Androulaki, M. "Sing Goddess of the Wrath of Achilles":From the Homeric Incipit to the Concept of the Musical Term Skopos and to the Mandinadha in Greek Folk Music (original) (raw)
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Muses and Teachers: Poets’ Apprenticeship in the Greek Epic Tradition
Rethinking Orality I
The Greek epic tradition, starting from the Homeric poemsand those of the corpus Hesiodeum,oftens peakso fi tself by referringt os ingers (aoidoi), but very little information is provided about how the singers learned their art.The main explanation for the phenomenon lies in the principle of poetry'sa uthoritativeness, which is acrucial one for all oral traditions and is especiallyensured by the relationship between the poetic messageand the divinesphere. But,upon closer scrutiny, certain pieces of information emerge when we read between the lines of some of the main, well-known passages in which the Greek poetic-and particularlye pic-tradition speaks of its origins and its first mythicalo rl egendary representations. And these pieces of informationb ring light both on the evolution of the cognitive processes of the singers and on the growth of Greek epic tradition.
Myths as exemplum in the archaic Greek Melic poetry: Paideia and poetic tradition in song culture.
Seventh Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy with special emphasis on paideia, 2022
It is well known that, in oral societies such as Archaic Greece, the songs played an important role in disseminating the history of the community, the stories about their gods and heroes, ethical values and knowledge, becoming one of the main sources of formation of new generations. Therefore, the myths presented in the melic songs – the lyric par excellence – are not merely descriptive, but are often used to thread a moral maxim that builds a bridge to the current moment of the performance, and draw conclusions about life, death, family and the polis dynamics. This compositional strategy is called exemplum, and it was already developed in the Meleagre’s history in Iliad 9. In this paper, will be analyzed three melic fragments from different poets who compose with this rhetorical device differently, having the Trojan Myth as a commun theme: Sappho Fr. 16 (Voigt), Ibycus Fr. S 151 (Davies) and Pindar Pythian 6 (Snell-Maehler). Through these fragments, we will discuss (1) how the myths are introduced; (2) their relation with the performance, and (3) what values, lessons and/or knowledge are being linked in the song for the audience that hears it.
THE DAUGHTERS OF MEMORY: THE MUSES AND THE ACCURACY OF TRADITION IN ANCIENT EPIC
The epic poetry of ancient Greece affords us a text which might have been composed precisely for a conference on Memory and Truth. I speak of what some consider the oldest European poem, the Theogony of Hesiod, his account of the origins of the world and the birth of the gods. This work opens with a complex invocation to the Muses, who at this very early stage of literary history already appear both as the bestowers of human eloquence and, in effect, as the goddesses of memory. I shall seek to demonstrate here that the conception of the Muses is a phenomenon rooted in the special characteristics of oral poetry, which makes daunting demands upon the poet's own memory and which also preserves the traditional memories of a pre-literate society. I should begin with a few general observations about the nature of ancient epic. Homer and Hesiod, with whom we will chiefly deal here, are acknowledged as the first Western poets, and a date of somewhere around 700 BC is widely accepted for both, although there is no internal or external evidence that can give a firm date for the poems, nor can we know which is the elder. Many insist on Hesiod, which is why I mentioned the Theogony as a legitimate candidate for Europe's oldest poem. The dating of these works, as well as the question of whether a specific date or author can even be meaningfully discussed for such works, is a much-vexed issue (the " Homeric question ") which we need not broach here. These poems belong, of course, to an oral tradition that long predates literacy. By the time they were first committed to writing, they represent a mature genre whose origins and evolution we cannot truly recover. Likewise, when the Muses first appear to us, their conception is already nearly complete, their domains and powers well-established. Most people familiar with literature or the arts know the nine Muses as the goddesses who preside over artistic inspiration. From them we thus have the terms music, from mousike techne, the skill of the Muses, which originally included poetry, music, and dance as inseparable phenomena; also museum, originally the sanctuary of the Muses at Alexandria which held the great library. Their individual names – Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, Erato, Urania – already appear in the Theogony, but their assignment to particular skills and attributes – Calliope as the Muse of epic, Clio of history, Terpsichore of dance, and so on – were not fully worked out until later antiquity. But apart from this increasing professional specialization at a later period, when they appear in Hesiod their identity is fairly well completed: this is in fact the fullest and most complex treatment of the Muses which we possess, and indeed later works tend to be more laconic about them rather than more expansive. Like much oral poetry it is constructed in an associative pattern of ring composition in an order that modern readers would not necessarily consider logical – for instance Hesiod does not begin with the birth of the Muses, but waits for fifty lines. I wish to start there by pointing out their parentage, which Hesiod address in line 53 of the invocation: their father is Zeus, the King of gods, which may call attention to their importance, but their mother a much more elusive figure, Mnemosyne or Memory, one of those less anthropomorphized deities embodying an abstraction, like Victory or Nemesis. She rarely appears elsewhere in mythology. Now, the Muses' parentage has many implications – memory is the most essential property of oral poetry and tradition; for Hesiod it is a technique, a profession. It is thus an
Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity (tradition), regularity (exemplarity), development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth-century BCe Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of memory entailed an "idea of history" that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres.
THE VOICE OF TRADITION: REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMERIC SINGERS IN ATHENAEUS 1.14a–d
The Classical Quarterly, 2007
The passage concerning the heroic lifestyle, surviving in the Epitome version of Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, is an area full of controversy. Scholars debate over the source(s) used by Athenaeus here and speculate about the relationship of the summarized version of the text to its original unepitomized form, which is lost to us. These two modern approaches to this part of the first book of the Deipnosophistae aim at general clarification of the content and the structure of the discussion of the Homeric lifestyle. I shall instead pay attention to one, relatively short, piece of the text preserved by the epitomator, namely the passage in which the question of the position and functions of archaic singers is addressed (1.14a-d). This passage as a self-contained whole has not yet received serious attention from scholars, although a more detailed analysis of some of its components has occasionally been offered. It seems that a closer examination of individual segments of this text as well as of the linkage between them allows us to elucidate some points of ancient Homeric scholarship and to detect traces of the structural devices used by the author of the Deipnosophistae. The topic is, then, worthy of consideration. The passage is a part of the discussion in which Athenaeus pursues the question of the simplicity of the life of the ancients and shares with other intellectuals an interest in the customs connected with feasting. Drawing illustrations of the ancient way of life from Homer's poems was commonplace in many works written by critics from the Alexandrian age onwards. 1 After the publication of Malcolm Heath's important article, 2 Isaac Casaubon's assumption 3 (widely accepted by scholars of the nineteenth century 4 and still adhered to by some modern classicists 5) that the only source for Athenaeus' description of feasting activities of Homeric heroes was Dioscorides, 6 the author of an exclusively 231 1 The beginnings can be, however, traced as early as Plato's writings (Resp. 3.404B10-C7). On the importance of Homer's poems for ancient considerations of the simplicities of early generations' life see R. Vischer,
Lyric Musical Practice in the Epic Context of Archaic Greece
Greek Lyric Poetry and its Influence: Texts, Imagines, Music and Cinema, 2020
It is the object of this paper to research how musical practice, which in Antiquity also means literary practice, of the Near-East could have directly influenced archaic Greece at a time in which the names of certain composers that specialize in the lyric genre begin to emerge. Their works have survived to a greater or lesser extent in a direct way or through other author’s quotes. This genre is mentioned in the Homeric poems. However, from the eighth century on, our knowledge of the lyric genre moves between the mythical information of legendary names and that of authors whose historicism is doubted by certain researchers in certain cases. This happens with Terpander, father of the innovations we find in eighth- and seventh-century Greece. Once the new musical characteristics are explained, we may find that Greece imported some from Asia. We shall try here to set out the differences that may be seen between the lyrical practice of these new composers and an allegedly older practice, mainly used for interpretation of the epic repertoire.