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In 118 BC the Delphians honoured two musicians from Arcadia who, apparently as trainers of boys' choruses, had presented 'items (arithmoi) from the old poets which were appropriate to the god and our city'.83 Similarly the citharode Menecles of Teos, for a Cretan audience, drew from many poets and historians to make up a 'cycle' of narrative song on Cretan legend and tradition.84 Nero sang the parts of various heroes and heroines from tragedy, wearing the appropriate masks and acting out their torments: Heracles mad, Oedipus blinded, Orestes beset by Furies, Canace in labour, and so on.85 Philostratus in his fictional biography of Apollonius of Tyana describes a citharode of Nero's time who goes about singing a selection of lyrics from the emperor's tragedies and threatening to denounce those who fail to reward him.86 Eunapius has a far-fetched story of another who bowled over a barbarian audience with highlights from Euripides' Andromeda.87 A papyrus document of the first or second century AD lists pieces in the repertory of (or performed on a particular occasion by) an aulete Epagathus and other artists. The first and better preserved of the two columns reads: |
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Songs of Epagathus the choraules 40
From dramas 6
From Hypsipyle 6
From Deidameia
From Androgynos (?)
From Ransoming of Hector
From Medea
From Antiope |
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Songs of his own 40 |
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Epagathus was a choraules, i.e. he accompanied singers, in this case probably soloists, not a chorus. In the second column there is mention of 'songs of the tragic actor . . .', and of another choraules.88 In the papyri of the first to third centuries AD we find excerpts from dramas in which not only the lyrics proper but also iambic speeches |
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83SIG 703. The usual interpretation of arithmoi as 'rhythms' is nonsensical. |
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84Inscriptiones Creticae i pp. 280f., mid-2nd c. BC. |
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85 Suet. Ner. 21, 46, Juv. 8. 220ff., Dio Cass. 63. 9. 4, 10.2, 22.6, Philostr. VA 5.7; Wille 342f. |
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86VA 4. 39. 82. |
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87 C. Boissevain, Excerpla Historica iussu imperatoris Constantini Porphyrogeniti confecta, iv (Berlin, 1906), 87. 21 ff. |
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88 W. E. H. Cockle, Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Papyrologists, Oxford, 24-31 July 1974 (London, 1975), 59-65 with pl. xv. |
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