Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece

What difference does music make to performance poetry, and how did the ancients understand this relationship? This volume explores the interaction of music and language in ancient Greek poetry, arguing that music crucially informs the ways in which these texts create meaning and exploring its place in contemporary critical writings.

Tom Phillips is a Supernumerary Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, having previously held a Junior Research Fellowship at the college from 2013-16. He is currently working on the Leverhulme-funded project 'Anachronism and Antiquity', and his research focuses on archaic and classical lyric, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarly culture. His first book, Pindar's Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts (Oxford University Press, 2016) deals with the reception of Pindar in the Hellenistic period.
Armand D'Angour is Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford and has been a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College since 2000. He is the author of numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature and on ancient Greek music, as well as the monograph The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is a composer of verse in Latin and Greek, including commissioned Odes for the Athens Olympics in 2004 and the London Olympics in 2012.

Frontmatter
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
0: Tom Phillips: Introduction: Music, Text, and Culture
I: Interpretation
1: John C. Franklin: Epicentric Tonality and the Greek Lyric Tradition
2: Armand D'Angour: The Musical Setting of Ancient Greek Texts
3: Tom Phillips: Words and the Musician: Pindar's Dactylo-Epitrites
4: Oliver Thomas: Music in Euripides' Medea
5: Stelios Psaroudakes: Mesomedes' Hymn to the Sun: The Precipitation of Logos in the Melos
II: Theory, Reception, Contexts
6: Naomi Weiss: Hearing the Syrinx in Euripidean Tragedy
7: Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi: Lyric Atmospheres: Plato and Mimetic Evanescence
8: Pierre Destrée: Aristotle on Music for Leisure
9: James I. Porter: Sounds You Cannot Hear: Cicero and the Tradition of Sublime Criticism
10: Andrew Barker: Disreputable Music: A Performance, a Defence, and their Intertextual and Intermedial Resonances (Plutarch Quaest. conv. 704c4-705b6)
Endmatter
Bibliography
Index