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It is associated with the idea of purification from injurious elements. A seventh-century Cretan composer of paeans, Thaletas or Thales of Gortyn, is said to have gone to Sparta in accordance with an oracle (the story is parallel to the one about Terpander mentioned above) and delivered the city from a plague by means of his music.101 We are told that Pythagoras used to sing paeans of Thaletas to the lyre to put his disciples in a serene state of mind, and that he had certain 'paeonic' or healing songs with which he cured bodily sicknesses.102 |
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Other passages suggest that this Pythagoras (who is a projection of the notions and ideals of some later Pythagoreans) owed the efficacy of his musical therapies to the judicious selection and arrangement of appropriate modes, scales, and rhythms. Some of them were wordless melodies on the lyre.103 In this case it was clearly the music itself, independently of any associated text, that was regarded as potent. |
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According to some writers the Pythagoreans much preferred the lyre to the pipes, which they considered crude and vulgar.104 The magical power of the lyre was, after all, reflected in the myths of Amphion, whose music charmed the stones to assemble themselves into walls for Thebes, and Orpheus, who not only shifted rocks and trees but even overcame the stern powers of the underworld and brought his wife back from the dead. Later Pythagoreans, in the Hellenistic period, appear to have tried to emulate Orpheus by using lyre music to liberate souls from the bonds of death.105 But in general it was the pipe that was considered the instrument with the greatest power to produce strange effects. To 'pipe on' someone meant metaphorically to bewitch or put a spell on him.106 Some held that certain kinds of pipe music were effective in treating physical ailments, including fainting, epilepsy, sciatica, and even snake-bites.107 |
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101 Pratinas, PMG 713 (iii). |
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102 Porph. Vita Pythagorae 32, 33; cf. Iambl. De vita Pythagorica 110. |
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103 Porph. 30, Iambl. 64f., 164. |
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104 Aristid. Quint. 2. 19 p. 91. 28, Iambl. 111. But Ath. 184e says many Pythagoreans practised the art of piping, including Euphranor, Archytas, and Philolaus, the first two of whom even wrote books about it. Aristoxenus (fr. 95) looked down on pipes and panpipes as being too easy to learn. |
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105 M. L. West, The Orphic Poems (Oxford, 1983), 29-32. |
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106Kataulein, Eur. HF 871, P1. Reap. 411 a, Leg. 790e. Piping and dancing in cures for madness: ibid. 791a. |
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107 Theophr. frs. 87-8; ps.-Democr. B 300.7. On some modern studies of physiological responses to music see Merriam, 111-14. |
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