Dissertation

Legitimating the nomos: Timotheus' “Persae” in Athens

Power, Timothy Conrad

2001

Overview

“Legitimating the Nomos: Timotheus' Persae in Athens” draws on classical philology and archaeology, critical musicology and contemporary social and cultural theory to examine how the innovative music of the Milesian citharode Timotheus was presented to and received by the late fifth-century BCE Athenian audience of his citharodic nomos Persae. The first part of the dissertation offers a critical appraisal of the main literary evidence for the innovations in the so-called ‘New Music’ of the later fifth century. Some methodological strategies are proposed whereby nuanced information about the social and institutional context of innovation can be extracted from our often vague, emphatically technical or broadly moralizing sources. The second and third sections consider the socioeconomic logic of the agonistic kitharôidia that was practiced by musicians such as Timotheus. Citharodes are professionals who produce music for profit on the large-scale, competitive markets represented by the Panhellenic and regional mousikoi agônes. Kainotomia ‘radical innovation’ comes into tension with the institutionally conventional disposition of the agonistic market; successful musical innovation must be strategically balanced with traditional elements. The effect of Old Comedy's conservative critique of the New Music on its Athenian reception are discussed here as well. Section four reviews and elaborates on arguments for a first performance of Persae at the Panathenaic mousikoi agônes. It is argued that the subject of the nomos, a ‘Salamis without Athens’, reflects a savvy negotiation between the demands of the important Athenian market and the broader pragmatics of Panhellenic diffusion. The final section looks to the text of Persae to uncover various ‘extramusical’ or ‘logocentric’ discursive strategies—specific diction, intertextual gestures, generic appropriation, references to civic traditions and institutions, historical and political allusions etc.—through which Timotheus constructs a rhetoric of legitimation for his innovative musical practices, one especially responsive to the dispositions of an Athenian first audience. The effectiveness of this rhetoric was, I argue, essential to the successful reception of Persae , and most likely to the nomoi he produced subsequently.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Aeschylus (522-456 BC) / Aristophanes (450?-388? BC) / Classical literature / Classical Studies / Euripides (484-406 BC) / Music / Pherecrates / Plutarch (46?-120?)
• ISBN: 0493215905, 9780493215907