Timeline
c. 1400 BC Date of the world’s earliest known musical notation, from the ancient city of Ugarit in what is now Syria.
670s BC Rough date of the first kithara competitions at Sparta’s Carneia festival, of which the famous Terpander is said to have been the first winner.
566 BC Athenian tyrant Peisistratus re-organizes and revitalizes the Panathenaic Games, a festival in honour of Athena held every four years, including prominent musical competitions.
534 (or 531) BC Peisistratus re-institutes the City Dionysia festival, where tragedies are performed in competition for the top prize.
510–508 BC Deposition of Peisistratid tyranny.
499–493 BC A conflict known as the Ionian Revolt draws Greek city-states into conflict with Persia and Asia Minor.
486 BC Comedy competitions are introduced to the City Dionysia.
c. 480 BC Creation and use of ‘Paestum pipes,’ some of our oldest surviving archaeological examples of ancient Greek instruments.
480–479 BC Persian monarch Xerxes leads an expedition against independent Greek city-states and is rebuffed, ushering in an age of Athenian cultural flourishing and beginning what is traditionally labelled the Classical Period.
472 BC Début performance of Aeschylus’ Persians, the first surviving Greek tragedy, at the City Dionysia festival. The theme is Athens’ victory over Persia as seen through the eyes of the defeated Persian king, Xerxes, and his retinue.
442 BC Comedy is introduced to the Lenaea Festival at Athens.
408 BC Début performance of Euripides’ Orestes, the only surviving fifh-century tragedy for which some original music is (possibly) preserved.
405 BC Début performance of Euripides’ Bacchae, the last surviving Greek tragedy. The theme is a hostile takeover of Thebes by the god of frenzy and theatre, Dionysus.
c. 200 BC Music which seems to be from Euripides’ Orestes is written down by an unknown scribe on a papyrus partially preserved as Pap. Vienna 2315.
First or second century AD Creation of the Seikilos Epitaph, a tomb engraving in what is now Turkey containing some of our clearest ancient rhythmic and melodic notation.
1
What this book is about
Music has always been with us. Even in prehistoric caves in Spain (the Caves of El Cogul) and Italy (the Grotta dell’Addaura), we can see depictions of dancing people painted onto the walls. And to this day there is no known culture in the world that lacks a tradition of singing, chanting, playing instruments, or moving to a beat. The earliest known form of written musical notation is carved into a clay tablet from around 1400 BC in the ancient city of Ugarit (now Syria). But that’s many thousands of years later than the aforementioned cave paintings, a fact from which we learn something important: music itself is much older than music notation. The vast majority of ancient music left behind no trace for historians to study. There are still songs being sung today that will never get written down – think of the rhymes you used to chant as a kid on the playground, or the private melodies that some parents make up and sing to their babies. These unwritten tunes might be passed down within families, or after a short while they might vanish forever. But whether written or not, music is a fundamental component of human life. Wherever there are people, they sing and dance together.
This book is first and foremost about ancient Athens – the voting citizens, the rich matrons, the enterprising prostitutes, the slaves, the immigrants, the children, and everyone else who lived together in a form of legally and culturally organized life called a city-state (or in Greek, a polis). Athens is near the eastern tip of Greece, the first major city one would encounter if travelling into Europe from Turkey or elsewhere in the Middle East. In the ancient world it was often a hub for commerce, travel, and trade among the many cultures that would move between those eastern regions and the communities of what is now Europe. This became especially true during the fifth century BC, in between 479 (when a coalition of Greek city-states managed to fend off colonization by the massive Persian Empire) and 404 (when Athens was forced under siege to surrender to Sparta, its major rival for power in Greece, at the end of the conflict between them called the Peloponnesian War).
The period before the Greek victory over Persia in 479 is usually called the ‘Archaic’ period, whereas the period after is called the ‘Classical’ period. Here we come up against a problem: as will soon become clear, the Classical period was a time of tremendous cultural flourishing, during which many of the developments that interest us took place. But it was also, crucially, not the period during which many of our sources about music were written. Quite a few great poets (such as composers of tragedy like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or of lyric like Pindar and Bacchylides) and historians (Herodotus and Thucydides chief among them) did leave written records of their work that survive to this day. But plenty of others, including many musicians and musical philosophers (Damon of Athens, Timotheus of Miletus, Lasus of Hermione, and the rest whom we will meet in this book) left nothing or only a few fragments.
We can ameliorate the situation somewhat by reading reports from philosophers such as Plato, who was born in the 420s BC and wrote reflections on fifth-century Athenian life throughout his career, though that career itself extended well into the fourth century. Other fourth-century writers, such as the philosopher and music theorist Aristoxenus, paid minute and careful attention to musical forms which probably originated, at least in part, during the fifth century and earlier. But in each of these cases we have to be careful: the echoes of history get fainter as each year passes, and methods of reporting were much less reliable in the ancient world than they are today. Besides which, every author has an agenda: Plato’s opus was devoted, broadly speaking, more to philosophical than to musical accuracy. And Aristoxenus was attempting to craft a standard system for organizing musical practices that were, in real life, much more unruly and varied than he often let on. Similar warnings apply to Plato’s student Aristotle, who wrote even later than his teacher, and to theorists like Dionysius of Halicarnassus – who was later still, and whose expertize in technical matters was somewhat limited.1 So although we are not at a loss for sources, we will always have to think in this book about who’s telling us the story, and be cautious about whose reports we take at face value. But through the late reports, the fractured testimonies, and the eyewitness accounts, we can get something like a glimpse at what happened to music in Athens during the fifth century and in the Greek-speaking world afterwards.
During the Classical period itself, Athens was buzzing with artistic and intellectual activity. Every so often in history, stars align and one city becomes a nexus where people from around the world meet, collaborate, and share new ideas – think of Detroit in the Motown explosion of the 1960s or Vienna in the eighteenth-century heyday of Classical music. That’s what Athens was like in the 400s: electric with new forms of politics, debate, and art. Flushed with the exhilaration of facing down a Persian onslaught, the Athenians came to see themselves as world leaders and to pride themselves on being at the cutting edge of culture. ‘Everything comes from every city into ours,’ said the Athenian general and statesman Pericles in 431 BC. ‘We reap the fruits of other cultures just as naturally as we reap our own.’2
Pericles was overstating the case quite a bit, but it’s true that Athens learned a great deal from the societies surrounding it (more than Pericles himself might have liked to admit). In the 400s, Athenian culture became a kind of crucible in which all sorts of musical traditions merged to form something radically new and exciting. The advancements made in musical theory and practice during that time caught on all around the Mediterranean. In some cases they radiated even further outwards to influence other cultures and subsequent generations – the Romans, especially, adopted many Greek musical practices and spread them throughout the ancient world.
That is why ultimately, though this book tends to focus on Athens, it’s about more than just Athenian music. As we’ll see throughout these pages, Greece was the starting point for a host of hugely important developments in music history, many of which endure to this day and have had major effects even on the music that remains popular in the modern West. From Shostakovich to Skrillex, from Bach to Beyoncé and in between, almost no part of Western music history is untouched by the musical legacy of ancient Greece.
This is not to say that Athens was the be-all and end-all of ancient music. Just the opposite: precisely because it was so abuzz with cultural commerce, Athens was indebted to a huge range of practices and ideas which weren’t at all Athenian or even Greek in origin. There is a wealth of valuable and significant music history to learn from before and beyond Athens, and plenty more that we simply will never know. Again, think how often music disappears without ever being written down or written about – if that’s still true today, it’s even more true for the many highly refined musical cultures which existed before Greece and which, for one reason or another, haven’t left the same kind of historical record that Greece did. We’re lucky that we have so much from ancient Athens, but even so we need to qualify what we do have with an awareness of all that came before and all that has been lost. We begin, then, by surveying some of what we know – and what we wish we knew – about the music that came into Athens from older traditions around the world.
Influences
One region whose music was certainly influential in antiquity was the vast expanse of realms and kingdoms known today as the ‘Near East.’ This wasn’t just one big block of land: it was a complicated patchwork of sprawling empires that jockeyed for power across Mesopotamia from as early as the 3000s BC. There were the Babylonians and the Assyrians, whose monarchs left behind imposing monuments, some of them still standing now, over all the huge territories that they conquered. There were the Israelites, a small but defiant race of monotheists who staked their claim to a territory beside the Dead Sea – their descendants, the Jewish people, are of course still thriving and practising their religion around the world. Then there were the Lydians, who ruled in Asia Minor (now Turkey) from about 1200 until 547 BC, when they would be conquered by the Persians. The wealth and sophistication of Persian culture, for its part, is on display even now in the immense remains of the Persian royal complex known as Persepolis, which people still visit in modern-day Iran. It was the Persians that lost the wars against Athens between 490 and 479, the opening of the Classical period. But even before the Persian wars, contact with the civilizations of the East played a major role in setting the scene for the fifth-century cultural explosion.
It stands to reason that encounters with Persia and the Near East would have galvanized Greek musical culture, because all of the societies mentioned above were alive with song and dance. The lyrics to many of ancient Israel’s greatest hymns were written down and survive in the book of the Bible called ‘Psalms’ – the Hebrew title of this book, Tehillim, simply means ‘worship songs.’ Tradition holds that many of these songs were written by the greatest king of Israel, David, who reigned during the tenth century BC and was known for the ecstatic dancing and singing with which he worshipped God (see the Bible’s Second Book of Samuel, Chapter Six). Later, King Sargon II of Assyria (who reigned between 722 and 705 BC) left behind an inscription claiming that he gathered ‘princes of the four regions of the globe’ for ‘a feast of music’ in his palace.3 Monarchs like Sargon prided themselves in assembling performers and musicians from the many cities within their power, as a display of how widely their empires ranged and how completely their own capital cities excelled the rest. Artists of all kinds, then, gathered from around the world in the great courts of ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant (the region on the east coast of the Mediterranean where Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan are found today). These massive royal complexes were centres of diverse and innovative musical culture.
From very early on, Eastern communities were doing business and sharing ideas with Greece. The Levant is only a short journey away from Athens by sea, and Asia Minor with its rich Lydian culture was separated from Europe by nothing more than a tiny strip of water called the Hellespont. Especially in the eighth and seventh centuries, Greek musicians seem to have taken cues from their neighbours in the East. There are some snatches of Archaic poetry which may indicate that Lydian harps were popular in that period among the Greek male gentry – although on vase paintings from the Classical period, harps are represented as an instrument for women. In any case, Archaic Greeks certainly did have their own stringed instrument, lower-toned than the Lydian harp: the long seven-stringed barbitos. The Greek court songwriter Pindar thought that Terpander (one of the first and best-known Greek musicians) created the barbitos after ‘hearing the lofty harp strummed at Lydian drinking parties.’4 Whether or not it really was Terpander who invented the barbitos, it’s clear that Greek musical culture before the fifth century grew and flourished in dynamic exchange with the thriving cultures of Lydia and Assyria.
One important place where Greek musicians met their fellow artists from the East was the island of Lesbos. That’s where Terpander himself was from, along with many of the other greats of the Archaic period. The people on Lesbos spoke Greek, but the island was right off the coast of Asia Minor, putting it closer to Lydia than to mainland Greece and making it a perfect meeting place for singers from all around the Mediterranean. The celebrities from that time in Lesbos are among the most famous of all Greek history: Sappho, especially, made such a name for herself that her admirers used to say she was one of the elegant goddesses of song and poetry known as Muses.5 Sappho wrote some of the most enduring love songs of her day – or any day, for that matter. The fragments of her work that still survive have been translated into English by famous poets – like the nineteenth-century English writer Christina Rosetti, for example. Or the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Classicist Anita George, who begins one translation of Sappho with the evocative line, ‘you: an Achilles’ apple / Blushing sweet on a high branch / At the tip of the tallest tree.’6
Students today usually read these words in print, as if they were poems meant to be written down in books. But in fact they’re song lyrics, and the tradition of poetry that they belong to is called ‘lyric’ poetry because originally it would have been sung along with a class of stringed instrument called the ‘lyre’ (more on this in Chapter 2). Sappho’s sensuous odes would have been sung at drinking parties (Greek symposia – see Chapter 3), and other compositions of hers would likely have been learned by choruses of young girls and performed at public festivals (see Chapter 4). The same is true of Sappho’s fellow Lesbian musicians such as Terpander and, a little later, the younger singer Alcaeus. The tight community of artists on Lesbos shared ideas and techniques amongst themselves, but they also learned from their eastern neighbours, making for a two-way international exchange of instruments and songs.
There was cultural crossover going on within Greece, too. Terpander, for one, was famous for having travelled west from Lesbos to the Greek city-state of Sparta. There he was said to have inaugurated the musical competitions held at a festival for Apollo (god of music and medicine) called the Carneia. As often happens in the early history of Greece, it’s hard to tell here where fiction ends and fact begins. There definitely was a contest at the Carneia in which performers would sing to their own accompaniment on the lyre and compete for prizes. Terpander is named as the winner in a list from the first of these contests in the 670s BC.7 He certainly composed for, and played on, the kithara – an elaborate professional-grade lyre for concert performance. There are stories (again, quite possibly fictional) that Terpander actually invented the kithara too, and it’s even possible (although far from certain) that he also wrote and played music for the auloi (singular aulos), a set of double-pipes which, along with the lyre, was the other major concert instrument of Greek tradition. Whether or not Terpander played the auloi, the pipes rivalled (or in some instances even surpassed) the kithara as the instrument of competition performance, festival song, and high art in Greece.
But whether or not Terpander was really the founder of the Carneia competition depends on how seriously we take the stories that his admirers told about him. Greek audiences loved their music, and they told all sorts of stories about their favourite singers. As mentioned already, Sappho was counted among the Muses. And the most famous Greek bard of all, Homer, was sometimes said to have been the son of gods. So lots of Terpander’s biography is probably just hype and publicity, not unlike the urban legends we tell today – the American blues singer Bob Johnson, for example, was fabled to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for unmatchable guitar skills. Even if no one really believes that story, it tells us something about Johnson’s reputation as a performer. In the same way, even if Terpander didn’t actually found the Carneian contest, the story gives us a sense of what a trailblazer he was. But we know that he certainly did compete at the Carneia, thus helping bring the sounds of Lesbos to the militaristic culture of Sparta.
Sparta took its music very seriously. Here again it’s hard to tell the truth from the tall tales, because the ancient Spartans didn’t write very much down. That means most of what we know about them is based on reports from outsiders like the Athenians, who saw Sparta as a fierce kingdom of uncompromising warriors. The cartoonishly blood-soaked movie 300 exemplifies the exaggerated image of the Spartans that still survives to this day: helmet-clad he-men in bristling regiments, with hearts and sinews as hard as their spearpoints. This is surely a caricature. But it does seem that Spartan life was harshly regulated, ruled by a strict sense of discipline on the concert stage as well as on the battlefield. Society in Sparta was broken up into immutable social classes, and this hierarchy was so rigidly enforced that those in the lowest ranks (the serf class race known as ‘Helots’) were forbidden from singing the most celebrated songs.8 Only free men could sing music by the likes of Alcman and Terpander, or by the native Spartan composer Tyrtaeus. Tyrtaeus wrote rousing military anthems to be sung on the battlefield, and a fair amount of the music written in Sparta was probably meant to be played on pipes as the army marched to war. The historian Thucydides writes that the regular beat of pipe music kept the Spartan army stepping in time, and the later (second-century-AD) writer Aulus Gellius tells us that the melody of pipes steadied soldiers’ hearts so they could face down enemies with cold determination.9
What’s next
Music was everywhere in ancient Greek life, and this introduction barely scratches the surface. What follows is a musical tour of Greece with special focus on Athens and its surrounding environs: the religious ceremonies, choral rites of passage, theatrical events, drinking parties, and countless other occasions at which pipe music, strings, dance, and singing could be heard and seen. Chapter 2 is about the history and cultural significance of instruments like the kithara and auloi. Music competitions like the Carneia will come back up in Chapter 3, which discusses the many occasions for which Greek music was composed and the venues in which it was performed. And Chapters 4, 5, and 6 will be about three of the most influential strands of Greek thought about music – how it relates to education, politics, and the heavens. Chapters 7 and 8 are for the reader interested in how melody and rhythm actually worked in Greece: they discuss the surviving theory and notation which let us reconstruct snatches of real song from Greek antiquity. The final chapter, Chapter 9, will indicate some ways in which the ideas and practices covered in the rest of the book made a lasting impact on cultures that came after Greece, including the many cultures of today’s world.
But first, Athens. How did artists and traditions from all around the Mediterranean find their way to one rocky little town in the east of Greece? There are more answers to that question than can possibly be summarized here, and still more that we will probably never know. But one crucial place where musicians could cross paths was at festivals. In Archaic Greece, festivals meant entertainment, and entertainment meant competition. There were gala contests all over the Greek mainland – I’ve already mentioned an important Spartan one, the Carneia, and there were four other major ones outside of Athens. There were the Pythian Games at Delphi, a city of sheer cliff-faces where prophets served the god Apollo and proclaimed his oracular predictions. On the Peloponnesus (the same southern peninsula where Sparta was) there were the Isthmian Games and the Nemean Games, respectively held near the cities of Corinth and Nemea. And of course there were the Olympic Games – then held every four years at Olympia in the Western Peloponnesus, and now resurrected in modern form at major cities across the whole world.
Like today’s Olympics, all of these festivals featured athletes who came from far and wide to face one another down – there were races by chariot and on foot, throwing contests with spears (javelins) and stone discs (discuses), and all sorts of other feats. And though winners did get physical prizes – expensive earthenware trophies, for example, or luxurious olive oil, or the famous crown of laurel leaves – they were also very often celebrated with victory songs called ‘epinicians’ (a Greek word meaning roughly ‘on the occasion of victory’). These were elaborate poems composed in intricate rhythmic patterns, sung by choruses (or in some cases solo), set to melodies on stringed instruments, and commissioned by wealthy winners to praise their achievements. Some of Greece’s greatest artists – Pindar and Bacchylides in the late Archaic and early Classical period, for example, and before them Ibycus and Simonides – wrote epinicians, and probably performed them too. But musicians didn’t only celebrate other people’s successes – they also competed in tournaments of their own. Many of these festivals offered prizes for the best composition and performance on kithara and auloi. The winners’ names were carved into stone, meaning we can still read some of them to this day.
Enter Peisistratus, an autocrat who seized control of Athens during much of the time between the years 560 and 527 BC. In Greek terms, Peisistratus was called a ‘tyrant’ – that is, he used force to take absolute power over Athens. He wanted to make a name for himself and his city-state on the world stage, and one of the ways he decided to go about it was by bringing Athens’ festival culture up to snuff. Much like the Olympics today, Greek festivals were a chance for the host city to boost its visibility, foster diplomatic relations, and show off its local culture. Besides which, monarchs who ruled by coup, as Peisistratus did, always needed ways to shore up support and popularity against other factions who stood poised to steal back leadership of the state. One excellent way to win favour with your subjects is to throw them a giant party that shows how rich and strong you are. So Peisistratus poured funds and effort into revitalizing both the City Dionysus, the annual theatrical festival which honoured the god Dionysus, and the Panathenaia, a festival in honour of Athens’ patron goddess, Athena. The Greater Panathenaia ran every four years, and during the intervening three years came a toned-down version called the Lesser Panathenaia – together, they were tailor-made to put Athens on a par with the cities around it. The Panathenaia had sports, music, religious worship – everything essential for spectacular civic self-promotion. The closest modern analogue would be a cross between St. Patrick’s Day, the Super Bowl, and a church service on Easter Sunday. It was a massive gathering that brought Greeks together and helped the people of Athens to build solidarity and cultural identity with one another. Shared music is one of the best ways to build common ground: hence the performance of national anthems at sporting events, or school songs sung at the beginning of assemblies. Peisistratus knew that a regular tradition of musical performance would go a long way towards making Athens a force to be reckoned with.
One of the biggest successes in that department was the recitation of poetry composed by the aforementioned Homer. Homer is perhaps the most celebrated, and almost certainly the oldest, artist whose work survives from ancient Greece. And because he’s so old, scholars aren’t sure whether he was even a real person. What we know is that, long before the Archaic period, singers were travelling around Greece singing a particular kind of music that would come to be known as epos (from which we get our modern word ‘epic’). Epos had its own kind of rhythm (called ‘dactylic hexameter’ – more on that in Chapter 8), and the songs these singers performed were fantastic tales of heroes, quests, gods, and monsters – the great myths and adventures for which Greece is still known. The songs were engrossing, hypnotic, and nail-bitingly entertaining; they kept audiences riveted for hours on end. Their tunes were probably pretty simple, and may have come with instrumentation on a barbitos or similar stringed instrument. At some point during the late eighth century (probably – it might have been the ninth or the seventh), there emerged from among these many songs two very long, continuous epics: the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first was a battle legend about Achilles, the Greek hero so powerful that entire armies depended on his strength, and the war in which he fought against the city of Troy in Asia Minor. The second was an adventure story about another Greek solider, Odysseus, and his long journey home after that same war. Scholars have argued for centuries about whether these poems were composed by one man or stitched together by many men in several stages. But they do seem to have been preserved through the eighth and seventh centuries on an eastern Greek island called Chios, handed down from generation to generation among a guild of singers called the Homeridae.
So by the time Peisistratus came along, something like what we now call the Iliad and the Odyssey was being sung (without a written text) by some very skilful bards who considered themselves heirs of a great poet called Homer. It seems like Peisistratus might have seen potential in these small-town stars, and he had the Homeric poems performed at the Panathenaia. This kind of thing still happens: local musical artists can always be picked up by wealthy patrons and get their work distributed to a wider audience, as when a local indie artist gets picked up by a big label and quickly turns into a household name, or when YouTube sensations build up their own private fanbase before scoring more prestigious distribution worldwide. At the Panathenaia, the Homeric poems became the enormous hits that they would be forever afterwards. The competitions probably also helped standardize the songs for mass distribution: if everyone simply sings from memory, then different people are likely to sing slightly different versions. But at festivals like the Panathenaia, performers needed an official version that everyone could agree on, which is why Athens might have been the first place where the entire Iliad and Odyssey were written down.10 At some point the lyre was left behind and performers simply chanted the words aloud in a kind of sing-song voice. But the performance of Homer remained one of Athens’ most celebrated musical claims to fame, and the Panathenaia put Athens on Greece’s cultural map in a serious way.
There were also, of course, epinicians and contests in kithara- and aulos-playing, as in the other festivals all over Greece. Pindar and Bacchylides both wrote songs to be sung at Athens, and compositions by Terpander and Alcman made their way there too. Under Peisistratus and his son Hipparchus, the city gained a new sense of unity and civic pride. Even after the Peisistratids were deposed for good (between 510 and 508 BC), Athens remained a formidable centre of cultural commerce in its own right, so that musicians started flocking there to make a name for themselves.
One such musician was Lasus of Hermione (from the Argolid, a region of the Peloponnesus), who came to Athens by invitation of Hipparchus and made a name for himself composing a kind of song called a ‘dithyramb.’ These were choral odes, sung by groups of dancing men and usually meant to celebrate the god Dionysus. Lasus remained in Athens after 508 and became a major figure on the Greek concert stage, establishing new competitions just for dithyrambs and writing what may well have been Greece’s first ever book on music – he was probably also one of Pindar’s teachers.11 Lasus was part of a growing community of multitalented artists within Athens who not only wrote music of their own, but also passed on their knowledge to pupils and theorized about best practices for composition and performance.
When Greece won its wars against Persia in 479 and Athens started to think of itself as the central hub of the cultural world, this local community of artists and thinkers was already starting to take off. All it took was winning the war for things really to explode: thrilled with its own success and newly re-established as a democracy, Athens came to see itself as the world centre for commerce and art that Pericles would eventually boast about in 431.
Of course, even while all this local buzz was developing, ideas kept flowing into Athens from outside as well. One crucial but mysterious figure who made a huge impact all over Greece (and beyond it too) was Pythagoras, from the Greek island of Samos in the far east of the Aegean (just off the coast of Asia Minor). Anyone who has ever tried to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle knows Pythagoras from the theorem that bears his name – he’s perhaps best known as a mathematician and the bane of teenage geometers. But in fact, since he never wrote anything down, no one quite knows what Pythagoras really did discover, and what was only attributed to him by his many followers. He was a philosopher who lived between about 570 and 495 BC, when a few very sophisticated schools of philosophy were growing up in the Eastern Aegean (called Ionia) and in Greek-speaking colonies throughout Southern Italy (especially in a town called Elea). To his devotees, Pythagoras was a visionary and a genius; to his detractors, he was an unhinged crank and a mystical kook. Legends about him are thick on the ground – he was a strict vegetarian, some say, and he never ate beans, but he could calm a rowdy drunk just by playing a soothing melody on the pipes.
Much of this is fiction, of course. But as that last anecdote suggests, some of Pythagoras’ teachings quite possibly did have to do with music. The most important musical discovery attributed to him is also one of the most contested: some say he discovered the use of mathematical ratios to describe the intervals between pitches on a scale. That is an insight that remains at the heart of music theory to this day. But in point of fact, the connection between music and maths may have become apparent more practically and less theoretically, among the craftsmen who built instruments for performance. Even so, many of Pythagoras’ followers were known for their subtle and detailed speculation about the connections between music, mathematics, and the structure of the cosmos.
These Pythagorean teachings about music were extremely influential, and many of them were brought by Pythagoras’ followers to Athens. Two strains of Pythagorean thought were particularly powerful: the use of mathematics to understand harmony, and the consequent attempt to connect musical sound with the laws of physics that govern planetary motion. Those ideas became part of the fast-paced intellectual environment that was developing in Athens, where scholars and self-styled experts (often called ‘sophists’) peddled ideas and theories about everything from biology and physics to rhetoric and politics. The sophists wanted to sell the upper classes on courses of study that could make them wise, or powerful, or both, and they did so by arguing and competing amongst themselves for the most effective and accurate ways of describing the world. The foundational philosopher Socrates, who seems to have found Pythagoreanism attractive, came of age in this fifth-century culture of debate. So did the musician Damon of Athens, who taught Pericles himself and who may have had Pythagorean ties as well. When mixed in with the bustling artistic and intellectual community that started under Peisistratus with folks like Lasus, Pythagoreanism helped kickstart a frenzy of post-Persian War debate and experimentation as performers and theorists worked to write, sing, and think about music in ever more new and compelling ways. There will be much more to say about all of this in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, because Pythagorean thought helped Athenian philosophers to make some of their most lasting contributions to world intellectual history, shaping how people all over the world would go on to think about music.
It should be clear by now that music was more than just a form of entertainment for many Greeks. It was a mystical experience and a way of life, a central part of education and a means of communicating with the divine. At dinner parties and in religious ceremonies, in school and in politics, the ancient Greeks shaped their lives around melody and rhythm. The Greek word mousikē, from which our ‘music’ eventually comes, means much more than just audible tunes. It means everything over which the Muses (Mousai in Greek – hence the word mousikē) presided. That includes dance, instrumentation, recitation, and all the forms of politics, mathematics, and religious worship which were thought to be connected with song and to have a sort of ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’ of their own. Still to this day, scientists and casual listeners alike are fascinated by the power of music – the ways in which it seems to activate our brainwaves and stir our emotions, maybe even connect us to God, as almost nothing else can. When we turn on Spotify or when we worship in church, we do more than just listen to sounds. We tap into something universal to our species which is at once deeply primal and profoundly sophisticated, visceral and elevated at the same time. If we have made any progress in understanding that phenomenon over the last 3,000 years, it’s thanks at least in part to the revolutionary developments that happened in and around Athens, where for decades thinkers and artists from far and wide came together and wrestled with their craft as they never had before. Whether we know it or not, the way we think about and even listen to music now has been shaped by the scholars and artists of Athens and the ancient Greek world. When we come to know them better, we come to know ourselves. That is what this book is for.
Some further reading
The cultural and musical interchange between Greece and the Near East has been covered in some detail by John C. Franklin of the University of Vermont. In particular, his essay ‘A Feast of Music’ is very rich – it can be found in the book Anatolian Interfaces (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008), which in general contains some worthwhile studies of interaction between Greece and the Near East. See also ‘Lyre Gods of the Bronze Age Musical Koinē’ in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions (volume 6, number 2, 2006, pp. 39–70).
A classic treatment of the interface between Greek and Near Eastern poetic culture is Martin West’s The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
A book by Maarit Kivilo goes into greater detail about the biographies and careers of great Archaic poets like Terpander and Sappho. It’s called Early Greek Poets’ Lives: The Shaping of the Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
A short essay that gives a broad overview of musical life in Greece is ‘Mousikē and Mimēsis’ by Giulia Corrente. It can be found in The Many Faces of Mimesis, published in 2018 by Parnassos Press. There are two other book-length general surveys – Music in Ancient Greece and Rome by John G. Landels (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998) and Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece by Warren D. Anderson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) – which may also be useful.
For a more detailed book-length study of the topic, see Martin West’s Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
A much more technical and difficult, but also more up-to-date, treatment than West’s is that of Stephan Hagel, Ancient Greek Music: A New Technical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). This will be of great use to readers who wish to go deeper into detail.
Though not yet published at the time of this writing, the publishers at Blackwell will soon produce a Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music (edited by Tosca Lynch and Eleonora Rocconi). I have been fortunate enough to read some of the book in advance and can recommend it highly.