Impious Melodies. Philodemus and the “Distractions” (περισπασμοί) of Music

Some columns of Philodemus’ book IV of On Music develop a critique against the Stoics Cleanthes and Diogenes of Babylonia, who claimed that musical performances are means to pray and to pay homage to the gods. The Epicurean philosopher rejects their doctrine by arguing that music is not only useless for this purpose, but even damaging for the following reasons: 1) it neither pleases nor gives pleasure to gods, 2) it creates unnecessary delights in the worshippers, 3) it “distracts” the human mind from the “vision” of the divine.In this research, I would like to better investigate how Philodemus grounds these three points, with a special focus on the third one, therefore also on the link between music and visualization of the divine. Indeed, what does a “distraction” or περισπασμός – an hapax in book IV of On Music – indicate? I will argue that it consists in a violent disturbance of the mental and linguistic faculties of humans, which are forced to behave in an unnatural way. Music provokes the same effects as love and drunkenness, namely causes madness, which leads the mind towards mistakes and to the blindness of the mind. If this hypothesis is true, it follows that musical performances do not contribute to the contemplation or worship of the divine, because they prevent the mind from experiencing a pure and calm veneration of the gods. Moreover, it follows that a musical performance is a form of impiety, for it gives a wrong picture of divinity and pays it a bad homage.Moreover, in order to connect this research with the panel theme, I will also argue that Philodemus believed instead that the gods can be known through visual arts. As Frischer has convincingly shown (1982, 2014), Epicureans recurred to sculptures and other visual artifacts for representing divinized wise men, thus allowing to contemplate the gods with a comparison with their mortal analogous of the σοφοί. This might suggest, if we keep in mind the parallel criticism of sacred musical performances, that Epicureanism implies an opposition between music and visual arts. The former never allows having a pure and true perception of the divine. The latter can instead help to contemplate the gods, because it builds a constructive analogy between the divine nature and the divinized humanity of the wise man.