The following is excerpted from Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig, by Judith A. Peraino. University of California Press, Copyright 2006.
THERE IS a persistent association in ancient Greek culture of music with sexuality—and not just incidentally, but rather as an operative factor in the vital dynamic represented by particular gods. What follows is a brief survey of some key players: musical-sexual gods who were central to the religious life of ancient Greece, and who remained important archetypes for philosophers, writers, and artists far into the modern era. These gods present a nexus from which we can learn more, for the music involved in the diverse sexual contexts of their myths and rituals was performed—by the gods and their celebrants—and not just contemplated. And instruments figure here in primary ways. Thus music itself can be said to be an instrument—of Dionysian catharsis, of Apollonian control, of sexual Pan(ic).
Music was central in the myths, plays, and cultic rituals devoted to the Olympian gods Dionysus and Apollo. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s early philosophical work, The Birth of Tragedy, these two gods were represented as opposing forces in Greek culture—as if in some kind of Hegelian dialectic. Nowadays scholars tend to see polarity expressed within a single god, Dionysus, and they are inclined to view mythology as manifesting diverse human responses, in which sexual responses, also diverse in nature, are prominent.
Both the name of Dionysus and his associated song type, the dithyramb, begin with the syllable “di,” meaning two, which may refer to Dionysus’ paternity (dios, “of god,” “of Zeus”), as well as his double birth. Dionysus was the son of Zeus and the mortal Semele, but Dionysus’ mother died before his birth. Zeus then took Dionysus within his own body until Dionysus emerged in a “second birth” from Zeus’ thigh. By his first birth Dionysus could be considered a man, by his second, same-sex birth, a god. Dios, then, refers to his maternity as well as his paternity. The poet of the Iliad knew him as a Greek god, but by the 5th century BCE he was clearly marked as a foreigner, said to come from Asia Minor in the region of Phrygia (now northern Turkey). His alleged foreignness metaphorically described and explained the strangeness of behavior demonstrated by his worshipers. Dionysus represents what we might call the melodramatic forces of nature, the polarities of epiphany and deception, ecstasy and horror, death and rebirth and—above all—liberation. To his followers he revealed himself most clearly, and paradoxically, in the delirious abandon kindled by wine. Despite his same-sex second birth, Dionysus was closely associated with women in myth and ritual, believed to have been raised by nymphs and always accompanied by the mænads, a group of frenzied female celebrants often depicted dancing wildly to the accompaniment of the aulos and tambourine. Male worshipers and even the god himself take part in his rituals as transvestites: they donned the long flowing robes of women, with turbans or ivy garlands, or sometimes satyr costumes. Playwrights and artists often depict Dionysus himself as womanly, with long curls, soft plumpness, and a fair complexion. Dance and song constitute the central component of Dionysian rituals. The dancing was accompanied by the aulos, a pair of reed pipes, said to have come from Phrygia, that became one of the two most important instrumental resources of ancient Greek music (the other being the kithara, together with its smaller, specifically Greek form, the lyre). Dionysian song was represented by dithyrambs, a large-scale song type performed by about fifty men and boys and accompanied by an aulos. Pottery art shows the mænads dancing to these songs, with heads and arms raised and bodies twisted as they move forward. These dancing worshipers may or may not have entered an altered state of consciousness, but when they did, they became momentarily liberated from social norms of duty and behavior. Savagery, specifically the tearing and eating of raw flesh (sparagmos), and sexual licentiousness, commonly represented by satyrs, haunted every Dionysian ritual, just as destruction haunts the very principle of liberation. The success of the ritual in liberating women, powerless and housebound by marriage or slavery, is obvious. Men who participated through ritual transvestitism thereby took on the mantle of passive sexuality, believed to be a characteristic of women and antithetical to adult male citizens. Transgressions of gender seemed to flirt with the chaos of savagery and orgy. The god himself, however, is often depicted as unperturbed and unaroused, modeling the very civic order and discipline that his rituals unravel. Stepping into a Dionysian dance, then, meant stepping into a state of high sexual tension; yet the ritual itself circumscribed the transgression and liberation. Just as the Sirens’ song offered Odysseus an opportunity for controlled transgression, Dionysian ritual dance and song resulted in eventual pacification, for the men as well as the women, and this in turn reinstated the civic ideals of unity and tranquility. By another apparent paradox, in the Hellenistic period (4th to 1st century BCE) the musical performers of Dionysian ritual became professionalized. These musicians, known as technitai Dionusou—artists of Dionysus—enjoyed a position of privilege in civic life and duties. Apollo represented the driving force behind the arts, especially music and poetry. One theory connects his name with the words apeile (a promise) and apellai (to hold an assembly). Thus he presides over all types of speech, including song and poetry, and all types of public spoken performances. Literally and figuratively the “youngest” of the Olympian gods, he was the last to enter the Greek cultural record, possibly through the Dorians on Crete, who represented him as an idealized perpetual ephebe—an adolescent boy on the brink of adulthood. In addition to music and fine arts, Apollo governed both the natural dynamics of sheep and wolves as well as plagues and healing, and the human dynamic of archery and hunting in association with his twin sister, Artemis. On a more metaphysical level, he was associated with order and prophecy, symbolized by the sun and light. He was thus a god of revelation and initiation whose means varied from abduction and infection (sheep/wolves, archery/hunt, plagues) to inspiration (music, poetry) to education and restoration (poetry, prophecy, healing). As the ephebe, Apollo represents the initiate who enters adult male citizenship through pedagogical and sexual rites of passage. In early Hellenic Dorian practices (8th to 6th century BCE), an adult male symbolically abducted the initiate, who became an apprentice in hunting and fighting, as well as an eròmenos or passive lover. The role of passive lover remained a common one in the education of young male citizens through the time of Plato and Aristotle. As a god, Apollo necessarily functioned as the teacher, the adult male citizen, and erastès (active lover). Thus Apollo paradoxically embodied both adult and ephebe, initiator and initiate, teacher and student, lover and beloved. There were ecstatic rituals associated with Apollo’s cults, notably the assembly of naked ephebes of the Gymnopaidiai in Sparta (a Dorian city), where singing and dancing were a part of endurance tests in their rites of passage. But he revealed himself mostly through prophetic oracles (famously at Delphi and Delos) and lyric poetry: Apollo’s service as inspiration and educator came together in music and its words. His instrument was the lyre (hence the term “lyric”), though it was invented by the trickster Hermes. As the most popular and esteemed Greek poly-stringed instrument, the lyre was plucked or strummed, providing a musical double to Apollo’s other principal attribute, the bow. Both bow and lyre project Apollo into the world in complementary ways, through arrows and songs. The kind of poem most closely associated with Apollo was the pæan, which originally included the hail Ie Pæan (Hail, Healer). Apollo was also closely associated with a song type called nomos. The word means “law,” possibly indicating the role of law (of some unspecified kind) or custom and convention in the generation and evaluation of music. Possibly related is Apollo’s epithet Nomimos, “the Law giver.” Unlike music in Dionysian rituals, which facilitated and circumscribed transgression, Apollo’s music brings calm to the passions of animals, humans, and gods, as Pindar (518–ca. 438 BCE) writes in his first Pythian ode:* O golden Lyre, possession of Apollo and the violet-haired For Pindar, then, the lyre is an instrument of civic order, the bow that sends forth sweet songs. As the voice of Apollo and the Muses, it brings peace to the Olympic gods and, by extension, to mortal society. Such music is an agent of control, of initiation into citizenship—the instrument of an erastès that pacifies (literally making passive) both men and other gods, turning them into eròmenoi. Here we see again music making for a graceful transition from one inner state to another: for just as Odysseus willingly converted from hero to slave in order to listen to the Sirens’ song, so the most virile and warlike gods, Zeus and Ares, become receptive and submissive partners to the ephebe’s lyric shafts. Liberation into orgy, seduction into serenity—these would seem to provide ample scope for music’s transgressive power. But the figure of Pan, perhaps more than any other, manifests the queer sexual potency of music. A lusty and rustic half-goat, half-man who terrified humans and entertained the gods, Pan originated in Arcadia, the mountainous region of central Peloponnesus (that is to say, he was not Olympian, and not Asian, and certainly not urban). Though a minor deity in myths, his cult spread into Athens by 490 BCE, and he seems to have been much worshiped, judging by the many dedications to him in the medieval collection of ancient epigrams known as The Greek Anthology. As a patron of herds and herders (being himself both human shepherd and animal flock), he looked after the propagation of life, hence his generalized sexuality, for Pan coupled with animals, men and women, and nymphs. But he represents all that is repellent to humankind, the ugly animal (nature) from which civilized people flee (panic being the sudden fright Pan causes—with unidentifiable noises and echoes—in humans who enter his wild woods). The Athenians called upon Pan during wartime, asking him to cause disorder in the ranks of the enemy. As a god, Pan represents indiscriminate desire and indiscriminate fear, both present in the images and myths of his numerous attempts at rape. But he’s also the god who causes joyful abandon and who entertains with leaping dances. By the 5th century BCE, the name Pan was poetically associated with the word pàn, meaning “all” in Greek, though the more likely etymology is from words sharing the Indo-European root *pa- (watch, protect, feed) and referring to pastoral activities and identities. Pan’s most frequently cited family history reads like a 19th-century Gothic account of sexual psychopathology. According to Athenian tradition, he was the son of the immortal Hermes and the mortal Penelope or the nymph Dryope. After his birth, Pan’s mother fled from her monstrous infant in disgust, and this maternal rejection seemingly left him doomed to violent, restless, and often frustrated desire. Many myths relate Pan’s predestined attraction to nymphs—the virgin companions of Artemis—who always reject him, as his mother had done. In one such case, the nymph Syrinx escaped Pan’s grasp with the aid of the Earth goddess, who turned her into marsh reeds. These Pan cut, violently. The breath from Pan’s woeful sighing caused the reeds to vibrate and sing. In this way Pan achieved a manner of sexual union with Syrinx, and the resulting musical instrument—the syrinx or panpipe—became his regular attribute, a proxy for sexual fulfillment. Pan’s music was comparable to that of the Sirens: it evoked uncontrollable desire for contact outside duly constituted relationships. Ironically, as a symbol of frustrated and sublimated premarital desire, his music became associated with some prenuptial rites of passage for young women. In his overt eroticism, Pan was closely associated with Dionysus, who was thought to have a special fondness for the goat-god. This is evident in Pan’s appearance—a clear visual echo—and in the image of the satyrs who dance around Dionysus. And the punishing Dionysian frenzy clearly resembled panic. Pan is also associated with Orpheus; they share prophetic powers and their music can enchant all of nature. In this regard, and as a musician god of shepherds and flocks, Pan comes close to Apollo as well. Their legendary musical contest, in which Pan was judged the winner by Midas, suggests that the music of this wild and unruly creature can exert greater powers of attraction and persuasion than the music of even “the most Greek” of the Greek gods. Although lacking the clear civic function attached to the music of Dionysus and Apollo, Pan’s music nonetheless offers a lesson: one cannot enter his undomesticated realm and expect to remain undefiled. A SURVEY of queer musical figures of ancient Greece should include two famous musicians, Orpheus and Sappho. Both are examples of an early mapping of same-sex eroticism onto a musician’s identity. They, like Dionysus, Apollo, and Pan, appear throughout the centuries in discussions of music and musicians, as well as transgressive sexuality. Orpheus is traditionally considered the son of Apollo and the muse Kalliope, though he seems to have originated in association with the Thracian Dionysian god Œagrus around the 6th century BCE. His powers, like those of Apollo, resided in his singing and lyre playing, which enchanted nature and could sway the hearts of gods. One myth from late antiquity even has Orpheus outsinging the Sirens, protecting the Argonauts with his own musical charm. Though not considered a god, Orpheus had magical and healing powers. He was a shaman figure who became the center of ascetic vegetarian cults that sprang up in the 5th century BCE as tempered versions of Dionysus cults. The two most stable stories of Orpheus are his descent to Hades to resurrect his wife (ending in failure), and his death at the hands of Thracian (also called Ciconian) women. Both have a 4th-century BCE witness in Plato’s Symposium, though Plato had a low opinion of Orpheus, calling him a mere kithara player, a lukewarm lover, and one lacking in courage. Thus, in Greco-Roman culture, Orpheus was an ambivalent figure, for alongside stories of his musical charms there was a longstanding tradition associating him with pederasty and misogyny. These diverse Orphic myths and traditions come together in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ca. 8 CE). Unified by an overarching theme of metamorphosis (“forms changed to other bodies”), Ovid’s compendium of myths told in verse became, along with Virgil’s Æneid (ca. 20 BCE), one of the most important sources of Greco-Roman mythology for writers from late antiquity to modern times. Ovid’s immediate source for the Orpheus story is Virgil’s Georgics 4. Virgil only hinted at the pederastic and misogynistic side of Orpheus, preferring to cast the singer as noble and tragic, whereas Ovid, satirizing Virgil, called attention to exactly those less noble characteristics that Virgil suppressed. At the beginning of book 10, Ovid tells how Eurydice, the new bride of Orpheus, was bitten by a serpent and fell dead, sinking to Hades, and how a grieving and lovesick Orpheus enchanted all the souls of the dead and the king and queen of Hades, Pluto and Proserpina. Taken by Orpheus’ musical supplication, Pluto grants Eurydice a second chance at life on the condition that Orpheus not turn to look at her until they’re securely out of Hades. Orpheus does look back at Eurydice, however, causing her to die a second time. The burden of transformation in this episode seems to belong to Eurydice (from life to death to life to death), but Ovid ends the story with Orpheus’ own metamorphosis—an erotic one: And now because it had ended sadly for him, or because he had vowed to be faithful, Orpheus fled the love of females. Yet many women longed for unions with the bard, and many grieved when he rejected them. He even taught the men of Thrace to turn their desire to tender males and so to pluck the first blossoms boys offer in that brief springtime before they become young men. This Orphic legend had had a long history by the time of Ovid’s recording. In the 3rd century BCE, the poet Phanokles wrote about Orpheus’ love of boys, noting also his introduction of pederasty to Thrace. Orpheus as the point of origin for homosexual pederasty was a theme that circulated well into the early modern era, competing with Christian allegories of Orpheus as Christ or Adam. Albrecht Dürer’s famous print The Death of Orpheus, for example, labels Orpheus “the first pederast” (“Orpheus der erstpuseran”). These words are inscribed on a scroll woven into the leaves of a tree, which serves as a natural witness to Orpheus’ death at the hands of frenzied Thracian women. Ovid links this martyrdom to Orpheus’ spurning of women. After the second death of his bride, we might expect Orpheus to sing laments about his loss, but in Ovid’s account he sings songs about pederastic gods and immoral women, gathering an attentive audience of animals, trees, and rocks. Book 11 begins with the scene of this concert disrupted by the violence of the Ciconian women, who throw spears and stones at the musician’s mouth—the source of his power and his misogyny. But as each object is hurled toward him, “it was overcome by the sweet harmony of his voice and lyre and came to rest at his feet like a suppliant seeking forgiveness for such a mad attack.” Here, in contrast to the penetrating effects of the Sirens’ song on Odysseus’ body, music protects Orpheus’ body from the women’s missiles. This inversion of the power of music—to protect rather than to pierce—highlights Orpheus’ musical mastery and magic. The women, who in some traditions are identified as mænads, then find a new tactic: fighting Apollonian music with that of Dionysus. Ovid writes, “all the angry weapons would have been soothed by Orpheus’ singing if the shouting, if the shrill cry of Phrygian flutes with flared bells, if the rattle of drums, the clapping of hands, the wailing, and the howling had not drowned out the sound of his lyre. But finally the stones no longer heard the poet as he sang, and they grew red with his blood.” Ovid’s black humor is in evidence here as music itself becomes metamorphic, changing from shield to spear; the Dionysian cacophony renders Apollonian song impotent, leaving Orpheus’ body vulnerable. The women tear him to pieces as if in the throes of a Dionysian sparagmos, scattering his limbs in the rivers. His still-singing head and sounding lyre float on the Hebrus to the sea and finally wash up on the shores of Lesbos, an island off the Asiatic coast. This legend, too, has Phanokles as an early witness. He tells how the head and lyre were entombed on Lesbos, and how “after this, the island had both songs and the lovely art of harping, and of all islands it is the most tuneful.” Lesbos was indeed an appropriate destination for the singing voice of Orpheus; the island had been the home of many well-known and innovative lyric poets since the 7th century BCE. Of these, the female poet Sappho (ca. 600 BCE) has gained broad and lasting notoriety, while her fellow male Lesbian poets have faded away. Sappho does not mention Orpheus by name, whose legends did not become widely known until a century or two later. Yet Sappho’s lyrics, intimate, emotional, and distinctively homoerotic, have given her the same status as Orpheus among scholars of classical poetry, and particularly among her present-day lesbian readership. Only one complete poem and nearly 200 fragments of Sappho’s lyrics survive—an extant œuvre filled with more tantalizing and mystifying gaps than clarifying words. Yet these fragments, culled from ancient papyri, potsherds, and quotations by later writers, present a compellingly subjective female voice. Translators and literary scholars often treat the fragments as coherent, interpretable statements, and the verbal lacunæ, though an accident of history, as itself an inscription of the poet’s amorous yearning. A woman of high social standing, Sappho composed songs that focused on emotional and erotic bonds among women. Male authority figures are notably few in her lyrics. She herself became a figure of authority: Plato has Socrates mention her as a source for wisdom about love in Phædrus, and classical writers proclaimed her the tenth Muse and one of the nine great Greek lyric poets. As a woman, Sappho could not participate in the symposia (gatherings of male intellectuals), which provided an important occasion for the composition and performance of much lyric poetry of the time. She nevertheless seems to have been the center of a circle of adult women companions and parthenoi, young unmarried girls perhaps associated with her as pupils and performers of her choral songs. These songs fall into a number of types: epithalamia (wedding songs), hymns or prayers to certain deities (especially Aphrodite), songs about members of her family, a possible epic, and songs about parthenoi. Some of these fragments are satirical in tone; some are erotic love songs and were recognized as such by classical writers. There is much debate about whether Sappho was a practicing lesbian (as currently defined), and whether such a practice might have been a parallel to institutionalized male pederasty. Comedies from the 4th century BCE portray her as a woman of riddles or a somewhat lusty heterosexual. A late papyrus fragment, probably recording material from the 3rd or 2nd century BCE, reports the rumor that she was called a gunaikerastria (a female erastès of women). Ovid used the by-then solid reputation of Sappho as a lover of women to parody her legendary heterosexual love for Phaon. Sappho was, of course, a Lesbian, and this “ethnic” identity—Asian as opposed to Attic—factors strongly in her lyrics, which are filled with references to deities, cities, personages, garments, and perfumes from her island and lands to the East. The short fragment 106 evinces a particular pride in Lesbian musicality: “… superior, just as when a Lesbian/ singer [outdoes]foreign ones …” Another fragment (176), consisting entirely of three words, barbitos, baròmos, barmos, offers a brief glimpse into what seems to be a poetic meditation on the low-pitched, long-armed lyre native to Lesbos. The barbitos was supposedly invented by the 7th-century Lesbian musician Terpander, who, like Orpheus, charmed men through his music. Sappho is herself depicted playing the barbitos on a red-figure wine vessel of the 5th century BCE, and her association with sounding music was later affirmed in the pseudo-Plutarchian De Musica (ca. 100), which ascribes to her the invention of the emotional Mixolydian mode. Sappho’s gendered, musical, and Lesbian (i.e., Asian) identity can be read in the homoerotic fragment 22. Here Sappho appeals to another woman, Abanthis, for a song about a third woman, Gongula, whom Abanthis once desired. Sappho’s song about the desire of another singer culminates in the appearance of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. Originally a Phoenician deity, Aphrodite entered the Greek pantheon via Cypress; Sappho frequently identifies her simply as “the Cyprian.” … I bid you sing As I pray … On one level, the topic of this song is Abanthis’ past desire for Gongula, here explicitly instigated by vision, specifically by a revealing dress. Yet, on another level, this song is about the desire for song, Sappho’s desire to hear Abanthis sing of that past erotic moment and to see Abanthis’ desire reanimated by song. Music serves as the erotic conduit between Sappho and Abanthis. This link, however, seems less about Sappho’s sexual desire, triangulated and voyeuristic, than an amplification and perhaps a celebration of an active, erotic female subjectivity—a queer subjectivity, to be sure, within the phallocentric culture of archaic Greek society (and for historians of sexuality, who tend to focus on men in classical Athens). Eva Stehle speculates that this song was not sung by Sappho to Abanthis but rather given to Abanthis to sing. Thus Sappho’s authorial command to sing, which ignites Abanthis’ desire, functions much like a bard’s petition to the Muse or Pindar’s invocation of Apollo, conjuring a mythic authorization for speech. Perhaps this is why Aphrodite enters the poem with a reproof, for it is she who customarily sets desire to fluttering. And it seems Sappho answers the goddess with a continued assertion of her subjectivity: “I pray … I wish.” Elsewhere, as many scholars have noted, Sappho uses her subjective, incantatory voice to revise the masculine poetics of Homeric epics. In fragment 16 she champions the lyric beauty of “what one loves” over the epic beauty of an army of horsemen, infantry, and ships. Sappho reinterprets the story of Helen of Troy as a prelude to a poetic rumination about her absent beloved Anaktoria. Helen is cast as a hero, a subject rather than object of desire who rightly chose to leave her husband and family in Sparta and follow her lover to Troy (thus sparking the Trojan War). Here, too, we may glimpse something of Sappho’s Lesbian identity, for Troy was an Asiatic city, favored by Aphrodite in the war. Challenging the authority of Homeric (read also: Greek) bards, Sappho claims: “It is completely easy to make this intelligible to everyone … [the Cyprian]led her away.” Sappho’s musical powers of persuasion are not to be disputed, for she has the advantage, in her mythic tale, of being a woman; she is part of an infantry that includes her circle of adult women and parthenoi as well as the most desirable Helen, all led by the most powerful Cyprian goddess. Judith A. Peraino is associate professor of music at Cornell University.
Muses that speaks on their behalf, to whom the dance step harkens …
and whose signal the singers obey …
you even quench the warlike thunderbolt
of ever-flowing fire; and as the eagle sleeps
on Zeus’s scepter, his swift wings
relaxed and folded on each side …
… Indeed, even strong Ares, abandoning the rough
violence of spear points, cheers his heart
in utter quiet, while your shafts enchant the minds of other gods as well.
of Gongula, Abanthis, taking up …
[your]harp, while once again desire (or longing [pothos]) flutters about you,
the lovely one. For the
drapery of her clothing set your heart aflutter as you
looked, and I take delight.
For the holy Cyprian herself
once blamed me …
this word …
I wish …
* Pindar, Pythian 1 (ll. 1–12), in Andrew M. Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation. Hackett, 1996, p. 146.
