When we think of symbols for the arts in Ancient Greece, we might think of a tragic mask, or a laurel wreath, or maybe a grouping of the Muses. These goddesses supposedly embodied the creative spirit of poets and performers of all kinds. But did real Greek women ever dabble in the works of the Muses? Were there female musicians in ancient Greece, what did they play, and how were they viewed by their contemporaries? As a musician and Classicist, I tried to do some investigation into these questions.
It might be worthwhile to divide Ancient Greek music by instrument: stringed instruments (the lyre and barbiton) versus the aulos (double flute). These two types of instruments provided the bulk of Classical Greek music, and dominated to such an extent that when Plato was deciding which instruments to allow in the ideal city, his choice was simply to ban flutes but keep the harps. Apparently, no other instruments were important enough for consideration.
Plato's choice reveals a bit about the associations his audience would have had with each instrument. The lyre, one of the attributes of Apollo, was a symbol of epic, while its seven-or-eight stringed relative, the barbiton, was the traditional instrument of lyric poets. Surviving images of rhapsodes, professional reciters of Homer and praise-poems, usually show them with a lyre in tow.
The aulos, in contrast, seems to have been associated more with what we would consider "entertainment". Its droning sound (rather like a cross between bagpipes and a swarm of bees) provided the soundtrack to symposia and dramatic performances. The double-reed construction enabled the performer to generate complex and dazzling harmonies. What made the aulos problematic (in Plato's eyes as well as others) was its association with a loss of emotional control. The sound of it was said to be so fascinating that men would wander about in a daze, or immediately rush for their weapons as if possessed. While this was all very well at a drinking party or in war, it was thought to make people decadent and unproductive in society.
Where do female musicians fit into these two worlds of ancient music? As always, finding source material for the lives of women in the Archaic and Classical period is a challenge. All of our written accounts referring to female performers are by men, and many of these are heavily colored by certain biases (more on these later). We have a richer body of visual evidence, particularly from painted pottery, but this too should be treated with caution since it can focus on stereotypes or "stock characters" rather than real women.
If we search for women participating in musical competitions, or women performing in settings formal enough to be called concerts, most of these depictions are of one woman: Sappho. There are four known depictions of her from pottery, most of which show her with barbiton in hand. For example this krater by the Brygos painter shows Sappho and her contemporary Alcaeus comparing lyrics:
fig.1 Alcaeus recites while Sappho observes him. Side A of an Attic red-figure kalathos, ca. 470 BC. From Akragas (Sicily). Wikimedia Commons.
This scenelet is credible enough, since Alcaeus himself mentions hearing Sappho's poetry. However, other depictions of her created long after her death function more as illustrations of her poems and cannot inform us of her performance context or audience. Another krater with a drawing of Sappho on one side seemingly following a woman on the opposite side is believed by scholars to illustrate her verse τίς σ᾽, ὦ Ψάπφ᾽, ἀδικήει; καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει " Who wrongs you now Sappho? For if she flees now, soon she shall pursue" and so is not meant to portray a real musical performance at all. The enduring appeal of Sappho as a poet and "The Tenth Muse" meant that depictions of her tend to grow more mythologized with time and less representative of what other female performers would have experienced.
While the frequency of depictions of Sappho speaks to her fame and the respect she was held in, the fact that we cannot put a name to another female lyricist in the visual record makes us aware of what an anomaly she was. While she and her verses might have gained immortality, the other nameless women we glimpse strumming a lyre remain enigmatically silent. For instance, this scene of three women, one playing the barbiton, one holding two halves of an aulos, and a third peeking into a chest, is challenging to unpick:
fig.2 Three women doing...something? The Walters Art Museum, Creative Commons.
Who are they, and why have they gathered? The two standing women are wearing diadems, so they could be preparing for some ritual, which will be performed with musical accompaniment. Their rich draperies, and the third instrument hanging on the back wall could indicate that they are muses, or maybe just wealthy ladies enjoying some informal music-making. Or is this just another scene of Sappho, just minus the labels?
When it comes to references to women playing the aulos, the difficulty in studying the literature is in separating the different usages of auletris, the feminine noun for "Flute-player." Its literal meaning is obvious enough, but by the Classical period, auletris was synonymous with a cheap sex-worker. Thus the numerous references to female flautists we have are necessarily coloured by the assumption that a woman who works as a musician is being hired for something else entirely. Theophrastus' character sketch of "The Vulgar Man'' ends with the gauche figure declaring to his friends that his servant can fetch a flute-girl from the pimp "so that she can play flute and we can be delighted." Isocrates also ranted against the moral laxity of young men who spent all day ἐν τοῖς τῶν αὐλητρίδων διδασκαλείοις διατρίβουσι ("hanging around the training schools for flute-girls.") This idea of flute-playing females as objects of lust is bolstered by surviving images such as this cup at Corpus Christi college:
fig. 3 A typical symposia, with wine, (naked) women, and song, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Wikimedia Commons
But Isocrates' scolding raises an interesting issue of how expert these women were at their instruments. "Training school" could just be a euphemism for brothel, or it could actually mean that these girls received training in their instruments. The aulos is an incredibly difficult instrument to play, requiring 5,000 to 10,000 hours of practice to achieve a tolerable sound. Barnaby Brown, an experienced piper who has worked in reconstructing various Greek auloi and performing on them, described the training process in an interview: "It's an Olympic sport, I've discovered... The sorts of training it requires, circular breathing, learning to hold notes steadily...the number of hours that you need to practise to deliver what they [ancient musicologists] describe in these documents...playing a steady note on the aulos is really, really hard."
This suggests a significant time commitment on the part of the performers, leading one to speculate: if their primary role was sex work, why bother with instruments at all? The argument that these women were actually highly skilled musicians is supported by the fact that several female composers/sex-workers are known to us. Charixene, an auletris mentioned by Aristophanes, is described as a "composer of musical pieces...and writer of songs”, while in the Hellenistic period the compositions of a certain Glauce gained popularity and were mentioned in Theocritus’ Idyll IV. That these women were proficient enough to compose pieces of a quality that was worth emulating suggests to me that they were not dilettantes.
This brings us to a second, more subtle, moral objection to female musicians: that the power of their music led men astray. Plato, never a fan of the performing arts, complained of the hypnotic quality of even mediocre auletrides: τὰ οὖν ἐκείνου ἐάντε ἀγαθὸς αὐλητὴς αὐλῇ ἐάντε φαύλη αὐλητρίς, μόνα κατέχεσθαι ποιεῖ " if anyone, whether a fine flute-player or paltry flute-girl, can but flute their tunes, they have no equal for exciting ravishment."
The music itself is at issue here: the dangerously appealing strains of the flute can have too much influence on minds. Add women to the blend, with their supposed lack of emotional and impulse control, and you had a dire blend. We can speculate how much the origin story of the aulos had to do with this bias. The goddess Athena supposedly crafted the first aulos from the dried-out bones of Medusa, but cast the instrument away in disgust when she realised how ugly her face looked when she puffed out her cheeks to blow into it. The discarded flute was then rescued by a satyr, and thus became a staple of Dionysiac revelling. The story of the flute saw it being rejected by the embodiment of female chastity, and put in the hands of one of the main symbols of the animal appetites. Looked at in this light, the opprobrium attached to auletrides seems slightly less odd. Their frequent appearance in sympotic scenes is also justified, more as an othering device than as a literal depiction of reality. Having an auletris in the picture announces: "This is a celebration of Dionysus. Normal rules need not apply."
However, there is some evidence to show that, despite any moral objections, female musicians did become professional performers outside the sympotic context. Pottery evidence from Greek cities in Italy indicates that female flute-players provided accompaniment to mime and comedy productions. Some fragments now housed at the Benaki Museum in Athens show a man in a comic mask on stage with a flute-player in the background. Unfortunately the musician's head is missing, but the fact that the hands playing the flute are painted white (the traditional colour used in pottery to distinguish women's skin from men's) strongly suggests that it is a woman on stage. More straightforward is a small lekythos housed at the National Gallery of Victoria showing a woman in richly embroidered theatrical costume with her flute:
fig. 4 A female flautist for the theatre. The National Gallery of Victoria, Creative Commons.
Although this is a small body of evidence, it suggests an enticing possibility that women were involved in large-scale public performances, at least by the later Classical period. The idea that women appeared on stage has long been deemed unlikely by scholars, at least in the context of tragedy, but this physical evidence seems to contradict that, at least for comedy-type performances. Unfortunately, literary evidence for this is next to non-existent, so further details about these performers are uncertain. Were they enslaved or free? Were they members of the theatre company, or was their appearance in plays just a way to get income outside the sympotic setting?
One day I hope archaeology will provide more concrete answers to this question, but for the moment, I can offer only supposition. I am inclined to believe that these women were members of performing companies, since literature does reference travelling bands of acrobats or mimes which contained both male and female performers. The dance troupe which makes its appearance in Xenophon's Symposium, for instance, contains an auletris whose primary role is to provide musical accompaniment to acrobatics and mythological tableaux. As to the status of such women, I think is is likely they were slaves or freedwomen, since entertainment, even when not explicitly tied to sex work, was not a prestigious profession.
Emma Arnold is a first-year Classics student at Newnham College. Her main interests are the history of art and philosophy.
Bibliography
James Davidson. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. Harper Perennial: New York, 1997.
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis. "Visualizing Poetry: An Early Representation of Sappho." Classical Philology , Apr., 2001, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 159-168
Alan Hughes. "Ai Dioinysiazuai": Women in Greek Theatre. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2008, Vol. 51 (2008), pp. 1-27
BBC Radio, "The Early Music Show: The Music of Ancient Greece." Aired 28 Jan. 2018, feat. Lucy Skeaping, Armand D'Angour, Barnaby Brown, and Steph Connor.
Isocrates, Antidosis, section 287.
Plato, Symposium, Section 215c.
Sappho, Fragment 1.
Theocritus, Idylls, 4.31.
Theophrastus, Characters, Section 20.10.
Xenophon, Symposium, Chapter 2.
Picture Credits:
fig 1 & 3: Wikimedia commons
fig. 2: The Walters Art Museum, creative commons.
fig. 4: The National Gallery of Victoria, creative commons.
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