Power, Timothy. 2010. The Culture of Kitharôidia. Hellenic Studies Series 15. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Power.The_Culture_of_Kitharoidia.2010.
Part IV. Panathenaic Kitharôida
1. Kitharôidia Comes to Athens
τῇσι χοροί τε μέλουσι καὶ ἀγλαὸς οἷμος ἀοιδῆς
καὶ μολπὴ τεθαλυῖα καὶ ἱμερόεις βρόμος αὐλῶν.
For I too am a follower of the Olympian Muses,
for whom choruses are a concern, and the splendid path of song,
and the vitality of song and dance (molpê) and the lovely roar of auloi.
Hermes has just revealed the newly invented lyre to Apollo, whose enthusiasm for its novelty is initially tempered by a certain defensiveness. The god of music asserts that he is, appropriately, just as dedicated a follower of the Muses as Hermes is. Nonetheless, the Hymn imagines that Apollo has had absolutely no exposure to the music of strings before this point. This is meant to be startling, and a bit comic. βρόμος αὐλῶν ‘roar of the auloi’ is saved as a sort of punch line until the end of Apollo’s description of the Muses’ concerns, which form a résumé of his own (limited) musical experience. (And it is difficult not to hear an allusion to Dionysus in that description, and his epithet Bromios ‘Roarer’.) As we will discuss in greater detail below, there is reason to believe that the Hymn was performed in later-sixth-century Athens, perhaps while Hipparchus was still in power. [29] If so, Apollo’s surprisingly late lyric conversion would present a playful allegory for Athenians’ own enthusiastic integration of the music of the lyre and kithara into their civic and sympotic musical lives, which had previously been centered around the aulos.
2. Citharodic Geopolitics
i. Athenian alternatives to Delphi
As we have seen, Heracles kitharôidos must not have been an independent creation of the vase painters. The figure is likely to have been inspired by a citharodic Gigantomachy performed at the Panathenaia, in which Heracles performed a lyric song to celebrate the defeat of the Giants, a performance that in turn offered an aition for the Panathenaic musical contests. Similarly, the tripod devices on the Giants’ shields may be picking up on a latent anti-Delphic/Alcmaeonid strain in the Panathenaic Gigantomachy. However, it is important to emphasize how mistaken it would be to reduce Heracles kitharôidos or the Gigantomachy from which he likely emerged to mere anti-Delphic (or worse, anti-Apolline) propaganda. The rhetoric involved in both is more positive than negative; both serve to celebrate and to legitimate mythically the cultural and political achievements within Athens of the tyrants. Yet still, the iconography does suggest an undercurrent of antagonism within the ideology of the Peisistratean Panathenaia directed outwards to Delphi and its Pythia.
ii. Delian overtures
καὶ Μίλητον ἔχεις, ἔναλον πόλιν ἱμερόεσσαν,
αὐτὸς δ᾽ αὖ Δήλοιο περικλύστοιο μέγ᾽ ἀνάσσεις.
εἶσι δὲ φορμίζων Λητοῦς ἐρικυδέος υἱὸς
φόρμιγγι γλαφυρῇ πρὸς Πυθὼ πετρήεσσαν,
ἄμβροτα εἵματ᾽ ἔχων τεθυωμένα· τοῖο δὲ φόρμιγξ
χρυσέου ὑπὸ πλήκτρου καναχὴν ἔχει ἱμερόεσσαν.
Although lines 177–178 of the Hymn (“And I will not cease from singing far-shooter Apollo of the silver bow, whom lovely-haired Leto bore”) would seem to mark the end of the Delian section, most scholars have realized that this passage nevertheless cannot be taken to mark the beginning of the Pythian section proper. We need not, however, assume, as some have, that it is a late “interpolation” or that the “authentic” opening of the Pythian section has been lost. [57] Rather, it is clear that, rhetorically and structurally, the passage serves to mediate a transition from the Delian to the Delphic realm—Apollo is literally in transit between the two—and that the perspective of the Hymn is at this point still Delian and Ionian. Indeed, the identity of this citharodic Apollo, “Leto’s son,” is distinctly Delian, and, importantly, has been so formed even before he leaves the island for Delphi, where, by implication, there is not yet lyric culture. The lyric tradition of Delos, by contrast, is notionally timeless, cognate with the god himself; Apollo’s first demand after his birth on the island is for the kitharis (Hymn to Apollo 131). Further, the image of Apollo kitharôidos as he leaves Delos cannot but recall the vivid and lengthy description of the Panionian panêguris there (146–166). Athletic and musical contests had been established at this festival to bring terpsis to the god (149–150), who with his phorminx and his festive finery is himself a model agonist. [58]
3. Late Classical Interlude
4. Apollo Patroos: Ideological Resonances in Athens
5. Brilliant Spectators
6. Lyric Politics in the Hymn to Hermes
We realize now that Apollo and Hermes have been arranged in a distinctly sympotic configuration. Having finished his song, Hermes will hand the lyre over to Apollo, who stands to his right; it is as if the two gods are laterally positioned, as they would be at a reclining symposium, rather than facing one another, as performer and spectator at a citharodic performance. The handover will thus be a model for the ἐνδέξια ἔργα of the historical symposium. [149] Appropriately, Apollo, immediately upon receiving the lyre, launches expertly into his own song, emulating precisely the technique of Hermes (499–502; cf. 418–420), and implicitly even bettering it, for it was the custom of skolion singing that the “receiver” of the the lyre would have to “cap,” that is, show up, the previous singer’s song. [150] It is likely that this game of “capping” is already alluded to in the comparison of Hermes’ first lyric performance to the mutual jibes of young symposiasts (55–56). [151] By implication, then, Hermes’ virtuosic citharodic humnos is imagined as a skolion; his citharodic performance is a prelude, as it were, to the symposium. At the same time, we may be invited to see the implicitly competitive exchange between Hermes and Apollo as a mythical prefiguration of the competition between citharodes at the Panathenaic citharodic agôn.
7. Aristocratic Agonists
8. Tyrannical Leitmotifs in Democratic Athens
The first “Periclean” agônes have been persuasively dated to 446/5 BCE. [219] In that year, as Plutarch says, the contests were moved to the Odeion, a large, roofed concert hall near the Theater of Dionysus on the southeastern slope of the Acropolis. Its construction—or massive renovation, if Themistocles had already erected a smaller prototype on the site—was overseen by Pericles himself amidst considerable political controversy. [220] Pericles’ opponents apparently seized upon this large and innovative building, and presumably his grand plan to house the Panathenaic musical contests within it, as an indication of his tyrannical ambitions and tried to have him ostracized for it. [221] It has recently been argued that the Odeion was not built to be a concert hall and was not used in the fifth century to house the agônes, despite its name (the “place of song”) and the fact that Plutarch, along with several other, admittedly late sources, indicates that it was. [222] It is true that the Odeion served in the fourth and fifth centuries as a gathering place for a variety of political and cultural activities, including the vetting of dramas for the City Dionysia, the proagôn. [223] That is logical, since the Odeion would probably only have been used for mousikoi agônes at the penteteric Great Panathenaia, leaving it empty for much of the time. [224] One scholar has expressed legitimate concerns about reconciling the enormous size of the Odeion with “the few days a year it would provide the ‘vital’ function of housing the hitherto open-air proagônes and music contests.” [225] But we must not overlook the fact that musical contests, centered as they were in the programs of major civic festivals, did play a vital role in the cultural experience of the Greeks, and that a large venue specially appointed for their display could very well be appreciated by a majority of the Athenians as performing a vital function. By comparison, no one would question the vital function of the Theater of Dionysus as a place to watch dramas.
The vase thus presents us with an expansive vision of “citharodic imperialism” as conceived under the Periclean democracy, one that both echoes and surpasses the ambitious Panionian agenda of the tyrants. Apollo kitharôidos, triumphant in the premier mousikos agôn, and Athena, armed with spear, together orchestrate the harmonious convergence of Panathenaic and Delian prestige and Attic-Ionic power, extending far and wide. We should note an important divergence from the sixth-century iconography, and the Peisistratid ideology that informs it. There Delian Apollo kitharôidos is typically portrayed in the guise of a mortal agônistês, sometimes in proximity to a Panathenaic festival setting, but he is never explicitly depicted as a Panathenaic competitor. On the fifth-century amphora, he is explicitly depicted as such. This explicit Panathenaic framing of Apollo is an innovation, and may speak to a more concerted attempt under the Athenian democracy, undertaken in conjunction with the reestablishment of the Panathenaic agônes, to appropriate Delian musical tradition. This would accord with the more aggressively controlling tenor in contemporary Athenian policy toward Delos. In the years during which the amphora was produced, the Panathenaia was taking on an increasingly central role in Athen’s imperial agenda as leading city of the Delian League, arrogating to itself the traditional Panionian investment in Delos. In 454 BCE the Delian treasury was removed to the Athenian Acropolis (Plutarch Pericles 12.1). [232] Probably at or near this time, the Athenians compelled members of the League to send tribute to the city during the celebration of the Great Panathenaia. [233] The premier event of the newly organized festival, the citharodic agôn, is appropriately imagined as the focal point of this centralization of geopolitical power and cultural prestige.
9. Dionysian Deformations: The New Nomos
Not surprisingly, Timotheus did compose at least one musical storm. In his Memoirs, the second-century BCE collector of anecdotes Hegesander told of how a famous aulete, Dorion, dismissed the storm conjured up in Timotheus’ Nauplios, saying he had seen a bigger one in a boiling pot (FHG IV 416 ap. Athenaeus 8.338a). On the basis of this anecdote, Wilamowitz argues that the Nauplios must have been an aulodic dithyramb. [246] But there is no reason to believe that cross-generic rivalries were any less intense than intra-generic ones. [247] Dorion’s criticism might better be read as an expression of the territorial rhetoric of musical professionalism. For the new kitharôidia, with its polukhordia and harmonic expansiveness, its focus on mimeticism and treatment of Dionysian themes, could be perceived, from the point of view of a working aulete, as an unwelcome encroachment on aulos-based music. The storm in the Nauplios was in all likelihood a sensational, arresting piece of musical mimesis, but its very effectiveness was what provoked Dorion to disparage it publicly as a failure. [248] At least one dithyrambic composer, Philoxenus of Cythera, responded to the citharodes’ appropriation of dithyrambic music in kind. In Philoxenus’ quasi-dramatic dithyramb of the early fourth century BCE, Cyclops or Galateia, Polyphemus was “played” by a solo singer holding a kithara, a coup de théâtre that was probably intended as a semi-parodic allusion to Timotheus’ nomic Cyclops. [249] It has been argued that Melanippides composed a dithyrambic Marsyas, in which was described, or rather acted out, the satyr’s startling transformation from aulete to citharode. [250]
10. Comic Critique and Popular Ambivalence
11. Legitimating the Nomos: Timotheus’ Persians in Athens
i. The wages of paranomia
ii. Salamis in Athens, without Athens
iii. Eunomian Strategies
καινὰ γὰρ ἀμὰ κρείσσω·
νέος ὁ Ζεὺς βασιλεύει,
τὸ πάλαι δ’ ἦν Κρόνος ἄρχων·
ἀπίτω Μοῦσα παλαιά.
There is no wider context supplied in the Athenaeus passage in which these lines are quoted that would allow us to date them with any certainty. [341] It is a reasonable supposition, however, that they were sung in the years before the Persians, when Timotheus was more extreme in vaunting his kainotomia, and accordingly courted charges of paranomia. [342] If so, the far more temperate, conciliative rhetoric of the sphragis of Persians might be intended in the spirit of a palinode. Timotheus claims that his music transcends generational differences, and implicitly the cultural and political divisiveness associated with them: ἐγὼ δ’ οὔτε νέον τιν’ οὔ- | τε γεραὸν οὔτ’ ἰσήβαν | εἴργω τῶνδ’ ἑκὰς ὕμνων (“But I keep neither young nor old man nor my peer away from these humnoi of mine,” 213–215). [343] The definitive polarity set up between old and new citharodic styles in PMG 796, τὰ παλαιά and τὰ καινά, is here collapsed. And while the citharode of PMG 796 figures his conflict with citharodic tradition as Zeus’ primal parricidal attack on the oppressive Kronos, in Persians 221–231 he is instead at pains to position his new Ionian kitharôidia within the validating “paternal” Aeolic tradition of Pierian Orpheus and Lesbian Terpander. His kitharis—a rhetorically marked archaism—with its eleven strings—the potentially controversial polukhordia euphemized as “eleven-struck meters and rhythms”—represents the natural continuation of the lyric tekhnê of these worthies, who are themselves, however, cast as “new citharodes” avant la lettre, pioneers of poikilia. [344] What is new is old, and vice versa.
μας, τούτους δ’ ἀπερύκω,
λωβητῆρας ἀοιδᾶν,
κηρύκων λιγυμακροφώ-
νων τείνοντας ἰυγάς.
In this passage, Timotheus savvily appropriates the same conservative critical tropes involving the moral and aesthetic degradation of music that were used against him to distinguish himself from his innovative peers. [345] Compare PMG 802, in which he dismisses Phrynis as an ἰωνοκάμπτας ‘bender of Ionian melody’, thereby redirecting actual or potential criticism of himself—an Ionian—toward his rival. [346]
ἔλθοις τάνδε πόλιν σὺν ὄλβῳ,
πέμπων ἀπήμονι λαῷ
τῷδ’ εἰρήναν θάλλουσαν εὐνομίᾳ.
The final word of the nomos is thus eunomia, which surely refers not only to the proper sociopolitical order overseen by Apollo, but also to the good musical order of the present nomos. [348] Timotheus thus answers, at the emphatic final cadence of his song, the charges of paranomia that had been brought against him, not only in Sparta, but, more importantly, in Athens; the present nomos is in no way transgressive, but wholly legitimate. Timotheus is not only defending the aesthetic and generic integrity of his music, however. More profoundly, he is laying claim to the storied legacy of the cosmic power of kitharôidia, which is recalled by the praise of his predecessors Orpheus and Terpander, as well as Apollo, who is invoked not only in the epilogue, but also in another paeanic section at the beginning of the sphragis, in which the god is enlisted as the special epikouros ‘auxiliary’ of the citharode in his struggle with the oppressive Spartans: “O you who foster the new-fashioned Muse of the golden kitharis (ὦ χρυσεοκίθαριν ἀέ- | ξων μοῦσαν νεοτευχῆ), come, healer Paean, as auxiliary to my humnoi” (202–205). [349] Timotheus is thus suggesting that with his nomos he has the same Apollonian mandate to effect proper sociopolitical order in Athens (or indeed in any city) that Terpander once brought to bear with his nomoi at the Carneia, when he sounded Sparta’s famed eunomia into being. Ironically, the Spartans, or any of the critics implicitly aligned with them, cannot appreciate this; their hostility to Timotheus may in fact indicate that they have become alienated from the pacificatory effects of kitharôidia, that it is they who have lost their eunomia.
ῥυθμοῖς τ’ ἑνδεκακρουμάτοις
κίθαριν ἐξανατέλλει
θησαυρὸν πολύυμνον οἴ-
ξας Μουσᾶν θαλαμευτόν·
The close proximity of kithara and city walls in lines 229–236 cannot but evoke Amphion’s construction of the walls of seven-gated Thebes with his heptachord lyre. At Seven Against Thebes 284 Aeschylus refers to the ἑπτατειχεῖς ἐξόδους ‘seven-walled exits’ of Thebes; Timotheus’ δυωδεκατειχής may specifically recall the Aeschylean epithet, underscoring the allusion to Amphion and Thebes. The numerology of the Persians sequence is impressionistic but nevertheless suggestive. We are meant to draw a meaningful connection between Milesian Timotheus’ eleven-stringed kitharis—itself an outgrowth of Aeolic Terpander’s “ten songs” (225–226)—and the notionally twelve-walled Ionian confederation: the former has, Timotheus implies, the Amphionic power to provide the musical foundation for the unity of the latter. [359]
iv. Paeanic frames
ἁγνότατον τέμενος, Παιᾶν’
ἐκελάδησαν ἰήιον
ἄνακτα, σύμμετροι δ’ ἐπε-
κτύπεον ποδῶν
ὑψικρότοις χορείαις.
This paeanic performance, no doubt mimetically reenacted by Timotheus with his kithara, marks a fitting end to the narrative of the battle of Salamis, but it also marks a transition in musical and performative style and ethos. [365] The fragmented and scattered “mad, sad, and foreign voices” heard in the preceding laments are capped by the organized choral song (keladein, 198) of the triumphant paean. [366] Set against the pathetic and unrestrained postures of the suffering barbarians is the image of the disciplined, “symmetrical” khoreiai of the victorious Greeks. [367] The contrast would be dramatically registered in the alteration of Timotheus’ own bodily mimesis; after “playing the other,” his own citharodic identity, Hellenic and Apolline, at this point would begin to reemerge in preparation for his appearance in propria persona in the sphragis. We can expect that this contrast in characterization was reflected in the musical score as well. [368] Text, score, and performance thus would have conspired to express the subordination of the exotic and the experimental “Dionysian” music of the omphalos to the ordered “Apollonian” music of the archaic paean, which in turn leads into the paeanically framed nomic sphragis. [369] The Salamis paean marks the restoration of proper order to Greece and to the nomos; in terms of the latter, Dionysian paranomia makes way for Apollonian eunomia.
v. Greek music in the Persian tent
12. Timotheus the Classic
Footnotes