Shane Butler - Sound and the Ancient Senses

Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, but it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the AncientSensesaims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the celestial spheres.

Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities.

This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.

Shane Butleris Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is the author, most recently, of The Ancient Phonograph(2015), and editor of Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception(2016). He is also co-editor, with Mark Bradley, of this series, as well as being co-editor, with Alex Purves, of its first volume, Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses(2013).

Sarah Nooteris Associate Professor of Classics, and of Theater and Performance Studies, at the University of Chicago, USA. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy(2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus(2017).

Series editors: Mark Bradley, University of Nottingham, UK, and Shane Butler, Johns Hopkins University, USA

Like us, ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand their world through their senses. Yet it has long been recognized that the world the ancients perceived, and the senses through which they channelled this information, could operate differently from the patterns and processes of perception in the modern world. This series explores the relationship between perception, knowledge and understanding in the literature, philosophy, history, language and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

SYNAESTHESIA AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves

SMELL AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Mark Bradley

SIGHT AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Michael Squire

TASTE AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Kelli C. Rudolph

TOUCH AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Alex Purves

SOUND AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter

For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/The-Senses-in-Antiquity/book-series/SENSESANT

Edited by Shane Butler and
Sarah Nooter

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 selection and editorial matter, Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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