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nomoi of Philoxenus and Timotheus, and dance them most zealously each year for the Dionysiac auletes in the theatres.110 |
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The Stoic Diogenes of Seleucia refers to a composition by Crexus that his readers may be expected to have heard, and he is able to compare Philoxenus' style of dithyramb with Pindar's.111 Nero's performing repertory included a Niobe and a Nauplius, which may well have been Timotheus' nomoi with those titles.112 In the following century C. Aelius Themison was still singing Timotheus, though now to new music.113 And at the Great Didymeia at Miletus in the third century one Aurelius Hierocles defeated 'the Timotheasts and Hegesiasts', who seem to be citharodes and orators in the styles of Timotheus and Hegesias respectively.114 |
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Does this continued popularity of leading representatives of the New Music imply that Hellenistic composers went on writing in broadly the same manner? The evidence of the surviving fragments of their music suggests that they may have done so for some time, but that other currents eventually came to the fore. |
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The various dramatic fragments from papyri of the mid-third to early second century BC115 are all too short to yield much information, and we do not know whether the texts in them are contemporary or older. But as far as they go, they present a fairly consistent picture of music characterized by modulation between chromatic and diatonic and between conjunct and disjunct tetrachords. In the Vienna fragments there are key-changes marked by explicit signatures where there was a progression between one section of the music and another. We also find a certain amount of chromaticism in the modern sense, exharmonic notes a semitone or perhaps a quarter-tone away from a regular scale degree, or dividing the interval between adjacent degrees. Not all the fragments show agreement of melody with word accent, which implies that some of them |
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110 Polyb. 4. 20. 8-9. Either he is using nomoi loosely to cover both nomoi and dithyrambs of these composers, or their citharodic works were actually performed as dithyrambs. This may well be possible, as the two genres had evidently converged a good deal. |
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111 Above, pp. 359, 364. |
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112 Suet. Ner. 21. 2, 39. 3. For the Nauplius cf. also Crinagoras, GP 1778; Lucillius, Anth. Pal. 11. 185. |
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113 Above. p. 378. |
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114 A. Rehm, Didyma, ii: Die Inschriften (Berlin, 1958), no. 181. 5; K. Latte, Eranos 53 (1955), 75 f. = Kleine Schriften, 593 L |
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115 Ch. 10, catalogue nos. 7-10. I leave aside the two Euripides fragments. In the following paragraphs I summarize the detailed observations made in Chs. 6, 7, and 10. |
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