Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds

In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.

Part I. Approaching Music and Memory: Introduction Lauren Curtis and Naomi Weiss; 1. Music, Memory, and the (Ancient Greek) Imagination Mark Griffith; Part II. Music, Body, and Textual Archives: 2. Musical Memory on Delos: Theseus in the Archive and the Repertoire Sarah Olsen; 3. Remembered but not Recorded: The Strange Case of Rome's Maiden Chorus Lauren Curtis; 4. Incorporating Memory in Roman Song and Dance: The Case of the Arval Cult Zoa Alonso Fernández; Part III. Technologies of Musical Memory: 5. Do Alexandrians Dream of Electric Sound? Recording Music in the Early Ptolemaic Empire Yvona Trnka-Amrhein; 6. Teichoacoustics, or the Wall as Sonic Medium in Antiquity Peter McMurray; Part IV. Audience, Music, and Repertoire: 7. Iacchus Resonatus: Sound, Memory, and Salvation in Aristophanes' Frogs Tim Power; 8. Performance, Memory, and Affect: Animal Choruses in Attic Vase Painting Naomi Weiss; 9. Meter, Music, and Memory in Roman Comedy Timothy J. Moore; Part V. Music and Memorialization: 10. Sirens on the Edge of the Classical Attic Funerary Monument Seth Estrin; 11. Music as Mnēma on Athenian White-Ground Lekythoi Sheramy D. Bundrick.

Lauren Curtis is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Bard College. She is the author of Imagining the Chorus in Augustan Poetry (2017) and is currently working on a commentary on Ovid, Tristia 3 for Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics.
Naomi Weiss is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She is the author of The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (2018) and co-editor of Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (2019).