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ARTICLE
Dancing in the Dark: Deconstructing a Narrative Epiphany on the Isopata Ring
C. Dawn Cain
Isopata ring bezel
In theory, narratives in any medium can recount religious, profane, real, or fantastic events. But some stories, those involving battles for instance, have more narrative value and are easier to relate and understand than others. The often-reproduced scene on a ring from Isopata, Crete, is an instructive example of the rich narrative character of the finest Aegean glyptic art. It also exemplifies the difficulties posed to the modern viewer-narrator by images that depict religious tales or events. The examination of the pictorial structure and gestures of the protagonists on the Isopata ring undertaken here, which takes the form of a comparative analysis and centers the discussion within the theoretical framework of narratology, discloses the intense ambiguities of the ring's representation. The characters on the ring appear to take part in an event of some significance, yet it is not possible to determine the individual status of each figure (e.g., divine or mortal) from the pictorial texts at our disposal. Their actions, positions, and the sequence in which the action depicted should be read is also difficult to determine. This revelation is unsettling, given that the traditional view of Minoan religion being focused on invoking an epiphany of the goddess through ecstatic dancing is based in large part on readings of the scene on the Isopata ring.
A middle position is offered by H. A. Groenwegen-Frankfort im her chapter on Minoan art entitled Homo Ludens. As the title 0borrowed from Huizinga's classic study on play in culture implies, she is zefering both to the subjects of Minoan art, including ritual games, contest, and dances, and the freedom of movement suggested by the playful use of space that, for example,violated a sense of a fixed groundline and allowed a figure to appear suspended in mid-air or to float into view. As axamlpes she cites dancers, precisely the type of figure whose interpretation Walberg questions. Is it not reasonable to suppose that Aegean artist p...iving dance and related activites as playful behavoir, themselves indulged in playfulness in representing the activity? In the same way that an artist of the Archaic period did not seek to illustrate the shipwreck of Odysseus, bur came noan artist is not illustrating cult dances but rather his own version of a ritual dance In so doing he is capturing the essential playfulness of the activity. The Isopata ring is not a snapshot of an Epiphany: but the activity depicted on it and examples can be interpreted in relation to objekts that are focalized and magically activated by ritual movement.
PYTHON was a monstrous DRAKON born from the slime of the earth after the great deluge. It was set to guard the oracle at Delphoi and was slain by Apollon when he claimed that oracle for himself.
Parents
GAIA (Metamorphoses 1.438, Hyginus Fab 140)
"But near by [Delphoi] was a sweet flowing spring, and there with his strong bow the lord, the son of Zeus, killed the bloated, great drakaina, a fierce monster wont to do great mischief to men upon earth, to men themselves and to their thin-shanked sheep: for she was a very bloody plague. She it was who once received from gold-throned Hera and brought up fell, cruel Typhaon to be a plague to men." -Homeric Hymns 3.300-306
"Straightway large-eyed queenly Hera took him [Typhaon] and bringing one evil thing to another such, gave him to the drakaina; and she received him. And this Typhaon used to work great mischief among the famous tribes of men. Whosoever met the drakaina, the day of doom would sweep him away, until the lord Apollon, who deals death from afar, shot a strong arrow at her. Then she, rent with bitter pangs, lay drawing great gasps for breath and rolling about that place. An awful noise swelled up unspeakable as she writhed continually this way and that amid the wood: and so she left her life, breathing it forth in blood. Then Phoibos Apollon boasted over her: 'Now rot here upon the soil that feeds man! You at least shall live no more to be a fell bane to men who eat the fruit of the all-nourishing earth, and who will bring hither perfect hecatombs. Against cruel death neither Typhoios shall avail you nor ill-famed Khimaira, but here, shall the Earth and shining Hyperion make you rot.'
Thus said Phoibos, exulting over her: and darkness covered her eyes. And the holy strength of Helios made her rot away there; wherefore the place is now called Pytho, and men call the lord Apollon by another name, Pythian; because on that spot the power of piercing Helios made the monster rot away." -Homeric Hymns 3.356-374
"[Apollon] killed the snake Python with a hundred arrows." -Greek Lyric III Simonides Frag 573 (from Julian, Letters)
“Olympos was the first to use the Lydian mode, when he played on his pipes a lament for the Python.” –Greek Lyric V Melanippides Frag 5 (from Plutarch, On Music)
“[Apollon speaks while in the womb of Leto] ‘Not yet is the tripod seat at Pytho my care; not yet is the great serpent dead, but still that beast of awful jaws, creeping down from Pleistos, wreathes snowy Parnassos with his nine coils.” –Callimachus, Hymn IV to Delos 91
"[Apollon] made his way to Delphoi, where Themis gave the oracles at that time. When the serpent Python, which guarded the oracle, moved to prevent Apollon from approaching the oracular opening, he slew it and thus took command of the oracle." -Apollodorus 1.22
"[In the musical contest of the Pythian Games held at Delphoi were] citharoedes, fluteplayers and citharists who played without singing, who rendered a certain melody which is called the Pythian Nome. Now the melody was composed by Timosthenes, the admiral of the second Ptolemy ... and through this melody he means to celebrate the contest between Apollon and the Drakon, setting forth the prelude as anakrousis, the first onset of the contest as ampeira, the contest itself as katakeleusmos, the triumph following the victory as iambos and daktylus, the rhythms being in two measures, one of which, the dactyl, is appropriate to hymns of praise, whereas the other, the iamb, is suited to reproaches (compare the word 'iambize'), and the expiration of the dragon as syringes, since with syringes players imitated the dragon as breathing its last in hissings." -Strabo 9.3.10
"[According to Ephoros who was in the practise of rationalising myths] Apollon, visiting the land [of Phokis], civilized the people by introducing cultivated fruits and cultured modes of life ... when he arrived at the land of the Panopaians he destroyed Tityos, a violent and lawless man who ruled there; and the Parnassians joined him and informed him of another cruel man named Python and known as the Drakon, and that when Apollon shot at him with his arrows the Parnassians shouted 'Hie Paian' to encourage him (the origin, Ephoros adds, of the singing of the Paian which has been handed down as a custom for armies just before the clash of battle); and that the tent of Python was burnt by the Delphians at that time, just as they still burn it to this day in remembrance of what took place at that time. But what could be more mythical than Apollon shooting with arrows and punishing Tityoses and Pythons, and travelling from Athens to Delphoi and visiting the whole earth?" -Strabo 9.3.12
”When Apollon and Artemis had killed Pytho they came to Aigialeia [Sikyon] to obtain purification.” –Pausanias 2.7.7
”The Kretans say (the story of Aphaia is Kretan) that Karmanor purified Apollon after he killed Pytho.” –Pausanias 2.30.3
"When Apollon and Artemis had murdered Python they came to Aigialeia for purification." -Pausanias 2.7.7
“The most widespread tradition [for the naming of Pytho, Phokis] has it that the victim of Apollon’s arrows rotted here, and that this was the reason why the city received the name Pytho. For the men of those days used pythesthai for the verb ‘to rot’ ... The poets say that the victim of Apollon was a Drakon posted by Ge to be a guard for the oracle. It is also said that he was a violent son of Krios, a man with authority around Euboia. He pillaged the sanctuary of the god, and he also pillaged the houses of rich men. But when he was making a second expedition, the Delphians besought Apollon to keep from them the danger that threatened them. Phemonoe, the prophetess of that day, gave them an oracle verse:- ‘At close quarters a grievous arrow shall Apollon shoot at the spoiler of Parnassos; and of his blood-guilt the Kretans shall cleanse his hands’ but the renown shall never die.’
It seems that from the beginning the sanctuary at Delphoi has been plotted against by a vast number of men. Attacks were made against it by this Euboian pirate.” -Pausanias 10.6.5
“[Orpheus] told them [the Argonauts] in song how Apollon long ago, when he was still a beardless youth rejoicing in his locks, slew the monster Delphyne with his bow beneath the rocky brow of Parnassos.” –Argonautica 2.703
“The people of Epeiros maintain that the [sacred] Drakones [of their temple of Apollon] are sprung from the Python at Delphoi.” –Aelian On Animals 11.2
"Apollon organised funeral games in honour of Python [the Pythian Games of Delphoi]." - Ptolemy Hephaestion Bk7 (as summarized in Photius, Myriobiblon 190)
"From Terra [Gaia] [was born]: Python a divine snake." -Hyginus Preface
“Latona [Leto] was borne there [Ortygia] at Jove’s [Zeus'] command by the wind Aquilo [Boreas], at the time when the Python was pursuing her, and there, clinging to an olive, she gave birth to Apollo and Diana [Artemis]. This island later was called Delos.” –Hyginus Fabulae 53
“Python, offspring of Terra [Gaia], was a huge Draco who, before the time of Apollo, used to give oracular responses on Mount Parnassus. Death was fated to come to him from the offspring of Latona [Leto]. At that time Jove [Zeus] lay with Latona, daughter of Polus [Koios]. When Juno [Hera] found this out, she decreed that Latona should give birth at a place where the sun did not shine. When Python knew that Latona was pregnant by Jove, he followed her to kill her. But by order of Jove the wind Aquilo [Boreas] carried Latona away, and bore her to Neptunus [Poseidon]. He protected her, but in order not to make voice Juno’s decree, he took her to the island Ortygia, and covered the island with waves. When Python did not find her, he returned to Parnassus. But Neptunus brought the island of Ortygia up to a higher position; it was later called the island of Delos. There Latona, clinging to an olive tree, bore Apollo and Diana [Artemis], to whom Vulcanus gave arrows as gifts. Four days after they were born, Apollo exacted vengeance for his mother. For he went to Parnassus and slew Python with his arrows. Because of this deed he is called Pythian. He put Python’s bones in a cauldron, deposited them in his temple, and instituted funeral games for him which are called Pythian.” –Hyginus Fabulae 140
"When Tellus (the Earth) [Gaia] deep-coated with the slime of the late deluge, glowed again beneath the warm caresses of the shining sun, she brought forth countless species, some restored in ancient forms, some fashioned weird and new. Indeed Tellus (the Earth), against her will, produced a Serpens (Serpent) never known before, the huge Python, a terror to men's new-made tribes, so far it sprawled across the mountainside. The Deus Arctitenens (Archer god) [Apollon], whose shafts till then were used only against wild goats and fleeing deer, destroyed the monster with a thousand arrows, his quiver almost emptied, and the wounds, black wounds, poured forth their poison. Then to ensure the centuries should have no power to dull the lustre of that deed, Phoebus [Apollon] founded the sacred games, the crowded contests, known as Pythian from that Serpens overthrown." –Metamorphoses 1.434
"My [Apollon's] countless arrows slew but now the bloated Python, whose vast coils across so many acres spread their blight." –Metamorphoses 1.459
“He [Apollon] put to rest throughout its winding coils the serpent Python, the terror of the peaceful Musae.” –Propertius 4.6
“The god [Apollon] had smitten the dark and sinuous-coiling monster, the earth-born Python, who cast about Delphos his sevenfold grisly circles and with his scales ground the ancient oaks to powder, even while sprawling by Castalia’s fountain he gapes with three-tongued mouth athirst to feed his deadly venom: when having spent his shafts on numberless wounds he left him, scarce fully stretched in death over a hundred acres of Cirrhaean soil, then ,seeking fresh expiation of the dead, he came to the humble dwelling of our [Argos’] king Crotopus.” –Thebaid 1.561
"He that shook the horns of sacred Parnassus [Python], twining his coils among them, until pierced by a hundred wounds he bore, O Delian [Apollon], a forest of thy arrows." –Thebaid 5.531
“Next [the Delphian Games] is celebrated the freeing of Phocis from the Serpent’s coils, the battle of the boy Apollo’s quiver.” –Thebaid 6.8
“Lilaea that sends forth the ice-cold springs of Cephisus, whither Python was wont to take his panting thirst and turn aside the river from the sea … quivers the god [Apollon] emptied here in countless slaughter.” –Thebaid 7.350
“A sacred place conspicuous; the place where the Pythian [Apollon] had noticed on a hill the ninecircling coil of the Drakon’s back, and put to sleep the deadly poison of the Kirrhaian serpent.” –Dionysiaca 4.314
“Zeus will not receive you without hard work, and the Horai will not open the gates of Olympos to you unless you have struggled for the prize … Apollon mastered Delphyne [Python], and then he came to live in the sky.” –Dionysiaca 13.22
"Delphoi: The sanctuary of Apollo. It was thus named because the serpent Delphyne was found there, the one which Apollon killed." -Suidas 'Delphoi'
Sources:
The Homeric Hymns - Greek Epic C8th-4th BC
Greek Lyric III Simonides, Fragments - Greek Lyric C6th-5th BC
Greek Lyric V Melanippides, Fragments
Apollodorus, The Library - Greek Mythography C2nd BC
Callimachus, Hymns - Greek C3rd BC
Strabo, Geography - Greek Geography C1st BC - C1st AD
Pausanias, Guide to Greece - Greek Geography C2nd AD
Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica - Greek Epic C3rd BC
Aelian, On Animals - Greek Natural History C2nd - C3rd AD
Ptolemy Hephaestion, New History -Greek Scholar C1st-2nd AD
Hyginus, Fabulae - Latin Mythography C2nd AD
Ovid, Metamorphoses - Latin Epic C1st BC - C1st AD
Propertius, Elegies – Latin Elegy C1st BC
Statius, Thebaid - Latin Epic C1st AD
Nonnos, Dionysiaca - Greek Epic C5th AD
Photius, Myriobiblon -Byzantine Greek Scholar C9th AD
Suidas - Byzantine Greek Lexicography C10th AD
.
Python
a snake, guardian of the oracle at Delphi, killed by Apollo: Apollod. vol. 1.2
a dragon, slain by Apollo and Artemis: Paus. 2.7.7, Paus. 2.30.3
cp. Paus. 10.6.5 ff.
mousikę, sc. technę, “art of the Muses”). A term which included among the Greeks everything that belonged to a higher intellectual and artistic education. Plato ( Rep.p. 136), while discussing education, speaks of “gymnastic for the body and music for the soul,” and ranks literature under the head of music. Music in the narrower sense was regarded by the Greeks both as an agreeable amusement and as one of the most effective means of cultivating the feelings and the character. The great importance they attached to music is also shown by their idea that it was of divine origin; Hermes or Apollo is said to have invented the lyre, Athené the simple flute, Pan the shepherd's pipe. Besides these gods and the Muses, Dionysus also was connected with music. Numerous myths, as, for instance, those concerning Amphion and Orpheus, tell of its mighty power, and testify to the Greeks having cultivated music at a very early epoch. It was always intimately allied to poetry. Originally epic poems were also sung to the accompaniment of the cithara, and the old masters of poetry, such as Orpheus and Musaeus, are at the same time masters of music, just as in historical times the lyric and dramatic poets were at the same time the composers of their works. It was not until the Alexandrian Age that the poet ceased to be also a musician. Owing to its connection with poetry, music developed in the same proportion and flourished at the same period as lyric and dramatic poetry. Of the Greek races, the Dorians and Aeolians had a special genius and capacity for music, and among both are found the first traces of its development as an art.
The actual foundation of the classical music of the Greeks is ascribed to Terpander (q.v.), of the Aeolian island of Lesbos, who, in Dorian Sparta (about B.C. 675), first gave a truly artistic form to song accompanied by the cithara, and especially to the citharodic nomos. In the Peloponnesian school of the Terpandridae, who followed his teaching and formed a closely united guild, kitharôidikę received its further artistic development. What Terpander had done for kitharôidikę was done not long afterwards by Clonas of Thebes or Tegea for aulôidikę, or song accompanied by the flute. The artistic flute-playing which had been elaborated by the Phrygian Olympus in Asia, was introduced by Clonas into the Peloponnesus, which long remained the principal seat of all musical art. Of the two kinds of independent instrumental music, which throughout presupposes the development of vocal music and always adapts itself to this as its model, the earlier is the music on the flute (aulętikę), which was especially brought into favourable notice by Sacadas of Argos (about B.C. 580), while the music on stringed instruments (kitharistikę) is later. Music was much promoted by the contests at the public festivals, above all by those at the Pythian Games. Its highest point of development was attained in the time of the Persian Wars, which seems to have seen the completion of the ancient system as it had been elaborated by the tradition of the schools. The lyric poets of this time, as Pindar and Simonides, the dramatists, as Phrynichus and Aeschylus, were held by the critics to be unsurpassable models. What was added in subsequent times can hardly be called a new development of the art. Athens in her golden age was the central city where professional musicians met one another-- Athens the home of Greek dramatic poetry. At this time vocal combined with instrumental music largely prevailed over instrumental music alone. The latter was chiefly limited to solo performances.
Ancient vocal music is distinguished in one important point from ours: throughout classical times part-singing was unknown. There was at most a difference of octaves, and that only when men and boys sang in the same choir. Theoretically, however, the Greeks were acquainted with some of the effects upon which harmonic systems are [p. 1063] based, though in practice the nature of their harmonics was extremely simple, with no sure trace of chords or groups of more than two notes. Again, in classical times, the music was subordinate to the words, and was therefore necessarily much simpler than it is now. It is only in this way that we can explain the fact that an ancient audience could follow the musical representation of the often intricate language of the odes, even when the odes were sung by the whole choir. Critics regarded it as a decline of art when, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, the music began to be the important element instead of the poetry. This change took place at first in single branches of the art, as in the solos (monôidiai) in tragedy and in the dithyrambic choruses. Thenceforward ancient music, like modern music, raised itself more and more to a free and independent position beside that of poetry.
The first place among the various kinds of music was assigned to the indigenous citharodic art, which was connected with the first development of the musical art; and, indeed, stringed instruments were always more esteemed than wind instruments, in part on account of the greater technical difficulties which had to be overcome, and which led to musicians giving particular attention to them. Moreover, playing on the flute [Figure]
was limited to certain occasions, as its sound seemed to the ancients to arouse enthusiasm and passion ( Polit. viii. 3). There is evidence that, on the one hand, the ancient theory of singing and of instrumentation, in spite of the primitive nature of the instruments, was brought to a high degree of perfection; and that, on the other hand, the public must have possessed a severely critical judgment in matters of music. The characteristic feature of ancient music is the great clearness of its form, resulting, above all, from the extreme precision of the rhythmic treatment.
This was not the only point in which ancient music differed from modern music; it also differed from it in the number of its modes. The modes were distinguished from one another by the place of the semitones in the octave. While modern music has only two modes, the major and the minor, the Greek had seven. These seven modes, the names of which are taken from the three great Greek races and the neighbouring Asiatic nations (Dorian, Aeolian or Hypodorian, Ionian or Hypophrygian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Hypolydian), were all employed at some time in the classical period, though they did not all of them come into use at the same date. It is significant of the distinction between ancient and modern music that of these modes the Dorian, which was the oldest and the lowest in pitch, and is described as dignified, severe, and grave, was most extensively used in all kinds of music.
As the basis of every melodic series of sounds the ancients had the tetrachord, a scale of four notes, to which, according to tradition, the earliest music was limited. The heptachord was certainly in use before Terpander, who is said to have given the lyre seven strings instead of four (Strabo, p. 618); but Pausanias (iii. 12. 10) states with greater accuracy that he added four strings to the previously existing seven. The heptachord consisted of two tetrachords, as the central note was at once the highest of the first and the lowest of the second tetrachord.
Next came the octachord or octave, and at last, after various additions, the following scale of notes was formed:
From the lowest b on ward, this scale was divided into tetrachords in such a way that the fourth note was always also regarded as the first of the following tetrachord; the intervals between the sounds of the tetrachord were, in ascending order, semitone, tone, tone. This sequence was called the “diatonic genus.” Besides this there was also the “chromatic,” the tetrachords of which were as follows: b c [Figure]
d e f [Figure]
g a (the intervals in this case were semitone, semitone, tone and a half). Thirdly, there was the “enharmonic,” the tetrachord of which had for its intervals 1/4 tone, 1/4 tone, 2 tones, and accordingly cannot be expressed in modern notation.
The musical notation (sęmasia) of the Greeks consisted of two distinct systems of signs--one for the voice, the other for the instrument. The vocal signs are taken from the common or Ionic alphabet. The notes of the middle part of the scale are denoted by the letters in their usual order; those of the lower part by an alphabet of inverted or otherwise altered letters; the upper notes are distinguished by accents--an accent signifying that the note is an octave higher than that of the unaccented letter. The following is a brief summary of Westphal's discoveries:
(1) The instrumental notation was derived from the first fourteen letters of a Peloponnesian alphabet, possessing digamma, W, the old form of iota, [Figure]
, and two forms of lambda, [Figure]
and [Figure]
. In a few cases the forms of the letters have been modified: thus alpha (originally [Figure]
) appears as [Figure]
, beta as [Figure]
, delta as [Figure]
, theta as [Figure]
, my (originally [Figure]
) as [Figure]
, iota as [Figure]
. By treating the two forms of lambda as distinct characters the number is raised to fifteen.
(2) These characters are applied to denote a scale of two octaves, as follows: [Figure]
The arrangement of the letters is worth notice. The inventor began by taking alpha for the highest note of his scale. Then he took the other characters in pairs, [Figure]
, and made each pair stand for the extreme notes of an octave. This scale may be regarded as the framework of the system of notation.
(3) A character may be varied by being reversed --i. e. written from right to left (apestrammenon), or by being turned half round backward (anestrammenon, huption). When reversed, it denotes a note half a tone higher; when half reversed, it denotes a note a quarter of a tone higher. The [p. 1064] combination of the two varieties evidently gives an Enharmonic puknon, or group obtained by dividing a semitone--e. g. if we take the four “stable” notes of the central octave, [Figure]
, we complete the scale in the Enharmonic genus by inserting the varieties of [Figure]
and [Figure]
, thus obtaining [Figure]
.
In some cases this method of varying the letters is impracticable--e. g. [Figure]
reversed does not change; [Figure]
half-reversed becomes [Figure]
, and vice versa. Other modifications are accordingly employed, and we have the groups [Figure]
, and [Figure]
.
(4) In the Diatonic genus the second lowest note of a tetrachord is not represented, as we should expect, by the reversed letter, but by the halfreversed one, the same character as the second lowest Enharmonic note.
(5) In the Chromatic genus the characters used are the same as in the Enharmonic, but the reversed letter is distinguished by an accent. Thus the Chromatic tetrachord e f f #a is written [Figure]
or (in the upper octave) [Figure]
.
(6) The system was enlarged by the addition of two tones, each with the corresponding puknon, at the lower end of the scale, and an octave, except the highest note, at the upper end. The two groups were denoted by the characters [Figure]
and [Figure]
,
Fragment found at Delphi in 1893 with part of a Hymn to Apollo in musical notation.
which are evidently invented on the analogy of the letters already in use. The new upper notes were denoted by accented letters, [Figure]
to [Figure]
, repeating the scale from [Figure]
to [Figure]
an octave higher.
We now have only seven pieces of ancient music whose authenticity is practically undisputed--the beginning of the First Pythian Ode of Pindar (see Boeckh's Pindar, De Metris Pindari, iii. 12); two hymns to Calliopé and Apollo, ascribed to one Dionysius (q. v. 4); a papyrus fragment of the music of a chorus of Euripides (Orestes, 338-344); an inscription found at Tralles in 1883, giving a musical setting to four short gnomes; a hymn of Mesomedes (q.v.) of the second century after Christ, published, with fac-similes, in Bellermann's Hymnen des Dionysius und Mesomedes (Berlin, 1840); and the fragments of a hymn found inscribed at Delphi in 1893. This last appears to be composed in a mood identical with the modern minor. It was composed after the repulse of the Gauls from Delphi in B.C. 279 and was first published in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, xvii. 569-610. The fragments of this hymn are fourteen in number; and from them various reconstructions of the piece reduced to the modern system of notation have been published, one of which was performed before the king of Greece at Athens not long after the discovery of the inscription. See the work by Monro cited at the end of the article.
Besides the pieces cited above there are also a few passages in the nature of short instrumental exercises; and a hymn to Demeter, first published by the Venetian composer Marcello, but regarded by Gevaert and other scholars as of very doubtful authenticity.
With regard to the musical instruments it may be mentioned that only stringed instruments (see especially Cithara and Lyra) and the flute, which closely resembled our clarionet, were employed in music proper (see Tibia); and that the other instruments, such as trumpets (see Salpinx), Pan's pipes (see Syrinx), cymbals (cymbala), and kettledrums (see Tympanum), were not included within its province.
In proportion to the amount of attention paid to music by the Greeks, it early became the subject of learned research and literary treatment. The philosopher Pythagoras occupied himself with musical acoustics; he succeeded in representing numerically the relations of the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. For representing the symphonic relations the Pythagorean School invented the monochord or canon, a string stretched over a soundingboard and with a movable bridge, by means of which the string could be divided into different lengths; it was on this account known as the school of the Canonici as opposed to the Harmonici, who opposed this innovation and continued to be satisfied with a system of scales (“harmonics”) sung by the sole guidance of the ear. Among the Canonici were philosophers such as Philolaüs, Archytas, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. Lasus of Hermioné, the master of Pindar, is mentioned as the first author of a theoretical work on music. The “harmonic” Aristoxenus (q.v.) Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle, was held by the ancients to be the greatest authority on music; from his numerous works was drawn the greatest part of subsequent musical literature. Of other writers on music we may mention the well-known mathematician Euclid, and the great astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, who perfected musical acoustics.
Among the Romans a native development of music was completely wanting. They had, indeed, [p. 1065] an ancient indigenous musical instrument, the short and slender Latin flute with four holes; but their national art of flute-playing was, at an early period, thrown into the background by the Etruscan, which was practised as a profession by foreigners, freedmen, and people of the lowest classes of the Roman population. Among the nine old guilds, said to have been instituted by King Numa, there was one of fluteplayers (tibicines), who assisted at public sacrifices. With the Greek drama, Greek dramatic music was also introduced; it was, however, limited to fluteplaying. Stringed instruments were not originally known at Rome, and were not frequently employed till after the Second Punic War. Indeed, as Greek usages and manners in general gained ground with the beginning of the second century, so also did Greek music. Greek dances and musical entertainments became common at the meals of aristocratic families, and the younger members of respectable households received instruction in music as in dancing. Though it was afterwards one of the subjects of higher education, it was never considered a real and effective means of training. Entertainments like our concerts became frequent towards the end of the Republic, and formed part of the musical contests instituted by Nero, a great lover of music, in A.D. 60, on the model of the Greek contests. Domitian had an “Odeum” built on the Campus Martius for the musical entertainments of the Agon Capitolinus, instituted by him in A.D. 86, and celebrated at intervals of four years to the end of the classical period. Passages bearing on music in Roman literature have no independent value, as they are entirely drawn from Greek sources, as in the writings of Martianus Capella and Boetius. See the general histories of music by Naumann, 2 vols. (London, 1882-86); Ambros (2d ed. Leipzig, 1880-81); and Fétis (5 vols. unfinished, Paris, 1868-76). Also Westphal, Die Musik des griechischen Alterthums (Leipzig, 1883); Fortlage, Das musikalische System der Griechen (Leipzig, 1847); Chappell, History of Music (1874); Paul, Boetius und die griechische Harmonik (Leipzig, 1872); Engel, The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (London, 1864); Gevaert, Histoire et Théorie de la Musique dans l'Antiquité (Ghent, 1881); and Monro, Modes of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1894).
This text is based on the following book(s):
Harry Thurston Peck. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. New York. Harper and Brothers. 1898.
Nomos
(nomos). (1) Originally an ancient kind of solo in epic form in praise of some divinity. It was either “aulodic” or “citharodic”--that is, it was sung to the accompaniment of the flute or the cithara. The citharodic nomos was from ancient times used at the festivals of Apollo, whom the Dorians especially worshipped. It received its artistic form from Terpander (about B.C. 675) principally by a systematic distribution into five or seven parts, of which three were the essential portions, the middle one forming the cardinal point of the whole. It formed an important element in the Delphian festival of the Pythian Apollo. On the other hand, the aulodic nomos, which Clonas of Tegea had introduced in imitation of the nomos of Terpander, was early excluded from this festival. By the side of the ancient nomoi, in which the words were sung to an instrumental accompaniment, there arose another variety formed on the same model. In this the song was dramatically recited to the tune of the flute or cithara, according as the nomos was “aulodic” or “citharodic.” Of the former kind was the nomos introduced by the flute-player Sacadas of Argos (about B.C. 580) at the Pythian Games, and hence called the Pythian nomos, a musical representation of the destruction of the dragon Pytho by Apollo. At a later period the province of the nomos was more and more extended and secularized, until it became the most important part of the musician's profession. See Plut. De Mus. cap. iii.-x.; and the article Musica.
Structural Sympathies
in Ancient Greek and South-Slavic Heroic Singing
John Curtis Franklin
American School of Classical Studies in Athens
Forthcoming in E. Hickmann and R. Eichmann (eds.), Music Archeological Sources: Artifacts, Oral
Tradition, Written Evidence, Serie Studien zur Musikarchäologie, Orient-Archäologie (Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut Berlin, Orient-Abteilung, Berlin, 2004).
1. Introduction
Until the twentieth century, it scarcely occurred to scholars to treat the Homeric poems as
musical documents. And yet clearly ancient Greek heroic narratives were sung, typically
to the phorminx, the round-based lyre of Aegean tradition. Demodocus, Phemius, and
Achilles are so portrayed by Homer as they sing ‘the famous deeds of men’ (klea
andrôn). There is besides the explicit literary testimony of Sextus Empiricus: “the epics
of Homer were of old sung to the lyre”. Conversely, Hesiod was considered exceptional
for not accompanying his song: “It is said that Hesiod too was ruled out of the [sc.
Pythian] competition, not having learned to play the kithara along with his singing”.
1
Today it is common knowledge that oral narrative song traditions, though mostly
evanescent, have survived in many parts of the world, and in others did so until very
recently. In the nineteenth century, however, when ethnographers first began to gather
such material, these traditions were virtually unknown. The collectors’ designation of
such singing as “folk music” is telling. Archaic forms, once esteemed by all classes of an
ethnic group, can survive longer in geographical and social spheres less subject to the
cultural ferment of court and city. That is, oral composition survives in isolated areas not
because it is inherently peasant music, but because these populations remain illiterate
longer than urban societies.
2
Many such traditions had become thus marginalized in many
parts of Europe even before the end of the Medieval period (see below), and by the
twentieth-century the gulf between the scholarly world and the oral poet was so wide that
one may speak of genuine discoveries. Bartók, despite years of energetic field work in the
Balkans, would remark to Kodály of South-Slavic heroic song: “it is almost incredible
1 S. E. M. 6.16-17 (166.17f.), Pausanias 10.7.3,
2 Lord 1960, 6, 20.2
that up to now I hardly had any idea that this last vestige of folk minstrelsy still flourishes
in our neighborhood”.
3
Bartók was introduced to this material in America during the war, having accepted an
appointment at Columbia University, where he was to make transcriptions of material in
the Milman Parry collection at Harvard. Parry had assembled this famous archive to test
his hypothesis that Homer had been an illiterate oral poet; the curious phraseological
repetitions of Greek epic diction which had puzzled generations of scholars were, he
argued, traditional formulae that were used by the poet as an aid to spontaneous
composition during performance. Parry’s untimely death in 1935 left the burden of proof
to his student Albert Bates Lord, who fulfilled the charge in an admirable series of studies
culminating in the influential Singer of Tales (1960). Our understanding of Homer’s
compositional process continues to be refined, and many scholars still maintain that
literacy had some effect on the ultimate formulation of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we
have them.
4
Nevertheless, it is now universally accepted that these poems are at least
derived from a living, preliterate tradition. This poetic art was one of song.
Since Parry, for better and worse, Serbo-Croatian epic has been the primary
comparandum for imagining Homeric performance. This is due to a general unfamiliarity
among classicists with other examples of oral epic: the publications of Lord remain the
best-known and most consulted studies, and are besides of immediate interest since the
comparison with Homer is explicit and detailed. Naturally, scholars with a special interest
in the oral epic are better informed, and in the last twenty years other narrative song
traditions have attracted increasing scholarly attention.
5
Consequently, early rigid models
of composition and transmission—relying too much on the peculiar dynamics of the
Yugoslav art—have been undermined by the recognition that the orality of every tradition
is unique.
2. Indo-Europeanism and Indo-European Poetics
And yet, given that the Greek and Slavic languages and cultures are historically related
due to their shared Indo-European ancestry, one might assert that these two heroic song
traditions have a greater right to comparison with each other than to, for example,
Philippine or Mongolian epic. It must be stressed that Parry himself did not choose to
collect the Yugoslav songs because he believed in a genetic relationship with Homer, but
simply wished to observe the oral method generally; his preference for central Asian epic
was frustrated by contemporary political conditions. Likewise, Lord never pressed an
Indo-European connection in his comparisons with ancient Greek epic; there are only
3 Bartók ap. Erdely 1995, 1 and n.1.
4 See e.g. Knox 1990, 19-22.
5 See e.g. Lord 1962, 1991; West 1986, 43 f.; Foley 1999; Reichl 2000a.
3
hints that he accepted its validity.
6
But the comparative study of Indo-European poetic
traditions has become highly sophisticated since the Singer of Tales, revealing deep
connexions between the poetic methods of cognate cultures.
It has been known since the late eighteenth century that Greek and Serbo-Croatian
(which belongs to the Southern group of the Slavic language family) descend from a
single ancestral tongue, generally dated to the fifth or fourth millennium BC,7
termed
Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Other languages or language groups deriving from PIE are
Celtic, Germanic, Italic (including Latin), Indo-Iranian (including Sanskrit, Old Persian,
and Avestan), Baltic, and Albanian; now extinct are Hittite and other members of the
Anatolian group (including Luwian and Lydian), Tocharian, Thracian (including
Phrygian) and Illyrian.
This simple vertical family-tree conception, long conventional, is now being refined
through greater attention to the phenomena of ‘dynamic synchrony’
8
—the mutual
adjustment of, or feedback between, languages in geographical contact (whether
historically related or not). And yet even the most energetic attempts at revision—notably
in India where the ‘Aryan’ question is very sensitive politically—have failed to negate
the primary validity of the basic diachronic relationships. Only thus can one explain close
linguistic and cultural sympathies between e.g. the Celtic and Indic worlds which, in the
historical period, were never geographically contiguous or in significant cultural contact
with each other.
The most reliable discoveries of diachronic cultural kinship come from historical
linguistics, because the data are amenable to scientific treatment. Cognate cultures may
bear little superficial resemblance to each other after centuries (or millennia) of
individual innovation since their common origin, just as most languages which are known
to be related are—by definition—mutually unintelligible. But deep structural sympathies
may lie below the surface, and the more closely these may be related to language use, the
more securely they may be demonstrated, since linguistic and semantic continuity go
hand-in-hand. By ‘continuity’, of course, I mean the persistence of elements which can be
shown to descend from a common archetype, without suggesting that these cognates are
the same as each other. Through the comparative method an increasingly detailed picture
of Proto-Indo-European culture has emerged: in religion, cult, law, mythology, social
institutions, magic, and medicine, remarkable affinities have been revealed between the
kindred language-culture groups.
9
The aspect of Indo-European studies which is of greatest relevance to music
archaeology is the comparison of poetic technique and diction, including conceptions of
poetry and the poet, as found in the earliest evidence of the cognate traditions. The
6 Lord 1993, 15.
7 Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995, 1.761.
8 Cf. Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995.
9 See especially Benveniste 1973; Polomé 1982b; Watkins 1995; Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995.4
subject was born with Kuhn’s assertion that a pair of poetic phrases—Greek kleos
aphthiton and Sanskrit s@ra@va(s) a@ks8itam, both meaning “imperishable fame”—were, in
terms of historical linguistics, equivalent in phonology, accentuation, and quantity
(syllable lengths).
10
In other words, they are descendants from a fragment of poetic
diction (reconstructable as PIE *klewos n8dhg w hitom) which was handed down in
parallel over many centuries, in continually diverging forms, by generations of singers
whose ultimate ancestors shared an archetypal repertoire of poetic formulae and narrative
themes. Long controversial, the formulaic status of these phrases is now established;
11
thus, though “imperishable fame” might seem an heroic commonplace, a distinctly Indo-European
version of it is linguistically proven. A substantial corpus of such cognate
poetic material has now been identified,
12
and the subject of Indo-European poetics won
official scholarly acceptance when the Goodwin Award of the American Philological
Association went to Calvert Watkins for How to Kill a Dragon in 1995.
4. Indo-European Metrics
A subordinate branch of Indo-European poetics, with important musical implications, is
the comparative metrical study of cognate poetic material, first attempted by Westphal in
1860. This allows the identification of rhythmic features in the ancient Indic, Greek, and
modern South-Slavic evidence which are so specific that independent development is
impossible.
The dactylic hexameter of ancient Greek epic verse, as well as other Hellenic metrical
forms, shares with the Serbo-Croatian deseterac, the ten-syllable heroic metre, the
property of being ‘stichic’, whereby a finite metrical grouping is repeated indefinitely. A
further specification of stichic poetry can be ‘isosyllabism’, when a metrical grouping
consists of the same number of syllables in each repetition or ‘line’ (the line per se, of
course, results from writing down such oral forms). Stichic repetition and isosyllabism
are found in the Vedic poems which are the earliest examples of Indic poetry, dating back
to the middle of the second millennium BC, when these poems assumed their present,
‘static’ form. The same features are found in the decasyllabic Serbo-Croatian deseterac.
In the Homeric hexameter and much other ancient Greek poetry, by contrast, quantitative
resolution and substitution—the exchange of two short syllables for one long, or vice
versa—could cause a varying syllable count. However, stichic isosyllabism is found in
the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus, whence such verse-forms became known as ‘Aeolic’,
after the ethnicity of Lesbos. In fact, isosyllabism was not restricted to the poetry of
Aeolic populations, but is sporadically attested throughout the Greek world, in cult, ritual
and popular contexts, allowing us to conclude that isosyllabism represents a very ancient,
10 Kuhn 1853.
11 Contra, Finkelberg 1986. Now established by Watkins 1995, 173—178.
12 Schmitt 1967, 1968; Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995, 1.731 ff.5
pan-Hellenic practice.
13
According to a hypothesis now widely-held, the epic hexameter
itself evolved from the combination of two such ‘Aeolic’ structures (see further below).
Stichic rhythms and isosyllabism are not unique to the Indo-European
traditions—although they are far from universal.
14
But the ‘Aeolic’, Vedic and Serbo-Croatian
evidence reveals a further specification which is otherwise unparalleled outside
the Indo-European world. This is the close of isosyllabic lines in clearly defined
quantitative cadences—distinctive patterns of long and short syllables. By contrast, the
opening of the isosyllabic line is not strictly regulated by quantity, being either
completely indeterminate (Serbo-Croatian), or showing only partial tendencies to
quantity (‘Aeolic’ and Vedic).
This combination of stichic, isosyllabic and quantitative features, taken together,
constitutes a very distinctive fingerprint, and it was this which led Meillet—one of
Parry’s mentors—to advance his theory of a common origin for the Greek and Indic
metres in 1923 (elaborated in detail by Nagy).
15
Jakobson went on to demonstrate the
statistical tendency of the Serbo-Croatian deseterac to a quantitative cadence, with two
short syllables and a long in positions seven, eight and nine respectively (x x x x | x x u u
— x, where ‘x’ marks an indeterminate position). Decasyllabic verse and closely related
forms are found throughout the Slavic cultures, and may be traced back to the earliest
evidence. This includes fossilized forms in Russian formulaic diction deriving from the
influence of pitch accent, which disappeared from that language by the thirteenth century.
In the fifteenth century, the ten-syllable form had become completely unknown to the
educated of some parts of the Slavic world, as shown by a scribe who “tried to force the
initial verses into the usual octosyllabic scheme”, and so was clearly unfamiliar with the
ancient decasyllabic art. In areas where vestiges of such verse still survive, the ancient
quantitative cadence has been all but lost, since now only Serbo-Croatian preserves
clearly the distinction of syllabic length. Yet even in Bulgaria, where quantity had
vanished from the spoken language, epic singers maintained a preference for an
elongated ninth syllable—a musical fossil from an earlier linguistic age.
16
Subsequent studies have argued for the Indo-European derivation of Italic, Celtic,
Germanic, Hittite, Lydian, Iranian, and Baltic metrical examples.
17
While many scholars
now believe that “the hierarchical dependence of metrical form on phonological and
phonetic form makes actual reconstruction of metrics an unrealistic goal”, the general
validity of Indo-European metrical kinship is now accepted by all “competent
authorities”.
18
This phenomenon demonstrates the the traditional singers’ astonishing
13 West 1973, 165 f.
14 See for instance Reichl 2000b, 136; Revel 2000, 195—197.
15 Meillet 1923; Nagy 1974.
16 Jakobson 1952, 23 ff., 28, 30; cf. West 1973, 170 f.
17 Watkins 1963; Cole 1969; West 1973; Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995, 1.737-740.
18 Watkins 1982, 164 f. Cf. Gasparov 1996.
6
power of conservation in their role as guardians of lore. As Watkins puts it, “the formulas
tend to make reference to culturally significant features—‘something that matters’—and
it is this which accounts for their repetition and long-term preservation”.
19
Beyond
metrical kinship and cognate phraseology, many specifically Indo-European
compositional elements, such as ring-structure and a predilection for sound patterns (e.g.
assonance, alliteration, and chiasmus of vowel or consonant classes) have also been
identified.
20
4. Indo-European ‘Melodics’ and the Comparison of Ancient Greek and South Slavic
Heroic Song.
For the study of Indo-European poetics, the data are drawn from the most ancient
material available in each of the subordinate traditions. In many cases this is sung poetry.
In others, like the archaic religious, legal, and magical material of the Hittites, which
displays patterned and artistic—i.e. poetic—language, our exemplars may or may not
have been song per se; and yet it is clear that such material derives from the same poetic
matrix which gave birth elsewhere to songs.
21
Indeed, it is highly probable that the
antecedents of such religious, legal, historical, and genealogical ‘poetry’ were in fact
musical. A student of Aristotle reports that laws were still sung in parts of Thrace, and
there is evidence for the practice in Greece itself which goes beyond the mere word-play
on nomos, meaning both ‘song’ and ‘law’, which we find in Plato.
22
Herodotus mentions
the ritual incantations and theogonic songs of the Magi, the Median priests who served as
religious functionaries to the Persians, and whose descendants left us the Avesta, sacred
texts of Zoroastrianism which, like the R8gveda, preserve very ancient elements of the
Indo-Iranian proto-culture.
23
Caesar gives a crucial description of the Celtic druids as
guardians of lore through song, the regional schools where training could take as long as
twenty years, and the sacred injunction against the use of writing—a frequent
characteristic of Indo-European societies.
24
Tacitus attests that the Germanic tribes sang
19 Watkins 1995, 9.
20 Watkins 1995, 34 et passim; Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995, 1.735-737.
21 See generally Watkins 1995.
22 Ps.-Arist. Pr. 19.28 offers the explanation that prior to literacy laws were sung, and reports that this was
still true among the Agathyrsoi of Thrace. Hesiod describes the Muses singing the laws (nomoi) of the gods
(Th. 66f., ). Plato develops
the association of the legal and musical nomos extensively at Lg. 656c-660c, 799e; cf. Phdr. 278c; cf. Mart.
Cap. 9.926 Graecarum quippe urbium multae ad lyram leges decretaque publica recitabant; Clem. Al.
Strom. 1.16.78, .
23 Hdt. 1.132.
24 Caes. B. Gall. 6.13—14. Cf. Diod. Sic. 5.31.2—5, ’
’
(“And among them are also poets of music, whom they call Bards. And these,7
“ancient songs, which is the only kind of record and archives that they have”, to celebrate
their gods, the interrelations and migrations of the kindred tribes, and as a means of
divination.
25
We may therefore posit for the Proto-Indo-European culture a unified
musical stream of which there were metrical and dictional components, and for which
there must also have been a melodic aspect.
One must beware from the start, however, that the term ‘melody’ is apt to be
misleading. Because it derives from Greek—melôidein ‘to sing a melos’ < melos ‘tune or
scale’)—one must beware that the word is inherently Hellenocentric and ultimately
irrelevant to any song tradition which predates, whether historically or structurally, the
spread of the Greek musical art (with its strong Near Eastern infusion) in the Hellenistic
period. This is not mere pedantry, for even within the ancient Hellenic musical cultures, it
is probable that melôidein referred to music based on tone structures very distinct from
those used by the epic singers. Thus Homer uses the simple aeidein of his vocal process.
By contrast, the post-Homeric melôidein, as a compound, is inherently more specific,
denoting a special kind of singing according to the different intonational customs
designated by melos (i.e. heptatonic).
26
That melos was distinct from epos is confirmed by
a number of sources traceable to Heraclides of Pontus (fourth-century BC), according to
whom Terpander—who flourished in the early seventh century and became the symbol of
Archaic heptachordal music—was the first to combine “the epic diction (epę) of Homer
and the melodies (melę) of Orpheus.
27
With this caveat, however, I shall henceforth use
the term ‘melody’, for convenience, to designate the musical use of pitch in both Greek
epic and South-Slavic heroic singing, relying on further arguments to clarify its ‘non-melic’
properties.
In theory, at least, the general melodic character of the proto-Indo-European art could
be understood by deduction from the comparative evidence of the descendant traditions.
If we could hear and study the Celtic, Germanic, and Iranian melodies mentioned by the
classical authors, and compare them with Greek epic and Vedic song, perhaps we could
identify similarities of method.
singing to instruments like lyres, make songs of praise and blame”). For the sources used by Caesar and
Diodorus, as well as other ancient testimony, see Rankin (1987), 272—276 et passim. Further ancient
references to Celtic music are collected by Ahl 1991. On the strength of the Celtic bardic tradition as late as
the seventeenth century, see further Watkins (1995), 76 ff. For the injunction against writing in Indo-European
cultures, see Polomé 1982b, 166 f.
25 Tac. Germ. 2—3 celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est
etc.
26 Franklin 2002b, 145.
27 Clement of Alexandria Stromata 1.16.78, Cf. Heraclides
Ponticus fragment 157 (Wehrli) ( = ps.-Plutarch De musica 1132c),
; Alexander Polyhistor FGrH 273F77 ( = ps.-Plutarch De musica 1132e—f); Suda s.v.
. See further Franklin 2002a, 445 f.8
Unfortunately, there is almost no direct evidence for these ancient traditions. Vedic
song, discussed below, may constitute an important exception. As for Greece, West has
argued that a hexametric inscription from Epidauros is supplied with a melody, dating
perhaps to the third century BC or earlier, which is to be repeated with each line.
28
This is
an exciting possibility, but even if right the melody would be in ‘Terpandrian’ style,
using epic diction sung to proper ‘melody’, i.e. using heptatonic structures, and so rather
different from the pure Homeric art. Moreover, the inscribed melody gives us no idea of
the myriad melodic variations that one should expect in real performance.
Similarly, Johannes de Grocheo, in a much-cited passage from the fourteenth-century
De musica, discussed the Medieval French chansons de geste, in which “the same
melody must be repeated in every verse”.
29
This description fits well enough with the
stichic (but not isosyllabic) nature of the poetry,
30
and suggests a broad similarity to
South-Slavic practice—though the French scholar, like the Epidaurian inscription,
neglects the subtle variations which make the melodies of the guslar so fascinating. His
further statement that the chansons de geste “should be sung to the aged, to citizens that
labour, and to those of humble birth”
31
is of particular interest, revealing the waning
status of this art—at approximately the same time as the decadence of decasyllabic verse
in many parts of the Slavic world—and providing yet another example of the survival of
narrative song in cultural backwaters.
For the Slavic family we have, besides Parry’s recordings, the transcription of a
sixteenth-century Bohemian melody which accompanied a decasyllabic verse related to
the Serbo-Croatian deseterac.
32
Thus, by contrast with the usual comparative method of the Indo-Europeanist, the
oldest poetic documents of each tradition are of little direct help for the comprehension of
melodic technique. Conversely, the traditional—and audible—songs of relevant present-day
societies have been neglected by Indo-Europeanists because they are so much more
divergent from the proto-Indo-European culture than the ancient documents, and
potentially quite confused by secondary influences.
33
The recorded South-Slavic
narratives, for instance, are millennia younger than evidence available from ancient
28 West (1986), 44 f.
29 Idem etiam cantus debet in omnibus versibus reiterari. Cf. West 1986, 43; Erdely 2000, 69.
30 Rychner 1955; West 1986, 43 n. 12.
31 See Erdely 2000, 15.
32 Jakobson 1952, 28 f. A certain number of Russian bylina melodies have also been written down (see
Reichl 2000a, 1 ff.).
33 Other material that might be valuable, but which has not been considered from this perspective, includes
Romanian ballads and heroic songs (Beissinger 1984, 2000), the modern oral epics of India (Reichl 2000a,
32), North Iranian lyrical verse, which uses a few tune types for thousands of texts (Nettl 1993, 113),
Icelandic rímur and the Faroese ballads. The Albanian narrative songs in the Parry collection are regarded
as due to diffusion from Slavic areas (Dietrich 2000), but it might be profitable to study their melodic
material in isolation.9
Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and Hittite literature. The content of these Yugoslav songs is a
world apart from the ancient societies.
And yet, as we have seen, the Serbo-Croatian songs reveal clear traces of inherited
structural features. Indeed, they are vital evidence for establishing the Indo-European
character of the ancient Greek and Indic isosyllabic metres with quantitative cadence; for
it is a dictum of the field that an archetypal element is only firmly established when its
descendants are demonstrated in three, not two, traditions.
Clearly this may have implications for the parallel survival of melodic technique, for
melody and rhythm are interdependent, and might to some degree stand and fall together.
We must therefore briefly examine the historical circumstances which account for the
persistence in the Serbo-Croatian art of this Indo-European metrical feature, a vestigial
survival of very archaic musical technique. In other words, is the great separation in time
between the Greek and South-Slavic songs an insuperable obstacle to the comparison of
the two traditions on a deep structural level?
The great efflorescence of South-Slavic narrative song, as we know it from the Parry
collection, was during the Ottoman period, when singers were esteemed not just in
villages, but in the courts of the conquerors. Conversely, after the Turkish victory at
Kosovo in 1389, the art waned in Christian communities through lack of patronage. This
situation clearly admits complications of external cultural influence.
34
A certain amount
of Turkic tonal material has in fact been identified in examples of South-Slavic melody,
both narrative and otherwise.
35
Likewise, with the frequent court settings and aristocratic
motifs of the heroic songs, there can be little doubt that Turkic thematic elements were
also absorbed. And yet, according to recent research, while both text and tune groups
may cross linguistic barriers, they do not generally do so together, but rather in
haphazard, piecemeal fashion.
36
If this is right, then the Serbo-Croatian material would be
a priori unlikely to represent an originally Turkic art which passed into Yugoslav culture,
but was rather an indigenous South-Slavic art which was occasionally influenced,
melodically and thematically.
In fact, as we have seen, an ultimately Indo-European basis to the deseterac is proven
by metrical features. Moreover, it is generally held that the systematic observance of
quantity in the classical Sanskrit and Greek metres (i.e. post-Vedic and non-Aeolic
respectively) was a generalization of what had once been only a tendency (see above).
37
Thus the Serbo-Croatian deseterac, as the Slavonic poetic form most faithful to the
ancestral characteristics, clearly represents “a very archaic state of affairs, parallel with
34 Cf. Jakobson 1952, 21.
35 Erdely 1995, 42 f.; Bartók/Lord 1951, 55 n. 45.
36 Nettl 1993, 113.
37 Watkins 1995, 19—21.10
the Vedic rather than the Greek situation”,
38
its principal features far older than any
Turkic influence.
Bartók confirmed that Turkic musical elements were distributed more densely in
places like Bulgaria where there had been active settlement for centuries, and were
relatively uncommon in more autochthonous regions.
39
Such were the remote reaches in
which Parry collected, where many archaic features of common Slavonic culture had
persisted, like the survival of pitch accent and syllabic quantity in the Serbo-Croatian
language. Yugoslav populations also maintained the strict segregation of male and female
recitations—epics and narrative laments respectively—an ancient pattern whereby “men
glorify the deeds of fallen heroes and women bewail their downfall”.
40
Ancient Greek epic was produced by a culture less remote from the Indo-European
proto-culture, simply by virtue of time elapsed. Due to its geographical position,
however, the Hellenic world was exposed to a myriad of external influences which
caused a nearly continuous cultural ferment in which inherited Indo-European attributes
were frequently obscured or annihilated. Yet there is good reason to suppose that the
narrative song tradition of the Dark Age, which was brought to a high polish by Homer,
represents the continuation of a more archaic—and hence more recognizably Indo-European—
musical substrate. In the Mycenaean period, when the Achaean palaces
formed the Western reach of the Bronze Age metaculture, foreign musical
influence—whether Minoan, Egyptian, Anatolian, West Semitic, or Mesopotamian—is
likely to have been relatively restricted to elite circles.
41
This is not to say that inherited
forms were not also cultivated within the palaces. The Achaean kings would have been
natural and well-paying recipients for such praise-poetry--for Greek epic was one heir to
an ancient Indo-European art of this type
42
--which the most favoured singers would have
developed in some exalted, regal form. This is confirmed by the existence of Mycenaean
forms in the deepest layers of the Homeric Kunstsprache, as well as references and
descriptions of aristocratic items which belong to the Bronze Age. At the same time, the
widespread and profound success of narrative song in the early Iron Age owes at least as
much to the essentially pandemic nature of oral artistry, which would have continued
throughout Dark Age Greece with more and less vibrancy, depending on the degree of
catastrophe and rate of recovery—though narrative song per se may not have been
universal—independent of the rise and fall of the Achaean palaces. The great wave of
Eastern influence in the Orientalizing Period, including the musical innovations
associated with Terpander, has of course no bearing on the Homeric evidence.
38 West 1973, 173.
39 Lord/Bartók 1951, 55.
40 Jakobson 1952, 34.
41 Franklin 2002a, 443 f., 2002b, 670.
42 See e.g. West (1988), 152-156.
11
In short, while one must allow for a great disjunction in time between the South-Slavic
and ancient Greek material, and account for synchronic innovations which might obscure
more archaic diachronic sympathy, the historical circumstances do not rule out the
possibility of benefiting from the cautious application of the comparative method.
5. Text, Tune and Tone: The Theory of Indo-European Accent-Melody
The unfortunate fact that no authentic Homeric melodies survive has several
methodological consequences. Even granting, on historical and cultural grounds, the
validity of comparing the two traditions, specific Serbo-Croatian melodies have no value
per se, since no direct comparison is possible. It would be fatuous to attempt the
reconstruction specific Greek melodies on the basis of the Yugoslav material.
In order to proceed at all, one must abstract the investigation to the comparison of
evidence actually surviving in both traditions, and which can itself be proven to be
cognate. Such evidence—which can only be linguistic and philological—could therefore
bear only indirectly upon the issue of melody. And yet, even within these limits, the
evidence might still increase our understanding of more narrowly musical issues. As
Nettl has recently written:
If music can be analyzed with methods that can also be applied to language, then we should be able to
make parallel studies of the simultaneously appearing structures of text and music. In other words,
methods that can be applied to both structures are the ones that ought to be first tried in a study of the
relationship.”43
Nettl envisions the parallel study of text and music within a single tradition. But one may
easily extend this approach to the comparison of related traditions: musical poetry
composed in cognate languages and exhibiting cognate metrical features, might be made
to reveal cognate melodic features, provided that melody, like metre, was related to
language. The elements of the equation may be schematized as follows:
South Slavic
Extant ‘Text-Melody’
|
Extant Text
|
Poetics/Metrics
|
Language
proven cognate
proven cognate
Ancient Greek
< Non-Extant ‘Text-Melody’>
|
Extant Text
|
Poetics/Metrics
|
Language
43 Nettl 1993, 115.
12
It is a common feature of many oral narrative traditions that the narrowly musical
elements of the art are a development of features inherent in the language. Language, in
its message-bearing capacity, is the raw material for the composition of poetry, as a
specialized semantic construction. But each language is also characterized by its own
sound properties, which may be equally exploited to make poetry stand apart from
ordinary language. An example of this in the Indo-European stylization of syllabic length
to create distinctive rhythmic cadences, as well as the patterning of sounds mentioned
above.
In many traditions, the linguistic use of pitch is also incorporated in the melodization
of poetic texts.
44
Of great potential importance for ‘Indo-European melodics’ is the
traditional singing of the R8gveda, the melody of which is a stylization of the pitch accents
of the poetry. (It also serves as a sufficient example that verbatim transmission of long
texts is possible in oral tradition.) The Saman chant, which uses the text of the R8gveda
but is more recognizably ‘melodic’—less bound to the pitch accent, and exceeding at
times a sixth in range
45
—might also be valuable: its beginnings must have been before
the Vedic hymns received their finished form, since they are already mentioned in the
R8gveda.
46
Unintentional, cumulative change in Vedic melodization itself is shown by the
disagreement of ancient theory and current practice.
47
Yet there is little doubt that its
main features have survived relatively intact from the middle of the second millennium
BC. We may also assume an earlier, perhaps more fluid, phase of development in the
Indo-Iranian period, from which both the Vedic hymns and the Magian theogonies and
incantations (and ultimately the Avesta) derive.
West’s hypothetical reconstruction of a Homeric tuning expanded upon Deubner’s
controversial defense of an ancient tradition that Terpander’s seven-stringed lyre replaced
an earlier instrument of four strings.
48
Pointing to both Serbo-Croatian heroic song and
the chanting of the R8gveda, West argued that this instrument implied a limited melodic
range which might be typical of an ancestral Indo-European song tradition.
49
Though the
reality of a four-stringed lyre remains disputed,
50
this detail is really beside the point, for
the plausibility of an epic song style using only a few pitches is overwhelmingly
supported by ethnographic analogies. Given that the tonal accent was an original part of
PIE, West suggested that “the practice of ‘singing’ texts by disposing the syllables over a
44 See especially the essays in Wade 1993.
45 See e.g. Faddegon 1951.
46 Fox-Strangways 1914, 249 n. 2.
47 Fox-Strangways 1914, 246 f.
48 Strabo 13.2.4; Deubner 1929; 1930.
49 West 1981.
50 Cf. Maas/Snyder 1989, 26, 36, 203.
13
limited set of fixed notes according to their accents was also Indo-European”.
51
(Besides
some intriguing parallels drawn by Fox-Strangways between Greek and Indic music, I
know of no other theory about Indo-European melodic practice.
52
) In Greek tradition,
West argued, the development of this ancestral practice resulted in “epic poetry on four
notes, the four notes to which [the singer’s] phorminx-strings were tuned . . . he followed
the contours given by the word accents”.
53
Anderson has since challenged the usefulness of the Vedic analogy, on the grounds
that the Greek and Indic accentuation systems are incompatible.
54
This objection is
misplaced, however, for musical practice could naturally diverge alongside the respective
languages.
At any rate, it is known that the Greeks of a later period incorporated the pitch accent
in many of their melodies; this can be observed in a number of the extant fragments.
55
This characteristic cannot be retrojected onto Homeric practice without further argument,
however, since, as stated above, there must have been substantial differences between
these ‘melic’ fragments and the earlier epic art. Nevertheless, the heroic singers’
observance of pitch accent may be supported by the following facts. Peculiarities of
Homeric accent and pronunciation were preserved in the rhapsodic tradition long enough
to receive the attention of Hellenistic grammarians.
56
Important new evidence from
Herculaneum—fragments of the On Poems by Philodemus—reveals that a type of
accent-melody, or accent-composition, was systematically addressed by certain
Hellenistic literary theorists, who treated ‘euphony’ as a formal art. One Pausimachus
cites in our fragments two Homeric passages in his treatment of accent-harmony in
poetry, and the refutations of Philodemus show that the issue was still alive in the first
century BC—as do accents inserted in parts of the text by the unknown owner of the
papyrus.
57
The most likely explanation of these data is that the melodic observation of
pitch accent, as seen from the extant melic fragments, is actually a survival from the
Homeric art, an important tributary to the musical confluence of epic and melic in the age
of Terpander (see above).
This hypothesis receives striking confirmation in Hagel’s sophisticated statistical
study of the Greek epic corpus, and especially the Iliad.
58
‘Localization’—the tendency of
a given metrical shape to occur at preferred locations in the hexameter—is proven to be a
property of word groups rather than individual words. That is, the poet did not have in his
51 West 1981, 114.
52 Fox-Strangways 1914.
53 West 1986, 45.
54 Anderson 1994, 46.
55 See Pöhlmann 1960, 17—25; West 1992, 198—200.
56 West 1981, 114 f.
57 Philodem. Poem. 1.93—94; cf. Janko 2000, 84, 298—301.
58 Hagel 1994.14
mind the neatly-stichic, word-divided text as we see it, but composed by sound,
individual ‘words’ joining harmoniously in ‘musical’ phrases. (Pausimachus may have
addressed this very issue, although the text of Philodemus is quite damaged here.
59
) Lord
described the same phenomenon in the Serbo-Croatian material, and identified many
other examples of ‘composition by sound’.
60
This concern with euphony, the harmony of
musical speech, is also found in the Sanskrit grammarians, and was, as mentioned above,
a basic feature of Indo-European versification.
61
For the present purpose, the most important of these sound patterns is the purposeful
distribution of pitch accent. Analyzing the localization of end-accented word-groups—
which provide the best test case because, as shown by the extant (melic)
fragments, their relation to melodic contour is the most unambiguous—Hagel has
demonstrated a high proportion of these ‘oxytones’ at metrical bridges, positions in the
hexameter in which word-group boundaries are avoided. Conversely, oxytones are
avoided at important caesuras, or word-group boundaries. Since bridges and caesuras
constitute the chief colometric features of the hexameter, and the localization of
formulaic language occurs largely in connection therewith, it follows that conscious,
artistic use of the pitch accent was an important part of the composition of Greek oral
epic, and was closely bound to metrical structure. Further accent patterns were detected
in relation to the syntactical rhythm which, through devices like enjambment, forms a
kind of super-metrical counterpoint with the colometry.
62
All of this implies (Hagel argues) a long musical prehistory for the hexameter,
contrary to the prevailing belief that the dactylic hexameter was a relatively recent
innovation based on the combination of archaic ‘Aeolic’ verse forms.
63
Clearly this has
important implications for any theory of an Indo-European melodics, since it is precisely
in the archaic ‘Aeolic’ forms that one would most wish to find a correlation of pitch
accent and metrical divisions. There are several possible ways out of this difficulty. One
might try to move back the hypothetical date at which the hexameter coalesced from
Aeolic forms. Or, if one supposes that the hexameter was taken over from a non-Indo-European
culture—the Minoans are the usual suspects—it remains equally possible that
the earliest ‘Homeric’ singers adapted a traditional formulaic language, complete with
metrical accent patterns, to this new form. An important investigation would be the
application of Hagel’s methods to the corpus of Aeolic poetry—though here the sample
size is probably too small to yield meaningful results.
59 Cf. Janko 2000, 296 f.
60 “Man without writing thinks in terms of sound groups and not in words, and the two do not necessarily
coincide . . . When the singer is pressed then to say what a line is, he, whose chief claim to fame is that he
traffics in lines of poetry, will be entirely baffled by the question”, Lord 1960, 25; cf. 1956; 1960, 42, 51 ff.
61 Watkins 1995, 26 ff. et passim.
62 Hagel 1994, 93 ff., 103 ff.
63 Berg 1978; cf. Haug/Welo 2001.15
These discoveries offer strong support for the validity of the Vedic analogy. Even if
the rigid melodization of accents was a specifically Indic development, it seems more
probable than ever that poetic accent patterning was a general characteristic of Indo-European
versification, and that Greek epic, and the Archaic ‘Terpandrian’ melic,
preserved this ancient feature even as the ancestral trait of stichic isosyllabism became
increasingly archaic.
The same phenomenon of patterned pitch accent within a formulaic metrical
environment has now been detetcted in the Yugoslav material. In a little-known paper
which appeared posthumously, Lord studied the distribution of pitch accents within a
sample of Serbo-Croatian decasyllabic verse, observing a 77% incidence of pitch accent
and/or long syllable in the ninth position.
64
The same was true, but to a lesser extent, in
the third syllable. By contrast, such coincidence was distinctly avoided in the first and
fifth positions, i.e. the beginnings of cola. We have then the same conjunction of metrical
and accentual patterns that is found in both the Homeric and Vedic material. Moreover,
this tendency is most strongly marked in the quantitative cadence—the very feature
which is a proven hallmark of Indo-European versification.
Unfortunately, the value of Lord’s study is limited by the very small sample size he
considered—a mere 225 lines out of the entire corpus. There appears as yet no distinction
between the metrical treatment of the four accent types.
65
Nor can I detect, in the 25 lines
which constitute Lord’s primary sample, any apparent correlation between accent and
melodic contour, much less a distinction between the four types. So far as it goes, then,
this evidence cannot yet support the theory of Indo-European accent-melody per se. But
clearly a more comprehensive statistical examination, comparable to Hagel’s analysis of
Homer, is needed to refine our understanding of accent patterns in the deseterac. Possibly
even some faint determination of melody by accent will emerge.
6. Conclusion
In the meantime, let us consider the melodic consequences raised by the comparative use
of the Vedic, Homeric, and Serbo-Croatian material in our present state of understanding.
In all three traditions, accent-patterns were an important factor in composition. The
Yugoslav melodization differs from the Vedic in its apparent neglect of these patterns,
and in this respect the Vedic material may offer the more valuable analogy to the Greek
situation, given the very probable observance of accent in Homeric melody. If it is right
that Indo-European narrative melodies were originally based on accent, some eventual
dissociation of the two would have been unavoidable in the daughter cultures, since the
accent has itself proven to be an evanescent feature. In Serbo-Croatian, the observance of
64 Lord 1993.
65 Lord 1993, 24.16
accents in the spoken language diminished significantly even during the twentieth
century.
66
It is conceivable, then, that the collected melodies represent a late, sublimated
stage of an ancient form in which a relationship between accent and melody would have
been more obvious.
In their present state, Yugoslav heroic melodies exhibit characteristics which seem to
lie midway between Johannes de Grocheo’s simplistic description of ‘the same melody
repeated in every line’ (and possibly the single melodic line of the Epidaurian inscription)
and the fluid movements of the Homeric accent patterns—which, if indeed they
influenced melody, must have produced many subtle variations within a seemingly
repetitive song.
67
It is true that, in addition to a special opening and concluding pattern, a
Yugoslav singer might know only a few melodic phrases for sustained narrative passages,
between which he will switch occasionally for the sake of variety.
68
These vary from
singer to singer all through a region,
69
as though each develops his own melodic
trademark. But within these restrictions, a good singer will introduce much variety, with
the result that the melody becomes as fluid as the poetic diction it accompanies:
A given phrase is apt to show up in a number of variant forms as the song moves along; some of these
changes can be ascribed to features of the changing text lines, but many of them cannot be. The
variation of a basic melodic idea goes so far afield that it can be quite difficult to draw the line as to
where it remains true to itself, and where it begins to shade off into some variant of another musical
phrase, in a manner which can be disconcertingly Protean.70
In other words, Serbo-Croatian melodies, in contrast to their decasyllabic metre, are not
adequately described as stichic, just as the outward form of the Greek hexameter belies
the complex inner accent-counterpoint identified by Hagel. Erdely aptly describes the
songs of Mujo Velic@ as “contour melodies moving in gentle curves, or simple tags,
changing their shapes like reflections on the water. He is talented in variation, in
changing his motifs, their scale notes, and modes”.
71
The putative ‘normal’ line-by-line
movement can be further obscured by considerable modulations of tempo for dramatic
reasons, where melody may be obscured and ‘speechified’ in faster passages.
Unless the Yugoslav modular melodic approach be regarded solely as the sublimation
of an archaic accent-melody, one might entertain the possibility that in Greek heroic song
too the accent patterns did not themselves provide the entire melody, but rather tempered
and varied more stereotyped melodic motifs. Towards this end it would useful to search
66 Cf. Anderson 1973, 197.
67 Cf. Hagel 1994, 102.
68 Lord 1960, 37; cf. 1993.
69 Erdely 2000, 76.
70 Herzog 1951, 62.
71 Erdeley 2000, 80.17
the Greek epics for ‘local’ accent-distribution patterns, rather than analyzing the
statistical tendencies of single poem (or corpus) as a whole. (In this scenario, however,
the Vedic practice of rigid accent melody would have to be regarded as a special
development.)
To conclude with a few words about the limitations of this investigation. I venture to
assert that the three traditions—Vedic, Homeric, and Serbo-Croatian—can rightfully
claim a common, if remote, historical foundation. There is, however, no question of
comparing or reconstructing actual melodies. One is deducing, rather, the general features
of a poetic and musical method. Specific melodies are irrelevant except where they might
be correlated with metrical, accentual, or other characteristics which are proven to be
cognate on philological grounds. Much more remains to be discovered in all three bodies
of material, and we can look forward to important discoveries in the future.
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ANCIENT SOURCES
For ancient authors I use the abbreviations of Lidell/Scott/Jones 1940. The most recent
editions are given in the Hornblower/Anthony 1996, under the entry for each author.
The role of aoidoi in defining popular notions of what the gods looked like and how they acted, as Herodotus observed, is without parallel in the East. The influence of aoidoi on religion is easily seen in how the word hęros changed from "champion" in Homer to "a dead person with honor" in classical religion. The heroes of Homer became the powerful dead who resided in ancient tombs and protected the interests of the living. Through its gods the polis established nomos, the law that ruled Greek society and set them apart from earlier and foreign societies.
The early (1960) "Das Lied von Ares und Aphrodite, Zum Verhältnis von Odyssee und Iliad" begins from the one fact on which all (almost) Homerists agree: the Iliad comes before the Odyssey. Can we find clear examples of indebtedness? Surely in Demodocus' song of Ares and Aphrodite in Odyssey 8 we can, B. suggests. Analysts have considered the song extraneous, but as usual their positions rest on shaky ground. B. draws astute parallels between the song of Ares and Aphrodite and the scene in Iliad 1 where Hephaestus excites laughter after a scene of strife. The "Deception of Zeus" in Iliad 14 also shares language and structural elements with the song, as does the battle of the gods in Iliad 20/21.
In this early article B. seems to be unaware of Parry's work, and so he explains the similarities that he identifies as conscious imitation by the "Odyssey poet" of features admired in the "Iliad poet." In his heart B. inclines toward German Analysis, though his reason keeps steering him in the other direction. Because the Iliad and Odyssey are different in important ways, Homer of the Iliad and Homer of the Odyssey cannot be the same man, he thinks. It's as if when you regarded two oceans you found separate coastlines and concluded that oceans are formed in different ways.
Twenty-five years after publishing his article on Ares and Aphrodite, B. has fully absorbed the meaning of Parry's research and in "'Irrevocabile verbum': Spuren mündlichen Erzählens in der Odyssee" (1995) he makes an important contribution to the theory of Parry/Lord. B. argues that the Homeric texts can only have come into existence through dictation, just as Parry and Lord thought (although B.'s ill-considered date for Homer in the 7th century B.C. vitiates his argument constantly). Because the Iliad and the Odyssey were dictated texts, they were never corrected. Homer did not go back over his text and fix things up. We should be able to detect occasional confusions of the poet in the received text, then, and B. gives some very interesting examples.
In the funeral games for Patroclus, for example, Achilles announces in advance a prize for shooting the string that holds the dove, although in the event the shearing of the string is accidental; he must be looking forward to the conclusion in his mind's eye. Oddly, Homer never tells us that the Cyclops has only one eye; well, he shares this knowledge with his intimate audience. Helen recognizes Telemachus because he looks just like the son of Odysseus, but she can never have seen him; she meant to say, "he looks like Odysseus," but Homer's knowledge about how he is going to handle his story has interfered with his narrative logic. Agamemnon first lands near "the house of Thyestes, where Aegisthus dwells" (but of course Aegisthus now dwells in Mycenae)--Homer is mixing up two narrative lines. On Scheria, the Phaeacians feast and Odysseus cries at the singer's song, then after exercise they feast again and again Odysseus cries (Homer has changed his mind in midstream about how he's going to set up the recognition). Odysseus instructs Telemachus to sequester three sets of armor, but further in the narrative, after Philoetius joins the conspirators, Homer pretends that the plan did not exist and makes up a new one. Hellenistic texts of the Odyssey seem to have Athena saying she will send Telemachus to Crete, a lectio difficilior, hence probably original: when Homer dictated the song, he was thinking of the many Cretan tales that Odysseus is going to tell. In old Analysis, such disjoinings were explained as the work of redactors, but B. shows with elegance how they support the thesis that the Ur-text of Homer was a dictated text.
An important clue, overlooked, in this maelstrom comes from recently recovered fragments of Stesichoros. Remarkably, these fragments preserve nearly word for word passages from the Odyssey. Apparently Stesichoros' innovations were both metrical and, unless Stesichorean performance was kitharodic, in the dance and display that now accompanied contemporary choral performance. B. doesn't say so, but implies that the genus of choral song therefore postdates the introduction of the Greek alphabet; of course you would need a script for twelve people to memorize it. Stesichorean poetry is never local but tells the same stories as does epic, as if groups of choral singers traveled through the Greek lands. The traditional aoidoi had performed in intimate and aristocratic surroundings, whereas Stesichorean choral song told old stories in a public setting. The conditions for the experience of Greek literature have changed.
The rhapsodes, just as dependent on written texts as choristers, successfully competed with this new form of entertainment (and drove out the aoidoi). Again, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo seems to show us rhapsodes reworking older aoidic material into a fresh creation, performed in 522 B.C. on Delos. The poem's pseudepigraphical claim that its author is the "blind man of Chios" proves that Homer by then was a classic.
But why "Homer" and not somebody else, exactly? Why did "Homer" become a classic? Because the reading of Homer was the basis of Greek education. But why? "The choice of Homer as a schoolbook is strange," B. concedes, but does not see the relation between Homer as the basis for Greek education and the origins of alphabetic technology (I would complain) or ask, "What was the basis for Greek education in 750 B.C.?" or, "Just when did Homer become the basis for Greek education?"
Walter Burkert, Kleine Schriften I. Homerica. Edited by Christoph Riedweg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. Pp. ix, 281. ISBN 3-525-25235-8. EUR 49.00.
Reviewed by Barry B. Powell, University of Wisconsin-Madison (bbpowell@facstaff.wisc.edu)
Word count: 4527 words
Walter Burkert turned 70 on February 2, 2001, and this first volume in a series presents a collection of his essays on topics related to Homer. Future volumes, to appear one each year, will consider Orientalia, Mystica, Mythica (two volumes), Tragica et Historica, and Philosophica. Given B.'s influence, and the out-of-the way venue of many of his short publications, these volumes will be highly welcome to classical scholarship.
In the first essay, "Typen griechischer Mythen auf dem Hintergrund mykenischer und orientalischer Tradition," which appeared in 1991, he cautions against such efforts as M. Nilsson's to find a single origin for Greek myth. Greek myth is too complex and diverse to be traced to a single source. We assume that strands of Greek myth go back to the Mycenaean period, but direct evidence scarcely exists. Debts to the East are now known to all, but B. suggests we approach the topic typologically first, and historically second.
Some myths are local, whereas others are universal. Local myths will include foundation myths, often little known, a type of story that B. considers to be a "real myth" in the sense that they are based in an oral tradition, revolve around certain families, and function as charters for historical conditions in various places. There can be no doubt that these foundation myths arose in the archaic period. Although such local myths, often genealogical, attempt to attach their beginnings to the Trojan and Theban sagas, they do not reach back so far and the connection is artificial and secondary.
A second category we might also call Homeric, because it refers to the world of the Trojan and Theban wars, long reports of which come to us in the Homeric poems. Such stories are not local but embrace all the Greek world. This is a synthetic mythology, where the names are often "speaking-names", as Polynices = "much strife," therefore perhaps artificial, but local traditions creep in too, so that Aias is localized on Salamis. On the whole, however, the Homeric mythology is recent, poetical, and deeply influenced by Eastern models of story telling.
Another category of Greek myth is folktales, especially those about Heracles and Perseus. These are not local, but belong to all the Greeks, even as do stories of the Trojan and Theban wars. Such stories belong to the "mighty deeds" type of myth and revolve around themes of initiation and the culture-bearer. They are often transparently Eastern, for example the story about a hero who killed a sevenheaded serpent.
A plethora of other myths attested especially in Greek tragedy give the impression of being the original and "genuine" Greek myths, for example, stories about Erechtheus, born from semen-stained cloth, or about Arion sired by Poseidon on the goddess Erinys. Such stories are always local and tied to local explanations for the origins of various customs and religious practices. Of all Greek myths, curiously, those appearing in the tragic corpus appear the oldest, some even of Indo-European origin (the Dioscuri). Names in such stories are usually inexplicable, unlike the speaking names of "Homeric myth."
Finally, there is the category of cosmogony and theogony. Such stories are not of local origin or relevance, are cast in the epic dialect, and are transparent importations from the Orient, no doubt in the archaic period.
In "The Formation of Greek Religion at the Close of the Dark Ages," from 1992, B. emphasizes the oddity that Greek religion is intimately bound up with the polis. Ordinarily we find a priestly class, or shamans and wizards, who control religious sensibilities, but the Greeks lacked a professional priesthood and aoidoi preempted the wizards. Because Greek religion is polis-religion, Greek religion as such cannot be older than the 8th century B.C., when the polis began to take on shape. Just at this time appear the polis temple and hero-cult, two of the most prominent features of classical Greek religion.
Recent work on the emergence of the polis directly enhances our understanding of Greek religion. The agora, at first = "meeting place," becomes "market place" where the temples are built that ensure traders' oaths. Striking is the Greek rejection of monarchy, the predominant and by far most successful of political forms in the ancient world. The hero cult was a way of focusing the polis' sense of itself as a unity without a worldly monarch.
Because Greek religion is polis-religion, the question of continuity from the Mycenaean period is placed in an awkward position. There is scant evidence of continuity of any kind, save for a few divine names in the Linear B tablets. Greek calendars, with names based on religious festivals, are demonstrably of Iron Age origin. Some forms of this polis-religion seem taken directly from the East after the collapse of the Mycenaean world, for example the building of temples and the female prophetess at Delphi.
The role of aoidoi in defining popular notions of what the gods looked like and how they acted, as Herodotus observed, is without parallel in the East. The influence of aoidoi on religion is easily seen in how the word hęros changed from "champion" in Homer to "a dead person with honor" in classical religion. The heroes of Homer became the powerful dead who resided in ancient tombs and protected the interests of the living. Through its gods the polis established nomos, the law that ruled Greek society and set them apart from earlier and foreign societies.
In "Homerstudien und Orient"(1991) B. reviews questions of Near Eastern influence on the Homeric poems. Oddly, commentators of the 17th and 18th centuries were alert to the importance of the Near Eastern traditions, about which almost nothing was then known, whereas in the 19th century, when real information about the East emerged, classical scholars showed little interest in the topic. Such impolite behavior no doubt grew from European cultural arrogance and frank anti-Semitism, yet Altertumswissenschaft was trying to break away from its earlier associations with theology. B. presents an interesting review of the scholarly views of important 19th century classicists about Near Eastern influence. He discusses the early noticed parallels between Gilgamesh and Homeric epic, and in the twentieth century the landmark publication of Hittite, Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian, Ugaritic, and Egyptian myths.
Archaeological finds more and more reveal the close relations Greeks had with the Orient after the 8th century. B. himself, with Martin West, articulated the thesis that Greek culture was a spin-off from the Near East, a thesis richly argued in Martin West's immensely important The East Side of Helicon, which appeared ten years after this article. B. does not here mention the sensational finds on Euboea, just being published, which have altered our understanding of Greek/East relations during the Iron Age, for Euboea seems never to have broken direct contact with the East.
The next article, the oft-quoted "Das hunderttorige Theben und die Datierung der Ilias," published in 1976, before the Euboean discoveries, attempts to establish a terminus post quem for the Iliad on the basis of the reference in Iliad 9.381-384 to "Egyptian Thebes, where the most wealth of all is stored in houses, which have one hundred gates, through each of which two hundred men course in their horse-drawn cars." B. resists the old analytic preference, still strong in German Homerforschung, to view these lines as an interpolation. Nor can the reference descend from the Bronze Age 18th Dynasty, he thinks, when Egyptian Thebes was at the peak of its glory, because the formulaic language is "recent." B. is at his most sketchy when he reasons that Greek knowledge of the ancient world's greatest temple complex, even today without parallel, must have perished after the Bronze Age and been unknown in the West until 663 B.C. when Assurbanipal sacked Thebes and paraded its wealth across Asia. On this argument he takes 663 B.C. as a terminus post quem for the Iliad.
Perhaps embarrassed by his own argument, which places the Iliad far too late according to the communis opinio, B. cites the wealth of Delphi and the Gorgoneion on the shield of Menelaus as other possibly 7th century details. Delphi and the Gorgoneion aside, the glory and greatness of Egyptian Thebes, even in decline, did not require an Assyrian sack to become a paradigm for Greek epic. Greek epic inherited confused traditions about Egypt that recur in Odysseus' lying tales and elsewhere. Consonant with such confusion, typical of oral tradition, is Achilles' notion that the temple pylons at Karnak and Luxor were city gates through which enemy chariots passed. Why would a city's destruction generate its reputation for greatness and wealth? One could use the same argument to establish a terminus ante quem for the Iliad, according to preference.
In the still earlier next article (1971), "Von Amenophis II. zur Bogenprobe des Odysseus," B. attempts to solve the mystery of Homer's description of Odysseus' victory at the suitor contest by comparative evidence from Egyptian celebratory inscriptions and iconography. The maids have set up twelve axes in a trench in the dirt floor. The Loeb's A. T. Murray desparately translates Od. 21.421-423: "and he did not miss the handle hole of any of the axe blades from first to last," for pelekeôn ... pantôn prôtęs steileięs, "but clean through and out at the end [dia amperes ęlthe thuraze.] passed the arrow weighted with bronze"(21.421). B. translates: "sämtliche Äxte verfehlte er nicht, oben am Stiel, durch und durch drang der Pfeil hinaus," which seems to mean "he didn't miss any of the axes, high up on the axe handle, and the arrow shot straight through."
Several schools of interpretation of these lines have emerged in the last two thousand years, about how exactly Odysseus shot through the axes. B. reviews various theories, then accepts Wilamowitz's judgment that Homer himself did not understand the nature of the contest but reported a garbled inherited version. What, then, might the original coherent version have been?
B. notices that Pharaohs of the New Kingdom boast of shooting through copper targets, and that in art such targets, in the shape of large copper talents, have a rough resemblance to a double axe, and he wonders if such boastful archery is not the origin of the feat that Homer confusingly describes. True, Odysseus shoots through twelve of them, and they are made of iron not copper, but such corrections are understandable. Hard to accept, however, is that royal Egyptian iconography and propaganda from the Bronze Age can have found its way into the description of a Greek suitor contest, in a climactic narrative scene, six hundred years later. This fault of "the third man"--how do we get from here to there?--reappears in B.'s writing.
"Homer's Anthropomorphism: Narrative and Ritual" from 1991 makes telling general observations about the relationship between Homer's poetic religion and the "real" religion exemplified by sacrifice. B. makes three principal points: (1) Homeric anthropomorphism does not derive directly from Homeric religion but is a narrative device based on Eastern models. (2) The gods' all-too-human behavior, which excites humor in the audience, does not call into question the seriousness of real religion, which is grounded in ritual. Such a religion of ritual, barely connected to the anthropomorphic gods, is a recurrent topic in epic, for example when a commander kills an animal to assure an oath, or when the Achaeans sacrifice to Apollo in thanks for an end to plague. (3) Homeric anthropomorphism does not derive from the spreading use of anthropomorphic images in Greek cult during the 8th century B.C.; if anything, the full anthropomorphism of classical Greek religious art depends on Homer's descriptions. B. argues each point with rich examples and illuminates that basic problem in reading Homer: Where do the gods fit and what do they have to do with the religion that Greeks of the archaic age experienced in their everyday lives?
In "THEÔN OPIN OUK ALEGONTES Götterfurcht und Leumannsches Missverständnis" (1981), B. tackles the problem of the meaning of opis, the pičce de resistance of "perhaps the most difficult phrase in Pindar" (Farnell), namely elpidôn eknich' opin (Isth. 5.58). B. traces a subtle development from an initial adverbial form to a noun of sometimes puzzling meaning.
The early (1960) "Das Lied von Ares und Aphrodite, Zum Verhältnis von Odyssee und Iliad" begins from the one fact on which all (almost) Homerists agree: the Iliad comes before the Odyssey. Can we find clear examples of indebtedness? Surely in Demodocus' song of Ares and Aphrodite in Odyssey 8 we can, B. suggests. Analysts have considered the song extraneous, but as usual their positions rest on shaky ground. B. draws astute parallels between the song of Ares and Aphrodite and the scene in Iliad 1 where Hephaestus excites laughter after a scene of strife. The "Deception of Zeus" in Iliad 14 also shares language and structural elements with the song, as does the battle of the gods in Iliad 20/21.
In this early article B. seems to be unaware of Parry's work, and so he explains the similarities that he identifies as conscious imitation by the "Odyssey poet" of features admired in the "Iliad poet." In his heart B. inclines toward German Analysis, though his reason keeps steering him in the other direction. Because the Iliad and Odyssey are different in important ways, Homer of the Iliad and Homer of the Odyssey cannot be the same man, he thinks. It's as if when you regarded two oceans you found separate coastlines and concluded that oceans are formed in different ways.
Twenty-five years after publishing his article on Ares and Aphrodite, B. has fully absorbed the meaning of Parry's research and in "'Irrevocabile verbum': Spuren mündlichen Erzählens in der Odyssee" (1995) he makes an important contribution to the theory of Parry/Lord. B. argues that the Homeric texts can only have come into existence through dictation, just as Parry and Lord thought (although B.'s ill-considered date for Homer in the 7th century B.C. vitiates his argument constantly). Because the Iliad and the Odyssey were dictated texts, they were never corrected. Homer did not go back over his text and fix things up. We should be able to detect occasional confusions of the poet in the received text, then, and B. gives some very interesting examples.
In the funeral games for Patroclus, for example, Achilles announces in advance a prize for shooting the string that holds the dove, although in the event the shearing of the string is accidental; he must be looking forward to the conclusion in his mind's eye. Oddly, Homer never tells us that the Cyclops has only one eye; well, he shares this knowledge with his intimate audience. Helen recognizes Telemachus because he looks just like the son of Odysseus, but she can never have seen him; she meant to say, "he looks like Odysseus," but Homer's knowledge about how he is going to handle his story has interfered with his narrative logic. Agamemnon first lands near "the house of Thyestes, where Aegisthus dwells" (but of course Aegisthus now dwells in Mycenae)--Homer is mixing up two narrative lines. On Scheria, the Phaeacians feast and Odysseus cries at the singer's song, then after exercise they feast again and again Odysseus cries (Homer has changed his mind in midstream about how he's going to set up the recognition). Odysseus instructs Telemachus to sequester three sets of armor, but further in the narrative, after Philoetius joins the conspirators, Homer pretends that the plan did not exist and makes up a new one. Hellenistic texts of the Odyssey seem to have Athena saying she will send Telemachus to Crete, a lectio difficilior, hence probably original: when Homer dictated the song, he was thinking of the many Cretan tales that Odysseus is going to tell. In old Analysis, such disjoinings were explained as the work of redactors, but B. shows with elegance how they support the thesis that the Ur-text of Homer was a dictated text.
In the recent (1999) "Der Odyssee-Dichter und Kreta," B. returns to earlier arguments that the Odyssey and the Iliad have different composers. For the Odyssee-Dichter had a keener interest in Crete, which figures importantly in the false tales, than did the Ilias-Dichter, whose accounts do not in any event always agree with the Odyssey. The Cretan stories have the ring of the contemporary about them all right and seem to speak to us directly about Homer's world, for example in the observation that five peoples lived on Crete. The probably Aristarchean version of Athena planning to send Telemachus to Crete, not Sparta, must precede the preeminence of Sparta in the early 7th century B.C., where B. wants to place Homer. B. plays with the slightest wisps of evidence here and teases out possibilities, but we are never sure if we are running in a circle when we use the text of Homer, whom we are trying to define, as evidence for "what was happening" in his age.
B. denies the authorship of the Odyssey to "Homer." He seems to accept "Homer"'s authorship of the Iliad, but hedges when he speaks of the Ilias-Dichter, as if that were something else. In the early (1972) "Die Leistung eines Kreophylos: Kreophyler, Homeriden und die archaische Heraklesepik" B. proposes that a lost epic, the "Oichalias Halosis" of which one line survives, presumed basis for Sophocles "Trachiniae", was in fact composed by Homer, at least the "Homer" who composed the Iliad. B.'s appealing argument takes off from the legend that Homer had given the "Oichalias Halosis" to a certain Kreophylos, who entertained him. We must be talking about texts here. A silly story, yes, but we must admit that the plot of the "Sack of Oichalia" is consistently unlike other stories told about Heracles and strikingly similar in theme and treatment to the Iliad. "Homer," then, may well and in fact have composed this poem. In that case, we will need to associate Homer with the existence of texts and conclude that the texts of Homer's poems are contemporary with "Homer."
In the collection's best-known essay, "Seven against Thebes: An oral tradition between Babylonian magic and Greek Literature" from 1981, B. attempts to tie the saga of the Seven against Thebes to a Babylonian magical medical ritual. He shows how the story of the saga is fixed already in Homer. Although most scholars accept an historical origin to the saga in a real war at Thebes in the generation before the Trojan War, ŕ la Heinrich Schliemann, its plot line simply cannot come from history. There is no such thing as a Mycenaean citadel with seven gates. Seven is a special number in the East. In Babylon magicians drove away disease by making images of seven attacking demons and seven defending demons. Brothers stood on either side, whose images were ritually burned at the end of the ceremony, recalling the funeral pyres on the plains of Thebes.
Such extraordinary parallels cry out for explanation, but we have a hard time imagining how a strictly magical ritual can have been translated into heroic saga. Whatever the relation between ritual and saga, B. has revealed oriental patterns in the story of the Theban War and called into question the historical basis for this legend.
Having written in German and English, the many-minded B. now slips into French with "La cité d'Argos entre la tradition mycénienne, dorienne et homérique" from 1998. We have almost no direct information about Argos in the archaic period, but B. sets out conclusions established from hint and inference. There can be no doubt that Argos was Dorian in classical times, but also prominent in the Bronze Age. Hence there was a change of population, or in the power elite, remembered in the legend of the return of the Heraclids. B. explores Mycenaean remnants, including the name Danaoi attested on a New Kingdom Egyptian inscription. In cult, Poseidon is Bronze Age, but Apollo could well have come in with the Dorians. The odd attribution of Argos to Diomedes, and Mycenae to Agamemnon in the Catalogue of Ships reflects the superimposition of Dorian power in the Iron Age over the old Mycenaean regime: Diomedes is from northwest Greece, land of the Dorians. Strikingly, the sanctuary of the Heraion dates from the 8th century so Hera may come in with the Dorians and not be Bronze Age at all. Homer's Argive Hera must postdate the 8th century! Anyway, why did the Dorians choose Heracles, a master of animals, as their legendary ancestor? Because of their claim, "We are not Mycenaean." In the legend, the Mycenaean king persecuted and oppressed Heracles, but the kingdom fell to the Heraclids.
Homer seems to know directly some things about archaic Argos. Sarpedon's killing of king Tlepolemos, a son of Heracles from Rhodes, reflects knowledge of the Dorian migration to Rhodes. Certainly epic poetry flourished at Argos, as proven by a reference in Herodotus, and the lost Thebaid, though in standard epic dialect, may have roots in Argos, whence the expedition set forth.
"Sacrificio-Sacrilegio: Il 'trickster' fondatore" from 1984, in Italian, presents similarities between the myth of the trickster Prometheus, bringer of fire and inventor of sacrifice, to the trickster Hermes in the Homeric Hymn, who makes fire by rubbing wood together and sacrifices twelve oxen. B. ties the background to Olympia, against N. O. Brown's old argument that the hymn is an Athenian poem. Rather, the poem reflects a local Arcadian ritual, B. thinks. The theme of cattle sacrifice also has ancient roots in religion, for example the cult of Mithras.
In "Kynaithos, Polycrates, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo" (1979) B. approaches the ancient problem of the authorship to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, with its clear bifurcation into hymns to the Delphic and the Delian Apollo and its famous claim to be by "the blind man of Chios." Appealing to a scholiast on Pindar's Nemean 2 who attributes the poem to one Kynaithos, B. ties the present form of the hymn to a redaction, or composition, by just that man under the sponsorship of Polycrates of Samos, who celebrated a festival to Apollo on Delos in 522 B.C. B.'s explanation fits the facts: separate dictated oral texts melded together by a rhapsode serving a political purpose, with a pseudepigraphic attribution to increase the new poem's stature--in this way the Hymn to Apollo came into being.
In "The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century B.C.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichoros," B. traces backward in the literary tradition direct evidence for knowledge of the poet "Homer." Xenophanes and Herakleitos take us firmly into the 6th century B.C., after which it's anybody's guess. Semonides, who may be 7th century B.C., mentions "the man of Chios," but the fragment could belong to Simonides from the 6th century B.C. Kallinos is the earliest certain reference, apparently, in the first half of the 7th century B.C., who refers to Homer's lost Thebais. What about rhapsodes? Herodotus first mentions them in connection with Sikyon of about 570 B.C. Homer must be earlier than that, because rhapsodic performance presupposes a written, fixed text.
Greek art is a promising source for information about Homer's date (and these days much exercised). The Mykonos Trojan Horse takes us into the 7th century, surely, but not until the 6th century B.C. are Iliadic themes firmly attested. Numerous signs show that at this time rhapsodes were already replacing the old aoidoi. Why? Because they had access to texts by earlier singers of genius, and being freed from old-fashioned improvisation they could refine and exhibit modern histrionic skills parallel to those that now appear in choral poetry. The Homerids, really just a name, were probably a family of rhapsodes who possessed complete texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the 6th century B.C. Hipparchus had complete copies of these texts, perhaps from the Homerids, and set up public performance at the Panathenaia--certainly not of the whole poems, which are far too long, but of portions performed in the same sequence as they appear in the complete text, according to the famous testimony in [pseudo]Plato's "Hipparchus."
An important clue, overlooked, in this maelstrom comes from recently recovered fragments of Stesichoros. Remarkably, these fragments preserve nearly word for word passages from the Odyssey. Apparently Stesichoros' innovations were both metrical and, unless Stesichorean performance was kitharodic, in the dance and display that now accompanied contemporary choral performance. B. doesn't say so, but implies that the genus of choral song therefore postdates the introduction of the Greek alphabet; of course you would need a script for twelve people to memorize it. Stesichorean poetry is never local but tells the same stories as does epic, as if groups of choral singers traveled through the Greek lands. The traditional aoidoi had performed in intimate and aristocratic surroundings, whereas Stesichorean choral song told old stories in a public setting. The conditions for the experience of Greek literature have changed.
The rhapsodes, just as dependent on written texts as choristers, successfully competed with this new form of entertainment (and drove out the aoidoi). Again, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo seems to show us rhapsodes reworking older aoidic material into a fresh creation, performed in 522 B.C. on Delos. The poem's pseudepigraphical claim that its author is the "blind man of Chios" proves that Homer by then was a classic.
But why "Homer" and not somebody else, exactly? Why did "Homer" become a classic? Because the reading of Homer was the basis of Greek education. But why? "The choice of Homer as a schoolbook is strange," B. concedes, but does not see the relation between Homer as the basis for Greek education and the origins of alphabetic technology (I would complain) or ask, "What was the basis for Greek education in 750 B.C.?" or, "Just when did Homer become the basis for Greek education?"
In "Lydia between East and West or How to Date the Trojan War: A Study in Herodotus" (1995), B. decisively debunks the popular notion that, somehow, the Greeks knew that Troy fell around 1200 B.C., very close in time to the destruction of Troy VIIa (unless Troy VI was Homer's Troy). In fact the Greeks knew nothing about real chronology of the Bronze Age and gave variously, for the Trojan War, the dates 910, 966, 1082, 1150, 1184, 1208, 1296, 1300, and 1334 B.C., all guesses. Any correspondence with archaeological data is entirely coincidental.
The book closes with a summary of important dates in B.'s career, a bibliography by year, and a list of dissertations that he directed.
Every word in B.'s book is interesting. Walter Burkert truly is one of the great modern classical scholars. His inexhaustible learning and lucid style in four languages deserve the highest respect, even awe. He takes the smallest pieces from diverse places to make a fresh model of the general picture. His love for small pieces can mislead him into rash conclusions, for example that Achilles' reference to Egyptian Thebes gives a terminus post quem of 663 B.C. for Homer's Iliad. But even when wrong, the questions are right. What is the relationship between Homer and traditions about Egypt, exactly?
Every classicist will read this book with pleasure, and we look forward to publication of the remaining volumes of B.'s Kleine Schriften.
An ancient Greek stringed instrument [see Lyre] The name is derived from Homeric "kitharis," meaning "string-playing" in general (see "Phorminx" for Homer's use of terms). First mentioned as a specific instrument in Theognis of Megara (640-579 BC?), the kithara is played much like other lyre-types. Its soundbox is a hollow wooden triangular or trapezoidal shape with hollow wooden arms curving gracefully upward. The cross bar, on which the tuning pegs were attached, is made of bone or ivory. If we can believe in vase paintings, the kithara had seven strings in the classical period (Eur. Ion 881 ff.), which are stretched down from the cross bar to the center of the soundbox. The instrument is pictured in mythological scenes, associated especially with Apollo, and is played by satyrs before Dionysos and Herakles. It is often depicted in an ensemble with players of the aulos.
Kithara: Tuning and Performance (see "Lyre"). The instrument is held close to the chest vertically in front of the player and the strings are sounded with a plectrum, held in the right hand. The left hand dampens or stops the strings. It is most often played standing and had a loud powerful sound (Eur. Ion 882), in contrast to the phorminx, which is a smaller and probably a much softer instrument.
Plato and Aristotle seem to disagree on whether the kithara is a proper instrument for use in educating the youth of ancient Greece. We do have scenes on vases depicting music lessons given on the kithara. The instrument was played during religious festivals, and soloists (kitharôidoi kitharistai) competed for recognition and prizes in music competition (agôn) during the 5th-4th centuries BC. It was also played to accompany the chorus' song and dance performances in Tragedy-- Sophocles himself was a player of some fame in his Thamyras.
Plutarch (de Musica 1141C:30; 1142C:31) often mentions the two most well known kithara virtuosos Philoxenus of Kythera (c. 436-380 BC) and Timotheus of Miltetus (c. 450-360 BC). In his nomos the Persae, Timotheus claims to have invented "eleven-stroke meters and rhythms" on the kithara (Timotheus fr. 15, 229-33). The meaning is rather obscure, and some scholars believe that Timotheus added four more strings; it seems more likely, however, that Timotheus was an innovative player who embellished the melody with intricate rhythmic ornamentation. The great kithara soloists were sometimes ridiculed in comedies (e.g. Aristoph. Wasps 1275 f.).
Maas, Martha and Jane Snyder, Stringed Instruments of Ancient Greece, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989
New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 3 vols., ed. Stanley Sadic, London, 1984
"Music.9. Instruments," Oxford Classical Dictionary (second ed.), Oxford, 1978
Nancy Sultan
See also
Lyre
Barbitos
Chelys-Lyra
Phorminx
Panathenaea
(ta Panathęnaia). The most ancient and most important of Athenian festivals. It was celebrated in honour of Athené, the patron deity of Athens. Related to have been founded in early times by Erichthonius, it is said to have been originally named only Athenaea, and to have first received the name of Panathenaea at the time when Theseus united all the inhabitants of Attica into one body. In memory of the union itself was kept the festival of the sunoikia, or sunoikęsis, on the 16th of Hecatombaeon (July-August), which may be regarded as a kind of preparatory solemnity to the Panathenaea. There was a festival of the ordinary or lesser Panathenaea celebrated every year, and from the time of Pisistratus, the great Panathenaea held every fifth year, and in the third year of every Olympiad, from the 24th to the 29th of Hecatombaeon. Pisistratus, in the year B.C. 566, added to the original chariot and horse-races athletic contests in each of the traditional forms of competition. He, or his son Hipparchus, instituted the regulation that the collected Homeric poems should be recited at the Feast of Rhapsodes. In 446 Pericles introduced musical contests, which took place on the first day of the festival, in the Odeum, which he had built. Competitions of cyclic choruses and other kinds of dances, torch-races and trireme-races added to the splendour of the festival. The care and direction of all these contests were committed to ten stewards (athlothetai), who were elected by the people for four years, from one great Panathenaic festival to the next (Pollux, viii. 93). In the musical contests the first prize was a golden crown; in the athletic, the prize was a garland of leaves from the sacred olive-trees of Athené, together with large and beautiful vases filled with oil from the same trees. Many specimens of these Panathenaic vases have been found in Italy, Sicily, Greece, and at Cyrené. They have the figure of Athené on one side and a design indicating the contest for which they are awarded on the other. Most of them belong to the fourth century B.C., 367-318; the so-called “Burgon Vase,” in the British Museum, to the sixth century. The tribe whose ships had been victorious received a sum of money, part of which was expended upon a sacrifice to Poseidon.
The culminating-point of the festival was the 28th day of the month, the birthday of the goddess, when the grand procession carried through the city the costly, embroidered, saffron-coloured garment, the peplus (peplos). This had been woven in the preceding nine months by Attic maidens and matrons, and was embroidered with representations from the battle of the gods and giants. It was carried through the city, first of all, as a sail for a ship moving on wheels, and was then taken to the Acropolis, where it adorned one of the statues of Athené Polias. The procession is represented in a vivid manner in the well-known frieze of the Parthenon. It included the priests and their attendants, leading a long train of animals festally adorned for sacrifice; matrons and maidens bearing in baskets the various sacrificial implements (see Canephori); old men in festal attire, with olive-branches in their hands, whence came their name, thallophoroi; warriors, with spear and shield, in splendid array; young men in armour; the cavalry under the command of both the hipparchoi; the victors in the immediately preceding contests; the festal embassies of other States, especially of the colonies; and, lastly, the aliens resident in Athens. Of these last the men bore behind the citizens trays with sacrificial cakes, the women water-pots, and the maidens sunshades and stools for the citizens' wives; while on the freedmen was laid the duty of adorning with oak-leaves the market-places and streets through which the procession moved. The feast ended with the great festal sacrifice of a hecatomb of oxen, and with the general banqueting which accompanied it. At the yearly minor Panathenaea, on the 28th and 29th of Hecatombaeon, contests, sacrifices, and a procession took place, but all in a more simple style, under the direction of the hieropoioi. (See Hieropoei.) In later times the festival was removed to the spring, perhaps in consequence of Roman influence, in order to make it correspond to the Quinquatrus (q.v.) of Minerva. All the ancient authorities are collected by Michaelis in his work, Der Parthenon, pp. 318-333 (1875); see also Mommsen, Heortologie der Athener, pp. 116-205 (1875); and H. A. Müller, Panathenaica (1837); with the articles Lampadedromia; Pyrrhica; Skiadaphoria.
This text is based on the following book(s):
Harry Thurston Peck. Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. New York. Harper and Brothers. 1898.
Paus. 1.29.1
a festival celebrated every fourth year at Athens; murder of Hipparchus at it: Hdt. 5.56
instituted by Erichthonius: Apollod. 3.14.6
festival celebrated by Aegeus: Apollod. 3.15.6
Panathenian games later than Lycaean games: Paus. 8.2.1
formerly called Athenian games: Paus. 8.2.1
Stage building (skene) with colonnades on all sides, may have had 3 stories. Seats divided horizontally by a diazomata. Lower section of seats had 26 rows, upper section 17. Entered through paradoi, special entrances at diazomata, and another entrance at the highest point of auditorium.
DELOS Greece.
Situated in the center of the Cyclades, Delos is one of the smallest islands of the group, measuring some 5 km N-S and 1.3 km E-W at the widest. The highest point on the island is Mt. Kynthos, which measures 112 m and down which flows the Inopos.
Famous in antiquity as the birthplace of Apollo, Delos is mentioned with great frequency in ancient texts. The most important ones which refer to it are the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Kallimachos Hymn to Delos. The oldest habitation site that has been found on the island is on the summit of Kynthos (end of the 3d millennium B.C.). The island seems to have been abandoned in the first half of the 2d millennium. Then a Mycenaean settlement was established at the future site of the Sanctuary of Apollo, which was itself founded at the beginning of the 7th c. B.C. The number of offerings between 700 and 550 indicates domination by Naxos at this period, but in the second half of the 6th c., it was Athens which attempted to control the sanctuary. Pisistratos, tyrant of Athens, intervened in the religious life of the island by “purifying” it, that is, by removing the tombs which surrounded the sanctuary. The Athenian supremacy became increasingly apparent in the 5th and 4th c., despite a short interruption from 404 to 394: Delos, then the headquarters of the maritime league directed by Athens, was administered by Athenian magistrates known as “amphictyons.” In 426 it was again purified, with all the remaining tombs removed and the bones and funerary furnishings deposited at Rheneia. In 314, Delos again became independent, remaining so until 166. The administrative accounts for the sanctuary and the inventories of offerings give us a rather good idea of the civil and religious institutions of this time. In 166, by Roman decree, Delos became an Athenian possession and was administered by an Athenian epimelete. It was declared a free port, and consequently attracted a great deal of maritime traffic and many merchants from Greece, Italy, and the East. This cosmopolitanism led first to the installation of foreign deities for whom sanctuaries of a non-Greek type were built; secondly, given the influx of immigrants, the town grew considerably. Delos was partially ravaged in 88 by the troops of Mithridates Eupator, and again in 69 by pirates of Athenodoros. These devastations together with the shift of commercial traffic to Italy as a result of the Roman conquest, led to the rapid decline of Delos. It remained a small town until the coming of Christianity, and was finally abandoned in the 7th c. A.D.
Excavations since 1873 have uncovered a very great part of ancient Delos. The ruins can be divided into seven groups: the region of the Sanctuary of Apollo, which is situated on a small plain behind the main port; the lake quarter and the theater quarter, which border on the sanctuary to the N and S respectively; the quarter of the Inopos; the Terrace of the Foreign Gods and Mt. Kynthos; finally two outlying groups, the stadium quarter, to the NE of the island, and the S region.
The sanctuary, which was established on the site of a Mycenaean settlement, began to take its present form towards the 6th c. B.C. It is reached by an avenue leading to a propylon, the avenue being flanked by two Hellenistic porticos, one of which was built by Philip V of Macedon. The propylon is contiguous with a 6th c. B.C. edifice called Oikos of the Naxians, which consists of a rather narrow room with an axial colonnade, and a four-column prostoon which was added later. Immediately to the N on the Sacred Way is to be found the base of the Naxian Colossos. Near it are three Temples of Apollo, constructed side by side and all facing W. The temple farthest N, which the inscriptions call Porinos Naos, dates to the 6th c. B.C., and appears to have consisted of a cella and a prodoinos. The second building is the Athenian Temple or Temple of the Seven Statues, which was built by the Athenians ca. 425-420. It was an ainphiprostyle hexastyle Doric temple which had in addition four pillars in antis. The interior of the cella was occupied by a horseshoe-shaped base which supported the statues of seven divinities whose identity is conjectural. The third Temple to Apollo, which was Doric, was the only peripteral temple on Delos. It was begun around 475-450 B.C., but not finished until the first half of the 3d c. To the N and the E of the temples are five buildings arranged in a semicircle. They are referred to as treasuries, but their actual purpose is unknown. They date from the archaic to the Classical period. To the E of the Temples of Apollo are a 6th c. B.C. edifice which may have been the bouleuterion, and the prytaneion, which was constructed in the 5th and 4th c. B.C. The latter is divided into several small rooms which inscriptions tell us included, among other things, a prodomos, a courtyard, and an archives room. Parallel to these two edifices is the Edifice of the Bulls, which is formed by a six-column prodomos, a long gallery flanked by benches, and a sort of cella reached by way of a bay framed by two supports, the pilasters of which are decorated with bull protoinas. The building, which was constructed at the end of the 4th c. or the beginning of the 3d, appears to have contained a ship which was probably a votive offering. To the W of the Temples of Apollo, on the other side of the Sacred Way, are various structures grouped around the Artemision. A first Temple of Artemis was built in the 7th c. B.C. on top of a Mycenaean edifice near which a hoard of gold and ivory Mycenaean objects has been found. This first temple was replaced in the 2d c. B.C. by a new one which incorporated it. To the E of the Arteinision the Sema of the Hyperborean Maidens Laodike and Hyperoche which was mentioned by Herodotos (4.34) has been identified by some. Nearby there is an apsidal structure of uncertain purpose. Contiguous with the S face of the Artemision are the foundations in poros of a large edifice which according to an account of the hieropoipoi was built by the Athenians in the 4th c. B.C. Blocks from the frieze represent the episodes of an epic of Theseus. Some have identified the structure, though without compelling reasons, with the Keraton mentioned in the accounts of the hieropoipoi. Parallel to its W face is the Edifice with the Hexagons, which is from the archaic period and had honeycomb decoration on at least two sides. To the N of the Artemision were the ekklesiasterion, which was remodeled several times from the 5th c. B.C. to the Imperial period, and a 5th c. building of very unusual plan which some have incorrectly identified as the Thesmophorion. It consisted of a courtyard with a Doric peristyle flanked by two symmetrical rooms whose roofs were supported by four Ionic columns. This building, along one side, borders an agora built ca. 126-125 by Theophrastos, epiineletes of Delos. A hypostyle hall built in the last years of the 3d c. B.C. opens onto this agora. Inside, 24 Doric columns and 20 Ionic columns supported a roof with a skylight.
To the N the Sanctuary of Apollo is closed by a portico constructed by Antigonos Gonatas. The gallery, with a Doric exterior colonnade and an Ionic interior one, was flanked by two projecting wings. The triglyphs of the intercolumniation were each decorated with a bull's head in high relief. In front of the facade of the portico, a Mycenaean tomb surrounded by a semicircular wall corresponds to the Theke of the Hyperborean Maidens Opis and Arge which was mentioned by Herodotos (4.35). Behind the Portico of Antigonos, the fountain Minoe consists of a square well into which one could descend by means of a wide staircase of 11 steps.
To the E the Sanctuary of Apollo is closed by a wall behind which was a residential district which has so far hardly been excavated and the Shrine of Dionysos, the latter flanked on either side by a cippa surmounted by the stump of a phallus. To the S of the Sanctuary of Apollo was the agora, a trapezoidal area surrounded by porticos built from the 3d to the 2d c. B.C. Baths were built on the agora in the Imperial period. Nearby, the basilica of St. Cyriacus is the only well-preserved Early Christian monument on Delos.
The lake quarter extends to the N of the Sanctuary of Apollo around the “trochoidal lake” mentioned by several ancient writers as one of the most notable features of Delos' scenery. In the archaic period, this region formed the Temenos of Leto, of which the lion terrace offered by the Naxians towards the end of the 3d c. B.C., and the mid 6th c. Temple of Leto, still remain. To the SW of the Letoon, the dodekatheon contained only the altars and probably the statues of the twelve gods. In the 3d c. B.C. an amphiprostyle Doric temple was added to it. To the E of the dodekatheon and the Letoon, the agora of the Italians testifies to the prosperity of Delos' Italian colony. The agora, which was paid for by the donations of various benefactors in the last years of the 2d c. B.C., consists of a large trapezoidal area surrounded by a two-story portico on which opened exedrae and niches. Except for two palaestrae, the N part of the district is formed essentially of private houses, including some of the most opulent dwellings on Delos: the House on the Hill, the House of Diaduinenos, The House on the Lake, and several recently excavated insulae, in particular that of the House of the Comedians, which included a two-story tower crowned with pediments. In addition to these private buildings mention should be made of the establishment of the Poseidoniastes of Berytos. Constructed in the first half of the 2d c. B.C. by the “Association of the Poseidoniastes of Berytos at Delos, Merchants, Shippers and Warehousemen,” it consists of two courtyards, living quarters, and four shrines dedicated to Roina, Poseidon of Berytos, and two other national divinities of the Berytians, probably Astarte and Echmoun. The establishment of the Poseidoniastes and the neighboring insulae are oriented N-S and E-W and stand on straight, right-angled streets. This district, which appears to have been constructed in the second half of the 2d c. B.C. must have been laid out according to a predetermined plan.
Such is not the case, however, with the area of the theater, which extends to the S of the Sanctuary of Apollo on the side of a hill. It is the oldest residential district of Delos. It continued to grow throughout the 3d c. B.C., and appears to be without prearranged plan. Its principal axis was the narrow Street of The Theater, which begins in a large flagged square called the Agora of the Herinaistes or Agora of the Coinpetaliastes on account of the numerous votive monuments erected there by these two Italian associations. The street, completely flagged, follows a twisting course as it rises to the theater, which was constructed in white marble in the 3d c. B.C. and could hold some 5500 spectators. The metopes of the frieze of the proskenion were decorated alternately with tripods and bucrania. The water which drained from the theater collected in a large cistern whose cover was supported by eight marble arches, which are still intact. On both sides of the Street of The Theater are houses dating in their present form from the 2d or the beginning of the 1st c. B.C. Most of them are two-story affairs. The most luxurious among them have a courtyard with marble peristyle and are decorated with mosaics. Some of them are well known: the House of Dionysos, which owes its name to a mosaic in opus vermiculatum representing a winged Dionysos (?) astride a tiger; the House of Cleopatra, in which the statues of its owners, the Athenian woman Cleopatra and her husband Dioskourides, are still to be found; the House of the Trident, whose peristyle of Rhodian type includes consoles decorated with two bull protomes and two lion protoines (probably symbols of Atargatis and Hadad), and which possesses several pictorial mosaics.
Behind the theater is a residential district which has only been partially excavated. The House of the Masks there is famous for the mosaics which decorate four contiguous rooms and which include a Dionysos on the cheetah and a series of ten theatrical masks. Almost directly across from it is the House of the Dolphins, which is almost equally famous on account of the vestibule mosaic with the symbol of Tanit and the mosaic in the iinpluvium, which is signed by [Askle]piades of Arados.
To the E of the theater precinct is the area of the Inopos, which is made up of public buildings and private houses along the banks of the Inopos. The waters of the stream were caught at this point in a reservoir constructed in the 3d c. B.C. The most noteworthy house in the area is the House of Hermes, which backs into a hill, and for this reason are preserved the remains of four stories. The sector includes two sanctuaries. The first is the Samothrakeion, consecrated to the Great Gods of Samothrace, Dioskouroi-Kabeiroi, and including both a temple built in the 4th c. B.C. which was enlarged in the 2d c. B.C. and the Monument of Mithridates, which Helianax, priest of Poseidon Aisios and the Great Gods, consecrated in 102-101 “to the gods of whom he is priest and to King Mithridates Eupator Dionysos.” The latter building consists of a square chamber with a statue of the king, and a facade with two Ionic columns in antis. Along the top of the walls ran a frieze composed of twelve medallions with half-length portraits of Mithridates' officers and allies. A little lower down is the Sarapeion A, the oldest of the Egyptian sanctuaries of Delos. It was built in 220 B.C. by the grandson of a priest of Memphis in obedience to a dream which is recounted in a long inscription carved on a colonnette found in the sanctuary. The sanctuary itself consists of a portico, two rooms, and a courtyard, at the far end of which stands a small temple. Some distance from the House of Hermes is the Aphrodision of Stesileos, a private organization of the 4th c. It consists of a marble temple, an altar, and five oikoi.
At the foot of the Kynthos massif extends a long terrace sometimes called the Terrace of the Foreign Gods because standing on it are the Sanctuary of the Syrian Gods and a Sarapeion. The sanctuary, consecrated essentially to Atargatis and Hadad, occupies the N half of the terrace. Built in stages during the second half of the 2d c. B.C., it was administered at first by hieropolitan priests and then as an official right by Athenian priests. It consists of a square courtyard surrounded by small rooms and shrines, and a long terrace onto which a small theater opens. Here the faithful sat during the ceremonies, as is indicated by the absence of a stage and the presence of a portico which surrounds the cavea and hid the spectacle from profane eyes. To the S is the Sarapeion C, which was under official administration from the beginning of the 2d c. B.C. A dromos bordered by porticos and small sphinxes alternating with square altars leads to a large flagged courtyard. This is surrounded by several small buildings of cultic purpose, in particular the little bluish marble Temple of Serapis and the Doric distyle in antis Temple of Isis. The facade of the latter has been reconstructed and its cella still contains the big statue of Isis. The dromos of the Sarapeion C is dominated by the Heraion. This temple, Doric distyle in antis, dates from the end of the 6th c. B.C. Its foundations enclose the remains of a much smaller, earlier temple which appears to date from the beginning of the 7th c. B.C.
The summit of Mt. Kynthos was reached by three roads which ran up the N and W sides. It was originally the site of a post-Neolithic settlement dating from the last centuries of the 3d millennium B.C. The remains of huts with generally curvilinear walls, as well as various stone and earthenware artifacts, have been found under the Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena Kynthia. This Kynthion was erected in Hellenistic times, for the most part in the 3d c. B.C. Its main structures are an oikos of Zeus Kynthios and an oikos of Athena Kynthia, both Ionic distyle in antis.
The W face of Mt. Kynthos supports two sanctuaries, that of Agathe Tyche and the Den of Kynthos; the nature of the latter has long been a matter of dispute. It consists of a natural cleft in the rock covered by a ridge-roof formed by 10 enormous blocks of granite leaning against and supporting each other in pairs. Inside is a base which bore a statue of Herakles. Although the Den was long considered to have been the original Sanctuary of Apollo, it would appear in reality to have been a Hellenistic Sanctuary of Herakles. The N face of Kynthos is occupied by several sanctuaries of oriental type, such as that of the gods of Iamneia and that of the gods of Ascalon.
The stadium area is in the NE part of Delos, running along the E coast. The stadium is bordered with tiers of seats on the W and has a tribunal on the E. It is next to a gymnasium, established there in the early 3d c. B.C. and rebuilt during the Athenian period, whose central courtyard with an Ionic peristyle is flanked by rooms on two sides only. The stadium dominates a partially explored residential quarter. Nearby on the shore was the synagogue, identified by its ground-plan and dedications to Theos Hypsistos. It was in use until the 2d c. A.D. Halfway between the stadium area and the Sanctuary of Apollo is the Archegesion or Sanctuary of Anios, mythical archegetes and king of Delos. It dates from the 6th c. B.C. but was remodeled during the Hellenistic period.
To the S of the Sanctuary of Apollo along the W shore are various ruins which have been only partially excavated. After a group of warehouses opening on the port comes a sanctuary which might be the Dioskourion. It contains various archaic and Hellenistic structures. More to the S the Asklepieion was built between the end of the 4th and the middle of the 3d c. B.C. Among other things, a propylon, an oikos, and the Doric tetrastyle temple have been found there. To the E of this sanctuary, on the side of the hill, is the exceptionally large House of Fourni.
In 69, Delos was fortified by the legate Triarios; remains of the Wall of Triarios are to be found in various places, particularly to the E of the lake area.
Most objects found on the island are preserved in the Delos museum, with the exceptions of some exceptional pieces in the National Museum of Athens. The former thus possesses a considerable collection of archaic kouroi and korai, some pieces of Classical sculpture, and a vast quantity of Hellenistic statues and reliefs. In addition it contains fragments of murals from the houses and the altars of the Compitalia; gold and ivory Mycenaean objects; ceramics from all periods, but especially from the 1st and 2d c. B.C.; Hellenistic figurines and furnishings; and hundreds of marble inscriptions.
Rheneia, to the W of Delos, has been only summarily explored. The E coast, which is that closest to Delos, contains the necropolis of the Delians. In addition to numerous tombs and funerary stelai, there have been found a columbarium from the Hellenistic period and the mass grave where the bones and funerary offerings exhumed in the “purification” of 426 were placed. A small Sanctuary of Herakles, dating from the 2d or the 1st c. B.C. has been found near the W bank.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
M. Bulard, Monuments Piot, XIV: Peintures murales et mosaďques de Délos (1908)I; L'Exploration arch. de Délos, 30 vols. (1909-74)MPI. I: A. Bellot, Carte de l'île de Délos (1909); II: G. Leroux, La Salle hypostyle (1909); II.2: R. Vallois & G. Poulsen, Compléments (1914); III: L. Gallois, Cartographie de l'île de Délos (1910); IV: L. Cayeux, Description physique de l'île de Délos (1911); V: F. Courby, Le Portique d'Antigone ou du Nord-Est et les constructions voisines (1912); VI: C. Picard, L'Etablissement des Poseidoniastes de Bérytos (1921); VII.1: R. Vallois, Le Portique de Philippe (1923); VIII: J. Chamonard, Le Quartier du théâtre (1922-24); IX: M. Bulard, Description des revętements peints ŕ sujets religieux (1926); X: C. Dugas, Les vases de l'Héraion (1928); XI: A. Plassart, Les sanctuaires et les cultes du Mont Cynthe (1928); XII: F. Courby, Les Temples d'Apollon (1931); XIII: C. Michalowski, Les Portraits hellénistiques et romains (1932); XIV: J. Chamonard, Les mosaďques de la Maison des masques (1933); XV: C. Dugas & C. Rhomaios, Les vases préhelLéniques et géométriques (1934); XVI F. Chapouthier, Le Sanctuaire des dieux de Samothrace (1935); XVII: C. Dugas, Les vases orientalisants de style non mélien (1935); XVIII: W. Deonna, Le mobilier délien (1938); XIX: E. Lapalus, L'Agora des Italiens (1939); XX: F. Robert, Trois sanctuaires sur le rivage occidental (1952); XXI: C. Dugas, Les vases attiques ŕ figures rouges (1952); XXII: E. Will, Le Dôdékathéon (1955); XXIII: A. Laumonier, Les figurines de terre cuite (1956); XXIV: H. Gallet de Santerre, La Terrasse des lions, le Létoon, le Monument de granit (1959); XXV: J. Delorme, Les Palestres (1961); XXVI: P. Bruneau, Les lampes (1965); XXVII: P. Bruneau et al., L'Ilot de la Maison des comédiens (1970); XXVIII: J. Audiat, Le Gymnase (1970); XXIX: P. Bruneau, Les mosaďques (1972); XXX: M.-Th. Couilloud, Les Monuments funeraires de Rhénée (1974); P. Roussel, Les cultes égyptiens ŕ Délos (1915-16)PI; id., Délos colonie athénienne (1916); R. Vallois, L'architecture hellénique et hellénistique ŕ Délos (1944, 1966) I, II; id., Les constructions antiques de Délos (1953)MPI; Gallet de Santerre, Délos primitive et archaique (1958)MPI; P. Bruneau & J. Ducat, Guide de Délos (1966)MPI; Bruneau, “Contribution ŕ l'histoire urbaine de Délos,” BCH 92 (1968) 633-709; id., Recherches sur les cultes de Délos a l'époque hellénistique et ŕ l'époque impériale (1970)MPI; J. Marcadé, Au Musée de Délos, étude sur la sculpture hellénistique en ronde bosse découverte dans l'île (1969)I.
Inscriptions: IG XI 2, 4; Inscriptions de Délos; F. Durrbach, Choix d'inscriptions de Délos avec traduction et commentaire I: Textes historiques (1921). Only Vol.
I is published. P. BRUNEAU
This text is based on the following book(s):
The Princeton encyclopedia of classical sites. Stillwell, Richard. MacDonald, William L. McAlister, Marian Holland. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 1976.
OCLC: 75030210
ISBN: 0691035423
Delos
formerly called Asteria: Apollod. 1.3.6
birth of Apollo and Artemis in: Apollod. 1.3.6
Orion in: Apollod. 1.4.2, Apollod. 1.4.3
Ilithyia comes to D. from land of Hyperboreans: Paus. 1.18.5
image of Ilithyia brought from D. to Athens: Paus. 1.18.5
Artemis comes from D. to Athens: Paus. 1.19.6
Theseus holds games in D. in honour of Apollo: Paus. 8.48.3
sacred embassy to: Paus. 1.31.2
first-fruits of Hyperboreans brought to: Paus. 1.31.2
visit of the Hyperborean virgins: Hdt. 4.33-35
Achaeia, Opis, and Hecaerge come to D. from land of Hyperboreans: Paus. 5.7.8
sacrifice and chorus sent by Messenians to Apollo at: Paus. 4.4.1
no birth or death allowed in: Paus. 2.27.1
processional hymns for use in: Paus. 4.33.2, Paus. 5.19.10, Paus. 9.12.6
its purification by Pisistratus: Hdt. 1.64
sanctity of Delos respected by Persians: Hdt. 6.97, Hdt. 6.118
station of Greek fleet before Mycale: Hdt. 8.133, Hdt. 9.90, Hdt. 9.96
D. the mart of Greece: Paus. 3.23.3
sacked by Menophanes, general of Mithridates: Paus. 3.23.3 ff.
its decline: Paus. 9.34.6
uninhabited except by guards of sanctuary: Paus. 8.33.2
great ship at: Paus. 1.29.1
ancient image of Aphrodite at: Paus. 9.40.3
palm-tree at: Paus. 8.48.3
lake in Delos: Hdt. 2.170
island off: Paus. 4.36.6
See also
Delians
