|
|
|
|
|
|
|
to dispense with their piper's services and 'let her go and pipe to herself or, if she likes, to the women inside'.66 Vase-painters often show scenes from the women's room with various instruments being played (P1.7). In an earlier generation Sappho and her friends made music in festive privacy, with flower garlands, scented unguents, and soft couches, just as happily as any male gathering. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Women also sang to relieve the monotony of work. Calypso and Circe in the Odyssey sing at their looms, and there are later references besides to singing while weaving).67 Women sang while grinding corn or pounding things in mortars.68 Mothers and nurses sang lullabies to babies.69 Wool-workers too had their own songs70 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Men engaged in solitary occupations, or insufficiently occupied, likewise sought solace in music. Achilles, having ceased to take part in the fighting at Troy, passes the time singing and playing the lyre in Patroclus' company. The young Anchises, alone at the ranch-house, wanders about playing the lyre, quite loudly. Vase-painters (if not epic poets before them) imagine Paris as having been playing the lyre to himself when the three goddesses arrived to ask his opinion of their beauty, and likewise Aegisthus when Orestes burst in to kill him.71 The patient watchman in Agamemnon warbles to himself in order to stay awake. Aristophanes compares Aeschylus' songs (as parodied by 'Euripides') to those of a rope-maker. The comic poet Crates may have referred to songs of bath-attendants.72 Herdsmen sang and played the panpipes.73 Singing-contests between them were no doubt an established custom long before Theocritus gave it literary status in his bucolic Idylls. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Children's songs must not go unmentioned. Some of the games that children played involved verses or ditties that accompanied particular actions. Several are quoted by late antiquarian writers, and |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
66 Pl. Symp. 176e. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
67Od. 5.61; 10. 221, 254, Eur. IA 788, Epicharmus fr. (spur.) 14. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
68 Ar. Nub. 1358, PMG 869, Ar. Byz. fr. 340A Slater (himaios); Ar. fr. 352, Phrynichus Comicus fr. 14, Nicochares fr. 9, Nicophon fr. 8; Tryphon fr. 113 Velsen ap. Ath. 618d. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
69 Pl. Leg. 790de, Theoc. Id. 24. 7-9, Chrysippus, SVF iii. 184. 8, Ath. 618e, Sext. Emp. Math. 6. 32, Hsch. s.v. baukalân. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
70 Tryphon, loc. cit. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
71Il. 9. 186, Hymn. Horn. Ven. 80; Maas-Snyder, 52 fig. 16, 104 fig. 9, 137 fig. 17. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
72 Aesch. Ag. 16, cf. Ar. Nub. 721; Ar. Ran. 1297; Crates fr. 42 (but see below, n. 77). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
73Il. 18. 526, Epicharmus frs. 4, 105(?), ps.-Aesch. PV 574, Soph. fr. 281a, Phil. 213, Eur. Alc. 577, IA 576, ps.-Eur. Rhes. 553, P1. Resp. 399d, Philoxenus, PMG 819; see R. Seaford's note on Eur. Cyc. 41-81. |
|
|
|
|
|