Ancient Greek and Roman Music: Current Approaches and New Perspectives

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (156-164), the Ionian audience famously thrills to the performance of the Delian maidens, such that each spectator “might think that he himself were singing” (φαίη δέ κεν αὐτὸς ἕκαστος φθέγγεσθ᾽, 163-4: Lonsdale, Kurke, Papadopoulou-Belmehdi and Papadopoulou, Peponi, Power, Prauscello, Stehle). This passage is but one example of the ways in which Greek poets and philosophers represent audience members as vividly and viscerally responsive to performance.

One of the most exciting and fastest developing frontiers of classical scholarship is the cultural interface between Greece and her neighbors to the East. While it is now clear that ‘orientalism’ was an ongoing dimension of Greek culture, rather than an historical phase (Morris 1992), the cultural exchanges of the Late Bronze and early Iron ages are of special import for the study of Archaic epic and lyric poetry.

In a letter to a colleague in 1638, the painter Domenichino recounted that he had begun experimenting with the construction of lutes and harpsichords capable of performing music in the “lost” ancient Greek enharmonic genus. He revealed that his source of inspiration for these musical activities was the Roman treatise De Architectura by Vitruvius, rather than any of the well-respected and widely-read theoretical treatises by Boethius, Zarlino, Gaffurius, and the like.