Sound and the Ancient Senses

Shane Butler, Sarah Nooter, Shane Butler, Sarah Nooter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138120389
• eBook ISBN: 9781317300427
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, even though it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the spheres.

Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities.

This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.

Part I
Ancient soundscapes

1
The sound of the sacred

Timothy Power

Ancient Greek religion was strongly oriented towards activity rather than contemplation, outward displays of worship rather than inwardly felt devotion, and diverse ritual practices circumscribed by local cults rather than universal adherence to a unifying dogma.¹ Accordingly, it is natural that scholars should have to attend as much to its material, lived and experiential dimensions as to its structural, discursive and theological ones. Indeed, the recent turn towards the material and phenomenal in religious studies – the focus on the interactive ensemble of objects, impressions, appearances, corporeal habits, performances and practices, spatial and temporal contexts that produce meaning and value within religious cultures – is nothing essentially unfamiliar to students of Greek (and Roman) religion, whose research has long taken account of material things and embodied practices. It is only in recent years, however, that they have begun to articulate their materialist and phenomenological approaches with quite the same theoretical self-consciousness as peers in other disciplines.²

Sensation and sense perception, integral to such approaches, have hardly been neglected in studies of Greek religion. But there, as in other areas of religious studies, it is sight and image that are foregrounded, whether implicitly or explicitly, whereas hearing and sound have been relatively ignored. It is not uncommon to find acknowledgements of the “multisensory” nature of certain Greek festivals and rites: their heady mix of sights, sounds, smells and textures. But sonic practices and acoustic phenomena are generally treated superficially, descriptively, as mere adjutants to visual experience, and very rarely made the object of dedicated investigation. Music has of course drawn increasingly sophisticated attention from classicists over the past twenty years or so, but, when discussed in conjunction with religious culture, the general tendency has been to treat mousikē discursively, structurally and functionally rather than situating it as a material presence within the lived acoustic experience of cult, as ritualized sound, which, alongside other, non-musical sounds, makes certain psychological and even physical impressions upon the worshippers who perform and listen to it.

Sound and vision

Ocularcentrism is foremost a symptom of the primary evidence. Greek religion is vividly attested by the archaeological and artistic record, and, in the obvious absence of sound recordings from antiquity, it is inevitable that scholarly investigations of religious life in early Greece – both its realia and its “imaginary” – tend to be visually focused, both in their means and ends. More broadly, we might situate this inclination to cast the gaze rather than lend an ear within the dominant visualist paradigm of the modern West, which accords epistemological and empirical privilege to the eyes over the ears and the other sense organs. Yet ancient Greek culture, despite its fundamental reliance on orality (and thus the aural), also exhibits a strong ocular bias, as Michael Squire takes care to explain in his introduction to Sight and the Ancient Senses. There is accordingly a pervasive tendency, much evident in the literary sources, to frame religious events and experience in predominantly visual terms.³

Three examples, drawn from prominent areas of Greek religious activity, will suffice to illustrate this tendency. First, there is the word theōria, used for a state delegation or pilgrimage to a cult centre. Although its precise etymology remains uncertain, theōria was clearly understood to belong to the register of sight: it indicated a viewing of a shrine and its attendant rites and festive spectacles, whether through a religiously concentrated “ritual-centered visuality”⁴ or a more diffuse and aesthetic mode of “sacred sightseeing”.⁵ Euripides vividly evokes elements of both modes in a mythical scene of theōria in his tragedy Ion, when the awestruck Athenian women of the chorus, visiting Delphi for the first time, bid one another to gaze upon the wondrous images in Apollo’s sanctuary, which “bring delight (terpsis) to [their] eyes” (232).

Secondly, there is the insistence on the primacy of vision, literal and metaphorical, in references to the initiatory rituals (teletai) of the Eleusinian mystery cult, which is demonstrated already in our earliest source for the cult, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: “blessed (olbios) is the man who has beheld (opōpen)” the mystic revelations (480). The “blessed” had undergone the emotionally powerful visual experience of initiation, which apparently involved a temporary veiling of the eyes followed by dramatic exposure to brilliant, quasi-epiphanic torchlight, among other moving and symbolically meaningful images. Thus changed from a figurative state of blindness to one of sight and enlightenment, they were called epoptai, “viewers”, candidates for a subsequent, still more profound initiation called the epopteia, “viewing”.⁶ A third example is the frequent characterization in Greek texts of the pompē, the sacred procession that was the most elaborate collective performance in Hellenic religious culture, as above all a visual spectacle, a “viewing occasion”.⁷

There can be no question that in these three cases vision did play a leading role, as it did in other areas of Greek religion. But if we read the sources with attention to the sonic references they contain (but that are often overlooked), we realize that, despite the visual bias evident in their descriptions and indeed in official cultic terminology itself, sound and hearing did make contributions to the holistic experience of these activities as significant as those made by image and sight.

First, soundmaking and audition, in ritually concentrated and more promiscuous forms, were present at virtually all stages of theōriai. The festivals that were often their destination points were complex soundscapes that fully engaged the ear of the visitor or pilgrim (theōros).⁸ He or she heard musical performances of all kinds, utterances, outbursts and acclamations, the “buzzing noises” of crowds and the sounds of sacrifice made by animals, instruments and worshippers, including most strikingly the ololugē, the shrill cry women raised as the animal was killed, which Walter Burkert memorably called “life scream[ing] over death”.⁹ There were also cries for euphēmia, the ritual silence, or at least a heightened mood of vocalic and sonic restraint, which punctured the noise and allowed the propitious voices of priests or singers to carry more clearly to the gods.¹⁰

The oracular shrines visited by many theōroi must have been especially loud places, flush not only with bodies, but voices and noises. Even at the relatively minor oracle of Apollo Koropaios in Thessaly, administrators felt the need to pass measures ensuring the maintenance of eukosmia “good order”, which probably included efforts at noise control.¹¹ Sound and listening were crucial to many forms of oracular consultation itself. Nowhere was this truer than at Zeus’ oracular sanctuary at Dodona, the most sonorous prophetic site in ancient Greece, a place that could be called omphēs meston “full of divine voice” (Philostratus, Imagines 2.33). Odysseus went to Dodona “so that from the god’s high-leafed oak tree he might hear (epakousai) the will of Zeus” (Odyssey 14.327–28 = 19.269–70). In some accounts, it was Zeus’ “talking oak” that delivered prophecy (e.g. Plato, Phaedrus 275b–c), in others, twin doves perched in its branches (Sophocles, Women of Trachis 171–2). Another sonic wonder was the ring of contiguous bronze cauldrons surrounding the oracle. When even one was touched, all the cauldrons would ring out continuously owing to the sympathetic vibrations (Demon ap. Stephanus of Byzantium s.v. Dōdōnē), thus creating an ambient “wall of sound” that must have permeated the entire sanctuary. It is unclear what role the cauldrons played in divination. Some late writers say that the harmonic drone induced an inspired trance state in the Dodonian priestess. But even if such claims are to be discounted, the ringing cauldrons must still have intensified the otherworldly aura of this place where mortals came to hear the very will of Zeus.¹²

But pilgrims were not merely passive auditors; they also made sounds, and we might say too they brought sounds with them, performing as musicians, chorus members and vocalizing officiants not only at the destination sanctuary, but on the theoric journey as well. Pausanias tells of a college of female devotees of Dionysus, the Thyiades, whose biennial theōria from Athens to Delphi followed a “songline”: the women sounded out their sacred journey through the landscape with choral songs and dances at traditional stopping points along the route (Description of Greece 10.4.3).¹³

Turning to the evidence for the Eleusinian Mysteries, we note how the focus on visuality obscures, but does not totally eclipse, the important acoustic features of the teletai. Here psychologically manipulative chiaroscuros of sound and silence seem to have complemented those of light and darkness. Plutarch alludes to the “uproar and shouting (thorubōi kai boēi)” made by excited initiands as they approached the telestērion, where initiations were conducted; when the ritual programme began, however, they attended in utter “fear and silence (siōpē)” (Progress in Virtue 81D-E). But the atmosphere hardly remained silent. “The ritual action of the mysteries (drōmena)”, Silvia Montiglio observes, “often relied on loud sounds precisely to arouse intense emotions”. Such arousal was necessary for the cathartic “suffering” (pathein) that Aristotle said was the goal of mystical initiation at Eleusis (rather than mathein “learning”).¹⁴ The sources are predictably vague about what these sounds were, but we do hear of one specific and presumably deeply affecting noise: a bronze gong struck at what must have been a central moment of the rites, “when Kore was being summoned”.¹⁵

It is clear too that the voice of the hierophant, the high priest conducting the ceremony, was crucial to the initiatory experience. The importance of his voice, however, may have lain not so much in its capacity for logos as in its sonorous, phatic and aesthetic aspec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Audio
• List of contributors
• Introduction: sounding hearing
• Part I Ancient soundscapes
• Part II Theories of sound
• Part III Philology and sound
• Bibliography
• Index