The Ancients - Music in Ancient Greece

Episode Date: March 28, 2021

Without recordings, and with notation and instruments long forgotten, how can we possibly know what music soundtracked Ancient Greek life? James Lloyd from the University of Reading has been studying Ancient Greek music, in particular its role in Ancient Sparta. In this episode James tells Tristan how it has been possible to recreate songs and instruments from antiquity. He takes us into the mythology connecting music to the Gods and Goddesses, and to nature, and he explains how the reaction to music in Ancient Greece may sometimes have been similar to the reaction to rock in the United States in the 20th century, and to drill in the UK today.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host,

and today's podcast, I've got a real treat for you because I'm joined by James Lloyd from the University of Reading to talk all about ancient Greek music. We're going to be talking about the significance of music for the ancient Greeks. We're going to be looking into the chorus. We're going to be talking about the significance of music for the ancient Greeks. We're going to be looking into the chorus. We're going to be looking into certain ancient Greek instruments such as the aulos. James is going to be playing an instrument. This is a first for the ancients. We've got actual music on the podcast. This was so much fun to record.

James is a fantastic speaker and you are going to absolutely love this one. Here's James. James, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. It's great to join you. Now, ancient Greek music, this seems like an often forgotten or overlooked part of ancient Greek history, but a part that was vitally important. Yeah, definitely. So I think it's easy to forget how important all present music was in a society before recordings, and how much of a community experience it was. So today, we can,

you know, go walking to the shops and listening to whatever we want to on Spotify or whatever streaming service there is. Again, we can sit down in the evening, put on our CDs and tapes if you're that age, or streaming again, etc, etc. But in antiquity, you actually needed a musician there in order to experience the musician. And that meant that a lot of people knew how to sing, a lot of people knew how to play instruments. So in Athens, there were yearly choruses, and there were about 1,000 to 2,000 of the citizens each year who would take part in these citizen performances. So it was a huge thing in terms of the amount of people who did music. It was massive at festivals, at dinners, sometimes in funerals, at parties, in religious ceremonies, kind of any conceivable situation there would be music being performed, with a few caveats, of course.

But yeah, it was a big thing. Sorry, from just what I heard there, did you say that they sometimes had performances where there were 1,000 to 2,000 people in a chorus singing? So not at the same time. So it's choruses of 50 people, nonetheless. So there's this chorus called the Dissiram, which is performed each year in Athens. And each tribe of Athens puts on a chorus of 50 people. And there's two categories, one for the boys and one

for the men. So throughout this festival, 2000 different Athenian citizens are going to be on the stage, not at the same point, but kind of one after the other. It's this spectacle and participation. Got it. Thank you for clarifying that. I was just envisioning an ancient Greek flash mob in the Agora or something like that. But just before we start, of course, there's no ancient Greek Spotify. We don't have an ancient Greek Walkman or any kind of recordings like that. So what are the sources that we have from antiquity from ancient greece for us to study music yeah so in terms of thinking

about the sound of music there are three main sources i suppose the instruments themselves that have survived so this is often wind instruments so the main wind instrument was called the aulos which is two single independent pipes played at the same time with two separate reeds. This was the clarinet, saxophone, oboe, all the rest of it rolled into one. It was played in all sorts of contexts. So we can look at those and looking at what survives, we can make reconstructions and figure out how they sounded.

Musical notation also survives, which is really exciting. And there's two different systems there, one for vocal music, one for instrumental music. And then there's fragments of this that survive around 60 or so. And these preserve the melodies, sometimes better preserved than others, of certain songs and choruses and instrumental exercises. And then we've got the texts themselves. So music was a big thing, philosophically speaking. So Plato wrote a lot about music and later philosophers. But also what we think of as Greek poetry is often ancient Greek song. And the rhythm of that can help us understand music as well as the words that they use to describe musical performance and how they categorise it. So those are the main things. Then there's iconography as well, which helps us understand the cultural aspects of music

rather than necessarily its sound. Brilliant. So it sounds like a nice mix between literary evidence and archaeological evidence that survives. Yeah, definitely. So I think the archaeological evidence is being looked at a bit more now that in the last 20 years we've really got to grips with the textual evidence. And you mentioned there one of the instruments themselves. Let's go through some of these ancient Greek instruments and you can explain what they are, what they were used for, etc, etc. And you mentioned the aulos there. And from what you're saying, this is a wind instrument with reeds. Yeah, so we know from a writer that the reed that was used, so the pipe itself could be made out of wood, bone, ivory, metal,

and it gets gradually more complex as engineering and musical solutions develop over the centuries in antiquity. But there's a really great description of the reeds. There's one lake in Boeotia in central Greece where apparently the musicians got their best reeds from. And there's a description of how they're made, the different times of years you might pick them and dry them and how long you would leave them, depending on the different kind of style of music that you want to perform, a kind of bendy style or a rigid style. Sadly, none of the reeds survive

though. So this text is really, really helpful in helping us reconstruct how they would have been made. It would be basically a cylindrical hollow of reed cane that would have been scraped out and squished down on one end to create these kind of two tongues that would vibrate when you blow through them. So similar-ish to a modern oboe or bassoon reed for anyone who's listening who's familiar with those instruments. So that's one of the instruments. The other instruments that we get are string instruments such as the lyre, the cellist, which had a sound box made out of a tortoise shell. This was commonly used in education and for informal settings. There's a barbitos, which is effectively the bass lyre, for want of a better description. There's a kithara,

which is a bit like a lyre, but made with a wooden sound box. It's a bit sturdier, it's a bit larger. And that was generally used by professional musicians. So we kind of think of this a little bit like the guitar of its day. So for example, this is the instrument that Achilles, not quite the instrument, but Achilles played a formix, which is a kind of predecessor to the cithara on the beaches of Troy, when he's really sad. And we're told that the yoke of that was made of silver. So some of these instruments could be really splendid as well. Then we get the panpipes, which is well known, found not just in ancient Greek society, but most societies, called the syrinx. They're often associated with rural music. Then we get a whole

host of other kind of lesser known instruments. So percussion instruments, clappers, drums, and the water organ. So a very crazy instrument that effectively worked a little bit like the modern church organ. It had bellows, which would blow over water and you would play kind of like a keyboard. Those are the main ones. I could go on a little bit with the really weird and wacky things that we have. But those are the main things that if you're in ancient Greece and Rome 2000 years ago, those are the kinds of things you might expect. Don't you worry, this is the podcast for weird and wacky in ancient history. So let's go into a bit more detail about some of these instruments, because you mentioned the Trojan War there and myth and all that, because we see with many city-states in ancient Greece that they have a founding myth which is shrouded in mythology. And is there something similar with the origins of some of these instruments?

Is there mythology associated with them? Yeah, definitely. So particularly with the lyre and the aulos, and there's a kind of juxtaposition between the two. They characterise very different things, at least to people like Plato. So the origin myth of the lyre, the lyre was often associated with Apollo, but Apollo was given it by Hermes. And Hermes comes across a tortoise and basically guts it. There's this Homeric hymn to Hermes, which is a kind of 6th century prelude to other songs that would have been known throughout most of ancient Greece. And it describes how he scoops out the insides of the tortoise, he gets some gut to make the strings,

there's the leather, there's the horns, and kind of this really bloody gruesome process. He then creates this almost magical instrument that sings with a beautiful voice. So there's this idea that while making this instrument would have been very bloody, and ultimately, you'd need to kill something in order to create this instrument, actually multiple things. It has this divine backing. It's made by the gods and kind of approved, signed, sealed and delivered and all the rest of it. The Aulos is a little bit more tricky. The gods don't really like the Aulos, Depending on which area of Greece you're from, in Athens, Athena really didn't like the Aulos. So we're told by a variety of sources that Athena, as this goddess of wisdom and craft, among other things, first made this instrument.

And then she would play this instrument, but it kind of distorts your face a bit, your cheeks blow out in order to blow the air out. And then Athena saw her reflection and said, oh, I'm not having that. This is horrid. Another version, which perhaps makes a bit more sense, is that you can't speak when you're playing a wind instrument. And that's why Athena didn't like it, the idea that you couldn't impart wisdom while playing it. But anyhow, she throws them away. And this satyr called Marcius picks them up. throws them away. And this satyr called Marcius picks them up. Marcius is a troublemaker. And he decides to challenge Apollo to a music contest. Knowing our Greek myths, we know that this is not going to end well. Again, various versions. But Marcius starts playing the Aulos. Apollo starts playing and the muses can't quite decide. It's kind of neck and neck. Then Apollo says, okay,

well, can you play your instrument upside down? And he turns his lyre upside down and plays it. And Marcius says, well, no, of course I can't play it upside down. There's nothing to speak. Apollo then wins the contest, perhaps through trickery, we might say. And then he claims his victory, which is to do to the other person whatever he wants. So this being Apollo, he strings up Marcius and flays him alive. In some examples of the story, turning his skin into a wineskin. So here we really have an instrument that the gods really don't like. They don't like the people who play it. They don't like the instrument itself. It's not the lyre. And this comes into thinking about the Aulos not really as something that Athenian citizens would make a career out of or necessarily be regarded socially very well if they could play it well. So these are two versions. But again,

we're talking about Athens here. In Sparta, it's very different. So in Sparta, Aulos players were hereditary, as far as we're told. They accompanied the army into battle. And there's versions of the myth of how this tradition of military Aulos players came to be. Little snippets, but they seem to suggest that either Athena gave this instrument to the Dioscoroi, the kind of twin heroes of Sparta, and then they introduced this tradition to Sparta. So it seems to have a much higher, almighty etiology there, which fits with the fact that in Sparta, there were hereditary Aulos players. So these are the two main myths. caught this nymph called Syrinx. Syrinx wants to refuse Pan. She runs away and in the process, she gets turned into these reeds on the water. Pan still wants to take away Syrinx and cuts off the reeds. And then the wind blows over the top of these reeds, kind of creating the Pan pipe is

one version of this. So those are the main mythological versions. And I think it's really fascinating that things like instruments are so closely tied to the gods in ancient Greece and Rome. It really kind of tells us how important they were in that society. You don't have the etiology of, at least not that I'm aware of, pots and pans being made by the gods, even though they were still really important. So yeah, there's some really fascinating stuff there. I mean, that was absolutely astonishing. I could take in so many different places from here. But one of the things I thought was really interesting there was how you said how the Athenians, they don't like the Aulos at all. They don't like the Aulos because of this

relationship with Athena. But the Spartans, they absolutely love the Aulos. And I think there's that scene in the film 300 when you see the Spartans going off to war and then there's the Aulos player at the front, which seems maybe is a nice little harkening back to that. Yeah, it's oddly one of the few things that most modern films about Sparta do get. They try and squeeze the Aulos players in there, even if they don't quite get the instrument right or anything else necessarily. But yeah, so in Athens, we're told that in an earlier period, it was seen as a respectable thing for the citizens to play the aulos. But then after the Persian Wars, things change a little bit. It's not really clear why, but it's one of those cultural shifts where the aulos, as you get into the fifth century

in Athens, become more of something that professionals play. And if you're a professional, you're doing something for a wage and a living, which the more leisured citizens regard as a little bit beyond them, I suppose. But it's very interesting how instruments in ancient Greece, like certain instruments seem to be more popular in certain city-states and less popular in other city-states. And if we get with Athens and Sparta, these two city-states who famously don't really get along well after the Persian War.

Do you think instruments is another medium through which to emphasise political differences between city-states? Yeah, definitely. So there's a little bit, I think it's in Aristophanes' Wasps, where it talks about the kind of sting of the Aulos players and this kind of language. And it's been interpreted as being a reference to the idea that the Athenians would have known the Spartans, the company went into battle with the Aulos. the idea that the Athenians would have known the Spartans, the company went into battle with the Aulos. So there is perhaps a little bit of that there as well. And again, in Thebes, Thebes churned out loads of really talented professional Aulos players for some reason. We don't really know why, but Thebes was famous for the Aulos players that it's put out. And I think this is really

interesting thinking about music and identity and how we express community and individual identity through music and how that can be scapegoated for other concerns. So if we think about the trials of rock musicians in America in the 20th century where rock music was regarded as the music of the devil and there were huge inquiries into this and again in the UK today with Drill it's the idea that music and it's not really concerned about the music, but trying to enforce the people who are playing the music. And we definitely see some of that in ancient Greece and Rome for sure. And with these identities and these instruments in particular,

what do these instruments tell us about the networks of these ancient Greek societies? So I think the way that they tell us about this is through thinking about travel. So a professional musician, particularly a famous musician such as Arian. So again, we've got a kind of little bit of a myth here in Herodotus. Arian was a famous Kithra player in antiquity. He worked in the court of Tyrant in Corinth, and then he traveled to Sicily. And then on his way back from the travels, he's kidnapped by pirates. He jumps into the Sihi. A dolphin takes him to Cape Malia in the south of Greece. The idea is that musicians, in order to earn their keep, particularly the very skilled ones, would be going from city-state

to city-state, traveling across the breadth of the ancient Greek world from Sicily and Italy, mainland Greece, northern Greece, Macedonia, Ionia. And with that, they're bringing the cultural traditions of the various places that they visited, and they're familiarising themselves with the local mythology, for example, if they're commissioned to compose songs for those specific regions. So I think music is a really key glue through which identity and networks worked in antiquity. Yes, you mentioned how the ancient Greek world, it's not just mainland Greece, as you say, you've got Sicily and you've got the Black Sea coastline as well. Forgive me if this is an impossible question to answer, but if someone was travelling

from, let's say, Sicily or Syracuse, and then they were travelling, let's say, Panticopeum in the Crimea, an ancient Greek city in the Crimea, in these two cities, got Hellenic culture, do you think music would have still been an important part of society and culture in these two very different geographic places? Yeah, definitely. So there's been some really interesting stuff coming out of the Black Sea regions, in particular, where we find some really fabulously crafted instruments that fit into kind of inverted commas, Hellenic music. And again, another example in Meroe in North Africa, there are alloy that are found within one of the queens buried in Meroe. And it dates to the exact point of that burial, roughly first century. But again, there's this idea that there's this musical spread through not just ancient,

this is where we get into problems of saying what is Greek and what isn't Greek. But yeah, even if they didn't necessarily know the exact kind of musical idioms, they were familiar with instruments, they were familiar with traditions, and we can kind of see the very reaches of where Hellenic culture spread in antiquity. And this is going back to this idea of networks and identity, because music works because it's so passionate, it's so emotive,

and it's the idea that music can communicate sometimes where language can't, I think. And there's some really interesting things there. I mean, hold the phone right there. You mentioned Meroe, I mean, Kingdom of Cush, 1st century AD. Are you saying one of these warrior queens of the Kingdom of Cush, buried in this place, had contacts with Romans and the Greeks, and we find a Greek instrument there? Yeah. So burying the head of Augustus underneath the steps and all the rest of it. But also, what's even more interesting is it's made with European olive wood. So either they're importing an instrument made in Greece because European olive isn't native to North Africa and they're importing these instruments. Or there are instrument makers in that region who are importing non-local wood to that region. local wood to that region. Again, the problem is with an instrument, you can't say that it was necessarily played in the same musical style that it might have been, say, in Athens at the same

time, but they're still getting instruments made from those Greek traditions there. Yeah, definitely. Well, we've talked about the instruments quite a bit now and what they looked like and how popular they were in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. Do we have any idea of what they sounded like? Yeah, so there's a few ways we can reconstruct how they sound. Again, going back to the songs of ancient Greece and Rome. So again, one of the big sources we have are the tragedians and the comedians because most of what we think of as a written text would have been sung to some extent. So we hear of the aulos as a very raucous instrument.

It could be very high pitched, very low pitched. There's a particular kind of song that was performed at Delphi, or kind of instrumental piece, which mimetically reenacted Apollo killing Python, the dragon. And we hear that Aulos players would need a particular hole near the top of their instrument to make this really shrill, horrific kind of screeching sound, which mimicked the death cries of Python. So there's a huge kind of array of different oral textures that we get preserved in some of these texts.

The other way of doing it is, of course, reconstructing some of these instruments. And this is something that's been done to a certain extent for a while. So there's these great archive recordings of trumpets from Tutankhamun's tomb being played in the 1930s on BBC radio. We don't do that anymore. We make replicas, we don't play the originals for sure. And that gives us a good idea of the sound. The problem is, we're not trained in those traditions. And the way that we play them might not necessarily be correct to the traditions in those traditions. And the way that we play them might not necessarily be correct to the traditions of antiquity. And then again, musical notation. So the musical notation tells us the notes, which helps us understand the tonality and modality of music

in antiquity. And there's a lot of ancient Greek musical theory that survives written. And from that, we can kind of get bare bones from which we can get an idea of how it sounded. But for example, ancient Greek musical notation, it doesn't tell us everything to get it spot on. It doesn't tell us how fast or slow it should be performed. It doesn't tell us how loud or quiet. But these are things that you need to interpret a bit. And if there's a little bit of text there, and it's talking about thunder and lightning, then perhaps you might get a little bit louder there those kinds of things talking james about reconstructions we talked about the outlaws i believe you have a reconstruction with you

yes yeah so it wasn't made by me made by a guy called thomas rozanka in austria and this is in olive wood but the original was made in sycamore and And it's a copy of an aulos in the Louvre Museum. We're not too sure of the date of it, but it's not an early type aulos because it's got a lot of holes and can play a lot of different notes. So basically, it's a cylinder of reed that's just squished down on one end. So that kind of gives you a rough idea. This is a first on the Ancients podcast. It's brilliant. Absolute first.

Well done. Yeah. it seems to be this secular stele i, what is it and why is it so significant? So the Sekelostele is a kind of cylindrical slab of stone that was found in modern day Turkey when a railway line was being built. And it's now in a museum in Copenhagen. And it is technically the earliest intact, completely notated musical song, which is a little bit of a tongue twister in itself. But basically, it's the earliest intact song with musical notation. We've got songs from Babylonia which have some kind of notation, but the caveat there is they're not complete. They're fragmentary. So we can twist the rules to claim that the ancient Greek one's the oldest, I guess.

We can twist the rules to claim that the ancient Greek one's the oldest, I guess. So it's really fascinating from that point of view. But also it's kind of seeped into modern culture more generally. So earlier we were talking about how it's used on the Civilization Games as the kind of soundtrack backing music there. And we see it popping up here and there in other places. And it's really interesting because it's a tombstone and it has this inscription saying dedication to Sekelos or from Sekelos to Euterpe. So we can perhaps romanticize that a little bit as perhaps saying, is it Sekelos to Euterpe his wife? Or depending on the grammar, does it mean Sekelos of Euterpe, so son of Euterpe?

So we're not too sure exactly on the general context of it. But the song is a little bit of a kind of YOLO, almost, Memento Mori. And it's got this really interesting text. And I can kind of sing it now a bit and then describe it in a bit more detail. Go for it. And it basically means, while you're alive, shine, don't have any grief or worries at all. Life only goes along for a short time and time takes its toll. So it's basically saying live while you can, don't be sad. We only live a short life. So you only live once basically, or more academically speaking, I suppose, a memento mori, a reminder that we're all going to die at some point. So we might as well, you know, have some fun while we're living. And this is particularly poignant, since it, of course,

comes on a tombstone. And would this song have been for the passersby to look at and be reminded? Would they have even been able to interpret the notation? Does it perhaps imply that the person who was buried, or who dedicated it was a musician? There's a lot of kind of unanswered questions there, which I think, highlight that musical notation is very much something that a very limited amount of people in antiquity would have known. It's still absolutely astonishing how from this one tombstone, discovered by accident when making a train line or something, from it, you can make a song and understand the tonality and make something that might have sounded like that 2000 years ago.

Yeah, no, and it's brilliant. And this is the thing, again, there are caveats, of course, probably my horrendous pronunciation of the Greek being one. But the thing is, it enables us to connect really emotionally and sensory. So something that's really interesting at the moment is thinking about the past through sensory studies, and how music can help us not only understand sound, but emotions and other cognition is really interesting as well. So what other songs have survived? There's two really interesting hymns from Delphi, 168 and 132, roughly first century BCE. And these were Athenian choruses who'd come to Delphi to sing them for Zeus, of all things.

And they were discovered in 1892, I think it was, during the French excavations there. And what's really interesting is everyone struck upon them and went, oh, wow, this is amazing. Hang on, we've got the modern Olympics coming up in four years. And a really big performance of them was given at the modern Olympics. It was kind of almost trying to recreate the Olympics, not just in terms of the sports that was being done, but the spectacles and the sounds as well. So those are really interesting. And you can kind of see them in the Delphi Museum on display there.

And Armand Dungor in particular has done some work there. And you can hear modern choruses singing those online if you search it in YouTube. Then we've also got Mesomedes. And I think this is great because he was effectively the court composer to Emperor Hadrian. And then after Hadrian, he fell out of favour a little bit but some of his songs survive in manuscript form as well and there's an invocation to the muses which goes a little bit like

and that would have been the invocation before a bigger song or recital or something like that. So to think that we can have a little bit of a song that Emperor Hadrian himself might have heard, that's kind of really mind blowing. Again, caveats, of course, but let's not ignore the headline there. But of course, this also meant that some people tried to fake it. So there's a guy called Athanasius Kircher, who people might be familiar with. He wrote about hieroglyphics. He got lowered into Vesuvius and all sorts of the crazy things, a Jesuit scholar. And he was like, okay, well, at his time, nothing really survived of ancient music. And he said, well, I'm just going to fake something. And he says Pindar. Pindar is perhaps the most famous ancient Greek poet, songwriter, singer that there is. And he knew the notation. This survived in ancient Greek theory, musical manuscripts. And he kind of fudged

it a little bit. And then we realised that it was a fake because he basically copied the text from the edition of Pindar of his day and stopped at the page turn in effect. But up until 1930, there was really some debate as to whether this was a genuine bit of Pindar or not. So there's always been kind of a little bit of an urge to try and reconstruct stuff. Nowadays, we do it a little bit more genuinely than Athanasius Kircher did back in the day, I guess. So yeah, there's all sorts of really interesting things that we can do with this music as well. And what this music meant and how it would have been interpreted, thinking about the styles of it. Well, you mentioned there the Olympics and you mentioned there Pindar. So let's go to the places where the music was performed. And let's focus first of all on the

ancient Olympics. Because as you say, you weren't just there to watch the games themselves, there were spectacles. And one of those spectacles were musical performances. the games themselves, there were spectacles and one of those spectacles were musical performances. Yeah, so something we often see depicted on vases is when athletes are doing the long jump, there'll be an outlaw player playing to kind of think of the hurly-whirly kind of organ that you might get at baseball or something like that, that's how I'd like to imagine it. So there's that going on. Again, there's also musical competitions often occurring at a lot of these big festivals alongside the athletic competitions. So at Delphi, again, there was this important song where the Aulos players had to try and mimic the sound of Apollo fighting this dragon. And they got absolute

tons of money for some of the things that they did, at least the high performing ones in certain categories. They would get talents or thousands of minai, or hundreds, perhaps I exaggerate a little. But the idea is that we have inscriptions that tell us who competed in what competition in what category of musical performance, and then the amount of money that they win. And this is really fascinating for kind of reconstructing the social position of musicians in antiquity. So at Delphi, they were performed. In Athens, there was the Odeon, which was a specific kind of building next to the Theatre of Dionysus where musicians would perform. And you'd get Odea throughout the Greco-Roman world as kind of concert halls, in effect, but theatres was where musicians would perform.

And of course, in houses alongside dinner parties. And those would often be what are conventionally, or used to be conventionally called flute girls, but are effectively professional female musicians who normally played the aulot, but other instruments as well. So there's a whole range of places where you find music being performed, and some really grand scenes in particular, such as the theatres and the Odea. And regarding the social significance, the social importance of certain musicians in ancient Greece, you mentioned how there seemed to be some figures who were perhaps more famous than others. Does that really suggest that you could become a celebrity musician in ancient Greece,

like you could gain a reputation as the real-life Orpheus or something similar? Yeah, definitely, definitely. So the go-to example here is someone like Pronomos. Pronomos was a Theban Aulos player, and he's particularly interesting because we know that he was very skilled, and he was attributed with technical innovations to the Aulos. So if you think of a bone pipe, there's only a certain number of holes that you can drill in it. There's only a certain number of holes that your fingers can cover to change the notes that you're playing. Pronymus created a kind of ring system, which would cover up extra holes, which meant that he could play more complex music and

music that traditional people like Plato weren't great fans of. But it had huge popular success. And one of the ways that we know he was hugely successful is that there's a vase that survives, which has Pronomos named on it, sitting in his kind of fine, really elaborate clothes, Auloi in hand, sitting down accompanied by the accoutrements of the dancers and choruses with the gods looking on. So he was really kind of a big name. So it sounds very similar, like if you're going to a concert today, and you have the big audiences, and they hear that someone's in town with their accompanying acts. So would it be in ancient Greece, could we imagine that Pronomos, he's traveling from

Thebes, he's going to Athens, people in Athens know that he's coming, they know that he's going to perform at the Odeon at a particular time, going to book tickets as it were but they're going to try and get a seat to watch him perform yeah definitely and I think that's part of Greek theatrics and religion you find contracts for later on you get kind of guilds of musicians gathering together so that you don't get kind of bad rates from the sanctuaries that they're going to and there is certainly the idea that some of these places want to get good musicians, because that brings more people to the sanctuary. Definitely. Oh, that's absolutely astonishing. So we can really see, and from what you've all been saying,

we can really start understanding the social significance of music in ancient Greek culture. Yeah, definitely. So while it's perhaps not entirely abnormal that other guilds, for example, would petition the Senate in Rome, but there's the Guild of Tabikines, which is a guild of Aulos players, Tibia in the Latin. And they basically go on strike because the priests say, no, you're going to have less holiday. Fewer of you can play in funeral possessions. And they go, well, good luck having all of that without us musicians. And they go off and they get cast as these kind of slightly literate drunkards. So the Senate sends people to go and get them drunk and then bundle them back into Rome. And then everything works out all OK.

And again, guilds from different areas of Greece, they go to petition the Senate to sort out their disputes. The idea is that each guild had specific areas where they were the guild that performed the musical entertainment at the festivals. And there would be sometimes disputes as to double bookings or something like that, I suppose we might say. So yeah, it's really, really interesting to kind of see music at the centre and driving all of this. But I think it's also good in that it highlights the classes and groups of people in antiquity that often don't have a voice. So women musicians in antiquity were often portrayed in a very negative light. Most scholarship until recently kind of conflates the terms for these musicians with

prostitutes or courtesans. And we definitely get that in the comedic plays with the kind of mistreatment of women musicians. But the fact is, these women musicians, as far as we can tell, were the first wage regulated professionals in ancient Athens. We're told that there was a two drachma price cap put on the amount of money you could spend on hiring a female musician to play at your dinner party, the kind of dinner party where people like Plato and Aristophanes and other might hang out and discuss what music's good for, is also the kind of place where vast amounts of money were being spent on women to come and play music at. Perhaps not Plato, because if you remember the symposium, he sends away the outlaw's player. But the idea being is that there were fights breaking out in the streets

between people who want to hire the best musician for their symposium. The city policemen in Athens would be going around checking that no one was hiring a female musician for more than this two drachma price cap. We even get some legal disputes being preserved where people are being brought to court because they've spent more than they should have. And people are accused of being slightly unsavoury because they hang out at the school of the aulatrides. Because these are women who don't have much political or social rights, they were often slaves or from non-citizen

families, it's really easy for them to be scapegoated. But I think we kind of need to rethink that and think about the central role that they had, effectively playing the music for every kind of elite dinner party that there was. Again, the male citizens would have been trained in music themselves and they would have been performing as well but I think there's a story there that it tells us that music is a way that signals and reduplicates the social systems of its age. And for instance the quality of the music that is done at a ancient Athenian dinner party was this really to emphasize the prestige to your guests to show look I've got this brilliant performer here, brilliant music. This really emphasises that I am a powerful person. I belong to a powerful family.

Yeah, definitely. So quite often we get told that the Aulertrades, these female Aulos players, aren't very good. That's difficult to agree with or disagree with, given the angles of our sources. agree with or disagree with, given the angles of our sources. But in ancient Athenian society, you might refer someone to a musicos, rather, without music. And that would be described to someone who isn't very cultured, because you need to have a certain amount of money and luxury to send your son off to school. And these are popular scenes on vases. There's a famous vase by Doris, which effectively depicts a music lesson. So that's one angle that we see it for sure. And there's the skolion, skolia, this kind of freestyle singing contest is a way to glamorise it a little bit, where the well educated citizens at the symposium would kind of swap

lyrics and verses with each other. We see this famously and hilariously in Aristophanes' Wasps, where you have the son and the father, one slightly more ignorant than the other, and kind of putting in rude, crude lyrics to finish off what should have otherwise been a well-known song if they were a little bit more educated. So there's certainly music is used to include and exclude in ancient Greece and Rome. include and exclude in ancient Greece and Rome. We're talking about excluding the neighbouring peoples to, let's say, the ancient Hellenic cultures, who the Greeks viewed as barbarians. Do we know in the sources, we know that the Greeks normally deride these people being barbarians and all that. Do they also deride these neighbouring peoples? Do you have any evidence that they derided them as also having, let's say, poor taste in music or being poor at making music? So that's where it gets complicated. It's often contradictory. So we have scales today,

like A major, B minor, C major, etc. In antiquity, the nearest equivalents were named after different races, I suppose, or regions or ethnics is more appropriate. So you have the Ionian, the Dorian, the Phrygian is one of them. So Marcius was associated with Phrygia. A slightly more ecstatic music is how it's generally categorised. But again, Northern Greece and Thrace often has some of the early mythological best musicians. There's Thamaris, who was, you know, equivalent to Apollo, or at least he challenged the muses, I think. Either way, he ended up being made blind and forgetting his musical skill. Also, you have Orpheus, who's happening kind of in the extremes of northern Greece, one of the most famous kind of mythological musicians. And then Plato talks a lot about Egypt and Egyptian influences in music coming into Greece, because in Egypt, their musical laws,

again, it's a little bit wrong, but he basically says that they've been unchanged for thousands of years. And this is something that is good. So there's an awareness that there is music in the regions outside of the known Greek world. And they're not entirely sure all the time whether it's good or bad influences that's coming in from these regions. That's very interesting. It seems quite a complicated, complex narrative or what we know. As you said, Orpheus is actually Thracian, isn't he? Yes. So this is the thing. Yet he kind of, in some versions of the myth, has the lyre of Apollo.

But this then gets into debates of how Greek is Thracian and all the rest of it. But the idea being is that a lot of the early mythological musicians are from the outskirts of what we now consider the Greek world. And I don't think we've kind of fully got to grips with that yet, necessarily. Something for the future, indeed. Now, I've seen that you've done work on music and nature. And in particular, I'd like to ask about animals and nature, because it seems that there's this interesting link between certain animals and music in ancient Greece. Yeah, so I think there's a interesting link between certain animals and music in ancient Greece.

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of musical inspiration in ancient Greece that comes from animals. And I think there's kind of a symbiosis here with knowing that musical instruments, on the whole, came from the natural world. So we know that a lot of 6th century, 5th century musical pipes, they were made from deer bone. And there's not a lot of evidence for this process, but it's an interesting process to think about. An instrument maker needed to acquire a deer bone. Did they acquire them from someone who kept deer? Did they hunt the deer? You then need to macerate the bones to get the flesh off them. You need to dry them out. It's a really kind of visceral process and you really did need to know. I mean, it would be unavoidable if you were making these instruments and playing them not to conceive that they were

connected in that process, that they were once living animals. There's a very funny passage from the travel writer Pausinias that talks about, it's a hill or mountain, I think it's in Arcadia, where it was known for having very good tortoises if you wanted to make a lyre. But the local shepherds there absolutely hated it and didn't want anyone coming. You get the impression that they're being bombarded with instrument makers trying to carry off their tortoises. But again, this is the thing. is trying to carry off their tortoises. But again, this is the thing. Today, our instruments,

we kind of don't have that connection with the idea that the sounds of the animals or what was something living is now kind of living and breathing again with the air and the thrum of the strings. And we get a little bit of that in the texts in antiquity. And again, birds was a go-to thing. Certain birds are described as more musical than others. So swans,

really heavily associated with Apollo in mythology. And they were supposed to have both the most beautiful song, thinking of the swan song that Plato talks about just before the swan dies, it sings this most beautiful song, and also the kind of thrumming sound of their wings as they fly. Again, thinking about it, there's kind of the trumpet swan and the other kinds of swans, including like silent swans. And they don't, to our ears, sound that musical. So I think there's something kind of wider in terms of connecting them with Apollo,

because when Apollo was born, swans were flying around the air above him, that kind of stuff. And then the cicadas are also spoken about as really kind of musical. We often talk today about choruses of cicadas with their kind of really rhythmical humming and thrumming sound, which is linked in some ways to the sound of a lyre being strum. So the natural world acts as a really kind of rich metaphorical pot from which musicians could draw musical phrases and inspiration as well as their instruments. So astonishing, this link and the importance of it for the ancient Greeks and the link between the music and the animals themselves, the swans especially. I mean, especially for us Brits, we know a lot about swans and all that.

especially for us Brits, we know a lot about swans and all that. Last of all, you've done some work, you've done a lot of work, and a lot of your fellow colleagues have done a lot of work for Thermopylae 2500. And if we look at the Spartans, we talked about the hour loss and the importance of music for the Spartans earlier, but is there any link of music with the Thermopylae campaign of 480? Do we see that anywhere? Yeah, so there are definitely some links. So 2020 marks, depending on how you count it, the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae. And one of the famous bits from that we have is this epitaph, go tell stranger that here the Spartans lie obedient to their orders. That's the rough paraphrase of it. But after that, we also have Simonides composing a lyric song which commemorates those who died at Thermopylae and Leonidas, which

we, it's not entirely clear whether it was sung at Sparta or at some kind of wider pan-Hellenic occasion. Again, there's a song that accompanied the victory at Plataea, which talks about the Spartans quite a lot too. So we know that there's that if you have a political victory, or in this case, a political defeat, one of the ways that you can spin that is by getting some media out about it. And song, whether that's a chorus or a poet singing in your halls, that's one way to do it. So Tertius is important here as well, this early kind of Spartan musician who helped the Spartans beat the Mycenaeans in war because of his inspiring lyrics. I mean, we actually get an edition of Tertius's songs being written by a professor in Edinburgh

during the American Revolutionary Wars. And the dedication says, so that the good officers of Edinburgh University fighting in America will know what honour and the good things of war are. And I find that absolutely amazing. And it ties in how rigidly structured classics was into relatively modern ideas of identity and heroism and what was actually supposed to be. So there's a lot of really interesting things. So yes, the short answer, yes. That's very interesting. I mean, do we have examples of then musicians being on ancient Greek battlefields, as it were, improving the morale of their soldiers? That's a trickier one. Plutarch tells us that the Spartans would sacrifice to the muses before battle, that there would be music accompanying them going into battle. But we kind of also have to wonder,

an aulos can be played very loudly, but you probably need quite a few of them for it to be heard by a marching army with all their bronze on. There's the salpynx, which is a bronze trumpet, which I shamefully haven't mentioned until now. Not necessarily a musical instrument, but it could make a very loud sound at any rate, and it could alternate its pitch. And again, there's the Roman cornu, there's the Gaelic carnax, which is this great big bronze tube with a fearsome monster on it. And sometimes its tongue would flutter when you blow through it. So there's the idea that that can be really inspiring. I think the way that the music's inspiring in Sparta is before battle. From a very young age, they've learnt the lyrics of Tertius off by hand. Going into battle, they might be thinking, okay, well, if I run away, I'm going to be absolutely, you know, all of the

Spartans will completely disown me. I want to behave as Tertius says a good Spartan should, as I have learned. Indoctrination might be a word that we could use here. So there's some interesting things there, not necessarily during the battle, but before the battle in terms of indoctrination and encouraging how to do things. In battle, of course, there were outlaw players and drummers who kept time on ships, but that's more about keeping time rather than necessarily inspiring valour and heroism and going for it, I guess.

James Lloyd, this has been a brilliant and eye-opening chat for myself over the last hour and just goes for me to say thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Tristan. Thank you.