4
‘Then the schoolmaster taught his pupils a song … either
“Pallas, Great Sacker of Cities,” or “The Shout Heard Round the World” –
Keeping the harmony tight which their fathers had handed down.
And if one of them messed around or riffed some fancy riff,
The kind those fancy riffers learn from Phrynis nowadays,
He got beat good and sore for drowning out the Muses.’
Aristophanes, Clouds 966–72
This is a speech from a comedy by Aristophanes, the raunchy parodist mentioned in the previous chapter. His concern in this play, Clouds, was with education – with the kind of teaching that young boys got when their parents sent them off to expensive schools. Speaking very generally, Aristophanes saw two very different forms of education on offer in Athens: the traditional style, in which tomorrow’s best and brightest were schooled in the good old ways of doing things (and smacked on the behind if they tried to stray from those ways) and the dangerous newfangled approach, in which smart-alec whippersnappers were instructed in subtle arts of rhetoric and relativism.
As often with Aristophanes, this is a distorted caricature for comedic effect – there was surely a range of pedagogical philosophies in Greece beyond just these two extremes of traditionalist indoctrination and sophisticated radicalism. But the play does get at something fundamental about how wealthy young males were regarded, and what was at stake in their education. Since young men grew up to lead Athens – into or out of war, towards or away from new policies and practices – it mattered tremendously how they were taught to regard the received wisdom of their forefathers.
Music, including the poetic words which constituted its lyrics, was a central part of that. Would the young accept the age-old rules that their teachers endorsed, learning by rote the recitation of Homer and sticking to the old ways of singing the standards? Or would they become seduced by the new styles being invented all around them, drawn like the rest of the listening public to the flashy experiments of daring kitharodes and auletes? And what about the rest of Athens, the people without access to ritzy schools where they would be drilled in the classics? What kind of music would they learn, and how?
So in fact, this one passage – from a speech by a character called ‘The Righteous Argument,’ who represents traditional values – tells us a lot about the range of possibilities for musical education in Athens. There’s a vision in it – albeit a silly and partially imaginary vision – of a traditional education, one with an accepted canon of suitable songs for learning. We don’t have copies of the two tunes mentioned in this speech, respectively entitled Pallas Persepolis Deina or ‘Pallas, Great Sacker of Cities’ and Tēleporon Ti Boama or ‘The Shout Heard Round the World.’ But whether real or fictional, they are clearly meant to stand in for time-honoured classics – well-known songs that the students’ ‘fathers traditionally sang’ – each of them kept meticulously free of modulation or melodic experimentation.
Old standards and new styles
This solemn and elevated form of traditional education was a load-bearing pillar at the centre of elite Greek society. Many Greeks, Plato among them, were fond of saying that there are two halves to a complete education: gymnastics for the body, and music for the soul.1 This is where it becomes important to remember that ‘music’ and ‘gymnastics’ aren’t the narrow modern concepts that those English words usually describe. These are the Greek words mousikē – the study of arts over which the Mousai, Muses, took precedence – and gymnastikē – physical activities which were traditionally done gymnos, in the nude (among them things like acrobatics, wrestling, and discus-throwing).
The Muses’ purview of mousikē included all intellectual and artistic pursuits: history, singing, mathematics, and even philosophy. Not all of those pursuits were what we would now call musical: not even the Greeks would have sung the prose histories of people like Herodotus or Thucydides. But we’ve seen already that many things – things like poetry and drama – were kinds of music for Athenians. And we’ll see in the next couple of chapters that even Greek maths, philosophy, and politics were musical in nature too. And even the broad division between physical and musical education advocated by Plato wasn’t strictly maintained in actual practice: Athenaeus, for example, tells us about a form of dance called the gymnopaidikē (a word meaning something close to ‘physical education’) in which boys would rehearse stylized versions of wrestling moves.2 Singing and dancing were crucial building blocks of classical Greek education because they represented the distilled version of something that, in one way or another, underlay almost all the humanistic and cultural practices that Athenian society held dear.
So boys learned music. Especially they learned to recite chunks of epic verse by Hesiod and Homer – these were the repositories of religion, allegory, and legend that educated men would cite regularly whenever they wanted to appeal to ancient wisdom. Epic, and especially the Iliad and Odyssey, were the closest thing to a bible that the Athenians (and the Greeks more generally) had. There was no central scripture for Greek religion that we know of, but Homer often served many of the same purposes as scripture: he was cited as the great recorder of worthwhile beliefs, stories, and observations about the world and its divine overseers. Schoolboys were taught to memorize and recite Homer so that they could enter productively into a society that used his epics as a main point of reference for cultural discussions.
They were also taught more advanced music, both vocal and instrumental. Here, again, it was considered of the highest importance that elite boys be cultivated in just the right way. The Greek word nomos, which refers to an individual song for recitation or performance, also means ‘law’ – learning the right way to do music, then, was the first step towards learning the right way to do politics. Opinions differed on just how much instruction of this kind was proper, but most schools certainly included some basic scales on a simple lyre and a little bit of singing. As detailed in Chapter 2, not all instruments were regarded as suitable for cultured gentlemen. Too much expertize in music of any kind, moreover, was regarded as beneath the gentry by the most conservative critics. Hence Aristotle recommended that boys, though they should study music for the refinement of their characters and sensibilities, should nevertheless stop short of technical virtuosity and paid performance. And heaven absolutely forfend that they should think of learning to play the aulos!3
As always, of course, these proclamations may be more marginal and utopian than their authors would have liked us to believe – Plutarch, in his biography of the controversial gentleman and politician Alcibiades, does note that he refused to play the pipes.4 But in doing so, Alcibiades had to resist the encouragements of his own teachers – so it’s likely that the aulos actually was more accepted as a subject of high-class training than Aristotle would have liked it to be. That there was a generally accepted canon of learning, however, and that certain songs and styles were more palatable to traditionalists than others, seems beyond doubt.
Such was the philosophy undergirding decorous elite education of the kind envisioned in Clouds. At the same time, in that same passage with which we began, Aristophanes lets us in with a wink on a big open secret: the kids aren’t really grooving to the golden oldies they have to learn in school. Instead, the more irrepressible among them have been known to wander into adventurous territory, mimicking the trendier artists popular among the younger set. Phrynis of Mytilene was one of the edgy kitharodes who came into his own during the days of the late fifth century BC, and he features in the Clouds quote above. ‘New Musicians’ like Phrynis (a term they never applied to themselves, but which modern scholars have invented to describe the trends of the late 400s) used to test out complicated modulations and melodic contortions.
So Aristophanes opens the door onto a more informal and tacit form of music education. It has always been the case – and still is today – that impatient young musicians who grow bored with formalized classical training will turn to their favourite artists for ad hoc training in the kind of things they really want to play. Guitar teachers lament that their pupils ditch Bach for John Mayer, or rigorous classical training on the organ falls by the wayside as kids rush to the electric keyboard. Even artists who do train classically sometimes leave the older ways behind in a bid for more pop relevance – this was the move that both Regina Spektor and Lady Gaga made to launch their careers in the early 2000s, for example. In Athens, even as schoolteachers handed down the classical learning of the old days, Athenian boys learned to test out hotter licks by imitating what they saw and heard onstage.
And, as a matter of fact, it was elite boys who performed in some of the most popular choral songs and dances of the Athenian year – notably, the dithyrambic and tragic contests at the City Dionysia featured young citizen boys selected in groups by the chorus-leader and trained specifically for the year’s performance.5 In those performances, boys would have been exposed to music like that of Euripides, which was known for its transgressive innovation. As a result – even if the sterner moralists disapproved – upper-class boys probably did get both training in and exposure to newer, more innovative forms of music.
Meanwhile for less well-heeled boys, or girls who didn’t get a classical training, informal learning by emulation may have been the primary or the only way to get good at music. Plato laments at several points in his dialogues that attendance at the theatre and at concerts actually came to supersede the old ways of education as a means for the public to learn its morals and its tastes.6 Certainly musicians themselves were keen to learn from one another and even steal one another’s secrets. Timotheus, in his song Persians (lines 202–37), looks back on a succession of past innovators who went before him, whose compositions he studied and whose style he used as a model for his own (before surpassing them completely of course, at least in his own estimation). ‘In the beginning Orpheus … produced the dappled tortoise-shell lyre,’ sings Timotheus, ‘and after him came Terpander … who yoked his Muse to ten chords.’ It’s a stylized, semi-mythological reference to the invention of new instruments and instrumental modifications described in Chapter 3: building off of Orpheus’ simple tortoise-shell, Terpander experimented with new notes and modulations so that Timotheus could build on his work by adding yet more.
The important point in all this for us isn’t that Timotheus really did learn directly from Terpander specifically, or from Orpheus (who may never really even have existed). It’s that he clearly saw himself as the next in a long line of sound musical practitioners, each looking back to the others’ trailblazing work and building on it in his turn. This is a kind of music-learning based on apprenticeship and rivalry – formal and informal relationships between expert musicians in which one player teaches another, or two contemporaries sharpen one another’s skills through professional competition.
Some of the artistic exchanges that arose in this climate were legendary in every sense of the word: they both produced amazing work and were probably exaggerated in memory beyond all proportion. There are claims in the biographical tradition of Euripides that he collaborated with Timotheus and that the two even composed a few songs together. Even if that’s not true, there are similarities in diction and rhythm between Euripides and Timotheus which make it nearly certain that the former learned a fair amount from watching and listening to the latter. The great Lasus of Hermione is said to have schooled Pindar, whose lyrical victory hymns were famous around the Mediterranean. Formal schooling was one thing, but for professional musicians and those outside the upper classes, informal emulation and collaboration was just as important if not more so for music learning.
The partheneion
We do also get glimpses, although they’re only glimpses, of a formal music education that wasn’t only for boys. Actually, one of the clearest such glimpses comes not from fifth-century Athens but from Archaic Sparta. There, at least, people practised one important musical ritual associated with girls coming of age: the performance of a partheneion (plural partheneia). The word means ‘maiden-song’ or ‘virgin-song’: it very likely describes a communal dance to encourage and celebrate a young woman’s entry into maturity and adult society.
The notion that Greek boys and girls should dance together in ways uniquely indicative of their gender and station in life – the practice of musical expression and celebration of what it means to be on the cusp of womanhood or manhood – is at least as old as Greek musical poetry itself.7 But scholars have been particularly interested in the idea that certain girls’ choral songs represent more formalized rites of passage. Think of the quinceañera celebrated by Mexican and Latin American communities when a girl turns fifteen: a large, ceremonial party for the gathering of friends and family to mark a transition into adulthood. Like quinceañeras, partheneia were very possibly a regular civic, religious, and social institution.
But unlike quinceañeras, partheneia would have been undertaken in groups – it wasn’t just one guest of honour who presented herself, but a whole chorus of girls that did so together. In that respect, think more of a graduation ceremony, in which a whole class performs one communal ritual of self-presentation and group values. At the same time, a partheneion involved the participants learning and showcasing culturally important material, in this case a song and dance in the style of high Greek art. There are similarities there to the Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, in which young men and women recite a portion of scripture and give a talk to demonstrate their ownership and understanding of their traditions.
Imagining different aspects of those various festivals rolled into one gives something like the impression of what a partheneion festival might have been: part quinceañera celebration, part graduation ceremony, and part bat mitzvah ritual. There’s some indication that similar rituals were practised in Sparta for boys, and girls probably sang and danced in choruses at various other times – not just as part of one big rite of passage. Probably the performance of partheneia was folded into a larger festival including various songs, dances, and rituals in celebration of a goddess (there has been much speculation about which goddess that might have been). But what’s most interesting here is the girls’ partheneion itself – both because it gives us rare insight into how young women were taught, and because we have extant examples.
Some words from a few partheneia have still survived until the modern day. One of the most revealing is the ‘Louvre Partheneion’ composed by Alcman, a lyricist from the seventh century BC. The fact that the words to these songs were written by well-known musicians like Alcman (Pindar also wrote some) tells us something off the bat: partheneion performances weren’t exercizes in writing and composition, but demonstrations of learning and assimilation into the traditions of mainstream society. Girls didn’t write their own music for these displays, nor did their teachers write music for them. Instead, pupils showed that they were entering woman’s estate by memorizing and perfecting a work by a recognized cultural authority. As with boys’ elite education in Athens, formal education for girls in Sparta seems to have had less to do with creativity than with tradition and cultural unity.
And Alcman’s words themselves make reference to a hazy figure who may tell us a little more about what musical life was like for Spartan girls. Hagesichora (a name which means ‘leader of the chorus’) appears as the khoregos (a word which also means ‘leader of the chorus’). Every Greek chorus had a khoregos – the tragedies which appeared at the City Dionysia, for example, featured a chorus with a leader as well. So did the dithyrambs written by masters like Bacchylides, Lasus, and Pindar.
Usually, the chorus leader not only took the lead in performance, but also helped to teach the chorus members. In this case, when those members are young girls learning to become adults, it’s reasonable to assume that Hagesichora was their mentor and leader. Perhaps the name is a way of making Alcman’s composition distributable among various different schools and groups of girls, so that they would have something to call their teacher regardless of her actual name. In any case, the lyrics are passionately admiring of her: ‘the flowing hair of my kinswoman Hagesichora blooms on her head like imperishable gold’ (lines 45–54).
The word ‘kinswoman’ is probably more affectionate than literal here – it’s not certain, and indeed it’s quite unlikely, that all girls in a chorus were related to their leader by blood. But this leadership figure was obviously meant to be regarded with a kind of reverence that went beyond respect for her purely musical skills. She is represented in the song as a model of beauty and grace, a figure for the girls to admire and probably emulate. In the lives of these girls, then, music wouldn’t just have been an academic subject to be theoretically analysed and memorized by rote. It was a ritual that taught decorum, a cooperative endeavour that would enable the girls to keep their poise in polite society and school them in the shared literature of their parents and grandparents. By dancing and singing the partheneion, young girls both demonstrated and developed their social awareness.
All of this needs to be qualified somewhat with a warning that has become somewhat ubiquitous in this book: there’s lots that we don’t know. That bears repeating here because we’ve ventured outside of Athens and, as mentioned in the introduction, one of the major reasons for studying Athens is that it left behind a wealth of written records when compared to other city-states. When we start talking about Archaic Sparta, the picture gets still hazier. Nevertheless, it’s important to survey what we can, because it lets us broaden our picture a little bit to the rest of Greece outside of Athens.
Unreliable narrators: the case of Spartan music
Alcman’s partheneion is a rare treasure because it comes from an actual Spartan. Many of the other things we think we know about Spartans (like the stories about how they cut strings off of Timotheus’ lyre in Chapter 2) come from later authors with Athenian sympathies – that story about the strings, for example, comes from a famous first-century-AD essayist named Plutarch. Plutarch eventually became a Roman citizen, but he read the great books and treatizes which were mostly written in Athens or by people who had studied there. As a result he, like many other authors who have left behind stories about Sparta, was writing from a distinctly Athenian angle – you might say he was more interested in using Sparta as a foil for Athens than in finding out the real truth about Spartan life.
That said, Plutarch and people like him are in many cases all we have to go by, and chances are good that they didn’t just make things up out of whole cloth. What’s more likely is that, here as always, we need to take what we read with a grain of salt – remaining aware that ancient authors, just like modern ones, can be biased.
For example: Plutarch also leaves behind what he claims is a record from the work of the Archaic-era Spartan legal reformer, Lycurgus. Lycurgus changed Sparta’s laws to make them more democratic, much as Solon and Cleisthenes did in Athens. Among Lycurgus’ reforms were careful instruction for the education of the youth, because Spartans no less than Athenians were concerned to make sure that children grew up to be good and productive citizens as a part of a healthy regime.
It seems music was a part of this: young girls, Plutarch says, were instructed to dance and sing at certain festivals. This passage is rich with colourful details about Spartan pedagogical practices, including a note that boys and girls both would perform in the nude to encourage fitness and self-confidence.8 But what Plutarch says also contradicts to some extent what Aristotle has to say about music education in Sparta, which is that young nobles were trained in music theory and appreciation, but that they disdained the notion of actually performing themselves.9 Given Plutarch’s claims about bold public singing and dancing on the part of Spartan youth, and given that we have copies of partheneia which show us that young women did sing and dance at regular festivals, it’s quite possible that what Aristotle says isn’t strictly true.
It may be that Aristotle’s account reflects a more restrictive attitude that developed after the time of Lycurgus, during the fourth century in which Aristotle himself wrote. But it may also be that Aristotle exaggerated the reality of Spartan strictures. This is a good example of one case in which it pays to read our reports sceptically, holding one up against the other to keep them honest.
Aristotle, after all, talked about Sparta in Book 8 of his Politics because he wanted a contrast with Athens. He was considering whether young children ought to be trained in some level of musical performance – not too much, so they became vulgar, but just enough so they could know their way around a lyre. Perhaps music education in Sparta was somewhat limited and restricted – perhaps girls learned to dance in partheneia but weren’t encouraged to learn a wider variety of songs and dances. Aristotle, on the other hand, wanted to advocate a decent variety of music as part of public education – he even wanted to go farther than his teacher, Plato, and say that people should learn some songs just for fun and relaxation, as well as edification.
In order to make his point, then, Aristotle may well have exaggerated by saying that the Spartans don’t teach their children to perform at all. In that case, what he likely observed was that the Spartans were careful and restrictive in what they did teach their children, and he blew that out of proportion so he could establish a contrast between Athens and Sparta. Notice that this leaves us with some analytical work to do, but that it’s not entirely hopeless: as usual, our record is imperfect but, with careful sleuthing, it can yield a basic picture of how life in and around ancient Athens worked. If Sparta was careful about what kinds of songs were taught to children, and if Athenians like Plato wanted to be similarly careful about musical education, then maybe Aristotle simplified things in order to advocate for a more liberal Athenian approach in contrast to the Spartan restrictions.
Putting it together
The more detailed we get, the more guesswork we have to do. But we can pull back the camera now and focus on some basic points we’ve learned from Plutarch, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Alcman, all together. For one thing, both Sparta and Athens used music as part of their training for young people as they reached maturity, a fundamental tool for helping children to become adults and operate well in polite society. For another thing, there was always a range of opinions about just how much music children ought to learn, and for what purposes.
For some, like Plato and perhaps Lycurgus, music education ought to be limited to just those kinds of songs and dances that could be considered useful and instructive for budding citizens. In one of his more restrictive moods, Plato suggested that children – and indeed all good Greeks – should be restricted only to learning hymns and choral songs which describe and affirm the laws of the city.10 Others, such as Aristotle, wanted to include a few more pleasurable tunes just to let the kids have a little fun and relax as a way of getting rejuvenated for further study. These differences of opinion bear witness to an ongoing conversation among the Athenian and Spartan upper crust about the best way to incorporate music in a course of study for upstanding young people.
It remains a constant, however, that Greek education not only included music but was saturated with it. This is something that remains true today about music education: it’s not just about learning music. Sometimes a music class’s primary function is to teach a particular song, instrument, or style, as when a student goes to a private instructor for singing, say, or guitar. And it does seem, for example, that schoolboys in Athens routinely had dedicated instruction in singing and playing the lyre. But just as often, music serves a purpose within a wider, integrated educational whole: we use songs in modern schools to memorize mathematical equations (‘x equals negative b, plus or minus radical …’), or to express institutional pride (as in a school song), or to foster group cohesion (as in a football anthem). In this sense, the Greek concept of mousikē turns out not to be so foreign after all: there’s more that is musical in our society than just the dedicated performance of song and dance.
In fact, there is a much later Greek scholar – Pollux, who studied and worked in Athens during the second century AD – who tells us that the word ‘chorus’ was sometimes used in Greek to mean not ‘a group of coordinated singers and dancers’ but simply ‘a school.’11 Choregos, likewise, didn’t only mean ‘a leader of singers and dancers’ but also simply ‘a teacher.’ This reflects a wider Greek tendency, not only to see the world as filled with mousikē of all kinds, but also to use melody and rhythm to express the order and logic that underlay all sorts of larger social structures. In the next few chapters we’ll see how political science, ethical reasoning, and even the movements of the heavens seemed to many Greek thinkers like a kind of music all their own – since all of them involved an intricate harmony of disparate parts brought together like different notes in one scale or song. Education, too, not only included music but was fundamentally musical – it could be looked at as an orchestration of distinct individuals into one harmonious whole.
In the case of education, those individuals were the citizens, and the whole was the city-state. We have seen in this chapter how singing, dancing, and the teaching of both were crucial ways in which young Athenians and Spartans were introduced into the customs and traditions of their respective societies. We have also seen that any break in that chain of instruction – any deviation from the old standards or attempt on the part of young people to explore more daring forms of music – was regarded with the utmost seriousness by teachers and cultural authorities.
In between formal education, amateur experimentation, and professional apprenticeships, there evolved a delicate dance of continuity and innovation which made up the musical life of the city-state. Who learned what, and why, was more than just an artistic question – it was an issue which struck at the heart of Greek society. Athenians and Spartans alike viewed music, and the education in humanities of which it was a central part, as a core of civilized social life. What kids learned in school would determine what they sang at drinking parties, which plays they voted for in the theatre, and whether they funded or even pursued professional music. All the cultural values and evaluations associated with those choices – many of which we have been studying in the previous chapters – were formed and instilled during those crucial childhood years. In the next chapter we’ll see just how important the Greeks thought those values could be, and how high the stakes of them were.
Some further reading
The idea that the partheneion can be understood as related to ritual initiations into womanhood is defended in Claude Calame’s Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce Archaïque (Choruses of Young Women in Archaic Greece), published by Edizioni Dell’ateneo & Bizzarri in 1977. For summary of and engagement with the various scholarly responses to that idea, a good place to start is ‘Visual Imagery in Parthenaic Song’ by Laura Swift (in The Look of Lyric, edited by Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois, Leiden: Brill, 2016, pp. 255–87). On the larger festival occasion and which goddess(es) may have been worshipped at it, see ‘The Occasion and Purpose of Alcman’s Partheneion (1 PGMF)’ by Robert D. Luginbill, in Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica (volume 92, number 2, 2009, pp. 27–54).
There has recently been some discussion about whether classical Athens – typically regarded as having been very restrictive when it comes to public choral performance by women – did in fact allow female choruses to perform in certain contexts. On this score, have a look at ‘Another Look at Female Choruses in Classical Athens’ by Felix Budelmann and Timothy Power, in Classical Antiquity (volume 34, number 2, 2015, pp. 252–95).
One excellent old book, Ethos and Education in Greek Music by W.B. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966) remains among the go-to authorities on the relationship between music and education in Greek life. For more discussions of musical ethics in education, in addition to the references at the end of the next chapter, see ‘The Good and its Relation to Music Education’ by Yaroslav Senyshyn, in Philosophy of Music Education Review (volume 16, number 2, 2008, pp. 174–92).
For more recent discussions of how ancient Greek musical knowledge was passed down, see the following:
There is a lovely chapter on ‘Musical Education in Greece and Rome’ by Stefan Hagel and Tosca Lynch in Wiley Blackwell’s Companion to Ancient Education, edited by W. Martin Bloomer (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2015, pp. 401–12).
On the selection of citizen boys for the dithyrambic and tragic choruses, see Helene Foley’s ‘Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy’ in Classical Philology (volume 98, number 1, 2003, pp. 1–30).
See also ‘Ps. Plutarch, “De Musica”. A History of Oral Tradition of Ancient Greek Music’ by Egert Pöhlmann, in Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica (volume 99, number 3, 2011, pp. 11–30).