Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination

571 Pages·2011·4.15 MB·English

by  Lucia Athanassaki

Archaic and Classical Choral Song
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck · Claude Calame
Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds
Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco
Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone
Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 10
De Gruyter
Archaic and Classical
Choral Song
Performance, Politics
and Dissemination
Edited by
Lucia Athanassaki
Ewen Bowie
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-025401-3
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025402-0
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Archaic and classical choral song : performance, politics and dissemination / edited
by Lucia Athanassaki and Ewen Bowie.
p. cm. -- (Trends in classics. Supplementary volumes ; v. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-025401-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Greek poetry--History and criticism--Theory, etc. 2. Greek language--Metrics
and rhythmics. 3. Greek language--Accents and accentuation. 4. Drama--Chorus
(Greek drama) 5. Greek drama (Tragedy)--History and criticism. I. Athanassaki,
Lucia, 1957- II. Bowie, Ewen.
PA3092.A67 2011
884‘.0109--dc22
2010052660
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
∞ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
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Foreword
All but one of the papers in this volume stem from the international
conference ‘Archaic and Classical Choral Song’, held in May 24–27,
2007 at the Rethymnon campus of the University of Crete and orga-
nised by its Department of Philology, Division of Classical Studies. The
conference was funded by research funds of the University of Crete and
by the Hellenic Ministry of Education. We warmly thank both institu-
tions for their generous support. The conference saw the launching of
the Network for the Study of the Archaic and Classical Greek song
(www.let.ru.nl/greeksong) whose inaugural meeting took place in Cor-
pus Christi College, Oxford, in June 2008. Gregory Nagy has opted to
offer his paper from that meeting to this volume.
The organisation of the Rethymnon conference proved smooth sail-
ing thanks to the invaluable support of colleagues and students from the
University of Crete. We are particularly indebted to George Motakis,
Administrator of Graduate Studies, who co-ordinated the publicity, the
secretarial support and the finances of the conference; to the members of
the Conference Secretariat, Irene Andreou, Maria Gerontidou, Stella
Grammatikaki, Urania Neratzaki and Aikaterini Tzamali, all undergra-
duate students at the time, who combined efficiency with youthful en-
thusiasm; to Yannis Tzifopoulos (then Director of the Division of Clas-
sical Studies), Anastasios Nikolaidis (then President of the Department of
Philology), Kostas Apostolakis, Eva Astyrakaki, Athena Kavoulaki, Ni-
kos Litinas, Konstantinos Spanoudakis, Dimos Spatharas and Stavros
Frangoulidis, all of whom embraced the project and supported it in
more than one way.
The conference was well attended by colleagues and students from
many other Universities as well, and discussion was lively. We warmly
thank all speakers, moderators and participants in discussions. Special
thanks are due to Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos both for
chairing sessions and for inviting us to submit the manuscript to their
series.
We also thank De Gruyter’s staff, and in particular Andreas Brand-
mair, Katrin Hofmann and Katharina Legutke, and of course the series
co-editor Antonios Rengakos for his unfailing interest from the incep-
tion to the completion of the editorial process.
vi Foreword
Last but certainly not least we thank the contributors to this volume
for their much appreciated co-operation.

January 10, 2011

Lucia Athanassaki Ewen Bowie
Rethymnon Oxford
Table of Contents
Foreword ................................................................................................... v
Introduction .............................................................................................. 1
Nicholas Richardson
Reflections of choral song in early hexameter poetry ............................ 15
Ewen Bowie
Alcman's first Partheneion and the song the Sirens sang .......................... 33
Timothy Power
Cyberchorus: Pindar’s Κηληδόνες and
the aura of the artificial .................................................................... 67
Claude Calame
Enunciative fiction and poetic performance.
Choral voices in Bacchylides’ epinicians ........................................ 115
Richard Rawles
Eros and praise in early Greek lyric ...................................................... 139
André P.M.H. Lardinois
The parrhesia of young female choruses in Ancient Greece .............. 161
Gregory Nagy
A second look at the poetics of re-enactment in Ode 13
of Bacchylides ................................................................................. 173
David Fearn
Τhe Ceians and their choral lyric: Athenian, epichoric and
pan-Hellenic perspectives .............................................................. 207
Lucia Athanassaki
Song, politics, and cultural memory: Pindar's Pythian 7 and the
Alcmaeonid temple of Apollo ....................................................... 235
Bruno Currie
Epinician choregia: funding a Pindaric chorus ...................................... 269
Andrew D. Morrison
Pindar and the Aeginetan patrai:
Pindar’s intersecting audiences ...................................................... 311
viii Table of Contents
Jenny Strauss Clay
Olympians 1–3: A song cycle? .............................................................. 337
Thomas Hubbard
The dissemination of Pindar’s non-epinician choral lyric ................. 347
Athena Kavoulaki
Choral self-awareness: on the introductory
anapaests of Aeschylus’ Supplices .................................................... 365
Laura A. Swift
Epinician and tragic Worlds:
the case of Sophocles’ Trachiniae .................................................... 391
Anton Bierl
Alcman at the end of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata:
ritual interchorality ......................................................................... 415
Chris Carey
Alcman: from Laconia to Alexandria ................................................... 437
Bibliography ........................................................................................... 461
List of Contributors ............................................................................... 499
Index of proper names and subjects ..................................................... 503
Index locorum ......................................................................................... 543
Introduction
Lucia Athanassaki and Ewen Bowie
The last fifty years have seen a steadily growing interest in various as-
pects of the performance of melic, elegiac, and iambic poetry: the occa-
sion of composition and performance, the socio-political background,
the communicative dynamics between poet/performer(s) and their au-
diences, monodic vs. choral execution, the relationship of the persona
loquens with the persona cantans or (in most cases of iambic performance)
the persona recitans, the impact of the ritual and artistic performance con-
text on composition, dissemination through re-performance and/or
circulation of written texts, re-performance venues, the pan-Hellenic vs.
the epichoric character of a given composition, and many more.
The contributors to this volume focus on choral song, address these
and related issues, and pose fresh questions, thus broadening the scope of
inquiries into important aspects of the composition, performance and
dissemination of choral poetry. These aspects include the ritual signific-
ance of evoking the entrancing performances of notoriously dangerous,
albeit imagined, choruses; the impact of a chorus’ projections onto other
ritual choruses to augment its authority, to achieve ritual connectivity or
to enhance or complicate dramatic effect; ritual parrhesia; the communal
character of choral voice in performance, a voice which represents at
once all singers and each individual singer, thus encouraging choral or
monodic re-performance; the range of city choruses’ self-definitions in
local and pan-Hellenic contexts, responding to the different socio-
political agenda of the occasion; the nature, extent and aims of Pindar’s
dialogue with monumental sculpture, actual or mythical, which was part
of the ritual setting or loomed large in local tradition; the role of the
honorand and his family in funding choral performances in public festiv-
als and their vested interest in these songs’ preservation and dissemina-
tion through re-performance; the thematic choices of poets composing
for performance before overlapping audiences; the multi-faceted and
creative integration of pan-Hellenic choral traditions and themes into
Attic drama; Alcman’s choice of dialect, themes and style that facilitated
the early dissemination of his songs, their popularity in fifth-century
Attic performance culture and their later inclusion in the Alexandrian
canon.