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terminate. Caracalla honoured him with a cenotaph; Eusebius recorded his floruit (AD 141) in his date-tables; Dio Cassius identifies him as 'the man who wrote the citharodic nomes'; Synesius, the cultured Christian Neoplatonist from Cyrene, about AD 400, quotes from his hymn to Nemesis as something that 'we sing to the lyre'; and some of his music was transmitted into the Middle Ages in association with later musical treatises.117 Why it enjoyed such prestige it is hard for us to comprehend, since the surviving specimens of it strike us as limited and uninspired in comparison with the Delphic paeans, whose composers' names left no echo. Mesomedes relies to some extent on melodic clichés. There is no true modulation (though there are shifts of tonal centre), perhaps no exharmonic ornament, and no perceptible correlation of melody to meaning. |
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Some other texts from the period, such as the Oslo and Michigan papyri (30-3), show us that a more florid style was in existence, usable at least for settings of dramatic scenes, characterized by more division of syllables between notes and decorative treatment of mythological names.118 This continues through the third century and is seen in its most developed state in the Christian hymn from Oxyrhynchus (51). The Timothean style, although it too might have been described by its critics as florid or over-ornate, had little in common with this later one, where, beneath the melismatic embellishments, stood a single plain diatonic scale. The New Music was by now finally dead and forgotten. |
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The Christian hymn is perhaps the latest composition preserved in the ancient musical notation. The notation apparently fell into disuse not long afterwards (p. 272), and this signals the end of the old professionalism. By the sixth century Olympiodorus could write that no remnant of the Hellenic music was preserved: 'we hear only the rumour of it, and know nothing.'119 |
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Of course the Greeks never stopped singing. Traditions of popular music must have continued, and there was the music of the Church. There are no doubt connections to be traced from the Hellenic music of the Roman period to the music of Byzantium. But |
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117Suda iii. 367.8; S.H.A. Pius 7. 8; Dio Cass. 77. 13. 7; Euseb. Chron. Ol. 230. 4; Synesius, Epist. 95. |
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118 See pp. 202f. |
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119 Ap. David, Prolegomena Philosophiae (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, xviii. 2) p. 64. 34, quoting Il. 2. 486. |
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