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account of the battle of Salamis in several hundred lines, with an epilogue containing prayers to Apollo and the artistic manifesto summarized above. After a hexameter opening it was in free form, falling into clearly marked paragraphs which may have been divided by citharistic passages. The rhythms are varied but not especially complex; iambic and aeolic predominate, and in the epilogue Timotheus settles down into a steady succession of aeolic verses. The language is elaborate, exuberant, highly coloured. The narrative concentrates on pictorial details, the noise and confusion of the naval battle, the surge and the spray, the emerald sea stained red with blood, the floating and washed-up corpses; there are emotional speeches by Persians expostulating through mouthfuls of salt water, chattering with cold on a beach, or abjectly pleading with a captor for mercy in comically broken Greek. Timotheus must have used a wide range of musical resource in putting all this across, variety of mode and register, expressive variations of vocal timbre, and so forth, perhaps underlined by facial expression and body movement. It is this mimetic aspect of the citharodic nomos that is given as the reason for its astrophic form: once the contestants at the music festivals learned to imitate action and stretch themselves, their songs became long and varied, changing continually to suit the representation of the subject matter.29 |
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Timotheus' dithyrambs showed similar characteristics. One of them contained a portrayal of a storm at sea (a critic remarked that he had seen a bigger one in a stew-pot); another dramatized the birth-pangs of Semele and her cries. It was probably in performing Timotheus' Scylla that auletes would make a show of grabbing at the chorus-leader, in imitation of the monster grabbing at Odysseus' sailors.30 Homer describes Scylla as yelping like a young puppy, and Timotheus no doubt tried to achieve this effect in the aulos part. Odysseus' lament for his lost men seemed to Aristotle a prime example of unseemly and inappropriate characterization.31 Evidently it was extravagant and unmanly. It seems that it was not related by the chorus as part of a narrative but performed by a solo singer. Similarly with Semele's birth-pangs, and perhaps others of these dithyrambs. Plato says that narrative without speeches is something particularly found in dithyramb (as opposed to epic or |
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29 Ps.-Arist. Pr. 19.15. |
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30PMG 785, 792-3; above, p. 106 |
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31Poet. 1454d30. |
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