The Sounds of War

Like any other human activity, warfare creates its own aural environment. From the blasts of horns and the clash of swords down to the moans of the dying, military conflict in the ancient world was a dangerously aesthetic experience. The epic tradition from Homer onwards has engaged with the noise of war by attempting to represent in verbal art the lethal clamor of battle through similes and other literary descriptions (e.g. recent work by Strauss Clay 2011 and Gurd 2016). This sonic dimension of aesthetic representation in Roman epic, however, remains relatively unexplored.

Aurality in Thucydides, unlike visuality, has gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship. Vision is usually considered to be the “privileged sense” in the History (Connor 1984: 10). Yet vivid visuality, in the narrative, is frequently accompanied with equally vivid depictions of sound, the two types of sensory phenomena conspiring together as complementary vectors for affect, each with the capacity to help or harm.

This paper argues that the military trumpet occupies a liminal space in Hellenistic aesthetics between musical instrument and disciplinary tool. It is thus an important test case for the relationship between melodic sound and the human soul. Does the trumpet’s wordless melody have an inherent power to stir our emotions, as the Stoic Diogenes of Babylon believed? Or is it simply a conventional symbol designated to communicate strategic directives, as claimed by the Epicurean Philodemus of Gadara? The war trumpet gives each critic an opportunity to make his case.

In this paper I look at places in Greek literature where the voice is transformed by instruments, in particular the salpinx (“war-trumpet”). The voice in this transformation becomes something like a prosthesis, both an extension and displacement of identity by way of a newly formed persona (Warr 2012).

Music in ancient warfare usually serves to stimulate, encourage, and organize one’s own fighters or to frighten those of the enemy (see e.g. for Greece, West 1992, 29-30, and for Rome, Wille 1967, 75- 104). Occasionally, however, we find texts in which music is directed towards inanimate objects, especially city walls. This paper will deal with one of the earliest accounts of such an occurrence, the report on the destruction of Jericho’s city walls as described in the sixth chapter of the biblical book of Joshua.