A Piping Odysseus in Ptolemy the Quail

Timothy Power, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Even in the odd company of Imperial mythographers, paradoxographers, antiquarians, and literary revisionists, Ptolemy the Quail (Ptolemaios Chennos), an Alexandrian writing around the turn of the first into the second century CE, qualifies as a fringe figure. [1] While the Quail was certainly not the only author of his time (or earlier) to walk the weirder byways of myth, literature, and history, no one else makes such incredible claims about what he discovers there.

The contents of Ptolemy’s New History (Kainê Historia) are summarized in the Bibliotheca of the ninth-century CE patriarch Photius. [2] This summary, though greatly condensed, indicates that the work was a collection of curiosities akin to others of its age, only more consistently bizarre: astonishing tales of birth, death, and love alongside fragments of secret histories and forgotten poems, eccentric onomastic lore, biographical trivia about the most minor of authors, absurd “solutions” to absurd pseudo-problems in the Homeric epics, bizarre aetiologies and etymologies, and, above all, radically variant, nowhere-else-attested versions of myths both familiar and obscure, versions so “out there” they seem deliberately chosen to defy and revise canonical mythology, especially that in Homer. [3]

This is “believe-it-or-not material” of the highest order. [4] One would like to believe that Ptolemy drew the bulk of his material from authentic witnesses to legitimately ancient local or Cyclic mythopoetic traditions and folk histories otherwise lost. But how much comes from entirely untraditional literary fabulists and revisionist mythographers of the Hellenistic period and after? And how much is the product of Ptolemy’s own imagination? Making these questions especially difficult to answer are the facts that most (but certainly not all) of the material presented by Ptolemy is elsewhere unparalleled, and so could very well be sheer fiction, and that the few sources for it named in the Photian summary of the New History also appear only there—they too could be Ptolemy’s inventions. [5]

The prevailing opinion has long been that Ptolemy is not to be trusted. Skepticism could be extreme: the Quail was a “shameless fraud” who “told lies as easily as he breathed.” [6] In a recent discussion, Alan Cameron has solidified and refined the skeptical position. While acknowledging that some “genuine material based on genuine texts and erudition” does in fact appear in the New History, he argues that its inclusion is a strategy to make the (far more numerous, in his opinion) fictional bits all the more believable. Bogus citations are a complementary strategy of false authentication. [7] For Cameron, however, Ptolemy’s literary fabrications are not intended to deceive the innocent reader in a purely fraudulent manner. The New History is more likely to have been a “tongue-in-cheek satire of the proliferating, all but out-of-control mythographic literature” of its day. [8]

A few scholars have attempted to defend the Quail as an honest researcher who scrupulously, if often too naively sourced the sensational material he presented. Even if his historical tidbits and mythical variants do not have a longstanding traditional pedigree, it is argued, they nevertheless do go back to preexisting sources of one kind or another, reliable or not. [9] The defenders point out, as Cameron concedes as well, that a fair amount of Ptolemy’s material was, we can be sure, in circulation, if not in exactly the same form, well before the publication of the New History. And they remind us that since Ptolemy’s goal was to present the most obscure versions of myth and history he could find, we should not be surprised that he succeeded: not only are the majority of his authentic finds elsewhere unattested, so are the recondite yet authentic sources he cites.

The “truth” of the New History probably lies somewhere in between the extremes of credulity and skepticism, believe it and not. I would suggest that Ptolemy himself positioned his work between the extremes, deliberately mixing together the fabricated and the inherited, not in order to deceive, but rather to test the breadth and refinement of his readers’ erudition, their polymathia: the game, as it were, was to distinguish the incredibly fake from the equally incredible “real.” [10] Cameron’s take on the New History as knowingly parodic and satiric is not so far from this reading. I would emphasize, however, that writer and reader are probably meant to be complicit in the fun. [11]

A related approach is to see the Quail not only as a creator of sui generis fictions, but as a creative manipulator of received narratives, elaborating, rationalizing, suppressing, transposing, and conflating mythical or historical details to produce novel expressions and assemblages of inherited material. [12] Again, some of this material would have gone back, via intermediate testimonia, quite far into obscure and overlooked oral and poetic traditions; other material would have been one-off stuff of more recent vintage (on the comic stage in Athens, for instance). In either case, Ptolemy would have reworked the curious things he found, making the strange even stranger, the unbelievable still more impossible to believe. The combination of learning and creativity behind his bizarre, often ridiculous “hypertexts” would of course have been best appreciated by the sophisticated few who could detect traces of the recherché “hypotexts” peeking through the palimpsest. [13]

For us, such source traces are of course harder to detect—not least because Photius has greatly condensed Ptolemy’s original work, giving us only its bare essentials and probably omitting many citations (whether bogus or genuine). [14] In virtually every instance, the New History as we know it frustrates attempts to apply traditional, linear Quellenkritik to pinpoint its precise sources. [15] Yet, even so, it repeatedly lures the curious—and not entirely skeptical—reader to do just that. In what follows, I take the bait and speculate on the provenance of one typically “unbelievable” entry in the Photian summary of the New History, presenting not one but two (separate) hypotheses about where Ptolemy may have found his source material, and how he may have creatively adapted and reworked what he found. But before that, I take a skeptical position, considering the possibility that Ptolemy worked from no real source at all, but concocted his own strange myth from a variety of familiar ingredients.

In the seventh book of the New History, Photius tells us, one reads:

Needless to say, this episode in the Ithacan hero’s life is attested only here. Did Ptolemy simply make it up? Perhaps. Certainly, key details are so at odds with known traditions concerning Odysseus that it is difficult to imagine their having any source besides Ptolemy himself. Nowhere else do we hear of Odysseus making music, much less on the double reed pipes called auloi, which are markedly absent from the Odyssey and are mentioned only twice in the Iliad (X 13, XVIII 495). The epics focus rather on the phorminx, the lyre-like stringed instrument played by the bards Demodocus and Phemius as well as the heroes Achilles and Paris. The latter are the only two Homeric heroes to play music, and neither do so in an agonistic context, which in reality tended to be the province of virtuoso professional musicians. Indeed, the Iliad and Odyssey are altogether lacking in references to formalized musical contests (mousikoi agônes) such as the one that seems to be imagined in the New History. [16] So Ptolemy presents us with a radically, perhaps calculatedly un-Homeric Odysseus: a virtuoso aulete of all things, who for some reason—here Photius probably omitted a scene-setting explanation—competes in an Etruscan musical contest.

And there is one more clever detail, delivered, as is Ptolemy’s wont, in the manner of a punch line. Odysseus wins the contest with a piece he learned or, perhaps more true to character, stole from the Phaeacian bard Demodocus, the Capture of Troy. [17] Demodocus sang his Capture to the phorminx. Ptolemy’s Odysseus has, we must assume, arranged the original poiêma (as Ptolemy calls it) for solo aulos, presumably capturing the narrative drama of the original sung text with the mimetic sounds of the reed instrument. Odd, yes, but that is the point. [18]

For all its strangeness, however, certain familiar Odyssean themes may have informed Ptolemy’s fantasy. Odysseus does compete in (and win) agônes on Scheria, although they are athletic, not musical. And while he never actually plays an instrument, he is three times in the Odyssey compared to a bard (xi 362–376, xvii 518–521, and, famously, xxi 406–409, where Odysseus strings his bow with the expertise of a bard stringing his phorminx). [19] The Quail may have brought together these well-known, if disparate agonistic and musical elements of the Homeric depiction to create the novel image of Odysseus the musical agonist.

Further, this image could be seen to bear specific hallmarks of Ptolemaic mythmaking. Contests recur in one form or another throughout the New History, so often that, as Cameron observes, the agonistic motif might amount to a signature of authorial invention. [20] The aulos, a quirky, “anachronistic” addition to the mix of vaguely Homeric base ingredients, may also have been a special interest of Ptolemy. The instrument and certain of its players make other appearances in the New History (Bibliotheca 149a6–8, 152a25, 152b25).

And then there is the setting, Tyrrhenia, i.e. Etruria—a suitably exotic place, it seems, to host such incredible goings on. But the Etruscan setting is more “traditional” than it might first seem. Odysseus was linked with Etruria long before Ptolemy put him there. In Hesiod’s Theogony it is said that the sons of Circe and Odysseus “ruled over all the renowned Tyrrhenians” (1016). [21] Hellenistic sources attest to a rich extra-Homeric tradition of the hero’s adventures and death in Etruria during a second period of wanderings after his return to Ithaca. The historian Theopompus records that Odysseus founded the Etruscan city of Gortynaia, that is, Cortona, where he died, was buried, and received great honors after death (FGrH 115 F 354 = scholia to Lycophron Alexandra 806; in a sly variant that combines disparate traditions, Lycophron has the hero’s ashes buried near Cortona, at Mt. Perge, after his death on Ithaca: Alexandra 805–806). The Pseudo-Aristotelian Peplos, a collection of fictitious epitaphs on Homeric heroes, twice refers to Odysseus’ burial in Etruria (640 Rose 12 and 13). Inscriptional and artistic evidence points to the fact that Odysseus was well known to the Etruscans, who called him Utuse, as early as the fifth century BCE. [22] The Etruscans may in fact have gone quite far in adopting Odysseus as their own. For although specific material evidence from Etruria is lacking, the Greek literary sources would seem to point to the existence of “an Etruscan tradition of Odysseus as a dead hero,” that is, an Odyssean hero cult based in Cortona. [23]

Ptolemy clearly knew the accounts of Odysseus’ death in Etruria. A notice in the fourth book of the New History records the tale of a Tyrrhenian witch, a protégée of Circe, called Hals ‘Sea’, after whom a well-known Etruscan tower was named. Hals administered drugs to Odysseus that turned him into a horse, which she kept with her until it, the Odysseus-horse, died of old age. The account supplies, we are told, the solution (lusis) to the interpretive conundrum posed by Odyssey xi 134 (Teiresias telling Odysseus he will have a “gentle death ex halos ‘from the sea’”). [24] The notice appears to be a typical case of Ptolemy’s gilding the lily, making a weird variant—Odysseus’ death in Etruria—much weirder (a bizarre replay of the Circe episode) and tying up the entire fiction with a ridiculous bit of Homeric exegesis. [25] Other odd yet “authentic” touches are mingled in to impart an aura of truth. Odysseus’ transformation into a horse, at the hands of Athena (not Hals), was probably a known variant in circulation before Ptolemy’s time (Sextus Empiricus Against the Mathematicians 1.267; cf. Servius ad Vergil Aeneid 2.44). And the “tower of Hals” (Halos purgon) punningly suggests genuine Etruscan local color: Pyrgos and Alsium were Etruscan coastal cities. Halos purgon may also be meant to evoke a place apparently linked to the Etruscan Odysseus: Mt. Perge, near Cortona, where Lycophron says the ashes of Odysseus were buried. [26]

So is Ptolemy up to something similar in his entry on the aulos contest, using the relatively obscure yet solidly pedigreed Odysseus-in-Etruria tradition as a convincing cover under which to let his imagination run wild? It is important to note here that the Etruscans were known to be great lovers of the aulos. Greek writers remark on its ubiquitous presence in Etruscan life, accompanying even the most mundane activities; we hear that a third-century BCE Athenian philosopher, Polystratus, a student of Theophrastus, was given the nickname “the Tyrrhenian” apparently on account of his enthusiasm for the aulos and its players. [27] The proverbial Etruscan fondness for pipes might be that piece of familiar (and true) lore meant to lend credence to the outlandish claim that Odysseus himself piped in Etruria. Indeed, it was perhaps Ptolemy’s original point of inspiration for the claim. Ptolemy’s logic of “deception” might have run along these lines: If Odysseus had displayed otherwise unattested musical skill, he most believably did so during his shadowy period in Etruria; and if he did play music in Etruria, he would most naturally have done so on the aulos.

Thus building upon and conflating traditional themes and lore—the Homeric Odysseus as athlete and metaphorical bard, the extra-Homeric Odysseus’ sojourn in Etruria, the Etruscan enthusiasm for aulos music—Ptolemy has, it might seem, fabricated a most untraditional kainê historia.

But are we giving the Quail too much credit? Or, from another point of view, are we being unfair to him? Karl-Heinz Tomberg, a vigorous defender of Ptolemy’s systematic use of earlier sources, argued that the musical Odysseus of the New History may well be entirely derived from a genuine Etruscan Lokalsage. [28] This is a view worthy of further consideration. At the most basic level, since we know from Theopompus and our other sources only the capital points of the Odysseus-in-Etruria tradition—his foundation of Cortona, his death and subsequent honors there—who are we to rule out the possibility that the Etruscans did in fact tell tales of Odysseus’ auletic prowess (or, for that matter, of his equine transformation and senescence chez Hals)? [29]

The aulos was, after all, a major presence in Etruscan society. Is it so incredible that, as Odysseus was “Etruscanized,” he may have been made into the culture hero of this locally prestigious instrument? We may want to look to Cortona and the hero cult of its founder for the genesis of this unique tradition. As Gregory Nagy has shown, hero cult could be the locus of the generation, collection, and transmission of biographical lore about the cult’s recipient. [30] Such lore was, as Nagy again has shown, like hero cult itself largely at odds with the Panhellenic mainstream, which tended to suppress what was markedly epichoric. [31]

The story of Odysseus’ victory in a musical contest may in fact have been closely tied to that of his founding the city of Cortona. Archaic Greece provides us with two loosely parallel traditions in which a culture hero is simultaneously involved in political organization and mousikoi agônes. These traditions in turn speak to a broader archetypal pattern in Hellenic and Near Eastern cultures according to which musical order brings about and/or restores political order. [32]

First, there is the tradition that has Terpander, a Lesbian lyre singer, restoring a fractious Sparta to good political order with his lyric music. Terpander’s harmonization of the polis is very probably to be correlated with his participation and victory in the first musical agôn to be held at the Spartan Carneia festival. Further, Terpander was attributed the first formal organization (katastasis) of musical culture in Sparta; we may assume that the very establishment of the Carneian musical contest was part of this initial musical organization. [33] Thus, in the Terpander-in-Sparta tradition we see themes of political and musical-cultural ordering interwoven with a foreign culture hero’s triumph in (and perhaps also establishment of) a local musical contest. [34] Could Ptolemy’s auletic Odysseus represent the vestige of a similarly structured tradition?

Of course, Terpander is first and foremost a musician; Odysseus as we know him is not. But consider the case of another hero who, at least in his Panhellenic persona, does not seem to have a musical bone in his body: Heracles. Indeed, according to an apparently widespread tradition, so unmusical was Heracles that as a youngster he murdered his lyre teacher, Linus (Apollodorus Library 2.4.9). [35] Yet the iconographical record of Archaic Athens indicates that, for a period of time under the Peisistratid tyrants, the Theban hero was, in Athens at least, figured as a musical agonist. A number of ceramic vessels from ca. 530–500 BCE depict Heracles mounting the bêma, the platform on which musical competitors performed, with either the large concert lyre, the kithara, in hand, or, more rarely, auloi. Athena is typically depicted too as an encouraging spectator of this unlikely virtuoso. [36]

It has been convincingly argued that these images were directly connected with the Peisistratids’ vigorous promotion of the premier Athenian civic festival (with its attendant mousikoi agônes), the Panathenaia. [37] Peisistratus himself very likely played a major role in the reorganization of this festival, and he and his sons certainly exploited it as an instrument of their domestic and foreign political ambitions. Heracles was a hero with whom Peisistratus seems to have closely identified, so the circulation of images of a citharodic or auletic Heracles mounting the agonistic platform would have served to advertise and reinforce the notion that the tyrants were the leading sponsors of the prestigious Panathenaic agônes. But there may be still deeper ideological implications. Conceivably, what these scenes depict is the prototypical Panathenaic musical contest, a foundational event in the mythical past fraught with political as well as cultural significance for the present. Heracles is the paradigmatic agonist competing, for the pleasure of Athena, at the very inauguration of the goddess’ Athenian games, games which were to play such a fundamental role in the tyrants’ political program, and, again, which Peisistratus, Heracles’ mortal emulator, may have himself re-established. [38] By extension, the Peisistratids themselves could be viewed as culture heroes engaged in a notional “harmonization” of the city of Athens as a whole.

Regardless of whether this ideological and political interpretation of the Heracles scenes is correct, the important point to be drawn from them is that they reflect a distinctly epichoric version of the hero, in which he is cast, very much against type, not only as a musician, but as a competitive virtuoso musician. If the vessels on which the scenes were painted were not preserved, and we had only a late mythographical notice to the effect that Heracles once played the kithara in a contest, we would probably reject the notice out of hand as pure whimsy, as we might be tempted to do with Ptolemy’s account of Odysseus at the Etruscan aulos contest. [39]

As far as I know, there is no clear evidence, literary or visual, for historical Etruscan mousikoi agônes. There is no doubt, however, that Etruria was home to a vibrant musical culture from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period that looked to Greece for model practices. The iconographical record makes it abundantly clear that the Etruscans enjoyed Greek-style contests of athletic skill. [40] Musical contests too would certainly not have been out of place in Hellenizing Etruria. Could then the account related by Ptolemy have originally served as a charter myth for an Etruscan musical contest, as accounts of Terpander and Heracles did for the historical institution of the Carneian and Panathenaic agônes? Further, could the account have been linked somehow with Odysseus’ foundation of Cortona (where he also historically received hero cult), as the Terpander and Heracles traditions were linked with the affirmation of political order in Sparta and Athens? The answer, especially to the first question, should be, I think, a resounding “perhaps.”

Where Ptolemy may have found this remote piece of Etruscan oral tradition is anyone’s guess. The history and lore of Etruria were of interest to Hellenistic Greek writers such as Theopompus, who were intent on rooting out Hellenic influences, and to Romans writers beginning with Cato the Elder, who were more interested in exploring Rome’s relation to the Etruscan past. [41] Theopompus may have referred to the story of the aulos contest in an unattested part of his works. But still earlier Greek historians and mythographers turned their investigations to Etruria. Herodotus speculates on the Lydian origins of the Etruscans (1.94.2–7). Hellanicus of Lesbos published research on the supposed settlement of Etruria by Pelasgians, the pre-Greek “sea people” (FGrH 4 F 323a, from his Phoronis), and we may assume that he explored other aspects of Etruscan antiquity as well. Hellanicus’ broad interests in musical myth and history—he composed a catalog of Carneian musical victors that began with Terpander (FGrH 4 F 85–86)—make him one possible candidate to be Ptolemy’s source (probably via later intermediaries) for the Odysseus-aulete story.

Indeed, it is worth noting that Hellanicus said a Pelasgian named Nanas led the Pelasgians to Kroton, which is most likely to be identified not with the Greek colony of that name, but with Cortona, the city founded by Odysseus in the tradition reported by Theopompus. [42] Lycophron Alexandra 1242–1245 merges the Pelasgian and Odyssean traditions in characteristically riddling and allusive fashion, by replacing the name Nanas with the word nanos ‘dwarf’. With the latter, Lycophron refers to Odysseus, who is described as short in Iliad III 193 and Odyssey vi 230. It is entirely conceivable, however, that Hellanicus had already taken account of both the Pelasgian and Odyssean traditions, and, in the course of treating the latter, included the story of Odysseus’ victory in a piping contest. [43]

Yet the Lycophron passage perhaps suggests another candidate. The scholia to the Alexandra indicate that the Sicilian historian Timaeus of Tauromenium was an important source for that work. [44] Could Timaeus have related the Odysseus-aulete story? He did, after all, like Hellanicus have an interest in musical contests (cf. FGrH 566 F 43b, on a legendary Pythian citharodic agôn featuring Italian competitors). Of course, the Tauromenian may himself have drawn on the older Hellanicus’ research into Etruscan musical myth.

But Ptolemy could have taken his auletic Odysseus from a very different kind of source, one that had no connection to authentic Etruscan traditions; in fact, one that had no connection to Etruria at all and was in no real sense “traditional.” I refer to Attic comedy. It has been argued that Ptolemy drew a good deal of his core material from Middle Comedy, which treated many of the same mythical characters (Heracles, Odysseus, Helen, et al.) and motifs that recur in the New History. What was presented as obviously fictive comic parody and burlesque in the former is presented in the latter as the ostensibly serious findings of careful research into mythical and literary history. [45]

It is a play that belongs to the tail end of the era of Old Comedy, however, that may have provided the inspiration for Ptolemy’s piping Odysseus: the Sirens of Theopompus, a comic poet of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE (and not to be confused with the Hellenistic historian of the same name). Although scantily preserved, we can be sure that this play, like other Siren-themed comedies before and after it, parodied the Homeric encounter between the singing Sirens and Odysseus. [46] In one of the few preserved fragments, someone says: αὐλεῖ γὰρ σαπρὰ | αὕτη γε κρούμαθ’ οἷα τἀπὶ Χαριξένης “She pipes on the aulos stale tunes like those from the time of Charixena” (fr. 50 K-A). We do not know whether Theopompus’ comedy took its title from a chorus of Sirens or whether a more traditional duo or trio of Sirens simply figured in it as a main “collective character.” [47] I lean to the latter view; perhaps Odysseus’ men made up the chorus, as in an earlier and perhaps influential comedy, the Odysseis of Cratinus. But in either case we should recall that, despite the canonical representation of the Sirens in the Odyssey as bewitching singers, the Archaic and Classical iconographical record makes it clear that the Sirens were also traditionally regarded as expert instrumentalists. [48] They were routinely depicted with all manner of instruments, lyres, tambourines, castanets, panpipes, and, above all, auloi. Indeed, on some fifth- and fourth-century BCE pots, an individual auletic Siren takes center stage, depicted alone, without her sisters, as if she were the epitome of the Sirens’ powers of musical enchantment. [49]

Since the aulos was traditionally considered the instrument best able to enchant and entrance its listeners (cf. e.g. Plato Symposium 215b–e), it would naturally have been perceived as the most akin to sirensong. But the nature of the Sirens—part maiden, part bird—readily assimilated them to auletes as well. Firstly, the reedy, plangent sound of the aulos was commonly compared to birdsong, in particular the intricately doleful song of the nightingale. Aristophanes plays on the comparison in his Birds, when he has Procne-turned-nightingale come on stage playing the pipes, or at least pretending to play them while the comic aulete supplied the actual music (665–685; cf. 223–224). [50] Secondly, women were known to play auloi in public settings with far greater frequency than they were lyres. In Classical Athens, hired aulêtrides ‘pipe girls’ were fixtures of practically every symposium. A few women even won fame as composers of aulos tunes beloved by generations of symposiasts. The speaker of the Sirens fragment refers to one such composer of classic hits for the pipes, Charixena, whose popularity had, however, faded by the end of the fifth century (as did that, we should note, of many once-honored male composers from the earlier Classical period). [51]

In view of the close association between Sirens and auloi, I think the female piper who is said to “pipe stale tunes like those from the time of Charixena” is very likely to be a Siren. [52] And I think we are justified too in making the assumption that this stage Siren has just made (or continues to make) a display of her auletic skill, probably in an attempt to spellbind Odysseus, and that the speaker’s dismissive critique is a direct response to this display of actual music (whether played by the actor impersonating the Siren, or by the offstage comic aulete). Aristophanes, we saw, similarly brought onstage an actor playing (or pretending to play) the aulos in his Birds. Could the critic of the auletic Siren be Odysseus himself? The speaker certainly seems dismissive of the old-fashioned style of music he hears. The fragment thus points to that perennial theme of Old Comedy, the standoff between “classical” music by the likes of Simonides, Aeschylus, and Charixena (along with their culturally conservative admirers), and the “New Music” of Euripides, Agathon, and Timotheus (along with their novelty-loving supporters). It is not out of the question that Theopompus cast the Sirens and Odysseus as partisans in this contemporary Athenian debate: the former, on their desolate island, are stuck in the musical past, as it were, while the latter, true to his polytropic, cosmopolitan spirit, is a proponent of the new style. [53] The joke, we might imagine, is how very un-seductive this outdated sirensong sounds to the jaded ears of the modern-minded Odysseus, who has nothing but scorn for the “stale tunes” of the piping Siren.

Contemporary Athenian musical culture anachronistically penetrated another comic treatment of Odyssean myth produced not so long after Theopompus’ Sirens. A character in Anaxilas’ Circe makes mention of a Cinesias (fr. 13 K-A), whom we should probably identify as the controversially innovative dithyrambic composer repeatedly attacked in plays of Aristophanes and Pherecrates (Birds 1372–1409, Frogs 366, 1437, fr. 156 K-A; Pherecrates Kheiron fr. 155 K-A). And in Theopompus’ own Penelope, someone speaks of an Asiatic triangle harp, a trigônos (fr. 49 K-A). This instrument perhaps belongs to the character of the Ithacan bard Phemius, who in Homer is outfitted with a traditional, Hellenic phorminx. [54] The substitution of the phorminx with the trigônos would be a characteristically comic travesty, playing on the fifth-century Athenian view of harps as exotic, unmanly, and suited to immoral love songs. [55]

Ptolemy conceivably could have transformed the comic confrontation between Odysseus and Sirens into the tale about the Etruscan musical contest. The music critic becomes an aulete; a contest of wills between musician and listener becomes a full-blown mousikos agôn; the setting is transferred from water to land, from the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the island of the Sirens was thought to be located, to the scene of Odysseus’ more obscure travels, Tyrrhenia. [56] The Sirens accordingly disappear from Ptolemy’s account, at least as we have it in Photius.

The absence of the Sirens, however, may seem an insurmountable objection to the notion that Ptolemy drew from Theopompus’ Sirens. Yet the Photian summary of the New History provides a clue that suggests Ptolemy may have had the Sirens in mind as he composed his Odysseus-aulete notice. For the notice Photius provides immediately before it concerns the death of Telemachus through the devices of the Sirens: “The Sirens killed Telemachus when they discovered that he was the son of Odysseus” (Photius Bibliotheca 152b32–34). I will pass over any speculation about the source of this information, but I would point out that the two notices were probably adjacent in the original text of the New History. [57] The point of continuity between them could simply have been the relation of son to father, but it may well be that the Sirens were a linking point as well, even if they were suppressed in the Odysseus-aulete notice. (Perhaps the learned reader was meant to recognize the suppression?) Of course, we should also allow for the possibility that Photius himself suppressed some mention of or allusion to the Sirens that was in the original notice in the New History, although it would be odd if he did so.

But another scenario is imaginable, although here—fair warning—I am pushing the outer limits of speculation. Could Theopompus have staged a mock mousikos agôn between an aulos-playing Siren and an aulos-playing Odysseus in his Sirens? It sounds preposterous, but that would have been the point. Other comedies re-envisioned the encounter between Odysseus and Sirens in ridiculous terms, straying far from the canonical account in the Odyssey. [58] It is not inconceivable that Theopompus had his Odysseus unbound from the ship’s mast, free to interact with the Sirens and, perhaps, to make music himself.

The other three remaining fragments from the Sirens mention seafood delicacies, fancy slippers, and cooking implements (frs. 52–54 K-A). It has thus been suggested that the play featured a banquet to which the Sirens invited Odysseus and his hungry men. [59] If so, the Sirens may have been figured as pipe girls; in later Classical and Hellenistic literature, Sirens are occasionally imagined as professional party girls, hetairai. [60] But this characterization need not rule out the possibility of a musical competition between host and guest. A sympotic setting would certainly be suitable for an impromptu contest of musical prowess, not to mention for trenchant musical criticism. [61] In the absence of additional fragments from the play, however, it is impossible to fill in the picture in any more detail.

There are indirect mythical and dramatic precedents for such a contest. In the Argonautic tradition, Orpheus pits the power of his lyre against the singing of the Sirens—a deadly mousikos agôn won by Orpheus (Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica 4.891–911). In fifth-century Athens, musical contests were represented in dramatic and probably in dithyrambic productions as well. There is first and foremost the famous agôn between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs. Hugh Lloyd-Jones has made the ingenious suggestion that the Inachus, a satyr play by Sophocles, staged a spontaneous musical competition between a singing Argos and a syrinx-playing Hermes. [62] Others have suspected that Melanippides’ dithyramb Marsyas featured a live-action agôn between an actor-singer playing Apollo (and the kithara) and another playing Marsyas (and the aulos). [63] It is worth noting that another Athenian dithyramb, the Cyclops of Philoxenus of Cythera, apparently included a dramatic part for a lyre-singing Polyphemus—another Odyssean character cast against type as a musician (scholia to Aristophanes Wealth 290–291). [64]

Even if Ptolemy did substantially derive the material for his notice from earlier sources, the reference to Odysseus’ contest piece, the Capture of Troy, seems a distinctly Ptolemaic touch, a punch line packed at once with Homeric (and Cyclic) allusiveness and sly humor. Naturally Odysseus emerged triumphant with this piece, which was composed by no less than Demodocus and featured the heroic exploits of the aulete himself!

Yet the identification of the Capture of Troy (Iliou Halôsis) as a competition piece is nonetheless partially grounded in tradition. First, it should be noted that already in the fourth century BCE Heraclides of Pontus considered Demodocus a historical musician-composer and on the basis of his performance in the Odyssey attributed to him, rather than to Homer, a Sack of Troy (Iliou Porthêsis, fr. 157 Wehrli = Pseudo-Plutarch On Music 3.1132b). Ptolemy is thus very much in line with long-established musical scholarship in conceptualizing “Demodocus’ Capture of Troy” as an autonomous composition.

Indeed, it is possible that Ptolemy was familiar with a “tradition” reported by another fourth-century scholar of musical myth and culture, Demetrius of Phalerum. According to Demetrius’ account, after Demodocus won first prize in lyre singing at one of the earliest Pythian citharodic contests, Agamemnon, accompanied by Odysseus, met the bard at Delphi and recruited him to watch over Clytemnestra while he was off at Troy (Fr. 144 Fortenbaugh and Schütrumpf by way of scholia to Homer Odyssey iii 267). This “tradition” was almost certainly invented, probably by Demetrius or another Peripatetic scholar, to supply a name and backstory for the anonymous bard exiled from Agamemnon’s court by Aegisthus in Odyssey iii 267–271. [65] That bard, Demodocus (as we now learn), would, as all readers of the Odyssey know, end up on the island of the Phaeacians, where he would again meet up with Odysseus. Obviously, it is impossible that Odysseus could have heard Demodocus sing his Capture of Troy at Delphi in the time before Troy was captured. But Ptolemy may have expected his readers to know this scholarly myth of Odysseus’ pre-Phaeacian experience with a Demodocus who, quite unlike his Homeric persona, is a virtuoso agonist.

A recent historical example of a lyric rendering of the fall of Troy, on Italian soil no less, may have occurred to Ptolemy’s first readers as well. Nero, in the guise of a citharode, is reported by Cassius Dio 62.18.1 and Suetonius Nero 38.2 to have sung a Capture of Troy on the Palatine Hill as Rome burned around him in 64 CE. These reports certainly reflect widespread popular accounts, and it is interesting that both give the title of Nero’s song as Halôsis Iliou, which is the same title Ptolemy gives to the composition of Demodocus. Was Ptolemy deliberately invoking the specter of the not-so-long-ago deceased emperor, whose musical career (including participation in agônes) was as unlikely as that of Odysseus?

The version of Demodocus’ poetic and lyric Capture that Odysseus performs is, however, instrumental and auletic. [66] In giving Odysseus this piece to pipe—that is, in casting it against type—Ptolemy may have also had in mind another composer’s rendition of the fall of Troy, this one much more closely associated with the aulos and auletic contests. The composer is Sacadas of Argos, a historical figure active in the sixth century BCE. The pseudo-Plutarchean On Music describes him as follows: “Sacadas of Argos was … a composer of songs (melê) and of elegies set to music. He was also a good aulete himself and is recorded as having won the Pythian agôn three times” (8.1134a). Athenaeus 13.610c records that among his compositions was a Sack of Troy (Iliou Persis). [67] The Athenaeus passage says that in this work Sacadas “cataloged very many” of the heroes inside the Trojan Horse. Such a catalog implies a composition with a sung text. Ewen Bowie has reasonably proposed that this Sack was an extended narrative elegy intended for aulodic performance (that is, sung to aulos accompaniment). [68]

But as On Music relates, Sacadas was a famous aulete as well as poet; the Sack of Troy, an aulodic composition with sung poetic text, could easily have been conflated with his activity as a virtuoso solo aulete and successful agonist, and so imagined (falsely) to be an instrumental, auletic composition. Thus it may well be that within what appears to be a purely invented detail the Quail packs a subtle reference to an authentic, if somewhat distorted musical tradition of Archaic pedigree. In Odysseus’ piping of Demodocus’ Capture of Troy in Etruria, the learned reader may hear the echo of an “auletic” Sack of Troy that brought Sacadas victory in the Pythian aulos contests at Delphi.

This is very much an aporetic paper; I have presented only reasonable possibilities, and I offer no firm conclusions. I suspect that many readers will favor the first scenario I explored, that the auletic Odysseus is Ptolemy’s own creation, a figure cleverly informed by traditional themes and motifs yet appearing nowhere else outside the New History. But some will, I hope, find merit in one or the other of the two separate hypotheses I offered, either that Ptolemy drew from Greek witnesses to an authentic Etruscan tradition about Odysseus’ musical and agonistic prowess, a tradition that may have served as aition for a musical contest in Etruria and was perhaps linked with Odysseus’ mythical foundation of and historical hero cult in Cortona; or that he adapted and considerably modified the burlesque of the Odyssean encounter with the Sirens in Theopompus’ comedy, which may have already featured a mousikos agôn and a piping Odysseus. And some readers, I hope, will share my view that Ptolemy’s almost too easy Homeric punch line may hide allusions to the Peripatetics’ agonistic Demodocus, to Nero’s notorious Capture of Troy, and/or to the Sack of Troy by the aulete-composer Sacadas of Argos.

I would like to think I have at least succeeded in following through on the reasonable premise that regardless of the degree to which we think the Quail lied, or fabricated, or simply distorted or parodied, there are still preciously genuine heirlooms hidden amidst the fake, counterfeit, and adulterated stuff in the New History; and that it can be worth the time and trouble to play Ptolemy’s game, to examine his “novelties” with more care than they may at first seem to warrant, even though we know certain authentication is almost always impossible. In the case of the entry I have examined, we may stand to catch a rare glimpse into one or another otherwise lost chapter in the cultural history of ancient music.