Athenian cup by Brygos Painter, 490-480bc

Greeks distinguished stirring music from reflective music, the first encouraged by Dionysus, the second by Apollo. Greek music combined three elements: words, melody and rhythm. Music was melodic, without the resources or distractions of harmony.

A reed instrument, the aulos, generated energy, and might stir up soldiers or dancers.

Various forms of multiple stringed lyres accompanied  more complex words. Homer’s recitations of Iliad scenes were chanted, accompanied by lyre. Visitors to Achilles, find him lyre in hand, singing.

Opera, developing two milenia later, originated in attempts to recreate the imagined power of Greek words, melody and rhythm incorporated in dramatic presentations.

Consider the power of Simonides’s lament, a choral song designed for funerals of nobles, perhaps the king who gazes at us now:

click blue notes to play  

 

You are a human, therefore
seek not to foretell what tomorrow may bring,
nor how long one’s happiness may last.
For not even the flutter of the fly’s wings
is as fast as the changing of fortunes.

Francis Yates begins her Art of Memory
with an account of Simonides:

At a banquet given by a nobleman of Thessaly named Scopas, the poet Simonides of Ceos chanted a lyric poem in honour of his host but including a passage in praise of Castor and Pollux. Scopas meanly told the poet that he would only pay him half the sum agreed upon for the panegyric and that he must obtain the balance from the twin gods to whom he had devoted half the poem. A little later, a message was brought in to Simonides that two young men were waiting outside who wished to see him. He rose from the banquet and went out but could find no one. During his absence the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, crushing Scopas and all the guests to death beneath the ruins; the corpses were so mangled that the relatives who came to take them away for burial were unable to identify them.

Simonides, however, remembered the places at which they had been sitting at the table and was therefore able to indicate to the relatives which were their dead. The invisible callers, Castor and Pollux, had handsomely paid for their share in the panegyric by drawing Simonides away from the banquet just before the crash. And this experience suggested to the poet the principles of the art of memory of which he is said to have been the inventor. Noting that it was through his memory of the places at which the guests had been sitting that he had been able to identify the bodies, he realized that orderly arrangement is essential for good memory.

‘He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.’

The credibility of Homeric stories depends on their power to bring back to life the circumstances in which past actions develop. Modern readers no doubt will consider good or bad the choices Homeric Greeks made. For such consideration to work, however, attention to specific circumstances in which Greeks lived and died can bring listeners closer to the Greek audiences originally attending Homer’s recitations. For the Greeks, what a story means follows what a story does.  A meaningful story, however clear, has no value for an unmoved audience. What, then, moves Homer’s audience? The convincing theatre in which men think, feel and act. Audiences see not only what a character sees, but also as a character sees. Practice looking not at a character, not at what a character notices, but through a character exploring a particular time and place:

Consider a Greek audience for Simonides’ threnos. A chorus at a stately funeral offers participants a dual response: the recognition that all fade to shades of living flesh and blood; but making your mark first earns the only respect which survives, a place in a story.

Shift the circumstances, however, and join partying Greeks, drinking, playing, gossiping in a stone-roofed room.

 For such symposiasts, Simonides offers a pleasing, if, challenging joke. Partying friends would first see inviting wine-grapes, then recline in conversation accompanied by an aulos player. Eventually the developing good spirits will end: the petrifying grin of the Medusa ends revelry.

Remember Euboulos the sober,
        you who pass by,
And drink: there is one Hades for all men.

 

  – Leonidas of Tarentum,
 The Greek Anthology

For now, dance in distinctive company:

Thracian Warriors

Amazons