Battle Hymn of the Empire: Domestication and Savagery in Pange Lingua
By Philip Wilson, Harvard University
If Latin songs were sung as Roman power collapsed, what was the relationship of Latin songs to Roman power? I ask that question of the hymn Pange lingua (PL), drawing on anthropological studies of literacy in postcolonial Ghana (Goody). In late antique Gaul, “the last poet of antiquity” (Bernt) Venantius Fortunatus wrote a hymn in trochaic septenarius, a meter sung by Roman soldiers, including those who occupied Gaul (Suetonius, Iul. 49.4, 51; Vell. Pat. 2.67.4).
Singing in the Streets: Public Deployments of Christian Song in the Late-Fourth Century
By Charles Cosgrove, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
In 362 CE, a group of women, led by a deaconess named Publia, stood in front of her house in Antioch and sang psalms against Emperor Julian as his entourage passed by (Theodoret of Cyr; Rosen; Teitler). This is one of the earliest known instances when Christians used song to make a public statement in the decades following the Edict of Milan.
Empire of the Pantomime: Kinesthetics of Power in Lucian’s On Dance
By Alyson Melzer, Indiana University
How could a dance concert spawn a riot? This study investigates the power which Greco-
Roman thinkers believed musical performance could have over the minds and bodies of
spectators by means of the pantomime dancer, and contextualizes this power in relation to
Roman Imperial power. Rising to popularity in the 1st century BCE in Rome and quickly
spreading throughout the Empire, pantomime dance featured a masked performer representing
mythological narratives with only gesture and movement. Recent scholarship has begun to
Medea's magical music: gendered song and power disruptions in Apollonius’ Argonautica
By Sarah Cullinan Herring, University of Oxford
This paper demonstrates that Apollonius’ Medea uses music as a means of usurping the
power of the poet and of achieving heroic deeds in the masculine sphere, usurping
hegemonic male power. There has been analysis of Apollonius’ Medea from various angles
including her psychology and her emotions (do Céu Fialho 2018, Klooster 2018, Buxton
2017) but nothing has focussed specifically on the connection between Medea’s magic,
music and power in book 4 of the poem. This paper builds on the suggestion of Fantuzzi
Ptolemaic Propaganda, the Chepel Papyrus, and the Artists of Dionysus
By Austin A. Hattori, University of Cincinnati