The Culture of Kitharôidia (review)

The subject of this book is the place in ancient culture of kitharôidia or singing to the kithara—the chief professional stringed instrument of Graeco-Roman antiquity—which, so Timothy Power observes, ‘was arguably the musico-poetic performance genre that was enjoyed by the greatest number of people in the greatest number of places over the greatest length of time in the ancient Mediterranean world’ (p. xii). The work is clearly intended for classical scholars who (for example) know the difference between the citharode, who sang to his instrument, and the citharist, who merely played it.

Part I begins at Naples in ad 64 with the emperor Nero’s debut as a citharode; he did not rely exclusively on his talent, or even his position, to obtain a favourable reception, for he took the trouble to organize a claque. Such conduct may be risible and reprehensible in an emperor, but was no doubt normal practice for the professional entertainers against whom he wished to be judged. Likewise, the finery with which Power imagines him and his instrument adorned does not mark him out as emperor, but is the traditional garb or skeuē of the citharode; for that reason our sources, always ready to point up ostentatious luxury and having no love for Nero, do not bother to mention it even to imply a mismatch between appearance and performance. For such a mismatch we must turn to Lucian’s anecdote of the rich but incompetent Euangelus and the poor but talented Eumelus, which Power doubts; cautious as one may be about modern estimates of ancient probability, he offers grounds for suspecting at least exaggeration. (However, Eumelus’ name does not, as he supposes, mean ‘Melody Man’, which would have been Eumelēs, but ‘well provided with sheep or goats’, eumēlos, and was borne by an alleged Corinthian poet some nine hundred years before Lucian’s time.)

Citharodes made money and flaunted it; this was the case by the late fifth century bc at the latest, when Herodotus related that some two hundred years earlier Arion, the favourite of the Corinthian strongman Periander in a prosperous and commercially minded city, nevertheless went on tour to Sicily and southern Italy, where the real money was, just like a modern rock star touring America. Their prizes in musical competitions were higher than that of any other performer; this both enabled and encouraged them to display their wealth in an ever more elaborate skeuē, but in some minds at least this garb was taken to distance the singer from the workaday world and identify him with Apollo, Orpheus, or Amphion.

Naturally such performers also attracted erotic attention from women and older males; the female fans mocked by Juvenal are hardly mere ‘figments of . . .misogynistic imagination’ (p. 51), even if the poet has exercised the satirist’s right of exaggeration. Eroticism is of course no less present when the performer is female; in most cases, at least, music is not to be supposed her only profession. How many women described as kitharōidoi—Greek, unlike Latin, does not admit a separate feminine form for the word—actually performed in public on the same terms as men cannot be determined.

Even in the Greek world, elite disdain for professional musicians, as for other persons who earned a living, had set in by the late fifth century; it was not only Roman sensitivities that Nero flouted at Hellenic Naples. At Rome, however, where public citharody had played little part in entertaining either the many or the few, he created a mass taste for it, to which even the quality would in time surrender. However, mass audiences are not uncritical, and not slow to show their displeasure; I do not see why Power should doubt that on occasions they threw stones, even if, as he insists, the performers so assailed cannot have been really bad, but only had off-days, or fallen foul of their rivals’ claque...