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The harp is another instrument that came to Athens from East Greece. Anacreon knows it; it is only after the middle of the fifth century that it appears on Attic vases, but then in several forms. It is normally a women's instrument, but we hear of a Gnesippus and a Cleomenes who composed and sang beguiling love-songs to the trigonos or iambyke.95 A party is described at which, after a girl with auloi has played a Carian melody, another with a trigonos accompanies herself in an 'Ionian' song, that is, a sexually provocative one.96 |
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The symposiasts themselves might sing songs or excerpts from well-known poets from anything up to a couple of hundred years back, and from various parts of Greece (though with alien dialects modified to something nearer Attic).97 The repertory also included popular anonymous items such as the Harmodios, which celebrated the memory of the two brothers who assassinated Hipparchus in 514 and hastened the fall of the Pisistratid régime.98 |
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The ten civil tribes that competed against each other in the dithyrambic contests sometimes, in their zeal for the prize, engaged outstanding non-Athenian musicians to compose or to play the auloi for them. This is probably why dithyrambic musictogether with citharody, which also occupied many outsiderscame to be particularly associated with novelty and avant-gardism. The music of tragedy also evolved, of course, but dithyramb and the citharodic nomos led the way.99 Lasus, Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar all wrote dithyrambs for Athenian choruses; of their modernism we have spoken already. In the second half of the fifth century there |
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95 Chionides fr. 4 (nine strings). Eup. fr. 148, cf. Cratinus fr. 104. Epicrates fr. 4. On harps see above, pp. 70ff. |
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96 Plato Com. fr. 71. 12 ff. 'Ionian songs' were known at the time as a category of erotic song; see Ar. Eccl. 883 (with Ussher's note), 890-9, 911-19. They may have been in the Ionian mode. though the Lydian is also associated with songs of that sort (Cratinus fr. 276). 'Ionian' may just refer to the hedonistic life-style associated with Ionia. By the late 4th c., songs of this character were called 'Locrian' (Clearchus fr. 33, PMG 853), probably with reference to Locri in South Italy, where the women had the reputation of being easily available; the old Locrian mode does not come into question. |
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97 See p. 25; PMG 891 = Alc. fr. 249. 6-9; Ar. Vesp. 1232-5 = Alc. fr. 141. |
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98PMG 893-6, 911. See the whole collection of Carmina convivalia, PMG 884ff. It can be observed from the metres that there were certain favourite tunes that were used again and again. |
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99 Tragedy was sometimes written by resident aliens, such as Pratinas of Phlius and his son Aristias, Neophron of Sicyon, Ion of Chios, or Achaeus of Eretria, but they were not noted for musical originality in the same way. |
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