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In spite of some similarites, these three musicians were the embodiment of divergent virtuosic types owing to their diversified professional artistic identities and personas. Antigenidas was a performing musician, composer, and poet, in contrast to the predominantly cult musician, Ismenias. While Timotheos cultivated a traditional artistic image as a member of Alexander the Great’s court, Antigenidas and Ismenias worked for various patrons in different locations in the Greek world. Owing to his innovations, Antigenidas wielded the greatest influence on the aulos’s development and its music. Together with Ismenias, both musicians engaged in extravagant solistic presentations through increasingly elaborate optical and acoustic stagings, which led to a trend, viewed critically by the Principate, toward ever greater artistic excesses.

In spite of some similarites, these three musicians were the embodiment of divergent virtuosic types owing to their diversified professional artistic identities and personas. Antigenidas was a performing musician, composer, and poet, in contrast to the predominantly cult musician, Ismenias. While Timotheos cultivated a traditional artistic image as a member of Alexander the Great’s court, Antigenidas and Ismenias worked for various patrons in different locations in the Greek world. Owing to his innovations, Antigenidas wielded the greatest influence on the aulos’s development and its music. Together with Ismenias, both musicians engaged in extravagant solistic presentations through increasingly elaborate optical and acoustic stagings, which led to a trend, viewed critically by the Principate, toward ever greater artistic excesses.

GERASA, in north Jordan, dating to the Roman period, has been found to contain impressive and well - Musicians and Musical instruments carving on architecture elements (pedestal or candelabrum base). The Gerasa carving expertly combined motifs with a long tradition, some going back to the Roman imperial age and earlier. This study is concerned with the musical instruments appear on architecture elements. The article provides a study of the musical instruments that can be classified into two main types: Aulos and Kithara. Purpose of this paper is to examine the details of those instruments and compare them with other musical instruments from the Roman period, where influences in design within and between regions can be seen. Wherever possible, comparative examples have been chosen from sites that are relatively nearby to establish an overview of musical instruments in the region, but also to distinguish the influences coming from Asia Minor and other areas.

The article argues that the famous story about the strike, exile and return of the Roman aulos players, which is recorded in the sixth book of Ovid's Fasti and referred to by other Latin and Greek sources, is based on a narrative model that already existed in Greece in the Archaic period. The study draws parallels between the tale of the pipers and the myth of the return of Hephaestus to Olympus, suggesting that, apart from similar plots, the two stories share many motifs, such as references to themes derived from comedy and satyr drama. Searching for a possible channel of transmission of the story from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome, the study explores the presence of satyric motifs in Etruscan vase-painting and Roman processional rites. It is furthermore emphasized that many of these motifs, which also appeared in lost satyr-plays, are echoed in Augustan poetry.

According to Plutarch, the young Alcibiades would have refused to play the aulos on the pretext that this practice distorted the appearance and the features of a man and was unworthy of an Athenian citizen; his example was followed and therefore the aulos was expelled from liberal education in Athens. Other textual and iconographic sources, testify instead of the presence of auloi everywhere in Athenian public and private life, throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. Analysing the ambiguous status of the aulos in Athens, we must certainly distinguish what refers to hearing and what refers to practice. From available sources, we can actually trace successive breaks in the evolution of acceptation or rejection of this instrument, but it is necessary to examine what were the causes and origins of these breaks. The analysis of the the young Alcibiades’ arguments autorizes hypothesis about the symbolic value of the aulos in political discourses of elites during the Peloponnesian War, whether they were favorable or not to democracy.

Contrary to the prevalent assumption that stringed instruments were absent from Phrygian music, tortoise-shell lyres excavated at Gordion show that such instruments were played in Phrygia during its heyday. Since the shells—or carapaces—are early and potentially the first from outside the Greek world, their identification is based on cautious analysis of worked edges, scrape marks, and a symmetrical pattern of drill holes that reveal details of the lyres’ construction and zoomorphic aesthetic. Two well-preserved examples from an abandonment deposit in the cellar of an extramural house on Gordion’s Northeast Ridge beneath Tumulus E can be dated stratigraphically to the first quarter of the seventh century B.C.E. This context of instruments and domestic artifacts preserves string music as the accompaniment to weaving, dining, and the worship of Matar (Cybele) in a prosperous household. These lyres clarify the musical culture of Anatolia, which is otherwise heavily abstracted in Greek myths and theoretical writings. Those instruments that Phrygia was best known for, the aulos and cymbals, are also materially and pictorially attested at Gordion, but the lyres expand the Phrygian soundscape to include a largely unknown polyphony. Additional figures can be found under this article’s abstract on AJA Online.

The aim of this paper is to study the letters that the Emperor Hadrian sent to the neoi of Pergamum, one of which contains the complete text and is preserved in two copies, and another of which only fragments have come down to us and whose recipients I suggest here were the neoi. These letters allow us to gain further insights into the emperor’s attitude towards the Greek gymnasiums and poleis. Hadrian strengthened the ties that Trajan had established with the Greek cities during the Parthian War, understanding that he could win over their living forces by supporting their gymnasiums. This was a step further in converting the civic oligarchies of the East into some of the most staunch supporters of imperial power. A number of individuals who acted as mediators were prime movers in the process of forging links between these cities and the emperor. With firm roots in their poleis, they were people who, due to some or other particular circumstance, had direct access to the emperor. One of the most outstanding was Aulus Julius Quadratus, the promoter of the second imperial cult temple at Pergamum. He also collaborated in the enlargement and adornment of the gymnasium of the neoi and was behind this association’s links to the emperor. Another key figure was Polemo of Smyrna. After having convinced the emperor to build a splendid gymnasium at Smyrna, he also promoted its counterpart at Pergamum, where he settled at the end of his life. Through the gymnasiums, Hadrian and the Greek aristocrats discovered a sphere of fruitful social and political collaboration that allowed the emperor to make himself felt at the very heart of civic life.

In Callimachus’ fifth hymn, the statement “her look is ever fair” may wittily allude to the myth of Athena as inventor of the aulos, which she immediately threw away thinking that playing it made her face ugly.

This paper discusses an Athenian calyx krater whose style, shape, and inscription allow attribution to the Pantoxena Painter, a member of the Polygnotan workshop. I argue that the unusual scene on the obverse—with a wreathed, draped youth mounting a bema before Nikai and judges—provides the only known image of a rhapsode from the second half of the fifth century BC and joins the very small group of scenes that depict this contest at all. Given the similarity to images of kitharodes and victors in other mousikoi agones, the krater testifies to the continued prestige given rhapsodia in this period. Unfortunately, because the krater was looted from the tomb in Tarquinia where it was placed after export from Athens, its meaning for an Etruscan viewer is more difficult to evaluate. The lack of documentation and physical context means that only part of this vase's biography can be recovered.