As such, like the painting described in the opening pages of the novel, and the novel itself, it is a memento rather than a warning. It is presented as a stylized 







Recent studies (for example, Lipkind et al. ) have compared the acquisition of birdsong and infant babbling. Also Kroodsma : –. Although it is probably an invention of Longus – see Hunter ; Morgan ; Bowie . For a different interpretation of the participle τὰ θρυλούμενα (understood as “often repeated sound”), Schlapbach . The literature on animal sounds as display of emotion or affect is vast, starting with Aristotle, Descartes, Darwin (see Hauser : –). Donald Griffin coined the “groans of pain” (GOP) concept to describe how animal vocalizations function as affective forms of communication, much like human facial expression (Griffin ). There are some exceptions to this theory (examined, for example, by Marler : –). On the difference between being expressive and being an expression of, and issues of representation, see Chapter .

Lost in Forest Paths: Anthropomorphism and Biomusicology



expression of emotion, even a disclosure (as the proper meaning of μήνυει suggests): not an outpouring of feelings but a reminiscence of a trauma that will not let go. In that respect, the bird brings us close to the origins of lament: after the original somatic outpouring of passion and unbridled expression of grief caused by the loss of the cows, the song can be seen, over time, as an ordered way of mourning the loss of her herd, or even the abandonment of her old human self. From emotion, it has turned into a performative display of emotion for an audience. In fact, the bird’s performance can be seen as an avian model and aesthetic paradigm for all human dirges: past the outburst of passion, it becomes a gendered, ordered, expressive performance, symbolic of a memorable event and a significant moment for a community. Marler’s second question, whether animals “speak in sentences,” also gives us some purchase on our story. Daphnis’ precise description establishes two things: the bird is not only, as I just discussed, understood as indicating something with her song (she signifies her misfortune), but she also voices a sentence – grammatically, it is an object clause “that she is looking for the cows that have wandered.” Much of Marler’s research is devoted to this precise question: do animals have phonological syntax (what he calls “phonocoding”) or lexical syntax (what he calls “lexicoding”)? According to his observation of bird vocalizations, animals do not speak object clauses of the type that Daphnis’ account gives us. Song sequences might be rich in affective content (they can, like Phatta, “signify misfortune”), but they lack in symbolic content (“she is looking for the cows that have wandered”). As Marler acknowledges, “symbolic functions are less at issue in music, and something like phonological syntax is also involved in musical composition. Could it be that more parallels with music than with language are to be found in the communicative behavior of animals?” The danger with statements such as this (underlining the “parallel with music”) is that, by ostensibly giving an answer about animals (“animal language is like music”), one sacrifices the subtlety of questions brought up by music itself – in particular, the question of what kind of language music is, who the speakers of that language are, what is being communicated, and so on. 



 

On the Greek institution of female lament, Alexiou ; Holst-Warhaft ; Foley : –. See also Chapter . The ethnographic study of Feld  (now in its third edition) is fundamental here for a comparison of the poetics of grief and its relationship with birdsong. See also Ford , on song transcending emotions, and Weiss a. One should note that Aristotle had already investigated the question of animal syntax: Zirin . Marler : .



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

There is always a risk, in having the Natural Sciences meet Musicology, of sacrificing the complexity of questions asked in one field to provide starting points to the other discipline. And there is no easy way to avoid taking one discipline’s hypothesis as another discipline’s premise. More fundamentally, for these scholars, while “humans” and “animals” might share practices, they are very much considered “others.” One might actually wonder if this detour through animal song and biomusicological research is not perversely the opposite of what is happening in the natureculture of the myth, and the opposite of what my approach is intended to be. Indeed, the work of biomusicologists is very much based on nineteenth-century humanist premises: they approach the animal world with developed scientific instruments, but with the same anthropocentric, humanist, and even imperialist, outlook as nineteenthcentury ethnographers. The sonogram is for the biomusicologist what the tape recorder was for the ethnographer, and the “they” of their research has moved from other, “primitive” human communities to animal groups. What François-Bernard Mâche, one of the founders of the field of Zoomusicology, takes as a goal in his  monograph Les Dauphins d’Arion: mythes, musique, nature, that is to “begin to speak of animal musics without quotation marks” should be, from the natureculture stance that this chapter and this book take, a premise – not an object to interrogate. At this point we need to gain distance and recognize that Biomusicology, no matter how relevant its questions about animal music seem to be, also takes us away from the main inquiry.

Music as Metamorphosis, and the Uncanny Power of Performance Ultimately, I see the significance of the metamorphosis myth not in what it says about the meaning of the ringdove song per se, but in the way it imagines the link between performance and metamorphosis. By representing vocal performance both as an agent and a product of metamorphosis, the myth provides a way to reflect on its nature and power. Indeed, 



This is the challenge, for example, that D. Martinelli faces in his work on Zoomusicology, an enterprise that he defines as “approaching nonhuman animals from the direction of human sciences, and music from the direction of biological sciences . . . Hence, to adopt the zoomusicological paradigm means to put seriously into discussion the present definitions of music, starting from its strongly anthropocentric connotation. At the same time, the whole conception of the nature-culture dichotomy is to be revised” (Martinelli : ). But Martinelli’s study does not entirely fulfill the promise and reduces the complexity of the question. Mâche : .

Music as Metamorphosis, and the Uncanny Power of Performance



vocal performance is first an agent of metamorphosis: the boy’s song results in the defeat of the girl and ultimately her transformation into a singing bird. Without the boy’s impromptu cow-charming solo, there would be no ringdove in the world. Music is represented as generating ontological surplus, as having a real creative, generating force in the world. But vocal performance is also the product of metamorphosis. It is a creative response to misfortune; it is the god-sent transformation of the girl’s defeat over her lost cows into something else, into a new vocal and avian entity in the world. The boy’s voice, itself a marker of metamorphosis, was not meant to remain in the world forever: all boys’ voices naturally break one day. By contrast, Phatta’s new being, expressed in the song, becomes a part of the cosmos. The vocal performance’s meaning actually goes beyond what any word could signify. An important insight for our purposes here comes from the biomusicologist Marler. Describing the greatest virtuoso of the forest, the winter wren, Marler explains how Each of the thousands of winter wren songs that exist means basically the same thing. Each serves as a kind of badge or emblem, a sign that denotes identity, population membership, and social status . . . Adopting once more a reductionistic stance, I concentrate on one ingredient of the creative aspect of music, essential for composers, performers, and other makers of music, and for those who delight in listening to music performed by others: the ability to create acoustic novelty.

This is what Phatta’s performance is: the new song resulting from her metamorphosis means beyond what she says. As music, it signifies her new identity – she is now a new species, and her song, as the story of her tragedy, “denotes identity.” Chloe’s question is to the point: what the ringdove is saying is how she came about, but it does not matter whether we understand her words as speech or music. When Chloe asks about the sounds’ meaning in our passage, and when Daphnis refers to the bird’s “song” (ᾄδουσα) and what it “signifies” (μήνυει) in the closing sentence of the myth, their approach is based on their initial acknowledgment that the  

Marler : –. See also, from a different perspective, Fitch : , who writes that even if animals have a rich mental life, “concepts (the ‘unnamed thought’ or unbennantes Denken, of Koehler ), [they] do not express them as signals. These conclusions are surprising to us humans, because we are a species born to express our thoughts. Something in our biology drives us to do what no other species apparently does – to freely (indeed incessantly) encode and express our thoughts – rendering our intuitions about animal communication untrustworthy. Humans tend to assume that an animal that is highly vocal, such as a singing bird or whale, ‘must be talking about something’ – but all available data indicate that they are simply singing, making music for its own sake, rather than encoding thoughts into these sounds.”



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

bird’s vocalizations are music. For them, there is no distinction, no quotation mark around the “music” of birds, no assumption of the type Marler makes, that music is “a distinctively human achievement.” The issue at stake in the passage, as I see it, is not the conceptualization of the relationship between species or what it tells us about human music, since the natureculture of the novel presumes that all animal species musick. At stake, rather, is the question of the nature of the experience of listening to a vocal performance. I see the metamorphosis myth as representing in narrative form, and giving an account of, the power of that experience. The bird metamorphosis is, more precisely, a fictional way to account for the complex nature of the experience of listening to something live (an idea I will be coming back to in several chapters). The transformation recounts diachronically two separate narrative moments (first the song of the girl, then that of the bird), for two features one might feel simultaneously in the experience of listening to nonhuman music. It is a bird voice one hears, yet it is a voice; it is animal musicking, yet it is musicking; it is animal life expressing itself through song, yet it is life expressing itself though song. Chloe acknowledges the ringdove’s vocalizations as requiring interpretation (“what does it mean?”), yet there is something else, perhaps like old human accents in bird speech that might make the song familiar, and chilling, perhaps even too familiar. She might sense it to be some version of herself, yet it is not quite that either. The bird is Phatta, yet it is not; it is also Chloe, yet it is not her either. There is no better way of explaining it than to think about the myth as a narrative account of the phenomenon of the uncanny (the Unheimlich). To describe the bird’s voice as originating from a human female (Phatta) is not to take human music as the measuring stick by which other types of musical activities are evaluated. The fact that Phatta was a human musician does not justify the fact that the bird is musical. Rather, to describe the human origins of a bird is to account for the disturbing phenomenon in which a voice seems to transcend the body (very much like Orpheus’ head still singing, apart from his dead body), while still originating from it. This description of the migration of the voice, from a girl to a bird, is the narrative means by which the myth reckons with the power of vocal performance and the phenomenology of listening. The myth as a whole, and the 



See Sharrock  on synchronicity and on the challenges (and, I would add, opportunities) of representing the representation of metamorphosis (here in a myth within a novel). On this question of “fascination” and “envoicement,” see Tomlinson : –; Abbate . See also Chapters – in this book.

Conclusion



metamorphosis in particular, is a way to figure the channels by which the power of vocal performance works, to explain the mixed and disquieting feeling one experiences when moved by a voice (with the sensory pleasure it creates and the grip it has on us) while trying to account for the source of that pleasure and the meaning of the performance itself, something both familiar and unfamiliar. While being a narrative strategy, the metamorphosis is also a way into a specific mode of thought on the fluidity of being, and on the lack of anchoring in strictly separate bodies. This complex aesthetic reflection takes the form of a myth that represents the bird’s voice as collapsing space and time, telescoping old human and new feathery selves. In her new avian body, Phatta is compelled to repeat the trauma of her old self. At the same time, she embodies a story of renewed vocal power, and of the power of the live sound. Just as Phattathe-girl sang a story of transformation and transmigration into a new species, from Pitys-the-girl into a pitys (pine tree), the bird now sings of the same topic, the transformation of Phatta-the-girl into the phatta (ringdove). The live voice, the live female voice, has taken a bird form, with its unsettling natural accents. The final form of the phatta is symbolic: of course, birds soar, defy the pull of gravity, are as much of a non-body as can be, and are beautiful. At the same time, the ringdove says something about mortality and bringing a voice back from the dead – an idea that several chapters of this book will address in different ways. The choice of this specific bird in particular is not innocent. It is linked to the ringdove’s association with the cult of Persephone (celebrated in cult as Persephatta), and its funerary associations. The boy’s voice is described by its quality (sweet and loud), but we are not given access to Phatta’s: it is only described by its power. She is ultimately the closest to Orpheus, not for the charming of the beasts, but for her associations with the Underworld and the singer’s form of defiance of death.

Conclusion Chloe’s question about the vocalizations of a ringdove has led me first to examine representations of aesthetic responses to song across the animal world in the passage, and to reflect more largely on the configuration of the 



Kossaifi . The lasting funerary association of the bird is illustrated by Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été: no.  (Au Cimetière): www.youtube.com/watch?v aHMnkmMQqY (with thanks to Carmel Raz for bringing this to my attention). See also Clément  on ideas about female voices.



Ringdove: On the Uncanny Power of Performance

categories of “nature,” “art,” “culture,” and mimesis and metamorphosis in the context of Daphnis and Chloe. Because of the intricate and sometimes paradoxical relationship between the natural world and forms of art (music and painting) in the novel, I have suggested that we rely not on those fixed categories but on the dynamic concept of “natureculture” coined by Donna Haraway. Within the framework of this “natureculture” and of changed premises for understanding the relationship between humans, other animals, and the world they live in, I have ventured into the domain of animal language, Biomusicology, and Zoomusicology, to briefly discuss aspects of the ethology of birdsong. Ultimately, the focus has returned to questions of aesthetics and ontology: on my reading, the myth is not so much a reflection on animal song per se as it is a commentary on the disquieting power of musical performance, as experienced from a human perspective. This return to the human does not contradict my commitment to decentering the human, or the pastoral romance’s enactment of the notion of natureculture. Rather, it acknowledges the rich and disconcerting nature of the embodied experience of performance, beyond the boundaries of human vocality. This move, from close attention to the narrative of the myth to considerations about the narrative and intellectual context to which the story belongs, and finally to ideas about aesthetics, is representative of the method that I will follow in the rest of this book and the type of work done there. As has become clear, my main focus is not so much on the vocal manifestations of animals or the sounds of the natural world per se – no matter how moving, evocative, or meaningful they may be. Rather, my readings will explore how myths featuring a human turned musical animal posed (and still pose) fundamental questions on the phenomenon of music, and on the very notion of being a musicking and aesthetic subject. The subsequent chapters will continue the investigation and examine topics introduced in the myth of Phatta: the nature of the voice, the meaning of listening, the power of the voice of musical objects, the significance of lament, and the relationship between music and silence. In each case, the reading reproduces the movements of the narrative, starting from a human and making a detour into the nonhuman (animal, vegetal, mineral, or nonorganic) world, before returning to the human animal.

 

Cicadas: On the Voice

Σχολὴ μὲν δή, ὡς ἔοικε· καὶ ἅμα μοι δοκοῦσιν ὡς ἐν τῷ πνίγει ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ἡμῶν οἱ τέττιγες ᾄδοντες καὶ [a] ἀλλήλοις διαλεγόμενοι καθορᾶν καὶ ἡμᾶς. εἰ οὖν ἴδοιεν καὶ νὼ καθάπερ τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐν μεσημβρίᾳ μὴ διαλεγομένους ἀλλὰ νυστάζοντας καὶ κηλουμένους ὑφ᾽ αὑτῶν δι’ ἀργίαν τῆς διανοίας, δικαίως ἂν καταγελῷεν, ἡγούμενοι ἀνδράποδ᾽ ἄττα σφίσιν ἐλθόντα εἰς τὸ καταγώγιον ὥσπερ προβάτια μεσημβριάζοντα περὶ τὴν κρήνην εὕδειν· ἐὰν δὲ ὁρῶσι διαλεγομένους καὶ παραπλέοντας ὥσπερ Σειρῆνας [b] ἀκηλήτους, ὃ γέρας παρὰ θεῶν ἔχουσιν ἀνθρώποις διδόναι, τάχ᾽ ἂν δοῖεν ἀγασθέντες. ΦΑĨΔΡΟΣ. Ἔχουσι δὲ δὴ τί τοῦτο; ἀνήκοος γάρ, ὡς ἔοικε, τυγχάνω ὤν. ΣΩΚΡΆΤΗΣ. Οὐ μὲν δὴ πρέπει γε φιλόμουσον ἄνδρα τῶν τοιούτων ἀνήκοον εἶναι. λέγεται δ’ ὥς ποτ’ ἦσαν οὗτοι ἄνθρωποι τῶν πρὶν Μούσας γεγονέναι, γενομένων δὲ Μουσῶν καὶ φανείσης ᾠδῆς οὕτως ἄρα τινὲς τῶν τότε ἐξεπλάγησαν ὑφ᾽ ἡδονῆς, [c] ὥστε ᾄδοντες ἠμέλησαν σίτων τε καὶ ποτῶν, καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες αὑτούς· ἐξ ὧν τὸ τεττίγων γένος μετ᾽ ἐκεῖνο φύεται, γέρας τοῦτο παρὰ Μουσῶν λαβόν, μηδὲν τροφῆς δεῖσθαι γενόμενον, ἀλλ᾽ ἄσιτόν τε καὶ ἄποτον εὐθὺς ᾄδειν, ἕως ἂν τελευτήσῃ, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ἐλθὸν παρὰ Μούσας ἀπαγγέλλειν τίς τίνα αὐτῶν τιμᾷ τῶν ἐνθάδε. Τερψιχόρᾳ μὲν οὖν τοὺς ἐν τοῖς χοροῖς τετιμηκότας αὐτὴν ἀπαγγέλλοντες [d] ποιοῦσι προσφιλεστέρους, τῇ δὲ Ἐρατοῖ τοὺς ἐν τοῖς ἐρωτικοῖς, καὶ ταῖς ἄλλαις οὕτως, κατὰ τὸ εἶδος ἑκάστης τιμῆς· τῇ δὲ πρεσβυτάτῃ Καλλιόπῃ καὶ τῇ μετ’ αὐτὴν Οὐρανίᾳ τοὺς ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ διάγοντάς τε καὶ τιμῶντας τὴν ἐκείνων μουσικὴν ἀγγέλλουσιν, αἳ δὴ μάλιστα τῶν Μουσῶν περί τε οὐρανὸν καὶ λόγους οὖσαι θείους τε καὶ ἀνθρωπίνους ἱᾶσιν καλλίστην φωνήν. πολλῶν δὴ οὖν ἕνεκα λεκτέον τι καὶ οὐ καθευδητέον ἐν τῇ μεσημβρίᾳ. ΦΑĨΔΡΟΣ. Λεκτέον γὰρ οὖν. ΣΩΚΡΆΤΗΣ.

: It looks like we have plenty of time, and it seems to me, too, that the cicadas, singing as they do in the stifling heat above our heads and engaging in dialogue, are looking down on us. So if they saw even the two of us behaving like most people and not engaging in dialogue in the middle of the afternoon but dozing off and being beguiled by them because of our lazy mindedness, they would be right to laugh at us, thinking that we are 



Cicadas: On the Voice

slaves coming to their retreat like sheep in the middle of the afternoon to nap near the spring. But if they see us engaging in dialogue, and sailing past them uncharmed as we would pass the Sirens, they would gladly bestow on us a privilege that they have from the gods to give to humans. : What is it that they have? It looks like I don’t happen to know it. : It is certainly not appropriate that a lover of the Muses does not know of such things! Well, once upon a time, the story goes, cicadas were men who belonged to the generation before the Muses were born. But when the Muses were born and song made its appearance, some of these men were so struck by pleasure then that, as they were singing, they stopped caring for food and drink, and in their forgetfulness they died. From these men was subsequently born the race of cicadas, to whom the Muses give the privilege of not needing any nourishment, but of singing right up to their death without needing food or drink. After that, they go to the Muses to report who among men here honors whom among the Muses. So by reporting to Terpsichore those who have honored her in their choruses, they make these people most loved by her, and they report to Erato those who were lovers, and in the same way for the rest of the Muses, according to the type of honor paid to each. And to the most revered, Calliope, and after her, to Urania they report those who did philosophy and honored their music, those [Muses] who deal with the heavens and with accounts about men and gods, and who emit the most beautiful voice. So for these reasons, one ought to speak and not sleep in the middle of the afternoon. : So let’s speak. (Pl. Phdr. e e)

If the ringdove of the previous chapter were the soloist of the animal orchestra, the cicadas on which this chapter focuses would be its brass section. Opinions differ on how to describe their sound (a rasp? A rattle? A song?) but one thing is sure: it is impossible not to notice them. These insects are present all over the Mediterranean, they appear with great frequency in Greek and Latin literature, but the myth of their origin is only recounted once in surviving ancient literature, in a passage of Plato’s Phaedrus – a Socratic dialogue devoted to love, dialectic, beauty, rhetoric, and writing. The passage predates the other narratives examined in this book by several centuries, but relies on the same paradigm of humans turned into nonhuman musical animals. Foreshadowing the Imperial myths in several respects, not least in being a form of resistance to 



On cicadas’ sounds, see Bodson ; Schafer : – (and Myers : – on cicadas’ sound organs). Rothenberg :  underlines the cicadas’ sonic “volume, energy, and roughness,” and how they “annoy us as well, especially those who would wish that nature was closer to silence.” The only other known myth related to the cicada is that of Tithonus, Dawn’s beloved, on which more, n. .

Cicadas: On the Voice



anthropocentric ways of thinking, it engages with vibrant questions about music and the voice debated in the author’s times and captures a mode of aesthetic and ontological thought that provides an alternative to other Platonic texts on the subject. With this passage, we go back chronologically to the origins of some of the debates that the Imperial narratives engage with and to some of the questions that are at the heart of ancient aesthetics. Before we turn to the larger debates, a few words about the myth of the cicadas in its narrative context. The story is recounted at a turning point in the Phaedrus, as Socrates moves from the three speeches on love that have so far occupied him and his conversation partner, Phaedrus, to the examination of rhetoric and the value of writing that will engage them to the end of the dialogue. The reference to the cicadas is at first puzzling. It is not the first time, of course, that Socrates comments on their natural surroundings; earlier in the dialogue, he remarked on the countryside setting, which “echoes in a clear-sounding and summer-like way the chorus of cicadas” (θερινόν τε καὶ λιγυρὸν ὑπηχεῖ τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ, c). But it is striking that he turns his attention to the environment at this precise point in the text, and that he takes his cue from the insects and tells the myth of their origin when he had concluded from the earlier observation that “countryside and trees cannot teach [him] anything” (τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν . . . ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, d). How can this be accounted for? This oddity has brought one of the major commentators of the Phaedrus to consider the cicada myth a “relaxing intermezzo.” Others, however, have proposed to take “listening to the cicadas” as the leitmotif of the Phaedrus, or to interpret the myth in the light of the main questions explored in the dialogue: as a reflection on the nature of the soul, as a celebration of musical eros, as a form of psychagogia, as a reinterpretation of the Pan myth, or as a presentation of different types of response to sensible beauty. Most commentators in fact have analyzed the myth by reflecting on its function in the context of the dialogue, and explained it in light of the rest of the Phaedrus. Yet this way of reading the myth does not quite do justice to the complexity of the narrative. The cicada myth is prefaced by an introduction that relies on poetic topoi about song and music, which introduce the main question that the myth handles in a narrative mode: the question of the voice. Plato’s myth is in dialogue with these ideas, but presents them in  

De Vries . See, respectively, Ferrari ; Gottfried ; Capra ; Rhodes ; Egan ; Werner .



Cicadas: On the Voice

a very different narrative mode. In concluding with references to the Muse Calliope (literally, “Beautiful Voice”) and the beautiful voice (καλλίστην φωνήν) of the two sister Muses, and with the double injunction to speak (λεκτέον τι, λεκτέον γὰρ οὖν), the cicada myth takes in new directions some of the issues explored in the story of the ringdove in the previous chapter. But it also allows us to outline the larger cultural, philosophical, and intellectual history of these questions, and how they came to bear in the Imperial period. With this in mind, let us follow Socrates and Phaedrus down the river Ilyssus to the sound of the cicadas’ chorus, and this time investigate not the effects of an animal voice on a listener, and the representation of the power of performance, but the way the nature of the voice is conceptualized in this arresting myth, and the aesthetic problems it brings up.

Cicadas: Sirens of Nature Setting the Stage for Song “My dear Phaedrus, where are you going, and where have you come from?” asks Socrates in the opening line of the Phaedrus. “I am going for a walk outside the walls, along the country paths,” explains the eponymous character. The walk is not taken for medical reasons, as Phaedrus pretends, but in order to practice reciting a speech (a logos) that he has just heard from the logographer Lysias, whose script he has gotten hold of. Having guessed the real reason for Phaedrus’ bucolic excursion, Socrates suggests that they sit down and he will listen to Phaedrus read the speech. The shady place they choose, under a plane tree near the river Ilyssus, has a nice breeze and is indeed the perfect spot to listen and talk. This scene has been read as the archetypal description of a locus amoenus, and Plato’s Phaedrus (despite its alleged rejection of what the countryside can teach the philosopher) is often one of the first texts examined when considering environmental literature. Once Phaedrus has read out Lysias’ speech on the merits of having a relationship with a non-lover rather than with somebody one loves, Socrates offers two speeches of his own. The first parodies Lysias’ praise 





By treating the voice as the main topic explored in the myth, one can better explain the unity or “organicity” of the Phaedrus (a whole “articulated” in parts, like an animal, as Socrates explains in e). This goes beyond the scope of this chapter, but see White : ; Werner : –. On unity in the Phaedrus, Schenker . Some fundamental texts devoted to the issue are conveniently compiled in Clayton . Fundamental essays of Voice Studies that focus on this issue are Chion ; Silverman ; Cavero ; and Dolar . For other fundamental questions of the voice, see Weidman . Murley ; Capra : ch. .

Cicadas: Sirens of Nature



of the non-lover, while the second is a recantation that this time praises love as a divine madness that takes over the soul. Socrates introduces the cicadas and their myth right at the point when he stops making speeches (logoi) and embarks instead upon a dialogue with Phaedrus investigating the appropriateness of spoken and written speeches. There is, at first sight, nothing unusual about referring to the insects. Socrates had earlier described their conversation spot and its specific soundscape, and the insects are as natural an aural feature of the countryside as the trees on which they perch. Cicadas are, as a matter of fact, a staple of poetic descriptions of the natural world and its appeal to the senses. They provide the bass line for the “music of nature” and the soundtrack of pastoral poetry. For Hesiod, who can be considered the forefather of the pastoral tradition, the cicadas’ song is a metonym for summer, a dangerous time when men are at their weakest, women at their strongest, and Pan is a danger to all: ἦμος δὲ σκόλυμός τ’ ἀνθεῖ καὶ ἠχέτα τέττιξ δενδρέῳ ἐφεζόμενος λιγυρὴν καταχεύετ’ ἀοιδὴν πυκνὸν ὑπὸ πτερύγων, θέρεος καματώδεος ὥρῃ, τῆμος πιόταταί τ’ αἶγες, καὶ οἶνος ἄριστος . . . When the golden thistle blooms and the chirping cicada, perched on a tree, pours down thickly its clear song from under its wings, during the toilsome summertime, at that time the goats are fattest, the wine at its best . . . (Hes. Op.  )

The song of the insect is not inherently threatening, but it is connected to a time of inversion, of looming potential for subversion. The same is true of another Hesiodic passage describing the season: ἦμος δὲ χλοερῷ κυανόπτερος ἠχέτα τέττιξ ὄζῳ ἐφεζόμενος θέρος ἀνθρώποισιν ἀείδειν ἄρχεται, ᾧ τε πόσις καὶ βρῶσις θῆλυς ἐέρση, καί τε πανημέριός τε καὶ ἠῷος χέει αὐδὴν ἴδει ἐν αἰνοτάτῳ, ὅτε τε χρόα Σείριος ἄζει . . . when the dark-winged chirping cicada perched on a green branch starts its summery song for men the nourishing dew is its only food and drink and all day long, from dawn, pours out its voice in the terrible heat, and when Sirius dries up the skin . . . (Hes. [Sc.]  )



On the relationship between the cicada episode and the myth of Pan, Gottfried .



Cicadas: On the Voice

Many poets associate the Greek countryside in the summer with the sound of the cicada: Archilochus, Alcaeus and (perhaps) Sappho, Aristophanes, Meleager, an Anacreontic poem, all describe the clear song of the cicada pouring out from the trees in the harsh summer time. For all these authors, the insect and its aural manifestations, synaesthetically described as a thirst-quenching liquid “poured” from up high, are familiar figures; a silent summer countryside would be uncanny. But the cicadas are not just a familiar pastoral presence. Indeed, a second, related poetic topos informs Socrates’ description: that of the dangers of the pleasure of song. The cicadas are described as singing (ᾄδοντες) and Socrates advises Phaedrus that they should sail past them, uncharmed (ἀκηλήτους), as one should pass the Sirens, the mythical songstresses who lure avid listeners to perdition on their shores, or rather to perpetual listening, forgetting their nostos (their safe homecoming). The image of the aesthetic power of the Sirens’ and Muses’ song is as old as Hesiod and Homer, and the adjective Plato uses to describe the imperviousness one needs against the charms of the Sirens’ song is also Homeric (and used to qualify Odysseus’ resistance to the seduction of another femme fatale, Circe, at Od. .). In the Odyssey, the Sirens “beguile all men” (ἀνθρώπους θέλγουσιν, .) “with their delicate song, sitting in a meadow” (λιγυρῇ . . . ἀοιδῇ, ἥμεναι ἐν λειμῶνι, .–), they “draw out their delicate song” (λιγυρὴν δ᾽ ἔντυνον ἀοιδήν, .), as “a mellifluous voice [comes] out of their mouth” (μελίγηρυν ἀπὸ στομάτων ὄπ’, .) – a beautiful voice (ὄπα κάλλιμον, .). This is the poetic past that Socrates conjures up when he recommends resisting the cicadic Sirens and not succumbing to the power of their song. Cicadas as Sirens There is more. Hesiod, in the passage cited above, describes the song of the cicadas with the very same vocabulary that Homer uses for the Sirens:





Alc. fr.  Voigt and b Voigt Sappho fr. a Voigt; Archil. fr.  West IE; Anacreonta ; Ar. Av. –; Meleager G&P ()  (figuring in a series of eighteen epigrams on cicadas, locusts, and birds in the Palatine Anthology, .–). See also Myers : –, on the mythology and literature of the insects; Antin  on literary cicadas; Kevan and Vickery  for a comparative mythology of what they calls “locusts”; Davies and Kathirithamby : –; Beavis : –; and Rothenberg  for a cross-cultural perspective. On the Sirens, Ford : –; Doherty ; Pucci : –; Peponi : –.

Cicadas: Sirens of Nature



both sets of songsters produce a delicate, shrill song (λιγυρὴν ἀοιδήν, Op. ). Conversely, he describes the Muses in the proem of the Theogony with the same image of the lily-like voice (ὀπὶ λειριοέσσῃ, Theog. ) that Homer uses in a famous simile comparing the talkative old men who address Helen on the walls of Troy to chatty cicadas. In the Iliad, the Trojan elders, γήραϊ δὴ πολέμοιο πεπαυμένοι, ἀλλ’ ἀγορηταὶ ἐσθλοί, τεττίγεσσιν ἐοικότες, οἵ τε καθ’ ὕλην δενδρέῳ ἐφεζόμενοι ὄπα λειριόεσσαν ἱεῖσι· who have stopped waging war on account of their age, but good orators, they resemble cicadas who, perched on a tree in the forest, emit their lily-like voice. (Il. . )

Shriveled and shrill, in awe of Helen, the old men, insect-like, are so many Tithonuses in love with Dawn. While the timbre and intonations of their voice are what most explicitly connects them to the cicadas, the elders are also like insects in that they are the familiar audience, a backdrop to, and often invisible witness of, the events waged on the Trojan plain. They see all, but they are not seen. Here, too, in this passage of the Iliad, the cicadas are introduced in a context where pleasure is not far from danger: the presence of the beautiful Helen makes even the wise elders of Troy admit that one cannot blame Paris for his crime and so legitimize his introduction of danger behind their walls. In the context of the Phaedrus immediately surrounding our passage, Socrates uses two related adjectives (λιγύς/λιγυρός) both for the cicadas and for the Muses: earlier in the dialogue, he described the place as “echo[ing] with summery shrillness the chorus of cicadas” (λιγυρὸν ὑπηχεῖ τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ, c),





On the vocabulary for cicada song: Arist. [De audib.] a–: “voices that are thin [λεπταί] and dense [πυκναί] are all shrill [λιγυραί], for example the voice of cicadas, grasshoppers, and nightingales.” See also Anacreonta . West: “it gives out a shrill [λιγυρὴν] song.” On the adjective, Stanford ; Egan ; Egan ; Acosta-Hughes . When Dawn asked Zeus to grant her lover Tithonus eternity, she forgot to ask him to preserve his youth. As he got old and shriveled up, she locked him behind doors; the gods took pity and turned him into a cicada. None of the early sources mentioning Tithonus – Il. ., .; Od. .; Sappho’s fragment devoted to old age (fr.  Voigt with Obbink ); Mimnermus fr.  West IE – mentions Tithonus’ transformation into a cicada. However, a simile in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (–) referring to Tithonus’ decay focuses on his voice and frail body (–), in words that could very well apply to cicadas: “his voice flows incessantly [φωνὴ ῥεῖ ἄσπετος], and he has no strength [κῖκυς] left in what used to be his supple limbs.” Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGrH  F ) is often named as the source for the idea of Tithonus transformed into a cicada, on the basis of a scholion to Il. ., but this testimony is risky, at best (see Davies and Kathirithamby : –, with further references; see also various contributors in Greene and Skinner ).



Cicadas: On the Voice

while he calls upon the Muses, “called ‘shrill’ [ligeiai] either because of the nature of your song or because of the musical race of the Ligurians” (ὦ Μοῦσαι, εἴτε δι' ᾠδῆς εἶδος λίγειαι, εἴτε διὰ γένος μουσικὸν τὸ Λιγύων ταύτην ἔσχετ' ἐπωνυμίαν, a). These passages reveal a complex network of images linking delightful song, dangerous beguilement (θέλξις), and a certain vocal quality or aesthetic perception (clear-sounding – λιγύς/λιγυρός, and lily-like – λειριόεις) common to Sirens, Muses, skillful speakers, and cicadas. On the one hand, this continuity in vocabulary betrays perceptual continuity: the quality of the sound, perceived or imagined, matters more than the ontological nature of the performer. Nonhuman animals (cicadas), humans (old men speaking), and gods (Sirens or Muses) are represented as producing the same type of sound (not necessarily pleasant but arresting). On the other hand, when Plato refers to the sound of the cicadas for his reader, he is as much actually invoking the sound of the insects as he is ventriloquizing Homer and Hesiod, in order to create a familiar countryside and to recall ideas associated with the singing or speaking voice, its appeal to the senses, and its danger. Most interpreters have noted these features and shed light on the mythical association of cicadas and Sirens: just as Odysseus must resist the sensual attraction of the Sirens’ song and continue his heroic return home (his nostos), so must the philosophers resist the auditory charms of the cicadas and continue on their intellectual quest. So it would seem. Yet two other aspects of the introduction complicate this picture, and frame the reading of the myth. The introduction, I suggest, is not just a rehearsal of ideas about the pleasure of the insects’ clear sound: for the focus is not on the cicadas’ voice (as Aristotle notes, cicadas actually do not have a voice stricto sensu), but on the cicada as figure for the voice – on the cicada as voice.







Descriptions of Sirens with λιγύς/λιγυρός: Hes. fr. .; Alcm. PMG ; Ap. Rhod. Argon .–, .. For Aristotle, [Mir. ausc.] a, the third Siren is called Ligeia (Λίγεια). For descriptions of Muses with λιγύς/λιγυρός: Hom. Od. .–; Hes. Op. –, [Sc.] –; Homeric Hymn to the Mother of the Gods ; Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri : Homeric Hymn to Hephaistos ; Alcm. PMG ; Sappho fr.  Voigt; Stesichorus PMG ; Theoc. Id. .. Capra ; Rhodes . The Odyssean paradigm, however, is a difficult one, since Socrates mentions the need to be “uncharmed” (ἀκηλήτους) – something we cannot guarantee that Odysseus did: rather, he found a way to experience, without succumbing to, the fatal pleasure of the Sirens’ voice. Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens exploits this paradox (Kafka : –). Arist. De an. b.

The Voice: Between Acoustic and Hermeneutic Pleasure



The Voice: Between Acoustic and Hermeneutic Pleasure The Voice in Context The question of the voice, or rather the voice as question, does not emerge out of nowhere when Plato invents the myth of the cicadas. Homer and Hesiod, Sappho and Solon, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Gorgias and Licymnius (to name only a few poets and authors interested in the materiality of language) all engaged with the issue of the pleasure and inherent danger that the voice represents, and the quandaries it brings up. For Plato, the question of the voice is all the more urgent as he writes in the context of the controversies (real or imagined) that accompanied the great musical efflorescence of the so-called New Music revolution of the late fifth century. The relationship between song and music, voice and instrumental accompaniment, and sense and the senses were the very type of musical issues on which late fifth- and early fourth-century poets took positions in their lyric, tragic, and comic poetry, and that Plato addressed in other parts of his corpus. While in dialogue with these ideas, the Phaedrus explores the question of the voice in a very particular mode, through a myth that needs to be investigated in its own right. The introduction to the myth describes the cicadas not just as singing (ᾄδοντες) but also as engaging in dialogue (διαλεγόμενοι) with one another. The expression plays with the idea, well attested in Greek thought, that most animals emit sounds (ψόφος) and have a voice (φωνή). Sound and voice are themselves part of a triad, again well attested in Greek and illustrated, for example, by a passage of Plato’s Republic, which arranges hierarchically the lowest common denominator, sound (ψόφος), then vocalization (φθόγγος), and then the most rare, voice (φωνή). But Socrates does not simply describe the cicadas as making 





On questions of voice and ontology in Archaic thought, Pucci , and in the Odyssey, Pucci ; on the voice in Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Nooter ; on the voice and rhetoric, Porter b; on literature as a “writing of the voice,” Butler . The most comprehensive take on the way the nature of the voice, and its associated pleasure, was conceptualized in the Archaic and Classical period is Porter a. On the New Music and the musical controversies attached to it, see Martin ; Csapo ; Csapo and Wilson ; Power ; D'Angour ; LeVen . Tosca Lynch discusses Plato’s own engagement with the New Music and its controversies in the book she is currently working on, Plato’s Musical Ethos and the Revolution of the New Music. Pl. Resp. a. Lachenaud : –, with n.  on the notion of the “triade hiérarchisée.” More generally, on words for the voice, and the idea that words for the voice capture and delineate ontological categories, Ax ; Ford : –; Goslin ; Lachenaud ; Nooter : –.



Cicadas: On the Voice

sounds, with a form of ψόφος or φθόγγος (as opposed to the Longus passage examined in the previous chapter that describes the ringdove as vocalizing, φθεγξαμένη). Socrates does not describe them as “speaking” or “saying something” either: if they talk, we are not told what they say, or what it means. Here the activity itself is more significant than the spoken product: the cicadas are engaging in dialogue. Should we take this as a fanciful metaphor that Socrates uses to describe the impression that one insect rasp responds to another? To anyone who has experienced a summer afternoon in a Mediterranean country, this idea will seem unlikely. The insect chorus produces a continual buzz and creates an engulfing stereo effect rather than disciplined question-answer exchanges. One would search in vain for any kind of “dialogue” in nature: rather than questions and responses, real-world cicadas produce an incessant overlapping of tones, rhythms, and cycles as if, instead of a conversation, different monologues were superposed, each spoken with its own cadence – “regular patterns layered upon one another, rhythmic but not quite exact, fitting together in this mystically thrumming way we can hear but not easily describe.” The richness of the myth and the real power of the expression is to be found somewhere else. For in the vocabulary of vocal activity, and in the Platonic corpus in particular, logos, dialogos, and dialektos occupy a specific place. A selective, and necessarily reductive, history of the changing meaning and significance of logos from Archaic poetry down to Plato is necessary here. This is different from the brief overview provided in Chapter  about the use of logos as a criterion for othering certain types of being. Already in Homeric poetry, there is a deep-seated opposition between two ways of referring to spoken words in reference to their nature and effects: logos refers to the type of deceitful speech used, in the epics, by wily females (Calypso or Circe), while mythos is the authoritative speech of heroes and rulers. The same is true of the verbs associated with these 

 



See Leigh Fermor : : “the roar of millions of cicadas burst on the ear. It came from the shore in rhythmic grating, metallic waves like the engines of an immense factory in a frenzy – the electric rattle of innumerable high-powered dynamos whirling in aimless unison . . . Each olive tree . . . was turned by the insects into a giant rattle, a whirling canister of iron filings.” Rothenberg : –,  for quotation. For Aristotle, only a few animals, those with a flexible tongue, have what he calls διάλεκτος, articulated speech connected to the intellect, λόγος (e.g., Hist. an. b–, a–a); at other points in his treatises, διάλεκτος is unique to man (for example, Hist. an. b–). On Aristotle’s view of phone, dialektos, and sound, see Ax ; Lachenaud : –. On the biology of language, Zirin . The key study on logos/mythos in the Homeric epics is Martin .

The Voice: Between Acoustic and Hermeneutic Pleasure



nouns: Homeric poetry consistently differentiates between λέγω (to produce empty words and seductive speeches) and μυθέομαι (to express one’s thoughts authoritatively). The Homeric mythos/logos dichotomy thus hints at different ways in which the product of the voice is linked to truth and seduction: logos is soft, seduces, and appeals to the appetites; mythos conveys authoritative content, appeals to mental capacities, and is performative. Logos is deceitful, devious; mythos straight and truthful. In Homer already the voice of a speaker is conceptualized, through the use of different words, in terms both of its aesthetic effect and of its relationship to thought and reason. At the end of the sixth and beginning of the fifth century BCE, mythos gradually came to be connected “with traditional tales (myths) that were the vehicles of authoritative social conventions. The first philosophers attempted to appropriate this authority for their own intellectual project, whose product, they hoped, would displace traditional sources of wisdom.” As mythos started to be associated with myth (and oral and song culture), logos became the privileged word for vocal expression (speech) and the intellectual activity (reason) associated with it and exclusive to humans. As we briefly saw in Chapter , what we call “animals” were for the Greeks ta aloga, “the ones deprived of logos” – of both speech and rationality. Logos is thus an activity (articulate speech), the product of that activity (spoken and written words, language), and the faculty that makes it possible (rationality). But logos, invested with the weight of the Archaic mythos, also inherited some of the negative connotations of the Homeric logos, including its appeal to the senses and the appetites through the sensual activity of the voice. 



 



Compare, for example, the description of Calypso trying to hold Odysseus back on her island by “enchanting him with soft and wily speeches [logoi]” (μαλακοῖσι καὶ αἱμυλίοισι λόγοισι | θέλγει, Od. .–), where the verb “enchant” is used also of the Sirens’ song (Od. . and ); and the description of the speech (mythos) of Sarpedon that “bites Hector’s heart” (ὥς φάτο Σαρπηδών, δάκε δὲ φρένας Ἕκτορι μῦθος, Il. .). The performative power of mythos is illustrated by the following line, for example: αὐτίκ᾽ ἔπειθ᾽ ἅμα μῦθος ἔην, τετέλεστο δὲ ἔργον (as soon as the word was uttered, the deed was accomplished, Il. .). Morgan : . On different historical ways of conceptualizing the opposition between logos and mythos, see Buxton . See Arist. Pol. a–: man is the only animal that has logos. The entry on logos in the Dictionary of Untranslatables sums up some of these difficulties (Cassin, Rendall, and Apter : –). For an explicit definition of logos as mental activity, Pl. Soph. e: “thought and logos are the same thing” (οὐκοῦν διάνοια μὲν καὶ λόγος ταὐτόν); and, in the same paragraph, thought is defined as “a silent dialogue [διάλογος ἄνευ φωνῆς] of the soul with itself.” On the relationship between the two meanings of logos, Heath : –. Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen analyzes the remarkable material and psychological power of logos. On the speech and the aesthetic questions tackled by Gorgias, see Porter a: –.



Cicadas: On the Voice

This issue of the power of logos (speech, discourse) in both its positive connotations (the relationship of language to truth) and its more negative ones (the power of rhetorical speeches to seduce the listener and deceive reason) is precisely at the heart of the Phaedrus. Rejecting the deceitful logoi of rhetoricians, Socrates praises the dialectic activity of the philosopher. This appeal to dialectic and dialogic logos is doubled, at the end of the dialogue, by a passionate defense of live, spoken logos as opposed to mute, written logos. The clearest sign of the association between good logos and the voice is Socrates’ description of the only serious logos as “living and animate” (ζῶντα καὶ ἔμψυχον, a–): it comes from within, like a voice. By contrast, the written logos is a mark that comes from without (ἔξωθεν, a; οὐκ ἔνδοθεν, a). If the Phaedrus defends the voice, it does not do so at all costs: it makes a defense of truth-seeking dialectic and spoken dialogue, but not of the voice of the rhetorician’s seductive and deceitful speech, especially when couched in writing. So, in the light of this dichotomy in the nature and uses of logos and its relationship to the voice in the Phaedrus, the “singing and dialoguing cicadas” are all the stranger and more arresting. I see them, in their double function as songsters and philosophers, as embodying a fundamental problem about responses to logos and the pleasure of vocality, and a question that is as fundamental to Plato in the Phaedrus as it is to the interpretation of the Phatta myth in the previous chapter, and to contemporary scholars of Voice Studies: in listening to a live voice, does one pay attention to the foregrounded medium (the singing or speaking voice, with, for example, its λιγυρός [clear-sounding] quality), or does the medium recede into the treetops, as the mere vehicle for logos (speech as the vocal expression of thought)? The philosophical and musical insects, even momentarily endowed with logos and engaging in dialogue, enact one of the paradoxes of the voice, by juxtaposing two functions usually kept separate: pure vocality and rationality. But, perched in their trees, Socrates’ cicadas also mark a fork in the road of philosophy. As Adriana Cavarero explains, if what is at stake in the term logos a notoriously equivocal word that means, among other things, “language” is “speech” [parola], then the “voice” also plays a part here. To put it formulaically, speech refers to speakers, and speakers refer to their voice. Plausible as it might seem, however, this is not the road taken by philosophy. Philosophy instead chooses a path that, through precise strategies, avoids getting caught up in the very question of the voice.  

On Plato’s double rejection of the poetic voice and written logos, Cavarero : –. Ibid., p.  (my emphasis), and – for the “devocalization of logos.”

The Voice: Between Acoustic and Hermeneutic Pleasure



The mythical cicadas of the Phaedrus are the very symptom of that predicament. While Cavarero attributes to Plato the “devocalization of logos,” the cicadas of our myth are Socratic, vocal figures, placing us in front of the very problem of the voice, to be confronted through the evocative medium of myth and its metamorphic logic, rather than philosophical dialogue. Under the Tettigal Gaze Yet, despite the emphasis on the aural presence of the insect, one needs to take stock of a second surprising feature in the passage setting up the myth: nothing specific is actually said about the cicadas’ vocal output. No adjective, no description, only a reference to two incompatible acoustic activities, singing and engaging in dialogue. For what unsettles Socrates and leads him to continue his musing about the cicadas is not their sound, but their gaze: they look down (καθορᾶν) on him and his companion. In the description of the insect, Socrates subordinates the importance of the voice to the realm of vision. The tettigal gaze and imagined thoughts unsettle the philosopher, as looking problematizes the relationship between thought, interiority, and subjectivity. The association between vision and thought in the insect stare complicates the relationship between voice and logos. The rest of the introduction is a fantasy on this tettigal perspective: what would the cicadas think if they saw the two men not engaging in dialogue with each other (διαλεγομένους) but taking a nap, “like common people” (καθάπερ τοὺς πολλοὺς), beguiled by the insects’ charm because of their lazy-mindedness (κηλουμένους ὑφ’ αὑτῶν δι’ ἀργίαν τῆς διανοίας)? The same participle used to depict the activity of the cicadas (διαλεγομένους) describes what men ought to engage in, bringing full circle the question brought up by the attribution of the verb to the insects in the first place. No sentence perhaps better encapsulates this problematic relationship between animal gaze and invitation to philosophy than the following: “The animal looks at us and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.” This is Derrida’s description of his own reaction when being seen naked by his cat: in the confrontation between human and nonhuman animal, it is not so much the boundaries and interrelations between animal species that are being explored, but the notion of 

Derrida : . On Derrida’s essay, see Bruns , and on the posterity of Derrida’s coinage “animot” (meant to have the plural “animals” [Fr. animaux] heard in the singular), see Senior, Clark, and Freccero .



Cicadas: On the Voice

subjectivity itself, and one’s perception and definition of oneself as thinking animal. Derrida’s phrase acknowledges his coming to terms with the question Who am I at that moment?, at that moment of being aware of his nudity, of feeling shame in front of his cat, and of feeling shame at his own shame when confronted with the feline gaze. In the same way, Socrates imagines the prospective shame inflicted by the mocking cicadas at the sight of silent men, sleeping instead of engaging in philosophy. The insect’s derisive stare underlines the men’s potential bêtise: the men’s silence is, to the ears of the cicadas, the aural equivalent of bestial nudity. In a dizzying spiral, Socrates invites Phaedrus to think about their own use of human logos in its vocal manifestation as “dialogue” by referring to the staring cicadas. The insects play the role of invisible commentators to the conversation. Heard but unseen, they are a form of “cinematic voice,” a voice that is often granted the power of vision and the faculty of reporting (on which, more later). What’s more, the insects are imagined as endowed with another vocal feature: laughter (καταγελῷεν). Laughter is barely a voice and more of a sound (ψόφος), but it is one of the privileges of humans, one of the features that the ancients already recognized as typically human: humans are the only animals endowed not only with logos but also with laughter. In the representation of the laughing cicada staring at the lazy men, the putative frontier between human and nonhuman is erased: in taking the animal perspective seriously (even in a flight of mythical fancy), Socrates explores the interspecies continuity of the voice, its different manifestations (from silence, to laughter, to song and logos), and what might be appropriate responses to it. But mythical fancy is a serious ontological business with significant consequences for the history of philosophy and for Animal Studies. The momentary malaise introduced by the cicadas’ presence – what one could call, in Derridean fashion, animalaise – is examined in the text in a last 

  

The cicadas are of course imagined differently from Derrida’s cat: they are plural, generic, while Derrida’s cat (“a female cat, a little cat,” he tells us) is singular, an individual. Moreover, Derrida is less interested in the cat’s perspective on the encounter than in his own reaction to the cat’s stare, in his experience of selfhood in the moment of confronting the other animal, naked. By contrast, Socrates imagines his own reaction to the foregrounded imagined reaction of the cicadas: his is a mediated experience, reflected upon through the reaction of the insects. The bêtise (stupidity) of the rational human puns on the irrationality of the animal (Fr. bête). On the cinematic voice, Chion ; Silverman : –. On man being the only laughing animal, see Arist. Part. an. a–. Modern scholars add criteria distinguishing humans from other animals: clothes, an opposable thumb, a polis, the practice of giftgiving, burial, mourning, etc.; on which, Sorabji .

The Voice: Between Acoustic and Hermeneutic Pleasure



moment of reversal, where the insects would think (ἡγούμενοι) that Socrates and Phaedrus are some kind of lowly creatures or slaves (ἀνδράποδ’ ἄττα) coming to a watering place like sheep (ὥσπερ προβάτια) in the middle of the day to nap near a spring. The metamorphosis of men into nonhuman animals is still only figurative: the change is only an imagined, metaphorical, scenario, presented in the optative mood, in a simile so common that it has lost its power. But the repetition of the same loaded vocabulary (διαλεγομένους – engaging in dialogue) to describe the analogy between men and cicadas brings the point home, by continually returning to the question, “Who is the animal other here, and what is the proper use of the phone – in its production and consumption?” The image also has additional significance because it is a form of rehearsal of the physical metamorphosis that is about to happen, in a move further away from the human: from human to another mammal, and from a mammal to the utterly other, the insect. Reading the introduction to the myth this way allows us to go beyond an interpretation that would see mere anthropomorphism in the description of the cicadas (and I return here to an issue already discussed in preceding chapters). Here, it is precisely the anthropos of “anthropomorphism” that is being questioned and the insects’ imagined gaze articulates and destabilizes the definition of human and nonhuman animal-ness. To repeat and specify: reflecting on the nonhuman perspective in this passage has opened the way to two fundamental questions related to the voice: one metaphysical, the other aesthetic. The first concerns the connection between sound and sight, and distinguishes two ways of conceptualizing mental activity and its relationship with humanness and philosophy: through logos or through sight, as phonocentric or videocentric activity. The second question has to do with the duality inherent in the voice, and in the pleasure it provides: how does one reckon with the pleasure of the voice – is it the mellifluous medium, or is it the fact that it bears meaning, through logos, that causes pleasure in the vocal experience? The cicadas are a figure to think about the connection between voice, thought, and sound (as speech or as song), and their respective dangers: the sensual pleasure of vocality (in song and rhetorical speeches) can lure away from logos (thought and reason). Yet one needs logos (speech as reasoning but also speech as vocal activity) to engage in the kind of live



See Cavarero : – (a chapter evocatively entitled “When thinking was done with the lungs . . .”) and Dolar : –, for radically different takes on the issue of the voice.



Cicadas: On the Voice

philosophy Socrates advocates: that is how Phaedrus will respond to Socrates’ description – λεκτέον γὰρ οὖν, “So let’s speak.” The issue of overlap between enjoyment of sound and sense that is figured through the animal transformation in Longus’ myth of the ringdove takes on another layer of meaning here: we are no longer talking about the cross-species appeal of song and the voice, but about the mystery of the voice and its spell. In the experience of sounding words, the Phaedrus asks, how (if at all) do we meaningfully separate the voice as object of aesthetic enjoyment and the voice as carrier of meaning, and are there alternatives to these two options? This is precisely the question that the Odyssean Sirens pose: is it the sweetness of their voice, or the knowledge they promise of “all the things that happened on the muchnourishing earth” (ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ, Od. .), that is so irresistible to Odysseus? Is it the sound or the story, and how do we ever separate the two? If we resist their song, uncharmed (ἀκηλήτους), are we not missing the knowledge that they offer? Socrates highlights one type of response (a faulty one), in which the listener is charmed by the aural medium and dies of the pleasure experienced, perishing on the Sirens’ shore, deprived of a safe nostos. If cicadas saw men being deprived of what characterizes them (logos, as thought, and dianoia, intellect) and being dazzled by the mere sounds of speech, they would rightly laugh at these lazy animals (which he could, but does not, call aloga). Socrates also suggests a positive response: let’s talk and mimic the dialogic animals in the trees, let’s engage in dialogue and use dialectic reasoning to investigate the question of what logoi are. But there is a more subtle alternative to these two responses, to which I will return in the latter part of the chapter: the voice signals individuality, live presence, and the presence of someone sounding the air for the companionship of a listener. Dialogue is not only about the dialectic activity in itself, it is also about two people engaging with one another, in their uniqueness. The individual presence of a voice cannot be taken away in a dialogue: it is not “the voice” but always “voices” – dialogue is always about dia-phony. In this introduction, Socrates relies on the poetic tradition, and the established metaphorical use of cicadas as “singers,” but subtly moves away 

 

Dolar : –. On the idea and on the voice in the rhetorical tradition, see also Porter b: : “The voice here was a continuum of breath, palpable and enjoyable per se. This is the aesthetic flip-side to Gorgias’ isolation of the abstract essence of language as logos.” Cavarero : – on the “ontology of uniqueness.” Bakhtin : –: “diaphony” presupposes a reaction of some sort (even unvoiced) to what is expressed by a voice.

Food for Song: Paradox of the Embodied Voice



from the familiar musical insects to present them as engaged in dialogue and as viewers. As Weil explains, “thinking as and about animals is an art that requires rumination . . . it should be haunted by our bêtises even as it takes stock of and pleasure in our capacities for rumination or for just walking (with) the dog.” By linking human and nonhuman animal in the fantasy scenario, deconstructing the boundaries between species, and extending the use of the animal voice to include (dia)logos, Socrates questions the metaphorical nature of the insects’ “song.” The fundamental continuity of the voice between different animal species also brings up another important, and related, question: that of the connection between voice and body.

Food for Song: Paradox of the Embodied Voice The Body of the Voice and the Embodied Voice The issue of the bodily, or bodiless, status of sound is an ancient one. It became a familiar topic of investigation in fourth-century BCE philosophy, but already had a long history of debates in philosophy before Plato, and the issue continued to be discussed for many more centuries thereafter by natural scientists, philosophers, and scholars of acoustics. Throughout this long history, two opposite views on the question of the physical nature of sound were held: on the one hand, the Pythagoreans and their followers (including Archytas and Plato) believed that sound was bodiless. It is created by the movement and impact of air. On the other hand, the Presocratic philosophers Alcmaeon, Anaxagoras, Gorgias, and Empedocles, as well as the Atomist Democritus and later, in the Roman period, Lucretius and the Stoics thought that sound was a body (σῶμα). These ancient debates hinged upon the question of sound as a bodily entity, but ancient texts also meditated on the issue of the status of the human body in the experience of the voice. This is the question that resides, on my reading, at the core of the first part of the cicada myth.  



Weil : xxiv. On the immaterial nature of sound, see Archytas fr.  DK; Pl. Phil. a–b, Tim. a–c; Arist. De an. b–a (and in particular b–), [De aud.] a–, [Pr.] b– (.); Euc. [Sectio Canonis] Pr.–. See also Ax : – on Plato, – on Aristotle; Barker : ; and Lachenaud : – on the essence of the voice. Democritus A DK ( Aët. ..); Epicurus Ep. Hdt. – (see also Democritus A DK); Lucr. .–; Aët. ..; Diog. Laert. .–. On Atomist ideas about the nature of the voice, Koenen : –, –; Koenen . On Stoic ideas about the nature of the voice, Ax : –. On ideas about the music of the voice in Classical and Hellenistic authors, see also Porter a: –.



Cicadas: On the Voice

The continuity between men and cicadas appears only in a simile in the introduction: by the work of the imagination and a handy comparison, cicadas could become laughing philosophers, and men sleepy beasts napping around a spring. But the myth takes this idea seriously and reifies the metaphor through metamorphosis: cicadas actually used to be men who, enchanted by song, forgot to eat and drink. Like sailors before the Sirens, neglect of their bodily needs (anticipating the real cicadas) caused their death, and from those men came the cicadas that “pour” down their song or voice (χέει αὐδὴν, Hes. [Sc.]  and καταχεύετ’ ἀοιδὴν, Hes. Op. ) in lieu of ingesting food. What strange singers that makes them, so far away from the “mere bellies” as Hesiod calls the singing shepherds in the proem of the Theogony (Theog. )! The cicadas invert a whole poetic tradition that closely associates food and song: from the Odyssey’s sustained engagement with the issue of food and its connection with song production through the economy of kleos, to the iambic poet Archilochus’ emphasis on his unmanageable appetite for fatty food “fattening himself on abuse” (Pind. Pyth. .–), there is a deep-seated equation between the words and sounds that come out of the singer’s mouth, and the food that goes into it. The voice and speech of the poet-singer exist in direct correlation with the food given to the body that produces song, and the quality of the diet dictates the type of speech and song composed. Yet the myth clearly explains that the Muses gave to the insects the privilege of interrupting this cycle, of not needing sustenance during their life, while being able to sing without interruption. How should we interpret this fantastic metamorphosis of song-crazed men who forgot to eat into cicadas who can sing without food? On the one hand, the myth works as an aetiological account of an apparent oddity of the cicadas’ diet. Ancient authors often comment on the remarkable abstemiousness of this species, and plenty of poems reckon with the marvelous (and almost divine) ability of the cicada to consume only the most ethereal of substances (dew) and describe its apparent freedom from any need. The overwhelming importance of sound in the insect’s life and the privilege (geras) given by the gods explains the adunaton: cicadas need nothing other than song to survive. On the other hand, the myth 



On the connection between food and poetics in the Odyssey, Bakker , and in iambic poetry, Steiner  and C. Brown . On the mouth as specifically charged locus, LaBelle . On the diet of the cicadas: Hes. [Sc.] ; Arist. Hist. an. b, b; Callim. Aet. fr. .; Theoc. Id. .; Meleager G&P () ; Anacreonta . West; Synesius Hymn .; and a fable in the Aesopic tradition (fable  Perry). Also Myers : –; Borthwick ; Davies and Kathirithamby : –.

Food for Song: Paradox of the Embodied Voice



highlights another paradox of the voice: depending on the physical apparatus of lungs, throat, and mouth for its production in humans, it straddles the domain of the body and its physical requirement, and that of the spiritual (through the assistance of the Muses). In the singers’ new life as insects, there is no overlap between the body as the vehicle that lets song out and the body as the receptacle that takes food in – all the more so since in insects, the fleshy parts and hard skeleton are inside out, and there are no lungs powering the song, nor throat or mouth connecting inside and outside, and directing the traffic of food and song. The narrative of the transformation is itself revealing. The myth presents a cosmogony of sorts: cicadas are born “of men.” The preposition and the verbs describing the generation of the Muses, then of song, then of cicadas (γίγνομαι, φαίνω, φύομαι) cue us to the type of grammar familiar from cosmogonic poetry and used for reproduction (sexual and asexual). Even though φύεται and “of them” (ἐξ ὧν) refer to a transformation rather than to reproduction, we find the same logic as in cosmogonic poetry, where offspring reproduce features of their parents (here the neglect of the body and love of song persist from men to cicadas). Again, as in cosmogonic poetry, the myth accounts for the creation not of individuals but of the race (τὸ γένος) of cicadas; like the entities described in Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of the cicadas is described as part of the fundamental constitution of the cosmos. At the same time, the narrative proceeds in a way that provides a fantastic natural history of music and an evolutionary theory of song: at the beginning were men; the Muses and song developed later; and then insects were created, the result of an adaptive development. The cicadas, in this scenario, are conceived as a thoughtful expedient to the continued art of music, with no developmental explanation other than the logic that ties the body to song production. Animal metamorphosis is presented as the counterpart to mimesis, as the unceasingly singing voice transcends species, resounding through different bodies once song makes its appearance. Just as in Hesiod, Plato’s Muses might be the divinities responsible for music, but men are at the heart and origin of this system. Taken at face value, then, the myth illustrates that “evolution might be antiteleological, as Darwin



On the physical needs of the voice and the paradox of its training in ancient Greece, Barker ; Melidis –; Melidis ; Melidis in press. For a fascinating modern perspective on the anatomy of performance and the intersection between discourse on anatomy and discourse on performance in the Romantic era, Davies , and Feldman  on the technologically created voice of the castrato.



Cicadas: On the Voice

acknowledged, and that may mean there is no end in sight to what humans and other animals can yet become.” The cicada myth also explodes, or offers an alternative to, the structuralist framework in which food delineates the proper domains, or marks the ontological boundaries, of animals, men, and gods. The ascetic cicada is closer to gods who need no sustenance to speak of than to animals who eat their food raw – and immensely far away from men, who not only need food but also consume it cooked. Such a framework is used as the basis for the interpretation of many passages of Hesiod’s Theogony or Works and Days, as I discussed in Chapter , but just as the introduction to the myth compromises the interpretation of the “singing and dialoguing cicadas” in terms of anthropomorphism, the transformation of men into abstemious cicadas cannot be fully illuminated in the light of the structuralist model. The issue does not lie in defining categories by opposition to each other, but rather in acknowledging the ontological fluidity between species: this fluidity, in turn, points to specific aesthetic questions. Acousmatic Presence A second problem resides at the heart of the story: acknowledging the ambiguous status of the body and the physical not only in the essence or the production of musical sound, but also in the enjoyment of song and the voice. After the birth of the Muses, it seems that the pleasure created by song can no longer be reckoned with in a human body. The body is either sustained by food or by song. The cicada-men here realize the promise of the Siren simile used by Socrates in the introduction: in an extreme case of irresistible musical pleasure, the attraction to song leads to the destruction of the men’s body. Yet, instead of consuming the bodies of others and turning them into a pile of rotting bones, the musical men (metaphorically turned Sirens) consume their own body and are reduced to nothing. The cicadas are the result of a simple yet bizarre equation: human minus body equals voice. The insects are thus a paradox standing for a symbol of the  



Weil : xxiv. The framework underlining such a division is Lévi-Strauss . See also Chapter . For an explicit comparison of cicadas and gods, Anacreonta . West: σχεδὸν εἶ θεοῖς ὅμοιος (you are nearly similar to a god). This is neatly captured by Calvino, in “A King Listens” (: ): “That voice comes certainly from a person, unique, inimitable like every person; a voice, however, is not a person, it is something suspended in the air, detached from the solidity of things . . . Is it a bodiless you that listens to that bodiless voice?” I will further consider the issue of the bodiless voice (and its prefiguration of the recorded, or telephonic, voice) in Chapter .

Food for Song: Paradox of the Embodied Voice



voice: physical in its phenomenology, the pleasure of the voice is created by the body and experienced through the body, but the insects themselves (and the notion of sound they encapsulate) are as close to bodilessness and invisibility as possible. As a matter of fact, the insectile body aptly represents the paradox of the voice, as it inverts assumptions about the body and literally turns it inside out (with their hard skeleton on the outside, and their fleshy parts inside). Cicadas are a body insofar as they emit a voice, but they are denied the fleshiness, the sexiness, the physicality associated with other iconic producers of the voice. For the cicadas, no lungs, no lips, no saliva that make voluptuous divas and desirable Sirens the icon for the singing voice. The paradoxical relationship of body and voice manifests itself in another, related way: tiny, black, and shriveled, the cicadas are tucked away in the trees, blending in with their background, an invisible orchestra – even a cinematic voice. The power of the insects’ voice emanates precisely from the underdetermination of its source: cicadas are heard, but not seen. Their body is only assumed, produced by the power of their voice rather than identified as a condition for it. This concealed chorus exudes a disproportionally loud, resonant sound, and their voice creates a form of enthrallment typical of the effect produced by unseen sounds. Music history from the seventeenth century down to twentieth-century pop and beyond is full of anecdotes associating the transcendent effect created by music with the absence of a visual cause for it: various techniques and technological tricks, from the concealment of choirs, back-up singers, and orchestras, to the invention of the phonograph and the recorded voice, aimed at divorcing the voice from its perceptible, physical, bodily cause, in order to reinforce musical transcendence. The unseen cicadas, repeating the same song for eternity, are a natural prelude to these experiments and explore the pleasure and thrills of this type of sonic experience. This ambiguous relationship of the cicadas with the body can be read in one more aspect: the natural life cycle of the insects, who spend a long time underground to sing a brief time in the trees, combines aspects of life, death, and rebirth. The human metamorphosis into a nonhuman animal is a way of actualizing the problem at the core of the myth. 



Connor’s notion of “vocalic body,” discussed in his work of ventriloquism, is instrumental here (especially Connor : –). On sound unseen (or the “acousmatic condition”), see Kane  (and specifically on “invisible orchestras and angelic choirs,” –). Also Goehr : –. I will return to this idea of acousmatic condition in the next chapter, in discussing Echo.



Cicadas: On the Voice

The issue is less that of the consequences of the transformation into a different type of body and more about the kind of aesthetic issue figured through that transformation. In that regard, the cicadas are close to both death and immortality: after spending time underground, they are reborn to sing and die again, in an apparently endless replaying of the same scenario. In the myth, both the men who became cicadas and the cicadas themselves die, but they are, as we are about to see, granted a privilege close to that of immortality. Considered in the context of the Phaedrus, the body of the cicada is, in a way, a parallel to writing: it is only the perishable shell, the erasable physical sign of a living voice. That body does not “produce” a voice as much as it is revealed by a voice. Yet it effaces itself as soon as a voice is heard. The physical body, like the material shell of writing, is an acknowledgment of death, but the voice itself is immortal, and so is memory, figured in the constant return of the generations of the singing cicadas. To sum up the voice of the cicadas, or rather the cicada as figure for the voice, brings up the problem of the connection of sound and the body in two ways: the voice is the area of overlap between the material and the spiritual. Mouth and breath are physical conditions for the voice, yet vocal sounds themselves are ultimately bodiless: whether one considers them as “impact of the air” (a Pythagorean idea) or as “air-shaped” or “breath” (an idea that Atomists and Stoics shared), the voice is not “bodily” in the sense that a tear, a fingernail, or a drop of blood is bodily, a palpable substance that issues forth from the body while being detached from it. The voice is a symptom of its somatic origins but it is detached from the body, it cannot be bound to it or subsumed by it. This idea is related more broadly to the Greek tradition of poetry exceeding the body of individual singers and iconically expressed in the Iliad’s invocation of the Muse preceding the Catalogue of Ships, where the singer asks for the goddesses’ help, acknowledging that not even “ten tongues and ten mouths, an unbreakable voice and a bronze heart” (οὐδ’ εἴ μοι δέκα μὲν γλῶσσαι, δέκα δὲ στόματ’ εἶεν | φωνὴ δ' ἄρρηκτος, χάλκεον δέ μοι ἦτορ ἐνείη, Il. .–) would allow him to name all the ship leaders that came to Troy.





On this aspect of the myth, and on the spiritual symbol of insect metamorphosis, see B. Clarke : – and Clarke . B. Clarke :  discusses “writing as the daemonic” and partially sums up his thesis in the following words: “the metamorphic exile of the body is an allegory of writing, and the structural consequences of writing are reified in the form of the daemonic. The textual realm of the daemonic is an allegory of transformative communication.”

The Voice of the Muses: Singularity and Plurality



At the same time, the voice is often imagined as having a power similar to that of a physical body: if we return to the famous Homeric Sirens episode mentioned above, we find that Odysseus prepares himself and his crew for the encounter with the Sirens’ voice by bodily techniques. Ears are sealed, arms are bound. The voice is a presence that needs to be resisted with wax, wit, ropes and cables, with the solid binding of the most robust of heroes, who becomes, in Italo Calvino’s words “a bodiless you that listens to that bodiless voice.” The sophist Gorgias sums it up in his defense of Helen (fr. ): she was swayed and carried away by logos (spoken words), by the persuasion of that “smallest and most invisible of bodies” (σμικροτάτῳ σώματι καὶ ἀφανεστάτῳ) that “can achieve most divine deeds” (θειότατα ἔργα ἀποτελεῖ). The voice is thus doubly paradoxical: it is bodiless yet affects the listener’s body as powerfully as the stoutest of assailants. And while not a body itself, it depends on, and reveals the intimacy of, its producer’s body. No wonder, then, that the Theogony and the Odyssey emphasize the gorgeousness of their female singers: it is a part of their physical appeal that transpires in their voice. And with that we return to the Muses.

The Voice of the Muses: Singularity and Plurality In the discussion of the introduction to the myth, one puzzling part was left unexplained: Socrates’ reference to “the [cicadas’] privilege that they have from the gods to give to humans” (ὃ γέρας παρὰ θεῶν ἔχουσιν ἀνθρώποις διδόναι, b). This gift is presumably different from the one that the Muses gave the cicadas (that they do not need to eat to keep making music). Interpretations of the Muses’ gift to humans have varied widely, from the gift of “strength to resist their charm” to the answer given at d, the “science of speaking” (τέχνης τινὸς τοῦ λέγειν). A key to the puzzle is given in the last lines of the cicada narrative, where the myth returns to the Muses. After their death, the insects report to the divinities the discipline in which each mortal most honored the Muses. In a tight network linking goddesses, men, and insects, the cicadas work as a threeway elevator system through time and through ontological statuses: from men to insects thanks to the gift of the Muses, and back to the Muses for whom they work as postmortem attachés.  

On the Odyssean Sirens, Cavarero : –. Burger :  for the former; Rowe  ad loc. for the latter. There is a further pun in the paronomasis geras (privilege) and gēras (old age, but also the skin that snakes and some insects cast off – see Davies and Kathirithamby : ).



Cicadas: On the Voice

But the last part of the narrative does more than connect the three realms: the cicadas actually take on the function of the Muses themselves. Besides being endowed with the goddesses’ gift of song, the cicadas perform the most important of the Muses’ roles: they are not just delightful songstresses, but by observing men from their leafy perches (and listening to their songs), they are able to see and know, like their Hesiodic model, “what is what will be, and what was” (τά τ᾽ ἐόντα τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα, Hes. Theog. ). The Muses’ traditional divine omniscience, in the Socratic account, is comically mediated by the humble cicadas, who infiltrate human life and faithfully report. The Muses do not know from seeing for themselves, but through hearing from the dead cicadas, their secret spies on earth. The all-powerful Muses become dependent on the tiny insects’ reports, blurring any hierarchy there might be between men, other animals, and the divine, as well as the hierarchy of the senses (vision and hearing) and their relationship with knowledge. Instead of the Muses, it is the cicadas that observe the spectacle of men’s life; and, conversely, instead of being hailed as daughters of Mnemosyne, understood as memory and associated with vision, the Muses, and especially the most important of them, are characterized by their voice (“Calliope [Beautiful Voice] and Urania . . . who emit the most beautiful voice”). The Muses’ knowledge is derived from hearsay, not autopsy. What to make of this presentation of the cicadas? I suggest that their description, as attachés to the Muses characterized by their voice, brings up one final aspect of the aesthetic question that occupies us: that of the relationship between singularity and plurality, mortality and immortality, in the experience of the voice. It might have already become clear that one figure is strangely absent from Socrates’ mythological account of musical activities: the human poet, who traditionally channels the vision, voice, and knowledge of the Muses and exhales them through his voice, product of mortal lungs, chest, and mouth, in a song that presents a necessarily bounded narrative. The myth of the cicadas does not leave room for a blind bard; instead, we have blind Muses, all ears to the insects. And 



On Hesiod, Pucci  and Clay . See also the difficult lines of Il. .–: “you, goddesses, who are present and know everything | while we only hear the kleos and don’t know anything!” (ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε, πάρεστέ τε, ἴστέ τε πάντα, | ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν). Omniscience is also claimed by the Sirens’ in the Odyssey : like the cicada-like old Trojan men, they know all the events that happened on the vast Trojan plain (ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’ ὅσ’ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ, Od. .) and they know everything that happens on the much-nourishing earth (ἴδμεν δ’ ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ, Od. .). An ironic choice if ever there was one, since cicadas, as ancient sources note, are nearsighted (Arist. Hist. an. b; Plin. HN .).

The Voice of the Muses: Singularity and Plurality



instead of a poet dependent on the Muses for his inspiration and knowledge, Socrates depicts a multiplicity of men honoring the Muses in different sonorous ways (song and dance, amorous speech, logos of various kinds), a multiplicity of philomousoi among which Phaedrus himself figures. In this transformation, we lose the divine voice (θέσπιν αὐδὴν, Theog. –) that was breathed into the bard, fragile in its uniqueness. Instead emerge innumerable mortal voices, each activating the power of the Muses. What the cicadas revisit, in their role as reporters to the Muses, is once again, but with slight variations, the question of the ontological status of the voice. Mortal in its phenomenology, the voice of the poet, for Hesiod or Homer, is a channel of the Muses’ knowledge. In that regard, it is a divine production, yet it is fundamentally singular because of the mortal status of the performer: the individual poetic voice will cease to exist at the death of the mortal poet, although the work will live on, passed on through new mouths. In these traditional poetic accounts, the singular voice of the bard (mortal, fleshy, connected to the performer’s body and its particular inflections, drawling, accents . . .) is also the medium for an immanently bounded, limited narrative: the divine perspective is necessarily framed and selective when it is poured from the Muses’ unbounded omniscience to the mouth of the individual speaker. It is not one mouth but ten, and ten tongues, and a chest of bronze, and an unbreakable voice (φωνὴ ἄρρηκτος) that the Homeric bard wishes for (Il. .–), acknowledging the physical limits of the mortal singer. By contrast, the experience of the voice described by the cicadas is one that takes the singular accents, intonations, and mouth movement of each individual speaker as a form of worship of the Muse of the beautiful voice – Calliope: philosophical dialogue, love speech, song are as many individual forms of the experience of the voice that praise the Muses. While relying on these traditional poetic ideas and models, the cicada myth thus shifts attention from the voice of the epic poet to the voice of individual yet anonymous speakers, worshipping individual Muses. The four Muses mentioned correspond to particular cases of vocal practitioners, and it is sound again that links human activity and goddess, each bound to the other by the very sounds of language: Terpsichore is honored by the 

In Homer, the voice is a marker of individuality: see Od. ., where Odysseus is recognized by his nurse thanks to his appearance, his voice, and his feet (δέμας φωνήν τε πόδας). When the spirit of Patroclus comes to Achilles (Il. .–), it is described as similar to him in stature, in voice, and in his fair eyes. Helen also reproduces the individual voices of the wives of the Achaeans hidden inside the Trojan horse (Od. .).



Cicadas: On the Voice

singer-dancer of choral music, who foregrounds the voice as medium; Erato is honored by the lover full of eros who, through the voice that comes from the cavity of the mouth reveals the intimacy of the individual, in the sense of letting out the most personal aspect of his or her self. The etymological work justifying the connection between Muse and mortal activity is of a slightly different kind in the description of the worship of Urania and Calliope, the eldest and most venerable of the nine sisters. These two have control over divine and human logoi, and are described as having the most beautiful voice (ἱᾶσιν καλλίστην φωνήν). The revised etymology of Calliope’s name in particular makes her less directly connected to the realm of epic poetry: she is not the one who has beautiful epe (ἔπη), as her name is usually explained, but the one with the beautiful voice (ὄψ), a noun used for a variety of species, from cicadas to goddesses, as we saw in Chapter . In the Platonic narrative, Calliope and Urania are the divinities associated with cosmology, the music of philosophy (τοὺς ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ διάγοντάς τε καὶ τιμῶντας τὴν ἐκείνων μουσικὴν), and the logoi (both accounts and speeches) about men and gods. The individuality of this “musical” voice is much different from the music of the poets: it is not one voice channeling that of the Muses through a mortal body, but instead each individual through their mortal, unique voice realizes the worship of the Muses. Every voice adds to the innumerable orchestra conducted by the divinities. Rather than providing a limited sampling of the divine (in its static immortality) in the epic bard’s song, the voice that the cicadas model celebrates the chorus of individuals offering a mortal, living narrative, unbounded and as multiple as the individuals creating it. Like individual generations of cicadas (and like the men who did not eat enough to sustain their singing), each individual voice is meant to die, but the worship of the Muse through vocal activity by the immortal chorus of philosophers continues. As such, with its invitation to speak, the myth triangulates the relationship of music, rhetoric, philosophy, and eros, which are the themes explored in the dialogue. All are based on the practice of the voice, and the surveillance of the cicadas ensures continuity between the 



Calvino : –: “The voice . . . is unique and inimitable, but perhaps in a different way from a person . . . the voice could be the equivalent of the hidden and most genuine part of the person . . . A voice means this: there is a living person, throat, chest, feelings, who sends into the air this voice, different from all other voices. A voice involves the throat, saliva, infancy, the patina of experienced life, the mind’s intentions, the pleasure of giving a personal form to sound waves. What attracts you is the pleasure this voice puts into existing: into existing as voice.” See also Barthes : –, on his own amorous relationship with a specific voice, that of the singer Charles Panzéra, who sang à voix nue. The two words have the same etymology but a different emphasis.

Conclusion



practices and the celebration of the Muses. The myth detaches the cicada from its simple association with song, and instead of a stable mythology and one-on-one association with natural singers (a sort of simple realization of the metaphor of “singing”), it puts pressure on it and explores the richness and paradox of the experience of the voice, poised between mortality and immortality.

Conclusion What are Plato’s cicadas exactly? What view of music and of the natural orchestra do they provide? And what kind of aesthetic question do they raise? Rather than using the Phaedrus as a whole to explain the puzzling myth, I have looked at the myth as a focus point of aesthetic and ontological questions explored in the rest of the dialogue, and later revisited in other critical texts. The myth also provides an alternative epistemic mode to discuss important issues of Platonic thought on music and the voice explored elsewhere in his oeuvre – and, again, used in later Imperial texts inspired by Platonic thought. On my reading, the Phaedrus is a dialogue about the voice: about the voice of the speechmaker, the voice of the lover, and that of the philosopher. The puzzling mythical narrative about the cicadas, I have argued, can be understood as a way to investigate the question of the voice, its power and its nature, and responses to it. Instead of being familiar figures from the summer countryside, Socrates’ insects are strange philosophical creatures. They are not invoked for the sound they produce: rather, they are themselves a metonym for the voice. The focus is not on what or how they sing, but on the paradox that the insects (and thus the voice) represent. The narrative about the insect is based on poetic topoi – the cicada as charming singer; the Muses as possessing knowledge of the past, present, and future of men; the danger of the irresistible Sirens – but it only provides these topoi as a way to come to grips with three important questions: what in a voice is so compelling, that it is a disappearing medium for signification or that it is the foregrounded, inescapable, medium? What is the ontological status of the voice? Is it physical or disembodied, and how does it relate to the bodies of its producer and its listener? Finally, what makes a voice singular? Is it the fact that it is linked to individual mortal bodies, or the fact that it is an unrepeatable act of worship of Calliope (etymologized as the Muse of the beautiful voice rather than of epic), unique unto each worshipper? The myth gives the cicada as its metonymic and paradoxical answer: it is the fact that the medium both disappears and is foregrounded that makes



Cicadas: On the Voice

the voice so powerful. The cicadas also embody another conundrum of the voice: as both a symptom of the body and an eternal echo of the somatic cavity from which it is born, it is a triumph of invisible physical matter that has power over both bodies and minds. The narrative connects many facets of the voice: the fleshy, the bodily, the Siren side of the embodied experience of song, but also the spiritual, bodiless, immortal stuff of the mind. The “music of nature” suggested by the familiar figure of the cicadas is thus only the pretext for an investigation of important acoustic, ontological, and aesthetic questions. And any time the myth suggests an answer pulling the voice in one direction (that of the body, or that of mortality), another possibility is ushered in (the voice is bodiless, immortal), in an endless game that transports us from the underground to the treetops and back again.

 

Echo: On Listening

Instead of a text, a blank space opens this chapter. For only a blank space, locus desertus, is the proper spot to encounter Echo, to reflect on her essence, and experience the play of presence and absence in the visual and aural realms. Although not a part of the nonhuman world like an insect, a plant, or a stone, Echo and her myth actually deserve to figure in our catalogue of metamorphic stories perhaps more than any other creature. For Echo is a figure of the natural world that brings up the most fundamental question that this book is concerned with: that of the relationality between listener and sound, between human animals and the nonhuman world, and between matter and ideas. The versions of the Echo myth are, like the nymph herself, multiple. Two important texts give an account of her origins: a story from Ovid’s 



Echo: On Listening

Metamorphoses , and an inset myth in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. Ovid’s story presents Echo as a skillful talker, burning with love for Narcissus, and shriveling into nothingness after being spurned by him; Longus depicts her as a superb musician who rejected the love of Pan only to be dismembered by her jealous and disappointed lover. In Ovid, one can read concerns about the right kind and mode of speech; in Longus, one casts a nostalgic glance back at the lyric performance culture of Archaic and Classical Greece. Despite these differences, both narratives stage the nymph in a tragic setting of frustrated love. Through her traumatic bodily transformation, both texts reflect on the materiality of sound, concluding in the disembodiment of Echo (either by desiccation or dismemberment) and ultimately accounting for the acoustic phenomenon of the echo – a voice without a body, or a voice that brings into question the body that produces it. Of the two narratives, the Ovidian version of Echo is undoubtedly best known. Most scholarship has read the two parts of the story (Echo’s unrequited love for Narcissus, and Narcissus’ blind and impossible love for himself ) as a duet on the theme of sensory delusion. The story of the garrulous nymph turned into mere reflection of other speakers’ words, and that of the boy facing his own reflection in the mirroring waters, are described as complementary aspects of a rumination on the experience of selfhood and self-knowledge, the experience of the senses, alterity, and “simulacral delusions.” But, presumably because of modern culture’s deep-seated privileging of visuality, Narcissus’ fame has come at Echo’s expense. Both Echo’s voice and Narcissus’ reflection in the pond actually defy the multisensorial nature of the experience of encountering a person: while in the everyday experience of an encounter, there is the possibility of both seeing and hearing (and sometimes smelling and touching) another person, Echo can only be encountered through sound, and Narcissus’ 







Echo as mythological figure also plays an important role in Pind. Ol. .; Hymn. Hom. Pan. ; Soph. Phil. –; Eur. Hec. –; Ar. Thesm. –; Callim. Epig.  Pfeiffer; Mosch. Ep. Bion. –; CIG ; Nonnus, Dion. ., ., ., .; Anth. Pal. ., .. The earliest and most comprehensive treatment of Echo is Wieseler ; Bonadeo  provides extensive bibliography. On the complexities of the relationships between voice, body, and personhood, see Chapter  and Chapter . Connor  is particularly helpful to reflect on the “capacity of the voice to put its source in question” () and “the power of a voice without a visible source is the power of a lessthan-presence which is also a more-than-presence” (). Hardie :  for the expression (more generally on the echo, ibid., –). On the parallel between the two figures, Brenkman : –; Rosati : ; Rosati : ; FrontisiDucroux and Vernant : –. On the historical hierarchy of the senses (and the privileging of vision), see Ihde , who proposes a welcome reevaluation. Also Porter .

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone



double through vision (even touch disturbs the image in the water). Echo has not inspired visual artists or psychoanalysts as much as her visual counterpart. The fact that the version of Echo in Longus (where she is not associated with Narcissus) is much less studied only reinforces the point: the nymph’s story in Daphnis and Chloe, like other inset stories in the novel, has only been read in the light of the mythos of Chloe and the narrator’s manipulations of his audience in the rest of the novel. Yet Echo is more than the sum of her narrative parts. At the heart of both versions of the nymph’s metamorphic story resides a fundamental aesthetic question. The two versions not only function as aetiological tales that explain an acoustic curiosity of nature, but also (and most importantly) problematize the activity of listening and meditate on different ways of listening. I thus propose to read the two texts as if they were a score marked with the indication “ascoltando” (en écoutant, “listening carefully”) – a term that Jean-Luc Nancy coined to describe a heightened form of attention to the activity of our ears, and an effort to open them to the activity of listening itself. My reading explores these narratives about the nymph Echo in light of different forms of listening – “causal,” “semantic,” and “acousmatic,” to use the terms of modern scholars of music and media. Because of her metamorphic nature, Echo is an indispensable mythical companion to any reflection on music and sound, as she focuses our attention onto an everchanging process (listening) defined by shifting identities rather than by fixed roles (such as “musician” or “musical product”).

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone Forms of Listening Longus’ narrative of Echo (.–) takes us back to the Lesbian countryside, a year and two books after our initial encounter with Daphnis and Chloe listening to the ringdove’s song, which I examined in Chapter . The two teenagers are having a romantic picnic in a locus amoenus probably not unlike that shady riverbank where Phaedrus and Socrates had their conversation. As they eat and kiss, they notice a fishing boat sailing by. The sea is 

  

Artists, however, have taken up the challenge of depicting the undepictable – the sound of an absent body. For a survey of Echo in iconography, Bonadeo : –; Elsner a is an extensive treatment of Echo as a subject of Roman painting. Kittler in press examines why Echo is less important for psychoanalysis than Narcissus. MacQueen ; Montiglio ; Schlapbach . Szendy and Nancy . For a concise introduction to Nancy’s take on listening, Kane . For elements of context and introduction on Daphnis and Chloe, see p. .



Echo: On Listening

calm, the sailors are rowing, and the boatswain is singing sea shanties (ναυτικὰς ᾖδεν ᾠδάς), to which the rest of the crew shout a response back in unison as a chorus (καθάπερ χορὸς ὁμοφώνως) at appropriate moments in the song (κατὰ καιρόν). As they perform this amoebean song at sea, their antiphonal voice dissipates in the air, but as soon as they pass a certain headland, with a bay surrounded by hills, their chorus is amplified. A loud shout resounds clearly and the boatswain’s shanties carry clearly to the land: Above the plain lay a high sided valley which took the sound into itself like a musical instrument and then returned a voice that mimicked everything that was said, the sound of the oars and the sailors’ song, all quite distinct. It was a delight to hear: first came the voice from the sea, and then the voice from the land with the same time lag at the end as at the beginning. Now Daphnis knew what was going on, so his attention was concentrated on the sea; he was entranced by the ship running past the plain quicker than a bird, and was trying to memorize some of the shanties to make them melodies for his pipes. But this was Chloe’s first experience of what we call an echo: first she would look out to sea, where the sailors were calling the rhythm, and then she would lift her eyes to the wood in search of the answering chorus. When they had sailed past and there was silence in the valley as well, she asked Daphnis if there was a sea behind the headland too, with another ship sailing by and other sailors singing the same songs, and all falling quiet together. Daphnis laughed sweetly and gave her an even sweeter kiss, and placing the crown of violets on her head, began to tell her the story of the echo, demanding ten more kisses from her as a fee for the teaching. (trans. Morgan)

The scene is fascinating for its attention to sound and song in a natural landscape. Nowhere in the novel is the ecology of music better described than in this passage, with niches for sea-songs and land-songs, instrumental and sung music, solo and choral music in a specific locale. But even more prominently featured than sounds figure descriptions of different forms of listening experience. First, the narrator himself offers a precise depiction of the soundscape: the wind has abated, and the sea has that supernatural stillness (γαλήνη) that Homeric mariners encounter, for example, before meeting the Sirens (Od. .). We are at the heart of an awesome moment, when the natural world is silent – the quiet before the downbeat . . . As Silvia Montiglio beautifully explains: this total stillness in Greece was feared as a mysterious arrest of nature that could release deadly voices (like the song of the Sirens) or aggressive, invading noises. We know that possession by Pan was extremely noisy, and that the god liked to break in at the quiet hours, midday or midnight, to seize his victims . . . Total stillness is the prelude to a supernatural utterance, which

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone



speaks of death . . . Vocal loudness builds up a contrast with the silent surroundings. It is as if this voice could not exist without that silence.

Divinely filled silence prepares the ear for a vocal epiphany. Already the soundscape suggests the lurking presence of Pan, who brings to mind fateful stories about musical nymphs (Pitys and Syrinx, for example). Echo has not yet entered the picture, but she is not far, and the physical landscape is overlaid with references to the future drama of the nymph. The narrator describes the acoustic conditions that make the reverberation of sounds possible: a rocky chamber, a hollow ravine that takes the sound in “like an instrument” (ὡς ὄργανον). While the landscape here is imagined on the model of a man-made object, the simile suggests some trauma, a drama to come, in the light of a number of aetiological stories about the violent creation of instruments (especially that of the syrinx, narrated earlier in Daphnis and Chloe, and which the following chapter of this book will examine). The simile is even implied in a more immediate fashion, as the word for ravine (κοῖλος αὐλών, koilos aulon) puns with the name of a musical instrument (the aulos, plural auloi) – itself the result of a gruesome act of creation and associated with mythical stories of competition and violence done to a female figure. Human, organic, and instrumental sounds synthesize and blend with each other, and the natural landscape, momentarily compared to an instrument, returns a voice (φωνήν) that works as imitator or impersonator of everything that was said on the boat (πάντων τῶν λεγομένων μιμητήν). The reference to mimesis of course brings us back to a major theme of the novel. But the echo/Echo scene precisely challenges a model in which humans would be seen as imitators of nature, or nature as delightfully artful and imitating humans. As Chapter  has already suggested, no such model (in which nature and art are understood in terms of their complementarity and opposition to one another) can adequately capture all the intricacies of our passage. Second, there is the listening of the sailors, who respond to the boatswain at appropriate moments in the song (κατὰ καιρόν), as a form of “call-and-response.” There is perfect antiphonal orchestration between solo and choral voice, rehearsed cuing and responses to vocal cues. The song itself not only gives rhythm to their repetitive activity but also takes  

Montiglio : . On the context for the Sirens’ song, see also Peponi : –. For the violence involved in the creation of musical instruments, see Chapter  (with references to the invention of the turtle-shell lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and to the invention of the auloi in Pind. Pyth. .–). On the theme of invention of musical instruments, see Restani : –.



Echo: On Listening

the sailors’ minds off their chore. This is a man-made form of echo, a hearty response answering a call, a dialogue more than a repetition. This actual conversation is matched by the imaginary repetition of the physical echo: the men’s chorus echoing the chorus leader is duplicated by a disembodied chorus. A solo voice is amplified by a choral one, and reverberated by a stereo one. In this description, the narrator emphasizes the effects of silence, time, and the symmetry they create (the voice from the land carries “the same time-lag at the beginning and at the end” – ἡ ἐκ τῆς γῆς φωνὴ τοσοῦτον ἐπαύετο βράδιον, ὅσον ἤρξατο), a feature that adds to the aural delight (ἄκουσμα τερπνόν). The most interesting form of listening is perhaps that of Daphnis, who is solely absorbed in memorizing the songs for a future syrinx adaptation. His listening takes a double form. It is focused on making out the tune and preserving it in his memory: songs, like fish, have a very ephemeral life once in the air. The same verb, “preserve” (διασώσασθαι), is used of the mariners hurrying to get the fish to town for wealthy people, and for Daphnis wanting to prolong the life of the song in his head and on his pipes. Like refrigeration (despite the different temporal scale), recording is an antidote to natural products’ ephemerality and uncanny connection with death. But Daphnis is also thinking ahead to the possibility of repetition, or evocation, of human voices by a musical instrument. It is a listening that wants to repeat the creative act and emulate it, an eager and inexhaustible attentiveness to sound that explodes the boundaries of a single aural event. This is the very kind of attitude that Apollo displays in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (–), where delight at hearing the divine song is not enough: the god is a seduced audience, full of desire (ἵμερος, ) and helpless longing (ἔρος ἀμήχανος, ), who wants to appropriate the music and be able to replay it. It is a listening with a thought about future re-performance, a “listening to re-perform” that already thinks of its self-perpetuation in its own echo, with its adaptations: the echoing will this time occur through the agency of the performer’s body and a musical instrument. Daphnis’ listening rechannels the description of the landscape as instrument: here, the character wants his solo-voice instrument (the syrinx) to replicate the choral effect of the song. Again, the element of time in the experience of hearing music is made particularly 

See Wittgenstein, quoted in Scarry : : “when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” It is also embodied by the narrator of Daphnis and Chloe, whose act of creation in the four-book novel is an echo, an emulated response (ἀντιγράψαι – “to write in response”) to the beauty of the painting whose ekphrasis the book opens with.

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone



vivid in the description of Daphnis’ attention trained on the ship “running past the land quicker than a bird [θᾶττον πτεροῦ]”: the boat is the visual marker of the quickly vanishing sound. But something in this image of the bird is still reminiscent of sound, as if the two senses, audition and vision (and, more specifically, perception of movement) were – as they actually are – indistinguishable and inseparable from one another. Finally there is Chloe, poor Chloe who does not understand the principle of the echo and looks for a landlocked double of the chorus of mariners. The narrator’s description again draws attention to the interdependence of the senses, and her auditory reaction replicates that of Daphnis in a way, by correlating sound to sight. This form of “causal listening” is defined by the film scholar Michel Chion as “consist[ing] of listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source).” It is the most natural of several types of listening, as it supposes that a sound requires a correlated visual phenomenon – something that is precisely the reverse of the echo (a sound without a sight). While Daphnis’ mode of listening goes beyond this causal approach to sound, Chloe’s listening strikes us as limited when compared to two other modes of listening highlighted by the narrative. These correspond to what Chion has termed “semantic listening” and “reduced (or acousmatic) listening.” The former, “semantic listening” is a form of attention to sound that looks for signs and deciphers meaning. It is illustrated by the chorus of mariners’ listening to the boatswain and waiting for his signal to chime in. Daphnis’ listening, on the other hand, is an emblem for the latter, “reduced listening”: it is an attending to sound for its own sake “that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning. Reduced listening takes the sound – verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever – as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.” Daphnis embodies, in Schaeffer’s words, the “acousmatic dimension” that fosters this form of reduced listening. In our text, the narrator’s listening mixes the three modes (causal, semantic, and acousmatic), in its attention to the origin, meaning, and perception of sounds.  



 

Ihde : – (especially –) on echo-listening and synaesthetic perceptions. Chion : . Chion adds the interesting caveat: “in reality, causal listening is not only the most common but also the most easily influenced and deceptive mode of listening.” Ibid., p. : “I call semantic listening that which refers to a code or a language to interpret a message: spoken language, of course, as well as Morse and other such codes.” Ibid., p. , borrowing the expression “reduced listening” from Schaeffer : . On the relationship between Schaeffer’s and Chion’s terminology, see the in-depth analysis in Kane . I cannot do justice here to Kane’s subtle and lively account of the acousmatic voice from the Pythagoreans to Les Paul and his magic box “Les Paulvirizer.” An anecdote that Kane recounts



Echo: On Listening Echo’s Origins

As they do in our experience, these different modes of listening overlap in the text in nature and in scope. They delineate the contours of what is at stake in the activity of listening while providing the background for interpreting the myth that Daphnis tells Chloe to explain the mysterious sound effect: “Νυμφῶν, ὦ κόρη, πολὺ γένος, Μελίαι καὶ Δρυάδες καὶ Ἕλειοι, πᾶσαι καλαί, πᾶσαι μουσικαί. μιᾶς τούτων θυγάτηρ Ἠχὼ γίνεται, θνητὴ μὲν ὡς ἐκ πατρὸς θνητοῦ, καλὴ δὲ ὡς ἐκ μητρὸς καλῆς. τρέφεται μὲν ὑπὸ Νυμφῶν, παιδεύεται δὲ ὑπὸ Μουσῶν συρίζειν, αὐλεῖν, τὰ πρὸς λύραν, τὰ πρὸς κιθάραν, πᾶσαν ᾠδήν· ὥστε καὶ παρθενίας εἰς ἄνθος ἀκμάσασα ταῖς Νύμφαις συνεχόρευε, ταῖς Μούσαις συνῇδεν. ἄρρενας δὲ ἔφευγε πάντας, καὶ ἀνθρώπους καὶ θεούς, φιλοῦσα τὴν παρθενίαν. ὁ Πὰν ὀργίζεται τῇ κόρῃ, τῆς μουσικῆς φθονῶν, τοῦ κάλλους μὴ τυχών, καὶ μανίαν ἐμβάλλει τοῖς ποιμέσι καὶ τοῖς αἰπόλοις· οἱ δὲ ὥσπερ κύνες ἢ λύκοι διασπῶσιν αὐτὴν καὶ ῥίπτουσιν εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν ἔτι ᾄδοντα τὰ μέλη, καὶ τὰ μέλη Γῆ χαριζομένη Νύμφαις ἔκρυψε πάντα καὶ ἐτήρησε τὴν μουσικὴν καὶ γνώμῃ Μουσῶν ἀφίησι φωνὴν καὶ μιμεῖται πάντα καθάπερ τότε ἡ κόρη, θεούς, ἀνθρώπους, ὄργανα, θηρία· μιμεῖται καὶ αὐτὸν συρίττοντα τὸν Πᾶνα, ὁ δὲ ἀκούσας ἀναπηδᾷ καὶ διώκει κατὰ τῶν ὀρῶν, οὐκ ἐρῶν τυχεῖν ἀλλ᾽ ἢ τοῦ μαθεῖν τίς ἐστιν ὁ λανθάνων μαθητής.” ταῦτα μυθολογήσαντα τὸν Δάφνιν οὐ δέκα μόνον φιλήματα ἀλλὰ πάνυ πολλὰ κατεφίλησεν ἡ Χλόη· μικροῦ γὰρ καὶ τὰ αὐτὰ εἶπεν ἡ Ἠχώ καθάπερ μαρτυροῦσα ὅτι μηδὲν ἐψεύσατο. “The race of Nymphs, maiden, is great: there are Melian [ash tree] nymphs, and Dryads [oak tree nymphs], and Marsh nymphs all beautiful, all musical. One of them had a daughter, Echo, mortal by virtue of her father’s mortality, beautiful by virtue of her mother’s beauty. She was reared by the Nymphs, taught to play the syrinx and the aulos by the Muses, to sing any song to the accompaniment of the lyre or the kithara. So at the peak of her maidenhood, she accompanied the dance of the chorus of the Nymphs, and she sang along with the Muses. She shunned all males, men and gods, loving her maidenhood. But Pan was angry at the maiden, jealous of the music and frustrated not to have gotten her beauty. He threw a madness over the herdsmen and goatherds. And, like dogs or wolves, they tore her apart and threw her limbs, still singing, all over the earth. And for love of the Nymphs, the earth hid all the limbs and preserves the music, and with the wisdom of the Muses she sends forth the voice and imitates everything gods, men, instruments, wild beasts as she used to when she was a () staging a little girl who deciphers the trick behind the awesomely resounding voice of a singer on stage (doubled by another singer offstage) brings full circle the Longus narrative that I am about to interpret.

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone



maiden. She even imitates Pan playing the syrinx, and hearing it, he jumps up and rushes throughout the hills, not desiring nothing other than to know who his invisible pupil is.” Once Daphnis had told the myth, he received not only ten kisses from Chloe but many more; and soon after Echo repeated the same thing as if to prove that he had not lied. (Longus D&C .)

Chloe’s grateful kissing of her mythology teacher, with which the scene concludes, creates an uncomfortable contrast with the tragedy of the dismembered maiden. As in the case of the ringdove analyzed in Chapter , the myth of Echo has particular resonance within the novel, as it too stages a love story with potentially violent and devastating consequences. Even though Daphnis draws less attention to the similarity between his addressee (Chloe) and the topic of his narrative than he did in his previous mythology lesson on the ringdove, the disturbing parallels between maidens remain. Indeed, Daphnis uses the same adjectives to describe Echo (beautiful and musical) as he had to describe Phatta – adjectives that are also apt for Chloe. Echo herself has a different status from that of the talented shepherdess: she is a superb musician, a virtuoso performer on many instruments, taught by divine professionals, but her closeness to the Nymphs is again reminiscent of Chloe’s own special status, as protected by these divinities. In a pastoral fantasy reminiscent of the main frame of the novel, the half-divine half-mortal nymph both converses with nature divinities and dances with Olympian ones. Unlike the story of Echo in Ovid, we never hear the sound of her voice or the content of her speech. Only her duplicated music, dance, and song are accessible to us. Again, as opposed to her Ovidian counterpart, who lusts after Narcissus, this Echo shuns all suitors, mortal and divine. In Longus’ Echo, there is no conflict between desiring flesh and stifled mouth. Here, we soon discover, she is a figure for the artist, a victim of the envy of a competitor jealous of her music (τῆς μουσικῆς φθονῶν). The motif of competition and jealousy is common in several musical myths. It is doubled here with the equally common motif of a male god making unwelcome advances to a defenseless female. The  



Montiglio . Chloe was abandoned in the Nymphs’ cave and henceforth is protected by the divinities: see D&C .–., ... See the contest between the Muses and the Sirens, the Pierides, or Thamyras, and the contests between Apollo and Marsyas, and Apollo and Pan (on these, Restani ). Competition is also at the heart of the ringdove myth in Chapter , and a very important dynamic of bucolic poetry in general.



Echo: On Listening

exact cause of Pan’s frustration is left vague: besides being jealous of her talent, he is also “frustrated not to have gotten her beauty” (τοῦ κάλλους μὴ τυχών): does this ambiguous phrase reflect Daphnis’ own hesitation or incapacity at naming the sexual act (that he himself is unwilling to perform on Chloe)? Or does it reflect a larger theme running through the novel, that physical beauty and musical talent are inseparable, as musical beauty irradiates the performer and erases boundaries between the physical (the body of the performer) and the immaterial (the sound of the music)? We may find here an idea similar to that found in the myth of the Phatta examined in Chapter , where the eight most beautiful cows are attracted to the beautiful music of the gorgeous lad: beauty attracts beauty and listener fuses with performer. Whatever the answer, the vengeance of Pan, part frustrated lover, part jealous performer, is lethal, and the mortal Echo becomes the victim of shepherds and cowherds, turned savage by the will of Pan. The manner of her demise in Longus is far more gruesome than that related in Ovid or that of the cicadas evoked in Chapter : no slow vanishing of the flesh to crystalize the mystery of the voice – instead, we witness her speedy dismemberment by possessed men turned into beasts. The aetiology for the natural phenomenon of the echo is contained in the next lines: the deified Earth, “for love of the Nymphs, hid Echo’s limbs/tunes” (τὰ μέλη Γῆ χαριζομένη ἔκρυψε πάντα). On the one hand, the pun is obvious, and often used in literature: the μέλη (“limbs”) of the musical nymph become the μέλη (“tunes”) of the earth, and the magic of language smoothly transforms the body of the nymph into the sounds of music. This is a form of answer to the question of the material nature of sound: in the myth, musical sounds have physical, even somatic, origins, but this materiality dissolves through divine intervention (that of Ge). The mortal part of Echo has to die – an echo that would not die would be nightmarish – but her immortal part will live on in the landscape (comprising ravines, woods, and headlands) that continues her work. Imagining the musical legacy of the nymph sustained in the natural surroundings is an ancient way of representing, and accounting for, the animist belief that all of the natural world is alive and envoiced. It is not just Pan but the Nymphs and the earth itself that are full of life and represent simultaneously divine and sensuous properties of the world. They are all in their 

On ancient views on the materiality of sound and the voice, see Chapter , pp. –. For ancient scientific discussions of the echo, see Arist. De an. b–a, [Pr.] b–a (.–) and b– (. and . .) (where echo is defined as refraction, ἀνάκλασις ., but not dispersion, κατάκλασις); Epicurus Ep. Hdt. –; Lucr. .–. More evidence for ancient discussions of the phenomenon of the echo is adduced in Koenen .

Longus’ Echo and the Gramophone



different ways the embodiment of natural voices – ash trees, oak trees, and marshes. Here the three types of divinities that Daphnis singles out – for no apparent reason, as he leaves unclear what kind of nymph Echo is – become the different forms of vocal expression taken on by nature. The earth’s receiving the dead body of the nymph is a return to a form of primal chant de la terre. The earth does with the songs of the nymph what Daphnis was trying to do with the shanties of the sailors: they are forms of memory, a sort of postmortem voice, after the boat has passed and the nymph is dead. The myth illustrates that life flows from form to form, and that it is not commensurate with the confines of a body. What is more, in her new form as telluric voice, Echo is described as imitating or reproducing (μιμεῖται) everything, just like the echoing voice rebounding in the ravine was said to be an imitation (μιμητήν) of what was said on the boat. But, unlike the sailors performing their call-and-response, Echo is not a conversational partner: she is an impersonator. There is no activity of transformation in her voicing back: she reflects the sound back to the singer, and calls for a self-reflexive kind of listening by providing an auditory mirror. Yet – and this is the most important feature of the story – in introducing a delay, Echo transforms the relationship that listeners have with sound and their environment. For the time lag and the absence of the performer’s body introduce two different but connected opportunities: the opportunity to hear a sound without seeing its obvious cause (as we observed in the case of the cicadas), and the possibility of hearing a sound or melody or voice again. On the one hand, the invisible Echo prevents a listener from attaching a sound to a sight: Echo mouthing the sound just heard is also a way of questioning the agency of the producer of the sound, and detaching it from its visible cause. On the other hand, like a gramophone, Echo reproduces the sound outside of its original context. By replaying the experience of the sound just heard, she transforms the immediacy of 





This is precisely the kind of attitude that Lucretius warns his audience against (.–). On this animist mythical thinking, see Pache : –, and –, where she notes () that “the belief in beguilingly seductive supernatural figures walking through the Greek countryside persists to this day.” See also Abram ; and for a modern account of a quasi-mystical experience of the divine presence in natural sounds, see Krause . For an interesting take on the Echo myth, see Apul. Met. .. Tordoff :  notes that in this version, too, “Echo not only reflects but also modifies the text which she echoes. Apuleius’ choice of the word reccinere subsumes two possible meanings; it may mean ‘singing back’ or ‘echoing’, as in the simple reflection of the voice, but it can also involve singing something that is not merely repetition, as in the context of amoebean song, where it means ‘singing in answer’ or ‘replying in song.’” On the gramophone and changed approaches to listening, see the fundamental work of Kittler ; Sterne ; Butler . Also LeVen b.



Echo: On Listening

the act of listening into a reflexive and self-involving practice. With the earth as echo machine, one can detach oneself from the time of the event, and experience sound anew. The sound is taken in in a sequence that is coherent within itself while detached from its original setting: the best proof is that Echo, as disembodied sound, is able in the last lines of the narrative to mouth the kisses that she was so reluctant to give as a nymph. This embrace is the marker of the echo’s estrangement. In this process of estrangement in time and space, the most radically transformed listener created by Echo as gramophone is Pan. Pan’s reaction can be read as the marvel of the listener before the recorded voice: a dead voice brought back to life through an amplifier – here, the echoing earth, a natural loudspeaker. When the sound is produced by the resounding landscape, Pan stops “trying to obtain the beauty” (τοῦ κάλλους τυχών) of the nymph and instead pursues a “reduced” approach to sound: he wants to find out, to experience, for no other reason than the sound itself, the origin of the music. Pan, in Schaeffer’s words, incarnates acousmatic listening: “acousmatic sound draws our attention to sound traits normally hidden from us by the simultaneous sight of the causes – hidden because this sight reinforces the perception of certain elements of the sound and obscures others. The acousmatic truly allows sound to reveal itself in all its dimensions.” This type of listening relegates the visual stimulus to the background, even discards it altogether, and focuses on the auditory instead. In a purely acousmatic type of listening, echoes would not be different from any other sounds, since the absence of a visual correlate would account for nothing in the overall sensual experience. The delayed performance, or the performance without a body, of the machine-activated sound has transformed Pan’s musical approach: he ceases to desire the performer. Aural arousal has replaced eros (sexual passion). Still, while beguiled by the sound for its own qualities, he yearns to discover the performer – proof of the near impossibility of “reduced listening” in actual practice. But, most spectacularly, Echo’s music (a mirror for Pan’s own) has transformed the amorous god into a Narcissus figure, unable to recognize that he is both object and subject, master and student. Ultimately, it is Pan’s relationship to his own experience of subjectivity that Echo has transformed. Because Pan’s own music always sounds first, there is no risk of him getting jealous of his studious disciple and dismembering him/her. But his metaphor (the sound of the 

Chion :  notes the difficulty and limits of reduced listening. They are particularly well illustrated by Pan, who, although eagerly listening to the sound, also wants to find the performer.

Echo as Creative Listener



echo as student, or copy, of the master sound) focalizes the experience in a new way, and once again introduces the dimension of time: the echo becomes a future generation of original sound. In so doing, it throws a disturbing light on the scenes of musical, and mythological, education within the novel, by substituting to the original (odd) pairing of Chloe and Pan the now familiar pairing of Daphnis with Pan and Chloe with Echo.

Echo as Creative Listener While Ovid’s narrative differs greatly from Longus’, desire, time, and various ways of framing or focalizing the activity of listening are likewise at its heart. The myth of Echo and Narcissus is narrated in book  of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a fifteen-book epic that describes itself as “a continuous narrative” (perpetuum carmen, .) telling of “shapes changed into new bodies” (in nova . . . mutatas formas | corpora, .–), “from the beginning of the world to [the poet’s] days” (ab origine mundi | ad mea . . . tempora, .–). The tragic story of Echo appears in the context of the revelations of the seer Tiresias. Asked by the nymph Liriope whether her gorgeous baby Narcissus would live a long life, Tiresias predicts that he would, “as long as he does not know himself” (si se non nouerit, .). Fast-forward sixteen years: enter the highly desirable Narcissus. No young men nor women had touched him (nulli illum iuuenes, nullae tetigere puellae, .–). It is on this virginal background that we meet the nymph Echo. She is first characterized by her gaze: aspicit hunc trepidos agitantem in retia ceruos uocalis nymphe, quae nec reticere loquenti nec prior ipsa loqui didicit, resonabilis Echo. corpus adhuc Echo, non uox erat . . . She saw him chasing agitated deer into his nets, the chatty nymph, who could neither keep silent when somebody spoke nor speak first herself, sonorous Echo. She was still a body, Echo, and not yet a voice . . . (Ov. Met. . )

Narcissus appears in an erotically charged environment: he is hunting, and the chased beasts are in a state of agitation (trepidos). The object of his animal hunt mirrors the nymph’s internal trepidation. While verb and object (aspicit hunc, “she sees him”) are foregrounded, the subject (uocalis 

Ov. Met. .–. On Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its importance for a certain type of idea about the human/nonhuman animal relationship, see Chapter .



Echo: On Listening

nymphe, “the chatty nymph”) is delayed until the end of the sentence and her name appears three lines down, as the final word, already like a sonorous echo (resonabilis Echo), always closing sentences. The nymph is uocalis, not simply endowed with a voice, chatty, but also eloquent. Some have seen her eloquence as uncanny, revealing a superb and disturbing storyteller. But uocalis primarily refers to the nymph’s past, before Juno punishes her and before sorrow destroyed her body. It contrasts with the description of Echo’s present acoustic state at the end of the next line (resonabilis Echo, “sonorous Echo”). Within the span of two lines we travel back in time, from the moment when we first met the garrulous girl in the text to the explanation of the punishment that Juno once inflicted on her. Immediately in the next line we move again back to the past, when the nymph “was still a body” (corpus adhuc Echo, ), and “not yet a [mere] voice” (non uox erat, ). Echo is already impossible to pin down, simultaneously a talented talker, female victim of a god’s punishment, and natural phenomenon: the images of the echo we know now, and of the Echo of yore that we are being introduced to, keep multiplying. The back and forth in time at this point of the narrative is significant as it thematizes, at the narrative level, the effects of time lag, memory, and expectation in the phenomenon of listening – an important feature that I pointed out in the case of Longus and to which I will return, and a particularly powerful Ovidian narrative technique (as it complicates linear chronological narratives). The next ten lines detail the nymph’s tragic loss of vocal agency (– ). Because Echo distracted Juno with her tales, preventing her from noticing that Jupiter was fooling around with other nymphs on the mountain, the goddess punished her by reducing to a minimum the power of the tongue that had deceived her (linguae . . . potestas | parua, –), and restricting the capabilities of the nymph’s voice (uocis breuissimus usus, ). From now on, Echo will only be able to repeat the last words uttered by her interlocutor (reddere de multis ut uerba nouissima posset, ), duplicate the syllables at the end of a sentence, and carry back the words heard (in fine loquendi | ingeminat uoces auditaque uerba reportat, –). In the emphasis on these forms of vocal constrainment, some have seen an “overdetermination perhaps point 



Raval : –, quoting parallels of uocalis used of Orpheus and Arion, “figures who are not only skilled artists, but, more important, have transformative powers” (). On Echo as figure for the voice, see Cavarero : –, in a chapter evocatively entitled “Echo, or on resonance,” where she sees Echo as “the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice” (). See also Butler : –. On the two stages of the transformation: Berger : .

Echo as Creative Listener



[ing] to an anxiety hovering over the differing presentations of Echo’s voice.” The text never repeats itself: it offers instead a real anatomy of speech in the moment it gets lost, with special attention devoted to the tongue, the mouth, the voice, and the words that are all given a specific role in the construction of the phenomenon of the echo, not only in the world but also on the page. When, after the analepsis, the narrative returns to the hunt scene, Echo is again characterized visually: Echo sees Narcissus, burns with passion (uidit et incaluit, ), and starts to stealthily follow in the boy’s footsteps (sequitur uestigia furtim, ), thus behaving like a shadow – another presence without a body, an apt parallel for the echo. Yet her powerlessness is already palpable: full of passion, she wants to act, eager to address sweet words and soft prayers, the habitual sounds of lovers (o quotiens uoluit blandis accedere dictis | et molles adhibere preces!, –). But the end of the line cuts short her display of emotion and introduces the harsh reality of nature that prevents Echo from taking the initiative (natura repugnat | nec sinit, incipiat, “nature prevents her and does not let her start,” – ). The line break in the sentence makes palpable the impediment forced on Echo and delays the processing of the sentence. The forced silence and the emphasis on vision give way to an obsession with sound during Echo’s fateful encounter with Narcissus. The scene deserves to be quoted in full: Forte puer comitum seductus ab agmine fido dixerat “ecquis adest?” et “adest” responderat Echo. his stupet, utque aciem partes dimittit in omnes, uoce “ueni” magna clamat; uocat illa uocantem. respicit et rursus nullo ueniente “quid” inquit “me fugis?” et totidem quot dixit uerba recepit. perstat et alternate deceptus imagine uocis “huc coeamus” ait, nullique libentius umquam responsura sono “coeamus” rettulit Echo et uerbis fauet ipsa suis egressaque silua ibat ut iniceret sperato bracchia collo. ille fugit fugiensque “manus conplexibus aufer; ante” ait “emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri.” rettulit illa nihil nisi “sit tibi copia nostri.” One day the boy happens to be separated from his trusted companions; he cries out: “Is anybody here?” “Here!” Echo replies. He stops, astounded, looks all around, and cries loudly, “Come here!” And she calls back to the one who called. He looks behind him, and seeing that nobody is coming, says, “Why do 

Raval : –.



Echo: On Listening

you flee me?” and he gets back as many words as he had uttered. He tries again, and deceived by the reflection of another voice, he calls out, “Here, let’s come together” and with a sound that would never be more willing, Echo responds, “Let’s come, together!” Stepping out of the woods, she hastens in accordance with her words, and throws her arms around the desired neck. But he flees away from her and in his flight says, “Take your hands off me! Let me die before you have power over me!” to which she answers nothing but “Have power over me!” (Ov. Met. . )

In this exchange, Echo’s responses realize Juno’s curse: the nymph only reflects the last words uttered by the speaker. Yet the virtuosity of the scene comes from the fact that the girl makes the most of this limitation, and throughout the conversation reappropriates Narcissus’ words and endows them with a meaning and emphasis of her own. While Narcissus barely awakens to his senses and awkwardly experiments with different approaches (aural and visual) to the world, Echo’s responses are characterized by variety, versatility, and verve. Echo’s words need to be heard closely. Separated from his companions, Narcissus, alone in the woods and perhaps perceiving a presence, asks, “Is anybody here?” (ecquis adest, ). The interrogative pronoun is not genderspecific, but Narcissus presumably thinks it masculine. By repeating the last word of the question, Echo turns it into an answer: adest, “she is here.” But the sound of the response is not enough for Narcissus: trusting his ears, he stops in his tracks. He wants visual corroboration and looks all around (aciem partes dimittit in omnes, ), looking for both evidence of the presence and the source of the spoken words. This form of “causal listening” that we saw illustrated by Chloe is the first step in Narcissus’ auditory education. The stupet (“he stops, astounded,” ) captures a variety of feelings: surprise, confusion, arrested readiness – all created by the voice of “She is here!” No matter what emotion we project onto stupet, in the next line Narcissus loudly begs (uoce . . . magna, ) the mysterious speaker to come (ueni). This time we do not hear the nymph’s response directly: it is mediated by the voice of the narrator, embodied in the line “calls back to the one who called” (uocat illa uocantem, ) that creates an inverted echo, a voice growing ever louder (or at least words growing ever longer): uoce – uocat – uocantem. Echo’s imperative response (“Come!”, ueni!) is engulfed in the voice of the narrator, whose sounds themselves reverberate (magna . . . clamat) in the poem. 

Edwards : : “like the echo of the voice of someone walking into a space that grows ever smaller, the voice of Echo gradually merges with that of Narcissus. When the two finally meet, her desire, like her voice, has become what it was from the beginning: his desire, his voice.”

Echo as Creative Listener



Here we witness Narcissus reckoning with two forms of listening: one (causal) that focuses on sounds and wants to correlate them to a presence, the other (semantic) that focuses on meaning. We are at the heart of the echo-listening paradox: how can the sound announce a presence, designate a presence, and yet not reveal a presence? Once again, confused by the response, Narcissus turns around (respicit, ) and looks behind him, expecting a presence to corroborate the meaning of the words. The next lines capture the essence of the echo: a sound that does not accompany a presence (rursus nullo ueniente, ). Frustrated in his hopes, Narcissus asks, “Why do you flee me?” (quid me fugis?, –). The text itself, in a process impossible to stop, multiplies sounds and aural ripples (quid’ inquit). Once introduced to Echo, we test the magnitude of her power and the immensity of her curse, and cannot reverse the way we listen, isolating the sounds of language rather than hearing them as meaningful. Again, the direct words of Echo are not repeated but mediated by the narrator, and only the principle is described; “he gets back as many words as he had uttered,” that is quid me fugis? Narcissus stands still, and, “deceived by the reflection [imago] of another voice” (alternae deceptus imagine uocis, ), sends his last order: “Here, let’s come together!” (huc coeamus, ). The imago of the voice deceiving Narcissus is of course that of Echo; its description appropriately mixes the realms of sound and vision, but it already invites us to think further (especially when looking for a translation, itself another form of imago): is the imago the Latin translation of the Greek εἰκών (“an image”), does it refer to a ghostly presence, or to the likeness of a voice, a reflection? Answers to these questions carry the interpretation into very different domains all inhabited by Echo: synaesthesia, religion, mimesis. But most importantly, which, or whose, other voice does the sentence refer to? I will turn to that question presently. For now, let us return to the scene in the woods. Echo’s response (coeamus, ) removes the adverb of place, and transforms Narcissus’ earnest injunction to “come together” into a crude invitation to copulate (which I have loosely translated with “come, together”). As the narrator describes the nymph’s response (retullit Echo, ), her name  



Rosati : –. Hardie :  points out that imago in Latin can mean echo as well as visual illusion, but the Greek equivalent, εἰκών, in the first sense is very rare. “Ovid may well have been led to the idea of combining echo and reflection by the parallel treatment of the two phenomena in De rerum natura .” Adams : –: “coeo was often used of ‘coming together’ in matrimony . . . But as the sexual verbal euphemism par excellence for copulation, heterosexual, homosexual or bestial, it was probably a metonymy rather than a metaphor like nubo, etc.”



Echo: On Listening

surfaces at the end of the line, as a triumph and a signature. The echo is even endowed with expressivity and the narrator describes the nymph’s feelings in uttering the words: she “was to respond to no other sound with more eagerness” (nulli libentius umquam | responsura sono, –). Having made her intention clear verbally, and “favoring her own words” (uerbis fauet ipsa suis, ), the nymph finally reveals her physical presence and attempts to join the act to the word, and embrace her beloved. In the closing sentence of their brief exchange, a horrified Narcissus pronounces the most words he has uttered so far, both giving an order, “Take your hands off me!”, and formulating a performative statement: “Let me die before you have power over me,” to which the poor Echo can only respond, “Have power over me,” in a line that mimics the stalling and choking of the nymph’s voice itself (nihil nisi “sit . . .,” ). This concludes the first part of the narrative. Few Ovidian passages explore the expressive potential of the sounds of language and the material of speech as powerfully as this one. Narcissus in these lines is all interrogations, orders, and performative statements, a human heap of question and exclamation marks. Echo has a much greater range of linguistic modes than he does: from statements to questions, exclamations to orders, she both states her mind and declares the state of the world, transforming Narcissus’ grammar as she creates her own. Like Ovid himself illustrating “il trionfo della grammatica,” Echo is a master of the Latin tongue (lingua). She effortlessly manipulates the usus (“use”) of words, thus punningly thumbing her nose at Juno and the limits that the goddess imposed on both the power of her tongue (potestas linguae) and the use of her voice (vocis usus). Simple rules of syntax allow Echo to appropriate Narcissus’ sentences and make them her own. Most of the word games come from her play with verbal markers of agency (verbs) and subjectivity (grammatical moods). Echo is hidden in the woods, of course, but she is also hidden inside a magic, shimmering triangle connecting the material sounds of language, the meaning of words, and their referent in the world: the silver threads connecting the three points of the triangle are not simply the conventions of the Latin language but those of syntax. Echo repeats sounds, but by dismembering language and breaking the syntactic chain between words, she transforms the reality they refer to. She is herself an agent of metamorphosis: she gives a new reality to words, making the listener perceive both old and new states of sound. She replicates in language what gods do to matter. 

The expression “trionfo della grammatica” is Bettini’s, quoted in Barchiesi and Rosati : .

Echo as Creative Listener



But she is also uncannily enacting here, or prefiguring, her own dismemberment tragedy as recounted in Longus, pulling apart the grammatical clauses, or limbs, of the sentence. In so doing, she is the first creative listener: listening to Narcissus’ words, she dislocates his sentences and reads in them a whole new set of meanings, deconstructing as he constructs them, reading them past syntax, ridding them of syntax. She asserts the constant flow and instability of meaning. The exact sounds remain, faithful to the echoing principle, but the texture of the reality described changes – time, for example, becomes wish when a subjunctive (“before you have power over me” – ante . . . quam sit tibi copia nostri, ) loses its anchoring in a temporal clause to become a subjunctive of wish (“have power over me” – sit tibi copia nostri, ). What Echo does in these lines is bring attention to the words as soundful, and the sounds as meaningful. Rather than a gramophone, this Echo is more like a whimsical radio or a good DJ, constantly switching the frequencies of our semantic listening. The Ovidian Echo is a figure for the infinite malleability of sounds, semantics, and syntax, for the delight taken in the materiality of language, and for the wit and love of the poet for the aural material he is given. The ultimate incarnation of the nymph is of course the narrator himself, who is always the one repeating, echoing his characters’ voice, and others’ voices, playing with the illusion that we are alone, yet never alone. The Ovidian narrator here is a playful storyteller, ready to toy with the mechanics of the physical echo, and, in a fantastic reflection on nature, to experiment with the length of answers: sometimes Echo returns the full length, sometimes just a bit of what was heard, and – at the peak of her distress – she is even able to mouth up to eight syllables! That is the added agency of the character, in concert with the narrator. But in the scene the narrator also echoes others’ sounds, from Lucretian didactic lines to elegiac bits. The nulli illum iuuenes, nullae tetigere puellae (), for example, which had opened the narrative, is a near quotation of Catullus , lines  and . If no one has touched Narcissus, it is said in a way that has been touched by others before.  

 



For the formulation, Ihde : . Echo is the intertextual nymph par excellence, what Hinds :  calls “the annotator” of a text alluding to another; see also Brenkman ; Wills ; Hollander . On poetic games played with the length of Echo’s response, see Colby . See Barchiesi and Rosati  ad loc. on the use of traditional vocabulary to describe Echo’s passion (calescit, for instance) or intertextual echoes – natura repugnat () is reminiscent of Lucr. .. On the intertext, Fränkel : . On the echoing nature of the line, Bettini and Pellizer : –.



Echo: On Listening

Some critics have argued that the joining of the two parts of the story (Echo and Narcissus) is original to Ovid. Others have provided a rich overview of the symmetry between the two tales, and the significance of interpreting one in the light of the other. In response to readings of the Echo-Narcissus encounter that have focused on the difficulty of interpretation, or the tragedy of being silenced and lacking agency, some scholars, finally, have read Echo’s masterful reuse of Narcissus’ words as an empowerment of the female voice, as a revenge of female agency, as a figure for the subaltern speaking. But in reading Echo in the light of Narcissus, or rather in taking Echo as the sonorous prelude to the Narcissus myth, one muffles the real originality of the narrative. The two passages are in some important respects asymmetrical, and the Echo episode brings up a question that is unique to the aural realm, and that needs to be examined for its own sake. The issue that the Echo narrative brings up is that of experiencing the duplication of sound in time: what does repetition do to sound and to listening? As soon as a sound is duplicated, it ceases to be the same. Repetition is a creative process. This is the unexpected blessing of Juno’s punishment, a singularly illuminating mechanism for both the nymph and the listener. Echoing is never a duplication of the same: this is true not just because sounds always happen in context, but also because repetition changes the relationship between sound and listener. Echo takes oral material and, by introducing a pause in the experience of hearing that oral material, by introducing delay and fragmentation, she isolates the potential and the ever-changing meanings of the sounds of language and their interpretive possibilities. I am referring to something deeper than Echo’s dismemberment of syntax: she does not simply subvert syntax (understood as the spatial arrangement of words), she subverts temporal order. As the Longus myth examined above suggests, although in a different way, the temporality of the echo transforms our listening. The time that was so crucial in pinning down the unfolding of the narrative of Echo’s punishment is essential here. By subverting and pausing the sequence in which we hear, 

 



Raval :  documents the debate. Rosati : – discusses Ovid’s originality, and the possibility of a Hellenistic predecessor. Also Edwards  and Hardie . A particularly important model for Ovid is Nicander’s version of the Hylas myth in his Metamorphoses: Hylas is transformed into an echo because the Nymphs are worried that Heracles will discover him among them (Keith : ). Brenkman . Nouvet ; Spivak ; Berger . There is no need to comment on Fränkel : : “Echo thus becomes a symbol of those pathetic but annoying females who are extremely responsive but have no initiative or originality of their own.” On “the paradoxical status of repetition,” Rimmon-Kenan .

Echo as Acoustic Mirror



Echo embodies and foregrounds the power of listening creatively to sounds in isolation. The process she illustrates is embedded at the heart of the text: sed, quod sinit, illa parata est exspectare sonos, ad quos sua uerba remittat. but, because nature allows it, Echo is ready to expect sounds, to which she responds with her own words. (Ov. Met. . )

Exspectare sonos (“to expect sounds”) relies again on the blurring of the parallel between the visual and the aural in the description of the attentive listener, as its root (spectare, “to look on,” from which we get “spectate”) refers to the sphere of vision; but exspectare also introduces the notion of temporality that the visual experience lacks. Echo expects, awaits, looks forward to what Narcissus says – exemplifying what is at the essence of listening, not just spectare (“to behold, observe”) but exspectare (“wait for”). Echo’s desire is crystalized in the exspectare that reveals what I would call her erogenous ear. The text enacts the mechanics later in the narrative: nullique libentius unquam responsura sono “coeamus” retullit Echo et uerbis fauet suis egressaque silua ibat . . . with a sound that had never been more willing, Echo responds, “Let’s come, together!” Stepping out of the woods, she hastens in accordance with her words . . . (Ov. Met. . )

Taking the sound (sonus) coeamus, Echo in her creative listening transforms it into a word (uerbum) of her own: her desire for the boy is channeled into her excited expectation of his words, and enacted in her creative listening. In love, as with the voice, part of the pleasure is in the anticipation. This is what Echo teaches us to do: listening is endowing sound with desire to mean.

Echo as Acoustic Mirror Yet this empowering listening, this possibility to isolate and reconfigure meaning in syntax, is, as we have seen, only one form of response that the 



The expression is borrowed from de Certeau, Julia, and Revel : . For a developed take on this idea, LeVen . The expression is inspired by Hodgkinson , who in his essay on listening calls music “sound that listens to itself.” “Sound listening to itself” defines Echo as much as music.



Echo: On Listening

text takes. There is a much more disturbing game being played, a much more serious way in which Echo plays with language – and a much more unsettling interpretation of what Echo does, in teaching us to listen. The whole scene, rather than being a meditation on desire and yearning, can be read, or perhaps reread, in a delayed, self-reflexive, echoing way, as a reflection on a disinterested approach to sound and knowledge. Let us try and hear the scene differently. First, in the adest () with which Echo replies, the absence of a personal pronoun in the Latin leaves doubts as to the referent. The one who is here (adest) can be male or female: so, is Echo saying that she is here – or that he (Narcissus) is here? In this suddenly enlarged hermeneutic space, one finds invitations to turn back and listen more attentively to the whole exchange. If Echo is not responding as an enthusiastic lover, as the Ovidian comedy invites us to think at first, what is she doing? Can we imagine an Echo detached from passion, stating the truth that Narcissus cannot hear: “He is here”? If we rid Echo of her comic erotic trappings, the text becomes a sort of Lucretian ghost: the echo is only facing Narcissus with the presence he cannot acknowledge – his own. In book  of the De rerum natura, Lucretius deals with this very question of the phenomenon of the echo, in an attempt to account for “the illusion of non-existent presences and sentiences, as part of his wider concern to empty the universe of malignant spirituality,” to use Philip Hardie’s words. On my reading, Ovid’s Echo is different: she is an answer to an aesthetic problem, that of the relationship between listener and sound in the experience of delay and repetition, of the dismemberment of language in a form of “reduced listening” that leads to a new kind of “semantic listening.” Because she does not allow causal listening (that listening focused on looking for the origin of the sound), or rather because she forces us to go beyond it, she is the condition for reduced listening. If we return to the scene and reconsider it without the Ovidian comic traits, we can read it for what it tells us about a listener faced with sound. Echo, in this context, only reveals the truth of Narcissus’ sentences, like an acoustic mirror. She might as well disappear as a mythical character, thus realizing the Lucretian reading of natural echoes. At the same time, Echo (or rather Ovid) also tests the reader: “what do you hear in the text,” asks the narrator as acoustic mirror, “and what does it say about you?” Echo thus becomes a figure for relationality, in acoustic and ethical terms.



Hardie : .

Echo as Acoustic Mirror



The next words Narcissus speaks are an order: ueni! (“Come!,” ). And Echo repeats it, providing the homonym: ueni, “I’ve come.” Now ventriloquizing Narcissus and moving from “he” to “I,” Echo states the obvious, and faces Narcissus with the truth he is uttering himself, but is unable to hear in his own voice. Instead of a tease, a flirtatious imperative in response to an order, in Echo’s ueni!, we find the cold de-doubling of the speaker: “Come! – I’ve come.” Narcissus continues: quid me fugis? (– ), addressing his question to the invisible speaker of the previous words, who has not heeded to his command. “Why aren’t you coming after I asked you to come?” is what is meant. But instead of a mechanically coy reply, in which Echo is seen as appropriating Narcissus’ meaning, and asking “Why do you shun my love?” we get a reformulation. With totidem quot dixit (“as much as he said,” ) we are left in the dark as to what exact quantity “as much” (totidem) refers to: we can also understand what Echo returns not as quid me fugis? but me fugis (“is it me you flee?”) or even, as a self-correction: fugis? (“do you flee?”) or fugis! (“it is you who are fleeing!”). By leaving doubt as to how much exactly the echo repeats of Narcissus’ original sentence, the narrator creates a different form of listening: Echo is isolating the words that Narcissus needs in order to understand his predicament, and erasing herself from the sensual picture. We, as readers, are listening out for the truth coming out of Narcissus’ mouth, repeated and thrown into relief by the nymph. It is a dialogue with himself, a monologue with a broken sense of identity that we overhear. While it is, in a way, a classic form of tragic irony (where we readers necessarily know more than the character), it also implies doing more: in this reading, we do not need Echo the punished nymph and the soon-to-be-spurned lover. She is only a mouthing mechanism, a grotesque figure, the dummy of the ventriloquist, the “imaginary divine presence” that we can dispense with if we know how to listen – or are willing to learn, with Echo as teacher. She allows us to see and do what Narcissus, as narcissistic listener, does not do; she is the best teacher Narcissus could have – a teacher telling him to listen for himself, to the truth of his own speech. The gap between the “you” and the “I” in the previous sentence (“Why do you flee me?”) is bridged in the next line with the coeamus () that 

While homographs, the two forms are of course not homophones: the imperative has a short e (ueni!, “Come!”), the perfect has a long e (uēni, “I’ve come”). An ingenious interpretation would suggest that Echo lengthens the vowel e in a way that is natural to echoes. For such a metrical transformation and echo, see later in the text, where Ovid plays the same game with dictoque uale, “uale” inquit et Echo (Met. .–). In that passage, Ovid picks up on Virgil (Ecl. .–) and creates “a fading effect” (Tordoff :  comments on the process).



Echo: On Listening

unites both persons in a plural pronoun (“Let us come together”): besides the explicit amorous intent of Echo’s reappropriation of Narcissus’ words, one can read an urge for the “I” to be reunited with the “you.” The “we” that Narcissus utters both acknowledges the divide (“you” and “I” are separated in grammatical terms and in the woods) and tries to bridge it (“Let us come together”), in a jarring way. But this bridging is immediately broken in the last sentence, where Narcissus refuses to give Echo power over him. In his sentence, the “we” has disappeared, there is a “you” and an “I” again, and the echoing sound “have power over me” is the acknowledgment of a unity or identity that will not happen: Narcissus will not listen to his own truth and his true sentence resounds in vain. The story is that of Narcissus’ appropriation of his own voice, learning to hear (or rather failing to learn to hear) the truth he speaks. No flirtatious nymph is needed, since the boy gives himself his own answers: from “He is here” to “I have come” to “I give you power over me.” This slow work of hearing Narcissus’ own truth, which requires patient rereading and rehearing, is very different from the interpretation that is empowering for Echo: instead of a narrative where the nymph finds her own voice, Echo in this alternate reading becomes invisible and faces Narcissus with his own reality, one that he does not hear himself. She forces him to begin listening to himself, and to see himself refracted in different ways. The nymph, in this scenario, is not talking about her desires, but functioning as an acoustic mirror for Narcissus: she returns to him his own words, not imbued with a meaning “special to her” and emphasizing her feelings, but with a meaning that applies to him and announces his own tragedy. They are perfectly appropriate responses for what he would need to know. On this reading, there is no tragicomedy, we are not given access to Echo’s interiority, we cannot feel her frustrated love, but we can read, through her, what a good listener of Narcissus’ own words can do by isolating the sounds of language. Narcissus is speaking his own words, mouthing his truth, truly alone in the woods. Here Echo exists for her own disappearance, and one can wonder about her real presence. We do not overhear her; we listen, thanks to, and through, her. This is not the reading that imposes itself at first hearing of the story, but in a form of delayed reading – like an echo of the first – it accounts for the truly  

On issues of identity in the Narcissus and Echo episode, see Janan : –. There is very little emphasis on the quality or tone of her voice. There is, however, a good physical reason why Narcissus would understand the echo as female. As one of the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata (a–b) explains, the echo introduces pitch deformation. Since it relies on the overtone series, the echoed voice is more high-pitched.

Echo as Acoustic Mirror



tragic overtones of their encounter, one that prefigures the drama of Narcissus’ meeting with his reflection in the pond. There is of course a paradox here. Most critics have seen the Echo narrative as the counterpart of the Narcissus one, two takes on illusions of the senses (that the double that one perceives in sound or in image is really someone else). Yet there is an obvious dissimilarity between the two scenarios: Narcissus is alone with himself when he looks in the pond; but he is described as not alone in the woods. In the Ovidian narrative, Narcissus actually listens correctly when he hears another person: what he cannot do visually (recognize his own self in the mirroring waters of the pond), he does acoustically – the comic Echo is really there, at least in the Ovidian narrative and its traditional reading (the first that I suggested, not the second, where the physical nymph Echo can be dispensed with). Even if she only mouths his truth rather than her own desires, she is still there, lurking in the wood, ready to throw her arms around the desired neck. What Narcissus fails to do as a viewer (distinguish between self and image), the Ovidian text achieves for him as a listener (he hears a dialogue in the delayed repetition of the same words). There is, in the end, no mythical explanation for why mirroring surfaces send reflections, but there is one for why echoes reflect. The aetiology of the disembodied Echo ventriloquizing speakers in deserted places is completely asymmetrical with that of the narcissus, the flower commemorating Narcissus’ death from his double’s failure to reciprocate his love. This distinction exists because there is something fundamentally different about the two senses: one has to do with space, the other with time. One (seeing a reflection) happens in synchrony, the other (listening to an echo) in diachrony. One can never hear the echo exactly at the same time as one is speaking, and one can never spend too much time with an echo. One can spend an infinite time with a reflection in a mirror – but as soon as one walks away, the reflection has no individual existence. Like the fish of Longus’ story, the lover’s face that Narcissus meets in the pond does not survive out of the water, and does not exist in diachrony. And before the 



See Hardie : : “This is how echoes behave in our world, voices that do not announce the arrival of somebody, whereas in the Ovidian world Narcissus’ words do have the effect of conjuring up one of those nymphs that for Lucretius are merely the fictional products of imagination (De rer. nat. .–).” Some have tried to inject more symmetry into the text by giving Narcissus a twin sister, whom he recognizes. Others have attempted to rescue Narcissus from his naïve mistake: for Pausanias (..–), it is impossible that a sixteen-year-old does not understand the phenomenon of the mirror image. Yet another fourteen-year-old is just as naïve: Chloe, who has never heard the phenomenon of the echo.



Echo: On Listening

nineteenth-century invention of the gramophone, the experience of one’s voice only existed as a one-time event, always meant to disappear once spoken. Once again, issues of listening join issues of subjectivity, as we saw at the end of the Longus narrative. The tale of the metamorphosis of the nymph Echo into a natural phenomenon is not just an aetiology for the acoustic phenomenon – a sound without a body, a voice with no bones, an aural phenomenon that hints at a presence, without necessarily involving a person. There is no anthropomorphism: Echo exists, in the tale, for the sake of her own disappearance. As suggested earlier, one does not need Echo: she is a grotesque caricature of what a good listener should do, always seeing both the fluidity of meanings and the ripples of sounds. For those who can hear, repetition is always a dialogue, a punning dialogue, and it always originates in a motivated, active, listening: not a spectative listening, but an expectant one. In the end, if we take Echo away, Narcissus is truly the creative listener, full of the desirous expectation that characterizes Echo: unbeknownst to himself he is ready, hearing nothing more than his own words, to imagine another person, who desires him in return, another with a voice that the text genders as female but that could be male (again, nothing is said about the pitch/intonation of the echo’s voice). Narcissus plays both sides of the duet. He is reflecting both halves of the courtship: one that conveys friendship, openness to the other, flirtation and attraction, and the other that resists being touched by anybody. The lack of response he laments in the visual image is constantly reactivated in the aural one. Ultimately the issue at the heart of the Echo narrative does not reside in the dichotomy between reality and illusion but between sonic materiality and aural imagination. The lustful nymph only exists as an explanation for the capacity to listen creatively and attentively. She is the figure for the power of finding alterity at the heart of listening, and the creativity (and 





On the invention of the gramophone, the phonograph, and other technologies that turned the voice into visual images, Kittler . Punning is itself a kind of mirroring that involves etymology, genealogy, identity, détournement, and supplement. I examine the punning dimension of the Echo episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in LeVen . See also Colby ; Empson ; Culler ; Kraus ; Bonadeo ; Schmitz-Emans . Antoninus Liberalis (Met. , based on Nicander’s Metamorphoses book ) attributes a different origin (male, and watery) to the echo: the beautiful youth Hylas who accompanied Heracles on the Argonautic expedition was transformed into an echo when water nymphs fell in love with him, pulled him into a river as he was fetching water, and metamorphose him to prevent Heracles from finding the boy among them.

Conclusion



interpretation) involved in the phenomenon of listening. Narcissus is not the victim of a delusion in believing in divine presences in nature: he creates them, and is willing to endow them with a richness of experience and a depth of feeling that one needs when listening. If Narcissus is deluded about his senses, he is enlightened as a listener, as he finds a meaningful presence in the experience of repetition.

Conclusion The fateful narrative about the nymph concludes with Echo’s demise: spurned, she hides, alone, ashamed, in the deserted woods: spreta latet siluis pudibundaque frondibus ora protegit et solis ex illo uiuit in antris. sed tamen haeret amor crescitque dolore repulsae: attenuant uigiles corpus miserabile curae, adducitque cutem macies, et in aera sucus corporis omnis abit. uox tantum atque ossa supersunt: uox manet; ossa ferunt lapidis traxisse figuram. inde latet siluis nulloque in monte uidetur, omnibus auditur: sonus est qui uiuit in illa. Thus rejected she hides in the woods, and she hides her shameful face with boughs, and from then on, she lives in lonely caverns; but her love holds fast and grows with the grief of rejection. Wakeful sorrows waste her miserable body away, leanness shrivels up her skin, and all the sap of her body dissolves into thin air. Only her voice and her bones survive: her voice remains, but the bones, they say, are turned into a figure of stone. There, she hides in the woods, and she is not ever to be seen in the hills, but everybody hears her: she is sound, a sound lives in her. (Ov. Met. . )

Her body that was so full of passion dries out, and only her voice survives, as the narrative promised. The text stretches out the moment of metamorphosis: the body becomes emaciated, the skin shrivels, the sap of her body vanishes in the air. Only voice and bones are left over. The reference to the bones is striking. They stick out awkwardly from the neat evanescence of the echo and become, “they say” (ferunt, ), a shape/figure of stone (lapidis figuram). If this is a tale about accounting for acoustic illusion, why bother with bones and other rocky remains? This makes for a strange ending for a talkative nymph: silence and cold rigidity take the place of what was warm flesh, burning passion, and ensnaring sound. Allegorically of course the bones of the echo, the ossified presence of the voice that is no longer sounding can be understood as writing. Traxisse figuram are two punning references to the written word, which “hands



Echo: On Listening

over, transmits, entrusts” (traho) the “shape” (figura) of language and “figures” of speech. The rocky bones are the visual marker of what remains of the vocal nymph. Just like Ovid’s text itself, with its signs and its figurae, the calcified remains of Echo are the visual medium that transmits her voice. This reference to a stony presence is also reminiscent of epigrams and epigraphs – a tradition that Barchiesi indeed associates with Echo. Just like the text itself, the presence of the stone inscribed with signs asks the viewer to imagine a voice, but a delayed voice. As with the echo, the stones inscribing Echo’s life confront the listener with his or her own aural imagination. In both cases, there is alterity in the experience of listening, in the experience of the delayed voice. Through her metamorphosis, Echo has become media. A more literal way to understand these bones is to see them as the pile of stones (figuram lapis) comprising the rocky background that is needed to create an echoing surface. With only open air, there is no echo, as the Longus narrative has already made clear. Voice and place are coconstitutive: the place determines the existence of the echo as much as Echo marks the place as a grave of sorts. With Echo, we clearly sound the depth of the relationship between place and music. And this relationship itself opens up questions of ontology. For one thing is never stated clearly: what is Echo exactly at the end of the story? An anthropomorphic divinity, but a divinity that undergoes a form of postmortem life? Or is she part of the nonhuman landscape itself? As Milla Tiainen has shown in a paper crucial for this book’s purposes, such questions “have much to gain from an engagement with posthuman/ist (feminist) theory”: the human actors involved in artistic or other sociocultural performances have always undertaken their actions, sensed, perceived, and attained increased or diminished capacities in relation to non human things and processes ranging from artefacts and specific material temporal milieus to the peculiar abilities of technological apparatuses and media.

Echo’s experience gives access to just that: the consciousness that perception and enhanced means of listening exist not just in us, but in relationship with our environment. Her nonhuman agency opens up real questions about the body and its capacities. For in a radical posthuman move, Echo has achieved the ultimate post-body condition. She has attained the ideal equilibrium between  

Barchiesi and Rosati . See also Porter a. Tiainen :  (emphasis in the text).



For a different take, LeVen c.

Conclusion



interiority and disembodiment. The text describes her as “hiding,” and thus reveals her agency. Repeating others’ utterances but truncating them, she also puts her own seal on every sentence. But she is not seen, and her agency cannot be reduced to a body. The “in her” in the text captures the paradox and ideal status of a body that is irreducible but also immaterial. The grammatical passive that describes her condition – nullo uidetur monte (“she is not ever to be seen in the hills,” ), but omnibus auditur (“she is heard by all,” ) – actualizes her posthuman condition: she is all in the relationality that only exists in the making. Echo exists because others sound out. The aesthetic question that I see at the heart of the myth (that of listening in time) is inseparable from the ontological issue of what the echo is and where it resides – in the locus desertus (“isolated place”) with which I opened this chapter. Following Tiainen’s invitation, Echo can thus be seen as an icon not just for posthumanist thinking but specifically for posthumanist feminist thinking. The once-chatty nymph answers the call for a feminist posthumanist form of Sound Studies: feminist sound studies would benefit from thinking agency increasingly as not merely a human affair. Adopting posthumanist and new materialist views of agency as any such process of being that exhibits capacities to affect and be affected by other beings might help feminist explorations of sound to re examine various sonic practices. These stances would also help them to grasp such recent performance practices that expressly focus on co formative relations between humans, technologies, other non human enti ties, and environments.

This is precisely what the Ovidian narrative puts forward: ontological inter-relationality and site-specificity in connection with vocal performance. As such, the nymph is a perfect icon of “becoming”: never stable, she doesn’t precede the voicing but manifests herself only in relationship to a specific type of place, which she in turn defines. The locus desertus on which this chapter opened is, in the end, marked by copresences and relations, forces and potentialities, rather than by solitude and absence.  

Tiainen : . These questions are discussed more fully in Moisala, Leppänen, Tiainen, and Väätäinen .

 

Reeds: On Musical Objects

ἦν δὲ ἡ σύριγξ οὔτε αὐλὸς ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς οὔτε κάλαμος, ἀλλὰ παρθένος εὐειδὴς οἵαν εὐχὴν κινεῖν. ὁ Πὰν οὖν ἐδίωκεν αὐτὴν δρόμον ἐρωτικόν, τὴν δὲ ὕλη τις δέχεται δασεῖα φεύγουσαν· ὁ δὲ Πὰν κατὰ πόδας εἰσθορὼν ὤρεγε τὴν χεῖρα ὡς ἐπ’ αὐτήν. καὶ ὁ μὲν ᾤετο τεθηρακέναι καὶ ἔχεσθαι τῶν τριχῶν, καλάμων δὲ κόμην εἶχεν ἡ χείρ. τὴν μὲν γὰρ εἰς γῆν καταδῦναι λέγουσι, καλάμους δὲ τὴν γῆν ἀντ’ αὐτῆς τεκεῖν. τέμνει δὴ τοὺς καλάμους ὑπὸ ὀργῆς ὁ Πὰν ὡς κλέπτοντας αὐτοῦ τὴν ἐρωμένην. ἐπεὶ δὲ μετὰ ταῦτα οὐκ εἶχεν εὑρεῖν, εἰς τοὺς καλάμους δοκῶν λελύσθαι τὴν κόρην ἔκλαιε τὴν τομήν, νομίζων τετμηκέναι τὴν ἐρωμένην. συμφορήσας οὖν τὰ τετμημένα τῶν καλάμων ὡς μέλη τοῦ σώματος καὶ συνθεὶς εἰς ἓν σῶμα, εἶχε διὰ χειρῶν τὰς τομὰς τῶν καλάμων καταφιλῶν ὡς τῆς κόρης τραύματα· ἔστενε δὲ ἐρωτικὸν ἐπιθεὶς τὸ στόμα καὶ ἐνέπνει ἄνωθεν εἰς τοὺς αὐλοὺς ἅμα φιλῶν· τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα διὰ τῶν ἐν τοῖς καλάμοις στενωπῶν καταρρέον αὐλήματα ἐποίει, καὶ ἡ σύριγξ εἶχε φωνήν. The syrinx was, originally, neither an aulos nor a reed, but a maiden so beautiful as to excite lovers’ prayers. So Pan pursued her in an erotic chase, but a dense forest received her as she was fleeing. Pan, leaping to his feet reached out to her with his arms and thought he had captured her and was holding her hair, but all his hand was holding was a head of reeds. She had, so the story goes, disappeared into the earth, and the earth grew reeds in her stead. In his ire, Pan cut down the reeds, as they had stolen his beloved. But later, as he could not find her, while he thought the maiden had fled in the reeds, he bemoaned his gesture, thinking he had cut down his beloved. Collecting the cut pieces of reed as if they were the limbs of a body and recomposing them as a body, he held the stumps of reeds in his arms and kissed them as if they were the wounds of the maiden. He wailed and set his passionate mouth to breathe across the pipes as he kissed them. And his breath flowing down through the narrow passage of the pipes made a piping melody, and the syrinx came to have a voice. (Ach. Tat. .. )

The last word of this passage, φωνή (“voice”), picks up where the previous chapter left off. Once again, as with the cry of the ringdove and the sighs of Echo, in the myth of the origins of the syrinx we are confronted with the 

Reeds: On Musical Objects



haunting presence of a musicking female voice. But Syrinx’s story exposes us to a different musical reality: we leave the realm of human and nonhuman animals, and insect performance, and enter that of matter, machines, and musical instruments. All Greek musical instruments have aetiological tales associated with their creation, and the syrinx (or panpipes) is no exception. A detailed account of the origins of the musical object appears in three texts: a passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (.–), a mythical narrative embedded in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (.), and the version quoted above from Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon. As with the rest of our stories, no link of imitation or subversion between different narrative versions of the myth can be established, since the dates of each of the narratives are so uncertain. All we can say is that the three narratives are similar in their basic scenario, but differ in their details and emphasis. These different narrative versions of the myth constitute elaborate (and sometimes discordant) meditations on aesthetic and ontological issues related to the musical instrument and the experience of listening to its sound. The Syrinx myth engages with ideas that are familiar from the preceding chapters of this book, in particular the relationships between song, the voice, and embodiment. At the heart of this conceptual cluster figures the Greek homonymy we have already observed between μέλη (“songs”) and μέλη (“limbs”). Chapter  described the Platonic cicadas as a metonym for the voice itself, straddling the domains of the physical and the spiritual; Chapter  further focused on the question of the corporeality of sound, and its fragmentation in the phenomenon of the dismemberment of the μέλη (limbs/songs) of the nymph Echo, as well as the nymph’s post-body condition, all in relationality. The current chapter continues to reflect on issues of musicking and the materiality of sound by concentrating on the creation of a voice coming from a machine. All three myths – cicadas, echo, syrinx – converge in their reflection on the invisibility and incorporeality of sound, and its power nevertheless to profoundly affect people’s senses and minds through a mysterious agency. Each takes music, sound, 



Chapter  will tackle the questions of music, voice, and gender more systematically in the figure of the nightingale. For a suggestive interpretation of the gender of (instrumental, nonvocal) music, Chua : –; on music and (gender) difference, Griffith's Music and Difference, in progress. On the gender of sound, Carson . The syrinx is omnipresent in bucolic poetry, especially in Theocritus’ Idylls, but the story of Pan’s invention of the instrument is never told there. Its first attestation is probably the brief mention in Verg. Ecl. .–. After Virgil, it continues to be exploited down to Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, where Syrinx is explicitly described as “having fled Pan’s unwedded love” (.) and “turned into a plant of baseborn reedy shape” (.).



Reeds: On Musical Objects

and voice, not only as a product but also as an agent of metamorphosis. The myths of Echo and Syrinx in particular are mirrors of each other: while Longus’ narrative about Echo accounts for the invisible source of sound in the phenomenon of the echoing voice, a musical “body” spread through the earth, the myth of Syrinx grounds the music in reed pipes, embodies it in an instrument, and attributes it a new form of life. In the Syrinx myth, the fundamental idea (and pun on μέλη, songs/ limbs) underlying these aetiologies is reinforced by an additional multivalence: the Greek noun for “instrument,” ὄργανον, also designates a bodily organ. This conceptual continuity carries with it a simple but important point: body parts and musical instruments (“organs”) are both conceived as entities that are part of a larger whole and that perform a specific function. The noun ὄργανον acknowledges that there is more to a musical instrument than its being a material object, a tool, a thing: like a body part, it is thought of in terms of its task and its affordances in “blended agency” with its user, and as part of an assemblage. This simple observation shifts the emphasis from the will of the instrument’s inventor to other forces and agencies, including that of the instrument itself and the combination of performer and musical organ, and it will guide my exploration of the different versions of the Syrinx myth. These narratives about Syrinx reflect on three related but different questions: first, what is the ontological nature of the instrument – what kind of body is it, and what animates it? Second, where does its “voice” come from? Finally, what is the status of the reeds’ singing but nonspeaking “voice”?

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object? Instruments’ Power and Paradox The mythical narrative about Syrinx quoted in the opening pages of this chapter belongs to Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon. Probably written in the second century CE in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of the Second Sophistic, the novel displays some of the typical thematic traits of the ancient romance genre: love between two beautiful and noble 



LSJ s.v. τὸ ὄργανον (ἔργον, ἔρδω) organon: “instrument . . .  organ of sense or apprehension . . . b of the body and its different parts . . .  musical instrument.” The Aristotelian view of organa is particularly important here: the purpose of an organon is to bring the end (the telos) into being. On the possible date of the novel and identity of its author, Plepelits . On the question of the generic features, or generic classification of the ancient novel, Whitmarsh : –; Goldhill ; Whitmarsh . On Leucippe and Clitophon’s relationship to the ancient novel “genre,” see Reardon ; Morales : –, quoting Plazenet : : “[Leucippe and Clitophon] inverse systématiquement les conventions du genre.”

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object?



adolescents, Leucippe and Clitophon, a string of misadventures (including shipwrecks, abduction, a pirate raid, disembowelment, international war, etc.), all threatening the virginity of the female protagonist, and a happy ending resulting in their marriage. The myth of the invention of the syrinx appears in a loaded dramatic context in the romance. The novel is nearing its denouement and the only barrier to the young couple’s happy (re)union is proof that, during all the events that separated them, Leucippe has remained a virgin. As it turns out, there is a way to prove the heroine’s enduring chastity: the verdict issued by the sounds of a syrinx hanging in the “cave of the virgin.” It is to explain the strange custom surrounding this cave that Leucippe’s father recounts the myth of Syrinx. He begins by explaining the design and mechanics of the instrument (a row of reed pipes that produce a sound similar to an aulos), and then relates the myth of its origins (quoted above). He concludes by explaining (..–) that whenever anyone is accused of not being a virgin, the people send her forth as far as the portals of the cave, and the panpipes try the case. The girl enters alone, dressed in the robe required by tradition, and someone else closes up the portals of the cave. If she be a virgin, a sweet, divine tune [λιγυρόν τι μέλος . . . καὶ ἔνθεον] may be heard, either because there is a musical breeze in the place itself, stored up within the panpipes [τοῦ τόπου πνεῦμα ἔχοντος μουσικὸν εἰς τὴν σύριγγα τεταμιευμένον], or perhaps even because Pan himself plays the pipes [τάχα καὶ ὁ Πὰν αὐτὸς αὐλεῖ]. After a short while, the portals of the cave open of their own accord, and the virgin emerges, her head garlanded with the foliage of the pine tree. If, on the other hand, she has lied about her virginity, the pipes are silent and a wail is emitted from the cave instead of the music [οἰμωγὴ δέ τις ἀντὶ μουσικῆς]. The people withdraw immediately, and abandon the woman in the cave. On the third day, the virgin priestess of the place enters, and discovers the panpipes on the ground and no sight of the woman. (trans. Whitmarsh)

This paragraph explicitly addresses one of the questions the myth meditates upon (what is the source of the syrinx’s voice?) and gives it two answers: the melody is either the effect of the breeze in the place, stored up in the instrument (how exactly, we are not told), or it could be the result of the god himself playing. But this deceptively simple question is itself entangled with several issues. First, as Chapter  explained in detail, the myth figures in a series of stories that can be labeled “exotica” or paradoxography: the novel is peppered with stories about animal lore, physical marvels, strange events occurring in distant lands, and other edifying and entertaining episodes presented by



Reeds: On Musical Objects

various protagonists. We hear about the magnetic stone, the strange diet of the elephant, the love of the sea eel and land viper, and other natural wonders, all of which are rhetorical tours-de-force aimed at impressing the damsel – and the reader. In Morales’ pithy formulation, many of these tales “facilitate what [they] exemplify”: as they describe erotic scenarios, they function as preparatory or summary episodes for the romance. The context in which the myth of Syrinx is told is no exception and reflects the novel’s assumptions about the social construction of masculinity, femininity, and gendered approaches to sex, as well as larger cultural anxieties of the Imperial period about male self-representation and the integrity of male and female bodies. More specifically, the myth (that features at its heart the attempted rape of Syrinx) reproduces the schema already observed in the adventures of Leucippe: the heroine has been threatened by unwelcome sexual advances from men, including the hero, no less than three times in the novel. Syrinx’s story is a variation on the novelistic theme of sexual predation, and the adventures of the human heroine color our expectations for the reading of the mythical narrative. But mythical insets within the novel, as well as paradoxographical passages, also create an experimental space where verisimilitude is at less of a premium, with various forms of exploration probing what the novel cannot otherwise showcase. The myths, like the fables featured in the novel, are a call for a different type of thinking, and provide, as we saw in Chapter , alternative responses to the narrative scenarios of the novel. They develop a radically different type of ontology from the humancentered one presented in the rest of the narrative: while the world in which the characters of the novel evolve has all the trappings of the real world (only inhabited by humans and animals that are under the control of human beings, with no epiphany of the gods), the world of the metamorphic myths is one where human and nonhuman animals and gods mix, and morph into one another. Traffic in being, however, mostly works in  



Morales : . For more on paradoxography, see Chapter . On these issues, see the following volumes (whose approach is largely indebted to Michel Foucault , with its focus on the ancient novel in the third volume of Histoire de la sexualité): Sissa ; Gleason ; Konstan ; Goldhill ; Haynes ; Lalanne ; Morales ; Jones . At .., Clitophon takes the myth of Apollo and Daphne (with its story of male erotic aggression and the subsequent transformation of a maiden into a plant) as a paradigm for his own pursuit of Leucippe. At .–, he interprets the myth of Procne and Philomela as paradigmatic of Leucippe’s situation (the female being the unwilling quarry, and being ultimately transformed into a bird). Finally, Thersander’s rage after his failed attempt to rape Leucippe (..) is very similar to Pan’s reaction after losing Syrinx in the myth. On the Syrinx passage and the parallel with other mythical episodes, Morales : –.

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object?



one direction: from human to nonhuman animal, vegetal, mineral, or elemental reality, but rarely from nonhuman to human animal or god. This is particularly important as the myth of Syrinx recalls a tradition of Archaic myths about the invention of musical instruments that provide a reflection on the creation of the cosmos. The story of Syrinx’s transformation into a musical instrument reflects on some of the same aesthetic and ontological issues as the myths, but offers an answer of its own. Most of the myths about the invention of musical instruments are told in narratives from the Archaic period, and they involve the Olympian gods or epic heroes. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, for example, recounts how the baby god Hermes invented the lyre by killing a turtle and using its shell as a sound box. A victory ode of Pindar (Pythian ) tells how Athena invented the auloi (the double reed pipes) to celebrate the hero Perseus’ victory over the monstrous Gorgon. These myths have in common the fact that they feature violence, death, and cosmic turbulence at their heart, and illustrate the domination of animals by gods or heroes: the beautiful, pure tone of the lyre started with the evisceration of a mountain-going turtle, and the mesmerizing sounds of the aulos originated from the awesome cries of a dying monster, the Gorgon. More than providing a gratuitous description of the grisly beginnings of these special objects, the myths meditate on the paradoxical status of musical instruments in the structuring of ontological categories: they are objects represented as resulting from the crossing of boundaries between life and death. The narratives self-consciously describe this paradox: in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hermes welcomes his invention by exclaiming “you were a defense against baneful assaults while alive; now that you are dead, you shall sing beautifully” (ἦ γὰρ ἐπηλυσίης πολυπήμονος ἔσσεαι ἔχμα | ζώουσ’· ἢν δὲ θάνῃς τότε κεν μάλα καλὸν ἀείδοις, –). A fragment from Sophocles’ Trackers describes the lyre with the same paradox: “dead, it has a voice, but alive, it was a mute beast” (θανὼν γὰρ ἔσχε φωνήν, ζῶν δ’ ἄναυδος ἦν ὁ θήρ, TrGF IV. fr. : ). The same antithesis is at the heart of narratives about the aulos: an epigram by the Archaic poet Cleoboulina (fr.  West IE) highlights the contrast between the live voice of the instrument and the animal death from which it was created in the form of a riddle: “a dead donkey struck my ears with the bone of his shin” (κνήμῃ νεκρὸς ὄνος με κερασφόρῳ οὖας ἔκρουσεν). In 

On these Archaic myths of instruments’ origins in general, see Restani . Specifically on Hermes’ invention of the lyre: Klein ; Svenbro , Clay ; Leppert . On Athena and the aulos, Segal ; Frontisi-Ducroux ; Steiner . For a comparative perspective on



Reeds: On Musical Objects

both cases, the sound of the invented instrument is the vehicle negotiating the boundary between life and death, but also stands in for humans’ domination of animal life (and its aural potential). This anxiety about the status of musical instruments has continued to be exploited into modernity, and the famous harpsichords of the Ruckers family, for example, all feature labels that state the same paradox: “I was once an ordinary tree, although living I was silent; now, though dead, if I am well played, I sound sweetly.” But ancient myths also focus on the extraordinary power of the object. Amphion’s lyre, for example, was imbued with such agency that it made stones move to build the walls of Thebes. Orpheus’ lyre, which could charm beasts, trees, rocks, and the gods of the Underworld, was also thought of as performing by itself without a human agent: in some versions of the myth, the lyre floats, after the musician’s death, to Lesbos, still making music, while in other versions, Orpheus’ singing head substitutes for the instrument, in an activation of the idea of organon as both instrument and body part. There are of course important distinctions to be made, first, between instruments themselves, in particular between wind instruments (such as the aulos and the syrinx) that prevent performers from using their own mouth to speak and chordophones (such as the kithara and the lyre) that allowed it. This opposition between the human speaking and singing voice and the instrumental singing voice is what resides at the heart of the myth of Apollo and Marsyas. The “voice” of the aulos or the syrinx thus has an ambiguous status since it substitutes for that of the performer and prevents him or her from using his or her own mouth for speech (logos). Debates surrounding purely instrumental, nontexted music and its mode of signifying raged in the fifth century BCE, prefiguring some of the ideological

 



myths about instruments, Schneider . Other myths also involve competition, violence, and death: the Muses and the Sirens, the Muses and the Pierides, Apollo and Marsyas.  Leppert :  with n. . Cf. e.g., Ap. Rhod. Argon. .–; Hor. Ars P. –. Cf. T –a, , – Kern. On Orpheus and his instrument, Segal ; Restani  (drawing from Leydi  on the talismanic power of instruments); Abbate  (ch. ); LeVen . On the power of musical instruments more generally, Gritten ; on their cultural significance, Dawe . The satyr Marsyas challenges Apollo to an instrumental contest, in which he plays the aulos while Apollo played the kithara. The satyr is doubly defeated, as he cannot play turning his instrument upside down, as Apollo can, and cannot sing while playing it. The myth of Marsyas was often exploited in cultural polemics about the role of instrumental music in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, on which see: McKinnon ; Leclercq-Neveu ; Wilson ; Feldherr and James ; Hamilton : –; LeVen ; Moseley : –.

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object?

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disputes dividing critics in nineteenth-century Europe, something that I will come back to in the conclusion of this chapter. The myth of the invention of the syrinx also distinguishes itself in another way from Archaic myths about the invention of instruments that I have referred to so far. In Archaic myths, the instruments are imagined as having supernatural agency: they move boulders and trees, like Amphion’s lyre, and they bring people back from the dead, like Orpheus’. Even though they are merely objects, they have some godlike or heroic power. Finally, like heroes or gods, they can be turned into constellations. But nothing of the kind is explained for Syrinx in our narrative: in the context of Achilles Tatius’ novel, the musical instrument has prodigious power, but its power is described as affecting humans and determining their fate. The instrument decides the denouement of the novel and the fate of the young couple in front of a whole community: more than a magistrate or a priest – or, for that matter, any political or religious power – it is the agency of one instrument that determines the human outcome of the entire story. But the narrative remains vague about the exact source of the instrument’s power – whether it is powered by the divine (played by the god himself ) or the result of a natural phenomenon (a breeze agitating the instrument). By not offering a single answer, it constitutes, along with the myth of the instrument’s origins, a rich locus of meditation on the status of the instrument as vegetal material endowed with extraordinary power and nonhuman agency. Syrinx’s Melodrama With this background of Archaic myths in mind, let us now turn to Achilles Tatius’ narrative of the invention of the syrinx. The scene takes place in the wild, at the margins of society and culture. Our initial encounter with Syrinx is purely visual and silent: the narrator insists on the beauty of the maiden (παρθένος εὐειδής) but says nothing about her being musical – a first significant variation from other versions of the myth, where Syrinx is “endowed with a musical voice” (e.g., τὴν φωνὴν μουσική, D&C .). The focus on vision is important thematically, as several other key passages in Leucippe and Clitophon are triggered by extraordinary sights (paintings, events, or natural wonders). What is more, the novel showcases several disquisitions on the mechanics of viewing, as well as on the 

On the catasterism of the lyre of Orpheus, see T – Kern.

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

physiology of desire and attraction, and how they relate to questions of agency – especially how much responsibility one has in responding to the call of beauty. The physiology and psychology of eros communicated through sight draws from Plato’s Phaedrus (b). The vocabulary is consistently that of flux and flow, and is reminiscent not only of Plato, but also of Stoic theories of vision. Whatever intellectual circles Achilles Tatius was gravitating in, his disquisitions on vision and matter are an integral part of the project of the novel, and need to be kept in mind when interpreting our myth. Actually, the author’s interest in the epistemology of the senses provides the backdrop for my interpretation of the myth, and for understanding the story in the light of ancient reflections on matter and attitudes towards it (something that I will be returning to in the last section in reference to Pan’s attitude to the reeds). In emphasizing Syrinx’s beauty, the passage also exposes the maiden’s vulnerability: she is so beautiful as to excite lovers’ prayers (παρθένος εὐειδὴς οἵαν εὐχὴν κινεῖν). The sentence closes with an allusion to one way of dealing with beauty and attraction: prayer and contemplation. But only the alternative, violence, will be illustrated in our myth. This is a second difference with the other versions of the story, where force comes into play only when persuasion fails. Our narrative describes the violence of Pan’s desire in the next lines as an “erotic chase” (δρόμον ἐρωτικόν), a hunt (ἐδίωκεν, “he pursued her”; τεθηρακέναι, “he had captured her”), and an attempt at “holding” her (ἔχεσθαι). The girl has no choice but flight. The image of the god grasping the maiden’s hair is symbolic of the savagery of his act; their relationship is explicitly construed as one of perpetrator and victim, hunter and prey, subject and object. We find here, in the violence towards, and objectification of, Syrinx some of the motives I have highlighted with respect to the creation of other musical instruments.

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





Ach. Tat. ..–, on beauty flooding down through the eyes to the soul, repeated at ..– and ..; ..– on the functioning of the eye. On this idea, Goldhill  and Morales : –, denying that one can precisely attribute either Platonic or Stoic origins to Achilles Tatius’ theory. The text here is difficult. The main commentator on the text notes: “the impossible reading of the MSS has been emendated in different ways.” I chose to print Jacobs’ suggestion, which “though not entirely convincing, has two merits: it is a very slight alteration and its meaning (quae facile vota amantium excitaret) fits well with the following” (Vilborg : ). On rape, see Zeitlin , who defines it in sexual and social terms in reference to the institution of marriage. The propensity of male figures for rape (as untamed form of sex, anti-culture) is aligned with the refusal of sexuality in the figure of the hunter or militant virgin. “Male sexual desire is separated culturally from war and the hunt but these are also its metaphors” (ibid., ).

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object?

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This powerlessness of Syrinx and her lack of agency culminate in her disappearance: after fleeing into the woods, she “went down into the earth,” an intriguing expression that can be understood literally (she sank into the marsh); but it also has more figurative associations and is used, for example, to describe death in Greek funerary epigraphy. As Syrinx ceases to exist as a beautiful maiden, a “they say” or “so the story goes” (λέγουσιν) marks the switch between modes of discourse and regimes of belief; between the all too real possibility of nonconsensual sex in a maledominated culture, and the unexpected vegetal metamorphosis. It is at this precise juncture that important conceptual work is done: Syrinx is substituted (ἀντ᾽ αὐτῆς) by a head of reeds. In Greek as in English, vocabulary makes the dramatic metamorphosis and the transition between ontological identities smoother: as Pan reaches for the maiden’s hair (τῶν τριχῶν), he grabs instead a “full head” of reeds (καλάμων κόμην). In an anthropomorphic verbal substitution, the text puts a plant in the stead of a girl, as if the logic of language justified heads of reeds to grow in place of human ones. Syrinx’s status as sexual object translates into the syntax of the text: she is objectified grammatically as well, and only figures in the accusative in sentences describing Pan’s actions, never in the grammatical case of the subject, the nominative (except in the sentence marking her disappearance). The narrative perspective has already silenced the girl from the start: during the pursuit, we never hear from her, have no access to her feelings, and only see her referred to in relationship to Pan, as the passive “the beloved” (τὴν ἐρωμένην). She remains so for the rest of the narrative, until she regains a name in the final line, as a common noun rather than a proper name. By contrast, Pan is full of movement, tension, and action; we are privy to his various emotions, from desire to ire, from anger to despair. As Pan acts, the reader becomes a voyeur, expecting the consummation of 



Tsagalis : –, on epitaphs using the image of “descending to the chambers of Persephone” and the phrase κατὰ γῆς (“under the earth”). The myth might also be drawing on representations of “the sexual experiment as drowning or engulfment, in a woodland pool over which the local nymphs preside,” used mostly about male heroes who fear losing themselves in the sexual act. Zeitlin : – analyzes the myths of Hylas and Hermaphroditus in these terms. The vocabulary and conceptual metaphor here invites us to go back to issues explored in Chapter  (on anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism), and to statements such as Keeton : : “almost all our words have some sort of human connotation, imply some sort of human motivation and purpose . . . You are cautioned, therefore, to recognize the pitfalls inherent in any application of human-oriented language to the activities of other animals.” The fact that ancient Greek describes the upper part of a vegetal as its “hair” or “head” (and calls young people “shoots”) facilitates the logic of the myth: but what Keeton sees as a “pitfall” is actually a boon in our conceptualization of the relationship between species.

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

the god’s desire. But the metamorphosis cuts short the sex act as the violence of his passion is deflected onto something else. The sexual threat translates into pure violence: Pan goes on a rampage and “in his ire, cuts the reeds” that “had stolen” the object of his desire. The mutilation of the reeds substitutes for the rape. When Pan destroys the organic matter, the “head” of reeds that took the place of the girl, he commits a form of murder; but once the mangled plant is put back together “as a body,” Pan’s divine breath brings the dead organic matter to a form of life. Now the beloved is brought from death back into a form of inorganic life, through her reembodiment as a manufactured instrument in the last lines of the story. In this form of literal “re-membering” of the maiden, we are reminded of another myth about an artist and creator blurring the boundaries between life and death: that of Pygmalion. Like the sculptor’s statue, the handmade syrinx becomes full of life as soon as it is animated by the breath of its creator. An important difference remains, however: prior to animation, Pygmalion’s statue was a lifeless piece of marble, while the reed, before being breathed into, was a living vegetal entity suddenly cut down by Pan. It would seem here that Syrinx has suffered two deaths, an organic and a metaphorical one. Not only does nothing of her lovely human self remain: being coerced into sex, she has ceased to be the possessor of her own person, then lost her human body, either in or to the reeds, and finally she has become the god’s property as she was turned into his instrument. But her own voice as human female is also stifled, when, unable to act upon her own desires, she becomes his silent prey. In the final lines of the myth, Syrinx has become what the text had proleptically opened on: an aulos, a reed, even a series of them (ἡ σύριγξ αὐλοὶ μέν εἰσι πολλοί, ..). A parody of a male being, she is now an extra-phallic appendage to Pan, a continuation of his body, a prosthesis to his desire. Iconography attests to this, by representing the instrument as a visual continuation of the god’s 





On aesthetic questions linked to the Pygmalion myth told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Rosati : –; Liveley . Several passages of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (..–.., .., ..) discuss the importance of the mouth as organ of breath, language, and kisses, all connected to the soul. See LeVen a and Zeitlin . See also Creese , devoted to a different Ovidian episode (Metamorphoses .) also staging the syrinx, imagined as the monstrous organ of the Cyclops Polyphemus. On the idea of instrument as prosthetics, Gritten : . Fundamental to this idea is the work of Marshall McLuhan, who describes technologies as “extensions of man” (McLuhan : –). For an elaborate revaluation of technology as prosthesis, see Stiegler . For a summary of such prosthetic approaches and their origin in the Greek myth of Epimetheus, see Hansen : –. See also Hankins and Silverman . This whole paragraph is indebted to Gundula Kreutzer, whom I thank very warmly.

Syrinx: From Subject to Musical Object?

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erect phallus. The embodiment of Pan’s passion, Syrinx has become his organ, and acts as an extension of the god’s senses. Up to this point, it would seem that the story can lend itself to be read along structuralist lines, showcasing the categories of subject and object, organic and inorganic, life and death, unity and multiplicity, and straddling them in different ways, as we saw in other origin myths. But the myth does not stop at describing the sound created by air blown across the narrow opening of the reeds as a piping (αὐλήματα): it calls it a voice (φωνή). Even if, already by the fourth century BCE, φωνή belonged to the technical vocabulary of acoustics and harmonics to refer to the sound of instruments, the text plays on the lexical continuity between human and instrumental “voice.” What does this voice have to do with Syrinx’s original one, and where does it come from exactly? Is it that of the girl? If so, what form of interiority can this voice express, and how do we reckon with the fact that a new body determines a new way of thinking? Is it that of the god? If so, what does this voice say, and how can it not ventriloquize the girl’s? Finally, if it is the voice of the reeds and of the newly made object, how does it complicate both the understanding of what a voice is and does (as we gathered from the cicadas myth in Chapter ) and our understanding of metamorphic logic? A reading that assumes fixed categories of active/passive, subject/object, life/death, grown/manufactured does not do justice to the details of the myth, or to the way the object is imagined in the story of Clitophon and Leucippe. Setting Achilles Tatius’ version of the Syrinx myth against two other texts will bring out the richness of the myth, its powerful exploitation in various narratives, and its specific areas of friction. In presenting these other versions, my goal is not to try and establish a relationship of influence between texts and authors, but rather to see where productive 



 

For iconographic representations of Pan on the model of aulos-playing satyrs, see Haas : , figs. , , . Even when the instrument is not as closely related to the body of the god, Pan is most of the time represented with the syrinx (ibid., –). On the vocabulary of sound, see Chapter . Archaic poets use the term as a way to “animate” the instrument and play on the idea of the object as in-between in the lyric experience (see, for example, Sappho fr.  Voigt, where she addresses her lyre and invites it to “speak” to her (μοι λέγε) and find a voice (φωνάεσσα †δὲ γίνεο†)). For further considerations on the voice and media, Porter a. Hayles : . These questions are in dialogue with, and provide an ancient paradigm for, questions asked by Emily Dolan and John Tresch, for example, in their evocatively titled collected volume Towards a New Organology. They explain (Tresch and Dolan : ): “we want to think about instruments as actors or tools with variable ranges of activity, with changing constructions and definitions, and with different locations in both technical and social formations.”

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

areas of thought are located, and how different texts and authors engage with them in the larger intellectual context of Imperial culture. In particular, as I shall highlight in the next section, different versions encapsulate different models to think about the idea of “embodiment” in the creation of the syrinx’s voice and to account for the instrument’s power.

Locating the Origins of the Syrinx’s Voice Ovidian Sighs and Suppressed Voices The first version I turn to comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The myth of the invention of the syrinx is one of the stories told by Mercury to Argus in book . Argus is the hundred-eyed monster whom the goddess Juno has placed to keep watch over Io, the noble maiden seduced by Jupiter. Jupiter has turned Io into a cow in order to deceive his suspicious wife. When Mercury, dispatched to earth by Jupiter with the mission to kill her guard, comes to Argus’ mountain, he poses as a shepherd (pastor) with a few stolen goats (capellas abductas, –) and a tune played on a syrinx prototype – a few oat stalks bound together (structis cantat auenis, ). Argus is instantly seduced by the sound of the god’s piping (uoce noua captus, ), but Mercury does not manage to completely overcome the monster’s watchfulness with the tune of the reed pipes alone (canendo uincere harundinibus, –). Instead, it is the story of the newly invented instrument (reperta fistula nuper, –), about which Argus inquires, that undoes him: Mercury begins to tell Argus the story of Syrinx (.–), starting with her origins, her commitment to her virginity and to the cult of Diana and her beauty and its effect on Pan. He continues, explaining how the nymph refused the god’s advances: et precibus spretis fugisse per auia nympham, donec harenosi placidum Ladonis ad amnem uenerit; hic illam cursum inpedientibus undis ut se mutarent liquidas orasse sorores; Panaque, cum prensam sibi iam Syringa putaret, corpore pro nymphae calamos tenuisse palustres; dumque ibi suspirat, motos in harundine uentos effecisse sonum tenuem similemque querenti; arte noua uocisque deum dulcedine captum “hoc mihi conloquium tecum” dixisse “manebit!” atque ita disparibus calamis compagine cerae inter se iunctis nomen tenuisse puellae.

Locating the Origins of the Syrinx’s Voice

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and [Syrinx], having scorned his prayers, ran through the wilds until she came to the calm stream of sandy Lado. There, with the water preventing her from going further, she prayed that her watery sisters transform her, and Pan, when he thought he had now seized Syrinx, held instead of the body of the nymph the marshy reeds. And as he pined there, the wind agitating the reeds produced a delicate sound, similar to a plaint. Seduced by this new art and by the sweetness of the voice, he exclaimed: “This way to converse with you is [still] left to me” and once the bits of reeds of different length were joined with wax, the instrument took the name of the girl. (Ov. Met. . )

The narrative is perhaps the least ambiguous of our three versions, but also the most fantastic with regard to the metamorphosis of Syrinx’s body and the structure of the instrument. It figures as the third of three myths told in rapid succession in book  of the Metamorphoses, all involving an attempted rape followed by metamorphosis, after the tales of Daphne (turned into the laurel tree) and Io (turned into a cow). Most importantly, our story relies on the assumption that the cosmos is full of shape-shifters, that matter is subject to constant flux and transformation, and that species can turn into other species at the will of the gods. In the Ovidian version, the origins of the instrument’s sound are also more explicitly assigned to natural elements: it is clearly the unexpected action of the wind, moving in unison with Pan’s panting (from exhaustion? from desire?), that creates the first syrinx melody – or rather, the first melody heard as syrinx melody. We are surprisingly close to Lucretius’ account of a natural history of the arts (De rerum natura, .–), where “the zephyrs whistling through the hollow reeds, first taught peasants to blow into the hollow of hemlock stalks” (et zephyri caua per calamorum sibila primum | agrestis docuere cauas inflare cicutas). And this is the main difference with other myths of invention of musical instruments: in the invention of the syrinx, no monster is killed, no god with extraordinary power involved, no creature dismembered. What lies at the heart of the passage is the god’s role as listener: the listener is born before the instrument. The first witness to the sound of the reeds before its embodiment in the syrinx, Pan is immediately seduced by what he calls a new art (arte noua captum), by its timbre (sonum tenuem), and by the sweetness of what the text calls a voice (dulcedine uocis), a sound similar to a plaint (similem querenti). 

Barchiesi et al. note the debt to Lucretius but understands Ovid’s borrowing as a “remythologizing” of the Lucretian original, with the goal of enchanting rather than persuading the audience (Barchiesi, Segal, Tarrant, and Koch : ).

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

In that regard, Pan is the prototype of an ecomusicologist, taking delight and inspiration from the natural world and the heightened access it provides to music. His experience is, in essence, that recounted by the ecomusicologist Bernie Krause. His “most memorable music lesson” consisted in the experience of listening to a colossal pan flute approximated by gusts of wind passing through a cluster of reeds of different length at the foot of Chief Joseph Mountain in northern Oregon. Krause describes how sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us. The effect wasn’t a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch . . . While never unpleasant, the acoustic experience was disorienting.

Krause does not expound on the reasons for his amazement, but one can surmise that his disorientation comes from the unsettling experience of hearing sounds with a tremendous expressive charge coming from a nonliving entity. Now with this insight, we can return to the Ovidian text. If we recall that, earlier in the narrative, Argus is depicted as being “seduced by the new voice” of the instrument (uoce noua captus, ), we see that Pan’s aesthetic reaction at once refers back to Argus’ own, while providing its mythical archetype. Indeed, Ovid’s Pan recalls the image of the god we introduced in the previous chapter of this book in connection with his discovery of Echo: our Syrinx myth, again, is as much about techniques and contexts of listening as about sound production, as much about the relationship between sound and ear as it is about each of them separately. In the Ovidian narrative, Pan’s agency in creating the original syrinx voice is limited to his wish to control the sound that has seduced him, a desire to replicate the natural mechanism of air forced through a narrow opening, to harness the acoustic wonder into a machine, and to tie its serendipitous functioning to a secure (and eternally reproducible) source. Here the newly created instrument integrates the power of the plant but produces the sound on a mechanical basis, powered by a breathing performer rather than by the whims of the environment or the moods of the listener. Yet none of this would have transpired if Pan had not been a willing listener. 



Ecomusicology, as defined by Allen  in the Grove Dictionary of American Music, is “the study of music, culture, and nature in all the complexities of those terms. Ecomusicology considers musical and sonic issues, both textual and performative, related to ecology and the natural environment.” On ecomusicological approaches (and their challenges and benefits): Rehding ; Allen a; Allen b; Rehding ; Pedelty . Krause : –.

Locating the Origins of the Syrinx’s Voice



This version of the myth thus offers a different view of the relationship between performer and music, and between music and audience. In contrast to Achilles Tatius’ version that concentrates on the sight of the material, Ovid offers above, all else, a story of the changed perception of a listener. But Pan in the Metamorphoses narrative also presents an interesting twist on the question of the agency of the instrument. The text paradoxically conceives of the instrument as independent from the girl – even if the syrinx is made of the reeds that come from Syrinx’s metamorphosed body. For the god, the instrument is a mediator, a way to communicate with Syrinx (conloquium tecum, ); indeed, it is the polar opposite of the symbolic fusion of bodies into an instrument imagined in Longus’ myth, as we will see in the next pages. The untexted music of the syrinx constitutes in this version of the story a form of conversation with the god – not a blending, a colloquy (conloquium). It is as if Pan entrusted to the plant what he could not, and still cannot, do himself: talk to the girl. The question of the nature and power of the voice emerging from the instrument is raised only incidentally in Ovid: the sound of the wind in the reeds is described as “plaintive” (more literally: “a sound similar to someone moaning”), and can be interpreted in two ways: either as the sound of the transformed Syrinx bemoaning her metamorphosis (just as Daphne/the laurel tree rustles in horror as a reaction to Apollo still fondling her in tree form), or as that of Pan, who laments the fact that Syrinx has escaped him and hears the reeds replicate his feelings. No matter how we interpret the sound, the melody of the wind passing through the plant is taken as evocative of a scenario between two characters (a love story with an unhappy ending). The invocation of the “plaintive reeds” introduces the elements of a complex debate about instrumental music and its connection to representation, expression, and emotions, on which I will touch more in the conclusion of this chapter, and to which the next chapter is devoted. But what is perhaps most remarkable in Ovid’s narrative of metamorphosis and sonorous embodiment is that the text relies entirely on a suppressed voice (supprimit uocem, ). Hermes is about to reach the heart of his story, telling Argus that “. . . Pan uidet hanc pinuque caput praecinctus acuta talia uerba refert” restabat uerba referre et precibus spretis fugisse per auia nympham donec harenosi placidum Ladonis ad amnem uenerit.

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

“. . . Pan crowned with a pine wreath sees her, and addresses her the following words” and [Hermes] still had to tell [Argus] the story, of how [Syrinx], having scorned [Pan’s] prayers, ran through the wilds until she came to the calm stream of sandy Lado. (Ov., Met. . )

Pan’s actual words are never stated in Hermes’ voice: the Ovidian narrator takes over, and presents the rest of the story as an indirect statement in a kind of praeteritio. The trope is a powerful way of simultaneously unveiling and covering, acknowledging and denying; it allows the story to be both said and still unsaid, to remain forever in a potential state, like the voice of an instrument silent in its case but ready to be played. The narrative here rivals the wordless instrumental music in presenting the latent power of the voice and in shifting the listener’s attention to the power of the mediator: Pan conceives of the instrument as an intermediary to the girl, thus highlighting the importance of the object itself in affording communication. In the same way, the Ovidian narrator brings our attention to the voice of the narrator, vicariously endowed for a moment with the power of the divine voice of Argus-killing Mercury. Moreover, just as stories need the breath, mouth, and tongue of a narrator to be activated and to deploy their power, the instrument is in need of the physical skills of a performer to trigger the power of music latent in it. The voice is never transmitted straight “through” an invisible storyteller, just as music never emanates from an invisible player. The Ovidian narrator always reminds us of his presence and the control he exercises over the narrative, most spectacularly in “‘Pan . . . addresses her the following words’ – and [Hermes] still had to tell [Argus] the story” (Pan . . . talia uerba refert – restabat uerba referre –) and talia dicturus (“he was about to say the following,” ). We are constantly aware of the potential power at his disposal, of forces ready to be released in narratives mesmerizing enough to lure fierce monsters like Argus. This complicates the deceivingly simple description of the instrument as mechanically reproducing the power of the wild reeds, and standing in as an intermediary between the god and the girl. Like the narrator himself, the instrument is a channel, but it also has a material presence that cannot be effaced and that draws attention to itself as awe-filling object. It displays something, but it is also a display in itself. The syrinx and its music are thus poised somewhere between the natural world and an economy of 

On instruments as displays and function of speech: see Hankins and Silverman ; Dawe ; Gritten : .

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

verbal transactions. The instrument is a mixture of organic matter, potential energy, human agency, and as such is a repository of power. The music of the syrinx might be caused by the action of air on multiple reeds, but any time we hear the voice of the instrument, it is also multiple stories that are reactivated: not only that of the fashioning of the instrument itself and the initial moment of aesthetic delight felt by Pan, but also that of the god forever addressing the girl while playing, as well as the origin myth of Hermes killing Argus. Longus’ Pastoral Economy of Instruments As we turn to another version of the myth, we access additional layers of meaning. A different account of the origins of the instrument reveals a different take on the power, nature, and narrative economy of its voice. Just as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, the tale of the syrinx is told in a charged dramatic context in Longus’ novel Daphnis and Chloe (.). The whole rustic community is gathered at night to celebrate Chloe’s rescue after her abduction by pirates, and to acknowledge Pan’s role (and that of his musical instrument) in her salvation. Daphnis and Chloe, their fathers Lamon and Dryas, as well as Philetas, the old gardener who instructed the two teenagers into “the name and deeds of eros,” all praise the god with a performance of their own (storytelling, instrumental music, dance, and pantomime). Philetas goes first, and tries to perform a tune on a syrinx he has borrowed from Daphnis, but has to give up because Daphnis’ child-sized pipes are “too small for his great techne” (.). While the audience waits for a bigger instrument to be fetched, Lamon relates the story of its origins: ὁ δὲ Λάμων ἐπηγγείλατο αὐτοῖς τὸν περὶ τῆς σύριγγος ἀφηγήσασθαι μῦθον, ὃν αὐτῷ Σικελὸς αἰπόλος ᾖσεν ἐπὶ μισθῷ τράγῳ καὶ σύριγγι· “αὕτη ἡ σῦριγξ τὸ ἀρχαῖον οὐκ ἦν ὄργανον ἀλλὰ παρθένος καλὴ καὶ τὴν φωνὴν μουσική. αἶγας ἔνεμεν, Νύμφαις συνέπαιζεν, ᾖδεν οἷον νῦν. Πάν ταύτης νεμούσης, παιζούσης, ᾀδούσης προσελθὼν ἔπειθεν ἐς ὅ τι ἔχρῃζε καὶ ἐπηγγέλλετο τὰς αἶγας πάσας θήσειν διδυματόκους. ἡ δὲ ἐγέλα τὸν





The story of the Syrinx concludes (–): “The Cyllenian [Mercury] was about to tell the above story [talia dicturus], when he saw that all [of Argus’] eyes, their light covered in slumber, had succumbed to sleep. He immediately stops speaking [supprimit uocem] and makes Argus’ sleep even deeper, caressing the languid eyes with his magic wand.” The suppressed voice of the narrator god brings the end of the monster, which gives birth to the story. It is as if one voice gave birth to another, as if there was a ceaseless flow of voice inhabiting different narrating bodies. On the myth, MacQueen ; Montiglio ; Bremmer .



Reeds: On Musical Objects ἔρωτα αὐτοῦ οὐδὲ ἐραστὴν ἔφη δέξασθαι μήτε τράγον μήτε ἄνθρωπον ὁλόκληρον. ὁρμᾷ διώκειν ὁ Πὰν ἐς βίαν. ἡ Σῦριγξ ἔφευγε καὶ τὸν Πᾶνα καὶ τὴν βίαν. φεύγουσα κάμνουσα ἐς δόνακας κρύπτεται, εἰς ἕλος ἀφανίζεται. Πὰν τοὺς δόνακας ὀργῇ τεμών τὴν κόρην οὐχ εὑρών τὸ πάθος μαθών τὸ ὄργανον νοεῖ καὶ τοὺς καλάμους ἐμπνεῖ κηρῷ συνδήσας ἀνίσους καθότι καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἄνισος αὐτοῖς· καὶ ἡ τότε παρθένος καλὴ νῦν ἐστὶ σῦριγξ μουσική.” ἄρτι πέπαυτο τοῦ μυθολογήματος ὁ Λάμων καὶ ἐπῄνει Φιλητᾶς αὐτὸν ὡς εἰπόντα μῦθον ᾠδῆς γλυκύτερον. Meanwhile Lamon offered to tell them the myth of the syrinx, which a Sicilian goatherd had sung to him for the fee of a goat and a syrinx: “This syrinx here didn’t use to be an instrument. It was a beautiful maiden, endowed with a musical voice. She used to pasture goats, play along with the Nymphs, and sing as she does now. As she was pasturing, playing, and singing, Pan came up to her to convince her to do what he wanted and promised to make all her goats have twins. But she laughed at his passion and said she would never take a lover who was neither fully goat nor fully man. Pan rushed to chase her by force. Syrinx ran away from Pan and his force. When she was tired of running away, she hid in some reeds and disappeared into a marsh. Pan in his anger cut down the reeds, but when he could not find the girl, he understood what had happened and devised the instrument. Having bound together with wax the reeds of unequal length, representative of his unreciprocated passion for the girl, he blew upon them. And the one who used to be a beautiful girl is now a musical syrinx.” Lamon had barely finished the myth when Philetas praised him, saying that he had told a myth sweeter than a song. (Longus D&C.. )

A major difference between this version of the myth and those examined before lies in the greater agency and vocal presence it initially grants Syrinx. Not only is she a singer, there is also an actual verbal exchange between Syrinx and Pan before the god resorts to force. In trying to persuade (ἔπειθεν) the nymph, the god even bargains with her, promising fertility for her nanny goats in exchange for sex, a form of displaced hyperbolic fecundity. But just as the hyperfeminization of her animals will not do for Syrinx, neither will the hybridity of her lover. The nymph maintains sharp lines of demarcation between species. She has clear ideas about each animal’s proper function, and leaves little room for crossing those boundaries. Just as the version narrated by Achilles Tatius, Longus’ description of Syrinx’s metamorphosis leaves vague what exactly happens to the nymph’s body: the text does not explicitly say that she dies or turns into reeds. The rape and resulting death might be too traumatic for the text and are hidden – either as a testimony to Daphnis’ wish to spare Chloe from knowledge of the traumatic dimension of sex, or as a sign of the still

Locating the Origins of the Syrinx’s Voice

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childish perspective from which the story is told, where the characters have no more of an understanding of rape than they do of eros. Syrinx simply “hides and disappears in the marsh” (κρύπτεται, εἰς ἕλος ἀφανίζεται). After her disappearance, the spurned lover Pan becomes a tragic figure who “understands what has happened” (τὸ πάθος μαθών). This striking expression seems to function as an explanation for the creative act that follows. Pan is said to “think up the instrument” (τὸ ὄργανον νοεῖ), prompted by the sight of the reeds cut to different lengths that remind him of their unequal love. As in Achilles Tatius, again, the impulse behind the creation of the instrument is not auditory, but visual: the creative act of binding the reeds with wax is a symbolic replacement for the physical coupling that never happened with the girl while iconically enshrining the inequality of their passion (ὁ ἔρως ἄνισος). What an ironic reversal of fate for Syrinx: she who rejected Pan’s advances on account of his being an animal-god hybrid is reinvented as an instrument made of sticks of mixed length! The musical object represents their relationship, but nothing is said of its sound or mechanism: the last line implies that the body of the instrument is gendered as female, and owes its musicality to originating from a musician, as if the girl’s voice had been transferred from a human to a mechanical body without major alteration (“the one who used to be a beautiful girl is now a musical syrinx”). I will return to the manner in which the aesthetic reflection linked to the syrinx in the myth is continued in the description of various performances on the instrument in the conclusion of this chapter. But before doing so, more has to be said about the way the instrument is conceptualized and represented. The myth concludes with the audience praising Lamon’s mythologizing as “sweeter than a song” (ᾠδῆς γλυκύτερον). Is this a conspiracy of the assembled adult males to silence Syrinx, and a nod to the increasing distancing between the characters, and the future silence of Chloe? We are reminded here of Chloe’s joyous kisses following Daphnis’ horrifying tale of Echo’s dismemberment encountered in the past chapter, and her delight at listening to the trauma-rehearsing ringdove. Again there is an 

 

When Chloe presents the myth in the pantomime (D&C .) after fleeing, “she hides in the forest as if [hiding] in the marsh” (εἰς τὴν ὕλην ὡς εἰς ἕλος κρύπτεται). When Chloe comes back at the end of the performance to take a bow, this is a form of vanquishing Syrinx. On the representation of metamorphosis, see Létoublon . On the idea of the hybrid, Taylor : –. Montiglio . Echoes of this way of displaying the suffering and silencing of female characters, for the pleasure of a mostly male audience, can be found throughout the history of opera (on which Clément ).

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

odd disconnect between the theme of the story and its reception by the characters. How can the tale of attempted rape, human loss, and divine rampage be “sweet” – and even rival the sweetness of a song? One can provide a nuanced answer only by understanding the sociocultural importance of the object in the novel, and the way it blurs the categories of natural/cultural, object/subject, male/female. The syrinx, first, is a charged object in the narrative economy of Daphnis and Chloe. Although described as originating from the metamorphosis of a female, the instrument is also implicated in a male rite of passage (of Daphnis) and the masculine symbolism of the instrument is particularly explicit. After the myth has been told, an adult-size syrinx is brought to Philetas. As the old man performs, the presence of his instrument instantly makes him regain a form of youthful manhood: “he blew upon the pipes strongly and with youthful vigor” (ἐνέπνει τὸ ἐντεῦθεν πολὺ καὶ νεανικόν, D&C .). Daphnis then picks up the imposing instrument and performs so skillfully on it that Philetas gives it to him as a gift. The object becomes a symbol of male genealogy and filiation, as Philetas – who already has a biological son – prays that Daphnis too may have as good an artistic heir as he himself found in him. Daphnis’ dedication of his “little set of pipes” and adoption of the full-size instrument represents a parallel mode of transmission of male sexual, social, and musical power, in competition with female reproduction and biological generation (itself threatened by the unbounded fertility promised by Pan in the myth). The text hovers over the ambiguity of the instrument, caught between a system of female natural reproduction, male symbolic and artistic competition, and divine invention, and fitting neatly into none of these categories. Once again, only the concept of natureculture introduced in Chapter  can do justice to the entanglement of biology, culture, and mimesis here. While made of organic material and originating from a rural setting, the syrinx becomes a sociocultural object of fundamental symbolic importance, inscribed in a culturally accepted rite of passage for Daphnis, as male and as adult musician. In both Longus’ and Achilles Tatius’ novels, the instrument serves as a powerful totem not only of individual expression but also of social consensus, imported from the individual and pastoral domain and staged in a social performance. While the denouement of Leucippe and 

Dawe  explores in detail the question of the intersection of musical instrument and cultural issues, with references to Merriam , especially p. : “musical instruments are formed, structured, and carved out of personal and social experience as much as they are built up from a great variety of natural and synthetic materials.” On the way, conversely, that innovation in musical instruments creates and transforms the idea of music; see Dolan .

Pan’s Metamorphosis: Vibrant Matter and Materialism



Clitophon revolves around a public acknowledgment of the girl’s virginity through the voice of a syrinx, in Daphnis and Chloe the syrinx is ostentatiously left behind and dedicated to the gods as the protagonists relinquish the countryside to settle in the city as socially and sexually mature adults at the end of the book. The instrument, finally, is enmeshed in another web of commercial and symbolic exchanges. Before telling the myth to the audience assembled to celebrate Chloe’s rescue, Lamon reminds his listeners of the price of the story: he learned it from a goatherd for the price of a goat and a syrinx. The story is thus worth more than the material object it describes! Syrinx becomes an object with infinitely malleable meaning, both immaterial (verbal) and organic, both like words and like things, simultaneously invaluable and used as exchange commodity, at once unique and indefinitely reproducible. With these competing ideas about the origins of the sound and the sociocultural status of the instrument in mind, let us now return to Achilles Tatius’ version of the story, the richest in terms of the explanation it provides for the instrument’s ontological status.

Pan’s Metamorphosis: Vibrant Matter and Materialism In returning to the text that opened the chapter, I want to further explore three ideas introduced above: first, the grammar of action and its narrative unfolding; second, ideas about production, creation, and Pan’s relationship with matter; and finally, the relationship between instrument and player. All of these questions bear on the question of the “voice” of the instrument, its agency, and its ontological status. Grammar and Agency In the version of the myth with which we began, Pan and Syrinx are not the only agents involved. Other elements are granted grammatical agency in the text. The wood is the first to be conceived as doing something (τὴν δὲ ὕλη τις δέχεται δασεῖα φεύγουσαν, “a shady wood received her as she was fleeing”), and the verb used to describe the wood’s participation is in the middle voice (a voice that Greek uses to emphasize the idea of doing something for oneself ). The word arrangement even reproduces the welcoming embrace thematically provided by the forest: first comes the object 

It has a pedigree, and this sort of genealogy recalls the genealogy of objects found, for example, in Theocritean pastoral (the ivy-wood bowl in Theocritus’ Idyll , etc.).

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Reeds: On Musical Objects

(τὴν δὲ), then the subject, its verb, and an adjective modifying the substantive (ὕλη τις δέχεται δασεῖα), then a participle describing the object (φεύγουσαν). It is as if the wood has already made the girl disappear by setting a screen in front of the pursuer and separating the subject from its adjective. It is difficult here not to see “grammar [a]s politics by other means.” The earth too (Ge, the feminine Gaia of Archaic poetry) plays a particularly important role: her sprouting of reeds is described with a verb only used for sexual reproduction (τεκεῖν, “to give birth to”). Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “political sisterhood” becomes particularly significant here, as forces of nature respond in kind to male power and agency. Ge’s mode of production is not sexual reproduction: like the Gaia of the Hesiodic Theogony, Ge can produce new entities of her own volition, without a male consort. The conception resulting from sex often tied to rape is replaced in the text by two modes of production: the female organic generation of vegetal life to replace Syrinx (an act of compensatory production meant to protect another female’s virginity), and the male manufacturing of the object (the syrinx). Ge is thus a sort of rival to Pan in that both spontaneously produce new entities. Finally, the reeds (masculine in Greek) are also the grammatical subject as well as an agent implied in the making of the syrinx: they “steal” (κλέπτοντας) the maiden, in a form of vegetal abduction that successfully compensates for Pan’s divine failure. In this scenario, Syrinx is still acted upon, but she is entangled in a much larger network of forces: pursued by Pan, saved by the wood and the earth, she is ultimately replaced by the vegetal entity that is generated by the earth to facilitate her rescue. Syrinx’s story involves more actors than it initially appeared. There is of course more to the reference to the action of the forest, the earth, or the reeds than the grammatical gender of the words referring to their signified or grammatical function in the sentence. Their being 

 

 

On forests as “sites of identity crisis and metamorphosis . . . places of religious insight or of rite of passage,” see Clark : . Also Harrison  and Wall :  reflecting on the forest as paradoxical place: as retreat, “nunnery,” as place of escape from the pressures of the patriarchy, but also as full of danger, and a potential place for involuntary exile and rape. Haraway : . The same kind of representation of the earth’s agency is used about the earth in the Echo myth in Longus ..: καὶ τὰ μέλη Γῆ χαριζομένη Νύμφαις ἔκρυψε πάντα. καὶ ἐτήρησε τὴν μουσικὴν (“and the Earth for love of the nymphs hid all her limbs and preserves her music”). Braidotti : . Wallin, Merker, and Brown : – suggest conceptualizing instruments in the light of Darwinian theories of culture, where the syrinx is thought of as a male form of generation, belonging to the class of replicators, “objects capable of being reproduced and transmitted to future generations.”

Pan’s Metamorphosis: Vibrant Matter and Materialism

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subjects of sentences betrays more than the necessities of syntax: the whole countryside of the myth is represented as being animated by different forces, endowed with an agency of their own and in opposition to each other. Nonhuman forces have real effectivity and power. We might discount this animation of nature and things as a function of language and representation, or a form of anthropomorphizing the forest, the earth, or the reeds, or a remnant of an animist view of the natural world. But we can also start from a more radical ontological proposition suggested by Bruno Latour, that “what semiotics designates as a common trading zone – that is, morphism – is a property of the world itself and not only a feature of the language about the world.” If Syrinx appears to be surrounded by different forces (especially a network of female powers, allowing the silent and relentless continuation of generative power in the face of male violence and destruction), it is because she is part of a world of actants (to use Latour’s vocabulary), which our text presents as such, that is endowed with agency. Syrinx is no longer an “object” of the violence of Pan, and the syrinx is no longer an “object” owned by him: Syrinx/the syrinx is part of a network of forces supporting and opposing each other in an overabundance of life – vegetal, mineral, divine, half-divine/half-animal and defined by their mutual relationship. This new ontology deployed in the myth renders obsolete the dichotomies of active/passive and object/subject and is the best able to do justice to the status of the musical instrument, an object with an agency of its own. Metamorphosis here is not a narrative trick of mythological thinking, but a form of epistemic belief. Metamorphosis is a way of illustrating the endless potentiality of beings. Pan’s Invention A symptom of this new situation is the figure of Pan himself, specifically his transformed relationship with the environment and his creation. 





Latour : . Also ibid., pp. –: “In other words, existence and meaning are synonymous. As long as they act, agents have meaning. This is why such meaning may be continued, pursued, captured, translated, morphed into speech. Which does not mean that ‘every thing in the world is a matter of discourse’, but rather that any possibility for discourse is due to the presence of agents in search of their existence. Story-telling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active.” On the question of art, narrative, and nature, see also Morton . For Latour, an actant is “any entity that modifies another entity in a trial,” something whose “competence is deduced from [its] performance” rather than posited in advance of the action (Latour : ) See Tresch and Dolan  on instruments as actants; for a larger context, a “thing theory” in which instruments would figure too, see Brown .



Reeds: On Musical Objects

As opposed to many other metamorphoses (most typically in Ovid) where the narrator dwells on the moment of transformation and the continuity between species or states, the moment when Syrinx ceases to be a nymph and becomes something else is never pinned down. There is an ellipsis, as if the narrative has slipped behind a curtain of reeds, with no indication of passing time. Instead, the narrative focuses on Pan’s subsequent metamorphosis, and particularly on his ethical transformation (his remorse and crying – ἔκλαιε τὴν τομήν) as well as the change in his outlook on physical matter. As the narrative progresses, we are given more and more access to the perpetrator’s psyche, and observe his transformation from rapist to artist. But this transformation is different from the animation of the object (on the model of Pygmalion’s statue), and also from Pan’s change as a listener in the Ovid narrative discussed above. Here, it is not the sound of the wind in the reeds that makes the god a changed subject: it is his perception of matter. The clearest manifestation of this change can be read “later” (μετὰ ταῦτα), in Pan’s reaction to his own violence. The narrative subsequently switches from his focalized perspective (κλέπτοντας αὐτοῦ τὴν ἐρωμένην, “the reeds had stolen his beloved”) to a view mediated by the narrator: “he thought the girl had escaped in the reeds . . . he reckoned he had killed his beloved” (εἰς τοὺς καλάμους δοκῶν λελύσθαι τὴν κόρην . . . νομίζων τετμηκέναι τὴν ἐρωμένην). In simultaneously distancing Pan’s thoughts from the event and bringing them to the forefront, the text makes us perceive the evolution in Pan’s relationship to the vegetal world. A subtle game of semantic substitution retraces the emergence of Pan’s emotional consciousness and the crystallizing of his view on the world. At the beginning, Pan was attracted to the beauty of Syrinx. But in seeing the cut reeds (perhaps as lithe and fragile as the girl herself ), something happens to Pan: there is a progression in the text’s focalization, from action to result, from the act of cutting (τετμηκέναι – “to cut,” τὴν τομήν – “the cutting”), to its product, “the cut pieces” (τὰ τετμημένα, a perfect participle that describes the result of an action). The neuter plural indicating a collective then gives way to a noun in the plural, referring to isolated items, “the stumps” (τὰς τομὰς), and most explicitly in the sentence “he held the stumps [τὰς τομὰς] of reeds in his arms and kissed them as if they were the wounds of the maiden [ὡς τῆς κόρης τραύματα].” After going wild, the god attempts to undo the destruction he has caused by putting the cut pieces back together into one metaphorical body (συνθεὶς εἰς ἓν σῶμα – “recomposing them in one body”). But his putting the reeds together is not an acknowledgment of an autopsy: breathing a kiss into this new synthetic entity, the product of

Pan’s Metamorphosis: Vibrant Matter and Materialism



his sadness and imagination, Pan connects with life in a different form, and serendipitously gives the syrinx a voice. The metamorphosis that occurs is not that of the reeds into an instrument, but that of Pan as an aesthetic subject, arrested by materiality. In the loving gesture of putting together the reeds “as if they were the limbs of a body,” I see Pan’s ultimate transformation and final acknowledgment of what Jane Bennett has termed the “call of matter.” For Bennett, matter speaks, and issues to the viewer a call for heightened attention. Inanimate materials (stones, sticks, silver . . .) have the “curious ability . . . to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” When he sees the cut pieces of vegetal matter, Pan does not see them as inert, independent bits, or as the limbs of Syrinx herself, but, enchanted by the vibrancy of matter, he sees them as endowed with a power of their own. The cut reeds are neither metonyms nor metaphors for the physical body of the girl, but are rather similes: he picks them up “as if they were the limbs of a body” and embraces them “as if they were wounds” – not because he sees them as a body. I read in Pan’s attunedness to the “thing-power” of the reeds a mode of comparison focalized through the narrator’s – not the character’s – perspective: “this window onto an eccentric out-side was made possible by the fortuity of that particular assemblage, but also by a certain anticipatory readiness on [his] in-side, by a perceptual style open to the appearance of thing-power.” Both the fortuity of Pan’s breath finding its way into the reeds and the anticipatory readiness on the part of the god are illustrated in the scene. Pan, in a state of shock and bereavement, turns to matter in a distinctive way that is particularly receptive to the qualities of the material. This condition is different from the emotional attachment one might feel for objects (their history, their personal value, their social embeddedness, etc.). Like hoarders who surround themselves with stuff not only as a way to cope with their feelings (of loss, of dejection, of solitude), but because they are arrested by the materiality of things themselves, Pan is newly endowed with a “distinctive sensibility” enabling him to find in the reed fragments something that calls for his attention.  

 

Bennett : . Bennett :  takes seriously this “call” of things, “that is, as more than a figure of speech, more than a projection of voice onto some inanimate stuff, more than an instance of the pathetic fallacy” with the caveat (ibid., n. ) that the notions of “pathetic fallacy” and “prosopopeia” are not right for her project, “even if stretched creatively.” Bennett : . For enlightening remarks on the hoard, Bennett : : “This same distinctive sensibility might also account for why hoarders experience the bodies of their junk and their own biological body as fused, as forming a working whole.” Most powerful for my purposes, ibid., p. : “the hoarded



Reeds: On Musical Objects

Following Bennett’s insights, I submit that, rather than loss and disappearance, Pan perceives in the cut reeds the continuity between different forms that animal and nonhuman life, conceived as zoe, can take. I use the term zoe in Braidotti’s sense of a “transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains,” and in opposition to bios, “the portion of life – both organic and discursive – that has traditionally been reserved for anthropos.” For Braidotti, life as zoe is not a given but a process, “interactive and open-ended.” Bennett puts the idea particularly pointedly in her description of the Kafkaian Odradek, which could apply word for word to syrinx: Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert, Odradek is ontolog ically multiple. He/it is a vital materiality and exhibits what Gilles Deleuze has described as the persistent “hint of the animate in plants and of the vegetable in animals.”

Instead of being a form of necrophilia or a Pygmalian embrace breathing life into a stone, Pan’s kiss is an acknowledgment of the continuity of vital matter, of the constancy of the flux of life as zoe between animal and vegetal (and even natural mineral substances such as stone and metal). The breath of the god does not so much animate an inert object as unite an existing life, for by blowing upon the reeds as he kisses them he creates a melody. What will survive of this initial kiss and melody in all subsequent syrinx music is perhaps Pan’s voice: chastened by his experience with Syrinx, Pan lends his trauma-induced voice to the instrument, just as in the case of the ringdove (Chapter ). As the text of Achilles Tatius suggests, it is the sobered god who pronounces the verdict on female virginity in the cave in which the object is exhibited. The voice that comes out of the instrument is not one that comes from the dead, but one that translates the slow and immortal murmur of things, the humming life of matter in the inanimate reeds that is the sonorous backdrop of zoe. The instrument is the latest form taken by the zoe of matter, in a constant flow of vibrant materiality.

 

object is like one’s arm, not a tool but an organ, a vital member.” The syrinx also has in common with “the hoard” that it can outlive humans. Braidotti : . Bennett : , quoting Kafka’s The Care of a Family Man: “Odradek . . . at first glance . . . looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors . . . But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle” (Kafka : ).

Pan’s Metamorphosis: Vibrant Matter and Materialism



This self-animation of the object can also be read in the passage with which I started, describing the cave of the virgin, where the breeze is said to be “stored” (τεταμιευμένον) in the instrument. These two features – the embeddedness of Syrinx in a network of actants, and Pan’s relationship with the material world – invite us, once again and for good, to rethink the notion of opposition between subject and object, the relationship between Pan and the syrinx in the myth, and the notion of subjectivity in the instrument’s voice. Syrinx and the Archaeology of “Becoming-Machine” But there is a final layer in the metamorphosis that deserves our attention. Once Pan has created the syrinx, his special relationship with the material object continues, as does their common transformation. There is more intimacy in the relationship between the god and his instrument than one can acknowledge by calling the syrinx an “object” or even making it the subject of vibrant materiality: Pan and Syrinx now define each other, they complement each other’s identity. Their story is that of a human-machine interface. Syrinx’s metamorphosis works as a form of substitution: the instrument is now Pan’s, where the girl would not be his. But as musical instrument, the syrinx has no independence – and neither has the god. For Pan and his mouthpiece are mutually dependent. In their blended agency, Syrinx needs Pan to sound, and Pan’s voice is mediated by Syrinx’s. The boundaries of their autonomous selves vanish into those of the whole they compose. Their unique assemblage is a combination of personal history, ecological embeddedness, and embodied experience. Reflecting on the notion of “machinic vitality” that takes vibrant materiality one step further, Braidotti has described the “becomingmachine” as the next incarnation of the Derridean “becoming-animal.” For her, the “becoming-machine” (understood as a symptom of the modern predicament) goes beyond the machine as “an anthropocentric device that imitate[s] embodied human capacities.” I see the seeds of this “becoming-machine” as already present in our ancient text. In our story, Syrinx is not an Hoffmannian Olympia, a reflection of (and on) anxieties over the relationship between nature, life, and machinery. In Syrinx, there 



The expression “human-machine interface” is Jacques Attali’s (Attali ). On this idea, see also Dawe , who uses a similar expression (body-machine interface) at p. ; Gritten : –. The notion of object agency extends beyond that of instrument. For a thorough exploration of the agency of objects in Greek tragedy, see Mueller , to which this paragraph is indebted.



Reeds: On Musical Objects

is no such imitation of the human (singing) voice uncannily encased in a humanoid body. Rather, Syrinx, as a “merger of the human with the technological,” results in a new transversal compound, a new kind of eco sophical unity, not unlike the symbiotic relationship between the animal and its planetary habitat. This is not the holistic fusion that Hegel accused Spinoza of, but rather radical transversal relations that generate new modes of subjectivity, held in check by an ethology of forces. They sustain a vitalist ethics of mutual trans species interdependence. It is a generalized ecology, also known as eco sophy, which aims at crossing transversally the multiple layers of the subject, from interiority to exteriority and everything in between.

The origin myth surrounding the creation of the musical instrument acknowledges that there is no clear divide between life and death, animate and inanimate, interiority and exteriority, creator and created, organic and mechanical. The narrative of the metamorphosis of the girl and the divine act of invention are a sped-up and suddenly frozen moment in the history of the eternal transformation of vital matter. Syrinx is a compound, the product of a transformation, his and hers, and as such she represents a new moment of subjectivity, mixing the ephemeral life and breath of the performer with the eternal casing of reeds and wax. Like the cicadas I examined in Chapter , Syrinx is an ancient Greek symptom of the posthuman condition, defined by Braidotti as “such as to force a displacement of the lines of demarcation between structural differences, or ontological categories.” As posthuman instrument and machine, the syrinx is a way to think about “organs” as part of a nature-culture continuum in their deep structure. Because of her unique mode of being in the world, Syrinx belongs to different regimes of description. She is not only the “becoming-machine” of Deleuze and Guattari described by Braidotti, or a prosthetics and new stage of embodiment of matter; she is also a cyborg, 

 

On the voice of machines, Hankins and Silverman : – (on uox mechanica); Kittler  (on the gramophone); Dolar : – (on the voice machine). For historical contextualization of the understanding of machines, see Voskuhl  (on eighteenth-century machines as scientific instruments); Hirt  (on “musical spirit and automation” in nineteenth-century German literature); Bonnie Gordon is currently working on a monograph on this subject provisionally entitled Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds. On the voice itself as technology, see Feldman  (on the castrato).  Braidotti : . See also Braidotti . Braidotti : . See Yates : , who notes “the proliferation of altered regimes of description such as the actornetworks of Bruno Latour, the cyborg, companion or multi-species of Donna Haraway, the ontological choreography of Charis Thompson, among others, which all deploy an additive, horizontal or topo-logical mode of description which assumes that ontological boundaries (subject/object, human/animal, animate/inanimate).”

Conclusion



the hybrid creature composed of organism and machine described so provocatively by Donna Haraway: the machine that is not an “it to be animated, worshiped and dominated,” but “an aspect of our embodiment,” making us embrace the idea that our bodies do not end at the skin. With these multiple registers that define Syrinx’s status, the description of the syrinx can only be, like Hermes’ Ovidian narrative of its origins, an unfinished sentence.

Conclusion The various narratives retelling the invention of the instrument that I have examined above provide different accounts of the origins of the syrinx: from Ovid’s tale of the accident of its creation featuring Pan as prototype of the listener, to Achilles Tatius’ description of the vibrant materialism of the instrument, via Longus’ focus on the economy of the object, ancient authors account differently for the agency of the instrument and for the nature of human/machine collaboration. Yet the most elusive aspect of the myth has to do with the nature of the instrument’s voice, the understanding of instrumental (untexted) music, and its relationship with subjectivity, emotion, and representation. This is not the most developed aspect of the myth, and is in fact barely touched upon in the Achilles Tatius narrative, which is more concerned with the moment of invention than with performance. By way of digressive conclusion to this chapter, and as introduction to the questions that I will explore in the next, I want to briefly consider the hints we get in the other two versions of the myth as a coda to the issues of identity and embodiment explored in the syrinx narrative. In commenting on the Ovidian passage, I have gestured at different possible interpretations of the plaintive voice (similem querenti) of the reeds. As a proto-instrumental sound, it can be understood as expressing the emotions of an imagined character (Syrinx in her reedy form, bemoaning her vegetal reembodiment). But the plaintive voice of the syrinx can also be the projection of the listener’s internal mood: Pan’s projection of his feelings onto the sound of reeds murmuring a melody. The Longus  

Haraway : . It is obvious that I cannot do justice to the richness of the debate on instrumental music (what the Romantics called “pure music,” also known as “absolute music”) and especially of the aesthetic issues that arose around it starting in the mid-nineteenth century. The most recent treatment of the history of the idea of “absolute music” is Bonds , with bibliography. See also Dahlhaus ; and, for a stimulating and provocative take, Chua .



Reeds: On Musical Objects

version considers these ideas in more detail. In Daphnis and Chloe, the syrinx’s voice is multiple by virtue of its versatility and its many mimetic possibilities. Taken as a whole, the passage of the novel following the myth offers a sophisticated reflection on questions of representation, expression, and emotions through instrumental music. At the thanksgiving party celebrating Chloe’s rescue, the syrinx is passed from mouth to mouth. Philetas plays first, giving what is described as a virtuoso pastoral performance, with various tunes appropriate to different species (εὐνομίας μουσικῆς ἐσύριττεν οἷον βοῶν ἀγέλῃ πρέπον, οἷον αἰπολίῳ πρόσφορον, οἷον ποίμναις φίλον, D&C .: “he played beautifully ordered music, tunes appropriate for cattle, proper for herds of goats, and pleasant to flocks”) and with great nuances of timbre and pitch (μέγα τὸ βοῶν, ὀξὺ τὸ αἰγῶν, D&C .: “loud for the cattle, shrill for the goats”). He imitates with one syrinx all syrinxes (ὅλως πάσας σύριγγας μία σῦριγξ ἐμιμήσατο, D&C .) and the melodious sounds coming from the instrument are evocative of the tunes played by Pan, ruler of the countryside and patron of shepherds. Next, upon Dryas’ injunction, Philetas pipes a second tune, a “Dionysiac song” (συρίζειν Διονυσιακὸν μέλος), while Dryas dances a grape harvest dance for them (ἐπιλήνιον ὄρχησιν ὠρχήσατο). The melody this time accompanies a different kind of mimesis. The dance is accomplished so gracefully (εὐσχημόνως) and evocatively (ἐναργῶς) that the whole audience has the impression that they are witnessing actual harvest activities (including Dryas “really” drinking: καὶ ἀληθῶς Δρύαντα πίνοντα) – such is the lifelikeness of the dance, on the musical backdrop of instrumental music recalling the mood of the wine festival. Finally, in the last performance, the “voice” of the syrinx and its music take on new shades: in a pantomime performance, Daphnis and Chloe dance the myth told by Lamon and represent (ἐμιμεῖτο) Pan and Syrinx respectively, with Daphnis accompanying himself on the god’s instrument. The text describes instrumental melodies in similes: Daphnis plays a distressed syrinx melody as if he were (the god) in love; an erotic one, as if he were trying to convince Syrinx; and a tune of a cattle call, as if he were looking for her (ἐσύρισε γοερὸν ὡς ἐρῶν, ἐρωτικὸν ὡς πείθων, ἀνακλητικὸν ὡς ἐπιζητῶν, D&C .). The instrument this time both imitates (expresses?) an imagined protagonist’s feelings – the god’s – and also mediates the player’s – Daphnis’ – interiority. Through Daphnis’ mouth, the instrument’s sounds express Pan’s feelings and become Pan’s voice as well as Daphnis’ way of courting Chloe (again, something that the 

On the episode and issues of mimesis in nonverbal music, see pp. –.

Conclusion



Achilles Tatius passage reflects on when describing the syrinx in the cave of the virgin as always “played by the god himself”). In Daphnis’ performance, he (Pan) speaks to her (Syrinx) through the instrument, but by the mediation of the syrinx, Daphnis also gives a musical form to his feelings for Chloe, in a disturbing repetition of the trope. In this narrative space, Daphnis and Chloe produce for the assembled audience the closest performance of what will later become their socially expected gender and relationship. This enacted ritual stirs the emotions of the audience, moving Philetas to gift Daphnis his own syrinx. In this charged moment, the novel conflates the emotions of an imagined character (Pan), the representation of a narrative (Pan calling onto Syrinx, etc.), as well as the emotions of the performer (Daphnis), and those of the audience (Philetas), through the medium of untexted instrumental music. These notions (emotions, expression, representation) take us on a journey northward, from the woods of Lesbos to those of Thrace, and to another narrative of passion and rape in the myth of Procne, Tereus, and Philomela.

 

Nightingale: On Expression

Πανδίων δὲ γήμας Ζευξίππην τῆς μητρὸς τὴν ἀδελφὴν θυγατέρας μὲν ἐτέκνωσε Πρόκνην καὶ Φιλομήλαν, παῖδας δὲ διδύμους Ἐρεχθέα καὶ Βούτην. πολέμου δὲ ἐξαναστάντος πρὸς Λάβδακον περὶ γῆς ὅρων ἐπεκαλέσατο βοηθὸν ἐκ Θρᾴκης Τηρέα τὸν Ἄρεος, καὶ τὸν πόλεμον σὺν αὐτῷ κατορθώσας ἔδωκε Τηρεῖ πρὸς γάμον τὴν ἑαυτοῦ θυγατέρα Πρόκνην. ὁ δὲ ἐκ ταύτης γεννήσας παῖδα Ἴτυν, καὶ Φιλομήλας ἐρασθεὶς ἔφθειρε καὶ ταύτην, εἰπὼν τεθνάναι Πρόκνην, κρύπτων ἐπὶ τῶν χωρίων. αὖθις δὲ γήμας Φιλομήλαν συνηυνάζετο, καὶ τὴν γλῶσσαν ἐξέτεμεν αὐτῆς. ἡ δὲ ὑφήνασα ἐν πέπλῳ γράμματα διὰ τούτων ἐμήνυσε Πρόκνῃ τὰς ἰδίας συμφοράς. ἡ δὲ ἀναζητήσασα τὴν ἀδελφὴν κτείνει τὸν παῖδα Ἴτυν, καὶ καθεψήσασα Τηρεῖ δεῖπνον ἀγνοοῦντι παρατίθησι· καὶ μετὰ τῆς ἀδελφῆς διὰ τάχους ἔφυγε. Τηρεὺς δὲ αἰσθόμενος, ἁρπάσας πέλεκυν ἐδίωκεν. αἱ δὲ ἐν Δαυλίᾳ τῆς Φωκίδος γινόμεναι περικατάληπτοι θεοῖς εὔχονται ἀπορνεωθῆναι, καὶ Πρόκνη μὲν γίνεται ἀηδών, Φιλομήλα δὲ χελιδών· ἀπορνεοῦται δὲ καὶ Τηρεύς, καὶ γίνεται ἔποψ. Pandion married his mother’s sister Zeuxippe and fathered two daughters, Procne and Philomela, as well as twin boys, Erechtheus and Boutes. A war over land boundaries broke out against Labdacus, and Pandion called for his ally from Thrace, Tereus son of Ares. He won the war thanks to Tereus and gave him his own daughter Procne in marriage. From her, Tereus had a son, Itys. But he fell in love with Philomela and raped her; he told Procne that her sister was dead, although he kept her hidden in the countryside. But although he was married he forced Philomela to sleep with him, and he cut out her tongue. But she wove onto a shroud designs that alerted Procne to the misfortune that had befallen her sister. Having found Philomela, she killed her own son Itys, cooked him and served him for dinner to the unwitting Tereus. She then fled with her sister in a hurry. Once Tereus realized what had been done, he seized an ax and started to pursue them. As they were overtaken on the Daulian plain in Phocis, they prayed the gods to be turned into birds: Procne became a nightingale, Philomela a swallow. And Tereus turned into a bird and became the hoopoe. (Apollod. Bibl. . ) 

Nightingale: On Expression



We’ve moved from the sun of Lesbos to a dark forest in Thrace. Imagine a wood, a wood densely packed with trees densely packed with leaves. A flash among the branches – it’s a nightingale. Nobody can see it but its intricate song echoes for hours. This is a very good image for the myth of the nightingale itself. Like the bird it describes, it is tantalizing, intractable, never quite willing to be pinned down – yet its echoes resonate far and wide. “Most musical, most melancholy bird” in Milton’s words, the nightingale occupies a special place in the ancient imagination. Its name in Greek, ἀηδών (aedon) shares the same root as the noun “song,” ἀοιδή (aoide) and there is unanimous agreement in Greek and Latin texts about the nightingale’s musical qualities. Of all the creatures in our natural orchestra, it has the richest mythology. Allusions to the bird and its song are so numerous in literature and art, from Antiquity to modernity, that they would be impossible to list, and at least six preserved ancient texts recount its origin myth, in three different versions. The version quoted above, preserved by Apollodorus, is the Attic one, that adopted in most narratives. It was already known to Hesiod and we find allusions to it in one of Sappho’s fragments, which refers to “Chelidon daughter of Pandion.” It is also the tale that Attic tragedy relies on, most spectacularly Sophocles in his Tereus, and is exploited by Ovid and Achilles Tatius in narratives that this chapter will explore in detail. The second, Theban version is alluded to in the Odyssey and was also known by the fifth-century BCE mythographer Pherecydes. In that version, the queen Aedon, daughter of Pandareus, kills her own son Itylus by mistake, thinking she is killing her sister Niobe’s oldest son. Aedon is ultimately transformed into a nightingale who mourns her young. The third version is idiosyncratic and told only by the Imperial Greek author Antoninus Liberalis (Met. ). Its complexity makes it difficult to provide a summary, but the tale unfolds along the following lines: Pandareus from Ephesus gives his daughter Aedon (a weaver) in marriage to Polytechnus from Colophon (a carpenter). The couple are happily married but taunt Zeus and Hera by asserting that their conjugal bliss is greater than that of the  

 

Milton, Il Penseroso. The lines are picked up in Coleridge’s A Conversation Poem. For surveys of the image of the nightingale in music, song, and poetry, from Antiquity to the present, and in poetry, theater, novels, and opera: Mansfield ; Chandler ; Shippey ; Pfeffer ; Harley ; Williams  (with useful appendices compiling translations of ancient texts devoted to the nightingale); Létoublon ; Gély, Haquette, and Tomiche ; Biraud and Delbey ; Leach ; Clouzot and Beck ; Mathieu-Castellani . On the different versions of the nightingale myth, see Biraud and Delbey  and Dubel . Hes. Op. –; Sappho fr.  Voigt. Od. .–; scholia to the Odyssey (V, V, B) .; Pherec. FGrH  F .

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Nightingale: On Expression

Olympians. Hera sends Strife among them, who makes them compete in a crafts competition. Polytechnus loses to his wife, and to avenge himself, rapes Aedon’s sister Chelidon and (after shaving her head and dressing her in slave clothes) gives her as a servant to Aedon. Aedon overhears her sister’s lament and recognizes her. The two avenge themselves by killing Polytechnus’ son Itys and serving him to his father to eat. After a few more narrative turns (with punishment and changes of heart), all characters (including, surprisingly, all of Aedon’s family) are transformed into a variety of birds – land birds for Aedon, turned into a nightingale; Chelidon, a swallow; Polytechnus, a woodpecker, and Aedon’s brother, a hoopoe; and seabirds for Aedon’s father Pandareus, turned into an eagle, and her mother, turned into a kingfisher. Whatever the version followed, there is something unique in the myth of metamorphosis accounting for the nightingale’s origins. Even though the narrative that Apollodorus provides gives us less purchase on aesthetic questions than do Longus’ text on the myth of Phatta or any passage from Ovid, it highlights two fundamental features that we need to start from. On the one hand, as opposed to all the other transformed creatures examined in this book, the two women who are turned into birds (Procne into a nightingale and Philomela into a swallow) were not musicians before their metamorphosis. This marks the myth as saying something distinctive about the origins of song, something other than that there exists continuity between human and nonhuman animal species in musicking. The myth looks for the sources of music at the core of lived experience, and locates the origins of music in something nonmusical: song arises from the raw experience of life and human emotions. Musicality is not seen as a taught or inherited skill but as resulting from an emotional condition, its roots digging deep into the experience of life. On the other hand, despite the countless allusions to the beauty of the bird’s song throughout Greek and Roman literature, neither Apollodorus nor any preserved narrative of the metamorphosis itself gives any explicit  

On Antoninus Liberalis’ method and agenda, see Delattre . For a fairly uncontroversial definition of emotions, see Robinson : : “an emotion is a response by a person . . . to some particular situation or event in the environment, which is registered as significant to that person’s wants, goals, and interests.” One question that I cannot examine in detail in this chapter is that of the historical construction of emotions. The bibliography on the topic is immense, even “too vast to survey” (according to Cairns and Nelis : ). Ultimately, it has little bearing on my argument, which is not about individual emotions per se, nor about their historical construction, but on the relationship between music and emotions, and on the understanding of the phenomenon of emotional expression in general. Studies that have influenced my thinking include Kaster ; Konstan ; Cairns and Nelis .

Nightingale: On Expression

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description of the bird’s song once Procne has turned nightingale. As opposed to tragedy, which appropriates the figure of the nightingale for a figure of lament, these metamorphic narratives say nothing about the bird’s voice and do not explain its cry (Itu-Itu) as being the mournful repetition of the mother calling for her son (Itys, or Itylus). They are less concerned about the song per se than about how it came about: what matters is the process by which the nightingale came to sing and what it says about the relationships between music, the emotions, and the nonhuman world. Starting from these two observations, this chapter will examine how the myth of the nightingale’s origins triangulates the notions of emotions, interiority, and the nonhuman. The narrative of metamorphosis allows a focus on three dimensions of any affective experience: () on the reification of an emotional change (a strong internal emotion is represented as a radical physical change into a nonhuman animal); () on the musical expression of internal states (emotions are given outward expression through music, in a form of somatic metamorphosis); () on the nonhuman nature of becoming musical (musical expression is concomitant with becoming nonhuman). This chapter looks in detail at the ways in which two narratives exploit this rich network of ideas and lay different types of emphasis on these questions. In their complexity, they provide an archaeology of the basic aesthetic quandary that has divided philosophers of music since the eighteenth century: is music a form of representation of emotions and internal states, or is musical expression an act of personal creation and a mode of becoming? Without putting the debate exactly in those terms, the myth, through its different narrative emphases, provides different paths to think about musical expression. To illuminate the history of the myth that Imperial texts reckon with, I first examine allusions to it in Archaic and Classical poetry (in the Odyssey first, then in Attic tragedy), where the figure of the nightingale appears most often. I then look at how Achilles Tatius provides a precise vocabulary for what makes music like and unlike the other arts in terms of its potential for representation; finally, I examine how the Ovidian narrative puts the emphasis on the relationships between emotions, the nonhuman, and subjectivity. These narratives of the myth make us confront the hardest 

On the song of the nightingale understood as the mourning cry of the infanticide mother in tragedy: Soph. El. – and –; Soph. Aj. –; Eur. Hel. –; Eur. Rhes. –; and explicitly parsed as “Ity, Ity” in Aesch. Ag. ; Soph. El. ; Eur. Phaeton (TrGF V., fr. : –).

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Nightingale: On Expression

question that this book tackles: why does music have so much power over us, and how do we account for the difficulty of explaining this power?

Homeric Nightingale, Tragic Song, and Setting the Problem Sense and Simile The oldest reference to the myth of the nightingale comes from the Odyssey. It is not a description of the metamorphosis itself but it provides important elements of background to understand the problem raised by the nightingale’s song and the particular strategies later narratives will employ to reflect on expression and affect. In a puzzling simile, Penelope compares her anguished thoughts to the song of Aedon/the nightingale: ὡς δ’ ὅτε Πανδαρέου κούρη, χλωρηῒς ἀηδών, καλὸν ἀείδῃσιν ἔαρος νέον ἱσταμένοιο, δενδρέων ἐν πετάλοισι καθεζομένη πυκινοῖσιν, ἥ τε θαμὰ τρωπῶσα χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, παῖδ’ ὀλοφυρομένη Ἴτυλον φίλον, ὅν ποτε χαλκῷ κτεῖνε δι’ ἀφραδίας, κοῦρον Ζήθοιο ἄνακτος, ὣς καὶ ἐμοὶ δίχα θυμὸς ὀρώρεται ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα, ἠὲ μένω παρὰ παιδὶ καὶ ἔμπεδα πάντα φυλάσσω, κτῆσιν ἐμήν, δμῳάς τε καὶ ὑψερεφὲς μέγα δῶμα, εὐνήν τ’ αἰδομένη πόσιος δήμοιό τε φῆμιν, ἦ ἤδη ἅμ’ ἕπωμαι Ἀχαιῶν ὅς τις ἄριστος μνᾶται ἐνὶ μεγάροισι, πορὼν ἀπερείσια ἕδνα, παῖς δ’ ἐμὸς ἧος ἔην ἔτι νήπιος ἠδὲ χαλίφρων, γήμασθ᾽ οὔ μ᾽ εἴα πόσιος κατὰ δῶμα λιποῦσαν· As when the daughter of Pandareus, the greenwood nightingale, sings beautifully at the beginning of spring, perched among the thickly packed leaves, she who makes many turns and pours her echoing voice, wailing for her dear son Itylus, whom she once killed with the bronze in her folly the son of Zethus. In the same way, my heart too is stirred here and there, whether I should stay with my son and guard everything steadfastly, my possessions, my servants and my roofed palace, and respect my husband’s marriage and the good reputation of my people, or whether now I should go together with the best of the Achaeans courting me in my halls and offering endless wedding gifts (but my son while he was still young and thoughtless did not let me marry and abandon the palace of my husband). (Od. . )

The image mobilizes several of the features that will become traditionally associated with the bird: its location in thickly wooded places and its association with spring, the beauty and virtuosity of its song, and the

Homeric Nightingale, Tragic Song, and Setting the Problem

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expressive quality of its music. There is, at first sight, something very odd in Penelope’s image and critics have pondered the disturbing nature of the analogy drawn by the Ithacan queen. Her situation as faithful wife and loving mother barely recalls that of the murderous queen Aedon to whom she makes reference, and the “resonance” and deep-level structure of the image are troubling: why would Penelope even mention the mythical parallel with a mother killing a dear son? But there is much more at stake in the image, and we can already find in the Homeric use of the myth the adumbration of several possible aesthetic theories accounting for the relationship between song and the emotions. First, there is the idea that the song of the nightingale is, or at least sounds like, a form of mourning: most explicitly, the bird is described as “lamenting” or “wailing” (ὀλοφυρομένη, ) and “pouring out a sorrowful voice” (χέει πολυηχέα φωνήν, ). An interesting variant of πολυηχέα is πολυδευκέα, which Aelian glosses as “representing with variegation” (τὴν ποικίλως μεμιμημένην); although suggestive, the text is elliptical as to whose sorrowful emotions are being expressed (those of the queen, or those of the bird she has turned into), but the song is described as expressive of sadness and distress. Embedded in the description of the music, there is also an aesthetic evaluation: the song is καλόν (“beautiful, fine,” ). Very much like her husband in book  of the epic, Penelope experiences and describes a form of split response to the song of the bird: on the one hand, it is judged for its formal beauty; on the other, it is praised for its content and expressive qualities (the story it tells and its mournful associations). Odysseus had expressed a similarly split response to the song of Demodocus earlier in the epic, when he cried about the content of the bard’s song (the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles that brought on the beginning of the evils between Trojans and Danaans) but acknowledged its beauty (it is κατὰ κόσμον, Od. . and κατὰ μοῖραν, Od. .). Both husband and wife make a distinction between the content and the form of the song: while the former is unpleasant and likely to bring tears, the former is an object of admiration. There is of course an important difference between bird and bard song: the bard’s song creates  





On the associations of the nightingale in Greek poetry and culture: Mynott : –. Anhalt : . On the passage: Austin : –; Russo ; Loraux ; Katz : ; Papadopoulou-Belmehdi : –; Nagy : –; Dimakopoulou ; Levaniouk : –; Chazalon  for visual representation; Dingremont . Ael. NA .. The question whether the song is or sounds like a lament is a crucial one that I will keep returning to in this chapter. Peponi : –.

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Nightingale: On Expression

its effects in part via a verbal representation (a form of mimesis), while the bird’s is wordless. If birdsong is mimetic, it is via a medium that excludes words. Yet the simile also performs more subtle work, and critics have paid much less attention to this feature. The two things compared are not Penelope’s and Aedon’s situations; the point of contact between the comparanda is actually the notion of “being stirred back and forth” (ὀρώρεται ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα, ). Penelope’s restless thoughts take as many turns and twists as the ever-changing (θαμὰ τρωπῶσα, ) melody of the bird. The simile sets in parallel an emotion (Penelope’s distress and uncertainty) and the dynamic motion of the music – the quickly changing melody. Seen another way, the rise and fall of the melody of the nightingale taking musical turns is compared to the queen’s quickly changing state of mind. It is the formal contours of the birdsong and Penelope’s emotional disposition that are set in parallel – the backstory of the lamenting bird and the disturbing resonances of the comparison between the mourning queens is only an added layer of connotation, but it is not where the simile is grounded. What matter are the contours of the music unfolding through time and the picture of an emotional stance it is associated with. Simile and Theories These two possible interpretations allowed by Penelope’s image actually rely on competing ways of thinking about the relationship between music and the emotions. While they are not explicitly articulated in the Homeric text, they are at the heart of the description, and mark the beginning of a long tradition of theorizing about the affective power of music. That there is a deep connection between music and the emotions is difficult to deny, but it is very difficult, and more difficult than for any other art, to explain what the exact nature of that connection is, what the psychological underpinnings of the process of creating emotions are, and what the best philosophical ways of accounting for them might be. Some fundamental questions, already at the root of the interpretation of the Homeric image, reside at the heart of most inquiries, ancient and modern: are the emotions in the music, in the listener, or in the performer – whose emotion are we talking about exactly? And what do we mean exactly when we say that 

This virtuosic variegation and ever-changeful quality is what is regularly expressed by the reference to the song’s poikilia, and by words (such as the verb ἐλελίζω [“to whirl”] and the adjective ξουθός [“trilling”]) that recur throughout the corpus in connection to the bird’s song.

Homeric Nightingale, Tragic Song, and Setting the Problem

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emotions are in someone? Does music arouse any type of emotion? Is there such a thing as a specific musical emotion? The variety of poetic representations of the emotional effects of music in ancient literature is staggering. We find descriptions of how music can make the listener cry (the way Demodocus’ song affects Odysseus in Odyssey ) or how music can push them to melancholy (the way Phemius’ song affects Penelope in Odyssey ); of how music makes listeners forget their ills and brings respite from worries (as the Muses remind us in the Theogony) and how music introduces or manifests chaos and wildness (as exemplified, for example, in Euripides’ Bacchae); of how music disturbs, when it comes too close to natural sounds (as is the case with Typhoeus’ voice, for example, in Hesiod’s Theogony) or enchants (as with the invocation of the nightingale in Aristophanes’ Birds). No less wide is the range of ancient philosophers’ views on musical affect. For philosophers from the fifth-century BCE music theorist Damon of Athens onwards, music affected the soul, in good and bad ways. It relaxes listeners (as Aristotle shows, quoting Musaeus) and, when used appropriately, it can provide training (by imposing order to the soul and counteracting its inner movements, as Plato argues). But when consumed in inappropriate ways, the music can also derail the proper functioning of both soul and city and corrupt citizens. Despite this great variety of views, one fundamental concept resides at the heart of most ancient explanations of musical affect: mimesis– with all the ambiguity inherent to the term, which can mean imitation, representation, and expression. Starting with Damon, mimesis played a crucial role in explaining the influence that music had on character (ethos), and the relationship that music (especially tunings, scales, and melodic patterns) entertained with the emotions. Similarly, mimesis was at the heart of Plato’s and Aristotle’s multifarious accounts of the disquieting power of music and its relationship with character and the emotions, at the level of the soul and at that of the city. In both Plato’s and Aristotle’s politicopsychological enterprises, in the Republic and the Laws and in the Politics respectively, the power of music is described as grounded in the mechanics of human nature, and in particular on the joint workings of sensual  





On the latter question, Kramarz . In the order cited: Od. .–; Od. .–; Hes. Theog. ; Eur. Bacch. –; Hes. Theog. –; Ar. Av. –. For example, Pl. Leg. d–a; Arist. Pol. b–b. On the latter point, corruption of the soul and the city, see Pl. Leg. a–b. Halliwell  is fundamental on these issues.

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Nightingale: On Expression

perception and psychological states. As Halliwell puts it: “the music ‘moves’ emotionally, and we ‘move’ with it.” Mimesis continued to be a fundamental term used through Antiquity, down to Saint Augustine, to conceptualize the power that music has on the workings of the soul. But the long explanations provided by both Plato and Aristotle do not provide a specific vocabulary to distinguish the effects that music has on the emotions from the way music is perceived as expressing or as representing somebody’s emotions: all these ideas are covered by the single notion of mimesis. Although modern scholarship is no less divided than ancient philosophers were on the question of the exact relationship between music and emotions, analytic philosophy provides a helpful vocabulary to think through this conceptual knot, by establishing a distinction between the expressive character of music, and music being an expression of something. Among the myriad views that have been exposed, there are three main theories that capitalize on that distinction. Their roots can be traced back to ancient conceptualizations of the effects of music and its connection with the emotions, but they are articulated with a vocabulary that establishes a distinction between three aspects of mimesis: imitation, representation, and expression. The first of these theories is what has been called “arousal theory.” Put simply, music arouses emotions. Happy music makes us happy, sad music, sad, anxious music, anxious, etc. This theory has the advantage of not positing anything theoretically suspicious and of accounting for complex emotions and not just the limited “garden-variety set” (joy, sadness, etc.). It has taken many forms, but has also found many opponents, the most vocal ones “usually regard[ing it] as crude and naïve” (Matravers : ). The most explicit formulation of the limitation of the arousal theory is that any arousal theory is also an expression theory (something that I discuss in the next few pages): it is not so much that the music is sad or hopeful per se, but rather that the listener feels moved and projects onto the song the emotions (sadness or hope) it arouses in her.   





 Ibid., p. . For a survey of ancient theories of music and the emotions, Kramarz . Kivy  offers a clear explanation of the difference. The bibliography on these questions is immense but helpfully summarized in Levinson : –. See Budd , who argues for the arousal “in an aesthetically relevant manner” of a variety of emotions. On musical arousal, see also Speck ; MacKinnon . Budd  is still fundamental. Matravers  provides an overview of the limitations associated with arousal theory.

Homeric Nightingale, Tragic Song, and Setting the Problem

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A second theory is known as “resemblance theory,” or, in Steven Davies’ more specific terminology, “appearance emotionalism.” Resemblance theory holds that we hear music as expressive of a certain emotion because its melodic or rhythmic contours resemble the body composure or the facial expression of somebody who is affected by such and such an emotion: for instance, fast tempo, rising melodic contours, and perky rhythms in the music resemble the upbeat and ebullient expression of a happy person, while slow tempo, descending lines, and ponderous rhythms resemble the downcast features and sunken attitude of a depressed person. Musical movement is “like human behavior in that it seems purposeful and goal-directed.” And, like human activities, the course of music “makes sense” and is experienced as such. Some favorite examples adduced by critics are the parallel between the contours of Barber’s Adagio for Strings or Monteverdi’s lament for Ariadne and the slow, dragging attitude of a sad person. This theory, more generally, is a form of “theory of representation” and has been championed by critics who focus on the formal features of music and see them as achieving a specific purpose. Steven Davies in particular describes how “the resemblance that counts most for musical expressiveness . . . is that between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behavior associated with the expression of emotion” (). The last theory, which is not entirely independent from the two I have outlined, is best known as “expression theory.” It explains musical expressiveness by the projection of a persona onto the music. The listener animates the music and imagines that the emotions are those expressed by a persona (not necessarily the composer’s or the performer’s) through the music. If music sounds plaintive or happy or full of tension, it is because one imagines a backstory for the persona inhabiting the music and expressing herself (and her mourning, her joy, or her anxiety) through music. The expressiveness of the music comes from the drama that the persona undergoes and the externalization of this persona’s emotions through musical means. This theory was formulated most economically 





Expressed in various forms in Davies’ writing, but most helpfully for my purposes in Davies  and Davies . There are variants on the theory, for example Kivy : – sees the resemblance in the contours of our voice when we express such and such an emotion. See also Davies : – (for an account quite similar to Kivy’s) and Budd : –, who sees cross-categorical similarities between music and emotions. Trivedi  argues for a resemblance-plus-imagination explanation. This is the view exposed most explicitly and systematically by Levinson . See also Robinson and Hatten .

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Nightingale: On Expression

by Jerry Levinson, who defines musical expressiveness in terms of “the expression of emotion in a persona in the music.” The idea of a persona (although not any persona, the persona of the composer) in the music goes back to Edward T. Cone’s idea, as he puts it in The Composer’s Voice, that “all music, like all literature, is dramatic.” For him, music communicates the musical persona’s inner life by means of symbolic gestures. This expression theory has the merit of treating musical expressiveness as a genuine expression of emotions, even if the persona whose emotions are heard “in” the music is fictitious. As Jenefer Robinson and Robert Hatten have made clear, it is possible that the emotions expressed by music can at least sometimes arouse similar emotions in the listener. For Robinson and Hatten, hearing a passage as expressive of a given emotion (sadness, excitement, anxiety, etc.) arouses, by a form of contagion, the corresponding feelings in the listener. But musical experience also tells us that the musical expression of some emotion (joy, languidness, or anger) can arouse in the listener a completely different emotion (disappointment, cheekiness, or excitement). While there is definitely a relationship between the expression and the arousal of emotions, there can be a discrepancy in the nature of the emotions expressed by the music and felt by the listener. If we return to the Odyssey simile, we can observe two of these theories formally described by modern philosophers underlying Penelope’s image and its possible interpretation. On the one hand, resemblance theory is what lies at the heart of the comparison between Penelope’s internal state of mind and the music of the nightingale. Penelope’s quickly changing emotions are compared to the contours of the bird’s quickly changing melodies. The ascending and descending phrases of the nightingale’s haunting song are meant to suggest the queen’s mental to-ing and froing. There is no clearer statement about the parallel between an emotional state of mind and music’s movements: the music represents emotions by means of its formal contours. On the other hand, what underlies the myth as a whole is clearly something like expression theory: the metamorphosis story is a justification of the expressive qualities of the nightingale’s plaintive song. The backstory makes sense of specific details of the music (the backand-forth in the music can be interpreted as the traumatic rehearsal of feelings, etc.) but, all in all, one is justified in hearing expressiveness in the bird sounds by imagining a scenario where the song of the woman-turned 

This description is indebted to Robinson and Hatten :  (quoting Cone : ). Robinson and Hatten : . Contra, Kivy : ch. .

Homeric Nightingale, Tragic Song, and Setting the Problem

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bird is indeed working through the complex emotions of an infanticide mother, betrayed wife, and vengeful sister. Expression theory does not say anything about the perception of the birdsong as the song of a bird, or what it might mean for the bird to sing it, but it does justice to the fact that the song is perceived as music expressive of a certain emotion, and that one interprets it with the tools of music appreciation – not ornithology or a different standard for appreciating sounds not produced by humans. It also makes sense of the birdsong for what it is: a piece of nonverbal music, aligned with the experience of instrumental (wordless) music, rather than a piece of sung lyric, expressing emotions through the words it uses to represent them. All in all, projecting onto the bird’s song the story of the mourning mother does a lot to help appreciate its formal features. Metamorphosis actually is the narrative key to expression theory. It provides the scenario that explains the expressive features heard in music. By enacting two aesthetic theories, Penelope’s image thus opens a window onto the rich world of the myth and the aesthetic questions it brings up. It is of course in dialogue with other passages about the power of music in the Homeric epics – Penelope’s response to Phemius’ song and Odysseus’ response to Demodocus’ song that I cited above, as well as the Sirens episode in the Odyssey – but it provides a unique vantage point to think about musical expression. The Homeric simile, as brief as it is, can be read as a meditation on the relationship between the internal world of Penelope’s emotions and its outward representation in the bird’s song. Tragic Bird Most of what has been written about the song of the nightingale has actually concerned its use in Attic tragedy. Referred to in over two dozen instances, the nightingale’s song and the tragic story that brought it about resonate particularly powerfully with tragedy’s preoccupations: the 

It has even more resonance when read in the light of another image about animal sounds, that of the “swallow sound” that Odysseus’ bow, compared to a lyre, makes once strung (Od. .–). Odysseus’ handling and stringing of his bow is compared to the gestures of an experienced phorminx player handling his instrument (on the image, Austin ; Borthwick ). The point of comparison is the gesture, but the added resonances of the simile is that the bow is like an instrument and makes the sound of an animal. The choice of animal has been read, in the narrative economy of the Odyssey, as important for its connotations of return, for the swallow is attached to the hearth and to the family. The role of the bird’s sound has been rather underplayed, but it is possible to read it as evocative of the vibrating and pulsating sounds of the string. Pavlos Avlamis suggested to me, per litteras electronicas, that different types of theories on musical emotions could be read into this simile as well, but in relation to the audience’s emotions rather than the characters’.

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Nightingale: On Expression

downfall of powerful families, infanticide and cannibalism, female suffering, lament, and an obsession with vocal expression. The tragic uses of the birdsong are varied and have been discussed with much sophistication by Nicole Loraux and Françoise Létoublon. There is no point in restating their subtle analyses, but it is worth noting, first, that both tacitly assume that the song illustrates one of the theories highlighted above: that the song is a form of expression. In their analyses, the persona of the mourning mother is projected onto the figure of the bird and the nightingale’s song interpreted as a dirge. Metamorphosis in this context works as the rationale for expression theory: it is because the bird results from the transformation of an infanticide (and remorseful) mother that one can hear the song as an expression of emotions and conceptualize the song as the expression of a persona (that of the woman the bird used to be). Expression theory, as a matter of fact, is always a metaphorical metamorphosis: it involves simultaneously hearing one thing and imagining something else. This is explicitly stated in one of the first tragic representations of the bird, Aeschylus’ Suppliants –: 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. (trans. Gurd )

The same idea is exploited in Sophocles’ Electra (–), where the eponymous character explains that “what matches [her] mood is the distraught bird that laments, repeating ‘Itys, Itys’” (ἀλλ’, ἐμέ γ’ ἁ στονόεσσ’ ἄραρεν φρένας, | ἃ Ἴτυν, αἰὲν Ἴτυν ὀλοφύρεται, ὄρνις ἀτυζομένα, –). The character assumes that the song means something, and that it expresses and represents quite precisely the emotional state of the mythical figure; avian sounds are reconfigured as human words but the main move consists in projecting onto the song of the nightingale the mourning lament of the mother. Expression theory can of course, as in the passage just quoted, mesh with a form of arousal theory to illustrate the idea that the “sad” song of 



We know of at least two tragedies relying on the myth as their main topic, Sophocles’ Tereus (TrGF IV frr. –B) and Philocles’ Pandion (TrGF I fr. ) and two comedies, Cantharus’ Tereus (PCG IV frr. –) and Anaxandrides’ Tereus (PCG II frr. –). Loraux : –; Loraux ; Létoublon . For a selective survey of nightingales in Greek poetry, and their connection to contemporary discourse on music, Gurd : –.

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries

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the nightingale makes the listener sad, or harmonizes with the singer’s state of mind. Electra’s description in the previous quotation is an example of this, but we can also perceive it in the chorus’ request, in Euripides’ Helen (–), that the nightingale “of the crying song” (μελῳδὸν | ἀηδόνα δακρυόεσσαν, –) come and accompany their dirge (θρήνων . . . ξυνεργός, ). Like attracts like and the song heard as an expression of lament works in conjunction with human lament. In this context, the birdsong is taken as the epitome of musical expressivity, the ideal condition for song to attain: a condition where music doesn’t need words to affect its listener but where emotions are aroused as if by contagion. Indeed, the second idea that scholarship on the tragic nightingale has emphasized is that her song itself is taken as an archetype for the tragic female threnos (“dirge, lament”). As the latest example shows, the lament seen in this way becomes a way of sublimating the tragic heroine’s suffering: it is an artistic transformation of the rawness of animal emotions, a transformation of grief through an artistic and social gesture. By referring, in articulated speech and stylized song, to the animal song, the tragic character can distance herself from the rawness of her emotions and bring some order to the dangerous outpouring of her pathos. “Expression” as seen in the birdsong is a way to curtail the threatening potential of the grieving female: the mobilization of a persona (that of the grieving queen transformed into a bird) to explain the expressive quality of the birdsong allows the tragic playwright to redirect the subversive potential of female song. As important as these two mobilizations of the figure of the nightingale are for the history of aesthetics, they constitute a rather different project from narratives actually focusing on the metamorphosis itself. In the rest of this chapter, I turn to two narratives (again from Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), produced several hundred years after the main epic and tragic passages quoted above, that feed off this tradition but articulate different questions.

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries about the Sister Arts At the beginning of book  of Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon (..–..), the narrator is confronted with the double bad  

 Davies . Alexiou, Yatromanolakis, and Roilos ; Holst-Warhaft . On this aspect, Suksi ; Ford ; and Weiss a: – (with regard to tragedy, especially Euripidean tragedy).

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Nightingale: On Expression

omen of sighting a hawk chasing a swallow, followed by the sight of a painting, in a painter’s workshop, depicting the myth of Procne and Philomela. From the outset, the text emphasizes the role and difficulties of interpretation, and points to a privileged reading method: Sign interpreters recommend, if we encounter paintings when we set off on some business, to examine the stories told in them [τοὺς μύθους τῶν εἰκόνων], and to compare what is about to happen to us to what is told in the [painting’s] story [τῷ τῆς ἱστορίας λόγῳ]. (Ach. Tat. ..)

These thoughts on the painting and its interpretation elaborate on other ideas about the visual arts and their exegesis in the novel. They are all the more important given that it is the viewing of a painting that provides the pretext for the narrative of the novel as a whole. Most commentators on the passage have read this scene (among other scenes of spectating) for its relevance to the rest of the story, and interpreted features of the painting in terms of its significance for the novel as a whole: the rape of the mythical maiden Philomela in a hut announces the attempted rape of the heroine, Leucippe, by Thersander later in the novel (.–), and the secret message sent between the sisters foreshadows the letter secretly sent by Leucippe to Clitophon (.). But there is another way of relating this short bird scene to the larger issues of the myth. For the two birds that the characters spot, the hawk and the swallow, correspond to the birds Tereus and Philomela are, respectively, transformed into in a different version of the myth. The two signs (bird sighting and painting) thus stand for two versions of the myth and already constitute a meditation on decoding sights and unstable signs and their relationship to narratives. The rest of my reading will show how the whole passage describing the painting is actually an engagement with the issues raised by representation and expression, and a reflection on the vocabulary for aesthetic and hermeneutic experiences as they relate to the emotions. Four Points about Mimesis After stating that the painting is a bad omen, the narrator describes what it depicts: the origins of the three birds. The passage is worth quoting in full, 



On the bearing of sights onto the interpretation of the novel, Bartsch ; Morales ; Bearden : –. Scenes of animal chases are also familiar elements of ancient novels (see the swallow chasing a cicada in Daphnis and Chloe) and have been read as emblematic of the issues relating to power struggles between male and female, and to the sexual threat posed to the heroine. Hyg. Fab. . The hoopoe is the hawk in another guise.

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries

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because the details of its narrative texture illustrate the intricacy of the problem: [The picture] told of the rape of Philomela and the violence of Tereus, and the cutting of the tongue. It had the entire narrative of what had happened [τὸ διήγημα τοῦ δράματος]: the woven robe, Tereus, the banquet. The maid was standing holding the unfolded robe; Philomela was standing by her and had her finger on the robe, to show the pictures woven into it. Procne nodded at this demonstration [πρὸς τὴν δεῖξιν ἐνενεύκει]: she was looking fiercely, angry at the picture [δριμὺ ἔβλεπε καὶ ὠργίζετο τῇ γραφῇ]; Thracian Tereus was woven into it, fighting with Philomela for Aphrodite’s prize. The woman’s hair was torn, her girdle undone, her dress ripped, her chest half bare. She was hurling her right hand at Tereus’ eyes, and with her left, she was trying to cover her breasts under the tatters of her dress. Tereus was holding Philomela in his arms, drawing her towards him as if to absorb her body into a constricting embrace. This was the depiction that the painter had woven into the robe [τὴν τοῦ πέπλου γραφὴν ὕφηνεν ὁ ζωγράφος]. As for the rest of the painting, it depicted the women showing Tereus the leftovers of the feast in a basket, the head and hands of his son. They were laughing and at the same time cowering. Tereus was depicted [ἐγέγραπτο] jumping up from his couch, and drawing his sword towards the women and kicking his leg against the table. It was neither standing nor fallen, but it indicated the depiction [ἐδείκνυε γραφὴν] of an imminent fall . . . Then Leucippe said to me (for the female species is rather fond of myths): “What does the story in the painting mean? And who are those birds? Who are these women? Who is that shameless man?” So I started telling her: “The nightingale, the swallow, and the hoopoe: all three humans, all three birds. The hoopoe is the man; of the two women, Philomela is the swallow and Procne the nightingale. The women came from the city of Athens. The man’s name was Tereus, and Procne was his wife. It seems that with barbarians one wife is not enough for Aphrodite’s needs, especially when the opportunity presents itself to revel in lust. So the opportunity to display his nature is provided to this Thracian by Procne’s tenderness: she sends her husband to fetch her sister. He leaves still as Procne’s husband but returns as Philomela’s lover, and along the way makes Philomela a second Procne. Fearing Philomela’s tongue, he gives her as a wedding present to never speak again and cuts out the flower of speech [κείρει τῆς φωνῆς τὸ ἄνθος]. But he doesn’t get anything out of it: Philomela’s skillfulness discovers a silent voice [ἡ γὰρ Φιλομήλας τέχνη σιωπῶσαν εὕρηκε φωνήν]. She weaves a robe as her messenger [ὑφαίνει γὰρ πέπλον ἄγγελον], and devises the plot with her threads [τὸ δρᾶμα πλέκει ταῖς κρόκαις]. The hand imitates the tongue [καὶ μιμεῖται τὴν γλῶτταν ἡ χείρ]: she indicates to Procne’s eyes 

On Achilles Tatius, see pp. –.



Nightingale: On Expression what is usually meant for the ears [καὶ Πρόκνης τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς τὰ τῶν ὤτων μηνύει] and tells her what she has endured by making the shuttle speak [καὶ πρὸς αὐτὴν ἃ πέπονθε τῇ κερκίδι λαλεῖ]. Procne hears from the robe [ἡ Πρόκνη τὴν βίαν ἀκούει παρὰ τοῦ πέπλου] of Tereus’ violence and seeks to get from her husband a revenge that surpasses his offense. They join in their anger, and the two women breathing as if one and mixing jealousy with violence, devise a dinner more ill fortuned than their mar riages. The dinner was Tereus’ son, whose mother Procne had been before her anger but now she had no memory of the birth pangs . . . Tereus dined on a dinner made by the Furies: the women brought him in a basket the leftovers of his son, laughing in their fear. Tereus sees the leftovers of his son, and bewails what he has eaten when he realizes that he is the father of his meal. When he realizes what has happened, he is driven mad with anger, draws his sword, and rushes at the women, whom the air takes up. And Tereus too is lifted up with them, and turns into a bird. And even now they preserve the image of their suffering [καὶ τηροῦσιν ἔτι τοῦ πάθους τὴν εἰκόνα]: the nightingale flees and Tereus chases it, thus retaining his hatred even in winged form.” (Ach. Tat. . .)

While the mechanism of transformation and the broad outline of the myth is familiar from Apollodorus’ summary with which this chapter opened, the specific emphasis and questions brought up by the Tatian version deserve attention. First, it seems like the narrative repeats itself and tells the story twice, once through the ekphrasis of the painting depicting the myth, and a second time through the narrative of the myth itself, done for the sake of Leucippe. As we shall see in more detail below, this sort of doubling is not innocent: it is as if the text itself were looking for the right medium to relate powerful emotions and achieve its fullest impact. The double retelling also enacts the topic it discusses, by representing two distinct aesthetic experiences: the experience of viewing and interpreting a painting (the narrator viewing the painting depicting the myth) and, embedded inside that narrative, the experience of viewing and interpreting a woven textile (Procne looking at the robe made by Philomela). As such, the narrative embeds a rich reflection on different media of representation: what we have is a text within a novel that represents, through words, visual artifacts that tell a story by visual means. The two media are complementary: the ekphrasis of the painting tries to give the reader a mental image of what it describes, while the painting and the embroidery try to give the viewer a sense of narrative and development through time. 

On ekphrasis: Elsner a; Elsner b; Goldhill ; Zeitlin ; Holzmeyer . See also Panofsky . One needs to set Achilles Tatius’ ekphrastic passage against the background of educational practices in Imperial times, especially the tradition of rhetorical exercises

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries

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Secondly, the episode enacts a reflection on modes of representation (mimesis) and their respective limits: the embroidered robe represents a single event, the rape as it is about to happen. It shows the moment the distraught Philomela fights the crazed Tereus. The painting, by contrast, depicts several events at once: the servant holding the robe, Philomela showing what is woven into it, Procne in the act of understanding, the subsequent revenge of the two women, Tereus’ later realization of his gruesome act, and the final transformation into birds. It condensates the time sequence and shows everything simultaneously. The difference between the two pieces of visual art (woven robe and painting) resides in the way representation relates to time: the artwork can be a “still” – the capture of one moment – like the robe; or it can give a sense of narrative and capture a sequence of events represented simultaneously, like the painting as a whole. The emphasis on the sense of time in representation is even highlighted by the narrator, who comments on the depiction of Tereus’ kicking the table: “a pictorial indication that it was about to fall.” More specifically, the text reflects on how different artistic media and different modes of representation (in other words, different kinds of mimesis) have different means of giving access to emotions and interiority. Neither the robe nor the painting is a representation of actions and emotions the way a verbal account describes interior states by putting words onto them. Because a painting or an embroidery does not give a verbal account of internal states, they have to represent the bodily responses and behaviors that express those emotions: Philomela’s distress, for example, is presented as being depicted through her gesture of scratching at Tereus’ eyes, and her shame and modesty are hinted at by the attempt to pull her robe to herself, etc. . . . Interiority is accessed through the interpretation of bodily gestures or attitudes that betray or exemplify internal states, while the narrative competes with the visual medium by explicitly describing mixed emotions: as Procne is about to kill her son, maternal love fights the pangs of jealousy (IV.) and after committing the infanticide, the two women “were laughing and were frightened at the



(progymnasmata), on which Webb  is fundamental, especially ff., in connection to the novels and other Second Sophistic texts. As Webb underlines, Achilles Tatius’ ekphrasis on the painting representing the myth of Philomela is only one of several ekphrases in the novel, and should be put in dialogue with them, as well as with other Imperial works that rely on ekphrasis (especially Philostratus’ Imagines, but also the prologue of Daphnis and Chloe as discussed in Chapter ). See Prioux  on the ways ancient artists in different periods dealt with representing emotions in the visual arts. More generally, Abell , who analyzes the relationship between emotions and the visual arts and adds the category of “perlocutionary acts” to the theories I have outlined above in connection to music.

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Nightingale: On Expression

same time” (III.). The virtuosity of the Tatian text comes from its adaption of its narrative strategy to the different artistic media it depicts, and from its description of emotions in terms appropriate to different modes of representation (visual or verbal). But the simultaneous depiction of two modes of representation also makes a statement about the nature of emotions and of the body: emotions are not purely internal, the whole body is a site of passion and affects shape the body just as the body gives rise to emotions. Metamorphosis here brings to a paroxysm what we know of everyday experience: that the body is a site of innumerable transformations. Thirdly, the Tatian passage presents different models of interpretation and aesthetic appreciation. The first is embodied in Procne’s approach: it consists in looking at a work of mimesis, and understanding its meaning. In the painting, Procne as interpreter looks at the robe, communicates (by nodding) her understanding of what is being shown (πρὸς τὴν δεῖξιν ἐνενεύκει), and has a strong emotional response: the text describes her as staring fiercely, furious at, or because of, the representation (καὶ δριμὺ ἔβλεπε καὶ ὠργίζετο τῇ γραφῇ). The second type of reaction and interpretation is that of Leucippe reacting to the painting of the myth: she looks at the painting, but does not understand and needs an interpreter. She asks for an explanation of who these birds are, etc. She is, in a way, the reverse of Procne: Procne looks at a depiction and immediately understands and reacts with violent emotions; Leucippe, by contrast, does not understand (although, to her credit, she does perceive and state that the man is shameless). There is a third type of reaction: that of the narrator. As the end of the passage indicates, “they preserve the image of their suffering”: this suggests that one can look at something and interpret its features in the light of a story one knows, as the narrator does. The difference between the narrator and Procne, however, is that the bird does not tell the entire story of how it came to be the way it is, it just preserves a metonym, a sign of it, an eikon. The work of interpretation is thus different, since the narrator recognizes the sign and recalls the story, while the robe provides the whole story. The former is indexical, connotative; the latter is deictic, denotative. Finally, the ekphrasis, besides being a mise en abyme (a visual artifact, the painting, representing another visual artifact – the robe) is also a mise-enscène: the painting illustrates, through the embedded response of the viewer of the robe, the reaction it itself hopes to create. As the character in the painting looks at the work of art, she responds with powerful emotions. The ekphrasis captures the moment of horror at seeing the

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries

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woven representation and the anger that arises in Procne as she interprets the story: viewing a work of art creates shock and arouses an intense emotional reaction. But the narrative presents more than an embedded story of interpretation. It also presents a story of partly failed aesthetic response. As Leucippe, the viewer of the painting, looks at the visual representation, she shows no sign of being moved: she is the polar opposite of Procne, who sees and immediately reacts with strong emotions. Leucippe asks questions: “Who are these women? Who are these birds? Who is this shameless man?” but does not show any emotional response to the drama depicted. This leaves open the question of the reader’s own reaction to the verbal account: will she be moved by the account of the myth (like Procne deciphering the embroidery and reacting with strong emotions) or will she react like Leucippe in front of the painting and ask questions? Prolepses and Substitution I see in this sustained reflection on modes and media of representation, and on mimesis and its relationship to time, an invitation tendered by Achilles Tatius to reflect on a medium that is not explicitly discussed in the passage but is always looming in the myth of the nightingale: music. Music is a temporal art that deals with representation in a very different way from other media (visual and verbal). Yet it brings up similar problems in terms of interpretive strategies and aesthetic responses. While the text explicitly describes two modes of expression and representation (verbal and visual), a third mode (musical) is implied: the birdsong is not described, yet it is always there, on the horizon of the narrative. The text works very hard to provide the critical vocabulary necessary to discuss music and the relationship between the birdsong and the emotions, via this double discussion of the painting and the robe, and its manipulation of the verbal material. One could object that arguments from silence are always suspicious, and that if Achilles Tatius does not mention the bird’s song, it is because he is not interested in it. But music constitutes an important aspect of the narrative strategy and concerns of Leucippe and Clitophon. The novel as a whole pays repeated attention to music and performance: the hero’s courting starts during the heroine’s music lesson, and the novel’s denouement hinges on a scene of collective listening, which I have discussed in the previous chapter (listening to the syrinx song coming from the cave of the virgin, followed by the myth of the transformation of Syrinx into a

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Nightingale: On Expression

musical instrument, Ach. Tat. ..–). The myth of the transformation of Procne and Philomela into birds (and especially into the most musical of birds) should thus be read not only in the context of the discourse on the visual arts (and in a series of painting descriptions) but in the context of the subtle discourse on music and its experience that runs through the novel. The clearest cue that the narrative actually provides all the elements for an elaborate reflection on music and its relationship with the representation and expression of emotions is the presence of a sustained parallel between the visual and aural domains in the description. The robe that Philomela weaves is described in terms appropriate to an aural phenomenon: the robe is a messenger (ἄγγελον) and the weaver’s hand “imitates the tongue” (μιμεῖται τὴν γλῶτταν ἡ χείρ). The mimesis involved here works as a form of substitution, as the robe represents what Philomela could have said if she still had a tongue. The image of the “silent voice” (σιωπῶσαν φωνήν) that Philomela invented (εὕρηκε) is, of course, not an innovation: it is a reversal of the Simonidean trope that “painting is silent poetry, poetry is painting that speaks.” But here the focus is on the visual medium described in aural terms: the eyes become a substitute for the ears and the shuttle is described as a channel for speech (τῇ κερκίδι λαλεῖ), in an elaboration of the expression “voice of the shuttle” used by Sophocles in his tragic exploitation of the myth. Put another way, the robe plays the role of a messenger speech in describing a scene that happened some time before, thus bringing in an element of time depth (both in tragedy and in the visual representation). The Tatian emphasis on the robe standing in for a voice has a further consequence: whatever is said about the visual can be read as a commentary on the aural, and commentaries on reactions to the robe can be taken as hints as to the kind of response the future birdsong will find. And that is indeed what I see as the elusive logic of the myth in its Tatian retelling. There is of course a simple prolepsis: even before the metamorphosis into birds is completed, we can read glimpses of what is to come: in a Philomela deprived of speech, we can already see the bird she will be transformed into – the swallow who does not sing but twitters. And in a Procne full of emotions, we can already see the virtuoso nightingale imagined as pouring 



Plut. Mor. f (De glor. Ath. ): ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν, τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν. On Sophocles’ version of the myth, and the significance of this expression in Sophocles’ Tereus, see Fitzpatrick . On Achilles Tatius as reader of Sophocles, Liapis  and Liapis .

Achilles Tatius’ Nightingale and Quandaries

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out her grief in an endless song. But, more importantly, there is a more subtle type of prolepsis, which makes the two sisters work as substitutes for each other: as Philomela’s tongue is cut out and she loses the ability to speak, it is Procne who reacts in silence. And as Philomela’s body is mutilated, Procne mutilates her own flesh – her son Itys. The artistic production of one sister (the robe) can be read as an equivalent and substitute for the artistic production of the other (the nightingale song). This equivalence between robe and song is reinforced in two ways. First, the text relies on a deep-rooted network of associations between song and weaving in the Greek tradition (from Homer to Pindar and the representation of female weaving as counterpoint to male epic singing). Fabrics woven by women (Penelope, Circe, Helen, or Andromache) tell a complementary story to that told by the poet singing the kleos of male heroes. Second, the fact that Sophocles uses the expression “voice of the shuttle” and that Ovid’s Metamorphoses calls Philomela’s robe a carmen miserabile (“a song inspiring pity,” .) metaphorically equates one sisterly artifact with the other. Achilles Tatius’ highly intertextual and conscious narrative plays off this traditional association and builds on the implications of this image. All the questions about communication, mode of representation, and emotions fastidiously explored by the text in the cases of the painting, the robe, and the narrative material itself raise the question, in the context of the myth, of the birdsong: does the song of the nightingale represent a story the way a verbal account or a visual description deal with representation? A related question is that of the kind of aesthetic experience provided by bird music: how, or to what extent, does the song arouse emotions – and does it do it more like a verbal account, or more like a visual representation, or in a different way altogether? If we think of the robe as a prolepsis for the nightingale’s song (and not simply as a replacement for Philomela’s voice), the description of the viewing of Philomela’s artifact gives us powerful access to the phenomenology of music and its reception: the representation of a dramatic moment (the moment of rape) provides access to interiority and to a world of emotions by outlining the contours that allow the viewer to read and interpret those emotions (the 





This is all the more true since their names are reversed in other versions of the story, as if their identities were interchangeable. Feldherr  develops this idea of substitution between the sisters in his reading of the Ovidian version of the myth. On the parallels between song and weaving, Snyder ; Steiner  (weaving in Pindar); Létoublon ; Fanfani . Feldherr :  for an analysis of the substitution of the sisters in the Ovidian narrative.



Nightingale: On Expression

gesture of pulling the fabric back out of modesty, for instance, or the struggle to get out of an unwanted embrace, etc.). Translated into the musical domain, this would be a version of the resemblance theory described above. On this analogic reading, the song of the nightingale would, like Philomela’s robe, depict emotions by presenting their contours and letting the listener infer feelings from resemblance to an imagined emotional stance. But there is a second layer to the analogy between robe and song: the text provides a description of the viewing of the robe (within the painting). The reaction of the viewer (Procne) is one of very strong emotional arousal. Procne’s response to viewing the robe illustrates a form of arousal theory, where an emotion – ire – is aroused in reaction to the content of a piece of art, even though the emotional stance of the art itself is different from the feelings it evokes: the painting shows how the fear that the viewer of the robe perceives in the representation of the characters provokes a reaction of anger. Following the substitutive logic of the myth, the song of the nightingale would, like the robe, arouse the listener’s emotions, even if the emotions of the listener do not correspond to those characteristic of the music. This montage of views about the connection between the visual arts and the emotions provides a virtuoso, if indirect, discourse on the phenomenology of song. With the mise en abyme of the myth (represented in a painting itself representing a visual artifact), Achilles Tatius implicitly reworks Platonic and Aristotelian arguments about mimesis, to point out the ins and outs of verbal and visual modes of representation, and to reflect on what is unique about music. In this context, one further detail needs to be pressed: the painting that the narrator spots and that gives rise to the ekphrasis is still in the painter’s workshop. Like the description itself, the painting-still-in-progress hints at the difficulty of settling on a single way of accounting for the mystery of musical affect: while providing a complex framework to think about it (with the paradigms of the visual and verbal arts) and an explicit vocabulary (that of mimesis) to talk about arts, it also acknowledges the impossibility of talking about the power of music directly: one best approaches it via analogy. A similar reluctance to talk about the bird’s song directly, but grounded in a different reason, can be read in Ovid’s account of the myth in his Metamorphoses.



The same phenomenon is doubled in the discourse on the painting: the anger that Procne feels is read from her bodily attitude: she “looks fiercely.”

Ovid’s Nightingale: Animal Emotions and Subjectivity



Ovid’s Nightingale: Animal Emotions and Subjectivity The myth of the sisters’ transformation is narrated in a book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that features many artists, especially sound artists: after the description of the metamorphosis of the weaver Arachne into a spider (.–), it tells of the Lycian peasants transformed into frogs (.– ), the satyr Marsyas (flayed for having lost a musical contest against Apollo, .–), and the musician Amphion (.–). Yet, from the outset of the episode, the focus is not so much on art as on animals. Nonhuman animals play a crucial role in the narrative – structurally, symbolically, and ethologically. Animals and Categories The first mention of an animal in the Procne and Philomela episode is significant and programmatic. Procne and Tereus’ wedding is described as being held “under the sign of the ominous screech owl” (profanus bubo, ) and, from the start, the description brings in ideas about metamorphosis and vocality. The owl (bubo) is commonly associated with death and its somber presence haunting the union of Procne and Tereus is made palpable through a sinister assonance (incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine sedit). The bird also opens the episode with the reminder that, in Ovid’s changeful world, many nonhuman animals are humans under other forms: the owl recalls Ascalaphus, who was metamorphosed by Proserpina into an owl in the previous book (.–). Moreover, the mention of the screech owl occurs in tandem with that of the Erinyes, another set of creatures with animal features – wings and snaky hair. The conjoined presence of these two beings points at the two-way relationships between life and death, between human and nonhuman animals, and between different forms of embodied existence in this episode, and suggests constant possibilities of reversal between states of being. This sort of ontological continuity that goes beyond specific forms of embodiment is also at play in the description of Tereus’ initial reaction upon seeing Philomela:





I am not, of course, suggesting that the episode is devoid of sophisticated reflections on art. As Feldherr : – shows, the passage abounds in reflections on mimesis and theatrical experience. In Greek poetry, the owl is a symbol of bad poetry: see Alcm. PMG .



Nightingale: On Expression Non secus exarsit conspecta uirgine Tereus quam si quis canis ignem supponat aristis aut frondem positasque cremet faenilibus herbas. digna quidem facies, sed et hunc innata libido exstimulat, pronumque genus regionibus illis in Venerem est; flagrat uitio gentisque suoque.

As soon as he saw the maiden, Tereus was consumed with love, as when someone sets fire to whitening grain or dry leaves stored in a hay loft. Her beauty was indeed worth it, but for him it was also an innate sexual urge that prompted him, as people from those countries are prone to Venus; he was burning with his own passion and that of his race. (Ov. Met. . )

Tereus’ passion is described as a natural element, fire (exarsit, “he was inflamed” ; flagrat, “he burns” ), with a metaphor that is as common in Latin as in English. But the image is developed with a rich simile borrowed from georgic life. Tereus’ desire, with its irresistible force, is assimilated to an elemental process (fire burning grain). The image actually recalls the description of Apollo’s desire for Daphne (Met. .–): gods and men are all under the power of stronger, internal, and sometimes indescribable forces that can only be compared to the inescapable force of natural processes (fire burning grain). On this reading, all beings (plants, nonhuman and human animals, and gods) are connected in their propensity to be overpowered by something greater than themselves. There is no opposition or implied hierarchy between vegetal, animal, human, and divine beings: all can come under the same forces, and individual animal connation is, in the end, negated by the relentless force of vegetal and elemental life. Yet Tereus’ passion is characterized by something else: his passionate nature (innata libido, ) is further described, in the next lines, as a trait of his race (genus regionibus illis, ). Natural elements, violent emotions, and a certain type of people (barbarians) are thus connected. In counterpoint to the discourse just presented on change and fluidity between human and nonhuman animal nature, death and life, one recognizes the strong-seated Greek discourse, recuperated in the Ovidian narrative, on the opposition between the world of the polis with its male, logos-endowed subjects and what lies beyond its boundaries: the  

 Kaufhold . For more on the parallels, Jacobsen ; Kaufhold . On connation, vegetal life, and modes of being, see Payne ; on ancient conceptualizations of the interconnectedness of humans and plants (from the early Greek philosophers to Ovid), see Zatta .

Ovid’s Nightingale: Animal Emotions and Subjectivity



non-Greek, the uncivilized, the nonhuman, mired in “nature” and the passions of the body. The union of one of the daughters of King Pandion with Tereus enacts this very mix of opposites, between Athens and barbarian Thrace. In the description of the characters’ interactions with one another, and in the drama that ensues, the narrative exploits the opposition between civilization and wilderness, Greek speakers and barbarians, human and nonhuman animals, logos (as rationality and speech) and the body. The same type of divide can also be read in the passage’s description of Procne’s rage and revenge. Relying on an imaginary of the female that goes back as far as Hesiod’s Theogony or Semonides’ satire of women in his poem known as fragment , and that sees women as rooted in the material and the body, in dangerous passions and wildness, the passage depicts Procne after she finds out about her sister’s fate with the same vocabulary as Tereus: she is “on fire” (ardet, ) – the same verb used for Tereus struck by Philomela’s beauty. And when she is about to kill her son, she is described “as a tigress dragging a suckling fawn through the dark woods on Ganges’ banks” (ueluti Gangetica ceruae | lactentem fetum per siluas tigris opacas, –) – again with the same verb (traxit, ) as is used of the barbaric Tereus who drags Philomela into the woods. The text very carefully constructs female emotions as ultimately untamable. In the final portion of the text, Procne takes advantage of a festival of Dionysus to turn herself into a Bacchant: in the socially constructed setting of a women’s festival, which provides a safe outlet for females’ threatening wild side, Procne acts out the fury of the bull-god Dionysus. As she enters the dark woods (the very place where the barbarian Tereus committed his assault), she dons vegetal and animal trappings, thus adopting metaphorical wild features: “her head was covered with vine branches, a deer skin hung from her left side, and a light spear was resting on her shoulder” (uite caput tegitur, lateri ceruina sinistro | uellera dependent, umero leuis incubat hasta,





In retelling Greek myths, Ovid always faces the difficulty of adapting them to a Roman cultural and ideological context. In this specific case, there is obvious tension in the reworking and understanding of ethnic identities: Rome is “like” Athens, but it is also the non-Athens and the frightening “other” that lurks beyond its boundaries. On this issue, see in particular Feldherr : –. It might also be important to note that Thrace is the home of other musicians (including Thamyras, and Orpheus and Linus [Apollod. Bibl. ..], both sons of Oeagrus). A representative example of this type of discourse is Segal : : “female violence . . . in this highly androcentric world, has something uncanny or supernatural about it.” For a reevaluation of the traditional alignment of females and nature in discourse, see Merchant ; Ortner ; Haraway ; Plumwood ; Alaimo .



Nightingale: On Expression

–). But Procne’s act is fueled by real rage, and the violent emotions that drive her are only partially contained in the socially constructed setting of the Dionysiac festival. While the Ovidian narrative partly relies on this type of representation (which implies deep-seated oppositions in the cultural discourse including between logos-bearing Greek males accessing transcendence and females, animals, and barbarians all stuck in the body, the material, and the emotions), two further points need to be considered to nuance our reading. Animal Similes First, the most striking feature of the passage is the number of animal and nature comparisons it comprises: there are more animal and nonhuman similes in the Procne and Philomela episode than in the rest of book , and more than in any other episode of the Metamorphoses as a whole. In the context of an episode relating the origins of an animal singer, this clustering of animal similes has particular significance. Indeed, similes are metamorphoses of language: they are the nonmaterial version of the physical transformations operated by the gods. This equation between verbal and narrated event works in two ways – “the way in which events of the narrative appear to treat abstract metaphors and similes as if they had a material reality, and the way in which metamorphosis embodies figures of speech.” But similes involve more than transforming a thing into a verbal other, and leaving the material behind. They can also be read as life practice: they are a way of mentally experimenting with metamorphosis before the physical transformation related in the narrative. These changes and their abstraction in language are a way of embracing a certain view of the world, where beings are shape-shifters and life is never to be quite pinned down in one stable state, just as figurative language cannot quite be pinned down. Reading similes is a way of decoding and participating in this world system, as we will see in the examples that follow. In a dazzling gallery of pictures, Tereus is successively an eagle, a wolf, and a bird of prey, and Philomela a hare, a lamb, and a dove. While still on 



Segal : : “Viewed in this way, Ovid’s combination of the Dionysiac pattern with the chthonic imagery . . . evokes the deep ambiguities that this culture feels toward female emotion (especially violent and aggressive emotion).”  On metamorphosis in the Metamorphoses, Feldherr . Kaufhold : .

Ovid’s Nightingale: Animal Emotions and Subjectivity



the boat that carries him from Athens back to Thrace, Tereus eying Philomela is compared to an eagle that has deposited in its nest up high the hare it has caught in its crooked talons (–). The relationship is stated explicitly as one of ravisher (raptor, ) and prey (capto, ), and the bird’s advantage over the weaker animal is encapsulated in the description of the eagle’s gaze: the ravisher “fixes his eyes on his prey” (spectat sua praemia raptor, ). In the following lines describing the king’s arrival in his land, Tereus metaphorically turns into an animal that “drags” (trahit, ) its victim into its lair (in stabula alta, ). And no sooner has Tereus dragged Philomela into the woods, the threatening domain of wild things and dangerous animals, he starts to act in character with the place: once again, it would seem that Tereus is manifesting his inner barbarian nature and that, overwhelmed by his passions, he is metaphorically turned into an animal. Yet this would be to ignore the fact that the scene is actually focalized from the weaker animal’s perspective on the situation. Philomela is first described as “pale and trembling and fearing everything” (pallentem trepidamque et cuncta timentem, ), with participles that will be used to describe two other frightened animals in the next similes: first a “trembling lamb who cannot believe she is safe from the wolf” (tremit uelut agna pauens, ) and then as a “dove that, still bloodied, palpitates with fear of the claws that pierced it” (utque columba suo madefactis sanguine plumis | horret adhuc auidosque timet quibus haeserat ungues, –). Gradually, the reader comes to realize that, in the rape scene, images of hunting animals are not ways of representing the assault itself. Tereus is not described as launching himself upon Philomela like a gray wolf: instead, the focus is on the victim’s emotions and the light it throws on her inner life – emotions that combine relief and disbelief in the case of the lamb escaping the wolf, and a mix of fear and hope in the case of the dove. After the rape, when Tereus, caught between fear and ire, commits out a further affront and cuts out Philomela’s tongue, the mutilated part of her body is described as “the tail of an amputated snake bound to wriggle, palpitat[ing] and seek[ing], as it dies, to reach the feet of its mistress” (utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae, | palpitat et moriens dominae uestigia quaerit, – ). Once again, the snake image is not used for the danger and violence it can represent but, surprisingly, in a tender way, almost as a pet. Its 

Segal : . The landscape has two different connotations: it is not the place of pastoral quietness but of Bacchic violence; and it is not a place where one can retreat into the wild, but where one can witness the violence of the wild.



Nightingale: On Expression

moment of agony is underlined, with a touching depiction of its faithfulness to its mistress even in its death throes. It is difficult to find in this snake an image of the terrifying animal adorning the hair of the Furies that presided at the marriage of Philomela’s sister. In Ovid’s world of metamorphosed bodies, this type of representation challenges a more stable system of oppositions between wildness and domesticity, danger and intimacy. All in all, images that describe humans as nonhuman animals in the rape scene throw light on the complexity of the latter’s inner life, and underline the continuity of suffering across animal species, human and nonhuman. In the process of image-making, nonhuman animals are used not only to represent, but also to make sense of, human emotions and their layered, mixed, and profound nuances. The effect of the similes is reinforced by the fact that, at the heart of the representation of sexual predation, Tereus and Philomela are presented as humans in a social context, and not as animals in the wild: Philomela is defined by her social status, et uirginem et unam (“a virgin and all alone,” ), isolated in her humanness, as if no other animal could be in her situation. Language and Emotions A second feature adds to the complexity of Ovid’s narrative and its multilayered discourse on animals, human and nonhuman, and their connections to the emotions: the familiar issue of language and its power, and the question of nonverbal signs’ capacity to signify emotions and give access to interiority. As Tereus rapes Philomela, she keeps crying and calling out, to her father, her sister, and the gods (–), while her aggressor does not utter a word. Words are presented as Philomela’s first recourse to express and communicate suffering, mental and physical, moral outrage, and feelings of powerlessness. Language puts a name on suffering and communicates its exact nature to others, humans and gods. It seems to be a sign of civilization, connected to family values (pietas) and respect for the gods. This is obviously a major difference from the animals with which Philomela is compared: despite the complexity of their emotions and depth of their inner life, animals do not put words on their feelings and it is the role of the Ovidian narrator to compensate for this lack and provide a picture of animals’ interiority to the reader. Violence might be 

On animal suffering and the emotional continuity between human beings and other animals, see Payne , esp. –.

Ovid’s Nightingale: Animal Emotions and Subjectivity



done to both Philomela and the lamb, but only Philomela calls on her family and on the gods for help, and ultimately describes the outrageous assault of which she was a victim. The lamb’s emotions, by contrast, are mediated by the narrator’s always inadequate viewpoint. Similarly, after Philomela has recovered from the sexual assault (the first form of physical metamorphosis), she makes a powerful speech that vouches for the power of language to let the truth out. In her description, language has an almost supernatural power: she vows that she will “fill the woods with her cries and make the rocks move, aware of her story” (implebo siluas et conscia saxa mouebo, ), on the model of Orpheus, and appeals to the sky and the gods – if there are any (audiet haec aether et si deus ullus in illo est, ). It is a remarkably brave speech, more threatening than any weapon in the capacity it has to precipitate the action, but still a delusional speech, since language proved so unhelpful as she was being violated. By contrast, the animal victims are described as isolated in their suffering, unable to share their emotions or act on their fate. The issue of language surfaces again at the second turning point in the narrative, when Tereus, fearing what Philomela could say, mutilates her: “as it was still calling on the name of her father and struggling to speak, he grabbed her tongue with pincers and cut it off with a cruel blade” (et nomen patris usque uocantem | luctantemque loqui comprensam forcipe linguam | abstulit ense fero, –). This violent silencing seems to make Philomela another female-turned-nonhuman-animal familiar from the Metamorphoses’ gallery of portraits, deprived of the ability to speak, like Io or Callisto. Philomela’s ability to express her emotions through words has been curtailed, in a form of “silencing that may serve to isolate women into the non-human form.” Her severed tongue, still trembling and speaking (tremens immurmurat, ), animated with the energy of Philomela’s body and wriggling at her feet as it tries to get back to its mistress, can be seen as symbolizing the severed self, trying to reunite itself with its missing part, and the estranged part of her humanity. Yet there is another form of silence described in the text, one that shows that the body and emotions do not need language to speak out and tell their story, and a form of silence that is not assimilated exclusively with the nonhuman. The narrative suggests that humans cannot be differentiated from other animals only by their access to language and their ability to put words on emotions: the body betrays and creates an equally powerful



De Luce : – on different readings of that trope (p.  for the quotation).



Nightingale: On Expression

nonlinguistic kind of communication. After Procne reads of her sister’s story, she too is unable to speak: germanaeque suae carmen miserabile legit et (mirum potuisse) silet. Dolor ora repressit, uerbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae defuerunt. and she reads the distressing narrative about her sister and (a miracle that she could) remains silent. Grief checked her mouth and words worthy of her pain failed the tongue that sought them. (Ov. Met. .  )

Silence rather than words is the most appropriate way to express the emotional overload. Procne holds her tongue – mirum potuisse (“a miracle that she could!”) – when learning of her sister’s traumatic experience. The tone of the expression is difficult to read and betrays the ambiguity that permeates the text’s view of the world. On the one hand, it can point to how difficult it is for human animals not to express their emotions verbally. On the other, it can signify that a vocal outburst is specifically women’s way of expressing emotions, and that refraining from speech is as difficult as containing natural forces. In this situation, language is an inadequate way of expressing emotions and representing interiority, and only silence properly does justice to Procne’s emotional turmoil. Here, as in some key moments in the narrative, nonverbal communication is privileged: silent gestures (nodding), emotional signs that accompany language such as groans and tears, screams and movements, and somatic manifestations (speechlessness or blushing) are more eloquent and more immediate than words, both to communicate with others and to reveal interiority. At the very end of the narrative, once Procne has rescued Philomela and brought her to her halls, Philomela makes a gesture that is as effective as a long speech (pro uoce manus fuit, ): the text, in its indeterminacy, captures the emotional overload of the scene. There is no need for Philomela to utter words to communicate a variety of internal states to her sister: shame, gratefulness, fear can all be summarized simultaneously in this nonverbal gesture. Once more here, Ovid’s narrative suggests deep ambiguity about the status of language as the most powerful tool to communicate both content and emotional load. In an ultimate reversal, language in fact even emphasizes what makes humans unique in their vices and wild violence. When Procne regains the ability to speak, she uses language as a deciding argument as she is about to kill her son, forgetting about her motherly love (pietas, ): the same tool

Reading the Nightingale



that is also that which extolls violence, and language is used as the deciding factor in making the decision to kill (“why is one able to make tender speeches, while the other is bound to silence because her tongue has been taken away? The one he calls mother, why can’t the other call sister?” – “cur admouet” inquit | “alter blanditias, rapta silet altera lingua? | quam uocat hic matrem, cur non uocat illa sororem? . . .”, –). In the last lines of the narrative, language is also the tool that Procne uses to undo Tereus after killing Itys, when, “eager to be the messenger of her bloody news” (cupiens exsistere nuntia cladis, ) she tells her husband that he has “within [him] whom [he] is asking for” (intus habes quem poscis, ). The organ that Tereus violated (the mouth) turns out to be the one through which he has perpetrated his latest crime (by ingesting his son). In being unable to get out of his body what his own mouth has consumed, the Thracian king is replaying a version of the tragic fate he has dealt Philomela, unable to get words out. The irony of language is capped by Tereus’ final powerless invocation of the Furies (), the very divinities that presided over his doomed marriage in the first place. Language thus occupies an ambiguous place in the episode: it is not depicted unambiguously as the ability that distinguishes human and nonhuman animals and that describes the former’s superiority when it comes to expressing emotions or communicating. As the episode makes clear, silence and nonverbal behavior can be much more powerful than language in communicating and expressing emotions and giving access to interiority.

Reading the Nightingale In light of the complex discourse on gender, animals, language, and emotions in the Ovidian episode, how can we read the narrative of Procne’s transformation into a nightingale? Like Io or Callisto and other females who are turned into animals, or Echo turned into an acoustic phenomenon, Procne, transformed into a nightingale, will be denied access to language and the ability to describe her own internal state. But it is difficult to see the bird’s deprivation of language as a form of loss, given the narrative’s ambivalence about the status of language as a mark of human superiority over their animal others in their ability to communicate and express emotions. The significance of the metamorphosis does not actually  

See Feldherr  on the cruel pun between ityn and intus, transforming Greek into Latin. See Sharrock :  n. . Also De Luce .



Nightingale: On Expression

reside in the deprivation of human language, but in the acquisition of song. One way the episode has been read, in the light of book ’s focus on artists, is as an extended meditation on the circumstances of the making of a work of art. In the case of Philomela, the product created (the embroidered robe) is interpreted as a double metamorphosis: that of silence into a sort of voice that can narrate events through a visual medium, and that of silence into communication, which allows Philomela to break free of her imposed isolation. This is notably how Geoffrey Hartman has read the myth in a fundamental article devoted to “the voice of the shuttle” (a metaphor he borrows from Sophocles’ Tereus). For Hartman, “truth will out . . . human consciousness will triumph.” With a combination of craft (cunning) and craft (weaving), the woman’s artifact (the embroidered robe) signifies the triumph of language. On Hartman’s interpretation, the myth marks the birth and triumph of the artist, and illustrates the power of art to overcome violence. His reading as a whole extolls the power of language, both in the pithy expression of Sophocles encapsulating the story (“the voice of the shuttle”), and in the myth as archetype. But Hartman says nothing of the nightingale and the new “voice” of the other sister, probably because their transformation into birds does not support any of the claims he makes for his ode to Art. Most importantly, the kind of male-centered reading he illustrates “make[s] an all too familiar elision of gender” – and, I would add, of subjectivity. Feminist critics have responded to Hartman, in particular Patricia Joplin in an article with the suggestive title “The voice of the shuttle is ours.” Joplin shows how the myth of Procne and Philomela can be read as a story of resilience and celebration of the woman’s voice, which can never be successfully destroyed, only contained. The tension that is at the heart of the story of Philomela’s emergence from silence is, for her, the tension not just of poetics, but of feminist poetics. “Perhaps because he [Hartman] cannot see the active, the empowered, the resistant in Philomela, he cannot see that the woman makes her loom do what she 

 



Gentilcore  (about transformation of mourning into art in Ovid), and studies of the figure of the nightingale in tragedy: Pfeffer ; Loraux ; Williams ; Létoublon ; Gély, Haquette, and Tomiche ; Dingremont . Hartman : . More generally, feminist studies have looked for the artist figure in female characters: Echo (Spivak ; Berger ), Arachne (Miller ), Philomela (Joplin ), the daughters of Minyas (Rimell : , who decenters the gender binary in our reading of Ovid). See Joplin :  for the quotation in the previous sentence and the next.

Reading the Nightingale



once hoped her voice/tongue could do.” Joplin goes on, recovering in the myth what is often concealed, unveiling and revealing what is hidden – very much like Procne herself. Rather than seeing the truth as “willing out,” the critic underlines the battle that cannot go unsaid. If the voice of the shuttle speaks, it is not to declare the power of art, but to vindicate the battle of women to let that voice out. While Philomela’s voice has been recovered by feminist critics, much remains to be done about Procne’s. In order to do justice to the nightingale, and avoid imposing readings of the myth that do not do justice to Ovid’s specific focus in his poem as a whole and in the episode in particular, we need to acknowledge the poet’s silence about the bird’s song. As opposed to many narratives in the Metamorphoses that linger on the moment where the ability to communicate is lost, or on the drama of losing one’s speech, our text says nothing about the tragedy of the silenced woman or about the pitiful song of the newly invented bird. Not a word, just a reference to the visual marks (notae) on the bird’s plumage. This silence has to be read as an aesthetic and epistemic stance. It is a very different silence from the one I described in the Tatian narrative, where the silence is a gesture to the impossibility of talking about musical mimesis in a direct way, an indication that the discourse on musical emotions must always remain incomplete, on the model of the painting of the myth that is still in the painter’s workshop. Ovid’s silence, by contrast, is calculated, thrown into relief by the earlier reference to Philomela’s artifact as carmen miserabile (a “distressing song/narrative”). Picking up on the poem’s initial lines and their programmatic statement associating weaving and song, the metaphor making Philomela’s weaving a figured song brings up the ambiguity discussed in the case of the Homeric simile and the Tatian narrative, and which always underlies the discourse on music and emotions: does the miserabile refer to what the robe represents in its design (it represents a wretched spectacle), what it evokes for the viewer (it elicits pity), or the emotions it allows its author to express (the misery she feels)? But while all these options are available for interpretation in the description of Philomela’s art, when it comes to the birdsong itself, the text refuses any hint of arousal theory (it says nothing about the pity that might be felt 



A thread links the tapestry of Philomela with that of Arachne, and also with the letters traced by Io’s hoof. Old and new selves are linked by a piece of representational art, the grammata (figures) spelling out a fateful story. On this, see Létoublon . On representation, see Leach . If we follow that reading (Miller’s Loeb edition, contra, prints miserabile fatum). The expression is also used by Virgil (G. .) of the nightingale’s song. See Hardie , who calls the use of the expression in Ovid an “ecphrastic presence.”



Nightingale: On Expression

by listeners hearing the nightingale), it does not describe any of its expressive features; instead it makes a powerful statement about emotional expression, by refusing to bridge the gap between personas. One only imagines that the birdsong’s expressiveness can be explained by the scenario of a woman turned bird. In Ovid’s silence about the birdsong can be read the real quandary that the narrative reflects on. The Ovidian text imagines what it would be like to have a body that did not match its possessor’s understanding of who he or she is as a person. [It] envisages the possibility that having such a body might challenge and even overcome one’s ability to be the person one wishes.

As opposed to other mobilizations of the myth that rely on the projection of one persona (the mourning mother) onto the other (the singing bird) via song, the Ovidian story stops short and interrogates this very move. By doing so, it enacts just that question: What would it be like to have one’s song always heard for what it is not? While the numerous similes of the episode focus on animal emotions, and especially imagined animals in powerless positions, here the final animal depicted in the episode (the nightingale) invites us to wonder about its own emotional stance, now that it is saddled with an infanticide mother’s past. There is something very powerful in not seeing the metamorphosis as a mere exchange of body as the expression of a new way of being in the world. Song here is the vocal means by which the new animal becomes what it really is. If there is expression, it is not the expression of the old persona’s emotions, but the vocal expression of becoming-nightingale – and that expression is impossible to access from a human perspective, thus the Ovidian text remains silent about it. To hear the song of the nightingale, then, not as expressive of another persona’s emotions (those of the infanticide woman the bird used to be), in other words, to resist expression theory, is to approach the song from the perspective of the bird itself – and this is what the passage as a whole invites us to do. Rather than assuming that subjectivity remains the same despite a change of body, the myth reflects on how the experience of embodiment might alter one’s perception of oneself, how interiority might be changed along with external form, and what “expression” means when more than the experience of embodied life is fundamentally altered. As the  

Payne :  (although not in connection with the nightingale). I discuss “posthuman lyric” further in a book project currently in progress, Greek Poetry and the Posthuman.

Reading the Nightingale



many similes of the passage urge us to, we need to ask: What it is like to be a nightingale? As Thomas Nagel has shown, it is impossible to access another form of subjectivity except through the imagination: the extrapolation will always necessarily be incompletable. We are unequipped to think about the subjective character of the experience of the nightingale singing, and using the persona of the mourning mother to acknowledge and explain away its expressive qualities is, on the logic of the text, not acceptable. The myth tries thinking to the limits of species and about the transfer of one’s emotional life into another body but then turns back – yet as it does so, it completes its intellectual itinerary, and manifests it in its silence about the birdsong. There is no neat parallelism with the triumph of Philomela’s weaving, no trivializing statement about the charm or sadness of the nightingale’s melody, only the chilling silence of the text echoing the depth of the abyss between old and new self in old and new body. The project of thinking about the song from the bird’s perspective and as expressing the bird’s old human self’s emotions is tantalizing yet unrealizable, and this is what the Ovidian narrative states, through its subtle orchestration of ideas about music, animals, and emotions. This is where the real posthuman move happens, in the reluctance to explain away, while relying on human subjectivity, the bird’s evocative song. The silence about the bird’s music is an extension of the striking accumulation of animal similes: it is a plea to consider the new emotional position of the bird, saddled with a story that is not hers, and unable to escape the body that makes this song possible. As Karoliina Lummaa explains in her interpretation of “The willow warbler complains” by Finnish poet Eero Lyyvuo (which explores birdsong from the subjecthood of birds): There is a vast and perhaps insuperable gap between human experience and avian experience, resulting from the anatomical, physiological, psychologi cal, social, and environmental differences between humans and birds, and also between different bird species. What poetry gives us is a hint of emotions belonging to those rich avian worlds that are very other to our own world. Poetry cannot imitate or represent avian emotions, just as it cannot imitate or represent their songs. But poems can open a space where we can experiment with our words, signs, and empathy in order to approach meanings and feelings that belong in the avian world. In this sense nature poetry is highly affective: it engenders bodily and emotionally changing events that may promise to lead us beyond species differences. 

I adapt here the title of Thomas Nagel’s fundamental article “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel ).



Nightingale: On Expression Or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s () terms, bird poetry creates an event of becoming animal, an uplifting moment of experiencing powers, drives, or desires that belong to the realm of the avian.

Conclusion The three narratives on which this chapter has focused (the Homeric simile of the nightingale, the Ovidian text, and the ekphrastic passage of Achilles Tatius) all put a different emphasis on the fundamental question that resides at the heart of the myth of Procne: that of the connection between music, emotions, and the nonhuman. The Homeric simile focuses squarely on the phenomenology of music and on the nightingale’s song itself. The narrative opens the possibility of several types of interpretation to account for the song’s expressive features: it can be seen as arousing emotions, as expressing emotions, or as representing them. In the Homeric simile, the metamorphosis (which is implied but not described) works as the underlying justification for projecting the persona of the mourning queen onto the bird, and for hearing in the birdsong echoes of the former human self’s story. By contrast, the Ovidian and Tatian narratives concentrate on the process of metamorphosis, and do not account for the song’s features. In Achilles Tatius, the emphasis is on framing the birdsong as part of the discourse on various art forms, their respective means of representation (mimesis), and the response they create. The Tatian narrative provides a rich vocabulary and complex framework to reflect on music by analogy with visual and verbal art, and provides an indirect discourse on music by reflecting on metamorphosis as process. The text makes a rich contribution to contemporary discussions on mimesis and ekphrasis, and provides vocabulary to engage with these loaded aesthetic and ontological questions. While staying clear of projecting onto the birdsong the persona of the Athenian queen, it suggests, by analogy, that song can both arouse and represent emotions, in a way that can only be described indirectly. As for the Ovidian narrative, I have interpreted its emphasis on metamorphosis and its silence on the birdsong, in a text full of animal similes, as a stance against taking the birdsong for what it is not. Far from projecting a human persona onto the sounds of the birdsong, Ovid invites his reader to think about the difficulty of being in a body incapable of giving expression to one’s internal life. Seen from 

Lummaa  (p.  for the quotation) interpreting Lyyvuo . The reference is to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Conclusion



another perspective, it is a profound questioning (and even denunciation) of the underpinnings of expression theory. On my reading, the emphasis of the narrative is on the relationship between emotions and the nonhuman, and on the fact that music is not so much a form of representation of the emotions (a translation of internal states into a different medium) as a way of accounting for the experience of emotions itself and changes in our relationship with the world that they imply.

 

Beetle: On Rhythm

. Κέραμβος Εὐσείρου τοῦ Ποσειδῶνος καὶ Εἰδοθέας νύμφης Ὀθρηίδος ᾤκει ἐν τῇ γῇ τῇ Μηλιέων παρὰ τὴν ὑπώρειαν τῆς Ὄθρυος. ἐγένετο δὲ αὐτῷ θρέμματα πλεῖστα καὶ αὐτὰ ἐποίμαινεν αὐτός. . νύμφαι δὲ συνελάμβανον αὐτῷ, διότι αὐτὰς ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν ᾄδων ἔτερπεν· λέγεται γὰρ μουσικώτατος τῶν τότε γενέσθαι καὶ ἐπὶ βουκολικοῖς ᾄσμασι διαβοηθῆναι καὶ σύριγγα ποιμενικὴν ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσι συνθεῖναι καὶ λύρᾳ πρῶτος ἀνθρώπων κεχρῆσθαι πλεῖστά τε καὶ κάλλιστα μέλη ποιῆσαι. . τούτων οὖν χάριν λέγουσιν ὀφθῆναι αὐτῷ ποτε νύμφας καὶ χορεῦσαι πρὸς τὰ κρούματα τοῦ Κεράμβου, Πᾶνα δὲ τοῦτο κατ᾽ εὐμένειαν αὐτῷ παραγγεῖλαι καταλιπόντι τὴν Ὄθρυν ἐν τῷ πεδίῳ τὰ πρόβατα ποιμαίνειν· ἐξαίσιον γάρ τι καὶ ἄπιστον χρῆμα χειμῶνος ἐπεῖναι μέλλειν. . ὁ δὲ Κέραμβος ὑπὸ μεγαλαυχίας ἐκ νεότητος οἷα θεοβλαβὴς ἀπελαύνειν μὲν ἐκ τῆς Ὄθρυος εἰς τὸ πεδίον οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν, ἀπέρριψεν δὲ λόγον ἄχαρίν τε καὶ ἀνόητον εἰς τὰς νύμφας, ὅτι γένος μέν εἰσιν οὐκ ἀπὸ Διός, ἀλλ᾽ ἔτεκεν αὐτὰς ἡ Δεινὼ τῷ Σπερχειῷ, Ποσειδῶν δὲ πόθῳ μιᾶς αὐτῶν Διοπάτρης τὰς ἀδελφὰς ἐρρίζωσε καὶ ἐποίησεν αἰγείρους, ἄχρι αὐτὸς κορεσθεὶς τῆς εὐνῆς ἀνέλυσε καὶ πάλιν αὐταῖς ἀπέδωκε τὴν ἐξ ἀρχῆς φύσιν. . τοιαῦτα μὲν ὁ Κέραμβος ἐκερτόμησεν εἰς τὰς νύμφας. μετὰ δὲ χρόνον ὀλίγον ἐξαίφνης ἐγένετο κρυμὸς καὶ ἐπάγησαν αἱ χαράδραι καὶ πολλὴ κατέπεσε χιὼν καὶ τὰ ποίμνια τοῦ Κεράμβου σὺν αὐταῖς ἀτραποῖς καὶ δένδρεσιν ἠφανίσθη. νύμφαι δὲ μετέβαλον κατ᾽ ὀργὴν τὸν Κέραμβον, ὅτι αὐταῖς ἐλοιδόρησε, καὶ ἐγένετο ὑλοφάγος κεράμβυξ. . φαίνεται δὲ ἐπὶ τῶν ξύλων καὶ ἔστιν ἀγκύλος ἐκ τῶν ὀδόντων καὶ συνεχῶς τὰ γένεια κινεῖ, μέλας, παραμήκης, πτέρυγας στερεὰς ἔχων, ἐοικὼς τοῖς μεγάλοις κανθάροις. οὗτος ξυλοφάγος βοῦς καλεῖται, παρὰ δὲ Θετταλοῖς κεράμβυξ. τοῦτον οἱ παῖδες παίγνιον ἔχουσι καὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν ἀποτέμνοντες φέρουσιν, ἡ δὲ ἔοικε σὺν τοῖς κέρασι λύρᾳ τῇ ἐκ τῆς χελώνης. . Kerambos, son of Eusirus (the son of Poseidon) and of Eidothea the nymph of Othreis, lived in the land of the Melians at the foot of Mount Othrys. He had numerous flocks and herded them himself. . Nymphs would give him assistance since he delighted them in the mountains by singing: he was said to be the best singer of those days, to be acclaimed for 

Beetle: On Rhythm



his bucolic songs and to have invented the shepherd’s syrinx in the moun tains and to have been the first of mankind to play the lyre, composing many very beautiful songs. . Because of these skills, one day the Nymphs (so the story goes) became visible to Kerambos and danced to his music. But Pan, out of benevolence for him, gave him this advice: to leave Othrys and pasture his flocks on the plain, for the coming winter was going to be extraordinarily and unbelievably severe. . But Kerambos, with the arro gance of youth, not only decided as though stricken by some god not to drive his beasts from Othrys to the plain, but he also said graceless and mindless things to the Nymphs, stating that they were not descended from Zeus, but that Deino had given birth to them with Spercheus. He also said that Poseidon, for desire of one of them, Diopatre, had made her sisters put down roots and turned them into poplars until, having fulfilled his desires, he released them and returned them to their original nature. It was such sneers that Kerambos addressed to the Nymphs. A little while later there suddenly came a frost and the streams froze. Much snow fell on Kerambos’ flocks and they were lost to sight, as were the trees and paths. The Nymphs, in anger against Kerambos because of his abuse, metamorphosed him and he turned into a wood eating kerambyx [a stag beetle]. He can be seen on trees and has teeth in the shape of hooks, and moves his jaws constantly. He is black, long, and has hard wings, resembling a great dung beetle. He is called the “ox that eats wood” and, among the Thessalians, kerambyx. Children use him as a toy, and cut his head off to wear as a pendant. The head looks like the horns of a lyre made from a tortoiseshell. (Ant. Lib. Met. )

This final chapter makes a turn to features more primal than those examined in any of the preceding chapters: we are brought to a more primal place, Mount Othrys – the mythical stronghold of the Titans during the Titanomachy, a place that symbolizes pre-Olympian order; a more primal form of being – an insect, rather than a bird; and more primal ideas about musicking – about rhythm, and being together, rather than performance or expression. In this primal setting, we encounter the kerambyx. The kerambyx is a paradox. Now a near-silent insect (a stag beetle, lucanus ceruus), it used to be the most musical man of his time, Kerambos. While the kerambyx is still omnipresent in the countryside all over Europe,  

The text is quoted from the Budé edition (Papathomopoulos ). On the identification of the insect, Goosens . For an introduction to the world’s “inordinate fondness for beetles,” see the beautifully illustrated Evans and Bellamy . On the stag beetle in particular: Taroni ; Sprecher and Taroni ; Sprecher-Uebersax ; and Maria Fremlin’s most detailed website devoted to the insect: http://maria.fremlin.de/stagbeetles/index.html. On the etymologically related kerambycidae, Yanega . On the sound of the stag beetle, see note .



Beetle: On Rhythm

the mythical shepherd Kerambos is virtually absent from all Greek and Roman texts; Kerambos’ story is only preserved in the passage quoted above and in a short passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The myth is also different from many other musical myths, and from the ones I have examined so far: in a reversal of the Procne story read in the previous chapter, where a woman turns into the most musical of birds, a most musical man here becomes an insect whose sounds are barely accessible to human ears. The creature that results from the transformation does not keep any of the characteristics of the used-to-be-human. Finally, the narrative seems to say nothing about music, except to explain the visual aspect of the insect, whose head resembles a lyre. It is no surprise then that the kerambyx has not been adopted into the big musical family that includes crickets, katydids, and cicadas, whose musicality is celebrated all over Greek and Latin literature. The kerambyx instead introduces a much more disquieting presence, one haunting the Kafkaesque imagination. In these respects, the myth might illustrate Eric Brown’s insight that insects are “a kind of Other not only for human beings but for animals and animal studies as well, best left underfoot or in footnotes.” Brown builds on Pliny the Elder’s rationale that the craftsmanship of nature is nowhere more remarkable than in the case of insects (nusquam alibi spectatiore naturae rerum artificio, HN .). What attracts natural philosophers, scholars, and artists alike is “insect form and materiality – that is categorically the shape, the workmanship, the ‘artificio’ of the insect that mark its singularity.” But why Kerambos? Is it only his lyric looks that explain his story? What does the silence of the beetle have to do with the virtuosity of the nightingale and questions of musical aesthetics more generally? Is it a counterexample to all musical myths, an aesthetic aberration, a posthuman provocation? Whatever he is, Kerambos pushes to their limits our ways of understanding music, metamorphosis, and their connection to life itself, and of reading musical myths in general. He forces us to complete the posthumanist project undertaken in this book and to venture into even less familiar acoustic territories.







Ov. Met. .–. Pliny (HN .) accounts for the origins of the Latin name of the stag beetle (lucanus ceruus). In Kafka’s “Wedding Preparations in the Country” a character mentions a vision of himself lying in bed in the form of “a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer” (Kafka : ). On insects as an obsession of early twentieth-century intellectuals, Sleigh . E. Brown : ix. On the unsettling character of insects more generally, see also the essays in ibid., pp. –.

Kerambos’ Poetic Compost



To do justice to the tale of the kerambyx and to the questions it raises, this chapter will examine first what I call the insect’s “poetic compost” (the poetic traditions processed and fertilely repurposed to make the kerambyx’s tale sprout, as it were). It will then examine how the narrative provides different understandings of what a “musical life” means and what rhythm means in connection to a musical life. I will conclude by investigating how the insect, as an embodiment of rhythm and flow, is a paradigm for the absolute connectedness of living things through music, and the paradigm for the form of “nomadic subjectivity” that Rosi Braidotti has described.

Kerambos’ Poetic Compost Musical Shepherding The main narrative about Kerambos comes from Antoninus Liberalis, a second- or third-century CE Greek author about whom we hardly know anything securely. Liberalis might refer to the fact that he was a freedman, and the name Antoninus suggests that he was active in Antonine times, in the second or third century CE (some prefer the second century for linguistic reasons, others the third for the wider use of the patronymic in that era), but nothing can be said for sure about his intellectual environment. Antoninus Liberalis collected forty-one stories of metamorphosis, most of them devoted to the origins of birds, animals, plants, and some natural phenomena. The narratives are mostly inspired by Hellenistic sources: twenty-two stories are based on Nicander of Colophon’s secondcentury BCE epic collection of Heteroeumena (Metamorphoses), and ten on the work of an otherwise unknown Hellenistic author, Boeo’s Ornithogonia. The overall purpose of Antoninus Liberalis’ collection is unclear, the audience for such a work can only be surmised, and it is difficult to make sense of the ordering of the stories. All we can say is that our author does not follow the order of the sources he seems to follow: although Nicander’s Metamorphoses has not survived, we can reckon from what Antoninus  

On Antoninus Liberalis, see Chapter , pp. –. Antoninus’ text indicates clearly the “sources” for the stories through marginal notes with the name of an author and ἱστορεῖ. The historicity and exactitude of these “sources” is discussed in Papathomopoulos : xv–xix. For a different view of Antoninus’ program, Delattre in press: “Antoninus Liberalis sets himself the task of harmonizing and recomposing these references [between mythographers] in order to provide a new version that contains, comments, and finally goes beyond them.”



Beetle: On Rhythm

Liberalis reports that Nicander’s books  and  mostly dealt with transformations into birds, while book  (from which our Kerambos story is drawn) was concerned with stories of petrification, dendrification, and transformation into nymphs – the very topic of Kerambos’ inset story about the Nymphs being turned into poplar trees and then returned to their original form. In Antoninus Liberalis’ collection as a whole, several stories are concerned with musical phenomena, including the myths of the Emathides (who compete with the Muses and are turned into magpies in a scene that also takes place in Thessaly), of Chelidon and Aedon (a version of the Procne and Philomela story), of Hylas (an alternate version to the Echo narrative), and of the dancing Messapians. If there is an Antoninian aesthetic program, it is difficult to make sense of it. It would seem from this presentation that Antoninus’ book specializes in alternate versions of myths, told in “grimly simple” or “Grand Guignol” style. And yet: far from being simply a learned invention of the Imperial age (or precisely because it is a learned invention of the Imperial age, an era obsessed, like the Hellenistic period, with traditions, actual or invented), the Kerambos myth itself taps into much more ancient material. The narrative is shaped along familiar lines, using motives (such as the protos heuretes [“first inventor”] motif, or the revenge of the gods punishing ungrateful or hubristic mortals) that draw from a long poetic tradition and recur throughout mythographical literature. Even though Kerambos is not a familiar face, he is reminiscent of many other mythical figures. In fact, as a virtuoso musician, the most musical of his contemporaries (μουσικώτατος), and the first man to have played the lyre among men, he recalls other musical heroes: Orpheus (also described as μουσικώτατος καὶ σοφώτατος, “most musical and most wise,” Ath. .c) and 





 



About sixty different species of birds are mentioned in Antoninus Liberalis. For a sample: guinea fowl (Met.  Nicander fr.  G&S); swan (Met.  Nicander fr.  G&S); different kinds of birds (Met.  fr.  G&S); owls (Met.  fr.  G&S). Petrification (Met.  fr.  G&S; Met.  fr.  G&S; Met.  fr.  G&S; also in book : Met.  fr.  G&S, a corpse is replaced by a statue); dendrification (Met.  fr.  G&S; also in book : Met.  fr.  G&S) and turning into nymph (Met.  fr.  G&S; also in book , Met.  fr.  G&S). On Chelidon and Aedon (a version of the Procne and Philomela story), see Chapter . On Hylas, Mauerhofer ; Fabiano . On the Messapians, Papaioannou : –. All these episodes are also treated by Ovid (drawing on Nicander) in his Metamorphoses. On style: Celoria : . Contra, Rocchi :  argues that Kerambos’ identification as a lyre player is only meant to justify his later visual aspect (lyre-like): it is only a function of his animal metamorphosis; see also Forbes Irving : . Kleingu¨nther .

Kerambos’ Poetic Compost



Amphion, both of whom are said to have received the lyre from the musician god Hermes, via his brother Apollo. Being most famous for his bucolic songs (βουκολικοῖς ᾄσμασι) and for many very beautiful tunes (πλεῖστά τε καὶ κάλλιστα μέλη), Kerambos is also a version of the hero Daphnis, the inventor of the bucolic genre. More generally, Kerambos is thought of in the mode of other musical herdsmen, such as Anchises, Paris, Linus, or Aristaeus, young men associated with pasturing animals and musical activity, and with a privileged relationship with a divine figure. Kerambos is also a mortal version of several divine shepherds: most obviously Pan, the theriomorphic god, patron of all shepherds and inventor of the syrinx; Pan’s father, Hermes, another god involved with flocks, and the first to play the lyre among the gods; and Apollo, who took up the lyre in earnest after his baby brother Hermes invented it on a whim, according to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Kerambos’ closeness to the divine is most explicit in the reference to the epiphany of the Nymphs. Their revelation of their dance to him is a marker of his musical exceptionality: it signals both the power of his music on nonhuman creatures (conceptualized in its most uncanny respect), and the sway of the nonhuman world over a human. This privileged position among the Nymphs sets Kerambos, again, in a position not so far from that of the god Pan, said to be the Nymphs’ leader in the dance. Poetic Initiation But this idea of divine epiphany invites us to see even more pointed parallels with different figures. The narrative of Kerambos is actually reminiscent of other narratives of divine manifestation and poetic initiation (Dichterweihe), especially those of Hesiod and of Archilochus, and posits itself as a late prose recasting of early poetic aetiological stories. At the beginning of his account of the creation of the cosmos in the Theogony, 





Traditionally, the turtle-shell lyre is described as an invention of Hermes, who then transmits it (tradita) to Orpheus via Apollo (see, for example, Hyg. Poet. astr. .; T  Kern). An alternative version gives Linus as inventor of the musical instrument: Schol. AV Il. .  citing Philochorus; FGrH  F . See also Aesch. Prom. – on the invention of the syrinx. Aelian (VH . PMG ) attributes the historical beginnings of bucolic poetry (τὰ βουκολικὰ μέλη) to the poet Stesichorus, who composed a Daphnis recounting the myth of the shepherd. On musical shepherds, see Larson : –. On herdsmen in Greek thought: Gu¨tzwiller . On nymphs: Od. .–, .–; Hes. Theog. –; Hymn. Hom. Ven. –; Callim. Hymn .–. On Pan as leader of the Nymphs’ chorus: Hymn. Hom. Pan. –; Soph. Aj. . On the power of nymphs and their responsibility “for altered states of consciousness linked to the influence of the landscape itself,” Larson : .



Beetle: On Rhythm

Hesiod presents himself as pastoring his flocks at the foot of holy Helicon (ἄρνας ποιμαίνονθ᾽ Ἑλικῶνος ὕπο ζαθέοιο, ), when the Muses address him, teach him beautiful song (καλὴν ἐδίδαξαν ἀοιδήν, ), and breathe into him an inspired voice (ἐνέπνευσαν μοι αὐδὴν | θέσπιν, –) – an epiphany that the Hesiodic narrator also reminisces about in the Works and Days . This is the first description of the link between shepherding and musical initiation, or between the shepherd’s staff and the lyre. The epiphany of the Muses to a shepherd is all the more surprising since shepherds, in the Archaic imagination, “not only tend to be young but also fallible,” something that the Muses themselves make clear, when they address the young Hesiod not by his name, but with the generic ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ' ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον (“shepherds of the field, base things, mere bellies!”, Theog. ). The Hesiodic passage introduces key elements that all inform the Kerambos narrative: the epiphany of the Muses, the insult to the shepherd (followed by a boast about their own power), and the connections between shepherding, poetry, and food, elements that I will be returning to shortly. Another scene relies on a similar matrix: the epiphany of the Muses to the seventh-century BCE iambic poet Archilochus. The way Archilochus was introduced to his musical destiny is described in the so-called Mnesiepes inscription, a third-century BCE text discovered on the poet’s native island of Paros and describing his life: The story goes that when Archilochus was still a little boy, he was sent by his father Telesicleus to the country, to the deme called Leimones, to bring a cow for sale. Getting up very early, by moonlight he led the cow towards the city. When he got to the place called Lissides, he thought he saw a group of women. Reckoning that they were coming back from work and going to the city he began to tease them [σκώπτειν]; they, for their part, welcomed him with jeers and laughter [μετὰ παιδιᾶς καὶ γέλωτος] and asked him whether he was selling his cow. When he responded that he was, they said that they would give him a good price. Upon these words, both they and the cow disappeared, but he saw a lyre at his feet. He was struck 

 



On epiphany, Platt , esp. – for the connection with the Dichterweihe, and Gumpert : –, on poetic initiation as the “collision with transcendence.” An epigram of Asclepiades has Hesiod shepherding in the middle of the afternoon G&P () , the time most dangerous for nympholepsy (on which, Pache ). Duchemin . Boys-Stones and Haubold : . On shepherds’ fallibility, see Il. .–; Od. ., which “has a proverbial ring to it” (Boys-Stones and Haubold : ). On their youth, Od. .–. The Mnesiepes inscription is edited as SEG .. On the passage, Brillante ; Clay . On Archilochus as a prototype of invective poetry, Rotstein : –.

Kerambos’ Poetic Compost



but a little while later he recovered his mind and understood that the ladies who had appeared to him were Muses, and that they had given him a lyre. So picking it up, he made his way to the city and explained to his father what had happened.

We have already encountered the equation “cow for song” in the story of Phatta and the rapt of her cattle (Chapter ). But it is worth pausing over the mythical archetype for this motif, which I have referred to several times already: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Probably a composition from the fifth century BCE, the hymn celebrates the accomplishments of the god Hermes, born of Zeus and the nymph Maia, and recounts his integration into Mount Olympus. After a few lines dedicated to the god’s birth, the text describes how the one-day old god invented the lyre (by killing a turtle and affixing arms and strings to a sounding box), stole his brother Apollo’s cows, defended himself in a trial judged by Zeus, delighted his brother Apollo with his musical talent, and acquired legitimate divine status on Olympus after a settlement with his brother involving the distribution of the privilege of shepherding and music playing. Even from this quick summary, it is easy to see that the Homeric Hymn to Hermes provides archetypal elements to understand the collocation of shepherd, musical talent, and epiphany of divine figures in a rural setting to both the Hesiodic and Archilochean narratives. The story of Kerambos seems to presuppose this same existing pattern: while Archilochus and Hesiod are presented as gaining musical talent in losing their status of shepherd and being granted an instrument establishing their poetic authority, Kerambos loses his musical and shepherd status by losing his flocks and becoming an animal himself, in a form of reverse initiation. But there is more at stake in the parallel between Hesiod, Archilochus, Hermes, and Kerambos than the loose equation of “animal for song,” and the parallels between the stories are worth examining further. Indeed, Archilochus, the Hesiodic Muses, and Kerambos all practice the mockery, taunting, and verbal abuse characteristic of the iambos genre – a genre and mode of speech whose origins are retraced in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. In the poem, the first song that the baby god Hermes performs is a hymn celebrating his parents and his birth. It is described as a beautiful improvisation (ἐξ αὐτοσχεδίης πειρώμενος, ) that the narrator compares to “the sort of indirect taunting (kertomein) that young men might utter at feasts” (ἠΰτε κοῦροι | ἡβηταὶ θαλίῃσι παραιβόλα κερτομέουσιν, –). 

Vergados  ad loc.: “‘tease each other with indirect attacks,’ with the idea that they will provoke each other to continue the game.”



Beetle: On Rhythm

Taunting is also the specific mode that the Muses use in Hesiod when, instead of addressing the shepherd-poet directly, they use an indeterminate plural (“shepherds of the field”), immediately followed by a sneer (“lowly creatures, mere bellies”). Finally, Archilochus too, in the text quoted above, participates in the iambic genre, when he makes fun (σκώπτειν) of the ladies coming back from the fields, and they return his jibes. All these forms of mocking, taunting, and verbal abuse are markers of the genre of iambos or invective poetry. It is difficult to miss that the two ideas presented above, kertomein (make fun of, taunt) and iambos (abuse), are at the heart of the name of our musical hero: Ker-ambos. Among the few critics who have commented on the myth of Kerambos, Jesper Svenbro and John Scheid have done the most with this idea. In their elegant and detailed analysis of the myth, the two scholars, working in the tradition of Marcel Detienne, focus on mythopoetic issues contained in the narrative and on the logic of mythmaking encapsulated in the name of the hero and of the metamorphosed insect. Their virtuoso analysis shows the deployment of the possibilities contained in Ker-amb-os and ker-amb-yx: not only is the ker part of the two nouns associated with biting and railing (ker-tomein/κερτομεῖν) that characterizes his youthful mockery prior to metamorphosis (kertomein comes from the root *skern, “tear”), ker also appears in the “horns” of the beetle (ker-ata/κέρατα). With his giant teeth-like horns, Kerambos is all railing, biting, and head-butting. He “has teeth in the shape of hooks, and moves his jaws constantly” (ἀγκύλος ἐκ τῶν ὀδόντων καὶ συνεχῶς τὰ γένεια κινεῖ): all this tearing and chewing make him an iconic figure of iambic abuse. Moreover, as Svenbro and Scheid explain, the horned head of the insect is also the heart (or as the Greeks thought of it, the head) of the story: the kerata (“horns”) of the stag beetle correspond also to the arms of the lyre, and, for the two scholars, this conceptual continuity motivates the creation of the myth. As for the tail part of Kerambos’ name, ambos is programmatic in itself, and has strong poetico-musical resonances: it is present not only in the noun for the genres of iamb and dithyramb but also 





On the term λοιδορία, used to describe Kerambos’ offense against the Nymphs (ὅτι αὐταῖς ἐλοιδόρησε), as a standard term connected with abusive behavior and laughter, Rotstein : –. To my knowledge, the myth has only been examined by Philippe Borgeaud (Borgeaud : –), Stella Georgoudi in her study of transhumance (Georgioudi ), and Jesper Svenbro in several studies, most recently in a volume co-authored with John Scheid (Svenbro ; Svenbro , reworked in part in Scheid and Svenbro : –). Richardson : –; Clarke .

Amousos Kerambos or the Tragedy of Bad Rhythm



in the names of the lowly characters Iambe and Lycambes, also associated with the countryside, mockery, and the iambic genre. There is a further way in which the story exploits the mythopoetic capacity of the name of the shepherd. The noun “Kerambos” acoustically recalls a variety of other nouns for pastoral creatures and practices. It is a paronym of the bucolic karambas (shepherd’s staff ) and the Thessalian name of the insect, kerambyx, rhymes with bombyx, silkworm, as well as with other pastoral presences (Bombuca, for example, is the lover invoked in the love song of one of the reapers in Theocritus’ Idyll ). The noun bombyx also designates “variously the aulos itself, the part of the aulos, or one of the sounds it produces.” With its characteristic ending in -mbyx, it is also partly evocative of the sound of bees. As this survey of the constellation of figures around Kerambos and his name indicates, the mythical shepherd is deeply embedded both in a rich pastoral texture and in a generic iambic matrix; the mere utterance of his name conjures up a host of other pastoral realities and verbal practices. The shepherd has sprouted from the poetic compost of many lyric figures, from Hermes and Pan to Hesiod and Archilochus, through Orpheus, Paris, and Daphnis. So how are we to read the narrative of his metamorphosis?

Amousos Kerambos or the Tragedy of Bad Rhythm The main difference between Kerambos and other poetic figures comes in the second part of the tale, once Kerambos abuses the Nymphs verbally and destroys his special relationship with them. By so doing, he confirms that he is closely modeled on certain mythical figures, but also neatly inverts and negates the values they embody. Seen another way, the inversion of the poetic tropes only reinforces the associations highlighted above. First, Kerambos does precisely the opposite of Archilochus: Archilochus knew when to stop teasing the ladies coming back from the fields, and his iambic stance connected him to his society. By contrast, Kerambos does not know when to stop. He goes too far, “in the rashness of youth,” and insults the Nymphs (αὐταῖς ἐλοιδόρησε). His insults, as opposed to the  

Rotstein : ch. . Hunter  ad loc. and Michaelides : –. There is a strange connection between reaping songs and decapitation: “at least one traditional reaping-song told how Lityerses, son of Midas, of Celaenae in Phrygia, after entertaining strangers hospitably, made them reap with him till evening, when he cut off their heads and hid their bodies in the sheaves. This apparently gave the name to all reaping-songs” (Edmonds : ).



Beetle: On Rhythm

measured skoptein of Archilochus and the appropriate response he gets, and as opposed to the decorous kertomein of young men at feasts (described in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) are not kata kairon: they are indecorous and foolish (λόγον ἄχαρίν τε καὶ ἀνόητον). While Archilochus’ teasing was acceptable, and actually insured that he was bestowed poetic status, Kerambos’ taunting disrupts and gets him punished. Kerambos also inverts the Hermes-singer motif. In his abusive genealogy of the Nymphs, Kerambos does precisely the opposite of what Hermes does in the Homeric hymn: right after he has invented the lyre, Hermes sings a song that tells of Maia’s union with the Cronid Zeus (–), and comically aggrandizes the status of his mother. By singing this genealogy, Hermes not only asserts his own Olympian origins and resolves his “identity crisis” (he is the son of a nymph and an Olympian god) but he also performatively achieves status: his singing brings him divine status, just as the narrator’s singing of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes establishes the status of the deity celebrated. Kerambos, for his part, does exactly the opposite: although born of a nymph (Eidothea), he insults his mother’s pedigree by claiming that the race of the Nymphs is “not born from Zeus but from Deino [one of the terrible Graeae] and the river Spercheus” (γένος μέν εἰσιν οὐκ ἀπὸ Διός, ἀλλ' ἔτεκεν αὐτὰς ἡ Δεινὼ τῷ Σπερχειῷ). He provides a competing genealogy to that of the narrator, but also one that, instead of elevating, lowers the status of the object of his speech. Instead of a theogony, we get a tale of metamorphosis (of nymphs into trees and back) and divine mischief (Poseidon’s seduction of a nymph). Instead of reinforcing the cosmos of Olympus through song (as Hermes does with his), Kerambos destabilizes the order of Othrys through his insults. Like the narrator of the collection of Metamorphoses himself, Kerambos does not account for how things came into the world from the very beginning to create a cosmos, but he focuses on the mechanisms that create flow in the ordering of the cosmos once it has been established, and the constant unsettling of any fixed category. It is as if, in a perfect reversal of the story of the Ur-shepherd, Hermes, Kerambos were performatively activating his own undoing in the world, his delegitimization, by making up a false genealogy of the Nymphs. In terms of poetics, too, his choice of the wrong genre (abandoning bucolic for abuse) is translated in  



On the terms associated with the idea of iambos, Rotstein : –. On the ambiguous social function of iambos, ibid., p.  sums up the difficulty of the genre: iambos can be both welcome and unlawful. Clay .

Amousos Kerambos or the Tragedy of Bad Rhythm



metaphorical, and geographic, terms in the concluding portion of the myth, as he loses the roads (of song) in the snow. Ultimately, the story can be read as a tale of divine punishment, familiar from other myths about punished musical heroes: Marsyas, who inappropriately taunted Apollo; Thamyras, who challenged the Muses; the Sirens, who competed with the Muses; the Messapian youths, who boasted before the Nymphs; and the Pierides who taunted the Muses (in a scene of poetic contest that took place on Mount Othrys, as Ovid relates in Met. , in the very landscape where our story unfolds). One might think that Kerambos’ fault is different, since it does not involve musical performance per se. But neither do the myths involving Marsyas or Thamyras. In these cases as well, the fault is less musical (a faulty technique or subpar execution) than ethical: mortals should not compete with gods, lower gods with Olympians, and categories should not be confused. Like all these musical characters who showed hubris and competed with superior creatures, Kerambos faces life-changing consequences for his act. It is not blindness (Thamyras’ punishment) nor flaying (Marsyas’), but a drastic lowering of acoustic volume – a near silencing – through metamorphosis into a beetle that Kerambos endures for his fault. From musical shepherd, Kerambos turns into one of the “base things,” the “mere bellies” that the Hesiodic Muses sneered at: the insect is reduced to a body part, a giant jaw, constantly eating wood with his hooked teeth and making virtually no sound. It is at this juncture that invective and insective issues converge. We need to reevaluate the story and appreciate the poetic significance of the transformation of Kerambos into an arthropod, a stag beetle “resembling large dung beetles” (ἐοικὼς τοῖς μεγάλοις κανθάροις), rather than into any other creature. Deborah Steiner’s work on “beetle poetics” in particular has highlighted the way in which beetles are specifically associated, in Greek thought, with abuse. As she argues, “authors introduce the zoologically lowly kantharos (dung beetle) in order to signal their embrace of styles of speech (chiefly mockery, invective and scatology) and genres that belong to 



The expression “path of song” (οἶμος ἀοιδῆς) is first attested in Hymn. Hom. Merc. . It is an Indo-European expression consonant with many Archaic poetic images for the path of speech (Pind. Ol. ., for example). For more, see Ford :  n. . Marsyas taunting Apollo: Diod. Sic. Bib. hist. ..; Hyg. Fab. ; Apollod. Bibl. ..; Plin. HN .. Thamyras challenging the Muses: first told in Il. .– (and picked up in Euripides’ Rhesus); Hyg. Poet. astr. .. The Sirens competing with the Muses: Paus. ... The Messapian youths boasting before the Nymphs: Ant. Lib. Met. . There is another version of a contest between Muses and other deities in Ant. Lib. Met.  about the Emathides. (The story is also told in Ov. Met. .–, and a parallel to the story can be found in Corinna, PMG ).



Beetle: On Rhythm

the correspondingly lowest rungs of the literary hierarchy, and, on occasion, to subvert or debase the symbols and conceits found in the ‘higher’ modes of discourse.” Steiner adduces scores of examples of ancient authors reflecting on the ethical, linguistic, and sociopolitical baseness associated with beetles. In her analysis, Antoninus Liberalis’ story of Kerambos figures at the end of a long list of ancient authors and genres, including the Archaic poets Semonides and Hipponax, the animal fable (ainos), and Attic comedy, that reflect on beetles, their specific diet, their affinity with scatology, and the ethics they were attached to in the Greek and Roman imagination. In the light of this larger network surrounding musical and animal ideas, it becomes clear that the rash Kerambos could not remain a fabulous musician, as outstanding music and inappropriate ethical behavior cannot coexist. As we saw in Chapter , in Greek thought, music is more than an acoustic activity: mousike is always connected to ethics, song and dance is a way to think the politico-cultural cohesion of the city and the community, and music is a mode of life, a bios. Tragedy often builds on this truth (via the depiction of musical heroes), and it is most spectacularly deployed as a central tenet of Platonic political philosophy and social psychology. There is a proper way to live an ordered, enriching life of the mind, and ideas of musicality, ethics, and other moral qualities go hand in hand. Nobody illustrates this better than the hero Amphion, who defends the mousikos bios, a contemplative mode of life, to his brother Zethus (a hunter and herdsman who defends hard work and the defense of property). Read against this cultural backdrop, Kerambos’ taunting of the Nymphs is doomed to bring about his demise as a musician, since he shows flaws in his conduct and is thus punished for his ethical shortcomings. From mousikotatos, Kerambos, all of a sudden, turns amousos, a victim of amousia, this quality of life without the Muses that Steven Halliwell has described with much finesse. The youth’s arrogant attitude goes beyond jeering at the Nymphs: he also refuses to do the right thing, which is to bring his animals down from the mountain, and to respect the rhythm of seasons on which transhumance is based (an important aspect to which

 



 Steiner : . On music as value in life, Halliwell . On the bios mousikos, see Eur. Antiope (TrGF V., frr. –, , –, –, ). On the values defended by the two brothers, Gibert . Halliwell .

Amousos Kerambos or the Tragedy of Bad Rhythm



I will return). The rashness and hubris that reveal Kerambos’ lack of understanding doom him. What he does not understand is the kairos, the right timing: he mocks the Muses in excess, not “according to what is opportune” (κατὰ μοῖραν), and he does not do the right thing at the right time – a crippling problem for a musician. I thus see the narrative of the Kerambos myth reflecting upon the aesthetic question of amousia, the lack of understanding of the art of the Muses, a mismatch between type of life and beauty. Kerambos is not “aroused to a powerful passion for the most beautiful sights,” to use Halliwell’s description of a musical life. His speech itself is unmusical, as he dwells on the lust of Poseidon, the lowly origins of the Nymphs, the motif of raping nymphs rather than falling under their spell. Kerambos the unsurpassable musician and shepherd favored by Pan does not live up to the promise of his art: even though he is described as most musical in his activities, he shows a complete lack of understanding of beautiful ideas, mocks and abuses instead of praising, and disregards the advice of the rustic god. He becomes a living illustration of Plato’s amousos individual in the Republic (c–e): such a person, who never keeps the company of a Muse, is a misologos (“reason hater”), and lacks any concern for the rest of mousike, metaphorically becomes “like a beast [ὥσπερ θηρίον] living in ignorance and insensitivity, with a lack of rhythm and grace [μετὰ ἀρρυθμίας τε καὶ ἀχαριστίας].” The same idea of rhythm as fundamental to a good life also appears in Protagoras’ theory of education (as we read it in Plato’s Protagoras: b, where “the whole of human life (in speech and action) needs very good rhythm and harmony [εὐρυθμότεροι καὶ εὐαρμοστότεροι].” Kerambos’ metamorphosis into a stag beetle that looks, as Antoninus Liberalis specifies, like a great kantharos (dung beetle), can be understood as the combination of two very Greek ideas: one, that “a life without music is not worth living” and the other, that a “dung beetle leads the worst [kakiston] way of life” (Semonides fr.  West IE). Kerambos’ new insectile form is the embodiment of this moral outlook. What is striking about his metamorphosis is his radical otherness, the fact that nothing 



Rocchi :  explains that the myth is generally taken to explain the origins of transhumance or the end of nomadism with the introduction of rearing animals as an integral part of civil life. The practice of transhumance is attested in Soph. OT, –. On transhumance, Georgioudi ; Skydsgaard ; and a good summary of the agropastoralism/transhumance debate and “pastoral politics” in Howe : –. Also McInerney : –, on pastoralism and landscapes of the mind. Halliwell : .



Beetle: On Rhythm

remains of his old musical self: he constantly moves his jaws, like the monstrous Gorgon, Euryale, that Pindar describes in Pythian , an ode devoted to the invention of a musical genre (the many-headed nome, polykephalos nomos) and to the creation of the aulos, ideologically opposed to the lyre. The description of the insect’s silent effort is also reminiscent of the effort of the player of a wind instrument (the musician playing the syrinx or the aulos, as suggested in the Pindaric ode). Kerambos as insect goes through the motions of a great musician – but unlike the cacophonic monster of the Pindaric ode, his overworking mouth produces no sound. That is his punishment: he has become the silent ghost of a wind player. Ultimately, his metamorphosis looks like a metaphor for the very Greek truth that an amousos life, a life without mousike understood as a graceful pairing of ethics and aesthetics, a life lacking rhythm and harmony, is not worth living. In the lowly beetle, there can be no music.

The Beetle and the Metronome Yet considering music mostly as a value of Greek bios, or as one mode of life to be adopted amongst other possibilities, leaves aside two central aspects of the narrative: first, the attention devoted to local geography and to the insect’s ecological embeddedness; and second, the particular mode of life and mode of thought that insects in general embody. In the rest of this chapter, I want to propose a different reading of the myth from the one I have offered so far, one that is much more subterranean, relies on a different type of ontology, and, in a way, more appropriate to insectile thinking. Having considered the important connection, in Greek thought, between music and life as bios, I now want to reflect on the connection between musicking and another form of life, or rather on the connection between music and life considered from a different point of view. My goal is to read the myth as a reflection on a nonhuman-centered understanding of time, rhythm, and music, and as a form of discourse on musical zoe. 

Stag beetles are silent, except at the larval stage: Sprecher-Uebersax and Durrer . The kerambycidae, however, make sounds: Yanega :  write that an important feature of the species, “less universal but quite practical when you are collecting live beetles, is the possession of a mesonotal stridulitrum. In essence, if you pick up a beetle and it squeaks or chirps, it is very likely to be a cerambycid.” There are, however, modern poetic representations of the insect’s sounds heard when it takes flight. Of the sound of the beetle’s flight, Tennyson writes in Claribel: “At eve the beetle boometh | Athwart the thickest lone | At noon the wild bee hummeth | about the moss’d headstone.” Thomas Gray wrote, in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight | And all the air a solemn stillness holds, | Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, | And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.”

The Beetle and the Metronome



Chapter  of this book introduced the notion of zoe (“vitalistic, prehuman, generative life”), in the interpretation of the myth of Syrinx/the syrinx; here I want to insist on the fact that zoe is the complementary way to conceptualize life as bios (“a discursive and political discourse about life”). Historically, bios has been foregrounded and privileged, and zoe has been hushed, as the embarrassing half of the couple – zoe is “this obscenity, this life in me . . . intrinsic to my being and yet . . . so much ‘itself’ that it is independent of the will . . .” and which is in the end “experienced as an alien other.” Because the story of Kerambos’ metamorphosis (like all the myths we have read) concentrates on the continuity, within a single body, between musician, insect, and inanimate object, it invites us to shift the focus from reflecting on music as constitutive of a quasi-divine, ethically oriented, bios as I have argued above, to consider it in the grittier, and more exuberantly mindless, context of zoe and its environment. Because in our myths music is an agent of metamorphosis, it actually can only be a manifestation of zoe. Music Makes Place First, the environment. I have in places noted the importance of the landscape in understanding the myths read so far – the rich ecosystem of Lesbos, the forested recesses of Thrace, a shady riverbank outside Athens. In the case of our narrative, the story does not unfold behind the walls of Thebes or in an Athenian music school, but in a specific ecosystem described in the opening lines of the story: the mountains of Thessaly, in the Melians’ territory, a wild place, the abode of lynxes, lions, and fierce snakes, witches and wild herbs. The place carries its own poetic memory: as I mentioned at the start, Mount Othrys is the mountain where the Titans were based during their fight against the Olympians, but also the place where the musical god Apollo use to pasture Admetus’ flocks, and Thessaly more generally is the site of the contest between Muses and Emathides/Pierides. Nothing makes the relevance of the place clearer than the version of the Kerambos myth transmitted by Ovid. The passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses devoted to Kerambos is as short as it is enigmatic. It is recounted in the context of the description of Medea’s flight through northern Greece. The witch flies over Thessaly and over  

  Braidotti : . Ibid., p. . Mili : . Hes. Theog.  for the Titans; Eur. Alc.  for Apollo. On the relationship between myth and map, see Hawes .



Beetle: On Rhythm Othryn et euentu ueteris loca nota Cerambi; hic ope nympharum sublatus in aera pennis, cum grauis infuse tellus foret obruta ponto, Deucalioneas effugit inobrutus undas.

Mount Othrys, and the places made famous by what happened long ago to Kerambos. Thanks to the work of the Nymphs, he was borne through the air on wings, and when the heavy mass of the earth was covered by the sea, he escaped unflooded the waters of Deucalion. (Ov. Met. . )

In this version, we do not hear about how or why Kerambos was metamorphosed, nor what he was prior to being turned into a winged being. All we can surmise is that, first, Kerambos’ story belongs to the beginning of the world since Ovid narrated the story of Deucalion’s flood, to which the last lines of our passage refer, in book .–, devoted to the origins of the world, and second, that the Nymphs here too play an important role, by helping him escape thanks to his winged form (making him either a bird or a winged insect). As short as the story is, its presence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses speaks to an important point: that myth, memory, and landscape and experience of the world are connected through the reality of environmental conditions (floods, storms, etc.). The land (here Othrys) is shaped as much by poetic memory (among other stories, that of Kerambos’ escape from the flood) as by natural elements (the flood itself ). The ecology of Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses as a whole reinforces that idea. The story told about Kerambos is only one point of entry into a kaleidoscopic world where all beings are connected, not only through the stories told about them within the text of the Metamorphoses but also through their changes of form between stories. The story told about the Nymphs turned poplar trees in particular is recounted in a much developed and different version in another passage of the Metamorphoses ( about Dryope). This narrative interconnectedness is representative of the lived interconnectedness of beings: for what seems now part of the natural landscape actually use to be a human animal. More than stories of endless transformation, what we find in Antoninus Liberalis’ project as a whole is an exuberant celebration of zoe: in this shape-shifting universe, nonhuman animals, trees, rocks, and places are all the result of metamorphosis. There is no explicit underlying theory of being (on the model of Orpheus’ speech on metempsychosis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example) but in each separate narrative in Antoninus Liberalis’ anthology of transformations the unruly reality and the grittiness of zoe is vindicated and legitimized by a story.

The Beetle and the Metronome



This focus on place actually bears on an additional, crucial feature of the Kerambos narrative. I emphasized earlier how Kerambos’ invective and taunting of the Nymphs sealed his fate but something else, just as if not more important, is responsible for Kerambos’ downfall: his ignoring Pan’s advice, and the specific climatic and ecological advice that the god offered him. Pan tried to help Kerambos, but the shepherd, in his youthful arrogance, did not listen. Embodying the false idea that “the human” has control over “nature” and is somehow separate from it, Kerambos adheres to a vision of life (and music) that is disconnected from (and inherently superior to) place, time, and the elements. In this deafness to the god’s environmental recommendations, we might be witnessing here the first ecological crisis: Kerambos does not observe warnings about what time and place demand, and where he as a human animal fits into this whole. The shepherd sneers at Pan’s warning and ignores pastoral time, thus committing an even more primal hubristic act than that against the Nymphs, in action and not in words. For if timing and sensing what is appropriate is important for poetics and music, it is crucial for pastoral life and shepherding. Transhumance, the practice of moving flocks to different altitudes according to seasonal cycles, is the human rhythmic response to the demands of the environment. Considered in structuralist terms, one could say, as Philippe Borgeaud does in his analysis of the myth, that transhumance is a condition for establishing order in the wild, where human presence is only temporary. Pastoral space needs to be given direction, and human movements in the wild need to be given rhythmical periodicity, in order to be part of civilized activities: “Refuser la transhumance équivaut à se livrer sans retour au dérèglement.” Only transhumance allows shepherds to escape nomadism, the equivalent of a nonlife in the Greek sense. Kerambos’ refusal to bring his flocks down from the mountain in time is the geographic and temporal illustration of the shepherd’s poetic fault and ethical flaw (his indulging in the wrong musical genre in reference to the Nymphs) and his unacceptable transgressive behavior. But there is an alternative to the structuralist reading of the myth, one that recognizes that Kerambos’ fault resides, rather, in his failure to acknowledge his embeddedness in an environment. Kerambos does not err by refusing to “escape nomadism” but by ignoring the god’s advice and the fundamental truth that there is no being outside an ecosystem.  

For an interpretation of Pan as embodiment of ecological consciousness, Hughes . Borgeaud : –.



Beetle: On Rhythm

Through his story, Kerambos’ fate illustrates the essential reality of zoe: that all beings are embedded in an environment, connected to it and each other, and co-constitutive of it. They make the ecosystem as much as they are shaped by it. The recent work of musicologists and composers contributing to the growing field of Ecomusicology provides us with a way of reevaluating more systematically the importance of place and the nonhuman environment in the interpretation of our narrative. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Ecomusicology probes what used to be considered boundaries between categories. Among its claims figures the important idea that music does not just take place but makes place. Kerambos’ character underlines particularly well how music has direct efficacy and shapes the ecosystem. Through the “grace of his songs,” the shepherd is an agent of environmental change: music reveals a new aspect of the nonhuman world by creating the divine epiphany of the Nymphs and by eliciting divine favor from Pan. This reality is immediately curtailed in the myth: just as Kerambos did not get the timing right for his speech (being amousos and arhythmos, he insulted the Nymphs when praise was in order), he does not get the rhythm right for his flocks and loses them in the abnormally cold winter. The story even takes a particularly pointed, and tragic, turn: the specific kind of tree that Kerambos the musician mocked is the poplar, which turns out to be the favorite kind of tree and main source of food for stag beetles. The narrative concludes with the vision of a blanketed silence, as the trees on which the wood-eating insect feeds have disappeared from view, announcing the animal’s demise. From this ecomusicological perspective, the Kerambos’ myth shows how a musician that belies in his life and his songs the essential truth that all beings are connected to each other and to their environment is doomed to a form of silence. Yet there is an even more eco-philosophical way of considering the connection between musical and pastoral rhythm, and the insect’s metamorphosis: Kerambos with bad rhythm becomes an embodiment of rhythm and temporality when he turns into the kerambyx. For insects in general are figures of temporality. Metamorphosis, of course, is their specific life strategy. They do not go through change, they are change, a constant process of becoming. And they are themselves an embodiment of rhythm and a marker of rhythms. Aristotle, for example, underlining the connectedness of insects with their environment, shows how the kantharos  

 See Chapter  and n. . Arist. Hist. an. b–; Ael. NA .. E. Brown : xi; Parikka : .

Between Bug Music and the Sustainable Subject



(the dung beetle) does not store food for the winter but hibernates, and an Aesopic fable shows a kantharos migrating for the winter, only to return at the beginning of the season. As David Rothenberg puts it: “Rhythm is an original fact of the natural world, and the insects first beat and bow it into being. They celebrate the dance of the world . . . The seasons go on, the snows approach, all bug music fades as this year is gone.” In this respect, insects are the keepers of the world’s beat. This truth about the natural world is just as important as the truth about the musical bios examined before: rhythm is everything. Bernie Krause’s statement describes this aptly: in instrumental music, timing is everything. So it is with the natural world: the day is split up into temporal segments, from macro time to micro time. It begins with the entire cycle of the day and night. Within that is embedded the dawn chorus, the daytime chorus, the evening and night choruses.

What Kerambos the shepherd, at odds with his environment, decided to ignore, the kerambyx will have no choice but to abide by. The punishment for the unrhythmical slanderer, who also ignored the cycle of seasonal weather and warning signs, consists in being transformed into a being that can ignore neither time nor timing. The sense of appropriateness that was missing in Kerambos’ bios mousikos is now encased in his insectile zoe, with a new way of relating to the world. The lesson that Kerambos is taught is that there is a noncognitive understanding of “understanding,” and especially of understanding one’s relationship with one’s environment: while the youth chose not to obey the injunctions of the god Pan and slighted a rational way of understanding the logic of time through changing season and weather, the insect embodies noncognitive understanding. Kerambos, with no sense of decorum and no sensitivity to special situations, becomes, once insect, an embodiment of sensing. This brings us to consider one final aspect of what is revealed by the continuity between the music of Kerambos the shepherd and the music of the kerambyx.

Between Bug Music and the Sustainable Subject The essential idea of insect rhythm/insect as rhythm can be developed along two complementary paths. One is musicological, the other    

Arist. Hist. an. a; Aesop fable  Perry (“the two dung beetles”); Rocchi : .  Rothenberg :  and . Krause : . On noncognitive ways of understanding: Braidotti : , –, –, for example. On insects and sensing: Parikka : xvi.



Beetle: On Rhythm

ontological – both originate in the idea that insects and their environment are co-constitutive, and both illustrate, in different ways, the utter interconnectedness of life through time and space, via music and the musical body. The first path is that opened by the work of ecomusicologists accepting deep ecology’s invitation “to change our view from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism.” It is illustrated, for example, by David Rothenberg’s work. Expanding from insect rhythm to bug music, he explains: Bug music is the most ancient and the most primal music, the emergence of great rhythmic complexity from the minds of creatures who have no conception whatsoever what they are in the midst of. Dance, song, evolu tion, transformation really, do you need to know any of it to grasp the power of the beat? Of course not.

Scholars, composers, and sound technicians like Rothenberg have devoted many volumes and recordings to the music of birds and bugs, winds and whales. They have jammed with crickets, and recorded not only cicadas and kathydids, but also reeds, rains, and even beetles. Their work revolves around revealing the connectedness and complexity of the sound structure of the “great animal orchestra” (to use Bernie Krause’s title) and biophony more generally, expanding the notion of music to any aural manifestation of the living (and sometimes not living) world. These ideas and approaches hinge in great part on the work of R. Murray Schafer and his  landmark The Tuning of the World (retitled, in its  second edition, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World), where the author coined the notion of “soundscape” understood as any acoustic field of study.” As Schafer explains, what is at stake is the definition of music itself. Quoting John Cage, he underlines how “music is sounds, sounds around us whether we’re in or out of concert halls: cf. Thoreau.” Music has come

 





Morton : . Rothenberg :  for next quote. For scholars: Rothenberg , , ; Rothenberg and Ulvaeus ; Krause ; Eisenberg ; Abram , ; contributions in Rothenberg and Ulvaeus ; Feld ; Feld and Basso ; Ingram ; Rehding , ; Allen a, b; Pedelty . For composers: John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, Brian Eno. The scholar/composer division is also doubtful, since scholars like B. Krause and D. Rothenberg are also performing musicians. The work of David Dunn is fundamental here: Dunn inserted microphones into trees that were being attacked by bark beetles, and recorded their activity, offering an unheard soundscape that is only accessible through technology: www.acousticecology.org/dunn/solit.html. On acoustic ecology and soundscape writings: www.acousticecology.org/writings/writingsessays.html. Schafer : .

Between Bug Music and the Sustainable Subject



to include “the sounds external to the composition itself . . . practices of musique concrète, which inserts any sound from the environment into a composition via tape; and finally . . . electronic music, which has revealed a whole gamut of new musical sounds, many of them related to industrial and electric technology in the world at large.” In a most revealing sentence, Schafer explains that he treats “the world as a macrocosmic musical composition”: “Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!” The Kerambos myth can be read in the light of these insights: the story of Kerambos is that of a human musician who has ceased to perform for an audience and in a landscape (the Nymphs and the mountains), to merge with his theater in the woods and become soundscape. It is not simply a story about the punishment of an unethical musician who loses his human music, but also one about the discovery of the soundscape and of a sounding universe, or rather, a universe that manifests itself through interconnected rhythms. Kerambos illustrates how the inescapable reality of a zoe shared by all living beings is manifested through sound. And indeed as Bernie Krause has shown, each creature in nature collaborates in the making of distinctive natural soundscapes. Every living organism – from the tiniest to the largest – and every site on earth has its own acoustic signature, and natural soundscapes are the voices of whole ecological systems. For Krause, who describes the “constantly evolving multidimensional weave of sonic fabric,” this interconnectedness can be read in the “score” of biophony: each creature has a specific sonic niche, and the spectrographic images of natural sounds are reminiscent of William Turner’s late seascapes. But more can be said, and needs to be examined in light of the second path referred to above. This path is paved (or should we say seeded with weeds?) by philosophers inspired by philosophies of immanence, that acknowledge the importance of life’s enduring power. To read the myth in this way, one needs to pay attention to the body of the musician throughout the narrative. The last lines of the story in particular bring our attention back to the materiality of the insect: the stag beetle’s head looks like a miniature musical instrument, a lyre. The insect body undergoes one last transformation, in death. But death is not the end, for the beetle becomes a miniature machine: with its severed head hanging   

Ibid., p. . The reference is to Cage’s Silence, where Cage references Thoreau’s Walden.   Ibid., pp. , . Krause : . Ibid., pp.  and . Braidotti , for example, building on Deleuze and Guattari , , ; and ultimately Bergson and Spinoza. Braidotti explicitly discusses (pp. –) insect music and the deterritorialization of sound they force us to operate.



Beetle: On Rhythm

from children’s necks, the beetle pendant is evocative of a musical instrument with its own power. It is an abstraction of music and a material symbol of it. It finds a diametrically opposed parallel in the nonhuman echo of the lyre in the sky – the constellation that was created to commemorate the power of Orpheus’ instrument: from being alive and crawling at our feet, to finding an eternal replication in a constellation in the sky, the dead insect for a moment finds a place in the human world of artifacts, but only to better explode it. Aspects of the myth of Kerambos have illustrated artists’ fascination with the fundamental strangeness of insects, their materiality and their workmanship. There is also a larger truth in the instrument-resembling insect: the animal invites us to simultaneously consider its life as bios and as zoe through its different forms and stages of embodiment, and its connection with the rest of the living world. The body of the beetle, in which one can iconically read the ex-musician’s bios and the tool of his trade, illustrates the power of zoe, the “endless vitality of life as process of continuous becoming.” The myth of Kerambos thus illustrates a vitalist logic stating that entities do not precede their becoming. In its overabundant energy, zoe creates in the kerambyx a new type of embodied subject. The understanding of this new embodied subject relies on a philosophy of endurance, which Braidotti describes in the following words: The techno logical body is in fact an eco logical unit. This zoe techno body is marked by interdependence with its environment, through a structure of mutual flows and data transfers that is best configured by the notion of viral contamination (Ansell Pearson ), or intensive interconnectedness. This nomadic ecophilosophy of belonging is complex and multilayered.

Braidotti’s plea for an ecophilosophy is precisely at the heart of the mythical thought underlying our narrative. Embodying a transfer from live musical efficacy (the musician shaping the landscape by his hubristic behavior) to insectile embeddedness in a landscape (the kerambyx gnawing on wood) and then to machinic potentiality (the severed head of the insect), the beetle is characterized by what we can call, with Braidotti, a  





T – Kern. Parikka : xxiv. The chapter on “met(r)amorphoses” in Braidotti : – moves from “becoming woman” to “becoming insect” (via “becoming animal”). Braidotti : . She also describes (p. ) the sustainable subject as “made up of sets of relations and encounters. These multiple relationships encompass all levels of one’s multilayered subjectivity, binding the cognitive to the emotional, the intellectual to the affective, and connecting them all to a socially embedded ethics of sustainability.” Ibid., p. , citing Ansell-Pearson’s Viroid Life.

Between Bug Music and the Sustainable Subject



“zoe-techno-body.” The lingering image of the beetle’s head hanging from children’s necks provides a locus of reflection on the interconnectedness, through rhythm and resonance, of insect, human, and their environment, underfoot and in the sky. The Deleuzian theoretical underpinnings of Braidotti’s account bring us to a view of the subject “as an entity that lasts, that is to say, an entity that endures sustainable changes and transformation and enacts them around itself in a community or collectivity.” Nothing better illustrates her claim that “the sustainable subject is made up of sets of relations and encounters” than the life of Kerambos, who flows from one state of being to the next, and sings a subversive song about the flux of being. But it is precisely through these transformations and changes of body that Kerambos – like Syrinx in Chapter  – achieves sustainability. The “sustainable subject” that Braidotti imagines marks the final decentering of the anthropos of anthropocentrism. Braidotti’s reliance on the vocabulary of media in the passage quoted above (“mutual flow,” “data transfer,” and “intensive interconnectedness”) is to the point. Media are ways of connecting things, on grand and small scales: in the form of forest paths and papyrus scrolls, electronic clouds and archives, insect swarms and telephones, media connect humans with each other and with their others. Media are everywhere in the environment, but more importantly media are environments in themselves – and environments are media. They reveal a certain ordering and meaning in nature and look at bodies as answers to the question of how to be in the world. Looking more specifically at insects in their natural environment, Jussi Parikka has argued that insects are the ultimate media by being “the contractions of the world and organizations into environmental relations and milieus.” The image and reality through which he makes the point is that of rhythm and resonance: media are a contraction of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus affording their rhythms as part of that resonation. An animal has to find a common tune with its environment, and a technology has to work through rhythmic relations with other force fields such as politics and economics.

This is perhaps the most provocative way in which one can read the myth of Kerambos: the musician-turned-insect brings to our attention, through  

 Ibid., p. . Peters  develops this provocatively enlarged understanding of media. Parikka : xiv.



Beetle: On Rhythm

his life story, the interconnectedness of beings with each other and with their environment, and their interconnectedness and co-constitution through temporality. Ultimately, these different ways of looking at Kerambos’ integration into his environment, as a form of insect-media, decentralize the notion of music as human practice and open our ears to a nonhuman understanding of rhythm, as a connected way of being in the world.

Conclusion In all the other myths examined in this book, the point of the story seems to be to explain the origins of a certain aural phenomenon in the world (bird vocalizations or echo, for example). But in the Kerambos myth, nothing is said about the sound of the beetle. The aural part is, in the end, not the focus of the story. Kerambos’ story concentrates not on issues related to the voice (he has none) or on musical communication or expression (we hear nothing about the beetle after his transformation), but on the integration and interconnection of sound and environment through time and rhythm. Kerambos does not become part of the tribe of birds, where the metamorphosis of human into avian voice could be seen as the sublimation of the human voice, thought through analogy, or even insects who produce beautiful, clear-pitched sounds, in which we recognize an echo of what humans understand as music or vocality (with the bounded subjectivity it assumes). The beetle is an extreme example of a much more elemental type of sound and of the endurance of rhythm in a zoe-techno-body. The myth calls us to change our technique of listening to the voice of the individual Kerambos, the shepherd with a specific genealogy, and to tune in, instead, to the specific frequency level of the nonhuman world. The story of Kerambos not only shifts our focus on music and rhythm, from human to environmental music and rhythm, but also invites us to modify our definition of music itself, from an anthropocentric practice to an environmental experience, and our definition of the music-making subject and its surroundings. The story is ultimately an invitation to further reflect on the idea of a musical cosmos and on the musical 



In his survey of silence, Prochnik :  notes that “we might think of sound, by way of contrast, as a force that stitches us in time and space.” Rothenberg’s provocative definition encapsulates the challenge: “How’s that for a definition of music for you? Tossing out sounds along improbable cycles of time. Forget about it, just play” (Rothenberg : ).

Conclusion



organization of sounds in nature. Kerambos might have stopped singing and playing the lyre, but the kerambyx is not really silent: it is part of the highly complex musical texture of the universe, most of which is unheard. The limited sounds of the insect only hint at that other way of understanding music as harmonia of the cosmos. What the myth explains, besides the silencing of the bad, unethical shepherd, is in what respect there is continuity between the micro-sound of the beetle and the virtuosity of the mousikotatos. All in all, the kerambyx illustrates a focus not on the bios mousikos (an adoption, or rejection, of music as a form of ethical life) but on zoe as full of rhythms and sound, heard or not, but above all lived. This is a more holistic way of reading the story: music is not solely a human vocal and instrumental practice that takes the form of a bios; it is a manifestation of zoe, everywhere in the landscape, from the lyre-like bug to bird songs and the constellation of the lyre in the sky. Being able to appreciate this zoe that exhibits itself in musical and rhythmical form means embracing one’s own position of nomadic subject in a musical universe, and captures the main point I see the myth as meditating on.  

On which, Hicks . On eco-listening: Ingram : , who underlines the connection between music and magic, and (p. ) the idea of communion and entrainment through music. See also Himmelman : .

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Citations Index

Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon (L&C) ..,  .-,  ..-..,  ..,  ..,  .,  .-,  ..-.., , – ..,  ..,  ..,  .-,  ..,  ..,  ..-,  ..-,  ..-,  Aelian Historical Miscellanies (VH) .,  .,  On the Nature of Animals (NA) .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  ., ,  ., 

.,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  Aeschylus Agamemnon (Ag.) -,  ,  Prometheus Bound (PV) -,  Suppliants (Supp.) -,  Aesop, Fables  Perry,   Perry,  Alcaeus, fr.  and b Voigt,  Alcman PMG ,  PMG ,  PMG ,  PMG ,  PMG ,  Anacreonta  West,  . West,  Anaxandrides, Tereus PCG fr. -,  Anthologia Graeca ., ,  Anthologia Latina .-,  Antigonus Carystus, Marvelous Stories (Mir.) ..,  Antipater of Thessalonike, G&P () ,  Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses ,  ,  , ,  , 





Citations Index

Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses (cont.) ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , ,  , ,  ,  ,  Apollodorus, Library (Bibl.) ..,  .-,  Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica (Argon.) .,  .-,  .-,  Apuleius, Metamorphoses (Met.) .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  Archilochus, fr.  West IE,  Archytas, fr.  DK,  Aristophanes, Birds (Av.) -,  -,  -,  Aristotle History of Animals (Hist. an.) b-,  b, b,  a-a,  a-b,  b-,  b-,  b-,  a,  b-,  b,  b-,  b-,  b-,  [On Marvelous Things Heard] ([Mir. ausc.]) a,  On the Soul (De an.) b-a,  b-a,  b-,  [On Things Heard] ([De audib.]) a-, 

Parts of Animals (Part. an.) a-,  [Physiognomics] ([Phgn.]) a,  Politics (Pol.) a-,  b-b,  [Problems] ([Pr.]) a-b (.),  b-a (.-),  b- (.),  b- (. and .),  Asclepiades, G&P () ,  Athenaeus, Sophists at Dinner (Deipn.) .e,  .a,  .e,  .c,  Augustine On Music (De mus.) ., -,  On the Teacher (De mag.) .,  Ausonius, Letter to Paulinus (Ep. ad Paulinum) , -, – Bacchylides, Ode .-,  Callimachus Hymn  (to Apollo) .-,  Hymn  (to Delos) .,  Cantharus, PCG Tereus fr. -,  Catullus, .-,  Cicero, On the Orator (De or.) III..-,  III..,  Cleoboulina, fr.  West IE,  Corinna, PMG ,  Democritus A DK,  A DK,  fr.  DK,  Diodorus of Sicily, Library of History (Bibl. hist.) ..,  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Philosophers .-,  Empedocles fr.  DK,  fr.  DK,  fr.  DK,  Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus (Ep. Hdt.) -, ,  Euclid, Sectio Canonis Pr.-,  Euripides Alcestis (Alc.) ,  Antiope TrGF, frr. -, , -, -, : 

Citations Index Bacchae (Ba.) -,  Helen (Hel.) -,  -,  ,  -,  Iphigenia in Tauris (IT) -,  Gorgias, fr.  DK,  Hellanicus of Lesbos, FGrH  F,  Herodotus, Histories (Hist.) .,  .,  Hesiod fr. .,  [Shield] ([Sc.]) -,  ,  ,  Theogony (Theog.) ,  -,  ,  , ,  -, ,  ,  ,  ,  -,  -,  ,  -,  Works and Days (Op.) -,  , ,  -,  ,  Homer Iliad (Il.) .-,  .-, , ,  .-,  .-,  .,  .-,  .-,  .,  .-,  .-,  Odyssey (Od.) .,  .-,  .-,  ., 



.,  .-,  ., ,  .-,  ,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .,  .,  ., , ,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .,  .,  .-,  .-,  .,  ., – .,  .,  .-,  .-,  Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Hymn. Hom. Ven.) -,  -,  -,  Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Hymn. Hom. Ap.) ,  Homeric Hymn to Apollo () ,  Homeric Hymn to the Dioscuri ,  Homeric Hymn to Hephaistos ,  Homeric Hymn to Hermes Hymn. Hom. Merc. -,  ,  -,  -,  -,  -,  ,  ,  Homeric Hymn to the Mother of the Gods ,  Homeric Hymn to Pan (Hom. Hym. Pan.) -,  -,  Horace Ars Poetica (Ars P.) -,  Odes (Carm.) .,  Hyginus Fabulae (Fab.) ,  , 



Citations Index

Hyginus (cont.) Poetica astronomica (Poet. astr.) .,  .,  Kern, Orphica Fragmenta T ,  T -,  T ,  T -a, -,  T ,  T -, ,  Libanius, Reply to Aristides on Behalf of the Dancers, Or. ,  Longus, Daphnis and Chloe (D&C) .-.,  .,  .,  ..-,  .-.,  .,  .,  ., ,  .,  .,  ., ,  .,  .,  .-,  .-,  .,  .-., , ,  .,  ., ,  .-,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  ., ,  .,  .,  ..,  ..-,  Lucian [Ass] ,  On the Dance (Salt.) ,  True Stories (Ver. Hist.) .,  Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura) , 

.-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  Macrobius, Saturnalia (Sat.) ..,  Meleager, G&P () , ,  Mimnermus, fr.  West IE,  Nicander of Colophon, Metamorphoses (Met.) fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S, ,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  fr.  G&S,  Nonnus, Dionysiaca (Dion.) .,  .,  Ovid, Metamorphoses (Met.) .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .,  .-,  .-,  ., ,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .-, – .-,  .,  .-,  .-,  ., 

Citations Index .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  ., ,  .,  ., ,  .,  .-, ,  .,  .,  .-, , ,  .,  ., – .-,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  ,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .-,  .,  .-,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .-,  .,  .,  .-,  .,  .-,  .,  .-,  .-,  ., ,  .,  .-,  .-,  .,  .,  .,  .-, , 



.,  .,  .-,  Pausanias ..-,  ..,  Phaedrus, Fables (Fab.), Prologue ,  Philochorus FGrH  F,  FGrH  F,  Philocles, TrGF Pandion fr. ,  Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana (VA) ., ., .,  Pindar Olympian Odes (Ol.) .,  Pythian Odes (Pyth.) .-,  , ,  .-,  Plato Laws (Leg.) d-a,  a-b,  Phaedo (Phd.) e-b, ,  Phaedrus (Phdr.) c, ,  d,  a,  b,  e-e, – b,  d,  e,  a-,  a-,  Philebus (Phlb.) a-b,  Protagoras (Prt.) b,  Republic (Resp.) a, ,  c-e,  b-b,  a-,  Sophist (Soph.) e,  Timaeus (Ti.) a-c,  Pliny, Natural History (HN) ., – .,  .,  .,  .,  Plutarch Gryllus e-f,  e-, 



Citations Index

Plutarch (cont.) a-,  b-,  Moralia (Mor.) a (Apoph. Lac.),  f (De glor. Ath. ),  e-f (Quaest. conv. ..),  a (De soll. an. ),  PMG ,  Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras ,  Pseudo-Plutarch, Placita philosophorum fa,  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria ..,  Sappho fr. .- Voigt,  fr.  Voigt,  fr. a Voigt,  fr.  Voigt,  fr.  Voigt,  Scholia ad Il. .,  SEG .,  Sidonius Apollinaris, Poem .-,  Simonides fr.  West IE,  PMG ,  Sophocles Ajax (Aj.) ,  Electra (El.) -,  -,  Oedipus Tyrannus (OT) -, 

Tereus TrGF frr. -B,  Trackers TrGF fr. .,  TrGF fr. .,  Stesichorus, PMG ,  Strabo, ..,  Synesius, Hymn .,  Theocritus, Idylls (Id.) , ,  .,  ,  .,  .-,  ,  .,  .-,  .-,  .,  ,  .,  Theognis, - West IE,  Timaeus, FGrH F a-b,  Virgil Eclogues (Ecl.) .-,  .-,  Georgics (G.) .,  Xenophanes fr.  DK,  fr. - DK,  fr. - DK, 

Subject Index

absolute music,  Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon,  gender and theme of sexual predation in,  mythographical sources used by,  nightingale myth in, , , , –,  paradoxography in,  syrinx myth in, –, –, , , – vision, focus on, – acousmatic or reduced listening, , –,  acousmatic voice, cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus as, – Aedon, Polytechnos, and Chelidon. See nightingale myth Aelian on human-nonhuman animal relationships, ,  on interspecies human/swan orchestra, , – on nightingale song,  paradoxography in,  Aelius Aristides, ,  Aeschylus, ,  aesthetics. See also responses to music, See also Sirens, See also emotion, See also voice, See also listening, See also Muses beauty, , –, , –, –, , , , , –, ,  emic/etic understanding of category of, – entanglement of aesthetic/ontological questions,  metamorphosis myths, aesthetic questions raised by, ,  phenomenology of music, , , , ,  power of music and voice, , , , –, –, , –, ,  Alcmaeon,  Alcman, –, –

amousia, inappropriate taunting of nymphs by Kerambos as, – Amphion, , –, , ,  Anaxagoras, ,  animals. See nonhuman animals anthropocentrism, , , , , ,  anthropomorphism, –, , ,  Antigonus Carystus, ,  antiphonic singing,  Apollo. See also Homeric Hymn to Hermes Daphne and, , , ,  interspecies human/swan orchestra celebrating, – Kerambos and,  Marsyas and, , ,  musical contests for,  Orpheus and Amphion receiving lyre from,  Apollodorus, Library, on nightingale myth, –,  Apollonius, Marvelous Stories,  appearance emotionalism (theory of musical emotions),  Apuleius, Metamorphosis or Golden Ass, – Arachne, ,  Aratus,  Archelaos,  Archilochus, , , – Archytas,  Argus, , ,  Arion and dolphin, , ,  Ariston of Rhegium,  Aristophanes animal choruses in comedies of,  nightingale song in, , ,  on cicadas,  on music creating order,  on the voice,  Aristotle,  comparing animals and humans,  emotion, on animal sounds as displays of, 





Subject Index

Aristotle (cont.) History of Animals, as paradoxography,  on bodily organs/musical instruments,  on dialektos,  on humans as only rational animals, ,  on insects and their environments,  on parrots,  on power of music,  arousal theory (theory of musical emotions), , ,  Athena, ,  Atomists and Atomism, , , See also Epicurus, See also Democritus, See also Lucretius Augustine of Hippo on birdsong, ,  on pantomime,  on power of music on soul,  auloi, , – Ausonius,  Babrius,  Bacchylides,  Balzac, Honoré de, Sarrasine,  becoming, concept of, , , , , , ,  beetle. See Kerambos/stag beetle myth Bennett, Jane, , – Bergson, Henri,  biomusicology, –, See also zoomusicology Bion,  body. See also embodiment Imperial culture, self, body, and voice in, – limbs and songs, homonymy between, , – metamorphosis and, , , –, – musical instruments and bodily organs,  of pantomime dancer, –, See also pantomime of singer, ,  prosthetics, musical instruments as, ,  reaping songs and decapitation,  transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), –,  voice and, , –, –, –, –, –, –, – Boios (Boieo), Creation of Birds, –,  Boreas,  Braidotti, Rosi, , , , –, , – Cage, John,  Callimachus, ,  Calliope, , –, 

Callisto, ,  Calvino, Italo, , ,  Cassandra, as nightingale,  castrati,  causal listening, , –,  Cavavero, Adriana, ,  Chamaeleon of Pontus,  Chelidon, Aedon, and Polytechnos. See nightingale myth cicadas. See also Phaedrus as poetic staple of pastoral scenes, – as Sirens, – “cinematic voice” of,  food and song, association between, – in Daphnis and Chloe,  origin myth, in Plato’s Phaedrus, –, – power of voice of,  Tithonus (turned cicada) and Dawn, ,  Cicero, De oratore,  “cinematic voice” of cicadas,  Circe, , , –, , , ,  competition and jealousy, in music myths,  Cyclops (Polyphemus), ,  Damon of Athens,  Daphne and Apollo, , , ,  Daphnis and Chloe. See Longus Darwin, Charles, and Darwinism, , ,  Dawn, and Tithonus turned cicada, ,  death, immortality, and music cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus and,  Echo, metamorphosis and bones of, – sustainable object, lyre-head of insect as, – Deleuze, Gilles, , ,  Democritus, , , , , See also Atomists and Atomism Derrida, Jacques, –,  Descartes, René,  dialogos, dialektos, and logos, – Didymarchus,  Dionysus, ,  Echo myth, – comparison of Longus and Ovid on, , , ,  divinity, association of natural sounds with,  gender of Echo’s voice, Narcissus’ interpretation of, ,  gramophone, Echo as sort of, – Hylas version of, , , ,  in Apuleius, 

Subject Index in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, , –, , , ,  in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, , , – Juno, punishment of Echo by, , ,  listening, as exploration of, –, –, –,  metamorphosis/dismemberment and bones of Echo, – Narcissus in Ovid’s version of, , , , – Pan in Longus’ version of, , –,  posthumanist feminist theory and, – ringdove/Phatta myth compared,  self-reflexive acoustic mirror, Echo as, – syrinx myth compared,  eco-listening,  ecomusicology, , – ecosophy,  ekphrasis, , , , , ,  electronic music,  Emathides, , ,  embodiment Imperial culture, self, body, and voice in, – Kerambos/stag beetle myth, head of insect embodied as lyre in, , – musical instruments’ conceptual continuity with body parts,  nightingale myth approached from perspective of bird, – Plato’s Phaedrus, physical nature of sound in, – emotion. See also lament animal song interpreted as display of, – appearance emotionalism (theory of musical emotions),  arousal theory (theory of musical emotions), , ,  defined,  expression theory (theory of musical emotions), –, ,  female,  language versus non-verbal behavior in expression of, – resemblance theory (theory of musical emotions), – song’s origins attributed to, –, –,  Empedocles, , ,  entrainment, ,  environment. See nature/environment Epictetus,  Epicurus, , See also Atomists and Atomism



Erato,  Eratosthenes,  Erinyes,  Eunomus of Locri,  Euripides metamorphosis in tragedies of,  music as wildness in Bacchae,  on Dionysus’ ontological nature in Bacchae,  on Thamyras challenging the Muses in [Rhesus],  expression theory (theory of musical emotions), –, ,  fable genre, talking animals in, – Faunus. See Pan feminist theory Echo myth and posthumanist feminist theory, – nightingale myth read as story of female resilience,  food and song, association between, – Gaia/Ge,  earth, agency of, in Echo myth,  Gaia hypothesis,  Galen,  gender body and selfhood in Imperial culture, – castrati and male falsetto voice,  dangerous female voice,  Echo’s voice, Narcissus’ interpretation of gender of, ,  education of main characters into, in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, – emotion and emotional expression, female, ,  in Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon,  in Kerambos/stag beetle myth,  metamorphosis more common in female than male,  nightingale myth read as story of female resilience,  phonic beauty and,  syrinx myth and, , , – Gorgias on the power of logos, ,  on voice, , –,  Gregory of Nazianzus,  Guattari, Felix, , ,  Haraway, Donna, , – Hera. See Juno/Hera Hermaphroditus myth,  Hermes/Mercury, , , , , , , See also Homeric Hymn to Hermes



Subject Index

Hesiod, , See also Theogony human/animal transformations in, ,  on cicadas, –,  on Muses, ,  on nightingale myth,  ontological categories in,  poetic initiation of, ,  Hipponax,  Homer, , , , , See also Odyssey, See also Iliad Homeric Hymn to Hermes, –, , – Horace,  Hylas myth, , , ,  Iamblichus, ,  iambos genre, taunting and comic abuse in, – Iliad animal similes in,  invocation of Muse and body of singer in,  on cicadas,  tripartite schema of human, animal, and god to interpret,  Imperial culture pantomime and non-verbal performance in, , – pepaideumenoi,  self, body, and voice in, – insects, otherness of, , See also Kerambos/stag beetle myth, See also cicadas Io myth, –, , ,  Juno/Hera in nightingale myth,  Io myth and,  punishment of Echo by, , ,  Jupiter/Zeus, transforming into animal,  Kafka, Franz, , , See also Odradek Kerambos/stag beetle myth, , – amousia, excessive/inappropriate taunting of nymphs as, – as poetic initiation story, – ecomusicological reading of, – ecosystem and landscape of, , – iambos genre, taunting and comic abuse in, – in Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses, , , , –, ,  in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ,  listening in,  lyre, head of insect embodied as, , –

media, vocabulary of, – musical/divine shepherd genre and,  mythopoetic capacity of name Kerambos in, – Pan, Kerambos ignoring advice of, , ,  “poetic compost” of, – posthumanist interpretation of, , – rhythm and, , , , – sustainable object, lyre-head of insect as, – zoe and, – lament. See also emotion birdsong and origins of, , –, – nightingale as figure of, , , – language versus non-verbal behavior in expression of emotion, – Latour, Bruno,  Leigh Fermor, Patrick,  Lesbos, and musical myths, ,  Leucippe and Clitophon. See Achilles Tatius Licymnius,  limbs and songs, homonymy between, , – listening causal, , –,  creative, –,  Echo myth as exploration of, , , See also Echo myth eco-listening,  in Kerambos/stag beetle myth,  Pan in Ovidian syrinx myth, as listener, –,  reduced or acousmatic, , –,  semantic, , , ,  locus amoenus, ,  logos, dialogos, and dialektos, – Longus, Daphnis and Chloe. See also ringdove/ Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe authorship and dating,  cicada in,  Echo myth in, , –, , , , , See also Echo myth ekphrasis in, ,  pantomime in, ,  role of myth retellings in, – syrinx myth in, , , , , , –, –, See also syrinx myth Lucian, – Lucretius, , , , , See also Atomists and Atomism

Subject Index machine-human interface between Pan and syrinx, – Marcus Aurelius,  Marsyas and Apollo, , ,  media, vocabulary of, – Mesomedes,  Metamorphoses (Ovid). See Ovid metamorphosis. See music, myth, and metamorphosis metempsychosis, –,  mimesis, – Echo myth and, ,  emotional affect of music and,  nightingale myth and, – ringdove/Phatta myth in Daphnis and Chloe and,  three aspects (imitation, representation, and expression) of,  Mnesiepes inscription,  Moschus,  Mount Othrys, ,  Musaeus,  Muses amousia, inappropriate taunting of nymphs by Kerambos as, – divine punishment by,  Phaedrus on cicadas and, – poetic initiation by, – Sirens, contest with,  music, myth, and metamorphosis, –, See also specific authors, works, and myths aetiological nature of stories of,  animal and human music compared, , – body and selfhood in Imperial culture and, – contact zone between human and non-human, – definition of music,  definition of myth,  emic and etic approaches, combining, – function of metamorphosis in stories of, – historical development of metamorphosis narratives, , – intellectual and cultural background to, – language articulating divide between species, , – mimesis, – mythos, concept of, – order and music, relationship between, – posthumanist approach to, – technique and music, relationship between, – theories of music in ancient world and, – vision of world in, –



musical instruments and objects. See also syrinx myth as prosthetics, ,  body parts, conceptual continuity with,  Kerambos/stag beetle myth, head of insect embodied as lyre in, , – ontological nature of, , – violent creation stories associated with, , , – musicking, , ,  musique concrète,  myths. See music, myth, and metamorphosis Nancy, Jean-Luc,  Narcissus, in Echo myth, , , , – natureculture, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe as, –, ,  nature/environment. See also zoe, See also nonhuman animals, See also Pan ancient conceptualizations of, –, – biomusicology, – eco-listening,  ecosophy,  music of, –, –, , – nature/art and nature/culture, , –, – zoomusicology,  Neoplatonists,  “New Music” revolution (late th century), ,  Nicander of Colophon, Metamorphoses, –, , ,  nightingale myth, – acquisition of song, focus on, in Ovidian narrative, – Attic version of (Philomela, Procne, and Tereus), – emotion, song’s origins in, –, –,  female resilience, as story of,  in Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, , , , –,  in Attic tragedy, , – in Nicander of Colophon,  in Odyssey, , , , ,  in Ovid, Metamorphoses, , , – internal emotional state, music as expression of,  lament, nightingale as figure of, , , – language versus non-verbal behavior in expression of emotion, in Ovidian narrative, – metamorphosis, emotion leading to,  mimesis and, –



Subject Index

nightingale myth (cont.) non-human nature of becoming musical and,  Theban version of (Aedon, Polytechnos, and Chelidon), – voice, failure to address, , –, – nightingale/nightingale song Aelian on,  Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses on,  Augustine of Hippo on,  Cassandra, as nightingale,  from bird’s perspective instead of transformed human, – in Aristophanes’ Birds,  in Theognis,  Pliny’s Natural History on, , – Plutarch’s Moralia on,  poetic tradition of writing about,  Niobe,  nomad/transhumance story, Kerambos/stag beetle myth as, , – nonhuman animals. See also music, myth, and metamorphosis, See also swans, See also nightingale/nightingale song, See also cicadas, See also Kerambos/stag beetle myth, See also ringdove/Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe Animal Studies, –, ,  asses, – cats,  cows, –, , –, , –, – dogs, –, ,  dolphins, , ,  elephants, –, ,  frogs, , , , ,  goats and kids, , –, , , –, , , ,  hawks, – hoopoes, , , – Iliad, animal similes in,  owls,  parrots,  partridges, , – pigs, –, ,  sheep and lambs, –, , , , ,  snakes, , , ,  swallows, , , , , , –,  Odradek, in Kafka’s Care of a Family Man, , See also Kafka, Franz Odyssey Cyclops Polyphemus and ram in,  Demodocus, song of, , , 

food and song in,  nightingale myth in, , , , ,  Phemius, song of, ,  Plutarch’s Gryllus and, – Sirens, encounter with, , , , ,  swallow-sound of Odysseus’ bow in,  tripartite schema of human, animal, and god to interpret,  Oppian,  order and music, relationship between, – Orpheus beguilement/enchantment as response to music and,  Kerambos/stag beetle myth and,  Lesbos and,  myth of,  on metempsychosis, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,  Philomela in Ovid, Metamorphoses and,  power of lyre of, – ringdove myth in Daphnis and Chloe and, ,  Ourania, – Ovid, Metamorphoses classical concepts of metamorphosis in,  Echo myth in, , , –, See also Echo myth Kerambos/stag beetle myth in, ,  metempsychosis in, ,  nightingale myth in, , , – syrinx myth in, –, ,  Pan. See also syrinx myth in Daphnis and Chloe’s Echo myth, , –,  in Homeric Hymn to Pan,  Kerambos and, , ,  supernatural stillness and,  pan pipes. See syrinx myth pantomime dancers, – Imperial culture of non-verbal performance, , – in Apuleius,  in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, , ,  mimesis and,  Ovid’s myths as topic of,  paradoxography, –, –, See also Achilles Tatius, See also Aelian, See also Aristotle, See also Pliny the Elder Parmenides,  Parthenius,  performance as agent and product of metamorphosis, –

Subject Index pantomime and non-verbal performance, Imperial culture of, , – ringdove/Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe, and, –, – Peripatetics,  Persephone/Proserpina, , ,  Phaedrus (fable writer), ,  Phaedrus (Plato), – acousmatic voice, cicadas as, – cicada origin myth in, –, – death and immortality, closeness of cicadas to,  embodied voice and physical nature of sound in, – food and song, association between, – gaze/thought of cicadas in, – laughter of cicadas in,  Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe compared, , , ,  metonymy for the voice, cicadas as, –, ,  Muses and cicadas in, – on danger of song, – posthuman condition, cicadas and,  syrinx myth compared to cicadas in,  voice, as dialogue about, , –, –,  Phatta. See ringdove/Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe Philo,  Philochorus,  Philomela, Procne, and Tereus. See nightingale myth Philostratus, , ,  Pindar, ,  Plato, , See also Phaedrus on logos, dialogos, and dialektos, – on metempsychosis, ,  on power of music,  Pythagorean beliefs in works of, ,  Pliny the Elder, Natural History as source for Aelian,  comparing animals and humans,  on nightingale song, , – paradoxography in,  Plutarch,  Gryllus, –, – on discourse of selfhood,  on pantomime,  political animal, mousike as product of,  Polyphemus (Cyclops), ,  Polytechnos, Aedon, and Chelidon. See nightingale myth poplar, mocked by Kerambos,  Porphyry, , 



posthumanist theory, –, See also Braidotti, Rosi, See also Bennett, Jane, See also embodiment, See also Haraway, Donna, See also music, myth, and metamorphosis becoming, concept of,  cicadas in Phaedrus and,  Echo myth and, – Kerambos/stag beetle myth and, , – natureculture, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe as, –, ,  nightingale myth from bird’s perspective instead of transformed human,  syrinx myth and,  Procne, Tereus, and Philomela. See nightingale myth Prometheus and Epimetheus myth,  Proserpina/Persephone, , ,  prosthetics, musical instruments as, ,  Proteus,  Pygmalion myth, , ,  Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism,  metempsychosis and, – on embodied voice and physical nature of sound, ,  Plato, Pythagorean beliefs in works of,  resurgence of, in first century CE,  reaping songs and decapitation,  reduced or acousmatic listening, , –,  reincarnation (transmigration of souls or metempsychosis), –,  resemblance theory (theory of musical emotions), – responses to music beguilement/enchantment as, – delight/pleasure as,  meaning, search for, as aesthetic response to song, , – ringdove/Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe, on, – stillness as,  rhythm and Kerambos/stag beetle myth, , , , – ringdove/Phatta myth, in Daphnis and Chloe, – as natureculture, –, ,  ecocritical approach to, – human-animal relationships in, – interplay between art, nature, and culture in, – metamorphosis and song performance in, –, – on animal/human responses to song, – Plato’s Phaedrus compared, , , ,  syrinx myth and, 



Subject Index

Roscius,  Ruckers family harpsichords,  Sappho, , , ,  selfhood and body in Imperial culture, – semantic listening, , , ,  Seneca the Younger,  similes as metamorphoses of language,  Iliad, animal similes in,  Simonides, , – Sirens beguilement/enchantment by, – cicadas as, – divine punishment, by Muses,  encounter of Odysseus with, , , , ,  Muses, contest with,  Solon,  Sophocles metamorphosis in tragedies of,  Tereus, nightingale myth in, , , –,  sound. See also vision versus sound, See also Echo myth physical nature of sound and embodied voice, – Plato on sound, vocalization, voice,  Sound Studies, ,  vision versus, , , –, – Spinoza, Baruch,  stag beetle. See Kerambos/stag beetle myth Stoics and Stoicism, , , , ,  Strabo,  sustainable object, lyre-head of kerambyx as, – swallow-sound of Odysseus’ bow,  swans Aelian, on interspecies human/swan orchestra, , – as traditionally musical animal,  syrinx myth, – agency and vocal presence of Syrinx in, , , , – compared to Echo myth and cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus,  creation stories of musical instruments/objects and, , , – Echo myth in Daphnis and Chloe and,  gender in, , , – in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, –, –, , , –

in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, , , , , , –, – in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, , –,  machine-human interface between Pan and syrinx, – ontological nature of instrument in, , –, – ringdove/Phatta myth in Daphnis and Chloe and,  “voice” of, , , –, – zoe and, ,  technique and music, relationship between, – Tereus, Procne, and Philomela. See nightingale myth Terpander,  Terpsichore,  Tertullian,  tettigal voice and gaze. See cicadas, See Phaedrus Theocritus,  pastoral world of,  representation of human and non-human music in, –,  syrinx in Idylls of,  Theodorus,  Theognis,  Theogony (Hesiod) absence of metamorphosis stories in,  Gaia in,  kerambyx and,  nightingale song in,  on cicadas, –,  Prometheus in,  syrinx in,  Timaeus,  Tithonus (turned cicada) and Dawn, ,  transhumance/nomad story, Kerambos/stag beetle myth as, , – transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), –,  vision versus sound, , , –, –, See also sound voice. See also Orpheus, See also cicadas, See also Phaedrus, See also Sirens, See also embodiment acousmatic voice, cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus as, – body and, , –, –, –, –, –, –, – Echo’s voice, Narcissus’ interpretation of gender of, ,  Imperial culture, self, body, and voice in, –

Subject Index melocentric versus logocentric focus, ,  nightingale myth read as feminist celebration of,  of syrinx, , , –, – Ovidian nightingale narrative’s absence of reference to, , –, – Plato’s Phaedrus as dialogue about, , –, –, 

Xenophanes,  Zeus/Jupiter, transforming into animal,  zoe Kerambos/stag beetle myth and, – syrinx myth and, ,  zoomusicology, , See also biomusicology

