[lit-ideas] Spartan Music
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 09:56:29 -0800
Since Eric and JL have previously expressed an interest in music, perhaps
they will be interested in what Cartledge has to say about Spartan music,
op. cit., pp 192-194:
". . . Argives and their allies advanced in a headlong rush full of sound
and fury, the Spartans moved forward slowly and to the music of many
aulos-players. This, Thucydides adds, was:
A standing institution in their army, that has nothing to do
With religion. Rather, it is intended to make them advance
Evenly, and in time, without breaking their order, as large
Armies customarily do at the moment of engagement.
"The Spartans, as we have seen from reading of Herodotus' account of their
behavior at the time of Marathon and later in the Persian Wars, were known
to be exceptionally pious. The aulos, a reed instrument something like our
oboe perhaps, was used by the Greeks in the performance of religious rituals
and ceremonies, for example to accompany performances of tragic drama at
Athens. It would therefore have been easy for observers of the scene at
Mantinea in 418 to put two and two together and make . . . five, assuming
that the Spartans used aulos accompaniment for religious reasons. Not so,
retorts Thucydides: its use was purely functional - just as functional, he
might have added, and adopted for precisely the same reason, as the music
played on an Athenian trireme warship by the trieraules, the member of the
supernumerary crew who played the aulos to help the rowers keep their
oarstrokes in time.
"What Thucydides does not add, because he did not need to in the context,
was that the Spartan auletai were members of an honoured hereditary guild,
'the sons of fathers who followed the same profession', as Herodotus had
phrased it. As such, they were on a par with the hereditary Spartan citizen
heralds and ritual sacrificers. In fact, music in general occupied an
honoured place in Spartan culture and society. Among the early composers
and poets named by Plutarch, in his essay On Music, as having achieved fame
outside their immediate locality, was one Xenodamus of Perioecic Cythera.
The finds from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia include fragments of auloi
made out of animal bone, some inscribed, and dedications of humble lead
figurines representing both aulos-players and players of the kithara, a form
of lyre. The conservative Spartans were supposed to have been very strict
with kithara-players who played around with the canonical number of strings.
Besides playing instruments, the Spartans were also particularly keen on
choral singing; Pratinas of Elis amusingly likened every Spartan to a cicada
- always seeking a chorus. Also, as we have seen, Alcman of Sparta invented
one particular form of Greek choral singing, the partheneion, or
maiden-song.
"The word chorus in Greek originally meant dance, so the Spartans were often
to be found literally making a song and dance. In fact, they were credited
with a number of peculiar local dance, including some that were frankly
obscene. When, in about 575 BC, an Athenian aristocrat got a little too
emotional during a contest for the hand of the daughter of a Peloponnesian
tyrant, he is said to have lapsed into performing some Spartan dances on a
table-top, perhaps becoming the original table dancer. All such
performances were considered within the sphere of the divine Muses, so
formally they contradict the ancient myth-image of Sparta according to which
the practical Spartans would have no truck with the higher arts. However,
it is only fair to end this digression by mentioning the handsome bronze
figurine of a trumpeter dedicated to the state's patron goddess Athena on
the Spartan acropolis in about 500 BC. He clearly was intended to represent
a figure who, in the real situation of hoplite warfare, after the
aulos-players had piped their men into battle, played a vital role in
signaling the wishes of the Spartan commander. "
Lawrence
Other related posts:
- » [lit-ideas] Spartan Music
