Spencer Klavan - Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm and Life

For Barnaby Taylor and Armand DAngour:
You believed I could learn, and that is why I did.

Classical World Series

Aristophanes and His Theatre of the Absurd, Paul Cartledge

Art and the Romans, Anne Haward

Athens and Sparta, S. Todd

Athens under Tyrants, J. Smith

Athletics in the Ancient World, Zahra Newby

Attic Orators, Michael Edwards

Augustan Rome, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill

Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic, Thomas Wiedemann

Cities of Roman Italy, Guy de la Bdoyre

Classical Archaeology in the Field, S. J. Hill, L. Bowkett and K. and D. Wardle

Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil, Richard Jenkyns

Democracy in Classical Athens, Christopher Carey

Early Greek Lawgivers, John Lewis

Environment and the Classical World, Patricia Jeskins

Greece and the Persians, John Sharwood Smith

Greek and Roman Historians, Timothy E. Duff

Greek and Roman Medicine, Helen King

Greek Architecture, R. Tomlinson

Greek Literature in the Roman Empire, Jason Knig

Greek Sculpture, Georgina Muskett

Greek Tragedy: Themes and Contexts, Laura Swift

Greek Vases, Elizabeth Moignard

Homer: The Iliad, William Allan

Julio-Claudian Emperors, T. Wiedemann

Lucretius and the Didactic Epic, Monica Gale

Morals and Values in Ancient Greece, John Ferguson

Mycenaean World, K. and D. Wardle

Ovid: A Poet on the Margins, Laurel Fulkerson

Periclean Athens, P. J. Rhodes

Platos Republic and the Greek Enlightenment, Hugh Lawson-Trancred

The Plays of Aeschylus, A.F. Garvie

The Plays of Euripides, James Morwood

The Plays of Sophocles, A. F. Garvie

Political Life in the City of Rome, J. R. Patterson

Religion and the Greeks, Robert Garland

Religion and the Romans, Ken Dowden

Roman Architecture, Martin Thorpe

The Roman Army, David Breeze

Roman Britain, S. J. Hill and S. Ireland

Roman Egypt, Livia Capponi

Roman Frontiers in Britain, David Breeze

The Roman Poetry of Love, Efi Spentzou

Slavery in Classical Greece, N. Fisher

Spectacle in the Roman World, Hazel Dodge

Studying Roman Law, Paul du Plessis

c. 1400 BC Date of the worlds earliest known musical notation, from the ancient city of Ugarit in what is now Syria.

670s BC Rough date of the first kithara competitions at Spartas Carneia festival, of which the famous Terpander is said to have been the first winner.

BC Athenian tyrant Peisistratus re-organizes and revitalizes the Panathenaic Games, a festival in honour of Athena held every four years, including prominent musical competitions.

534 (or 531) BC Peisistratus re-institutes the City Dionysia festival, where tragedies are performed in competition for the top prize.

510508 BC Deposition of Peisistratid tyranny.

499493 BC A conflict known as the Ionian Revolt draws Greek city-states into conflict with Persia and Asia Minor.

BC Comedy competitions are introduced to the City Dionysia.

c. 480 BC Creation and use of Paestum pipes, some of our oldest surviving archaeological examples of ancient Greek instruments.

480479 BC Persian monarch Xerxes leads an expedition against independent Greek city-states and is rebuffed, ushering in an age of Athenian cultural flourishing and beginning what is traditionally labelled the Classical Period.

BC Dbut performance of Aeschylus Persians, the first surviving Greek tragedy, at the City Dionysia festival. The theme is Athens victory over Persia as seen through the eyes of the defeated Persian king, Xerxes, and his retinue.

BC Comedy is introduced to the Lenaea Festival at Athens.

BC Dbut performance of Euripides Orestes, the only surviving fifh-century tragedy for which some original music is (possibly) preserved.

BC Dbut performance of Euripides Bacchae, the last surviving Greek tragedy. The theme is a hostile takeover of Thebes by the god of frenzy and theatre, Dionysus.

c. 200 BC Music which seems to be from Euripides Orestes is written down by an unknown scribe on a papyrus partially preserved as Pap. Vienna 2315.

First or second century AD Creation of the Seikilos Epitaph, a tomb engraving in what is now Turkey containing some of our clearest ancient rhythmic and melodic notation.

Music has always been with us. Even in prehistoric caves in Spain (the Caves of El Cogul) and Italy (the Grotta dellAddaura), we can see depictions of dancing people painted onto the walls. And to this day there is no known culture in the world that lacks a tradition of singing, chanting, playing instruments, or moving to a beat. The earliest known form of written musical notation is carved into a clay tablet from around 1400 BC in the ancient city of Ugarit (now Syria). But thats many thousands of years later than the aforementioned cave paintings, a fact from which we learn something important: music itself is much older than music notation. The vast majority of ancient music left behind no trace for historians to study. There are still songs being sung today that will never get written down think of the rhymes you used to chant as a kid on the playground, or the private melodies that some parents make up and sing to their babies. These unwritten tunes might be passed down within families, or after a short while they might vanish forever. But whether written or not, music is a fundamental component of human life. Wherever there are people, they sing and dance together.

This book is first and foremost about ancient Athens the voting citizens, the rich matrons, the enterprising prostitutes, the slaves, the immigrants, the children, and everyone else who lived together in a form of legally and culturally organized life called a city-state (or in Greek, a polis). Athens is near the eastern tip of Greece, the first major city one would encounter if travelling into Europe from Turkey or elsewhere in the Middle East. In the ancient world it was often a hub for commerce, travel, and trade among the many cultures that would move between those eastern regions and the communities of what is now Europe. This became especially true during the fifth century BC , in between 479 (when a coalition of Greek city-states managed to fend off colonization by the massive Persian Empire) and 404 (when Athens was forced under siege to surrender to Sparta, its major rival for power in Greece, at the end of the conflict between them called the Peloponnesian War).

The period before the Greek victory over Persia in 479 is usually called the Archaic period, whereas the period after is called the Classical period. Here we come up against a problem: as will soon become clear, the Classical period was a time of tremendous cultural flourishing, during which many of the developments that interest us took place. But it was also, crucially, not the period during which many of our sources about music were written. Quite a few great poets (such as composers of tragedy like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or of lyric like Pindar and Bacchylides) and historians (Herodotus and Thucydides chief among them) did leave written records of their work that survive to this day. But plenty of others, including many musicians and musical philosophers (Damon of Athens, Timotheus of Miletus, Lasus of Hermione, and the rest whom we will meet in this book) left nothing or only a few fragments.