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third century AD It was employed there in the 'rousing' of Dionysus after his periodic descent to the lower world.104 But it was more commonly to be heard in secular contexts, as in the Roman theatre and amphitheatre.105 Gladiators fought to the death to the accompaniment of an organist, who watched them attentively and, like the cinema organist of a more recent era, improvised music to match the action; trumpeters and horn-blowers stood by to support himor herat dramatic moments.106 Only loud instruments were suitable for such events, and these were the three loudest.107 We have seen in Chapter 4 how the organ was made ever larger and louder in later Antiquity.108 |
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Timotheus remained a classic for centuries. His works were often performed, and some of the other composers of his time were also kept in circulation. At the Athenian Great Dionysia of 319 BC the boys' chorus of the Cecropid tribe won the dithyramb contest with a rendition of Timotheus' Elpenor. His Persians was performed at the Nemean Games in 205 by the citharode Pylades of Megalopolis. At Cnossos and Priansos, sometime about 170-150, an envoy from Teos called Menecles, as both cities recorded appreciatively in similar inscriptions, entertained his official hosts with several recitals to the kithara of 'the works of Timotheus and Polyidus and of our own (Cretan) ancient poets'; the Cnossians add 'as befitted a man of culture'.109 The youth of Arcadia at this period |
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are trained from infancy to sing the traditional hymns and paeans with which they honour the local heroes and gods of each area; and later they learn the |
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104 Inscription in Jahreshefte des Österreichischen archãologischen Instituts 7 (1904), 92; cf. M. P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, ii2 (Munich. 1961), 363f. |
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105 Anon. Aetna 296, Petron. Sat. 36.6. |
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106 See the 2nd-c. mosaics from Nennig (Rhineland) and Zlitis (Libya) in J. Perrot, L'Orgue de ses origines hellénistiques à la fin du XIIIesiècle, 105-9 and pl. i-ii; also the bronze vase from Rheims in the Gréau collection, H. Degering, Die Orgel, 74 and pl. IV. 1. The two organists shown in the Zlitis mosaic are women. There is other icono-graphic and epigraphic evidence for female organists; see Perrot, op. cit. 267. |
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107 Sen. QNat. 2. 6. 5. |
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108 On the Roman taste for massive sonorities cf. Sen. Ep. 84. 10 (choirs larger than audiences used to be, singing in unison with a massed wind and string band); S. H. A. Carinus, 19.2 (100 trumpeters or horn-players or pythaulae or choraulae). |
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109IG 22. 3055; Plut. Phil 11.2, Paus. 8. 50. 3; Inscriptiones Creticae i pp. 66 no. 11 and 280 no. 1. |
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