Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi - Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws-Cambridge University Press (2013) PDF

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P e r f o r man c e an d C u lt u r e i n P lat o ’ s L a w s
This volume is dedicated to an intriguing Platonic work, the Laws. Probably the
last dialogue Plato wrote, the Laws represents the philosopher’s most fully devel-
oped views on many crucial questions that he had raised in earlier works. Yet
it remains a largely unread and underexplored dialogue. Abounding in unique
and valuable references to dance and music, customs and norms, the Laws seems
to suggest a comprehensive model of culture for the entire polis – something
unparallelled in Plato. This exceptionally rich discussion of cultural matters in
the Laws requires the scrutiny of scholars whose expertise resides beyond the
boundaries of pure philosophical enquiry. The volume offers contributions by
fourteen scholars who work in the broader areas of literary, cultural, and perfor-
mance studies.
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi is Professor of Classics at Stanford University. She

works on Greek aesthetics in poetry, philosophy, and criticism. Frontiers of
Pleasure: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought
was published in 2012.
��
P e r f o r man c e an d
C u lt u r e i n P lat o ’ s L a w s
Edited by
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
Stanford University
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Performance and culture in Plato’s Laws / Edited by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-01687-3 (hardback)
1. Rhetoric, Ancient. 2. Plato – Language. 3. Plato. Laws. 4. Meaning
(Philosophy) I. Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia, editor of compilation.
PA4326.P47 2013
321′.07–dc23 2012035665
ISBN 978-1-107-01687-3 Hardback
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C ontents
List of Illustrations page vii

Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction 1
Part One. Geopo l i t i c s of P e r fo r man ce

2 Cretan Harmonies and Universal Morals: Early
Music and Migrations of Wisdom in Plato’s L aw s 15
Mark Griffith
3 Strictly Ballroom: Egyptian M o u s i k e and Plato’s
Comparative Poetics 67
Ian Rutherford
Part T wo. Con cep t ua l i si ng C ho ra l i ty

4 Choral Practices in Plato’s L aw s : Itineraries of
Initiation? 87
Claude Calame
5 The Chorus of Dionysus: Alcohol and Old Age
in the L aw s 109
Oswyn Murray
� v
Contents
6 Imagining Chorality: Wonder, Plato’s Puppets,

and Moving Statues 123
Leslie Kurke
7 Broken Rhythms in Plato’s L aw s : Materialising
Social Time in the Chorus 171
Barbara Kowalzig
8 Choral Anti-Aesthetics 212
Part T hree . Red efi n i ng Gen re

9 The Orphaned Word: The P h a r m a k o n of
Forgetfulness in Plato’s L aw s 243
Andrea Nightingale
10 Praise and Performance in Plato’s L aw s 265
Kathryn A. Morgan
11 P a i d e s M a l a k o n M o u s o n : Tragedy in Plato’s L aw s 294
Penelope Murray
12 The Rhetoric of Rhapsody in Plato’s L aw s 313
Richard Martin
13 Unideal Genres and the Ideal City: Comedy, Threnody,
and the Making of Citizens in Plato’s L aws 339
Marcus Folch
Pa rt Fo ur. P oet ry a n d M u s i c i n t he
Aft erl i fe o f t he Law s
14 Deregulating Poetry: Callimachus’ Response to
Plato’s L aw s 371
Susan Stephens
15 The L aw s and Aristoxenus on the Criteria of
Musical Judgement 392
Andrew Barker
Bibliography 417
General Index 443
Index of Platonic Passages 453
vi �
I llustrations
1A Egyptian musicians, with double pipes and two different kinds of lutes, 28
1B Egyptian depiction of a lyre player, perhaps a foreign professional, 29
2A Minoan lyre player in procession for sacrificial ceremony, 30
2B Minoan double-pipe player, at sacrificial ceremony, 31
3A Minoan ceremonial bull leapers, 32
3B Hittite ceremonial bull leapers, accompanied by lute players, percussionists,
and dancers, 32
4 Neo-Hittite/Phrygian musicians in ceremonial procession for sacrifice,
including double pipes and two kinds of lyre, plus percussion, 33
5 Map of Crete and the eastern Mediterranean region, 39
6 Arrhythmia in the geometric Greek chorus, 188
7 Chorus members ‘strung’ together in their arrhythmic garment, 189
8 Hoplites on dolphins circling the rounds of the vase, 198
9 The walled chorus, 200
10A Movement in the Greek chorus, 204
10B The static Egyptian chorus, 205
� vii
C ontributors
Andrew Barker is Professor of Classics Emeritus at the Institute of Archaeology

and Antiquity, University of Birmingham.
Claude Calame is Directeur d’Études, École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales, Centre AnHiMA (Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques).
Marcus Folch is Assistant Professor of Classics at Columbia University.
Mark Griffith is Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages
and Literature, Professor of Classics and Professor of Theatre, Dance, and
Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Barbara Kowalzig is Associate Professor of Classics and History at New York
University.
Leslie Kurke is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of Classics and Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard Martin is Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at
Stanford University.
Kathryn A. Morgan is Professor of Classics at the University of California,
Los Angeles.
Oswyn Murray is Emeritus Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University.
Penelope Murray retired as Senior Lecturer from the Department of Classics,
University of Warwick.
� ix
Contributors
Andrea Nightingale is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at

Stanford University.
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi is Professor of Classics at Stanford University.
Ian Rutherford is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading.
Susan Stephens is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and Professor
of Classics at Stanford University.
x �
Acknowledgements
This volume arose from a conference on ‘Mousike, Performance, and Culture

in Plato’s Laws’ held at Stanford University in February 2007 and supported
by the generous funding of the Department of Classics and the senior associate
dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. The conference was designed
to eventually result in a comprehensive publication. Intense dialogue among
the speakers and between the speakers and the audience greatly enriched the
final outcome of this endeavour. The active participation of Benjamin Acosta-
Hughes, Karen Bassi, Ann Bergren, David Fearn, John Ferrari, Gregory Nagy,
Josh Ober, and Frances Spaltro was an invaluable addition to the exchange of
views during the conference.
The first and lengthy discussions I had about Plato’s Laws, a decade ago,
with my former students in Rethymno, Crete (not too far from the Idaean
Cave, the destination of the interlocutors’ journey in the Laws), have been a
great source of inspiration over the years.
I am grateful to Dr. Jason Aftosmis, who has helped me tirelessly and
insightfully with the many tasks that the preparation of such a volume
requires. In the final stages, the knowledgeable assistance of Foivos Karac
halios has been invaluable. Finally, for his meticulous work on the indexes,
I owe many thanks to David Driscoll.
AEP
� xi
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C hap t e r O n e
I n t ro d u c ti o n
Probably the last dialogue Plato wrote, the Laws represents the
philosopher’s most fully developed or revised views on many
crucial questions that he had raised in earlier works. Yet it
remains a largely unread and underexplored work. Some rea-
sons for this disjunction have been addressed in the critical lit-
erature. The Laws is the longest work Plato ever composed, and
its style has often been characterised as less creative and vivid
than that usually employed in his other writings. Moreover,
one encounters significant differences in the ideas given privi-
leged discussion in the dialogue, especially when these are
compared to what has always been considered the Laws’ twin
work, the Republic. Such discrepancies in form and content
have in the past inspired some hesitancy about the authenticity
of the work, despite the dialogue having been explicitly attrib-
uted to Plato even by Aristotle.1 But for all its alleged idiosyn-
crasy, and to some extent because of it, the Laws remains an
exceptionally intriguing piece of thought.
The present volume is a contribution to the increasing efforts
to shed more light on this major but perplexing Platonic work.2
More specifically, the volume aspires to illuminate one con-
sistently underestimated aspect of the dialogue: its uniquely
rich discussion of cultural matters.3 This enterprise requires
the scrutiny of scholars whose expertise resides beyond the
boundaries of pure philosophical enquiry. It calls for readings
� 1
by those working in the broader area of literary, cultural, and

performance studies.
A reader of the Laws soon realises that, more than in any
other of his dialogues, cultural practices are fundamental to
Plato’s theorising about the formation of the citizen and the
polis. And although recent scholarship has indeed brought
to our attention the great significance of Plato’s controver-
sial social theories as they appear in his latest dialogues, and
especially in the Laws, its almost exclusive focus on Plato’s
moral and political stance often leaves unexamined the
all-encompassing nature of the philosopher’s approach to soci-
ety, which places cultural institutions at its core. Of course, the
definition of culture – along with the breadth of its inclusive-
ness and its relationship to the whole of society – has been a
notoriously challenging enterprise in philosophical, sociologi-
cal, and anthropological studies.4 No attempt at such definition
seems to be invulnerable to further conceptual questioning.
Nevertheless, one of Clifford Geertz’s well-known attempts to
define ‘culture’ may be quite illuminating for our purposes. ‘It
denotes’, Geertz suggests, ‘an historically transmitted pattern
of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited con-
ceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about
and attitudes toward life’.5 Interestingly, the notion of paideia
in the Laws, which emphasises the importance of the transmis-
sion of, and further elaboration on, inherited communal values
and attitudes, presents considerable affinities with such a con-
ceptualisation of culture.6 At the core of paideia the dialogue
puts those symbolic forms that are associated with the broader
area of musical practices in the Greek polis.
Recent work has focussed on one of the major discrepancies
between Plato’s middle dialogues – especially the Republic –
and the Laws.7 In the former dialogues, a fully fledged moral
and rational formation, the absolute prerequisite of happi-
ness, is restricted to philosophers. Those who reside outside
the realm of philosophy have at most a limited grasp of this
ultimate good. In the Laws, on the other hand, a larger pool
2 �
Introduction
of citizens, even though nonphilosophers, has the potential to

attain virtue and consequently happiness. In this later, perhaps
more generous Platonic model, legislation becomes instrumen-
tal for the formation and preservation of individual and col-
lective morality. In addition, the Laws seems to favour a more
unitary view of the relationship between body and soul as well
as between the parts of the soul. This view is especially notice-
able when compared with Plato’s struggle, most conspicuously
in the Republic, over stricter oppositions between the rational
and the nonrational aspects of human motivation, a struggle
illustrated through his tripartite division of the soul.
Such differences may be attributed to deeper shifts in Plato’s
thought or might be seen as resulting from the diverging pro-
grammatic orientations of dialogues such as the Republic, on
the one hand, and the Laws, on the other.8 Examining them has
been a crucial advance. The present volume, however, emerges
from a related but quite distinct and overarching question,
usually neglected or marginalised in studies engaged with
Plato’s political and moral deliberations. How are we to inter-
pret Plato’s pervasive, meticulous, and unusually construc-
tive preoccupation with all things musical in the Laws? As an
increasing number of publications over the past two decades
indicates, mousike – that is, the various types and combina-
tions of verbal, instrumental, and kinetic action – was not only
the quintessence of cultural institutions in the Greek polis but
also a decisive component in the making of the collective imag-
inary, especially in classical Athens.9 In fact, one can argue that
it is precisely this socially dominant and influential function
of mousike that drove Plato to agonise in most of his dialogues
(above all, in the Republic) about diminishing or even eliminat-
ing its role in the city-state. Although this is not explicitly and
systematically argued in his work, Plato’s implicit assumption
is that the prevalent musical culture of his time nourishes and
strengthens the lowest constituent of the soul, the appetitive
part. It thus prevents citizens from achieving virtue. As is well
known, the tenth book of the Republic, a long portion of which
is dedicated to musical and poetic matters, openly proposes
� 3
banishing poetry. Interestingly, however, in this book Socrates

leaves two interrelated issues open. First, despite his demand
for the banishment of mimetic poetry, hymns and encomia are
to be maintained, yet with no further specification as to their
performance and function in the polis.10 Second, room is left
for poetry lovers ( philopoietai) to defend poetry in prose, if
they can prove that poetry is not merely delightful but bene-
ficial as well.11
Is, then, the Laws Plato’s own ultimate effort to reestab-
lish poetry and, on a broader scale, mousike in the polis? Are
the detailed descriptions of, and prescriptions about, musi-
cal matters in the Laws Plato’s own response to the two issues
that Socrates left open in the Republic? Or, to return to the
divergences between Plato’s middle dialogues and the Laws
concerning moral philosophy and psychology, to what extent
does Plato’s more inclusive model of the virtuous and happy
society in the latter affect the way he now thinks about musi-
cal – which is to say, cultural – matters? If indeed the Laws
privileges a more unified perception of the human soul, how
does this more consolidated perception of human motivation
affect the philosopher’s struggle against the prevailing Greek
(especially Athenian) modes of creating and dealing with cul-
tural artefacts and institutions? In the course of the Laws, it is
made abundantly clear that the political and moral aspects of
Plato’s views either arise from or depend on his scrupulous dis-
cussion of the cultural institutions to which he refers. To put
it in a different way: beyond abounding in often unique and
valuable references to dance and music, customs and norms,
the Laws seems to suggest a comprehensive model of culture
for the entire polis – something unparallelled in Plato.
Precisely because culture looms so large in the Laws, we
are enabled to appreciate, close up, its programmatic empha-
sis on the diverse cultural identities of the three interlocutors:
Athenian, Spartan, Cretan. This marked heterogeneity widens
the cultural spectrum of this dialogue in an unprecedented
way, especially in the course of discussions about ritual and
educational practices pertaining to mousike. At the same time,
4 �
Introduction
Plato’s specific references to all three aforementioned cultures

underscore one of the main differences between this work and
the Republic. Unlike the Republic’s ideal city, which is located
beyond space and time, one soon realises that the Laws’ exem-
plary city, Magnesia, is imagined within very specific histor-
ical and geographical coordinates: it is to be a fourth-century
colony, located in the south of Crete and is supposed to operate
under the control of Cnossus.12 Thus the interlocutors, in order
to identify the best cultural elements to be introduced into the
new city, engage in illuminating investigations about diverging
local traditions. In other words, although fantasised from the
point of view of an Athenian aristocrat like Plato, the distinc-
tive diversity of the Laws presents us with an active imaginary
that is engaged in envisioning the Athenian milieu through the
lens of differing cultural environments.
This kaleidoscopic examination of Greek cultural matters
in the Laws, along with its important references to Egyptian
practices, arises in most of the contributions to this volume but
is exclusively addressed in two essays specifically dedicated
to the subject. Mark Griffith explores some of the dialogue’s
geographical and cultural paradoxes. He carefully eluci-
dates Plato’s views on whether Magnesia should contain its
own aesthetically consistent, geographically fixed, and over-
all purified mousike, or instead resemble Athens, filled with
a polyphony of multifarious and heterogeneous sounds, both
local and imported. Surprisingly, as Griffith shows, despite all
his ideological constraints Plato’s cultural vision in this dia-
logue allows for some variation and flexibility. Multiplicity
and uniformity sustain and support one another in an other-
wise well-monitored cultural regime. Ian Rutherford, on the
other hand, focusses specifically on the way Egyptian culture
is described and conceptualised in the Laws. He interprets
Egypt’s position in this Platonic work as a musical utopia that
is likely to reflect prevalent ideologies rooted within Egypt and
influential enough to affect the way in which Greek intellec-
tuals perceived and idealised Egyptian culture in the fourth
century b.c. A central issue in Rutherford’s investigation is
� 5
the way in which the Laws presents Egyptian mousike (and

choreia more specifically) as an archetypal model for Spartan
and Cretan musical ideologies and practices.
The institution of choreia, the coordinated song-and-dance
performances by men or women of various age-groups, is a
cardinal issue for the Laws. The significance of its extensive
discussion for our understanding of the evolution of Platonic
thought cannot be stressed enough. From extant choral poetry
and sporadic references to choreia in later texts, we know that
choral singing and dancing were of paramount importance for
the formation of character and taste and a fundamental vehicle
of social consciousness in most Greek cities. Yet Plato’s Laws
constitutes the only surviving ancient source that thoroughly
theorises about Greek chorality. For the first time, Plato here
presents not only the negative and dangerous aspects of poetic
and musical practices in a society (as he sees them) but also
a positive and comprehensive model of total participation in
communal performances. Although secondary literature has
generally noted the significance of this late Platonic approach
to chorality, a focussed and extensive discussion of its mul-
tifaceted treatment in the Laws has long been wanting. The
volume contains comprehensive discussions of the anthropo-
logical, political, and aesthetic aspects of Plato’s views on the
subject.
The initiatory function of the chorus, its traditional role
in promoting and controlling the passage from one age-class
to the next, makes choreia key to our understanding of social
and cultural norms in Greece. Is Plato’s program, concerning
the age-group choruses of Magnesia, a vision of choreia’s ini-
tiatory role? A detailed approach to this question leads Claude
Calame to the conclusion that Plato’s musical vision in the
Laws, clearly privileging melic genres, presents us with sev-
eral novel aspects. While the philosopher’s discussion of chor-
eia may create the impression of a nostalgic return to archaic
models of social organisation, Calame argues that Plato’s choral
ideal proposes a new musical and educational order. Although
indeed meant to replace a musical regime that Plato perceived
6 �
Introduction
as utterly disoriented and disorderly in his native city, his

ideal choreia does at the same time undermine the conventional
initiatory role of this institution in the Cretan and Spartan tra-
ditions with which the Athenian interlocutor is supposedly in
dialogue throughout the Laws.
Oswyn Murray as well argues for a Platonic subversion of
the authority of the traditional Spartan model in analysing
another major issue raised in the dialogue: the relationship
between the institution of the symposion and that of the cho-
rus, especially with reference to the puzzling overlap between
the sympotic and the choral activities of the so-called cho-
rus of the elders. This interesting institutional hybrid, at the
same time choral and sympotic, is viewed by Murray in the
broader context of Plato’s fundamental reassessment of human
nature in the Laws. Pleasure, instead of being confronted as
the adversary of virtue, is now treated as a sensation that can
be redirected to underpin a novel cultural ideal.
Plato’s extensive analysis of the function of the chorus, then,
is a mixture of archaising ideas and fresh, at times striking,
approaches to the way in which mousike can restructure the
world of the polis. The vital role of choreia in Plato’s blending
of traditional and innovative perceptions of society is explored
by Leslie Kurke. Her interpretation of Plato’s conceptualisation
of chorality in terms of puppetry provides a new understand-
ing of the programmatic yet enigmatic reference, in the first
book of the Laws, to human beings as divine puppets. In the
Laws, as Kurke shows, the image of divine puppets is intimately
linked to Plato’s modelling of choral education: in fact, this
image distils and reenvisions certain deeply traditional Greek
conceptions of the pleasures, powers, and aesthetics of choral
dance as a means of social cohesion.
Social cohesion is a leading aspect of the philosopher’s
all-inclusive choral program, a notion that Barbara Kowalzig
discusses in terms of Plato’s underlying interest in the rela-
tionship between chorality and rhythm as social and politi-
cal tools. Benveniste’s well-known analysis of the etymological
relationship between the verb rhein (to flow) and the noun
� 7
rhythmos (rhythm) helps Kowalzig interpret Plato’s vision of

choreia as a collective ‘manner of flowing’, where Platonic
notions of rhythmicity and temporality bring together not
only the individual and the collective but also nature and
culture. Finally, in my essay I claim that Plato’s choral model,
while apparently reestablishing mousike for the entire polis, in
fact promotes a cultural model that is utterly untheatrical and
inherently de-aestheticised. Thus, the all-participatory choreia
of the Laws emerges as Plato’s last (and perhaps most creative)
device through which mousike can be ostensibly affirmed,
while at the same time the Athenian musical scene is effec-
tively undermined. Challenging notional and cultural bonds
between spectatorship and aesthetic pleasure, well established
within antiquity, is crucial to this Platonic strategy.
Choreia, thus, is unquestionably a key to better understand-
ing Plato’s vision of culture in this late work. But there are
other, equally revealing, ways in which Plato interacts with
and transforms established cultural categories, especially
those related to performance genres. One of the innovations
introduced in the Laws, having to do with the intersection
of political and cultural institutions, is that of the ‘preludes’
( prooimia) to all legislation governing the new city. That the
term pro-oimion (prelude) is a deliberate choice on the part
of the Athenian both to evoke and to transform established
poetic and musical practices is made clear in the fourth book
(722d–e), where the Athenian reminds his interlocutors that
the original employment of this term applies, for instance, to
the introductory segment of the kitharodic nomes. In this vol-
ume Andrea Nightingale argues that in the Laws the actual
combined text of the preludes plus the laws, so central to the
entire program of the dialogue, transforms the law code into a
new and hybrid genre that becomes, in turn, an example for all
discourse to be used in education. More importantly, if we take
into account Plato’s analysis in other dialogues of the func-
tion of the written text as opposed to oral composition and
delivery, his insistence on the memorisation of the written law
code in the Laws suggests that this text operates as a ‘lethic’
8 �
Introduction
tool, meant to destroy the citizen’s memory of earlier cultural

practices.
The Laws’ versatile transformation of the notion of genre
is also explored by Kathryn Morgan, who illuminates the for-
malised structures of praise in the ideal city of Magnesia and
the way in which the genre of praise becomes the organising
principle of all cultural and civic life. As she emphasises, the
society envisioned in the Laws involves an unprecedented
supervising of the citizen body, in a world structured around
the ancient discursive (mainly poetic) polarity of praise and
blame, thereby turning the entire range of citizen life into a
peculiar type of performance.
While the two just-mentioned contributions explore dif-
ferent aspects of Plato’s transmutation of the very concept of
genre, the three following contributions investigate the philos-
opher’s approach to conventional genres: tragedy, epic poetry,
comedy, and lament. The Laws’ attitude towards tragedy is dis-
cussed by Penelope Murray, particularly in comparison with
the Republic. Although ostensibly lenient towards the genre,
in fact the Athenian asks for nothing less than a full redefini-
tion of the tragic, thus completely altering its very essence and
generic identity. Tragedy is therefore the genre to which the
philosopher remains most hostile in his last work. Politely and
tactfully, as Murray argues, the poets of tragedy are indeed
banished from the city. Starting from the prominence of the
interlocutors’ local identities, Richard Martin asks why it is
only the Athenian who cites the ‘foreign’ poetry of Homer and
suggests that the Laws accurately captures for us a rhetori-
cal habit of Plato’s own contemporary city-state. The Athenian
Stranger is not merely a stand-in for Socrates or Plato, and his
habitual cultural stance may represent a contrast to Plato’s own
ideological treatment of epic in light of concerns about moral-
ity and mimesis.
Finally, Plato’s attitude towards the ‘lower’ genres of invec-
tive and comedy, on the one hand, and of lament, on the other,
is explored by Marcus Folch. In this case performers and audi-
ence are socially distinguished one from the other: these ‘lower’
� 9
genres can be attended by the body of Magnesia’s citizens, yet

they cannot be performed by them; their performers can only
be the ‘lower’, disenfranchised, classes of noncitizens and
slaves. Thus, as Folch suggests, despite Plato’s struggle against
theatrocracy, a new type of ‘theatrocracy’ is established in the
Laws, the citizens’ institutionalised viewing of social alterity.
This is an emblematic instance of the way aesthetics and poli-
tics intersect in Plato’s late thought.
As mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, the
Laws remains one of the least read Platonic dialogues in modern
times. By contrast, there are indications that this late Platonic
work was read often and intently in antiquity. As the specific
focus of this book is Plato’s extensive and detailed discussions
of cultural matters throughout the dialogue, it concludes with
two essays exploring the way in which the Laws can illuminate
the work of two remarkably influential authorities in musi-
cal and poetic matters. More specifically, the essays explore
Callimachus’ and Aristoxenus’ views on musical and poetic
decorum in the light of Plato’s discussion of such matters in
the Laws. Susan Stephens argues that Callimachus’ choice
of topics on which to confront his ‘critics’ is not random or
merely indicative of contemporary Alexandria but a deliberate
invocation of Plato and his attempts to regulate poetry in the
Laws. Callimachus strongly questions and, at times, ironises
those Platonic proposals. Andrew Barker, on the other hand,
discusses the criteria by which, according to both Plato and
Aristoxenus, a piece of music can properly be assessed as ‘cor-
rect’ or ‘incorrect’ and as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Examining how these
issues were addressed by Aristoxenus, a non-Platonist musical
expert in the late fourth century, enables us to identify more
clearly the idiosyncratic components of Platonic approaches to
musical decorum in the Laws.
The reader of this volume will realise that there are many
other themes linking its four parts. Issues pertaining to the
relationship between authority and performance, pleasure
and manipulation, tradition and innovation, coherence and
diversity, spectatorship and participation, the actual and the
10 �
Introduction
imaginary, permeate all individual contributions and set up

resonances throughout the entire volume. Key passages of the
Laws do surface in several chapters, to be discussed from dif-
ferent but complementary angles. By focussing on issues rele-
vant to performance and culture in the Laws, the volume aims
at raising new questions in the study of Plato, while making
clear the extraordinary significance of this Platonic work for
cultural studies as well as for art theory and criticism, both
ancient and modern.13 Opening, as it does, fundamental enqui-
ries relevant to aesthetics and reception, literary and cultural
theory, texts and enactments, the book flows well beyond the
disciplines of classics and classical philosophy, towards the
vibrant confluence of social anthropology, comparative litera-
ture, and the philosophy of art.
Not e s
1 Eduard Zeller (1969 [1839] 117–35), for instance, had initially
questioned the authenticity of the work. On scholars questioning
the authenticity of the work in the nineteenth and in the twen-
tieth century, see Lisi (2001b) 11–13. For Aristotle’s references to
the Laws, see, e.g., Pol. 1264b–1265a, 1266a, 1271b, though it is
uncertain what version of the text Aristotle was referring to. For
a brief account of the textual transmission of the Laws, see Lisi
(2001c) 277–88. For a brief account of problems related to the
date and the composition of the Laws, see Stalley (1983) 2–4.
2 See, e.g., Lisi (2001a); Bobonich (2002); Scolnicov and Brisson
(2003); and most recently, and while the present volume was in
an advanced stage of its publication process, Bobonich (2010).
3 In his seminal study on the Laws, Morrow (1960) dedicates a
chapter to ‘Education’, where he presents many of the cultural
issues raised in the dialogue. This illuminating chapter is a help-
ful basis for further deliberation on Plato’s controversial views.
In her relatively recent study on the Laws, Mouze (2005), who
offers an overall interpretation of the dialogue, has an excellent
eye for the philosopher’s cultural concerns. In the first part of
his book, Panno (2007) discusses interesting aspects of theatrical
culture, religion, and politics in the Laws.
4 See Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963); Kuper (1999).
5 Geertz (1973) 89.
6 See esp. Laws 643a–644a.
� 11
7 See especially Bobonich’s (2002) study of these issues at length

and Kahn’s (2004) extensive response.
8 Kahn (2004); Sassi (2008).
9 See, e.g., Dougherty and Kurke (1993, 2003); Goldhill and
Osborne (1999); Nehamas (1999b); Murray and Wilson (2004).
10 Rep. 607a.
11 Rep. 607c–e.
12 See esp. Laws 702b.
13 The Laws is usually absent from volumes dedicated to the his-
tory of aesthetics or to the history of literary and art criticism.
Limited space is given to this Platonic work in two major anthol-
ogies of ancient criticism and modern aesthetics respectively;
Russell and Winterbottom (1972) 81–4; and Hofstadter and
Kuhns (1964) 49–52.
12 �
��
P art O n e
Geopolitics of
P e r f o r ma n c e
��
C hap t e r T wo
C r e ta n H a r m o n i e s
and Universal
M o ra l s
Ea r ly Mu s i c a n d Mi gr a t i o n s o f
W i s d o m i n P l a t o ’s L aw s
Mark Griffith
Int ro d uc t ion
Why does Plato choose Crete for the founding of his (second)
model city? What was it about this island – in reality or in
the Athenian imagination – that might make it an appropriate
musical and legislative site for building the best possible indi-
vidual characters and political community? And how distinc-
tive, fixed, and definitive is the musical regime meant to be for
Magnesia in comparison with other Greek cities? The title of
my chapter is intended to signal that I discuss here both some
of the geographical or geopolitical aspects of the musical cul-
ture that are mentioned in the Laws and various Platonic (and,
more generally, classical Greek) notions as to where ‘Greek’
music – and ‘wisdom’ in general – originally came from, and
what qualities of the earliest music (and wisdom) might be most
I am very grateful to Giovanni Ferrari, Crawford H. Greenewalt Jr.,

Leslie Kurke, Derin McLeod, and especially Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
for their generous comments, corrections, and suggestions.
� 15
Mark Griffith
deserving of preservation and admiration. Also under scrutiny

are some of the movements (‘migrations’) that are described in
the Laws as taking place, or having taken place, from one city
to another or from visiting ‘strangers, guest artists’ (xenoi), and
itinerant professionals, whose performances may, or may not,
be incorporated into the carefully planned musical regime of
Magnesia.
Plato’s musical program, both in the Republic and in the
Laws, is generally regarded as being extremely conservative
and restrictive, in comparison to (indeed, in reaction against)
the instrumental and harmonic developments of the fifth cen-
tury, and especially the innovations and multiplicity of musical
forms of Athenian theatre culture (tragedy, comedy, and dithy-
ramb). In his strong preference for lyre and cithara over auloi,
and for Dorian – and, to a much smaller degree, Phrygian –
modes over all others (Mixolydian, Syntono-Lydian, Ionian:
Rep. 398d–399e), he clearly seems to be seeking to purge his
ideal educational system and performance spaces of all for-
eign and new-fangled elements that might corrupt, soften, and
stunt the ethical potential of his intended citizens.1 Such ideas
about the moral and sociopolitical effects of music (including
choral performance) were not new, but Plato seems to be push-
ing them further than most of his contemporaries and in a more
concertedly conservative direction,2 and in particular his pro-
posals for banning tragedy in the Republic and the fastidious
regulation of choruses in the Laws have struck most readers as
being both extreme and eccentric.
The notion that the musical performances – including
dances – of a particular community (a ‘people’, a nation, a
region, an ethnic group, or even a single town) might be espe-
cially indicative – and formative – of its cultural identity and
‘character’ is familiar enough, of course, and uncontroversial.
And there can be no doubt that the formation and maintenance
of a common Hellenic culture during the archaic and classi-
cal periods among the various cities and communities dotted
all around the Mediterranean Sea involved many complexly
interwoven strands. Even as such standardising institutions as
16 �
Cretan Harmonies and Universal Morals
the Panhellenic festivals, architectural and sculptural styles,

conventions of hoplite and naval warfare, athletic training,
the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, and eventually the spread
of (mainly Ionic/Attic) written texts all tended to draw the dif-
ferent communities into a sense of belonging to a single, dis-
tinctive cultural heritage, in many other respects the Greeks
remained quite fragmented and disparate – and proudly so –
in their local forms of cultural expression, including dialects,
laws, religious cults and calendars, mythological and genealog-
ical traditions, ceramics, weights and measures, coinage, and
even writing systems.3 This was certainly true of their musical
and choreographic performances as well, though the surviving
evidence is inevitably scant and elusive. On the one hand, it
seems clear that most of what came to be regarded as tradi-
tional ‘Greek’ musical instruments, tunings, and perhaps even
whole melodies were in fact originally adopted and adapted
from neighbouring peoples to the north and east – a process
that apparently continued into the classical period. It also
appears, on the other hand, that local variation and innovation
among different Greek communities were frequent and cultur-
ally important (as with those other forms of symbolic expres-
sion and practical usage just mentioned), as these communities
sought to identify themselves as thoroughly ‘Greek’ and yet also
to distinguish themselves in certain respects from other Greek
neighbours and rivals.4 Narratives about the careers of leading
poet-musicians such as Terpander, Olympus, Arion, Sappho,
Anacreon, Pratinas, Euripides, and Timotheus attest to the
ongoing processes of cultural innovation and local competition
within the field of choral and solo musical performance, while
the surviving poems of Simonides and Pindar – and the com-
edies and satyr plays of the Athenian theatre – likewise refer
to ongoing challenges and disagreements about proper modes
of performance.5 From another perspective, the revolutionary
impact of reforms made in choral performances by Cleisthenes
of Sicyon and the Peisistratids in Athens during the sixth cen-
tury is well known and probably represents part of a much
larger cultural phenomenon.6
� 17
Mark Griffith
Vocal and instrumental music and dance are among any

community’s most prominent (visible as well as audible) mark-
ers of cultural identity.7 Even in the modern era, when com-
munications (including recordings) are infinitely faster and
more extensive, as is travel and the migration of populations,
the different characteristics of particular local or ethnic musics
are often distinctively maintained; and, at the same time,
within any one region or city there may be sharp discrepan-
cies between the music favoured by the elite (‘classical’ or ‘art
music’) and that embraced by one or more of the less privi-
leged or more ethnically distinct social groups (‘folk’ or ‘pop’
or ‘traditional’).8
The sociopolitical stakes in maintaining such local or ethnic
or class differences, or in trying to suppress them in favour
of a single ‘national’ (or ‘correct’ or ‘pure’) musical idiom and
repertoire, can be huge, and Plato is by no means unusual in
seeking to ban or restrict certain types of music and dance –
especially those considered to be of ‘foreign’ or low-class or
ethnically dubious origin9 – from being performed in his ideal
states, whether for the purposes of education or for entertain-
ment of the population at large, while promoting and fostering
the performance of other, ‘correct’ types. Our own era pre
sents numerous instances of these same tendencies, including
in many cases attempts by governments to impose strict rules
about the arts and to ban or severely curtail minority/ethnic or
immoral/irreligious or modernising/Westernising musical per-
formance styles.10
Thus, the anxiety that we find expressed by several ancient
Greek educational theorists and moralists – including Plato
and Aristotle – concerning the need to shape this most cultur-
ally essential and expressive art and preserve it from the cor-
rupting effects of ‘foreign’ tunings and melodies, untraditional
‘mixing’ of elements, and all the innovative extravagances of
the New Music conforms to an age-old and pervasive pattern
of national or cultural pride and prejudice.
In this chapter I want to examine the ways in which Plato
does and does not work towards designing a distinct and
18 �
standardised musical-cultural identity for his Magnesians.

The ‘Cretan harmonies’ of my main title are thus the vari-
ous musical elements that are described, prescribed, and pro-
scribed in Plato’s Laws, while the ‘universal morals’ refer to
Plato’s overarching epistemological and ethical theories to
which any local performative regime must presumably con-
form.11 As for the second part of my title, the term ‘Early
Music’ alludes to a late twentieth-century musicologists’
term for the fashion of preferring fifteenth- to eighteenth-
century European music to that of the nineteenth century,
and – even more definitively – of playing that music on orig-
inal or restored instruments and employing as far as possible
the exact ornamentation and phrasing intended and expected
by the composer, rather than using instruments, orchestra
sizes, and styles of playing and singing that had become nor-
mal in concert halls since the mid-nineteenth century. The
‘Early Music Movement’ was inspired by the conviction that
‘authentic, original’ is best: performers and audiences should
respect what the composer intended – for this and only this
is the proper mode of performance for that kind of music.
Thus, even if perfect ‘authenticity’ may not always be recov-
erable, every possible attempt should be made – even if (or
especially if ) modern audiences’ ears and tastes may need to
be radically reeducated out of their decadent (post-Romantic)
habits. There is often a moral, as well as an aesthetic, compo-
nent to this movement’s rhetoric.12
As for ‘Migrations of wisdom’, I am alluding here to
Richard Martin’s studies of ‘metanastic poetics’, conducted
in the first place with regard to Hesiod and the Seven Sages
and developed further by others in recent years, with regard
both to displays of individual verbal and technical virtuos-
ity by travelling sophoi/sophistai and to the sharing by differ-
ent Greek poleis of choral and other performances in religious
embassies and festivals.13 My own purpose here is to try to
sort out how Crete’s place in the ancient geopolitical world,
and in the migratory history or mythology of music – and of
legislation – is configured in Plato’s idiosyncratic, yet highly
� 19
Mark Griffith
traditionalising, account in the Laws. Where does Magnesian

music come from, and how distinctive and standardised does
Plato intend it to be?
It seems clear enough, to be sure, that Plato, like Pythagoras
and Damon before him, and Aristotle and Aristoxenus after
him,14 was convinced that different types of music (tunings,
scales, melodies, rhythms, dance movements) each conveyed
and fostered their own distinctive ethical characteristics, that
these different tunings and styles and performance traditions
often had fairly specific regional – even ethnic – affiliations
and origins (e.g., ‘Lydian’, ‘Phrygian’, ‘Ionian’, ‘Dorian’), and
that only the best of them should be selected and instilled into
young people, through constant reiteration (practice, practice,
practice) and careful regulation. This conviction is evident at
various points in the Republic and seems at first glance to be
even more so in the Laws.15
In the next section I want to focus on the view or views that
are presented to us in the Laws concerning the origins of the
best music in general and the best Greek music in particular,16
including some consideration of what Plato’s three interlocu-
tors (and other Greek theorists of music) have to say about
the ways in which music (including poetry in general) has
been transmitted from one place to another and adopted by
one society from another. I supply also a brief account of cur-
rent scholarship assessing the origins of Greek music and its
relationship to other musical traditions, especially those of
the Near East, along with some general observations on the
apparently simultaneous emergence of the idea of a ‘standard’
Greek language and a standardised or theorised musical tradi-
tion, from the late fifth century onwards. Then, in the third
section I explore some passages in the Laws that seem to grant
opportunities, even in the context of Plato’s fantastically
conservative and xenophobic curriculum of traditionalised
musical performances, for continued musical borrowing and
hybridisation (‘migration’), and thus for the exposure of the
citizen population of Magnesia to a variety of more or less
new sounds.
20 �
‘ Ear ly Mu sic ’, Plato and the Gre e ks

What did the Greeks – Plato or anyone else – know or
believe about their musical past? What do we ourselves know
about it?17
Plato makes some remarkable claims about ‘Early Music’ in
the Laws, especially about Egypt:
Athenian: Now where laws are, or will be in the future,

rightly laid down regarding musical education and
recreation, do we suppose that poets will be allowed to
teach whatever rhythm or melody or words they per-
sonally happen to like to the children of law-abiding
citizens and the young men in the choruses, no mat-
ter what the result may be in the way of virtue or
depravity?
Cleinias: No, that really doesn’t make sense at all.
Athenian: But at present that’s what is allowed in prac-
tically every city and state, with the exception of
Egypt.
Cleinias: How, then, has the law/custom (nomos) about
such things been set up in Egypt?
Athenian: It is marvellous, even just to hear about. It
appears that long ago they determined on the rule that
we’re now talking about, that the youth of a state should
practise in their rehearsals those postures, movements,
and tunes that are good: these they prescribed in detail
and posted up in the temples, and outside this official
list it was, and still is, forbidden to painters and all
other producers of postures, movements, and repre-
sentations to introduce any innovation or invention,
whether in such productions or in any other branch
of music and the arts, over and above the traditional
forms. And if you look there, you will find that the
things depicted – painted or carved – 10,000 years ago
(I mean this quite literally: 10,000!) are in no way any
better or any worse than the productions of today, but
produced with exactly the same art.
Cleinias: That’s amazing! (656c–657a)
� 21
Mark Griffith
Here is a community, it is stated, where for ten thousand

years no changes have been allowed in painting, sculpture, or
musical performance; the same set tunes and songs for each
occasion are ritually repeated, year after year after year – music
that may have been composed by the goddess Isis herself, the
Athenian goes on to suggest;18 and these artistic stipulations
have all been carefully written down to ensure universal and
permanent adherence.
In fact, of course, conservative though many forms of
Egyptian art certainly were over the centuries, this set of
claims is wild exaggeration, if not outright nonsense.19 Perhaps
Plato is following Herodotus, who assures us with an equally
straight face that the Egyptians know only one melody:
They keep the customs of their forefathers, and never add any
new ones. Among other notable customs of theirs is this, that
they have one song, ‘Linus’, who is sung about in Phoenicia
and Cyprus and elsewhere too. Each nation has a different
name of its own for this character, but it turns out to be the
same song that the Greeks sing and call ‘Linus’. There were
many things in Egypt that amazed me, and this was one of
them: from where did the Egyptians get [the name] ‘Linus’?
Plainly they have always sung this song; but in Egyptian Linus
is called Maneros. They told me that Maneros was the only son
of their first king, Aigyptos, and when he died prematurely
this dirge was sung by the Egyptians in his honour; so this,
they said, was their earliest and their only song. (Hdt. 2.79)
This primeval Egyptian dirge is thus supposed to be ‘just the

same as what the Greeks sing’, by which Herodotus may be
referring to the Homeric mention of the ‘beautiful Linus song’
(Il. 18.569–72), though other pre-Herodotean references to
such a pastoral lamentation-poetry seem to have existed too.20
In any case, there is plenty of documentation, both visual and
textual, to show that the Egyptians in fact had a wide variety
of different musical forms and instruments, some of them dat-
ing back to well into the second and even the third millen-
nium, others emerging later.21
22 �
Plato’s point, however, is obviously to contrast the extreme

(alleged, idealised) traditionalism and sanctification of Egyptian
sacred music with the excessive innovations and consequent
ethical instability of Athenian music of the late fifth century
(Laws 799a–b; 800d–e). Within this binary Egyptian-Athenian
opposition, Plato is then able to introduce a middle term
(one that is quickly agreed upon by all three interlocutors),22
namely, the long-standing and conservative musical tradi-
tion that the Cretans and Spartans claimed to share: these two
Dorian communities are said at several points in the Laws (as in,
e.g., Aristotle’s Politics 2, chs. 6–7, esp. 1269a22–5, 1271b15–
1272b4) to have developed and maintained a large number of
cultural characteristics and institutions in common – including
mess halls (sussitia or phiditia), military training, law codes,
and music (especially choruses) – all of which are supposed to
date back to the glory days of their first great legislators many
centuries before (a topic to which I return later).
This musical-military-institutional traditionalism (real or
alleged) is represented in both cases as being based on ‘laws/
tunes’ (nomoi, a term much punned upon in the Laws) that
were instituted by the combined efforts, it appears, both of
some extraordinary lawgivers (Minos/Rhadamanthys and Zeus
in Crete; Lycurgus and Apollo in Sparta) and of some excep-
tionally gifted musicians. In the case of Crete,23 the poet-sage
we hear the most of is Epimenides, who is said to have improved
greatly the rougher, earlier productions of Hesiod (677c–e). In
regard to Sparta, early in the dialogue Tyrtaeus is cited (Laws
629a), and his elegiacs are repeatedly quoted, but in due course
other famous ‘Spartan’ musicians and early lawgivers are men-
tioned too as contributing significantly to the formation of the
Spartan character. In particular, we are told that the choruses
of Sparta (and Crete) have been in place for centuries and have
been a key to their military prowess as well as their politi-
cal stability; so we are clearly meant to be reminded of the
choral lyric traditions of Alcman, Terpander, and others. Ever
since those early days, we are to imagine – days more or less
� 23
Mark Griffith
contemporary with Lycurgus himself – choruses (or ‘herds’) of

young men and women24 have been singing and dancing more
or less the ‘same’ songs, year after year, as part of the elaborate
educational system, the ‘upbringing’ (agoge) for which both
societies were renowned, a set of institutions almost as fixed
and self-contained as those of the celebrated Egyptians.25
Yet, even in the same breath in which he first mentions

Tyrtaeus’ beneficial effects on the Spartans, Plato’s Athenian
observes (629a) that this quintessential Spartan poet was in
fact an Athenian by birth,26 just as a moment later he mentions
that Theognis, too, that arch-conservative moralist-educator-
symposiast so beloved by upper-class Athenians, came in fact
not from Megara-just-down-the-road-from-Athens but from
the Megara in Sicily (630a). And this general picture, of star
musicians and poets arriving from elsewhere, ‘bringing’ with
them or ‘inventing’ new elements of musical technique that
have since become completely and essentially ‘Greek’ (or spe-
cifically echt-Dorian), is one that is found not only in Plato’s
Laws but in many (perhaps even most?) of the accounts of
their musical past provided by Greek cultural historians and
music theorists of all periods. That is to say, the best – and
most characteristically Greek – harmonies, tunings, melodies,
and even instruments came, or were said to have come, from
other regions or countries, and from other peoples. Thus, at
Laws 677c–e, the ‘short history’ that Cleinias supplies (with
tactful augmentation from the Athenian) of the most impor-
tant cultural inventions through the millennia (εἴ τι τέχνης
ἦν ἐχόμενον σπουδαίως ηὑρημένον ἢ πολιτικῆς ἢ καὶ σοφίας
τινὸς ἑτέρας) runs through Daedalus, Orpheus, Palamedes,
Marsyas and Olympus, Amphion, and – much more recently
(‘just yesterday’ (χθὲς καὶ πρώιην), 677d6) – Epimenides. Of
these, Daedalus is a Cretan who migrated to Athens, as – in a
sense – was Epimenides. Of the musical ‘inventors’, Orpheus,
Marsyas, and Olympus were all northern or eastern foreigners;
only Amphion was a homegrown Greek (from Thebes). And in
many of the narratives of cultural innovation and importation,
24 �
the particular individual who brings the vital new musical ele-
ment (an instrument, extra strings, or tuning, or a set of special
songs) into Greece, either as a foreigner coming to visit or to
immigrate or as a Greek travelling to another land to acquire
this new expertise, is also credited with being a lawgiver or
settler of civil disorder.
Let us briefly survey some examples:
1. Olympus: According to the Suda, he was ‘a Phrygian, an

aulete, who lived in the time of Midas’; Pseudo-Plutarch
(De Mus. 5.1132ef ) reports that he ‘was the first to intro-
duce instrumental music (kroumata) into Greece, along
with the Idaean Daktyls’ (!), while Pollux (4.78) states that
‘the tunes (nomoi) of Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygian
and Lydian’. As for Plato himself (or Pseudo-Plato), in
Minos (318b) Socrates raises the question, ‘Who of the
ancients was a good lawgiver (nomothetes) in the pipe-
playing tunes/laws (auletikois nomois)?’, and, as often,
answers his own question, ‘Was it not Marsyas . . . and his
boyfriend/student ( paidika) Olympus the Phrygian?’27
2. Terpander of Antissa: Pseudo-Plutarch (De Mus.
28.1140f ) states that ‘those who have investigated such
things ascribe to Terpander the invention of the Dorian
nete . . . and he is said also to have invented the entire
Mixolydian mode (tonon)’ (and to have brought these
to Sparta).28 He also remarks (5.1132f, citing ‘Alexander
in his work On Phrygia’) that ‘Terpander emulated the
hexameters (epe) of Homer but the melodies (mele) of
Orpheus [i.e., a Thracian]’.
3. Alcman: There was controversy in antiquity, as to whether
this most famous of all Spartan choral poets was himself a
Lacedaemonian or really a Lydian: according to the Suda
(= Campbell T1; cf. T 2–12), ‘Alcman: a Laconian from
Messoa, though Crates of Pergamum wrongly makes him
a Lydian from Sardis. . . . He was born of a slave family
(ἀπ’ οἰκετῶν)’. An epigram by Antipater of Thessalonike
(Anth. Pal. 7.18) refers to his tombstone: ‘Here he lies,
a topic of dispute (eris) to twin continents, whether he
was Lydian or Laconian. Singers (hymnopoloi) have many
mothers’.29
� 25
Mark Griffith
4. Sappho of Mytilene: She too was said to have obtained some

of her Aeolic artistry from Lydia – not only clothes, orna-
ments, perfumes, and elegant style of self-presentation

but also music; and she is credited with inventing (or

adopting?) the Mixolydian mode, as well as two Eastern-
flavoured string instruments, the pektis and the magadis
(instruments about whose origin and social propriety
disagreement persisted for many generations).30 The
question, whether or not she was herself a ‘teacher’ (of
girls’ choruses, in particular) is in turn much debated: if
so (as most scholars are now inclined to believe), then her
‘political’ impact on the communities of Lesbos would
have been comparable to that of Alcman or Terpander in
Sparta.31
5. Thaletas/Thales: The poet Thaletas, hailing from Gortyn,
Crete, but visiting Sparta to bring better music and laws
there in collaboration with Lycurgus, seems often to be
confused in ancient accounts with the Milesian sage
Thales (who himself visits Egypt to learn mathematics and
astronomy, and thus becomes the first Greek philosopher-
scientist).32 The musical Thales/Thaletas was said by some
to have learned his pipe technique from Olympus.33
6. Epimenides: This travelling Cretan healer/purifier/
wonder-worker/sage, whose spells and policies saved
Athens from plague and civil dissension, is mentioned
repeatedly in the Laws and will be discussed further in
the next section.
7. We should note too that Thrace and Thracians were cred-
ited with having made a large contribution to the develop-
ment of early Greek music: Orpheus, Dionysus and his satyr
chorus, Marsyas – perhaps too Thamyris, whether we
regard him as Pierian, like the Muses, or as fully Thracian.
Pliny (NH 7.207) states that Thamyris invented the Dorian
mode. In political terms, of course, then as now, the Greeks
tended to pour scorn on their northern neighbours as
being rough, primitive, and incapable of enlightened self-
government; yet at the same time it was apparently from
these regions that most of the ‘Orphic’ and goetic-shaman-
istic rituals of purification and salvation were supposed to
have originated.
26 �
In the Laws (and in later accounts too – some, but not all,
of them perhaps influenced by Plato), several of these figures
have the travelling/immigrant musician either himself be or be
closely related to a lawgiver, so that his arrival in a mainland
city from elsewhere (e.g., Anatolia, Thrace, Crete) introduces
both a new and better ‘attunement’ and a new social ‘harmony’
and political order.34 I will return to this issue below.
Although we have learned to be sceptical of ancient biog-
raphies of the poets and of narratives concerning the ‘first
inventor’ of this or that cultural phenomenon, the overall
picture provided by these accounts of the Hellenic musical
heritage seems not to be completely misleading – that is to
say, not only in classical and Hellenistic musicological tradi-
tion (and post-Hellenistic musical theorising and terminol-
ogy too),35 but as a matter of musical-historical fact,36 Greek
string and pipe construction, tunings, scales, modes, and
other elements were indeed closely related to – and probably
derived originally from – Lydian, Phrygian, and Carian con-
tacts (whatever the ‘hypo-’ or ‘mixo-’ element might signify
by way of a ‘Greek’ component in some of the later mani-
festations and refinements), and beyond these ultimately to
Hittite, Babylonian-Hurrian, and even Sumerian origins.37
There can be no doubt that archaic and even classical Greek
music did sound very much like Anatolian music; and visual
representations of the instruments and modes of performance
often look identical or strikingly similar (see Figs. 1A, 1B, 2A,
2B, 3A, 3B, and 4).38
The status of ‘Dorian’ modes and performance styles is
tantalising here. In Greek narratives and musical-critical
discourse, ‘Dorian’ music is frequently combined and asso-
ciated with ‘Lydian’, ‘Phrygian’, and other Anatolian (or
even Libyan/Egyptian) strains, just as it is in the mythology
(ethnomusicology) of those poetic-legislative migration nar-
ratives that we have surveyed – with the tunings/legisla-
tion normally passing from Sardis to Sparta, or from Egypt
to Crete (and thence perhaps to mainland Greece). The bot-
tom line seems always to be, however, that Greek ethnic and
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Mark Griffith
1A. Egyptian musicians, with double pipes and two different kinds of lutes. Wall painting
from Theban Tomb of Nebamun (New Kingdom Eighteenth Dynasty, that is, sixteenth to
fourteenth century b.c.). British Museum (37981). Drawing by Lisa Manniche (1991 no.
25, p. 46), reproduced with permission of Lisa Manniche and the British Museum.
musical identity – even its most quintessentially and proudly

‘Greek’ components, the choral lyric performance and the stal-
wart Dorian-athletic-militaristic conduct that it is supposed to
foster – come originally from the East; thus, the oldest and best
Greek nomoi are not really indigenous and autochthonous at all
but foreign-bred or at least hybrid.
At the same time, side-by-side with all these stories of musical

importations and immigrations, there existed also quite differ-
ent traditions of homegrown musical authenticity and indig-
enous origin. So, for example, Hermes was supposed to have
invented both the lyre and the syrinx in Arcadia (according
to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes);39 and Pan too, famous piper
and musical innovator (and regarded by many as the father
28 �
1B. Egyptian depiction of a lyre player, perhaps a foreign professional. The ‘Beni Hassan’
lyre player (Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty, that is, twentieth to nineteenth century
b.c.). British Library (Hay MSS 29853, 272). Drawing by Lisa Manniche (1991 no. 20,
p. 38), reproduced with permission of Lisa Manniche and the British Museum.
of the music-loving satyrs/silenes), was also an Arcadian.

Indeed, the Arcadians were regarded by some not only as the
oldest-established inhabitants of Greece – long predating the
‘Earth-born’ Athenians – but also as being among the earliest
founders of homegrown Greek musical culture in general.40 Or,
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2A. Minoan lyre player in procession for sacrificial ceremony. Crete, Ayia Triada sarcopha-
gus, north/front side (LM IIIA[1], that is, ca. 1500 b.c.). Herakleion Museum. Drawing by
Monika Schuol (2004 no. 89.1, Tafel 37), reproduced with permission of Monika Schuol
and the Deutsche Archäologische Institut.
in another set of traditions, the auloi were said to be a thor-

oughly Boeotian instrument (one especially favoured – though
later abandoned – by Athena)41 – whereas Athenians told quite
a different story.42
One more possible (imaginary or real) geographical origin for

Greek music should be mentioned: Crete. Whether or not – or to
what degree – Minos (and his brothers) should count as Greek
has always been a thorny problem: but both for nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Western scholars, who have preferred their
ancient Greeks not to be too heavily derivative from Anatolian
or Egyptian cultures, and for Homeric and classical Hellenes
who saw Minos and his supposed thalassocracy, sacred caves,
30 �
2B. Minoan double-pipe player, at sacrificial ceremony. Crete, Ayia Triada sarcophagus,
south/reverse side (LM IIIA[1], that is, ca. 1500 b.c.). Herakleion Museum. Drawing by
Monika Schuol (2004 no. 89.2, Tafel 37), reproduced with permission of Monika Schuol
dance floors, and legislation as a precursor to later, even finer

Hellenic cultural hegemonies, the Bronze Age ‘Minoan’ civili-
sation of Cnossus (and the numerous other cities of the island –
though these are rarely mentioned by name in ancient sources)
was regarded as being quite distinct both from the culture of
the ‘Mycenaean’ Greek mainland and from that of other soci-
eties of that period (e.g., Cyprus, Egypt, the Phoenician cit-
ies of the Levant). Yet Crete was also believed to have shared
(or contributed) many of its best qualities with (to) its Greek
successors. There was also a great deal of imprecision – not
least in Plato’s texts – as to the general period in which Minos,
Aeacus, and Rhadamanthys might have flourished, and how
the traditions surrounding the Minotaur, Pasiphae, Phaedra,
Theseus, and other mythological figures (in what we would call
the Bronze Age, ca. 1800–1250 b.c.) should be reconciled with
accounts describing the Dorian period of settlement on Crete
and Thera (in what we would call the eighth to seventh cen-
tury). Was Minos to be imagined as a pre–Trojan War Bronze
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3A. Minoan ceremonial bull leapers. Crete, fresco (heavily restored) from Cnossus (ca. seven-
teenth to fifteenth century b.c.). Herakleion Museum. Drawing by Elizabeth Wahle.
3B. Hittite ceremonial bull leapers, accompanied by lute players, percussionists, and dancers.
Hüseyindede-Vase (central Anatolia; sixteenth or fifteenth century b.c.). Drawing by
Monika Schuol (2004 no. 10, Tafel 4), reproduced with permission of Monika Schuol
Age monarch, or as an archaic lawgiver, almost contemporary

with Lycurgus, Thaletas, and the rest? In either case, the tra-
ditions of Minos’ ongoing relations (regular conversations, it
appears) with Zeus, and of those famous caves (some of them
full of musical Daktyls and Curetes) that helped to produce and
nurture Crete’s unique heritage of divinely blessed tradition-
alism, are frequently mentioned in the Laws as the oldest and
original site/source of eunomia, in all its senses.43
Obviously we are in no position ourselves (and it is unlikely

that Plato was in a much better position, even had he wanted
to be historically and ethnomusicologically accurate – which
we may doubt) to assess with much confidence or in any
detail the actual musical contacts, migrations, borrowings,
adaptations, and combinations that took place either in the
32 �
4. Neo-Hittite/Phrygian musicians in ceremonial procession for sacrifice, including double

pipes and two kinds of lyre, plus percussion (Karatepe relief, southeast Anatolia; ninth
century b.c.). Drawing by Monika Schuol (2004 no. 43, Tafel 15) reproduced with per-
mission of Monika Schuol and the Deutsche Archäologische Institut.
Bronze Age or during the archaic and early classical periods.

But the general picture is not in doubt. For the Bronze Age,
there is substantial visual and documentary evidence indicat-
ing several common features to the musical cultures of Egypt,
Minoan Crete (and Thera), and – especially – the Hittite
(Nesite) Empire of central Anatolia; and again later, for the
archaic Greek period, the visual record, as well as the remains
of actual musical instruments, indicates a certain degree of
homogeneity throughout West Anatolian and East Aegean
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Mark Griffith
performance cultures.44 Whatever name(s) the Greeks may

have assigned to the Hittites of the early period (1600–1350)
or later to the Neo-Hittites (900–550), whose visual culture –
and perhaps musical culture too – merges during the eighth
to sixth century with that of the Phrygians at Gordion and
elsewhere, these peoples must correspond to some extent with
those referred to by archaic and classical Greeks as ‘Phrygians’
or ‘Carians’. So it is not far-fetched to suppose that the musi-
cians, singers, and dancers whom we see portrayed on numer-
ous Anatolian monuments, blowing double pipes, strumming
lutes and lyres, and banging cymbals, castanets, tympani, and
clappers, would have been performing in modes close to those
later categorised in classical Greece as ‘Phrygian’, ‘Carian’, or
‘Lydian’.45
It seems safe to say, then, that, not unlike the modern
Middle East and North Africa – or the fifteenth- to nineteenth-
century world of the Ottoman Empire – the Ancient Middle
East, Anatolia, and Greece (including Crete) shared many com-
mon elements, if not exactly a common repertoire, of instru-
ments, tunings, basic scales, melodies, and vocal stylings, even
as local variations certainly continued to be distinctively main-
tained, whether on purpose, or simply by accident and habit,
for many centuries.46 Some of these common elements had
been inherited at the earliest stages of Greek culture; others
certainly continued to be introduced – or resisted – through-
out the archaic and classical periods. We may note that, on
the whole, the more expert and professionalised Greek music
(especially instrumental music) became, the stronger the ten-
dency (at least among Athenians) seems to have been for
nonindigenous – often Anatolian or Thracian, or Theban –
musicians to be employed to perform it (whether hired profes-
sionals or slaves), rather than fellow citizens. The implication
might be that Greek music (as distinct from music theory)
was in some respects less developed and less virtuosic than
Phrygian, or Carian, or Thracian, and that a growing contra-
diction was being felt among elite Greeks between the desire
to listen to the most technically brilliant music and the sense
34 �
that a liberal education for citizens should not be geared to the

training of professional instrumentalists or vocalists.47
We might hypothesise, then, a development in Greek musics

during the period circa 800–300 b.c. parallel to that observable
in the Greek linguistic dialects, both spoken and written. In
the case of the different (in some cases, quite wildly different)
dialects, even though they persisted to varying degrees into the
Hellenistic period, most of them were broadly in retreat (at least
in polite circles of discourse, and in the inscriptional record too)
by the late fourth century, as the Attic koine became more and
more dominant as the standard common language. So too, proba-
bly, local variations of musical ‘dialect’ (instrument-construction
and tunings, vocal timbre, phrasing and articulation, rhythms
and percussive effects, choreography and costume, etc.) were
steadily giving way to more standardised performance prac-
tices, especially in the contexts of Panionian, Panathenaic, or
Panhellenic competition – just around the period when more
skilful and complicated innovations were being made by spe-
cifically Greek performers and composers (especially in fifth-
century Athens, and especially with the development of the
New Music), while simultaneously the first Greek music theo-
rists were trying somewhat systematically to account for the
phenomena of acoustics, aesthetics, and musical affect.48
Certainly, fifth- and fourth-century Greek educators, mor-
alists, and philosophers found the mishmash of historical
and theoretical explanations, concerning musical origins and
‘discoverers’, the essential (or culturally variable) characteris-
tics of this or that musical mode or sonority, and the social-
ethical-religious function(s) of music in general, to be both
highly engaging as a topic of speculation (or assertion) and,
at the same time, increasingly confused and confusing. That is
not to say that all these explanations were entirely wrong and
misleading; rather, they were attempting to explain too many
phenomena all at once and were often doing so at the same time
as they were also prescribing particular (new or old) formulas
for improved social and political stability and enlightenment.
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The Greek language first began seriously to concern itself

about ‘correctness’ (orthotes, orthoepeia, etc.) in the mid- to
late fifth century with critics and teachers like Protagoras
and Prodicus. By the time of Aristotle, a hundred years later,
‘Hellenismos’ is established as a recognised term for ‘proper,
standard Greek’, and the teaching of correct Attic Greek
was thoroughly institutionalised, from primary school up to
advanced courses in rhetoric. Back in the eighth or seventh or
even sixth century, however, it appears that speakers of differ-
ent Greek dialects may sometimes have thought of themselves
as speaking languages almost as separate as those of their
non-Greek neighbours (e.g., Phoenician, Scythian, Lycian,
Sicilian), so different were the morphologies, pronunciations,
and writing systems of the various Greek (or semi-Greek)
communities.49 This was probably even more the case, I sug-
gest, with musical idioms and with the vocal, instrumental,
and corporeal techniques of song and dance – most of which
required no understanding at all of another person’s spoken
language to be transferable and shared.
Some respected authorities have assured us, to be sure, that
music does not really spread so easily or so directly and that
cultural contact does not generally produce musical cross-
fertilisation or hybridisation; instead, indigenous cultural (or
‘racial’?) traditions of melody, rhythm, and performance style
persist and remain separate and distinct:
Even when two races of different culture are in constant eco-

nomic or military contact there is little evidence that they
adopt each other’s musical forms. . . . Even when foreign musi-
cal instruments are adopted, the relevant literature [sic] seems
to be taken over only to a small extent or in mutilated form.50
But this, it must be said, is almost complete nonsense.51 For

while it is perhaps true that the English and French could
occupy and exploit vast areas of India and Africa and East Asia
up into the mid-twentieth century, without European classical
composers and instrumentalists showing any significant signs
of adopting the musical ‘forms’ or instruments or inflexions
36 �
of those colonised peoples (except as occasional ‘exoticising’

experiments), the converse is certainly not true52 – and there
are myriad examples of societies-in-contact whose spoken lan-
guages have been utterly different but whose musical exchanges
have been deep and ongoing. (Indeed, this was already true of
the multilingual Hittite Empire and its neighbours, as we have
noted.) Furthermore, ‘mutilation’ is a loaded and misleading
term: one observer’s ‘mutilated form’ may be another’s ‘inven-
tive cross-fertilisation’ or ‘hybridity’ or ‘crossover’ – and influ-
ences and borrowings may go back and forth, and in several
directions, in response to factors such as class, gender, eth-
nic and linguistic discrimination, and particular kinds of spe-
cialisation and ‘professionalisation’. It could be argued, for
example, that music, dance, song, and instrumental and vocal
timbre have all often featured prominently among the ‘arts of
resistance’ mobilised by colonised or enslaved peoples or social
groups wishing more or less covertly to assert their own iden-
tity, or to parody their oppressors – or (conversely) to adopt the
styles and idioms of the dominant culture (and vice versa).53
So it is time now to address directly the question whether
Plato’s Athenian Stranger (through the persona of his
Magnesian elders) is proposing to establish an ethnic-cultural
identity for his citizen-performers and citizen-audiences that
is meant to be distinctive, traditional, unique, and unchanging
and to keep his community as immune and insulated as pos-
sible from foreign and degenerate influences, or whether this
identity is to be – at least somewhat – open to new lessons and
new directions, both geographical and performative.
The Ide ntity of the Magne sian

Co mmunity
The Multiple Musics of Magnesia

Crete was, to be sure, a particularly suitable location for imag-
ining a history of musical (cultural) evolution that could be
at one and the same time both Ur-Greek, supertraditional,
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Mark Griffith
and uniquely sanctified, because the island was reputed to be

the birthplace of Zeus and the site of his face-to-face consul-
tations with Minos and Rhadamanthys, and yet, in the eyes
of mainland Greeks, still rather exotic, mysterious, and for-
eign. Even its location, at a distance, in the middle of the sea
between mainland Greece and North Africa (Egypt and Libya),
is significant.
Crete is an island, separate and remote (see Fig. 5).54 It is full
of caves. In the classical Greek imagination, because of its antiq-
uity and its distance far to the south of the mainland, it might
sometimes be regarded as quasi-Egyptian; and certainly its
population was known to contain elements that were famously
pre-Greek. It is also a myth-rich island already celebrated in
Homer for its dancers and musicians, as well as its ninety cities
and multiple languages and cultures. As Odysseus remarks –
mendaciously, yet largely accurately, it may be assumed:
One of the great islands of the world

In midsea, in the wine-dark sea, is Krete:
Fine and rich and populous, with ninety
Cities and much mingling of tongues.
Achaeans there are found, along with Eteo-Kretan 175
Hillmen of the old stock, and Kydonians,
Dorians in three blood-lines, Pelasgians –
And one among their ninety towns is great Cnossus.
Here lived King Minos whom great Zeus received
Every ninth year in private council – Minos
The father of my father, Deukalion. 180
(Od. 19.172–80; trans. Fitzgerald (1961), adapted)
This description describes a large and multiethnic commu-

nity, containing ‘original-Cretans’ (Eteokretes – presumably
non-Hellenic?) as well as ‘Achaeans’, all of whom must date back
presumably to the Bronze Age55 – but also several branches of
‘Dorians’, which presumably reflects the historical fact that the
island since the Bronze Age had been resettled on a large and
dominating scale by Dorians.56 In this Homeric account, most
strikingly, ‘There is a different language-mix for [each of the]
38 �
5. Map of Crete and the eastern Mediterranean region. Drawing by Elizabeth Wahle.
different [peoples] there’ (ἄλλη δ’ ἄλλων γλῶσσα μεμιγμένη,

19.175). Even apart from this ethnic and linguistic diversity,
Crete is very large: the distance from one side of the island
to the other is almost as great as the distance from Athens to
Thessalonike, and one should hardly expect a single constitu-
tion, or culture, or set of songs, tunings, and vocal styles to
be observed all over such an extensive (largely mountainous)
area and throughout scores of different towns. Yet for Plato in
the Laws, as for Aristotle, Ephorus, and others of the fourth
century and later, Crete was noted as a bastion of Dorian homo-
geneity, political stability, and cultural traditionalism. What
are we to make of this contradiction? Does Plato expect us to
notice it?
As Paula Perlman has shown, the idea of a uniform Crete, a
single ‘Cretan constitution’ and culture – a notion quite alien,
as we have seen, to the Homeric picture (and to the inscriptional
evidence of the classical period, for that matter) – seems to be
largely a fourth-century fiction, and one that was designed pri-
marily to create an imaginary origin for the hallowed Spartan
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Mark Griffith
constitution of Lycurgus.57 Greek political scientists from

Herodotus onwards, in a tradition continued by (Pseudo?)
Plato (Minos), Pausanias, and Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus), all
narrate that Lycurgus got his constitution from visiting Crete,
or by having Thaletas bring it to Sparta from Crete for him.58
And Platonic nostalgia, the yearning for the oldest possible
constitution, has certainly contributed in a big way to build-
ing up this idea of one Crete, and one Cretan-Spartan set of
very old and hallowed institutions.
Indeed, in the Laws, Crete and the Cretans, the setting and
the people, whether uniform or multiform, are both geograph-
ically and culturally of central significance; and the new foun-
dation of Magnesia, planned by an Athenian, is to be carefully
chosen for optimal geography and climate. It will include rep-
resentatives from many different cities all over Crete and even
beyond (707e–708d), and it will be located in a specific place,
in the southeast of the island, about ten miles from the coast
(702c–705c). Climate and accessibility are thus recognised as
being important for the ideal operation of a city – which in
itself might imply that not all Cretan cities are entirely similar,
though this topic is not addressed in the dialogue.
But there is another potential question mark hovering over
our celebrated island. In addition to its conflicting claims to
be, on the one hand, famed for its multiplicity and diversity (as
well as its former sea power, we might note), and on the other,
renowned as the most homogeneous bastion of Dorian-type
conservatism in all Greece, Crete was also notorious as the home
of the best liars. We think not only of Odysseus (self-styled ‘son
of Deukalion’ in Od. 19, quoted earlier) but also of the Cretan
sage Epimenides, famous for asserting paradoxically, ‘Cretans
are always liars’ (Kretes aei pseustai, DK 3 B 1).
And indeed, the same island that produced Minos and laid
the foundations of Greek legal wisdom is also credited within
Plato’s own text (636c–d) with having produced the (libellous)
fiction of Ganymede, Zeus’ alleged abduction/rape victim – by
which Plato clearly intends to remind his readers of the strong,
and apparently well-deserved, reputations that both Crete and
40 �
Sparta enjoyed for elaborate adolescent homoerotic courtship

rituals and same-sex quasi marriages.59 As for Epimenides him-
self, that ‘marvellous/inspired [Cretan] man’ (θεῖος ἀνήρ) is
also said (by Cleinias) in the Laws to have participated in an –
absurdly anachronistic – intervention just before the Persian
Wars, once again in Athens (642d–e). What are we supposed
to believe about these famous Cretan traditions? This is indeed
a place of many possibilities and many contradictions – some
of them already well established, others of Plato’s own making.
What does Plato make of them, as his dialogue unfolds?
The interlocutors in Plato’s Laws are walking near the
Idaean Cave, a famous source of cultural authority;60 and at
various points the Athenian refers also to Crete’s position ‘in
the middle’, not too far from Egypt nor yet from Athens, Ionia,
and other influential Greek communities (see Fig. 5). Yet the
Cretan, surprisingly, claims that he and his fellow countrymen
‘don’t make much use of foreign poetry’ such as Homer’s (οὐ
γὰρ σφόδρα χρώμεθα οἱ Κρῆτες τοῖς ξενικοῖς ποιήμασι, 680c):
apparently he means that ‘this poet of yours’ (ὀ ποιητὴς ὑμῖν
οὗτος) is all too Ionic (too ‘charming . . . and urbane’ (χαρίεις
. . . μάλα ἀστεῖα, 680c2), and also presumably that the Cretans
don’t have anything like the annual Panathenaic festival of
rhapsodic performances. In any case, this position ‘in the
middle’ of things, yet somewhat distant and cut off from the
rest of the world as well, could mean either that this island is
well positioned to combine the best of all the cultural assets of
the Mediterranean region from Egypt to Anatolia and Thrace
or that it is so cut off that it can resist all these contaminating
influences and successfully maintain its own indigenous purity,
age after age, in a way that maritime, expansionist, innovative
Athens, for example, notoriously could not on the mainland.
As we shall see, Plato seems to want to have it both ways.
It is emphasised that the newly founded city of Magnesia
should both draw from the best possible existing musical tradi-
tions (i.e., combine what is available from its new population
of co-founders) and yet at the same time aim to be as conser-
vative and unchanging as possible (like Egypt; see 656c–657a,
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799a–b, discussed previously). This paradoxical combination

of innovation and conservatism, of multiple origins and har-
monious uniformity, is reflected in these (intentionally?) con-
fusing and contradictory accounts that, as we have seen, are
given piecemeal throughout the course of the dialogue, as to
where the best traditions and finest poets of the Greek past
have in fact come from, and who really (representing what
musical traditions) ‘educated’ the Spartans and Cretans (and
others) to their present levels of virtue in the first place. Was
Tyrtaeus, inspirer-par-excellence of Spartans to military val-
our and supremacy, actually an ugly, low-class Athenian in ori-
gin (629a)? And was ‘Theognis’, that archconservative moralist
of the aristocratic symposium, perhaps from the other Megara,
in Sicily (630a) – that is, from an island notorious for its tyrants
and its democracies?
Because my focus in this chapter is on musical harmonies
and performance, not about mathematics or astronomy or even
law giving (eunomia and nomoi in their other senses), I do not
pursue here some of those bigger questions about ‘migrations’
of other types of wisdom, interesting though these might be.61
But we should certainly note that Egypt, even as it is apparently
home of the most enduringly and unchangingly harmonious,
hallowed, and religious music, is also the seat of a notoriously
corrupt kind of ingenuity (‘criminal trickery instead of wisdom’
(πανουργίαν ἀντὶ σοφίας), 747c). This is the result, it is said,
of excessive or inappropriate instruction in mathematics with-
out a corresponding attention to ‘lessons designed to remove
the appetite for wealth and unfree pursuits’ (ἀνελευθερίαν καὶ
φιλοχρηματίαν, 747b), and the Egyptians are compared in this
respect with the Phoenicians.
Universal Harmonies (?) and Platonic Values

How are we, in any case, supposed to correlate ‘wisdom’ (sophia),
‘music’ (mousike and choroi), and ‘laws’ (nomoi) – in relation to
Plato’s epistemological theories? And to what degree is Plato
committed in the Laws to the ideal of a single, universally best
42 �
‘harmony’ that should be studied and established for all? Even

as the Athenian insists on the need to establish and maintain
one set of specific, optimal rhythms and melodies for each
occasion, and to stick to it, he also insists that these melodies
and dances will be different for each chorus – that is, there
will be one for boys and another for girls, one for adult men
and another for women, and again different ones for the old.
Furthermore, we discover in due course that there are to be
additional kinds of music and dance performed by slaves and
noncitizens – and these noncitizen performances, though in
some respects clearly quite déclassé and disparaged, turn out
to be indispensable to the community. Magnesian mousike thus
turns out overall to be quite a variety show.
Why so? It seems that Plato cannot escape the uncomfortable
awareness – an awareness only intermittently acknowledged
by the Greeks at large – that so much of their best ‘music’ (as
we have seen) had come originally from (been ‘invented by’)
others, mostly ‘barbarians’ – Phrygians, Lydians, Thracians,
Carians – and that even now, in the classical period, their music
was often best performed by experts from those various other
regions and cultures, whether these performers were slaves
or paid professionals.62 And this was particularly the case for
‘Bacchic’ and other Anatolian-Thracian performance styles
(e.g., Corybantic rites; dances for Cybele, Bendis, Adonis,
Sabazius).
One particularly attractive aspect of the satyr figures
that pervaded Attic vases and theatre spaces alike was their
capacity as stand-ins, visually and verbally, for slaves: the
childish-slavish behaviour of the satyr choruses in particular
(constituted in performance, of course, by Athenian citizens)
seems to have reinforced – yet also mitigated – the audience’s
habits of thought about natural and cultural ‘difference’ and
about the proprieties of adult male behaviour.63 The hypermu-
sicality and choreographical energy of theatrical satyr dance
and of Dionysiac choreia in general64 seem to have provided
a kind of surreptitiously animalistic self-expression, an aes-
theticised, ‘playful’ indulgence of forbidden desires that filled
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Mark Griffith
a real psychosocial need. Athens (along with the Argolid) in

fact seems to have valued satyrs more than most other cities,
and satyr choruses do not appear to have been so popular
in Crete or Sparta: perhaps this was because in those partic-
ular communities there were other ‘locals’ ( perioikoi, Helots,
etc., i.e., the indigenous, non-Dorian populations of Crete
and Messenia) who could provide entertainment for the full
‘citizens’ without their having to train and employ Thracians,
Phrygians, and others (in the Athenian case, even Boeotians,
like Pronomos) to blow auloi and dance the wildest dances in
the symposium or sussition/andreion.65 Plato too, as we shall
see, for all his insistence on the need to maintain decorum and
citizen morals through dance and choreography, turns out to
be quite comfortable with the idea that these types of music
should persist – provided his citizens don’t perform all of them
themselves.
Magnesia’s Variety Playbill: Innovation

and Tradition
The geographical and cultural contradictions (or paradoxes)
of Plato’s Cretan city are indeed pervasive, though rarely
foregrounded amidst the constant reminders about the need
for consistency, uniformity, moral integrity, homogeneity,
and traditionalism in the citizens’ educational and perfor-
mative regime. The musical-choral rules (the ‘blueprint,
model’ (ἐκμαγεῖον), 800b) seem to require that nothing must
change, tunes must be fixed and proper (correct), and we must
apparently strive to be like those Egyptians, keeping the ‘same
song’ for ten thousand years and using just one melody for each
ritual occasion; yet, on the other hand, we must also allow for
Dionysiac improvisation and youthful or drunken enthusiasm,
and we must recognise and appreciate the special, time-proven
differences of ‘Phrygian’ and ‘Hypophrygian’ harmonies – as
well as ‘Dorian’, of course – all of them migrating, modulating,
and alternating from one chorus and one festival to another,
within (or nearby) our evolving Cretan city.66
44 �
What should be concluded from these discrepancies? Is

Magnesia intended to contain – and maintain – a distinctive,
uniform, aesthetically consistent, and geographically recognis-
able music of its own (like Egypt’s, in the name of Isis, or Zeus,
or Dionysus)? Or will our city instead be more like another
Athens, an innovation-obsessed ‘theatrocracy’ (701a), full of all
kinds of sounds imported from everywhere and mixed indis-
criminately (and competitively) together?67 Most readers of the
Laws have concluded the former; yet we do seem to find, as the
dialogue unfolds, a somewhat coherent – if piecemeal and even
at times covert and evasive – plan emerging through which leg-
islators and community leaders may be able to establish a fixed
regimen of musical, intellectual, and political traditions, while
also harnessing (managing, integrating, if not naturalising or
quite legitimising) a number of ongoing innovations and impor-
tations. As a result, the city’s artistic-educational program will
end up being at the same time both highly ‘traditional’ and dis-
tinctive and yet curiously varied and multicultural.
The inherent desirability of having multiple musical forms
is suggested already by the Athenian at 669b–d, where, in the
same breath that he complains about the ‘mixing’ of genres and
indiscriminate ‘combining into one’ of elements that should
belong to quite different genres, instruments, performers, and
styles, he acknowledges that ‘the Muses themselves’ would
in fact be able to perform all of these individual elements
correctly – ‘they would not make any mistake’ – which might
be taken to imply that the best music would indeed include all
of these types of performance, even as care should be taken to
keep the different kinds separate from one another and avoid
mixing them up, as the Athenians ‘and most cities in our part
of the world’ have been doing. This gives us a strong clue that
musical variety is in fact to be a high priority for Magnesia.
And that is indeed what we find, as we survey the complete
lineup of the city’s annual musical activities, in all their geo-
graphical and cultural heterogeneity and hybridity.
To begin with, we must recall that the city is to be founded by
people coming from all over Crete, and even beyond (especially
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the Peloponnese: 708a), each presumably bringing with them

the indigenous, traditional musical forms of their original com-
munities. That is to say, these people are likely, on the one hand,
to share common ‘Dorian-Cretan’ elements (‘one song’), but also
to reflect the (Homerically attested and empirically inevitable)
heterogeneity of each Cretan city’s particular constitution, geog-
raphy, ethnic/linguistic blending, etc.68 In addition (obviously
enough), if male citizens will learn and perform different music
from what females do, and the young will perform different songs
and dances from those of adults and the elderly, we already have
six different basic groups of ‘choruses’. Further, not only will
different religious occasions and age-groups require different
songs and dances, but a basic division into warlike and peaceful
musics is also required (πυρρίχη vs. ἐμμέλεια, 814e–816d); and
while only a limited number and type of the latter will actually
be acceptable, citizens will still come to learn these subdivisions
of more aggressive and more relaxed styles (even while women’s
martial music is still to be different from men’s, it appears). All
of these citizen dances and songs, of course, will be relatively
graceful and ‘Greek’, based on the simpler, nobler kinds of tun-
ing and thereby fostering excellent deportment, moral fibre, and
self-control. So some degree of uniformity is retained among all
these citizen groups. But they will nonetheless have come to hear
and know, as audience members as well as performers (assisted
by the Dionysian powers of wine),69 a wide repertoire of differ-
ent tunes and rhythms appropriate for different occasions and
purposes; and the more experienced citizen-musicians/singers
will be able to discriminate expertly between these.70
But this is far from being the sum total of Magnesian musical
performance. And this is where things start to get especially
interesting. For there will be several additional – if rather indis-
tinctly defined and even in some cases literally marginalised –
types of musical activity that also have to be performed within
and around the city. Some of these musical types, it would
appear, will provide Magnesian citizens with a much broader
and more colourful repertoire of styles and techniques than
their own basic performance regime, even while the Athenian
46 �
Lawgiver sounds a little coy at times as to how often, and by

whom, these performances will be provided. These additional
musical forms will not include much tragoidia, to be sure –
because this most emotionally stimulating and stylistically var-
ied of all performance genres involves too much ‘mixing’ and
faking of ethical types by people (actors/singers) whose bodies
and minds will be thereby distorted (along with those of their
audiences).71 But comedy, satyr play, perhaps dithyramb, and
certainly other ritual performances, notably lamentations, will
continue to be performed, all with significant and often highly
exciting musical content.72
So we find several kinds of ‘Bacchic dancing’ (Bakkheia
orchesis) discussed at 815c–d, both the kind that represents
‘Nymphs and Pans and Satyrs and Silenes, drunk’ and those
which are ‘involved in purifications and initiation rites’. The
Athenian grants that ‘this whole general class of dances’ is to
be categorised ‘neither as warlike nor as peaceful music’, and
indeed is not really ‘political’ music at all73 – so ‘we’ll let it lie
there as it is, and leave it alone, and turn back now instead
to what is unambiguously our business, warlike and peaceful
dances’. Does he mean ‘let it lie there for now’ or ‘for ever’?
In either case, the concession seems to be quite a cop-out – or
quite a significant admission that ‘Bacchic’ performances, per-
haps enhanced by the appropriate use of wine as well as prop-
erly orgiastic music, are really indispensable, especially on the
island on which Dionysus was first united with Ariadne74 and
where baby Zeus was entertained by the vigorously dancing,
noisily percussive Curetes and nymphs.
Furthermore, the music that will be enjoyed by the citi-
zens of Magnesia is by no means limited to that which they
perform themselves. Two additional areas of musical per-
formance are clearly of significance to the well-being of the
city but rely on noncitizen performers to achieve the desired
effect. So, perhaps surprisingly (at first blush, anyway), we
find the Magnesian musical variety lineup being extended
so as to include komoidia and other forms of ugly, grotesque,
ridiculous, shameful performance (816d–e) – with the actors
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and choruses supplied by slaves and ‘professional noncitizen

foreigners’ (ξένοις ἐμμίσθοις, 816e6).75
And earlier (800b–e; cf. 669c3ff.) the Athenian has granted –
perhaps grudgingly yet unequivocally and open-mindedly –
that for the most emotional and disturbing musical events
(e.g., funerals and other celebrations of grief and remembrance)
‘professional singing choruses from outside should come in,
like those who are paid to escort the dead with Carian dirges at
funerals nowadays’:76
Well, in our part of the world this is what happens, one may
almost say, in nearly every one of the States. Whenever a mag-
istrate holds a public sacrifice, the next thing is for a crowd of
choruses – not just one – to advance and take their stand, not
at a distance from the altars, but often quite close to them; and
then they let out a flood of blasphemy over the sacred offer-
ings, straining the souls of their audience with their words,
rhythms, and most doleful tunes, and the chorus that succeeds
at once in drawing most tears from the city that has conducted
the sacrifice wins the prize. Must we not reject such a cus-
tom/tune (nomon) as this? For if there ever is really a need
for the citizens to listen to such mournful songs, it would be
more appropriate for the choruses that attend to be hired from
abroad, and not on holy days but only on days that are unclean
and unlucky – just as hired mourners perform their Carian-
style music at funerals. Such music would also form the fitting
accompaniment for choral songs of this kind; and the clothing
befitting these funeral songs would not be crowns or golden
ornaments, but just the opposite, for I want to get done with
this subject as soon as I can. Only I would have us ask our-
selves again this single question: Are we satisfied to lay this
down as our first basic rule for songs? (800c–e)
The Athenian here sounds reluctant (‘if we must’), but com-

mitted (‘then we should/must/have to’): ‘If the citizens really
do sometimes have to be subjected to and excited by such
gloomy musical sounds . . . then we really should get choruses
from outside’ – and even ‘then’ (tote), it must only be on the
ill-omened days. To judge from the context of this passage as
48 �
a whole, and of the Laws in general, this ‘if’ is concessive,

not hypothetical. People, even well-disciplined and musically
enlightened citizens, do ‘need’ on occasion (in the ancient Greek
view, including Plato’s)77 to indulge in ‘wailing, groaning’ and
mournful dirge-music (oiktoi and goos). And the best performers
of such music are, clearly, Carians – or those trained in Carian
musical technique. So we will have to bring those professional
performers in, when ‘needed’, perhaps several times per year.
One result of this stipulation that slave and ‘foreign’ per-
formers should sing and dance for us, of course, is to guarantee
a steady influx of nonindigenous musical styles, as well as a
superior level of technical musical proficiency. Comic actors,
instrumental virtuosos, and more ‘exotic’ and emotionally affec-
tive singing and dancing groups – travelling professionals, and
even some of the slaves (who themselves are quite likely to hail
from Phrygia, Thrace, or Caria, or even Egypt), will doubtless
be star attractions (on ‘nonpurified’, nonsacred days: hemerai
tines me katharai, 800d); and the possibilities of encountering
a new Marsyas or Olympus, Terpander or Thaletas, Alcman
or Pronomos (or comic Epimenides) may not be entirely ruled
out. Metanastic sophia (aka mousike) will thus flourish, even as
the Cretan City’s indigenous traditions remain unchanging and
intact, its citizens’ proper harmonies still carefully regulated
and perfectly attuned.
Conc lu sion
How distinctive and unique will Magnesian music be? Are
a city’s (or a nation’s) performance traditions a reliable and
essential index of its character and cultural identity? And if
so, are a community’s (city’s, region’s, nation’s) most charac-
teristic singers and dancers, most typical (best?) body types,
and most moral/spiritually enlightened mentalities, born or
made? To a large degree, it seems (according to Plato’s Laws),
they are made. Nomoi (laws, customs, melodies) surely exist
nomoi (by convention, by design), not physei (by nature); and
so the Magnesians will learn to be (musically) good not because
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Mark Griffith
of any peculiar genetic aptitude but primarily through obedi-

ence – and practice, practice, practice. Choral performances
will constitute an integral component of their moral training;
and these will be carefully planned and monitored. But the
citizens will also experience other musical forms, of a varied
and to some degree nonindigenous kind, and these musical
performances seem to be an integral part of the annual event
calendar. Thus, unlike the verbal laws, which seem to be (in
Plato’s view) universally valid and identical, the musical com-
ponents of Magnesia seem in the end to be intrinsically some-
what more malleable and more subject to variation, and even
choice. Unlike the ratios and relationships of mathematics,78
which are universally fixed and unalterable, Cretan harmonies
and rhythms will not be so uniform, or so unchanging.
As Paul Gilroy has stated the issue (from a modern but not
entirely unrelated perspective): ‘The most important lesson
music still has to teach us is that its inner secrets and its ethnic
rules can be taught and learned’.79 So Plato’s Greeks (especially
his Athenian-designed Cretans?) will have learned many musi-
cal secrets (conveyed, definitively, long ago from Zeus to Minos,
but also more recently and continuously from Carians and
Phrygians/Hittites and Lydians – and even Egyptians); and
they will continue to need to learn and enjoy such imported
and foreign/guest (xenos) harmonies and performers as well
as indigenous citizen ones. Just as (in Gilroy’s discussion)
‘blackness’ and the essence of black identity (closely identified
by many since the 1960s with musical ‘soul’) are shown to be a
matter of ongoing cultural formation, rather than being innate
and essential, whether for an individual or for a group, so will
civic identity for the Magnesians require a constant process of
musical and cultural habituation, modification, and evolution.
That is to say, the formation of a suitable (ideal) Magnesian
identity is shown to be:
(a) ongoing;
(b) taught and learned, through choral instruction, prac-
tice, and ‘laws’ (nomoi) that have been drawn from a
multicultural range of traditions;
50 �
(c) shaped also by continuing proximity to and interac-

tion with xenoi (local noncitizen residents, equiva-
lent to, for example, Athenian metics, or Laconian
perioikoi) and other non-Magnesian Cretans, as well
as with visiting ‘foreign’ professional performers and
resident slaves;
(d) dependent on a calendar of musical performances
(within the topography of Magnesia and its environs)
that includes ‘nonpolitical’ music, especially Bacchic
or orgiastic dance, in addition to the highly regulated
choruses to which the Athenian (as virtual lawgiver)
devotes most of his attention. Some of these dances will
be performed by citizens, others (most notably, the rit-
ual lamentations and comedies) they will instead watch
(and enjoy, critique, etc.) as they are performed by the
professional guest-artists or slaves. This ‘nonpolitical’
music, it seems to me, comes as something of a surprise
in the Laws. But Plato apparently saw no alternative
to retaining it – presumably because Dionysian perfor-
mances were in fact so pervasive and so highly valued
throughout Greek society.
As a result, there will be quite a few non-Magnesian, non-Cretan,

even non-Greek melodies and dances to be heard in Plato’s Cretan
city. Whether or not Plato intended us to notice this (perhaps
these elements are there despite his original design, rather than
as an integral part of it?), the ongoing process of cultural forma-
tion for the Magnesians will require many different harmonies
and rhythms to be danced and listened to during the course
of the citizens’ lives: some local, others imported; some fierce,
others mild; some new, others old; some Greek, others foreign.
Does this mean Magnesia will end up just like another Athens,
a city full of imported musical styles, and itself the originator
of none? Or will it be a model of Panhellenic, long-term musical
blending, its citizens quintessentially ‘Greek’ precisely by rea-
son of this long and ongoing process of cultural exchanges and
migrations? In either case, Plato’s Crete seems to offer us more
of a ‘world music scene’, and less of a narrow commitment to
‘early music’, than we might have expected.
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Mark Griffith
Not e s
1 By ‘foreign’, I do not necessarily mean ‘non-Greek’. Plato else-
where criticises the idea that barbaros is a meaningful category
(Pol. 262c–e), because there are so many different ‘barbarian’
peoples, with different languages and customs; and nowhere
does he express simplistic notions of ‘Greek’ versus ‘Asian’
nature and culture, as do (e.g.) the Hippocratic writers and
Aristotle and several speakers in tragedy. On the other hand,
at Rep. 469c–471c it is agreed that the ideal city will make war
on (and enslave) ‘barbarians’ but not Greeks, because only bar-
barians are ‘natural enemies’ to Greeks. In the Laws, Plato does
not discuss this issue directly (though we consider the ‘ethnic’
makeup of Magnesia later in this chapter; cf. too the ambiguous
reference to opponents in war who are ἐκτός τε καὶ ἀλλοφύλους,
629d4); but here and elsewhere he does constantly distinguish
between local/civic and outsider/noncitizen performers in ways
that would normally (e.g., in Athens, or Sparta) entail an ethnic
distinction of some kind. In the Republic, Socrates makes clear
that ‘Ionian’ modes are just as immoral as ‘Lydian’ ones, though
the ‘Phrygian’ modes are acceptable for certain kinds of musical
activities for the young (398e–399c), a point on which Aristotle
expresses disagreement, arguing that the Phrygian mode, like
the auloi, is suitable only for ‘emotional’ and ‘orgiastic’ pur-
poses, that is, especially Bacchic/Dionysian music (Pol. 1342a–b);
see Gostoli (1995). On the uncertain status of Phrygian modes
within the musical regime of the Laws, Plato does not stipulate
explicitly which modes are to be used for the various songs and
dances; but it seems to be taken for granted throughout that
Dorian behaviours will be prevalent, and the only mode actu-
ally mentioned is the Dorian (670b–c). It may well be the case
that musical modes, and theories about them – including Plato’s
own – had changed somewhat between the 390/380s when the
Republic was probably composed, and the 350s (the likely date
of the Laws); see further W. D. Anderson (1966) 124–30; Hagel
(2009) 446–52.
2 W. D. Anderson (1966); Wallace (1991, 2004); Gostoli (1995).
3 See, e.g., Hall (1997); Kraay (1976); Luraghi (2010); and the essays
in Dougherty and Kurke (2003).
4 In general, see Burkert (1992 [1984]); Hall (1997); Kowalzig
(2007b); and (for musical adaptation and variation) West (1992)
329–32; W. D. Anderson (1994); Kilmer (1997); Franklin (2002,
2007). West (1993–4) 179 remarks that ‘when one surveys the
development and spread of musical instruments in the eastern
52 �
Mediterranean and western Asia between 3000 and 500 b.c., it

appears natural to see the whole area as a cultural continuum,
with much regional variety and individuality of musical practice
but no fundamental antinomies. The life of instruments is to be
measured in centuries and millennia, and the same is likely to
be true of the musical styles associated with them’. Thus there
are many depictions and descriptions of ‘lyres’ of one kind or
another, and of auloi and aulos-like wind instruments, through-
out the Near East and the Mediterranean regions (and beyond)
from Sumerian times to the present: these display many similar-
ities and continuities, as well as many variations. The surviving
(pieces of ) Greek auloi as well as literary descriptions of aulos-
construction, harmonics, and performance technique confirm
that these varied considerably from place to place and from one
time period to another: Landels (1999) 24–46; Mathiesen (1999)
177–222; Matelli (2004); Hagel (2009), with further references.
5 See Franklin (2013); Griffith (2013) with references.
6 We cannot trace in any detail at all the festival reforms or changes
in poetic rules that must surely have taken place during the
political vicissitudes of, e.g., Megara, or Syracuse, or Mytilene.
7 This is the field of ethnomusicology, for which Merriam (1964)
is fundamental; see further, e.g., Nettl (2005); Nercessian (2007);
also Shiloah (1995) 68–109; Keil and Feld (1994) 12–22, 109–50,
197–217; Naerebout (1997); Agawu (2003) 152–71; and (for the
ancient Greek context) Kowalzig (2007b) 1–12, 161–80.
8 Shiloah (1995) 154–63 devotes a separate chapter of his book on
Music in the world of Islam to ‘Folk musical traditions’, begin-
ning it with the observation that he is thereby ‘excluding the
more eclectic, sophisticated traditions of “art music” as well as
certain forms of religious practice already discussed in previous
chapters’. The same distinctions generally have to be made in the
discussion of premodern and modern Western (and ‘Christian’)
musics. In both these contexts, it may be observed that popu-
lar music (as opposed to ‘art music’, or ‘religious’ music, or
‘traditional/folk music’) has tended until very recently to be
neglected both by musicologists and by historians: see Agawu
(2003) 117–50; Nercessian (2007) 183–212; also Keil and Feld
(1994) 197–217; Nettl (2005). In any case, distinctions between
‘art’ music, ‘folk’ music, ‘religious’ music, and ‘popular’ music
seem to be largely inapplicable to Greek performance culture of
the archaic and classical periods.
9 Plato does not state that the reason for banning this or that
‘harmony’ or instrument is specifically that it is foreign (i.e.,
non-Greek): but the harmonies and instruments that are banned
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Mark Griffith
are almost invariably those associated with Lydia, Phrygia,

Caria, and beyond, whereas the ones that are explicitly approved
are always ‘Dorian’ or at least traditionally Greek, especially the
lura and kithara, and also the syrinx (Rep. 399d). Thus, at Rep.
399c–d Socrates expresses aversion to the (Lydian-originated,
polychordal) pektis and trigonon, and to the (polyharmonious,
and Anatolian-derived) auloi; and in the Laws, low-class or for-
eign/nonindigenous kinds of music (and drama) not to be per-
formed by citizens are mentioned at 800b–e, 816d–e, 817a–c,
and cf. 669–70, 815c–d (all discussed later in the chapter). See
further, e.g., Eur. Bacch. (59, 124–7), 513; Ar. Ran. 849, 1302–28,
and my subsequent discussion for the disparagement of ‘foreign’
music by old-fashioned, moralising Greek men of this period.
10 A few examples will serve here to illustrate some of the issues that
occupy the attention of Plato’s Spartan, Cretan, and Athenian
interlocutors in the Laws.
In North Africa, comparisons between the musical styles
(vocal timbres, scales and melodies, rhythms) and cultural histo-
ries of, e.g., the various peoples of Ethiopia and Sudan between
1960 and the present reveal striking areas of resemblance and of
difference, both between these separate nation-states and within
each (large and multilingual) region. For Ethiopia, see/hear the
extensive CD series Ethiopiques (ed./prod. Francis Falceto: Buda
Musique), covering the 1960s to late 1980s; esp. vol. 23 Orchestra
Ethiopia (860152) with liner notes by Charles Sutton. See too
in general the Rough Guide CDs (World Music Network) for
Ethiopia (RGNET 1124, 2004) and Sudan (RGNET 1152, 2005),
along with their liner notes (by Francis Falceto and Peter Verney,
respectively), for helpful introductions to several of the main
cultural developments and musical forms of this whole region.
In West Africa, post-independence Mali and Senegal both
enjoyed periods of enthusiastic government support for dance
and music as expressions of a new – or renascent – national iden-
tity. The permutations, collaborations, and disputes amongst the
pioneers of these various trends – traceable through the numer-
ous recordings from the 1970s to the 1990s of, e.g., the (Super)
Rail Band of Bamako, Orchestra Baobab, and L’Étoile de Dakar,
and culminating in the development of mbalax and the emer-
gence of Salif Keita, Baaba Mal, Youssou N’ Dour, and others as
‘world music’ superstars – recall in many respects the musicocul-
tural debates of late fifth- and fourth-century Athens.
In post-Ottoman Anatolia (Turkey), various governments
have intermittently instituted and maintained a ban on non-
‘Turkish’ (minority/ethnic/Islamic etc.) language, literature,
costume, music, and other cultural expressions, especially
54 �
in the public media (radio, recordings, TV, movies), with the

result that the vibrant traditions of, e.g., Kurdish, Laz, Sufi,
and Romany musics have experienced lengthy periods of sup-
pression and attempted silencing, in the name of ‘Turkishness’.
Yet all of these have continued to produce superior artists and
to attract ardent enthusiasts; and in recent years, government
policies mostly have been more tolerant of this cultural and
artistic diversity. An easily accessible introduction to some of
these issues is the 2005 movie Crossing the bridge: The sound of
Istanbul (dir. Fatih Akin).
In Europe and the United States from the 1920s to 1950s (and
beyond), educators, cultural critics, arts funders, and even psy-
chologists tended to regard jazz, ‘race music’, rock ‘n’ roll, funk,
and the like as undermining both aesthetic and moral/spiritual
values, especially among the young: ‘blue’ notes, the ‘devil’s
horn’ (saxophone), and syncopated rhythms were all supposed
to be detrimental to the brain and to the body, and a threat to the
racial purity of the white West. The bibliography on this topic
is too vast to need citing: among the more egregious (hilarious)
misreaders of musical culture along these lines were Theodore
Adorno and (the piously Platonic) Allan Bloom.
11 In Plato’s world, virtue, like knowledge and/of mathematics,
must be one and unchanging. On the face of it, therefore, the
ideal musical tunings and styles of performance, if or once dis-
covered and attained, should never be altered. For the purposes
of this chapter, I am assuming for the most part that Plato’s
views on virtue, music, and education remained broadly consis-
tent from the Republic to the Laws. See in general Moutsopoulos
(1959); Gostoli (1995); G. R. F. Ferrari (1989); Pagliara (2000);
Pelosi (2010).
12 See, e.g., Kenyon (1989, 2001); McComb (1999). After three
decades of ‘early musical’ ascendancy, or at least prominence, in
recent years the pendulum seems to have swung somewhat back
the other way in the performance of classical (Western) music:
see esp. Taruskin (1995); Kenyon (2001). On the comparable phe-
nomenon of ‘folk music revivals’, which often have a very local
or ethnic impulse, see Nercessian (2007) 98–105.
13 Martin (1992, 1993); also Ker (2000); Montiglio (2005); Tell (2007);
Kowalzig (2007b) 56–131.
14 See W. D. Anderson (1966); Barker (1984–9); Wallace (1991,
2004); Gibson (2005).
15 See notes 1 and 9. Plato can be a perplexing author, and the
Laws in particular is a peculiar – and, in many respects, pecu-
liarly unpersuasive – text: so I prefer to state ‘seems’ rather than
‘is’. Whether or not Plato was senile when he wrote the Laws
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Mark Griffith
(cf. O. Murray in this volume), or being ‘ironic’ (even in the

absence of Socrates) with a view to keeping us on our dialectical
toes, alert for this or that character’s false argumentative step, or
unjustified assertion, or tongue in cheek, in what follows I am
going to proceed more naively, on the assumption that Plato’s
interlocutors in this dialogue – especially the Athenian – are
for the most part producing statements and arguments that are
intended by the author to be taken fairly seriously, even while
elements of play and fantasy are (quite explicitly) introduced
from time to time and a general aura of radical speculation may
be felt throughout. See in general on these issues Morrow (1960);
Bobonich (2002) 8–13, 384–91, 402–7. Bobonich remarks (406–7):
‘Plato accepts that revision and improvement are possible in any
set of laws. . . .[But] we have seen good theoretical and textual
bases for thinking that the laws concerning dances, songs and
children’s games will be especially hard to change’.
16 Throughout this chapter, there are many occasions on which
I refer to ‘music’ to mean μουσική or χορεία in the extended
(Platonic) sense of ‘musical culture’ or ‘culture’ in general. There
are other occasions on which I mean more specifically a more
limited ‘musical’ system of harmony, melody, and rhythm. I
think the context will make clear which sense is appropriate on
each occasion.
17 For testimony and discussion of the origins, general character,
and development of archaic and classical Greek music, see espe-
cially Sachs (1958); Barker (1984–9) I; Campbell (1988); West
(1992) 327–55; W. D. Anderson (1994); Franklin (2002); Schuol
(2004); and for Greek music theory, see Barker (1984–9) II; Gibson
(2005); Prauscello (2006), with further references.
18 Laws 657a–b: καθάπερ ἐκεῖ φασιν τὰ τὸν πόλυν τοῦτον σεσωμένα
χρόνον μέλη τῆς Ἴσιδος ποιήματα γεγονέναι. All translations
are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
19 W. D. Anderson (1966) 81, with n. 30. For modern accounts
of ancient Egyptian music, see Manniche (1991); Fantechi and
Zingarelli (2002); and Arroyo (2003) with further references.
We may note that neither Plato nor Herodotus is ever cited by
modern musicologists as a reliable source for Egyptian or Near
Eastern music.
20 See especially Ael. VH 10.18 = Stesichorus fr. 279 (F 102 PMGF);
cf. Diod. Sic. 4.84.2–4. West (1971) argues that this is a late
Hellenistic composition by a quite different Stesichorus (also of
Himera); see (contra) Griffith (2008) 81.
21 See especially Manniche (1991); Arroyo (2003); Schuol (2004)
77–84, with Tafel 17–20, nos. 51–63, and further references. It
is clear that Egypt was in fact far from being isolated or unique
56 �
in its musical forms, in relation to other cultures such as the

Hittites, peoples of the Levant, Libya, and so on; see, e.g., Fig.
1B. The period of Achaemenid Persian dominance in particular
would have guaranteed that Egyptian culture was exposed to a
wide variety of Anatolian and Iranian performance modes: see
further Rutherford, Chapter 3 in this volume.
22 Perhaps they agree too quickly: so Oswyn Murray, Chapter 5 in
this volume.
23 I disregard for the moment the primeval musical contributions of
the Curetes, the Daktyloi, and Dionysus, all of whom have very
Cretan resonances to them.
24 For the agelai (herds) of young men and women, and the asso-
ciated choral/athletic/military training for which Sparta was
famous, see esp. Jeanmaire (1939); Kennell (1995); Calame (2001
[1977]); Christesen (2012); for the Cretan equivalents (for men
only, it seems), see Strabo 10.4.16–22 (= Ephorus FGrHist 70
F 149), and Jeanmaire (1939); also P. Perlman (1992). Plato’s
interlocutors do not address the issue, how male poets (such
as Alcman) might have acquired the expertise to compose the
best songs and dances for female choruses to perform (the gods,
presumably, or specifically the Muses would miraculously grant
this?). Nor in the Laws is the possibility entertained (though it
had been strongly suggested by Socrates in the Republic) that
talented girls and women should be given the same gymnastic
and philosophical training as boys and men.
25 On the Spartan educational system in general, see esp. Kennell
(1995); Calame (2001 [1977]); Ducat (2006); Christesen (2012); and
for resemblances between Spartan institutions and attitudes and
Plato’s Kallipolis in the Republic, see G. R. F. Ferrari (2000) xiv–
xvi. On ancient Egyptian education, see Brunner (1957); and on
Egyptian athletics (in relation to Greek), Decker and Thuillier
(2004).
26 According to some accounts, Tyrtaeus was originally a school-
master ( grammatistes), quite a demeaning occupation, or he was
lame, stupid, cheap, or deranged: cf. schol. Laws 629a (p. 301
Greene), Pausanias 4.15.6, and other testimonia and comments
in Gerber (1999). See too Beck (1964) 111–12; Marrou (1965)
78–83; on the position of schoolteachers in classical Athens. The
Suda also mentions a tradition that Tyrtaeus came from Miletus
(which would make him an Ionian).
27 See further, e.g., Campbell (1988), ‘Olympus’ T1, T2, T10, T13.
For further discussion of the role assigned by later generations
of Greek music theorists and historians to ‘Olympus’, see W. D.
Anderson (1994) 51–4 (regarding him as a more or less fictitious
figure), Landels (1999) 106–9, 153.
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Mark Griffith
28 See W. D. Anderson (1994) 61–6, 72, emphasising Terpander’s

Greekness and accepting his historicity: ‘For practical pur-
poses, Greek lyric begins with Terpander, a native of Lesbos’
(p. 66); cf. Franklin (2002). Considering that Aeolic metres and
Indo-European-derived poetic formulae had clearly been flour-
ishing in Lesbos and elsewhere for several centuries before
Terpander’s supposed birth date (mid-eighth century?), and that
Archaic Lesbian poetry constantly advertises its indebtedness
to Anatolian (esp. Luwian and Lydian) elements, this assess-
ment seems implausible: see Watkins (1963, 2007); West (1973a,
1973b); also Franklin (2002, 2007).
29 See further Campbell (1988) s.v. Alcman T1, T4.
30 See Campbell (1982) for references, esp. T 37 (Plut. [De mus.]
16.1136c, citing Aristoxenus) and T38 (Athen. 14.635b);
also Barker (1984–9). For the aesthetics of habrosyne and the
close associations between the poetry and lifestyle of archaic
Mytilene and the elite cultures of Lydia and Persia, see Kurke
(1992). During the sixth and early fifth century, such ‘delicate/
luxurious’ behaviours continued to carry with them political
implications, notably in Samos and early classical Athens, that
is, during its ‘Anacreontic’ sympotic phase. For specifically
Anatolian (and ultimately Mesopotamian) elements in Sappho’s
poetry, see Watkins (2007).
31 See esp. Calame (2001 [1977]).
32 See Campbell (1988) 321–9, with further references: esp. T1 (Diog.
Laert. 1.38), T4, T7 (Plut. [De mus.] 9.1134b–c, and 42.1146b,
discussed below), T5 (Paus. 1.14.4: ‘Thales stopped the plague
for the Lacedaemonians . . .; and Polymnestos says that Thales
was from Gortyn’), T6 (Plut. Lyc. 4), T9 (Strabo Geog. 10.4.16).
33 Plut. [De mus.] 10.1134d (Campbell T8).
34 See Martin (1992, 1993) for discussion both of ‘metanastic’ poet-
ics and of the Seven Sages; and further Ker (2000); Nightingale
(2004); Tell (2007) on theoria and exchanges of ‘wisdom’ (sophia).
On ‘wandering poets’, see further Hunter and Rutherford
(2009).
35 See W. D. Anderson (1966); Barker (1984–9); West (1992); Gibson
(2005); Prauscello (2006), all of whom base much of their dis-
cussions on authors ranging from the fourth century b.c. (Plato,
Aristoxenus) to the Roman period (esp. Athenaeus and Pseudo-
Plutarch).
36 Perhaps ‘fact’ is too strong a term, but the conclusions of
C. Sachs, F. Lasserre, M. L. West, J. C. Franklin, S. Hagel, and
many others seem firmly anchored in ethnomusicological and
archaeological evidence, as well as anthropological probabil-
ity. In earlier generations (before the multiple debts of Hellenic
58 �
culture to other Near Eastern – especially Anatolian – cultures

had come to be at all widely acknowledged by classicists),
authorities such as Wegner (1949, 1950); W. D. Anderson (1966),
less so W. D. Anderson (1994), tended largely to discount the
Phrygian or other Eastern elements in Greek music, regarding
the Greeks’ own accounts of the origin of their musical modes,
instruments, tunings as mere mythmaking. But in more recent
years, just as, e.g., Greek sculpture, temple design, sympotic
behaviour, and mythology are recognised as having evolved out
of long-established Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levantine, and
Anatolian (especially Hittite and Luwian) traditions, so too is it
coming to be accepted that their musical instruments and melo-
dies were largely adapted from the Near East: see Lasserre (1988);
West (1992, 1999); Schuol (2004); Hagel (2005); Franklin (2002,
2007); and in general Burkert (1992 [1984]). (We may note too
that similar arguments are being made about the evolution of
Greek athletics – another cultural form once regarded as exclu-
sively Hellenic: see Decker and Thuillier (2004); on possible
Hittite origins, Carter (1988); Puhvel (1988)). On the continuities
between Bronze Age Hittite and ‘Late Hittite’ (or ‘Neo-Hittite’)
culture of circa 1000–700 b.c., and the relation between the latter
and the Phrygian culture based in Gordion (ca. 750–550 b.c.), see
below, n. 46; and further (on their musical traditions) Alp (2000
[1999]) 1–2; Schuol (2004) 136–53, 259–60). As for the relation-
ship between Bronze Age Cretan (‘Minoan’) music and that of the
Hittites, we can only speculate. But instruments of similar type –
and also bull-leaping ceremonies, accompanied by music – are
represented on Minoan and Hittite monuments (see Figs. 2A, 2B,
3A, 3B, and 4; Lasserre (1988); Younger (1998); Schuol (2004); also
Bachvarova (2009); Rutherford (2007) for discussion of music in
Hittite ritual practice). Direct Egyptian ‘origins’ for Greek music
are perhaps less likely, though Greek literary/musicological tra-
dition does sometimes associate the aulos, not with Phrygia, but
with Libya (e.g., Eur. Hel. 171; Ath. 618c, with Barker (1984–9)
I.67 n. 34, 275 n. 72); cf. Fig. 1A.
37 For a clear exposition of the basic elements of the Greek harmoniai
of the classical period – Phrygian, Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian,
among others – and their differences, see Barker (1984–9)
II.14–17. As Barker remarks (1984–9) II.14–15, ‘From the sev-
enth century, if not before, the Greeks were familiar with a num-
ber of distinct melodic styles, associated with different regions
or peoples of the Aegean area. Although one such style, called
‘Dorian’ after the Dorian race of Greeks, came to be thought
of as peculiarly and nobly Greek, interaction between Greeks
from different places, and contacts with non-Hellenic cultures,
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Mark Griffith
led to the adoption of several other such styles into the music
of the major centres of civilisation. By the sixth century this
process was well advanced. . . . [The styles] were not assimilated
into a single, undifferentiated cosmopolitan mélange: Ionian,
Phrygian, Lydian, and Dorian music seem to have retained dis-
tinct characters, credited with distinct emotional, aesthetic, and
moral effects, and found their places in different religious or cul-
tural niches. . . . Attempts to reduce such harmoniai to a system,
and in particular to express them as orderly transformations of a
single structure, probably originated in the later fifth century’.
38 In particular we may note the continuing similarities with the
musical culture of the ninth- through sixth-century Hittites
(now ‘Neo-Hittites’ or ‘Late Hittites’) and Phrygians; see further
West (1992) 327–55; W. D. Anderson (1994) 53, 62 (and my note
36); Schuol (2004); also Burkert (1992 [1984]) esp. 39, 52–3. The
Greeks themselves never had a term for ‘Hittites’. In Greek trag-
edy, choruses describe themselves as singing ‘Carian’ or ‘Ionian’
or ‘Kissian’ or ‘Mysian’ or ‘Mariandynian’ laments; celebrations
of Bacchus and Cybele are conventionally ‘Phrygian’; and refer-
ence is also made to the ‘Libyan’ aulos. ‘Orpheus’ too (a Thracian/
Macedonian) is cited as an idealised source of powerful song (e.g.,
Eur. IA 1211–15). The ubiquitous satyr chorus must generally be
imagined as originating from Thrace as well (home of Maron,
Ismaric wine, etc.; see, e.g., Eur. Cyc. 141 with Seaford’s note),
and their magical song at Eur. Cyc. 648 is ‘an incantation-charm
of Orpheus’ (cf. Griffith (2005a) 178–9). Likewise, Thamyris, who
competed against the Muses themselves (Hom. Il. 2.594–600),
was a Thracian; cf. Wilson (2009). See further Barker (1984–9)
I.62–92.
39 It appears that the seven-string tortoise-shell lyre that he invents
(lura, chelus – but referred to as a kitharis at 499, 509, 515 and a
phorminx at 506) is especially suited to informal, sympotic set-
tings (478–90), though mention is made also of ‘choruses’ and
the komos; see further Zschätzsch (2002) 18–24.
40 See especially Polybius’ proudly chauvinistic account at 4.20.5–
21.9 (Polybius was himself from Megalopolis). Pan was credited
with inventing the syrinx in Arcadia; Landels (1999) 69–71,
159–60.
41 For Athena’s invention of the auloi, especially striking – and
puzzling – is Pindar’s account in Pythian 12; see further Wilson
(1999); Landels (1999) 153–9; Zschätzsch (2002) 24–7; Martin
(2003). Apparently the best reeds for auloi (donakes or kalamoi;
cf. Barker (1984–9) I.90–2, 186; Matelli (2004)) grew around Lake
Kopais near Orchomenos in Boeotia; see Pindar Pyth. 12.27 with
schol., Theophr. Hist. pl. 4.11.1–7.
60 �
42 Wilson (1999); Zschätzsch (2002) 18–24; Martin (2003).

43 Laws 624–5a (cf. Hom. Od. 19.178–9); 630d; 632c; 706a–b. In
Laws Book 1 especially, Minos and Lycurgus are repeatedly men-
tioned in the same breath, as contributing almost identically to
their respective communities (Crete and Sparta). The same is true
sometimes in Aristotle and Ephorus (apud Strabo), both of whom
refer to ‘Minos’ as the inventor and establisher of the laws of ‘the
Cretans’. To confuse chronology (and historicity) still further,
Aristotle, like Plato, often writes as if there was just one ‘Cretan
constitution’, even though there were of course many (not just
Cnossus and Gortyn, the alleged home of Thaletas: Paus. 1.14.4;
Plut. [De mus.] 9.1134c; cf. Campbell T 5, 6, 7). Unfortunately,
modern scholars have no way of determining how similar the
Cretan singing, instrumentation, and choral dancing that we see
represented on monuments of the ‘Minoan’ period in Crete and
Thera (e.g., Figs. 2A and 2B; cf. Younger (1998); Schuol (2004))
may have been to the Cretan and Theran musical performances of
the seventh through the fifth century b.c. – or to Spartan music
either, for that matter. (The famous seventh-century rupestral
inscriptions from Dorian Thera make repeated – and excited –
reference to dancing.) Nor do we know whether in Plato’s day
(roughly, 400–350 b.c., a period in which mainland Greek theo-
rists were becoming increasingly interested in Cretan institu-
tions, it seems), a distinctive ‘Cretan’ type of music existed at all.
On all these issues, see further Morrow (1960) 17–35; P. Perlman
(1992); Saunders (1970).
44 Visual and documentary evidence for the ceremonial uses of
instrumental and vocal music, acrobatics, and dance (and also
wine) among the Bronze Age (and later) Hittites indicates that
they had much in common with those of both the Minoans and
the Mycenaean Greeks: see Figs. 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, and 4, and Alp
(2000 [1999]); Schuol (2004); Bachvarova (2007); Rutherford
(2007); also Younger (1998). For their resemblances also to the
(much older) traditions of Egyptian musical performance and
chironomy, see Figs. 1A and 1B and Manniche (1991) and my
note 36); and for Mesopotamian (esp. Sumerian-Babylonian-
Hurrian) musical traditions, see Lasserre (1988); West (1993–4);
Hagel (2005), with further references.
45 See previous note. The ‘Neo-Hittites’, or Late Hittite culture of
the early first millennium, seems to have been in part assimilated
into the (Thrace-derived[?], linguistically different) Phrygian
culture of the eighth to sixth century b.c. Overall, we are safe in
concluding both that seventh- to fifth-century b.c. Greek music
must indeed have sounded similar to Hittite or Lydian or Thracian
music in many respects and that it was used for many of the same
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Mark Griffith
purposes and occasions (see, e.g., Figs. 4A and 4B). To put this
another way: even though obviously the words to the songs will
have been almost entirely different (though often closely related,
as West (1999) has established in detail; cf. Watkins (2007)), the
instruments, the nomoi and harmoniai of the instrumentalists
and singers, and the schemata of the dancers, must often have
looked and sounded very similar.
46 See Shiloah (1995) and my note 10. Contemporary CD collections
of ‘Arabesque’, ‘Saraha Lounge’, ‘Desert Grooves’, and similar
works combine tracks from groups based, e.g., in Lebanon,
Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and Israel – as well as émigrés recording
or remixing in Paris, London, and New York. At the same time,
numerous quite distinct ethnic/‘folk’ musical traditions flour-
ish in, e.g., Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, and Greece
(especially Crete) – and it is not uncommon for performers to
have repertoires of songs in three or four different languages.
47 For Pronomos and Theban (rather than Athenian) auletes, see
Barker (1984–9) I.274 n. 52; Wilson (1999); and my note 62
herein. For the ‘Asiatic’ (and servile) associations of the virtuosic
‘New Music’ in late fifth-century Athens, see Csapo (2004). See
further Aristotle Pol. 1340b–1341b, and my subsequent com-
ments on Carian mourners.
48 See W. D. Anderson (1966); Barker (1984–9) II; Gibson (2005);
Hagel (2009), with further references.
49 Morpurgo Davies (1987); Woodard (2008).
50 Schneider (1957), cited with approval by West (1992) 328.
Schneider’s chapter was written for Wellesz (1957), a stan-
dard – but by now obsolete – study of ‘Ancient and Oriental [sic]
Music’.
51 It could only be stated by a musicologist whose convictions were
rooted unshakably in the European traditions of symphonic and
chamber art music perfected and crystallised between about
1600 and 1925. Only in that one (peculiar) tradition would music
be expected to be a ‘literature’ (i.e., written, and consisting of
fixed compositions); and this particular (West European) tra-
dition of art music had worked hard to homogenise its instru-
mentation and tunings (‘concert A’ = 440; the ‘well-tempered’
keyboard; etc.) and to rid itself of many of the most intricate and
emotive techniques available to other (earlier, or geographically/
ethnically distinct) traditions – such as forceful or syncopated
rhythms and polyrhythms, use of microtones, ‘bent’ notes, and
variable vocal timbres, in favour of ‘purity’ of tone and complex-
ity of polyphony, harmony, and thematic structure.
52 By the early twentieth century, ‘Western’ instruments were
already becoming an integral part of many Indian, African, and
62 �
Southeast Asian musical traditions: e.g., violins (Egypt, Turkey,

etc.) and harmonium (India and Pakistan); or later in the twen-
tieth century, accordion (East Africa), electric guitars and saxo-
phones (West Africa); cf. Shiloah (1995).
53 See Scott (1992); Gilroy (1993); Lott (1993); Keil and Feld (1994)
197–217. Even in the Iliad (19.301–2), the female captives (Trojan =
‘Phrygian’[?]) are represented as joining in a distinctive song of
lamentation, led by Briseis, in the Achaian camp over the corpse
of Patroclus; and the (implicitly Greek) narrator makes a point
of specifying that they are lamenting not only (or ‘not really’ –
prophasin) the Achaean hero but ‘each their own troubles/con-
cerns’ (kedea): see Alexiou (1977); Dué (2002); Suter (2007).
54 See Laws 680c (on Homer and xenoi), discussed subsequently.
55 These would be presumably the troops led by Idomeneus in
the Iliad, where he is consistently portrayed as a reliable senior
leader, though there were varied traditions as to Idomeneus’
own career after the Trojan War; cf. Gantz (1993) 697–8. In the
Iliad (2.649), it is stated that Crete has one hundred cities, not
ninety; the discrepancy was much debated by Aristotle and the
Homeric commentators.
56 For the conventional Classical Greek (and Platonic?) notions
about Dorians (who, despite being themselves newer than,
e.g., Ionians, were reputedly both more stable and more ‘old-
fashioned’ than they, especially in their devotion to choruses,
mess halls, etc.), see O. Murray, Chapter 5 in this volume.
57 P. Perlman (1992), with further references, including extensive
epigraphical material; she suggests, plausibly in my opinion, that
the particular model for this blanket ‘Cretan constitution’ was
the small city of Lyktos – mentioned prominently by Ephorus,
Aristotle, Polybius, and others.
58 Hdt. 1.65: ‘The Lacedaemonians themselves say that Lycurgus
brought [the politeia] from Crete after he became guardian of
his nephew Leobotas, king of Sparta, and acted as his regent’;
Plut. Lyc. 4: ‘Lycurgus through favour and friendship persuaded
Thales/Thaletas, one of the Cretans who had a high reputation
for wisdom and political ability, to go off to Sparta. This Thales/
Thaletas was ostensibly a composer of songs for the lyre ( poieten
lurikon melon) . . . but in reality he was doing the work of the best
of the lawgivers (nomotheton), for his songs were exhortations
to obedience and harmony, composed moreover in melodies
and rhythms that were marked by great orderliness and tran-
quillity. . . . So there is a sense in which Thales/Thaletas paved
the way for Lycurgus in his instruction/education ( paideusin)
of the Lacedaemonians’ (trans. D. Campbell, slightly adapted).
Cf. too Strabo 10.4.19; Arist. Pol. 1274a; also Paus. 1.14.4; Plut.
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Mark Griffith
[De mus.] 9.1134b–c; Ael. VH 12.50 – and also Socrates’ amus-

ing remarks at Pl. Prt. 342a7–d4. For extended discussion of
the relationship between Cretan and Spartan ‘constitutions’ and
social organisation, see esp. van Effenterre (1948); Chrimes (1952)
205–47; Huxley (1971); P. Perlman (1992).
59 Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 149 (Strabo 10.4.16–22); see further
Griffith (2001) 74–80.
60 Some commentators have preferred to understand this as the
Dictaean Cave; but see Morrow (1960) 27–8.
61 What exactly does ‘Egyptian’ knowledge of mathematics,
astronomy, and similar fields have to do with Crete’s (or Thales’/
Thaletas’, or Solon’s) special and highly influential wisdom: 656c–
657b; 747b–c; 819a–b; and where might Plato’s Timaeus and
Critias fit in? On some of these issues, see further Rutherford’s
Chapter 3 in this volume.
62 The famous Attic red-figure volute krater known as the Pronomos
Vase (Naples, Mus. Nat. 3240; ARV2 1336,1) provides a useful
perspective here: painted circa 400 in Athens, it celebrates a
Theban (professional) aulete with some enthusiastic Athenian
citizen satyr choreuts in a strikingly Dionysiac context. See fur-
ther Taplin and Wyles (2010) and my note 47 herein.
63 Griffith (2002, 2005b).
64 See Voelke (2001); Seidensticker (2005); also Seaford (1987);
Kowalzig (2007a).
65 It was said that the Spartans routinely got their Helots drunk
in order to make a spectacle of them to the young so that they
would not grow up to be so dissolute and embarrassing (Plut.
Mor. [Inst. Lac.] 239a–b; cf. Lyc. 28.57a). We do not hear of
Athenians doing this with their slaves or paid entertainers, but I
am suggesting that satyrs provided a kind of stand-in.
66 Presumably ‘Lydian’ and ‘Mixolydian’, and ‘Ionian’ too, will be
banned from all citizen performances; see my note 1. Although
no specific mention is made in the Laws as to which modes
(tunings, scales, melodies, or styles) will be employed for which
dances and other performances, it is natural to assume (on the
basis of the Republic) that all the warlike choruses will per-
form in Dorian, whereas some of the peaceful dances may be
in Phrygian. But to what music do the girls dance? And how
‘relaxed’ or ‘exciting, orgiastic’ is the Bacchic music allowed to
be (cf. Arist. Pol. 1340ff.)? Plato’s vagueness is curious.
67 On Magnesia as a second Athens, see Morrow (1960); O. Murray,
68 For ‘one-hundred (or ninety)-citied Crete’, see my earlier discus-
sion, and cf. P. Perlman (1992). For the population planning and
64 �
demographics of Magnesia, see Morrow (1960); Bobonich (2002)

374–84.
69 O. Murray’s example of Professor Wang’s grappa dance in
Chapter 5 of this volume may be relevant here.
70 For the cultural value of musical appreciation and discrimina-
tion (krisis) – acquired partly through lyre performance at an
elementary level but mainly through attentive listening, with
peers, to expert professional performers – as a key component
in the education and leisure activity (diagoge) of free men of all
ages, see Arist. Pol. 1340b–1342b – a passage that surely reflects
Aristotle’s thoughtful reappraisal of Plato’s ideas about musical
education and entertainment in the Laws.
71 It remains unclear how many of the visiting tragic playwrights,
along with their mighty-voiced actors (presumably most or all
of them Greeks, perhaps Artists of Dionysus), who apply for a
permit to perform a tragedy in Magnesia will be granted a cho-
rus (presumably of Magnesian citizens): but it seems that few are
likely to satisfy the rigorous moral standards of the authorities
(817a–c). See P. Murray’s Chapter 11 in this volume.
72 Dithyramb is mentioned explicitly in the Laws only in the con-
text of (past) Athenian excesses and confusions in musical prac-
tice (700b); but it seems likely that the references to ‘Bacchic’
dances and rituals at 790e and 815c would bring dithyramb to
the minds of Athenian and other Greek readers, as might the
discussions of old men’s choruses dedicated to Dionysus (665)
and also children dancing in choruses (admittedly, dedicated to
the Muses rather than to Dionysus – but in a context heavily
inflected with the habits of wine drinking: 664b–666). See in
general (on dithyrambs all over the Greek world) Kowalzig and
Wilson (2013).
73 Saunders (1970) translates this phrase ‘outside his [the states-
man’s] province’, which seems right, though England (1921)
ad loc. argues that it should mean ‘not belonging in the polis
at all’.
74 ‘Satyrs . . . drunkenness, etc.’ in the context of choral per-
formance must inevitably suggest, first and foremost – to an
Athenian reader at least – satyr drama. For the romantic, non-
political story lines and emotionality of satyr drama, see Seaford
(1987) 33–44; Voelke (2001); Griffith (2005b, 2010).
75 We may think of the performers depicted on the so-called phlyax
vases from South Italy, which may well represent Athenian
comedies being restaged for Apulian audiences by travelling
actors (perhaps Dionusou technitai): see Taplin (1993); Green and
Handley (1995).
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Mark Griffith
76 For ‘Carian’ (or ‘Asian’ in general) music and professional mourn-

ers at funerals, we may point to esp. Aesch. Pers. and Cho.; Eur.
Tro. 511ff.; Ar. Ran. 1302; Poll. Onom. 4.75–6; Ath. 4.174–5,
13.580d; cf. Alexiou (1977) 10, 107.
77 This is certainly Aristotle’s view, too; cf. Pol. 1340a, 1341b–1342b.
78 What about gender difference? Plato’s position on that ques-
tion is notoriously elusive: in the Republic girls and women are
to be assigned the same educational program as boys and men
towards becoming Guardians and philosophers, including gym-
nastics and athletics (Rep. 451c–457c); but in the Laws we get a
strong impression throughout that girls and women will always
be given different dances (and no wine), as distinct from boys
and men.
79 Gilroy (1993) 109. He is discussing there (and in his book over-
all) the continuing and multifaceted evolution of ‘black’ cul-
tural identity (the ‘black subject’) in northwest Africa, Western
Europe, the Caribbean, and the East Coast of North America,
especially in relation to their shared, yet locally distinct and
distinctive, cultural forms. Despite the enormous distances of
time and place separating Plato’s (real and imagined) Crete from
Gilroy’s (real and imagined) Atlantic-Caribbean, the relevance
of his cultural analysis (cf. too Keil and Feld (1994) 238–46) to
Plato’s and other Greeks’ concerns about the purity of their own
language, morals, and (especially) musical culture, should be
obvious enough.
66 �
��
C hap t e r T h r e e
S t r ic t ly B a l l ro o m
Egy p t i a n Mo u s i k e a n d
P l a t o ’s C o m p a r a t i v e P o e t i c s
Ian Rutherford
Int ro d uc t ion
In the proem of Plato’s Timaeus, Critias comes close to imply-
ing that the best legal system is the Egyptian one. He reports
the tradition told by the Egyptian priests to Solon and thence
passed down in his family according to which certain prin-
ciples (nomoi) of the Egyptian political system, notably the dis-
tinction of citizens into castes, are surviving examples of those
established by the gods nine thousand years before, in the era
of Atlantis (24a). Both these ideas – that that Egyptian civili-
sation is about ten thousand years old, and that Greek states
borrow the caste system from Egypt – are pretty conventional
by Plato’s time.1 Significantly, Critias is made to say that he was
reminded of this tradition from listening to Socrates’ exposi-
tion the previous day about the ideal state, the exposition we
know as the Republic (25e). It seems to follow that for Plato the
Egyptian political system is close to perfect.
However, there are signs that we should not infer out-and-
out Egyptomania on Plato’s part. For one thing, the theory of
Thanks to all participants and in particular to Susan Stephens. Thanks

also to Lucia Prauscello for reading the chapter over.
� 67
Ian Rutherford
the ideal state sketched in the Republic itself is worked out in

wholly abstract terms, without reference to Egypt or any other
foreign model. In the preface to the Timaeus Socrates says that
he wants to see the ideal city in action, involved in conflict
with other states (19c–d), and to that end Critias offers to tell
him the story of the war that Ur-Athens, which was a millen-
nium older than Egypt, waged against Atlantis. The Egyptian
system of social organisation is mentioned merely because it
still exists, unlike that of Ur-Athens, which did not survive
the apocalypse there. Thus, what is special about Egypt is not
its laws but merely its stability, and this comes down to phys-
ical geography – the ‘Saviour’ Nile, flooding up from below,
which protects Egypt from the periodic conflagrations that
engulf other regions (22d).2
When he came to write the Laws, Plato could have gone in
either of two ways on Egypt. He could have followed his strat-
egy in the Republic and excluded references to actual historical
societies, or he could have made use of Egypt as a paradigm of
the divinely inspired jurisprudence of ancient times. In fact,
he seems for the most part to follow the former course. When
he mentions the political systems of other states, it is usually
to criticise them, as when in Book 3, he contrasts Persia and
Athens as paradigms of monarchy (too restrictive) and democ-
racy (too free). The topic where a reference to the Egyptian
system would have been most appropriate is that of social
castes, where Greek thinkers traditionally detected Egyptian
influence, but on this point it is worth observing that one of
the key differences between the Laws and the Republic is pre-
cisely that in the Laws Plato seems to have abandoned caste as
a structuring principle.
The role of Egyptian culture in the Laws is ambiguous. On
the one hand, it has two clear virtues. First, Egyptians teach
their children maths (819a–c) – probably a true observation,
in view of surviving mathematical texts from Egypt.3 In fact,
their degree of mathematical skill is pretty advanced, including
knowledge of ‘irrational’ numbers.4 (If knowledge of Egyptian
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mathematics had not already permeated to Greece, it might have

been introduced in this period by the mathematician Eudoxus
of Cnidus, who seems to have spent time in Egypt in the fourth
century).5 Second, in two passages Plato/the Athenian expresses
his admiration for the Egyptians for having figured how a soci-
ety can guard against internal change and moral decline by
manufacturing invariance in respect of mousike. This technique
to prevent corruption can be compared with what Critias says
in the proem of Timaeus, where it is the physical geography
of Egypt and the Nile that safeguards its laws. Unlike in the
Timaeus, however, the focus here is exclusively on the resis-
tance to change shown by Egyptian culture and hardly at all
on the Egyptian political system itself. And the Egyptians are
also presented as being possessed of certain faults; the ‘Sons of
the Nile’ are criticised for not welcoming foreigners at feasts
(953d–e), and the same mathematical skill they are praised for
in Book 7 is earlier held up as a fault (747e).6
Invar iant Mou sike

In this chapter I focus on the two passages that deal with
resistance to change. The first is in Book 2, in the context of a
discussion of education and the arts, leading into the famous
proposal for three choruses for different age-classes. By way of
explaining how the correct artistic and moral norms for chil-
dren are to be safeguarded, Plato talks about the fixed forms
that the Egyptians imposed ten thousand years before:
Athenian: . . . Long ago, apparently, they realised the

truth of the principle we are putting forward only
now, that the schemata (forms or gestures) and tunes
(mele) which the children of the state are to practise in
their rehearsals must be good ones. They compiled a
list of them according to style and displayed it in their
temples. Painters and everybody else who represent
movements of the body of any kind were restricted to
these forms, and modification and innovation outside
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this traditional framework are prohibited even today,

in both this field and the arts in general. If you exam-
ine their art on the spot, you will find that ten thou-
sand years ago (and I’m not speaking loosely: I mean
literally ten thousand) paintings and reliefs were pro-
duced that are no better and no worse than those of
today, because the same artistic rules were applied in
making them.
Cleinias: Fantastic!
Athenian: No: simply a supreme achievement of legisla-
tors and statesmen. You might, even so, find some other
things to criticise there, but in the matter of music
(mousike) this inescapable fact deserves our attention. It
has in fact proved feasible to legislate about such mat-
ters and firmly consecrate music (ta mele) that shows an
aural correctness.7 But it is the task of a god, or a man
of god-like stature; in fact, the Egyptians say that the
tunes that have been preserved for so long are the com-
positions of Isis. Consequently, as I said, if one could
get even a rough idea of what constitutes ‘correctness’
in matters musical, one ought to have no qualms about
giving the whole subject systematic expression in the
form of a law. It is true that the craving for pleasure
and the desire to avoid tedium lead us to a constant
search for novelty in music (kainei mousikei khresthai),
and choral performances (choreia) that have been thus
consecrated may be stigmatised as out-of-date; but this
does not have very much power to corrupt them. In
Egypt, at any rate, it does not seem to have had a cor-
rupting effect at all; quite the contrary. (656d–657b)8
Plato takes it for granted that the Egyptians identify a form

of ‘correctness’ with respect to music (orthotes: cf. the mousikan
orthan performed by Apollo in Pindar, fr. 32) and regard this
as a vital part of moral education. The focus here is not on the
nature of Egyptian music and dance, about which he says noth-
ing, except that the Egyptians attribute them to Isis.9 Instead
he concentrates on the technique the Egyptians have devised to
prevent their mousike being corrupted over time – registering
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the correct forms of schemata and mele and displaying them in

the temples. Although the text of the crucial passage is appar-
ently corrupt, it seems that he describes this action as a form
of legislation and consecration, and one that must have been
carried out by a being with a share in divinity: a god or a
godlike man.10 The idea of the original lawgivers manipulating
religious institutions to achieve a political end is reminiscent
of the atheism of Greek intellectuals, such as we find it in the
Sisyphus fragment ascribed to Critias, which claimed that gods
were invented by ‘a shrewed and clever-minded man’ to ensure
respect for the law. Plato himself argues forcefully against that
sort of atheism in Laws 10, 889e–890a.11
Plato returns to Egypt later in Book 7, where again he talks
about the ‘consecration’ of choral song, and this time he explic-
itly derives a law from Egypt:
Athenian: . . . We must do everything we possibly can
to distract the younger generation from wanting to try
their hand at presenting new subjects, in either dance
(orcheseis) or song (melodiai); and we must also stop
pleasure-mongers seducing them in the attempt.
Cleinias: You’re absolutely right.
Athenian: Now, does any of us know of a better
method of achieving such an object than that of the
Egyptians?
Cleinias: What method is that?
Athenian: To consecrate (kathierosai) all our dances and
music. The first job will be to settle the festivals by
drawing up the year’s programme, which should show
the dates of the various holidays and the individual
gods, children of gods or spirits in whose honour they
should be taken. Second, it has to be decided what
hymn (ode) should be sung at the various sacrifices to
the gods and the type of dancing (choreiai) that should
dignify the ritual in question. (798e–799a)
This is the only specific law in Laws that is given an Egyptian

origin.12 Once again, the point is to ensure against innovation
in the musical repertoire, but this time it is not just a matter of
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displaying the tunes or figures of dance in temples; rather, the

songs and their accompanying dances (i.e., mele and schemata
again) are to be embedded in the cultic calendar, and their
being regarded as ‘consecrated’ acts as a brake on innovation.
Whereas the passage in Book 2 took a diachronic perspective,
focussing on how Egyptian mousike remains invariant over the
longue durée, in Laws 7 he suggests that invariance can also
be achieved if mousike is embedded in a different sort of time,
the regular yearly cycle of the sacred calendar.
These statements about invariance contrast with the
Athenian’s insistence elsewhere in Laws (665b) that song
involves constant variation in form. Presumably these passages
can be reconciled by allowing that variation is acceptable as
long as it is made from a menu of approved forms.13
If we put all this together, it seems that Plato has given
Egypt a really unusual role in the Laws. He shares with other
Greek thinkers the belief that Egyptian culture is uniquely
ancient and stable, but whereas the conventional approach
was to present Egypt as a fundamental influence on aspects of
early Greek religion or social structure, and often as an admi-
rable model in these respects, the Plato of the Laws has a much
more limited admiration for Egypt: apart from mathematical
education (819a), it comes down to the mechanisms by which
the Egyptians prevent change with respect to mousike, and so
prevent a more general decline or transformation in moral atti-
tudes, since Plato assumes that those two are linked.
S c h e mata
A key problem in the first passage is what Plato means when he
says that the Egyptians compiled a list of schemata and tunes
and displayed them in the temples. It is known that Egyptian
temples contained libraries of sacred texts; a late Greek source,
Clement of Alexandria, mentions that one of these ‘contained
hymns of the gods’.14 Scholars have recently identified a man-
ual of the ritual practice required in Egyptian temples, the
so-called Book of the Temple, though no reference in it to
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dance has so far emerged.15 In principle, there might have been

a written record of tunes and poses, naming them or describ-
ing them, although the idea that the Egyptians recorded tunes
is particularly problematic, because they had no musical nota-
tion, as far as we know, at least until they adopted Greek nota-
tion in the Hellenistic period.
An alternative view is that the term schemata means pic-
tures of human beings involved in singing and dancing, and
the poses they take up. Egyptian visual art is distinguished by
its regular, quasi-mathematical proportions,16 and it seems very
likely that the Greeks saw this quality in it as well. There was a
later tradition that early Greek sculptors adapted the Egyptian
canon or grid system of representing the human form, and
some historians of Greek art have agreed.17 Furthemore, dance
is a common theme in Egyptian art. A recent study of repre-
sentations of dance in the art of the Old Kingdom distinguishes
ten regularly occurring dance styles, including the Diamond
Dance, the Salute, the Swastika Pose, and the Harvest Dance.18
In the New Kingdom and later, images of dance frequently
appear on the walls of temples, as part of the representation
of the great festivals; the walls of temples often also recorded
the texts of hymns and songs.19 Perhaps these were interpreted
as prescribing the manner in which the dances ought to be
performed.
A third possibility is that by schemata Plato understands
the hieroglyphic symbols of Egyptian writing – not so much
of the propositional content of hieroglyphic writing but the
hieroglyphs themselves, many of which consist of pictures
illustrating a human being or parts of the human body in a spe-
cific pose.20 That Plato, like other Greek writers, saw writing as
particularly characteristic of Egyptian culture is clear from the
fable of Thoth and Thamus in the Phaedrus, in which Thoth is
said to have invented writing and King Thamus to have rejected
it, on the grounds that it is ‘a drug for forgetfulness’ rather
than for memory. In the third century a.d. the Neoplatonic phi-
losopher Plotinus (himself born in Lycopolis) praised the wise
Egyptians for having chosen to avoid an alphabetic script tied
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to the sound of language and to use instead a script based on

images (agalmata), which represents reality more directly.21
It is not impossible that Plato’s line of reasoning is somewhat
similar: he knows that Egyptian temples are characterised by
mysterious picture writing, much of which represents poses of
the human body, and he is suggesting that these images repre-
sent modes of stance prescribed by a primeval lawgiver. That
Plato refers to ‘painters’ in 656e is not an objection to this view
because hieroglyphs to a Greek eye would have looked a lot
like painting, and in any case it is generally acknowledged that
there is a high degree of overlap between writing and represen-
tation art in Egypt.22
Plato and Gre e k Id e o lo g y about Egypt

Many of the things Plato says about Egyptian culture may have
been fairly conventional insofar as they turn up in earlier or
later writers as well – its immense antiquity, the use of social
castes, the role of writing. However, although other Greek
writers occasionally mention Egyptian song, no one else says
that the performance styles of Egyptian mousike were institu-
tionally fixed.23
As usual, when trying to understand a statement by Greek
writers about a foreign culture, two approaches are available:
to look at how the statement represents the other culture and
to look at how it reflects the writer’s own mentality, and it will
usually turn out, unless the writer is extraordinarily engaged
with the other culture or extraordinarily self-absorbed, that a
complete explanation will involve both dimensions. So in this
case we can try on the one hand to evaluate whether Plato’s
representation of Egyptian culture is accurate and on the other
hand to understand what role these remarks play within Plato’s
own thinking, or within more general discursive agendas of
Greek thinkers. And we should expect that a full explanation
involves taking both components into account.
In the case of Plato’s statements about Egyptian mousike,
one’s first reaction may be that accurate information about
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Egyptian culture is unlikely to have been the highest priority

for Plato, creator of the grand primeval myth of Ur-Athens,
Egypt, and Atlantis in the Timaeus. On the other hand, we
have already seen that some of what he says about Egyptian
culture rings true: Egyptian representational art was indeed
based on conservative and regular principles, and a form of
practical mathematics was indeed taught in Egypt.
To begin with, we can try to understand Plato’s statements
about Egyptian mousike in terms of the strategies of argumen-
tation Greeks of this period use when dealing with Egypt. To
Greek observers of the fifth century b.c., the most remarkable
thing about Egypt was its immense antiquity and its resilience
to change. By contrast, Greek culture was younger and less sta-
ble, but some parts were less stable than others. For Athenians,
it was obvious that Sparta was a much more conservative
culture than their own, which followed closely the divinely
revealed constitution of Lycurgus and resisted change. In
respect of its conservatism, then, Sparta was closer to Egypt
than other parts of Greece.
Greek writers do indeed make this connection in several
respects. For example, Herodotus observes that Egyptian
young men respect their elders, just like in Sparta.24 A more
significant parallel is the division of society into heredi-
tary castes, observed first by Herodotus (6.60), and followed
by other many writers, including Aristotle in the Politics.25
Related to this is the issue of the existence in both cultures of
a separate caste or castes of warriors, a point made most clearly
in the Busiris by Isocrates, who argues that Sparta’s military
practices imitate Egypt’s (17–18), albeit the Egyptian version is
better, because Egyptian warriors, unlike Spartan ones, do not
take advantage of their societies (19–20).26 In view of this accu-
mulation of parallels, it was eventually bound to be suggested
that Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan constitution, had
been inspired by a visit to Egypt: as far as we know, this was
first suggested by the historian Ephorus, writing in the fourth
century b.c., and was developed by later Greek writers such as
Hecataeus of Abdera and Plutarch.27
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Plato, apparently a great admirer of the Dorian political sys-

tem, does not himself explicitly link Sparta and Egypt, and in
one text he seems by implication to refute Isocrates’ assertion
of the link. This is in the proem of the Timaeus, when he talks
of the Egyptian system of castes (24a–b), and compares it not
with contemporary Sparta but with Ur-Athens.28 Nevertheless,
it seems likely that Plato is aware of the conventional compar-
ison between Egypt and Sparta. We saw earlier that in Laws
he criticises Egyptians for xenelasia (953d–e), and, as Anton
Powell has pointed out, for Greeks of this period xenelasia
would be associated with Sparta.29 Similarly, in a passage soon
after his discussion of Egyptian mousike, Plato observes that
Cretan and Spartan music too was traditional:
Cleinias: Good Heavens, sir, do you really think that’s

how they compose nowadays in other cities? My experi-
ence is limited, but I know of no such proceeding as you
describe, except among us Cretans or in Sparta. In danc-
ing (orcheseis) and all the other arts (mousike) one novelty
follows another; the changes are made not by law but are
prompted by wildly changing fancies that are very far
from being permanent and stable like the Egyptian tastes
you’re explaining: on the contrary, they are never the
same from minute to minute. (660b)
Cleinias’ view is confirmed by the standard musical histories,

which represent Spartan music as having been laid down in
two early acts of canonical organisation (katastasis), the first
by Terpander of Lesbos, and the second by Thaletas of Gortyn,
Xenodamus of Cythera, and others. Part of the second katasta-
sis was the setting up of the Gymnopaedia festival at Sparta.30
In fact, another key feature of Plato’s choral regimen reminds
us of Sparta as well – the three choruses in Laws 2, which seems
similar to the programme of the Spartan Gymnopaedia.31
Plato’s admiration for Dorian music in the Laws is not, how-
ever, unqualified, as we see in the discussion of the chorus of
Old Men, where the Athenian observes that the Cretans ‘have
failed to achieve the finest kind of song’.32
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You organise your state as though it were a military camp

rather than a society of people who have settled in towns, and
you keep your young fellows together like a herd of colts at
grass. (666e)
So here we have implicit criticism of the militarist nature of

Dorian society and the choral performances that provide its
ideological voice; notice that the last clause here amounts to
a criticism of another Dorian institution, the rigorous agoge
for young men, as we know it from Ephorus account.33 As an
example of such militaristic choral poetry, he then goes on to
mention the poems of Tyrtaeus (667a).34
The possibility arises, then, the homoeostatic Egyptian
mousike was an invention by Plato. His starting point could
have been the traditional nature of Dorian mousike, and on
the basis of the conventional association between Sparta and
Egypt, he might have reverse-engineered an invariant Egyptian
mousike. Secondly, this mousike was then given a frame and an
anchor within Egyptian culture in the form of the ideal pat-
terns inscribed ten thousand years ago on temple walls, which
also appealed to Plato’s interest in mathematics and his dis-
dain for realistic art. Plato’s Egyptian mousike would thus be
an anthropological fiction, an exotic practice projected onto a
distant people. In a similar way and perhaps not much later, a
Peripatetic author seeking to explain the origin of the name of
the Greek lyric genre ‘nomos’ claimed that in preliterate soci-
eties it had been the practice for laws to be sung to prevent
them falling into oblivion, and he attributed this practice to
the even more remote Scytho-Thracian Agathyrsi.35
Th e L a w s and E gypt
However, before we conclude that Plato made it all up, we also
have to assess what the Egyptian evidence suggests. As far as
can be made out from our limited understanding of Egyptian
music and dance,36 and of what Plato means when he talks
about writing up the schemata and mele in temples, Plato’s
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statements about it are partly accurate and partly inaccurate.

He is right to imply that dancing and singing were a central
feature of Egyptian society, particularly of Egyptian tem-
ple rituals and festivals (although this would be true of any
ancient society);37 and he is right to say that Egyptian cul-
tic calendars sometimes incorporate references to hymns to be
performed on certain days or even several lines of the hymn.38
(Incidentally, another of Plato’s remarks about the religious
calendar of Neo-Magnesia seems to have an Egyptian correlate
also, namely the idea that each month is dedicated to one of
the twelve gods.)39
On the other hand, although Egyptian sources occasionally
mention the teaching of singing or dancing, there is no sign
that Egyptians attributed an educative function to music and
dance or associated them with moral qualities.40 Indeed, there
are reasons to believe that in Egyptian religion the people who
performed sacred song and dance were generally members of
specialised troupes attached to the temples; this was not a song
culture like Plato’s Neo-Magnesia, where all citizens partici-
pated and participation defined membership of the commu-
nity.41 And if, as I suggested, the schemata that Plato refers
to in Laws 2 are Egyptian hieroglyphs, which he interprets as
instructions on correct posture in dance, then that is a mistake
as well.
There is also a broader issue in play: Plato’s general attitude
to Egyptian culture as highly conservative has recently been
shown to resemble the attitudes propagated by Egyptians
about themselves in the Saite period (seventh–sixth cen-
tury b.c.), a period of intense archaising.42 The German
Egyptologist Jan Assmann has suggested that already in this
period Egyptian society had developed a feature that we
are more familiar with from the Hellenistic period – namely,
the temples had acquired a special role as repositories of
Egyptian cultural identity, their walls lined with accounts
of traditional rituals and theology, and traditional imagery.43
The temples also contained libraries and were staffed with
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priests and religious personnel who want to be seen as the

heirs and faithful guardians of ancient traditions that went
back thousands of years. In Assmann’s phrase, the Egyptian
temple had become a ‘cultural canon’.
To conclude, Plato was not the first Greek intellectual to
find merit in aspects of Egyptian society, but he does seem to
have been the first to identify as the crucial achievement of the
Egyptians their techniques for preventing change in mousike.
Plato’s accounts of Egyptian mousike in Laws 2 and 7 are partly
fantastic but they may also reflect at least a vague knowledge
of Egypt art and attitudes to the past. How he got hold of his
information about Egyptian music is anyone’s guess, but by
this time many Greek historians had written about Egypt,44
and plenty of people in Plato’s circle must have visited Egypt,
even if he did not himself.45 At the same time, however, the ref-
erences to Egyptian mousike in Laws should be seen as part of
a discursive strategy, inherited by Plato, of representing Egypt
as model for, and in many ways similar to, the Dorian cultures
of Sparta and Crete. Within the terms of that equation, there
was a space for an Egyptian choreia as an antecedent for the
Dorian one, and if it had not existed, Greek intellectuals might
well have been tempted to invent it.
Seen from the point of view of his intellectual development,
Plato’s discussion of how the Egyptians guard against innova-
tion in choreia seems to mark a considerable change from the
attitudes to Egyptian culture shown in his earlier works. In
particular, we are a long way from the parable of Thoth and
Thamus in the Phaedrus, where Thoth presents the newly
invented writing as a ‘drug for memory’, and Thamus answers
that it is nothing but a ‘drug for forgetfulness’. In the Phaedrus
Socrates argued that philosophy should be conducted via
direct dialogue and without ‘dead’ written texts, but in Laws
the Athenian praises the Egyptian lawgivers for setting down
as a public record (if not literally in written form) the compo-
nents of musical orthotes and, furthermore, securing compli-
ance by representing it as divinely sanctioned.46
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Not e s
1 Ten thousand years: Herodotus 2.142–3 on Hecataeus of Miletus,
with Moyer (2002); caste system: Herodotus 2.60, and also see
p. 75.
2 On the passage, see Raith (1967); Bonneau (1964).
3 Reineke (1980); Maza Gómez (2003).
4 See Froidefond (1971) 315–16 on the problem occasioned by the
fact that in Theaetetus 147d Plato seems to attribute the discov-
ery of irrationals to the Greeks.
5 This was suggested by Jaeger (1944) 257–8 and Brunner (1957)
78ff.; these references from Froidefond (1971) 311. For Eudoxus,
see Lasserre (1966); Goyon (1974).
6 Egyptian culture often attracted the accusation of xenophobia.:
compare a passage from the Hebrew Genesis (43.32) where the
Egyptians are said to eat alone because the Egyptians might not
eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an abomination unto the
Egyptians. Some, such as Brisson (1987), think Plato may be refer-
ring to Busiris, whose manner of treating foreigners was paradig-
matically barbaric. There is another vague critical reference at
657a. For negative portrayals of Egypt, see also C. Cooper (2003).
7 The text of 657a is problematic. The paradosis is τοῦτο δ’ οὖν τὸ
περὶ μουσικὴν ἀληθές τε καὶ ἄξιον ἐννοίας, ὅτι δυνατὸν ἄρ’ ἦν
περὶ τῶν τοιούτων νομοθετεῖσθαι βεβαίως θαρροῦντα μέλη τὰ
τὴν ὀρθότητα φύσει παρεχόμενα. As England (1921) points out,
it is awkward to take nomotheteisthai as a middle, and tharrounta
looks like it may have been copied from a few lines below:
ὥσθ’, ὅπερ ἔλεγον, εἰ δύναιτό τις ἑλεῖν αὐτῶν καὶ ὁπωσοῦν τὴν
ὀρθότητα, θαρροῦντα χρὴ εἰς νόμον ἄγειν καὶ τάξιν αὐτά. We
need a transitive verb, and kathieroun seems to give an accept-
able sense (note ten kathierotheisan choreian, a few lines below).
8 All my translations are adapted from Saunders (1970).
9 The Egyptian goddess most associated with music seems to be
Hathor, but Isis and Hathor were often linked; see Froidefond
(1971) 329 n. 530.
10 For the text, see note 7.
11 For a full discussion, see Kahn (1997) 254.
12 Other Greek historians were prepared to entertain the possibil-
ity that some Greek laws came from Egypt. Herodotus 2.177,
had claimed that Solon derived a law about declaring one’s
livelihood from Egypt; modern scholarship gives that little cre-
dence, but it shows that the idea of Egypt as a source for law was
already in the air. The first book of Diodorus of Sicily, heavily
indebted to Hecataeus of Abdera, includes a section on Egyptian
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laws (1.75ff.) dealing with perjurers, false accusation, parents

and children, and military desertion. He also has a catalogue
of Egyptian lawgivers (1.94ff.). Diodorus/Hecataeus mentions
another law supposedly introduced by Solon to Athens about
personal debt, and he also identifies as Egyptian (1.78) a law that
cowardice in battle is to be punished by disgrace rather than
death, which is similar to one of Plato’s Laws (944c). Could there
be a connection? But Plato himself claims an Egyptian origin for
only one law in the Laws, namely the one concerning arrange-
ment of songs and festivals described in Book 7 (799a). On Greek
writers on Egyptian laws, see now Lippert (2008) 6–7.
13 On the passage, see Kowalzig (2004) 47; thanks to Lucia Prauscello
for this reference.
14 Clement of Alexandria, Str. 6.4.35; see Gardiner (1938); Fowden
(1986) 57–9.
15 Quack (2000); mention of a singer on p. 17.
16 See Davis (1989); Robins (1994).
17 Diodorus of Sicily (1.98) says that it was adapted by two Greek
sculptors, the sons of the Samian sculptor Rhoikos, and Diodorus
is largely indebted to Hecataeus of Abdera, the fourth-century his-
torian. For modern scholarship, see Iversen (1957); Tanner (2003);
also Davis (1979) with 123 n. 8, (1981), (1989); Robins (1994).
18 Kinney (2008).
19 For representations of dance, see Brunner-Traut (1958); Wild
(1963) 49–69; Kinney (2000, 2008); for texts, see Zabkar (1988)
on Philae and Darnell (1996) on Medamud.
20 Thanks to Leslie Kurke for this point. Assmann (1992) also seems
to take it this way. On perceptions of Egyptian writing in Greek
sources, see Rochette (1994). For Egyptian writing in Greek
sources, see the convenient survey of Vasunia (2001) 136–82.
21 Plotinus, Enn. 5.8.6. For other late sources on Egyptian writing,
see Vasunia (2001) 136 n. 1. Compare also the introduction of
Treatise 16 of the Corpus Hermeticum which contrasts Greek and
Egyptian words; the latter contain the energy of the objects they
speak of. See Copenhaver (1992) 58.
22 Baines (1989); Assmann (1992) 57 n. 46.
23 Herodotus says that the Egyptians sang a sort of lament like
the Greek linos song but in honour of a certain Maneros (2.79),
adding that this is the only song that the Egyptians know (see
Stephens (2002–3)) and that that although many aspects of
Dionysiac religion came from Egypt, Dionysiac choral songs did
not (2.48); cf. Emerit (2002) for the absence of song in the cult of
Osiris. Later Greek sources are hardly more forthcoming about
Egyptian music. The treatise On Style attributed to Demetrius
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(71) mentions that Egyptian priests sang the gods ‘with the seven
vowels’, sounding them one after another, a ritual practice that
has turned out to have a parallel in a Greek magical papyrus
(PGM 13, 822–933; Ruelle (1889); Betz (1986) 191–2). Plato’s
idea that Egyptian children learn mousike can be compared with
a tradition attested in several sources from the Roman period
that choruses of boys accompanying the Apis bull sang and
made prophecies (Plin. HN 8, 184–6; Ael. NA 11.10; Xenophon
of Ephesus 5.4; cf. Stadler (2004) 209). Clement of Alexandria
(Str. 6.4.35) attributes a major role in the ritual of the Egyptian
temple to a figure called the ‘singer’: ‘First comes the singer, car-
rying one of the symbols of music. They say that he must have
understood two books from among those of Hermes, of which
one contains hymns of the gods, the other consideration of the
life of the king’ (see Deiber (1904) 110; Assmann (2006) 75). Here
a canonical collection of hymns is associated with Hermes-Thoth
rather than to Isis (as in Laws). Egyptian Hermes invents music
at Diod. Sic. 1.16.1. Isis is the leader of the Muses at Hermoupolis
according to Plut. De Is. et Os. 3. Diodorus Siculus 1.81 says that
Egyptians regarded the teaching of music as useless and even
harmful. In the quasi-fictional De Genio Socratis (579b), Plutarch
describes how the Spartan king Agesilaos sent a document in
Egyptian script to Egypt to be deciphered, and the Egyptian
priest Chonouphis of Memphis interpreted it to be an order to
organise a contest for the Muses, that is, to cultivate the peaceful
pursuits of philosophy and mathematics.
24 Herodotus on Egypt and Sparta: Tigerstedt (1965–78) I.104,
404–5. Youth and ages: Hdt. 2.80.
25 Hdt. 6.60 (cf. 2.164–8); Arist. Pol. 7.10 (set up by Sesostris). Cf.
Pl. Ti. 24a–d. Cf. A. B. Lloyd (1975–88) III.182–3.
26 The same view is implicit in Herodotus’ observation (2.166–7) in
respect of the avoidance of handicraft by Egyptian military castes
that the practice has been adopted all over Greece but especially
in Sparta. Cf. Plut. Lyc. 4, 7–8, which Tigerstedt (1965–78) II.364
n. 359, attributes to Hecataeus.
27 Ephorus, FGrHist 70 F 149 (= Strabo 10.4.18); Plut. Lyc. 1.8;
Hecataeus, FGrHist 1 F 25 (= Diodorus 1.96); Tigerstedt (1965–
78) I.211, 496 n. 908a, II.87–8, 364 n. 389.
28 Livingstone (2001) 70.
29 Powell (1994) 298; for xenelasia, cf. Tuplin (1994) 150.
30 Plut. [De mus.] 9, 1134b.30.
31 For the Gymnopaedia, see Rutherford (2001) 31.
32 Apparently an allusion to the end of Pindar, Paean 6.182: see
Rutherford (2001) 328 n. 89; notice that Plato is saying choral poetry
is not sufficient, while the context of Pindar’s text is a choral poem.
82 �
Strictly Ballroom
33 See Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 149 (= Strabo, Geog. 10.4); for bibliog-

raphy, see Koehl (1986) 103.
34 For Tyrtaeus as choral, D’Alessio (2009).
35 Ps. Arist. Pr. 19.28. Froidefond (1971) 330–7; Halliwell (2000)
104–5; Catoni (2005) 293–6, esp. 295 n. 4; Panofsky (1975 [1924])
6: Plato’s ideal was met by the works of those Egyptian painters
and sculptors, who not only seemed to adhere eternally to firmly
established formulas but also abhorred any concession to visual
perception.
36 See Hickmann (1982) 230.
37 General guides: Manniche (1991); R. D. Anderson (1995). On the
Egyptian term for a chorus (šsp/t), see Gaudard (2005) 123.
38 As in this entry from a calendar at Edfu, relating to part of the
New Moon festival held the 15th of Pachon, and the epiphany
of Harsomtus (a form of Horus): They sing: ‘you strike your
enemies, Harsomtus. You strike your enemies, who are brought
together beneath your feet. You strike them like the harvest. You
cause that all lands praise your name, for you are Re, ruler of for-
eign lands’. Grimm (1994) G47 (= new moon festival of Pachon,
15th day).
39 Laws 828b (cf. 745d–e for the twelve gods). Herodotus also says
that the Egyptians have the days and months assigned to differ-
ent gods (2.82.1; cf. 2.4.1–2). For the Egyptian parallels, Long
(1987) 147–51, 177, 339; Neugebauer and Parker (1960–9) III.12–
14 n. 2; Osing (1982) 191–2. This is different from Greek practice,
though it seems to creep into Greece via Macedonia in the late
fourth century b.c. Trümpy (1997) 273–5 has argued in favour of
Egyptian influence in this case.
40 Teaching of singing: Brunner (1957) 47 (dance instruction for
girls), and 103 (singing).
41 On troupes, see Kinney (2008) 20–41. On the Egyptian for ‘cho-
rus’, see also Gaudard (2005) 123.
42 Brunner (1970); I. Nagy (1973); Moyer (2002); Loprieno (2003).
43 Assmann (2002).
44 For historians, see the convenient appendix in Vasunia (2001)
289–305.
45 On the tradition of Plato’s visit to Egypt, see Brisson (1987).
46 I am indebted to Froidefond (1971) 337–42. Contrast the opin-
ion of Vasunia (2001) 213 n. 54: ‘By saying in the Laws that the
Egyptians are good at following sacred written texts, Plato is not
contradicting the views about writing that he set forth in the
Phaedrus, where he distinguishes between beneficent and harm-
ful kinds of writing’, referring apparently to pp. 150–1.
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��
P art T wo
C o n c e p t ua l i s i n g
C h o ra l i t y
��
C hap t e r F o u r
C h o ra l P rac t i c e s i n
P l ato ’ s L aw s
It i n e r a r i e s o f In i t i a t i o n ?
Claude Calame
If there is one anthropological concept that was in fash-

ion during the second half of the previous century and to
which nowadays we hesitate to have recourse, it is the ‘rite
of passage’. In particular, we should condemn the abuse of an
unnuanced application of the notion of the ‘tribal initiation
rite’ as a category encompassing all collective rituals of pas-
sage from adolescence to adulthood. If it is a rite of passage,
a ceremony should conform to the threefold schema of rites
of separation (from childhood), of transition (during puberty),
and of integration (into the adult community). Not only has
the tribal initiation ritual been naturalised to the point where
it has implicitly been endowed with a universal essence, as has
happened successively to the concepts of taboo, ordeal, myth,
and the structural opposition of nature versus culture, but this
schema, elaborated one hundred years ago from ritual prac-
tices, has also been widely overused and misused as an analyti-
cal tool and as a key to interpreting various heroic and divine
narratives that involve adolescent characters.1 Furthermore, it
turns out that the logic of such narratives is not the same as
Translated from French by James Kierstead.
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that of rites of passage: in the alleged initiation narratives, the

young man or woman who is the protagonist of the narrative
often does not achieve the status of adult.
From an aetiological perspective, a narrative considered to
be ‘mythical’ and ‘initiatory’, not completed as far as its logical
progression is concerned, can manage to lead to ritual action.
A relevant example is the narrative of the adolescence of the
handsome ephebe Hyacinthus, beloved of the god Apollo and
inadvertently killed by his lover throwing a discus. The pre-
mature death of the young man results in the great festival of
the Hyakinthia at Amyclae near Sparta. This civic celebration
seems to resemble rituals in which young boys and girls, who
have completed their gymnastic and musical education, pre-
sent themselves to the community, and it can be interpreted
in terms similar to the final phase of such rituals – that is, of
admission into the community after having run a course of
tribal initiation.2 As for young women, we can cite the exam-
ple of Iphigenia as Euripides depicted her on stage. Sacrificed
by her father Agamemnon in a symbolic act of death but saved
by Artemis, who substitutes for her a doe, the young girl is
transported to barbarous Tauris by the goddess, who makes
her priestess of her own rites, before making her guardian of
her sanctuary at Brauron, on the borders of Attica. Heroised
as a servant-companion of Artemis just as Hyacinthus was
with respect to Apollo, Iphigenia protects in particular the
‘service of the bear’, which, at Brauron, referred both to the
social adolescence of young female Athenians and to menstrual
blood. The reference is thus more to individual rites of virginal
puberty than to collective rites of tribal initiation.3
Thus, the narrative that founds the ritual aetiologically in
the time of the heroic past establishes the status of the adoles-
cent protagonist at the moment of her or his death; this turn
of events in the narrative corresponds to the phase of transi-
tion and of symbolic death in tribal rituals of initiation or of
puberty, enacted in present time and leading to the integration
phase, which is absent in the narrative. In other words, the
ritual has an initiatory function, the ‘myth’ not.
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Choral Practices in Plato’s L aw s
As I have attempted to show on many occasions, the process

of formation reserved in the archaic Greek city-states to young
men and to young girls, in order to allow them to take on the
status of adults, is characterised in every case by two common
and distinctive traits: a poetic and musical education in choral
groups, and homoerotic relationships in the interval between
adolescence and adulthood. One must also apply to this defini-
tion the various local modalities entailed by different political
regimes (from aristocracy to democratic forms of government);
one must also consider the distinctions of gender, which imply
a status for the adult male corresponding to that of the citizen-
hoplite and a female status that coincides with that of the wife
of a citizen, mother of male offspring.4 The integration of both
male and female adolescents in choral groups and the ritualisa-
tion, through collective poetic expression, of feelings relating
to transitory and asymmetrical homoerotic practices permit us
to interpret this long educational process, from an anthropo-
logical point of view, in terms not of tribal initiation rituals
but of a pedagogical curriculum that has a ritual and initiatory
character.
Insofar as, in Plato’s Laws, musical and gymnastic education
holds a central role in the education of the ideal citizen, the
influence of a model such as the one that appears in the debate
presented by Aristophanes as ‘the old education’ (he archaia
paideia) on the educational processes proposed in the dialogue
should be examined.5 The perspective of historical and cul-
tural anthropology in such an examination is all the more legit-
imate because the interlocutors of the Athenian in the Laws are
a representative of the Cretan tradition and a representative of
the Spartan model – namely, informants about more traditional
social systems for an Athenocentric enquirer. We know that
for a contemporary of Plato, the historian Ephorus, Cretan edu-
cational customs with regard to the manly quality of courage
were marked by the ritual upbringing of adolescents by adult
aristocrats. The young man was trained in a period of homo-
erotic relations and of hunting outside the civic community,
before being reintegrated with the gift of an ox, signifying his
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participation in the cultic sacrifice; of a cup, referring to his

integration into the symposium of citizens; and of the hoplite
armour, marking the young man’s accession to the status of
citizen-soldier.6 On the other hand, another historian of the
fourth century, Xenophon, records in his Constitution of the
Spartans the trials of resistance to which Spartiate adolescents
were subjected under the direction of a pedagogue. They were
accompanied by educative relations of homophilia, designed
to make of young people, through the erotic, asymmetric, and
fiduciary relationship with an adult, citizens and soldiers at
once disciplined and courageous.7 One wonders if and how the
traditional paideutic habits of Sparta and of Crete, with their
initiatory character, have influenced the educational system
imagined and displayed by Plato in the Laws.
Th e Int ro d uc t ion to the L a w s :

A C h o ral Ed ucation
In the prologue to the Laws, the three interlocutors from Sparta,
from Crete, and from Athens have reached some agreement about
the role played by symposiastic meetings in the collective exer-
cise of temperance, in contrast to the Spartan and Cretan cus-
toms more centred on practices of courage. After the prologue,
a first long introductory passage is dedicated to the means for
achieving such mastery: education ( paideia, 653b) understood
as the ‘first appearance of virtue (arete) in the child’. Now, this
long argument, which covers the whole of Book 2, reaches a
remarkable conclusion. ‘For us choral art (choreia, 672e) in its
entirety is education in its entirety’, declares the Athenian,
probably referring to and echoing the famous opening affirma-
tion: ‘So then, for us, the man without education (apaideutos,
654a) will correspond to the one who is not a member of a
chorus (achoreutos), while we must suppose that the educated
man is he who has received choral education’. Straight off, the
Athenian specifies that the good education includes both sing-
ing and dancing (aidein kai orcheisthai, 654b); in conclusion,
he adds that if both the voice and the movements of the body
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are marked by (metrical) rhythms, vocal movement is distin-

guished from choreographic movement in that the voice is
modulated by harmonies understood as melodies (melos, 672e)
and the dance by the attitude of the body (schema). It is this
distinction that, placed under the umbrella of rhythm, leads
to the essential distinction between music and gymnastics: on
the one hand, the art of the Muses, which corresponds to the
education of the soul in values; on the other hand, the ‘play
of choral dance’ (he tes choreias paidia) for the education of the
body in the same comprehensive virtue. This complementarity
will be put into question later on, and more briefly, in Book 7.8
We will return to this point soon.
The Three Choral Groups

Now, these remarks on the fundamentally choral and musical
character of all education are framed by allusions to the famous
division of the whole of the population of a city-state into three
choral groups. From the beginning of Book 2, the issue of the
right kind of education touches on the necessity of mastering
the emotions, whether this involves pleasure or pain. In the
perspective of human history and of the birth of civilisation
often invoked by Plato, it was the gods who compensated for
the pains connected with the mortality of the human species by
festivals (heortai, 653d): celebrations in which the Muses, Apollo
Mousagetes, and Dionysus participate and which thus permit
mortals to take part temporarily in divine rejoicing. It is this
allusion to the history of mankind that introduces the cardinal
notions of rhythm and harmony, which are the foundations of
choreia. Etymologically associated with rejoicing, chara,9 choral
practice depends, then, on the gods, who are at the same time
the chorus leaders and the synchoreutai of men, with song and
dance given as the divine foundations of education.
Having reached the end of this long exchange on the musical
basis of paideia, destined to civilise mortal men, the Athenian
introduces his conclusion on the pedagogical virtues of a cho-
ral art associated with gymnastics by a fresh allusion to Apollo,
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the Muses, and Dionysus. In the very Greek attempt to find an

origin that functions as a cause, these divinities are at the same
time those who have initiated and those who have given to men
the sense (aisthesis, 672c) of rhythm and of harmony. In some
way inscribed into the nature of man by the will of the divin-
ities of music, this double sense, which animates both the soul
and the mind, will be developed by the practice of the arts of
the Muses and the techniques of gymnastics.
As for the organization into three choral groups, this plays
a central role in the educational process that is intended,
within the framework of a city-state, particularly for chil-
dren. It is, after all, their souls that, because of their youth
and their tenderness, will be most sensitive to the charms that
the Greeks attributed to poetry since Homer. The aesthetic
effect of poetry is traditionally captured in terms of terpein (to
please) and thelgein (to charm); Plato attributes to it the func-
tion of enchantment (epaidein, 664b). The same is the case in
the erudite Encomium of Helen composed by Gorgias, a well-
crafted prose poem that plays constantly on the rhythms of its
phonetic material. In pacifying the strongest emotions and in
provoking rejoicing (chara), discourses act like inspired incan-
tations and magical formulae: they bewitch the soul of the
auditor in producing pleasure and in carrying conviction.10
And just as on many occasions in the Socratic dialogues the
interlocutors prefer story (mythos) to discourse (logos) to
develop an argument, so in the city-state of the Laws choral
songs will be privileged for the purposes of persuasion. Thus,
first of all, the children of the chorus are to present themselves
‘at the centre’ (es meson, 664c) and to address themselves to the
whole of the civic community, inspired by the Muses. Then it
will be the turn of the chorus of those under thirty, under the
aegis of the god Paean, invoked for his powers of persuasion.
Last of all is the choral group of mature men between thirty
and sixty years old, consecrated to Dionysus. As for those
who are older, incapable of singing, they will have the role of
‘mythologists’. They will tell, that is, the stories that enjoy a
divine reputation.11
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The Essence of Choreia: The Melos

What is brought into play by music’s charm in these choral per-
formances is the content of the songs, presented to the assem-
bled civic community on the occasion of the festivals that mark
its calendar. The institution of the three choral groups ensures
that the education of the citizens takes place in the context
both of the legislator’s definition of the pious and just life
and of the equivalence between the pleasant and the just life
(dikaiotatos, hedistos bios, 662d) in the practice of the good and
of the beautiful. It is because of this surprising coincidence
between the sweetness of a way of life that brings mortals close
to the gods, and the justice of their actions, that poets are reha-
bilitated in society, under the control of the legislator. Indeed,
it seems possible now to steer clear both of the lies of the poets
about the gods and of theatrocracy, which were discarded from
the ideal city-state of the Republic.12
By a double play on words, the souls of young people must
gain conviction through songs that are enchantments (oidai/
epoidai, 659d) and through the playful dances, which are also
educational ( paidiai/paideia, 659e). By analogy, it will be the
legislator’s right ‘to have recourse to beautiful words and to
words of praise in order to persuade . . . the poets to create, by
correct composition, the rhythmic attitudes (schemata, 660a)
of men who are thoughtful, courageous, and good in every
way, as well as melodies (mele) marked by harmony’. The poet
recognised by the legislator is no longer the epic poet or the
tragic author, but is actually the melic poet, master of the cho-
ral art for poems that are themselves sung enactments.13 The
Athenian declares it straightaway: the question is whether,
concerning both education and entertainment ( paideia/paidia,
656c) by the Muses, the laws of each city-state will authorise
specialists of poetic art (tois poietikois, 656c) to give choral
instruction to children and to young people uniquely on the
criterion of the charm created by a poem that offers rhythm,
musicality (melos), and beautiful words, a text sung on a musi-
cal melody (melos in the strict sense of the word) and scanned
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by a choreographic rhythm. It is hard to describe melos, in the

broad sense of the term, any better.14
There are, then, poems that are mimetic neither in the
sense in which Aristotle understands it in the Poetics nor
in the sense that Plato himself conceives of in the Republic.
They are not narrative poems that, in epic or dramatic form,
through both creative talent and technical skill, tell of the
actions of men who are better than real men; nor are they
compositions that imitate, by the misleading and sometimes
deceptive means of poetry, human actions that themselves are
but pale imitations of the truth.15 In choral poetry as Plato
conceives of it in the Laws, the act of a good man is in some
way modelled on the figures of dance and on the harmony of
music. It is not about eliminating either rhapsodes or citharo-
des, comedians or tragedians, or even puppeteers: to each his
own public, but for the whole of the civic community choral
poems have this almost physical power of integration, via aes-
thetic pleasure, in the midst of rhythm and harmony, of the
values that animate good people. Thus, the tale drawn from
the heroic past has its place in the choreia organised by the
legislator. For example, the mythologema of the founding act
of Cadmus, who kills the dragon on the future site of Thebes,
and who plants the teeth of the monster in the soil from which
Spartans will rise, the first, autochthonous inhabitants of the
city-state, has its place. No doubt such a tale has little veri-
similitude (it is apithanos, 663e, literally ‘unpersuasive’), but
it is up to the legislator to find the means to render it persua-
sive. This rule is valid for the whole of the community, which,
through its entire life, has to be able to express itself vocally
‘in songs, in tales, and in discourses’ (en te oidais kai mythois
kai logois, 664a).16
We have thus passed surreptitiously, by way of an argumen-
tative shortcut that has troubled numerous commentators, from
the poet to the public, from the person who composes the song
to those to whom it is addressed. To facilitate the people’s expe-
rience of the poem, an intermediary is designated – namely, the
choral performance, where the moment of production and the
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moment of reception of song overlap and are contained within

the same ‘choral matrix’.17
In fact, this affirmation regarding the content of poetic tales
introduces the famous passage on the three choirs and on their
effect of incantation and enthrallment. For what is ultimately
at play is truth: that truth which the god Apollo, invoked as
Paean Apollo, guarantees in the second chorus as intermedi-
ary; that truth which is concerned with the affirmation by the
gods of the coincidence between the most pleasant life and the
best life; that truth which the Egyptians inscribed in a tra-
dition stretching back millennia into the past and to which
their paintings and sculptures bear witness; that truth which
makes the melodies of poets correspond with the postures and
gestures (schemata, 656d; cf. 660a) reproduced in the plastic
arts. It is the truth of the just and pious life, which is a truth
concerned with the pattern of behaviour and with the cor-
rect form of human actions. Such is the physiological sense of
choreia as a rhythmic and melodic exercise of the body. And it
appears that in the end the universalisation of choral education
can permit the city-state to do without poets, because ‘it must
come about that the city-state as a whole, adults and children,
free men and slaves, women and men, never ceases to address
enchantments to itself (epaidousan, 665c) . . . so that those who
sing what we have said experience an inextinguishable desire
for songs (hymnoi), all the time finding pleasure in them’.
The corporeal and rhythmic component of education by
choreia gives a new meaning to mimesis. Choral practices must
in fact be considered as imitations (mimemata, 665d), as ‘turns’
(tropoi), as ways of being that underlie musical action.18 The
words sung, along with the melodies and choreographic fig-
ures (the three components of Greek music), work together.
And here we have the foundations of a particular conception of
representation. If in the domain of the art of the Muses every
poem must be considered at the same time as an imitation and
as a reproduction (mimesis te kai apeikasia, 668b–c), if musical
performance is comparable to the imitation of the beautiful,
the beautiful will be born less from the charm than from the
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correctness of a representation. What counts then is the aes-

thetic quality of the mimetic act itself, its beauty. The mime-
sis corresponds no more to the representation of the actions
of men belonging to the heroic past as in the narrative imita-
tion denounced in the Republic, but once again the mimesis is
attached to the choral performance itself, to the action sung
and danced in the hic et nunc of its collective enactment.
C h o ral Ed ucat ion : B e com ing a

C it iz e n (M ale o r F emale)
But what is there in the part of the dialogue dedicated to laws
in the proper sense? We can recall that the whole of Book 7
is dedicated to the principles and to the different phases of
education understood as trophe and paideia (788a), as ‘first
education’ and ‘formation’. If it appears on the face of it dif-
ficult to legislate about education to the extent to which it is
made up of a series of private acts relating to family life, its
goal on the other hand does not allow for the least doubt: ‘An
education which is correct and properly understood must be
able to make bodies and souls as beautiful and good as possi-
ble (hos kallista kai arista, 788c)’. The education of young men
and women remains then connected to the classical ideal of the
kalos kagathos, the beautiful and good being.
Songs for the Gods (Book 7)

Though here complemented by a few concrete examples, the
principles underlying the education of children over six remain
the same as in the prologue. The instructions regarding the
correct education are twofold: develop bodies through gym-
nastics and souls by the art of the Muses. Two notes are added
to these instructions. First, even if young men and women will
be separated, they will be submitted to the same twofold learn-
ing process. Second, the dance (orchesis, 795d) will be the link
connecting gymnastic exercises and musical performances,
because it allows for the imitation of the nobility of the Muses
while also providing to the movements of the body agility and
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beauty through rhythm. In the context of gymnastics, battle

exercises elevated by elegance of gesture and healthy prowess
will be preferred to more violent practices (as illustrated by
the monstrous beings Antaeus, Cercyon, or Amycus, all three
offspring of Poseidon). In the context of music, it is once again
choral practices that are appealed to, with a preference given,
probably in relation to the intermediary role played by dance,
to different forms of armed dances.
For the arts of the Muses, the Athenian cites legendary
examples drawn from the two regions from which his two
interlocutors come, in what initially resembles an ethnographic
enquiry. For Crete (which the Athenian refers to with a deic-
tic expression, ton topon tonde, 796b, since that is where the
dialogue is set), there is the dance of the young Curetes, illus-
trated for us by the famous hymn of Palaikastro addressed to
Zeus Kouros. For Sparta, we have the dance of the Dioscuri
for which the Spartan poet Alcman had already composed
a hymn.19 As for Athens, to pass from the ‘informers’ to the
investigator-anthropologist himself, the model is the armed
dance of Athena, goddess and young girl (kore, 796b), and
mistress of the city-state. Just as Apollo, in the Homeric Hymn
that is dedicated to him, takes pleasure in the dances and cho-
ral songs that the representatives of the cities of Ionia perform
in his honour on the island of Delos, so Athena for her part
rejoices in the educational entertainment represented by cho-
ral art (he tes choreias paidia). In a reflexive way, the armed
dance of Athena should serve as a model to imitate (mimeist-
hai, 796c) for young men and women when they honour the
goddess: a preparation for martial activity but also, in times
of peace, for the processions and celebrations of the different
gods (and the heroes born from them), along with the musical
competitions that such festivals include.20
The consequences for the arts of the Muses are twofold.
First, in dances and melodies, choral activity is connected
to the celebration of the gods. This means that dances and mel-
odies will have a sacred character (kathierosai, 799a) and that
the different choral manifestations will be organised according
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to the calendar of religious festivals. Second, from the point of

view of the choral genres implied, the song will assume essen-
tially the form of a hymn: a hymn to the gods, in the restricted
sense that Plato gives to this term in the Republic, in contrast
to the broad sense that it has in the archaic period to designate
different forms of melic song. It is, then, no longer a question
of a taxonomy of poetic genres (as is the case, for example,
in the Ion, where the dithyramb, encomium, hyporcheme,
and also epic and iambic poetry are mentioned one after the
other). Instead, the legislator will privilege songs (oidai, 799b)
and choral dances that can be performed (ephumneisthai, 799a)
to accompany sacrifices honouring the gods.21 Because of this,
songs of funereal lamentation will be entrusted to foreign cho-
ral groups, and songs of praise (encomia, 801d) will be tied to
prayers that present affinities with the hymns to the gods. In
other words, neither threnodies nor songs of praise (such as
skolia or epinicians) may be performed by civic choruses.
The role assigned to the poet is by now well defined: in the
perspective of the law concerning the arts of the Muses, ‘the
poet must not compose anything ( poiein, 801c) other than that
which is legal, just, beautiful, and good within the framework
of the city-state’. The deeper meaning of the wordplay on the
common root of paidiai and paideia becomes clear: sacrificing,
singing (adonta, 803e; cf. also 797a), and dancing are ludic
practices that contribute to the honouring of the gods and
repel the enemy, and to ‘play’ is to submit to civic education.
In another etymologising word game, songs (oidai, 799e) are
to be considered as ‘laws’ by reference to the meaning that
the ancients attributed to nomoi in the designation of melodic
modes, notably in the context of kitharody.22 With respect to
the deviation of the original civic freedom into democratic
freedom (in political terms) and into ‘theatrocracy’ (in musical
terms), the Athenian had recalled that the arts of the Muses
were organised in genres and types (eide, schemata, 700a).
Among these poetic forms and kinds of song must be counted
the prayer to a divinity represented by the hymn, the thren-
ody, the paean, the dithyramb, and finally the nomoi attached
98 �
to citharodic production. It is easy to recognise in these five

forms of poetry the melic genres that, along with the hymenaios,
seem to have had a generic identity in the archaic period.23
But these musical forms, of which the last mentioned
(nomos) bears the name of the law, come from the past; they
belong to the time of the palaioi nomoi (700a). In the blurring
of the rules of genre brought about by the extension of democ-
racy, in the musical licence encouraged by the introduction
of the theatre, pleasure replaces correctness (orthotes, 700e),
and the order of the Muses is shaken up by the dissonant vio-
lation of rules (amousos paranomia, 700d). This is no doubt
why only one functional genre of poetry will be admitted into
the new city-state, that of the hymn, encompassing the differ-
ent forms of address and offerings to the gods. There will be,
accordingly, three phases of development in musical art: a past
marked by well-defined forms, a present troubled by confu-
sion among genres, and an ideal future sustained by a single
hymnic genre.
Musical and Cultic Celebrations (Book 8)

The problem of education by the arts of the Muses and of
the role played by the musical forms is followed immediately
by the question of the institution of festivals (heortai, 828a).
The entire affair has to do with determining, according to the
advice of the oracle of Delphi, which offerings to consecrate
to which divinities. In the framework of the ideal city-state
with its twelve tribes, a calendar will be established instituting
twelve festivals for the twelve gods, each one honoured every
month by sacrifices accompanied by choral performances and
musical and gymnastic competitions. Musical practice is then
integrated by the power of the law into the celebration of the
gods of the city-state.
Placed under the control of the guardians of the laws and
in particular of the officer in charge of education, poets will
be called to compose songs addressed to the gods (as we have
already noted), but also poems that praise or blame men who
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have been victorious in gymnastic competitions. While encomia

for living citizens are limited, epinicians are reintroduced here
in the framework of the poetry of praise and blame, with equal
treatment for men and women. The musical celebration of the
practices of both the soul and the body are taken into account.
In the Republic, in terms of creative poetry addressed to the
city-state, only hymns (hymnous) for the gods and songs of
praise (encomia) for men had been retained.24
Then the section devoted to gymnastic competitions requires
a few further additions with regard to the arts of the Muses.
Along with the question of the insertion and of the distribu-
tion in the calendar of musical competitions dedicated to the
relevant gods, the competitions of rhapsodes are reintroduced,
probably by an indirect reference to the rhapsodic recitations
that marked the Great Panathenaia in Athens.25 This is the
source of a new definition of musical competitions as includ-
ing words (the logos, perhaps with reference to the Homeric
and narrative recitations of the rhapsodes), songs, and musi-
cal harmony with its rhythms and its choreographic routines.
With this broadened definition of the art of music, the musical
competitions are integrated, according to the rules established
by the legislators, into the religious festivals.
Finally, it is not unimportant to note that the provisions
regarding musical competitions that permit the realisation
of the choral education of citizens influence the regulation
of relationships between young men and women. There is a
problem, in other words, presented by the inevitable pres-
ence of the most powerful of all urges (epithumiai, 835c). As
it turns out, the way of life dedicated to offerings, festivals,
and choruses, which has been organised by the legislator, risks
facilitating the emergence of immoderate lust. It is necessary,
then, to submit the sexual relationships to the principle of
self-control (sophronein, 836a) and to the supervision by magis-
trates, whether it is a case of pederastic (male and female) love
affairs or the case of relations between ‘heterosexual’ adults.
If we are familiar with the special pedagogic role that Plato
accords, notably in the Symposium, to homophile relationships
100 �
between an erastes and an eromenos, making of such affairs

an allegory for a mode of access to philosophical truth, we
will be rather surprised by the position that the Athenian
imposes on the legislator with regard to ‘homosexual’ rela-
tionships.26 With reference to practices attested both in Crete
and in Sparta, relationships with young men are here strongly
condemned. Without the least reference to the role played by
Eros, they are compared to sexual relationships with women
( pros meixin aphrodisia, 836c) and from this perspective are
declared ‘contrary to nature’ (me physei). That is to say that, in
the domain of what we perceive as homosexual relationships,
the classic Greek distinction is no longer valid. The asymmetri-
cal and temporary association between an adult and an adoles-
cent, made valuable by the education of the latter, is no longer
seen as differentiated from relations between two adults of the
same sex in an active-passive relationship that is depreciated
as possibly leading to male prostitution. In the Laws, the erotic
relationship of a pedagogic type between erastes and eromenos
is superimposed on the relationship of an adult citizen with
a ‘wide-assed’ debauchee of the type so often mocked and
denounced by Aristophanes;27 addressing themselves to the
body and not the soul, these ‘homosexual’ relationships (it is
claimed) will not lead anyone to virtue ( pros areten, 836d).
Certainly, in the analysis following the formulation of this
principle, the reciprocity of trust represented by philia (836e),
desire, and ‘love affairs’ (ten ton legomenon eroton physin, 837a)
will be taken into consideration. If friendship is civilised and
shared, desire is divided between attraction for the body in
its prime and religious respect for the soul with its qualities of
mastery, courage, grandeur, and reflection. As for love, it has
to be love for virtue, accompanied by desire to make the young
man as good as possible. Sexual relations then will be strictly
limited to those who tend towards procreation and reproduc-
tion. Adultery, concubinage (to produce illegitimate children),
masturbation (declared ‘contrary to nature’, para physin,
841d), and love affairs between men will be banished from
the city-state. In it there will be admitted only relations with
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legitimate wives, with ‘women who enter the house under the
auspices of the gods and of marriage celebrated according to
ritual custom’.
This leads into an astonishing encomium of chastity: both
for athletes, whose abstinence will be recompensed by the
beauty of a victory preserved by heroic tales, by maxims,
and by melic poems (en mythois te kai rhemasin kai en melesin
aidontes, 840c), and for young girls, who will modestly attend
a marriage ritual consecrated by the gods. Sexuality realised
within the unique framework of marriage, consecrated by rit-
ual and under the control of the gods – such is the ultimate
foundation of the law on sexual relations and erotic associa-
tions ( peri aphrodision kai hapanton ton erotikon, 842a).
An Init iato ry Ed ucation?

The key to musical education – as the Athenian conceives of
it – is in some sense revealed at the conclusion of the dialogue
as a whole. Ultimately, everything depends on the nature of
the soul, which is the ‘most ancient and most divine’ thing
( presbutaton kai theiotaton, 966d; cf. 967d) of everything that
has been created and everything that is in movement. It acts
through the intellect (nous, 966e), which has put to order
the whole, the universe. The antiquity and immortality of the
soul both constitute an invitation to mortal man to respect
the gods (theosebe, 967d). The piety that will be habitual in
the ideal city-state applies both to the knowledge of principles
of harmony that order the universe ruled by intellect and to
the familiarisation with the disciplines of the Muses’ arts. The
musical education of the ideal citizen will, then, prepare him
for the knowledge and practice of the intellectual principles
that govern all things.
But what is the relationship between this educational system,
conceived for an ideal legislator, and the old model of initia-
tory education? In the Spartan system, established, according
to tradition, by the legendary Lycurgus, the poems composed
by Alcman for young women’s choruses from aristocratic
102 �
families make of the homoerotic relations between adolescents

and women coming up to full maturity one of the central ele-
ments of an educational curriculum based on the Muses and on
gymnastic practices. The musical education of young Spartans
is realised in the very performance of the poem, under the
guidance of the beautiful choragos and under the control of
the poet, who carries out the function of chorus master. For
young people, it is the ‘pederastic’ poems (consigned to the
second book of the Theognidea by a probable act of Christian-
inspired censorship) that illustrate for us the asymmetrical rela-
tions between adult erastes and younger eromenos developing
in the context of the symposium. Poetry is the inspirational
aspect that confers a pedagogic dimension on such relations,
as witness the appeals to the young addressee, in the other
distichs of the corpus, to associate himself with the qualities of
the beautiful and good man.28 We could also invoke the role of
education in the beauty of female maturity, under the sign of
Eros and of Aphrodite, treated in some of the poems of Sappho.
Probably performed in a choral setting, at times within a sanc-
tuary dedicated to the goddess of sexual desire, these composi-
tions make of amorous relations between an adult woman and
a young girl a ritual preparation for the blossoming husband
who is mentioned in the epithalamia. The compositions of
Anacreon show us that homologous relations between an adult
male and an adolescent could develop in the symposium, at
times during the very performance of melic poetry.29
That is to say that the different forms of melic poetry, most of
them choral in character, have a pragmatic role that is essential
in the education of adolescents for their gender roles within
their society. This educational role is realised in a poetic, collec-
tive, and ritual expression of homoerotic emotion but equally
within the cultic framework of the honours given to the local
divinities that protect the transition to adulthood: Aotis-Helen
in Alcman and Aphrodite in Sappho, both of them encouraging
the flowering of physical beauty, which stimulates erotic desire
in all its fertility. The asymmetrical and ephemeral character of
a homoerotic relationship leading, often under the aegis of a
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divinity, to reciprocal heterosexual relations demonstrates, in

comparative anthropological terms, the initiatory function of
relations of homophilia placed under the sign of divinities of
amorous education. This inversion of sexual and gender rela-
tions is considered to be normal for the purpose of gaining
access to the status of a full member of the adult community.30
Does this mean that in the Laws the three choruses corre-
spond to a series of stages of initiation? The transition from the
chorus of paides to that of neoi, the one protected by the young
women that are the Muses, the other invoking the young
Apollo Paean, might seem to encourage a reading of this sort.
So does the all-encompassing quality of the choral groups, each
member of which seems to display the characteristic features of
communitas, which, in the anthropological definition, defines
groups of adolescents undergoing the ritual process of tribal
initiation.31 Besides this, both the implicit correspondence that
has already been mentioned between the choral group and the
population of the city-state, and the ideal character of a cho-
rus, which would unite the members of several age-classes of
an entire civic community (going well beyond the fifty chorus-
members of a dithyrambic chorus), show that Plato brings us
here into a utopian city-state placed at a considerable distance
from the historical reality that seems to inspire it. This is not
a return backwards towards archaic customs evocative of a
golden age but an idealised organisation with pretensions to
universality, even if it is nourished by references to Athenian
culture, past and present.
But in the model conceived of by the Athenian for the
purposes of the legislator, it is above all the disconnection of
sexuality and homophilia that makes any attempt at an inter-
pretation framed in terms of initiation impossible. As I have
tried to show elsewhere, choreia reveals itself ultimately to be
a functional concept that makes it possible to think about the
ideal educative process of citizens for the good of their bodies
and their souls within the warm embrace of the city-state. In
this respect, it is significant that in the opening setting of the
dialogue, the reference to the archaising customs of the Cretans,
104 �
and then of the Spartans, are discarded little by little in order

to give to the Athenian interlocutor a monopoly of reflecting
on the organisation of a city-state in an Athenian mode. We
move from historical and ethnographical reality to philosophi-
cal and anthropological exposition, and on to the even more
general perspective of anthropopoiesis, the (normative) con-
struction of the human. In a utopic way, the Laws proposes
to overcome not only the democratic disorder of ‘new music’
criticised in the Republic, but also the aristocratic paradigm of
ancient music. For an education in small choral groups for the
offspring of the aristocratic families, young girls on one side,
young men on the other, the lawgiver will substitute a musical
training and a choral order for the whole civic body, including
adolescents, adults, and elders, men and women.32
After the outdated archaisms of the ancient educational sys-
tems of Crete and Sparta, after the confusion of musical genres
in the Athens of the tragedians and of the sophists, we are
presented with musical and educational order, under the aegis
of the gods and within a tightly organised ritual framework.
We are far from the defence of Eros spoken by the tragic poet
Agathon to the companions represented in the Symposium:
‘Of all the gatherings which bring us together, such as this
one here, he is the organiser; he is our guide at festivals, in
courses of choral dancing, in sacrifices; out of savages he makes
us civilised men’. We are now far from the conception of Eros
the initiator that Socrates, in a significant mise en abyme, puts
into the mouth of Diotima, involving the progressive access to
disembodied beauty; the pathway to follow leads the erastes
from beautiful bodies towards the abstract knowledge of the
beautiful, producing beautiful discourses and thus engender-
ing virtue. The guide capable of inscribing merit in human
nature – adds Socrates – is Eros.33
As it is, in the Laws it is no longer the historical Socrates
who expresses himself through the voice lent to the prophetess
from Mantineia but a nameless Athenian, a generic Athenian
who monopolises the discussion with his two interlocutors.
The Spartan and the Cretan are reduced to a mechanism of
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approbation for the city-state of the Magnesians, whose name,

at the end of this long dialogue, is intentionally elided.34 Erotic
melic poetry, with its function of initiatory education, no
longer has any place.
Not e s
1 See Calame (2003 [1999]) 15–38 [280–9] for a return to the empiri-
cal category elaborated by Arnold van Gennep (1909), and Graf
(2003) 8–15, for the crossovers between the notions of rite of pas-
sage and of initiation ritual; see also Burkert (2002) and Calame
(2009) 281–4.
2 The details of the story are given by Apollod. Bibl. 1.3.3 and
3.10.3; for the relationship with the festival of Hyakinthia, see
notably Paus. 3.1.3 and 19.3–4; cf. Calame (2001 [1977]) 174–85
and 260–1; Sourvinou-Inwood (2005) 121–5 (with essential
bibliography).
3 Cf. Eur. IT 1462–8, with the fine comments of Wolff (1992) on the
aetiological conclusion to the tragedy; as for the different aspects
of the cults dedicated to Artemis Brauronia, see now the contri-
butions edited by Gentili and Perusino (2002).
4 For an attempt at distinguishing the two from the point of view
of the social status of the sexes in traditional musical and choral
education, see Calame (2002 [1992]) 101–45 and Calame (2009).
5 See in particular Arist. Nub. 961–1002, with the comments of
Marrou (1965) 74–86.
6 Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 149.21 (transmitted by Strab. 10.4.21);
bibliography on this often-invoked ethnographic description
(cf., e.g., Brelich (1969) 197–202) in Calame (2001 [1977]) 245–9.
7 Xen. Lac. 2.2–15. See also the long passage dedicated to Spartan
educational customs by Plut. Lyc. 16.7–17.8, notably in that
which concerns the agoge and the regrouping of adolescents in
‘bands’, very quickly interpreted as a system of age-classes; see
in particular Brelich (1969) 113–91; supplementary bibliography
with comments in Calame (2003 [1999]) 30–8. On the concept of
‘homophilia’, which allows us to avoid projecting our own con-
ceptions of homosexuality on Greek erotic practices, cf. Calame
(2002 [1992]) 101–22.
8 Plat. Laws 795d–796e. For the game of the choral dance, cf.
657c–d, with the useful remarks of Ceccarelli (1998) 12–16,
regarding this comprehensive conception of dance as a musical
art with a pedagogical function written into the morphology and
semantics of the term paidia.
106 �
9 Cf. Calame (2001 [1977]) 19 n. 3. See also Kurke and Peponi,

Chapters 6 and 8 in this volume.
10 Gorg. Hel. 9–10; cf. Segal (1962).
11 The complex place reserved by Plato for the mythoi understood
as traditional stories is the subject of a study by Brisson (1994)
114–43 (cf. 184–90 on the meaning of mythologos).
12 Plat. Rep. 394d, 605c–d, and 607a; see, e.g., the comments of
P. Murray (1996) 21–4, 171–9, 223–9, and Giuliano (2005).
13 For this conception of poetic forms belonging to the genre melos
as acts of song and so as acts of ritual, I permit myself to refer to
my two studies (1998, 2006) where some examples of this will be
found as well as numerous bibliographical suggestions.
14 For the double meaning of melos as melody (vocal sound) and
melic poem, compare, e.g., in Plato himself, Rep. 398b–d and
399c with Rep. 400a–c; see the numerous references which I have
given in Calame (1998) 107–9. For the choreia as ‘unity of voice
and body’ already in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, see Peponi
(2009) 55–60.
15 Plato, Rep. 557d–599b and 602c–3c; cf. P. Murray (1996) 197–8
and 213–14, with numerous bibliographical references on this
question of mimetic arts as third-degree representations.
16 Cf. Bertrand (1999) 400–5, who concludes: ‘the chorus is at once,
thus, addressee and addressor of what it sings: it enchants itself
according to the rules laid down by the legislator, but it also
knows how to enchant the city-state as a whole’. See also now
Hatzistavrou (2011) 374–9.
17 See Chapter 8 in this volume by A.-E. Peponi, who shows that
the realisation of this ‘paradigmatic choral matrix’ operates in
the coincidence between the pleasure of the interpreter and the
pleasure experienced by the public.
18 On this issue, see also Peponi, Chapter 8 in this volume.
19 For the epigraphic hymn to Zeus Kouros, a commentary is pro-
vided by Furley and Bremer (2001) II.1–20; Alcman frr. 2 and 12
Page-Davies = 2 Calame.
20 Cf. Hymn. Hom. Ap. 146–67; for the tradition of the armed dance
of Athena, and on the introduction of the pyrrhic competition to
the Panathenaic games, see Ceccarelli (1998) 27–36.
21 Pl. Ion 535c. The broad and restricted senses of hymnos are made
explicit by Furley and Bremer (2001) I.8–14; cf. Pl. Rep. 607a.
22 For this double meaning, musical and juridical, of nomos, cf.
Rep. 531d, and probably Ti. 29d, but again in the Laws 722d–e
(equally with reference to citharodic song) and 775b (with regard
to education).
23 As for this apparent taxonomy of melic forms and its tradition, cf.
Calame (2001 [1977]) 74–85 (with the article cited p. 74 n. 197).
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24 Pl. Rep. 607a; the fundamentals of the poetry of praise and

reproach are well illustrated, e.g., by G. Nagy (1999) 222–42. On
the performance of praise and blame in the Laws, see Morgan,
Chapter 10 in this volume. For the choral and ritual education of
women, see now Bruit Zaidman (2009).
25 The organisation of gymnastic and musical competitions is fore-
seen at 764c–765d; see the systematisation proposed for this sub-
ject by Piérart (2008) 356–8. On the issue of rhapsody, see the
contribution in Chapter 12 of this volume by R. Martin.
26 On the concept of ‘homophilia’, see note 7. For the control of
erotic feelings through choral dances in the Laws, see Wersinger
(2011).
27 The jibes directed at inverts in the comedies of Aristophanes and
in the orators of the fourth century are numerous: references in
Calame (2002 [1992]) 150–9, with reference in particular to the
work of K. J. Dover and D. M. Halperin.
28 For Alcman’s Partheneion in the context of the tradition of melic
homoerotic poetry, cf. Calame (2001 [1977]) 244–63 and (2002)
23–52; for the Theognidea in particular, cf. Lewis (1985) as well as
Bremmer (1990) with regard to the context of the symposium.
29 The role played by sexuality in groups of the choral type brought
to life by Sappho are well described by Williamson (1995) 90–132;
see also Calame (1996).
30 Calame (2002 [1992]) 103–22 and 152–9.
31 The functionalist concept of communitas was first put forward
by Turner (1969) 131–65.
32 See my study, Calame (2003) 40–9. For the ancient controversy
about the ‘New Music’, see Csapo (2004). For the dynamics
between old and new musical regimes in the Laws, see Griffith,
33 Pl. Symp. 197d, 211a–c, and 212b; on these frequently discussed
passages, see the references in my study, Calame (2002 [1992])
206–17.
34 Pl. Laws 969a; cf. 704a on the relative importance of the name
given to the city-state in the Laws, then 848d, etc., with the
comments of Piérart (2008) 7–13 and 530–2.
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��
C hap t e r F i ve
T h e C h o ru s o f
D i o n ys u s
Al c o h o l a n d Ol d Age i n t h e Law s
Oswyn Murray
Plato’s obsession with the symposion and styles of drinking

runs through the whole of his work. The topic is treated explic-
itly in two dialogues, the Symposium and the Laws: in the first
he takes the occasion of a symposion with its complex rules
and rituals concerning the consumption of wine and presents
a series of reflections on the nature of the most characteristic of
all sympotic subjects, love and sexual desire; slowly he uses the
influence of alcohol to bring us to the recognition that the idea
of the good is the sole aim of true love: he brings us through
conviviality to the illumination that comes from drinking long
and deep, the vision of the form of the Good, the ultimate mys-
tical experience afforded by philosophy. In the Laws, Plato
is more concerned with the potential educational uses of the
consumption of alcohol, how it may be harnessed to train the
inhabitants of his new city (and, by implication, how it may be
used in the ordinary everyday polis of the Greek world).
The roots of this preoccupation go back to Plato’s definition
of pleasure. In a fundamental sense his whole conception of
desire and pleasure is based on the distinctive pleasures of the
symposion; for him pleasure is always concrete and concerned
with the basic human appetites satisfied in the symposion. For
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Plato there is indeed no other form of pleasure than that to be

found within the rituals of the Greek symposion: to him plea-
sure is always conceived of as related to the consumption of
wine and food, poetry and sex: he accepts the famous sympotic
triad – wine, women, and song – as first defined by Solon:
These are the works that are dear to me, those of the Cyprian
goddess, those of Dionysus, and those of the Muses, who bring
joyousness (euphrosynai) to men. (Solon fr. 26)1
Moreover, Plato’s obsession with the symposion is not just a

matter of explicit philosophical argument: it is always a danger
to regard Plato as if he were a philosopher rather than a liter-
ary artist seeking to persuade by all the means at his disposal.
In particular, much of his meaning is contained within con-
text and metaphor; all his sentences carry an implicit charge
of meaning, and the metaphor and imagery of the language of
pleasure used by Plato are concerned solely with the pleasures
of the symposion: the relationship between physical experi-
ence, desire, and sensation of pleasure are imagined as if the
only place for experiencing them is within a sympotic context.
This concrete basis in pleasure practices that are specifically
and uniquely Greek explains and limits Plato’s attitude to the
problems of pleasure and the emotions.
For the desires of the body are insatiable and indetermi-
nate: the more they are indulged the stronger they become,
and the more dangerous to the other parts of the soul, the
thumos and reason.2 These desires (although characterised by
poikilia, variety, changeability) are the simple pleasures of the
sympotic appetite, for drink, food, and sex. It is perhaps argu-
able that in the Philebus at least Plato also conceives of higher
forms of pleasure, especially the contemplation of the good
(it is not for nothing that Plato is often argued to be essen-
tially a hedonist, requiring all activities to relate to the plea-
sure principle); but if this is so, the pleasure of contemplation
is a higher form of pleasure unconnected with the world of
bodily desires: he characterises it as eudaimonia (happiness)
rather than hedone (pleasure). Thus throughout all dialogues
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The Chorus of Dionysus
before the Laws pleasure stands on the side of the body, and
against the demands of philosophy: it must be controlled or
banished as far as possible. This is surely one reason why that
other sympotic pleasure, the magic of poetry and the manip-
ulation of human emotions through the power of the word,
starts with an intrinsic disadvantage, which results in a view
of art as illusion appealing to the emotions rather than reason,
and the conclusion that theatre and the poet must be banished
from the ideal republic.
The symposion may therefore be used as a mise-en-scène or a
vehicle for enlightenment, but it is necessarily opposed to the
purposes of a training in philosophy. The change that comes
about in the Laws is not a change in the definition of pleasure
but part of a fundamental reassessment of human nature and
the realisation that human beings are so imperfect that they
cannot be controlled through persuasion alone: they must also
be trained in the proper use of their desires. Pleasure can then
be used to create the basis for an educational system articu-
lated through play and enjoyment and for a process of lifelong
learning.
In this sense the first two books of the Laws are not an irrel-
evant digression never referred to again in the work but a nec-
essary preamble to the changed programme of legislation that
is based on a reevaluation of the place of pleasure in human
society. But in another sense these two books are a separate
entity, the first treatise Peri methes (On Drunkenness), which
led to a long and fruitful tradition of philosophical discus-
sions on the uses and abuses of drunkenness and conviviality
in treatises and theories of the logos sympotikos, which can be
traced from Aristotle onwards in all the philosophical schools
of the Hellenistic period and the Roman empire.3
So much for the underlying presuppositions and the general
purpose of these two books. The starting point for the discus-
sion is, however, the contrast between Spartan (or, more gen-
erally, Dorian) and Athenian styles of sympotic behaviour, in
which the Athenian Stranger seeks to persuade his sceptical
companions of the positive benefits of the apparently unruly
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drunkenness allowed in Athenian symposia. This discussion

goes back to Plato’s notorious uncle Critias (who incidentally
created in the Thirty Tyrants a political grouping based on the
traditional number for a sympotic group in an andron with fif-
teen couches). Critias in the late fifth century had advocated
new rules for the Athenian symposion in conformity with the
current aristocratic fashion for laconising in politics and social
practices.
This too is the custom and established practice at Sparta, to

drink from the same wine-bearing cup, and not to toast people
by name or pass the cup to the right in a circle of the group. . . .
A Lydian Asia-born hand invented cups and proposeis (toasts)
to the right and calling by name on the one you wish to drink
a toast. Then from such drinking their tongues are loosed into
foul words, and they make their bodies weaker. A dark mist
settles on their eyes, oblivion melts away memory from their
minds and reason is tripped up. The slaves develop bad habits,
and house-ruining extravagance runs riot. But Spartan youths
drink only enough to turn their minds to cheerful thoughts,
their tongues to friendly talk and gentle laughter. Such drink-
ing does good to the body, mind, and property; it suits the
work of Aphrodite and of sleep, a haven from toils, and Health,
most pleasing of the gods to mortals, and Sophrosyne neigh-
bour of Piety. . . .
For toasts from cups that go beyond the measure may give
sudden pleasure but bring grief for all time. But the Spartan
way of life is well ordered, to eat and drink moderately so as to
be able to think and work; there is no day set aside to steep the
body in uncontrolled drinking. (Critias eleg. fr. 6)
Critias is here criticising the Athenian custom of toasting the

beloved, the proposis, whose prevalence is attested in the hun-
dreds of surviving ‘kalos’ vases: this is the meaning of the
so-called kalos inscriptions. These toasts (together with the
first libation to the gods) were the only occasions when it was
permitted to drink unmixed wine: not unnaturally, young
Athenians took advantage of offering multiple proposeis in
order to get drunk very fast.
112 �
In the Laws, Plato reverses the recommendation of Critias.

He argues that the Spartan way of drinking, the syssition of
duty, does not actually achieve its goal of creating hoplites
schooled in andreia (courage) and self-control; rather, the
Athenian style of the pleasure symposion is more useful. The
reasons given are both paradoxical and problematic and are
hedged around with caveats.
According to Plato, the effect of alcohol on human beings is
to intensify the emotions, and therefore the pleasure derived
from them, and to release social controls; it also serves to reduce
the power of memory and reason. Earlier, in the Philebus Plato
had defended the happiest life as that of reason, or perhaps
that of reason mixed with the emotions: true happiness should
not be confused with pleasure. In the Laws he is concerned
with the educational aspects of drinking. Behind his willing-
ness to allow the usefulness of alcohol in training the young
lies a long-standing underlying problem of his educational the-
ory – how to educate the young not just to be virtuous but also
to know and avoid vice: alcohol is therefore useful in training
young men to avoid the dangers of the emotions and in dis-
playing their virtue and their love of social control. The best
form of training is that which strengthens the power of shame;
and therefore, although solitary drinking has a function as a
propaedeutic before public display, drinking in a social group
is the most powerful test.
These claims reflect widespread Greek beliefs: wine reveals
the true character of a man, that is, oinos kai alatheia (wine is
truth, Alcaeus 366); oinos gar anthropou dioptron (wine is the
mirror of a man, Alcaeus 330; compare Theognis and others);
and memory too becomes problematic in the sympotic context.
As Critias and Plato say, wine causes forgetfulness; indeed,
memory has a wider ambivalence in the symposion – on the one
hand, remembering songs is good, and the memory of great
deeds is a suitable subject for sympotic song; on the other, what
is said in the symposion should be forgotten at the door.
In principle, therefore, according to his argument, Plato
ought to be prepared to allow heavy and even solitary drinking
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outside a social context – that unheard of vice among men,

confined only to women and slaves, who are excluded from
the symposion and so must steal their wine. But he draws back:
the dangers of wine are so great that he seems to have con-
siderable sympathy for the Spartan practice of drinking as a
spectator sport – deliberately forcing their helots to become
drunk and perform obscene dances and songs, so that they
may learn sophrosyne (self-control) through the pleasure of
viewing the degradation of others. In fact, those who may be
in most need of education, the boys, are denied alcohol com-
pletely, and even grown men may drink only in moderation
and under strict controls.
But at this point Plato departs from his sympotic metaphors
and turns to the world of music and dance. His society will
have three choruses, the chorus of the Muses, performed by
boys; the chorus of Apollo, performed by adult men; and the
chorus of Dionysus, performed by old men. He has sometimes
been thought to be inconsistent about the age groups these
represent; but I think that is due to mistranslation (or unwill-
ingness to believe old age starts so young for the Greeks): in
fact he clearly defines the main chorus of adults in the prime
of life as those under thirty (i.e., between eighteen and thirty);
old age would seem then to begin at thirty and last until sixty;4
after that, men are too decrepit to sing and are confined to
telling mythoi of an appropriately improving nature (664 cd);
although later we learn that those over sixty are the ‘officers
of Dionysus’ whose task it is to regulate the rowdiness of the
drinking (671de; cf. 812b–c).
Even if we accept the possibility of a connection between
the metaphors of chorus and the symposion, in Greek thought
both the symposion and the chorus are normally regarded as
the preserve of young men. How does the chorus of old men
work? Cleinias the Cretan is amazed:
A chorus of old men sacred to Dionysus! That sounds very odd

on first hearing, if you seriously mean that men between thirty
and up to fifty or even sixty are to form his chorus. (665b)
114 �
At first sight, amazement is indeed in order. The definition of

‘old’ as over thirty strikes us as bizarre; but it does, I think,
correspond to the military distinction between iuniores and
seniores in most ancient armies, and to various age qualifica-
tions in the Athenian social system, where thirty is the age of
marriage and of eligibility for magistracies. But however com-
mon choruses of old men are in tragedy and comedy, they are
scarcely suitable for the function Plato attributes to them. In
tragedy their role is simply to comment, often wisely enough,
but always ineffectually on the dramatic action. In comedy
they may play more central roles: there is the chorus of old
men and old women in the Lysistrata who behave in the most
disgraceful manner, hurling abuse at each other, but without
any educational intent. There are a few representations of cho-
ruses of old men in Attic vase painting: notably a red-figure
vase in Malibu by the Sabouroff Painter – but these old men
are transvestites dancing madly in women’s clothing.5 Finally
there is a very curious red-figure hydria of circa 465 depicting
a group of five grey-bearded satyrs seated on thrones, with
sceptres and costly robes, before a sphinx; this is identified by
Erika Simon as a representation of the chorus of Aeschylus’
satyr play Sphinx.6 This chorus will have danced, but surely
not in the manner that Plato had in mind.
The metaphors of the symposion and the three choruses do
not sit easily together. We are accustomed to contrast choral
poetry, performed at festivals and in public, with monodic
lyric and elegiac poetry, performed in private sympotic groups.
This division is not of course absolute, because in Sparta the
syssitia were at least semipublic places of performance for
monodic poetry. Moreover, the choral odes of Pindar and
Bacchylides are full of sympotic language and imagery, which
suggest a close relationship between choral performance and
the symposion. Indeed, Pindar wrote a series of choral poems
specifically designed to be performed in a victory symposion;
however, the tone of these does reflect a less formal and less
public type of performance. For instance, when Xenophon of
Corinth won a double victory at the Olympic Games of 464 b.c.,
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he celebrated it with a grand public victory ode, Pindar’s

Thirteenth Olympian. But he also commissioned a second ode
to accompany his dedication of fifty (or a hundred, depending
on whether Pindar is counting the girls or their legs) sacred
prostitutes at the temple of Aphrodite on Acrocorinth.7 This
was a skolion performed perhaps by the prostitutes themselves
at the inaugural banquet; unlike Pindar’s more serious poetry,
it is full of jokey and private allusions. It begins:
Most hospitable young ladies, servants of Persuasion in wealthy
Corinth, who burn on the altar the fair tears of pale incense,
while often you fly in your thoughts to the heavenly mother of
desires, Aphrodite; she permits you without reproach, my chil-
dren, to pluck the fruit of your tender youth in your beds of
love. Under the yoke of necessity all things are beautiful. . . .
But I wonder, what will the lords of the Isthmus say, when
they see me finding such a beginning for my honey-sweet
drinking song (skolion), associating it with sociable women.
We have taught how to test gold with a pure touchstone.
O lady of Cyprus, hither to your grove Xenophon has
brought a hundred-legged troop of grazing girls, in thanks for
vows fulfilled. (Pindar fr. 122)
So the chorus and the symposion are not in themselves incom-
patible, even if it is difficult for us to imagine the performance
of choral dances within any normal-sized andron or drinking
room. By the late sixth century it is clear that the sphere of
private and public festivities were becoming amalgamated, in
such practices as the grand sympotic events held by tyrants –
for example, Cleisthenes of Sicyon’s marriage contest, which
took place over a year and at least partly involved public ath-
letic contests.
In terms of the symposion, Plato’s three choruses are first
defined by their access to alcohol, but they also underlie the
whole discussion of education in these two books. But Plato
does seem to use the two images of the symposion and the cho-
rus separately: the choruses involve education through dance
and example; they no longer concern testing for virtue and
self-control. Moreover, suddenly the use of alcohol is severely
116 �
restricted: the boys are not permitted to drink at all; the young
men may only drink moderately. Alcohol is in fact of serious
use only for the chorus of old men, the chorus of Dionysus,
because the dryness of their souls and the stiffness of their
limbs require the softening effect of the drug before they can
actually perform their function of instructing through dance
their younger fellow citizens, and even then they should be
over forty before they need to drink (666b). Wine reproduces
infancy, a form of second childhood (646), and the soul needs
to become wet in order to function rhythmically. These seem to
be medical or quasi-medical doctrines: the benefits of alcohol
were well recognised in Greek medicine.
In fact, although Plato does not allow us to know it, the
three choruses may well have a Spartan origin, although it
is difficult to be sure, because the relevant descriptions of
Spartan customs may rather reflect the influence of Plato: it
may be that the Laws provided the model for this alleged fea-
ture of Spartan society, rather than knowledge of Spartan prac-
tice providing Plato with his theme. At any rate, according
to Plutarch Lycurgus 21, at Spartan festivals there were three
choruses, of old men, adults in their prime, and boys: they
sang antiphonally and in turn on these three themes: ‘We were
once valiant men’, ‘But we are now the valiant ones: put us
to the test if you wish’, ‘But we shall be far mightier’. This
suspiciously systematic description may in turn be derived
from a work ‘on Spartan festivals’ by the Spartan antiquar-
ian Sosibius (third to second century b.c.); the relevant pas-
sage of Sosibius in Athenaeus is clearly corrupt but appears to
say that at the Gymnopaedia crowns called Thyreatic crowns
were given to competing sets of choruses of boys and adults in
their prime, who danced naked and sang songs of Thaletas and
Alcman and paeans of Dionisodotus the Spartan. This Sosibius
fragment has often been emended on the basis of Plutarch to
refer to three choruses rather than two and to include a chorus
of old men (Athen. 15 678 BC = FGrHist 595 F 5). However this
may be, and whether or not Sosibius took his cue from Plato,
he was clearly both a learned and a philosophically inclined
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antiquarian writer on Spartan customs. So it is at least possible

that Plato’s three choruses may be not a free invention by him-
self (copied by Sosibius) but an allusion to a genuine Spartan
ritual practice, known also to Sosibius, on which he then built
an educational programme.
This possibility raises a further question. What is the rela-
tion between these first two books and the entire project of the
ideal state put forward in the Laws? Earlier I suggested that
Plato begins his argument from a contrast between Spartan and
Athenian customs. To understand the significance of this, we
need to consider the contemporary world of political theory
in Plato’s later years. The only comparative material we pos-
sess is to be found in Aristotle. The famous controversy on the
development of Aristotle’s political thought begun by Werner
Jaeger has in recent years met with increasingly weary scepti-
cism: few philosophers seem now to believe that we can trace
a development in Aristotle’s thought from Platonic idealism to
pragmatic Aristotelianism in either the Politics or the Ethics.
And yet, and yet – surely there is an incompatibility between
the programme of compiling historical treatises on 158 dif-
ferent constitutions and the project of creating a single ideal
state. And surely the second is essentially a project derived
from the Platonic view of the purpose of political philosophy.
Aristotle’s Politics as it now exists begins with a detailed analy-
sis of the vocabulary and basic units of society, and an analysis
based on the whole history of the Greek polis; only at the end
does he begin the process of constructing an ideal state. This
process is incomplete: after discussing population, geography,
economic organisation, early childhood, and education, the
treatise breaks off at the point where Aristotle seems already
to have promised the next topic, the actual constitution of the
city (1331b24). There is no evidence that the missing main part
of his ideal state (which would have comprised at least another
eight books) is lost: it was rather simply abandoned.
I believe that Books 7 and 8 of the Politics are in fact an early
work, written while Aristotle still viewed the task of political
philosophy in Platonic terms, as the construction of the ideal
118 �
state.8 This project was never completed, for Aristotle revised

his notion of the purposes and methods of political philosophy.
But these two books may perhaps be taken as an example of
the type of political philosophy that was being practised in the
Academy in the later years of Plato, under the influence of the
Laws or during the same period: they have often indeed been
seen as a form of extended criticism of the Laws.
If such a view is correct, we can use these books in order to
attempt to understand the political preoccupations of Plato’s
late Academy. One thing that is particularly striking in the
Aristotelian version of the ideal polis is the enormous impor-
tance of the Spartan model as a basis for creating the ideal
state. Land tenure, ownership of property, and social prac-
tices are all subordinated to the conception of the ideal state
as closely related to the Spartan model, in which agricultural
property underpins a system of communal meals, which is in
turn the basis of political and social life. I have already pointed
to a number of respects in which Plato in the Laws uses the
contrast between the Athenian and the Spartan model: indeed,
he seems to have deliberately set this conflict up, by establish-
ing his three protagonists as an Athenian trying to persuade a
Spartan and a Cretan of the right form of ideal state.
It seems then that Plato is engaging in these first two books
with the view that the Spartan social system is the basis for
the creation of the ideal state: he recognises that any such
discussion must begin from Sparta. But he is determined to
subvert that view by offering a critique of the Spartan and
Cretan syssition, which will force its adherents to recognise the
necessity for a different starting point – one indeed that is far
closer to the mature Aristotle’s belief that we need to analyse
the practices and language of real states, or even to the later
Peripatetic view that we must collect and analyse the detailed
laws of different cities. The whole discussion of the different
drinking customs, together with the use of the three cho-
ruses, can then be seen as intended to subvert the authority
of the Spartan model, so that, having disposed of it, Plato can
begin anew at the start of Book 3 with a typically Aristotelian
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question: ‘Enough then on this matter. But what may we take

to have been the first beginning of a politeia?’
In placing Plato’s discussion of the symposion and the cho-
rus within a historical context, I have not of course illumi-
nated the philosophical issues to which these images give rise.
But I hope I have at least taken seriously the difference of the
Greeks, the fact that the meaning of Plato’s images and his use
of them are not the same as ours. His allusive and discursive
way of thinking in the Laws has often suggested the way of
thinking of an old man, in which logical argument gives way
to a succession of vivid but perhaps fragmentary representa-
tions of another reality, perceived or remembered beneath the
surface of the argument. We begin perhaps, as J.-P. Vernant
once said, ‘to see the moon with the eyes of the Greeks’, and
to recognise that the foundations of the ideal state may indeed
rest on drinking customs and the world of communal dancing.
This is not political philosophy as we know it, but an attempt
to understand the Greek polis in terms of the values to which
it adhered, in which alcohol, dance, and poetry are the basis of
society. Let me end with a story that illustrates my point.
Some years ago, in November 1995, we entertained Professor
Wang Dunshu to the modern equivalent of a symposion at
home; Professor Wang is the doyen of ancient world historians
in China and descends from a distinguished Mandarin family:
he told us that as a young man his uncle had passed out top in
poetry in the Imperial Chinese Examinations and was immedi-
ately (in his twenties) made ambassador to the whole of South
America.9
Halfway through the meal Professor Wang said, ‘This wine
is too weak, have you nothing stronger?’ So I brought out a
bottle of vintage Grappa, which seemed to satisfy him. After
dinner, during which he had consumed almost half the bottle,
we began to talk about the role of music, dance, and poetry in
ancient cultures. He said that they had always been combined
in China. Most of those in the present Communist leadership
continued this tradition and were themselves expert ballroom
dancers, having learned their skills in Paris in the twenties as
120 �
penniless refugee students unable to afford any other form of

entertainment. Indeed, President Chou En Lai was particularly
skilled at the foxtrot and the quickstep – all that is except
Mao Tse Tung, who could not dance at all, having no sense of
rhythm (although of course he married a dancer). We could not
help feeling that this was a fundamental criticism of the Great
Leader: as Plato says in the Laws, ‘a well educated man can
both sing well and dance well’ (654b6).
In the old days, Professor Wang said, dancing and poetry
were combined with calligraphy as the essential skills of gov-
ernment, and he was indeed one of the few people left who
could still perform the ancient poetry in the traditional man-
ner. He proceeded to demonstrate this with a selection of
poems, chanting rhythmically, and shuffling back and forth in
a fashion dimly recognisable to us Westerners as an old man’s
chorus. He ended with my favourite poem, by the eighth cen-
tury poet Li Po:10
We both have drunk their birth,

the mountain flowers,
A toast, a toast, a toast,
again another:
I am drunk, long to sleep;
Sir, go a little –
Bring your lute (if you like)
early tomorrow!
Not e s
1 Translations of the Greek passages are my own.
2 The best account of Plato’s attitude to pleasure is to be found in
Giulia Sissa’s fundamental work (1997) ch. 2.
3 See the brilliant Oxford doctoral thesis by my pupil, Manuela
Tecusan, ‘Symposion and Philosophy’ (1993), which won the
prestigious Conington Prize, but is still alas unpublished. For
other discussions of Laws 1–2, see Morrow (1960) 297–318;
Belfiore (1986); Tecusan (1990).
4 At 670a he refers to thirty-year-olds and those over fifty; the lat-
ter need special training, but both seem to be in the chorus of
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Dionysus. Perhaps the chorus is conceived of as having leaders

as well as participants.
5 212189 Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum; ARV² 837.10; Simon,
(1982) pl. 6.2 (A); CVA Malibu J. Paul Getty Museum 8, 52–3
fig. 23 pls. (1718–19) 441.1–2, 442.1–2.
6 See Simon (1981); also Krumeich, Pechstein, and Seidensticker
(1999) 191–6; pl. 22b; illustration in Simon (1982) pl. 7.1–2.
7 Van Groningen (1960) 19–50.
8 Cf. O. Murray (2005) 203.
9 In June 2012 I gave a keynote address at the International
Conference of Ancient World Historians at Nankai University,
Tianjin, China, the university where Professor Wang has founded
one of the two largest graduate schools of Western ancient his-
tory in the world (the other being Oxford). It was a pleasure
to find Professor Wang’s love of poetry and alcohol undimmed
after seventeen years. It is notable how important the role of
poetry has always been in diplomatic affairs: from Petrarch, Sir
Thomas Wyatt, and Sir Henry Wotton to George Seferis and
Pablo Neruda, the list is very distinguished; even in the present
pedestrian age one of my own pupils, the poet Philip McDonagh
has been successively Irish ambassador to India, the Holy See,
Finland, and Russia.
10 Translated by Arthur Cooper (1973) 110.
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��
C hap t e r S i x
I magi n i n g C h o ra l ity
W o n d e r , P l a t o ’s P u p p e t s ,
a n d Mov i ng St a t u e s
Leslie Kurke
As a specialist in Greek choral poetry, I was drawn to the Laws

originally for its lengthy discussion of choreia and the proper
forms of choral education in Books 1 and 2. When I first read
this account, I was puzzled and fascinated by Plato’s elaborate
conceit of human beings as ‘divine puppets’ or ‘puppets of
the gods’. This image, which appears explicitly twice in the
Laws (644d7–645c6, 803c2–804c1) has occasioned surpris-
ingly little commentary from scholars.1 Yet the puppet image
is strikingly vivid and also in context somewhat opaque. In
what way precisely are we ‘puppets of the gods’? And why
does Plato choose to introduce the image of puppets where he
does – within the first two books of the Laws, perhaps the
most lengthy and explicit analysis preserved from antiquity of
the powerful effects of habituation and socialisation produced
by choreia, choral song and dance? In what follows, I suggest
that there is a significant nexus of ideas that links the imagery
Thanks to all the participants at the Laws Conference at Stanford,

and especially to Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi for her organisation of the
conference and her tireless editorial work on the volume. In addition,
I am grateful to G. R. F. Ferrari, Boris Maslov, Lucia Prauscello, and
Naomi Weiss for detailed discussion and comments on earlier drafts.
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Leslie Kurke
of puppets to Plato’s theorisation of choral habituation, while

this image also participates in the complex superimposition
of the levels of individual, community, and cosmos in Plato’s
modelling of choreia. At the same time, Plato’s lurking fantasy
of choruses of dancing puppets will allow us in turn to make
out the lineaments of a much older set of Greek cultural associ-
ations that imagines choruses as moving statues and statues as
frozen choreuts, all bound together under the sway of wonder
(thauma) and desire (eros).2
Within his long preliminary argument for the positive uses
of wine and drunkenness in Book 1, the Athenian Stranger at
one point offers the remarkable image of ‘each of us, though
we are living things’, as ‘a divine puppet (thauma . . . theion),
put together for the gods’ play or their seriousness – we don’t
know which’:3
Let’s think about these things in this way: let’s consider each
of us, though we are living beings,4 to be a divine puppet
(θαῦμα . . . θεῖον), put together either for their play or for some
serious purpose – which, we don’t know. What we do know is
that these passions work within us like tendons or cords, draw-
ing us and pulling against one another in opposite directions
toward opposing deeds, struggling in the region where virtue
and vice lie separated from one another. Now the argument
asserts that each person should always follow one of the cords,
never letting go of it and pulling with it against the others;
this cord is the golden and sacred pull of calculation (τὴν τοῦ
λογισμοῦ ἀγωγὴν χρυσῆν καὶ ἱεράν) and is called the com-
mon law of the city; the other cords are hard and iron, while
this one is soft, inasmuch as it is golden; the others resemble a
multitude of different forms. It is necessary always to assist this
most noble pull of law because calculation, while noble, is gen-
tle rather than violent, and its pull is in need of helpers if the
race of gold is to be victorious within us over the other races.
Thus, the myth of virtue, the myth about us being pup-
pets, would be saved, and what was intended by the notion
of being superior to oneself or inferior would be somewhat
clearer. Moreover, as regards a city and a private individual,
it'll be clearer that the latter should acquire within himself true
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Imagining Chorality
reasoning about these cords and live according to it, while a

city should take over a reasoning either from one of the gods or
from this knower of these things, and then set up the reason-
ing as the law for itself and for its relations with other cities.
Thus, certainly, vice and virtue would be more clearly distin-
guished for us. With this distinction sharpened, education and
other practices will perhaps be clarified, and the practice of
spending time drinking together, which might be considered
too trivial to be worth so many words, may well appear not
unworthy of such lengthy speech. (Laws 644d7–645c6; trans.
Pangle (1980) 24–5, slightly modified)
Modern readers have tended to follow the lead of the

Athenian’s own denigrating qualification (‘play or seriousness’)
to understand the puppet image as a negative figuration of
human helplessness and insignificance in relation to the
divine; thus E. B. England (for example) in his commentary
quotes King Lear (4.1.38): ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the
Gods: They kill us for their sport’.5
This reaction is perhaps not surprising, given another pas-
sage in the Laws that strongly suggests the lowliness of pup-
pets within a ranked hierarchy of entertainments. In Book 2,
the Athenian imagines an open competition regarding pleasure
within the city:
Well, I suppose it’s likely that one, like Homer, would present
a rhapsody, and another a recital on the kithara, and another
a tragedy, and another, again, a comedy; and it wouldn’t be
surprising if someone thought he could best win by presenting
puppets. (Laws 658b7–c1; trans. Pangle (1980) 38)
In this context, all three discussants readily agree that the

winner of the contest would depend on the class of persons
judging (because of their habituation): very small children, the
Athenian asserts, would choose the one exhibiting puppets;
bigger boys would opt for comedies; whereas tragedy would
appeal to educated women, younger men, ‘and nearly every-
body else’. Finally, the old men would judge rhapsodic per-
formances of Homer and Hesiod the best (Laws 658c10–d9).
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Leslie Kurke
Thus, puppets rank as the lowliest form of entertainment in

this series, their crude mimesis designed for and geared to
please the naiveté of the very young.6
But we should not be too quick to take the Athenian’s bait
and regard his ‘puppet’ as an entirely derogatory image, for
this response completely misses the profound cultural strange-
ness and choral specificity of his eikon. To appreciate these
better, I would like to dwell for a moment on the Athenian’s
choice of term here – thauma. This term is by no means neces-
sary, as we can see from 803c5, where the Athenian recurs to
the image of puppets but instead (at least once) uses the term
paignion (plaything), and as we can see from a revealing pas-
sage from Xenophon’s Symposium, where the puppet image also
comes up, but the term used there is ta neurospasta (lit., ‘things
drawn by cords’, or ‘marionettes’; Sym. 4.55).
The designation thauma points us to something essential
about puppets, focalised (as it were) through the credulous gaze
of very small children: though we know them to be mechani-
cal and inanimate, we simultaneously believe that puppets are
alive, for they are infused with motion and voice. And this
doubleness (which is one of Freud’s prime examples of ‘the
uncanny’) is a kind of magic or wonder that itself arouses
wonder.7 In relation to the puppet as thauma, I draw on new
work by Richard Neer, who argues for ‘wonder’ as one of the
key aesthetic effects cultivated by archaic and classical Greek
sculptors in their crafting of images.8 As Neer formulates it,
In Greek as in English, one wonders at wonders; and literary

texts from Homer on suggest that the quintessential wonder
is a spectacle of brilliant radiance, flashing speed, and radical
‘otherness’. Uniting these qualities is a basic effect of twofold-
ness or doubleness in viewing: the statue should seem simulta-
neously alien and familiar, far and close, inert and alive, absent
and present.9
Puppets, though merely low and common objects designed

for the amusement of children, participate in wonder akin to
that awakened by the doubleness of statuary because they
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Imagining Chorality
move and so seem simultaneously ‘inert and alive’. And the

effect of both these forms, I would contend, is intimately asso-
ciated for the Greeks with the ‘wonder’ generated by choral
performances. It is this synapse between statues/puppets and
the wondrous effects of choreia that I wish to explore.
Indeed, it is worth noting that Plato in the passage where
he first introduces the puppet image (644d7–8, quoted previ-
ously) has effectively intensified or redoubled this charge of
thauma, offering in compacted fashion all the constituent ele-
ments of the effect of wonder produced by choruses in scenes
of archaic Greek poetry. There is first the pointed opposition
between thauma, the inert and mechanical object, and ton
zoon – as England formulates it, ‘ “living creatures though we
are”; we are not lifeless – put together . . . out of wood, but we
are puppets, all the same’.10 Then again, the mutual repulsion
or taut oxymoron between the lowly puppet (thauma) and its
adjective theion, which implies made by the gods, the gods’
possession, but also somehow infused with divinity. This col-
lapse or uneasy fusion of three normally mutually exclusive
categories – divine, mortal human, and artifice or object of
skilled crafting – is indeed a ‘wonder’ that is also, I suggest,
very much at the core of the Greek imagination of chorality.
Thus I will argue, first, that the image of divine puppets is
intimately linked in the Laws to Plato’s model of choral edu-
cation and, indeed, helps him theorise how such education
works. Second, I shall argue that this image in fact captures
and distils certain deeply traditional Greek ways of conceiving
chorality – its pleasures, its aesthetics, and its powers. For the
puppet image effectively combines two characteristic features
of choral performance implicit in many scenes of archaic Greek
poetry: (1) Choral performance is a machine for the conjur-
ing of absolute presence, whereby gods, chorus members, and
audience are all linked or joined together by a single (mimetic)
chain. (2) A perfectly performing chorus is assimilated to or
fantasised as a set of moving statues or agalmata, the prod-
ucts of divine or uncanny crafting. The combination of the
two broader arguments will produce a somewhat ungainly
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yoking of two disparate and asymmetrical parts – first, a phil-

osophically underdeveloped reading of the Laws and, then, a
somewhat breathless coda on traditional models of choreia as
they are embedded in Plato’s poetic precursors. At first glance,
these may seem very different arguments that speak to differ-
ent audiences and, because of restrictions of space, both parts
are necessarily more cursory and schematic than I would like.
Nonetheless, it seemed worthwhile to lay out both as a provo-
cation to interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophers and
scholars of Greek choreia.
I
From this passage in Book 1 of the Laws, it is not at all clear
what the elaborate image of puppets and cords is supposed
to be an eikon of (beyond its general application as an image
of self-mastery): what exactly are the ‘helpers’ or ‘assistants’
(ὑπηρετῶν) of the golden cord of logismos meant to be in
the Athenian’s conceit? He does not say explicitly, and dif-
ferent readers have proposed different solutions.11 André
Laks has observed that one striking feature of the Laws as a
text is its repeated deferral of actual legislation;12 but Laks’
point can, I think, be applied more broadly – the Laws as a
whole is all about deferral, and the same is true of the slow
emergence of meaning or connections for the Athenian’s tan-
talising puppet image in Book 1. Thus, to unpack this con-
ceit – its referent and its implications – we must attend to
recurrent leitmotifs and images that cluster around the pup-
pet analogy. We should note that, within the argument on
drunkenness, the Athenian has already shifted the topic to
paideia at 641b6, and that paideia is somehow linked to ‘cor-
rect mousike’ (642a3–6). Within this frame, several elements
that will figure in the fully formed puppet image of 644–5
show up dimly adumbrated: thus the opposition ‘play ver-
sus seriousness’ ( paidia vs. spoude) occurs in the Athenian’s
assertion that one must practice in play from childhood what
one will have to do seriously as an adult (643b4–7). After
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offering the examples of the farmer, the house builder, and

the horseman, the Athenian concludes:
The attempt should be made to use the games to turn the plea-
sures and desires of children toward those activities in which
they must become perfect. The core of education, we say,
is a correct nurture (ὀρθὴν τροφήν), one which, as much as
possible, draws the soul of the child at play toward an erotic
attachment (εἰς ἔρωτα) to what he must do when he becomes
a man who is perfect as regards the virtue of his occupation.
(643c6–d3; trans. Pangle (1980) 23)
That ‘pleasures, desires, and eros’ (which prefigure the

πάθη of the puppets passage) are already associated with the
language of ‘turning’ and ‘leading’ (τρέπειν, ἄξει) furnishes a
clue to the puppet image: the proper education that consists
of ‘correct nurture’ (ὀρθὴ τροφή), then, is the habituation
that turns and guides the pleasures and desires into alignment
with virtue (ἀρετή). And this is done by guiding the soul to
eros (‘desire’ or ‘love’) of the right things in play. Ultimately,
as the Athenian goes on to say, a ‘liberal education’ serves to
make each a ‘desirer and lover of being a perfect citizen, know-
ing how to rule and be ruled in turn with justice’ (ποιοῦσαν
ἐπιθυμητήν τε καὶ ἐραστὴν τοῦ πολίτην γενέσθαι τέλεον,
ἄρχειν τε καὶ ἄρχεσθαι ἐπιστάμενον μετὰ δίκης, 643e5–6).
The precise nature of the education and habituation the
Athenian advocates becomes clearer in Book 2, where he can
even conclude succinctly, ‘So the uneducated man will be
the one untrained in choral performances (ὁ μὲν ἀπαίδευτος
ἀχόρευτος), and the educated ought to be set down as the one
sufficiently trained in choral performances’, 654a9-b1; trans.
Pangle (1980) 33).13 That is, choreia is the very core of civic
education or education in citizenship. It is in this context of
choreia as civic education that we must situate the Athenian’s
emphasis on the crucial work done by eros or desire in this
process of the proper formation or habituation of the child
towards what he should be as an adult. In the second half of the
chapter, we shall see that eros figured as an essential element
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in representations of choral performance in a wide range of

archaic Greek poetry. This traditional notion of the potent
erotic effects of choruses in performance was also appropri-
ated by Plato, along with many other traditional Greek associa-
tions of choreia, for his theorisation of proper civic education
through chorality.
The argument that leads the Athenian to the conclusion
that ‘the uneducated man will be the one untrained in choral
performances’ is permeated with the language and imagery of
puppets, which thereby solves the puzzle or riddle left hang-
ing (as it were) in Book 1:
Now, this education which consists in correctly trained plea-

sures and pains tends to slacken (χαλᾶται) in human beings,
and in the course of a lifetime becomes corrupted to a great
extent. So, taking pity on the naturally toilsome race of men,
the gods have ordained the alternations of festivals in hon-
our of the gods as times of rest from toil for them. They have
given as fellow celebrants the Muses, with their leader Apollo,
and Dionysus – in order that [human beings] be set upright
again (ἵν᾿ ἐπανορθῶνται) – and they have given the sustenance
occurring at festivals together with the gods.
It is necessary to see whether or not the things the argu-
ment is singing to us now are true according to nature. The
argument asserts that every young thing, so to speak, is inca-
pable of remaining calm in body or in voice, but always seeks
to move and cry: young things leap and jump as if they were
dancing with pleasure and playing together, and emit all sorts
of cries. The other animals, the argument goes, lack percep-
tion of orders and disorders in motions (the orders which
have received the names of ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’); we, in
contrast, have been given the aforementioned gods as fellow
dancers, and they have given us the pleasant perception of
rhythm and harmony. Using this, they move us and lead us
in choruses, linking us one with another by means of songs
and dances (ᾠδαῖς τε καὶ ὀρχήσεσιν ἀλλήλοις συνείροντας);
and that is why they bestowed the name ‘choruses’ – from the
‘joy’ (chara) which is natural to these activities. First, then, do
we accept this? Do we proclaim that the first education comes
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Imagining Chorality
through the Muses and Apollo, or what? (Laws 653c7–654a7;

trans. Pangle (1980) 33, modified)
This is a sneaky passage, since it moves backwards from

the need to restore the work of education in adults to the first
formative effects of choral activity in children. Still, what
I want to highlight is the way in which every stage in this
reverse chronology is defined (haunted even) by the imagery
of puppets. Thus, what happens in the adult is that the first
proper organisation or alignment of pleasure and pain with
ἀρετή is ‘slackened’ – χαλᾶται; that is, it has its strings loos-
ened and, like a puppet abandoned by the puppet master, col-
lapses all in a heap.14 The gods, taking pity on the ‘toilsome
race of men’, have ordained the variety of festivals as release
from toils, and they have given human beings the Muses
and Apollo Mousagetes and Dionysus as fellow celebrants,
‘in order that they [human beings] be set upright again’ (ἵν’
ἐπανορθῶνται).15 Most translators blunt the force of the verb
ἐπανορθῶνται, but after χαλᾶται we should take it very con-
cretely: as the gods gather up the strings of the fallen pup-
pet, he is ‘set upright again’, standing and ready to move in
response to the tugging of his strings. Next, the Athenian
abruptly shifts backwards in time to an account of the first
uncontrollable and disorderly motions of young creatures and
how these are ordered in human beings by the pleasant per-
ception of rhythm and harmony, bestowed on us by the Muses
and Apollo and Dionysus as our fellow dancers (συγχορευτάς).
And here again the puppet image returns: by the perception of
rhythm and harmony together with pleasure, ‘these gods move
us and lead us in the dance, linking us one with another by
means of songs and dances’16 (ᾗ δὴ κινεῖν τε ἡμᾶς καὶ χορηγεῖν
ἡμῶν τούτους, ᾠδαῖς τε καὶ ὀρχήσεσιν ἀλλήλοις συνείροντας).
συνείρειν (which, like χαλᾶται, occurs only here in the Laws)
means literally ‘string together’, so that the gods are said to
string us together and make us move (κινεῖν, χορηγεῖν). But
here, notice, the image has developed – rather than a single
puppet ‘set upright’ by having his strings drawn tight, we
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have a whole chorus of puppets who move and dance in perfect

synchronisation, bound to each other (ἀλλήλοις συνείροντας)
without ever getting their strings tangled or confused.17
This is the remarkable work of choreia – the perfect coordi-
nation or orchestration of movement and song, so that many
voices sing as one voice and many bodies move as a single
organism. And in this fleeting or half-formed image of a whole
chorus of puppets ‘strung together’, we get an intimation of
how choral education serves its civic function; it forms ‘perfect
citizens’, for they all work in unison, in harmony with each
other. Thus, this passage clarifies one thing that the ‘helpers’ or
‘assistants’ of the ‘golden cord of logismos’ can be understood
to be – a lifetime of choral habituation and training under the
guidance of the gods at festivals that transport us, at least tem-
porarily, back to the ease and bliss of the golden race.18
This connection between the puppet image and chorality is
confirmed by the only other passage in which this image explic-
itly recurs in the Laws, the strange ‘digression’ of 803–4:
Athenian: I assert that what is serious should be treated

seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by
nature god is worthy of a complete, blessed seriousness,
but that what is human, as we said earlier, has been
devised as a certain plaything of god (ἄνθρωπον δέ . . .
θεοῦ τι παίγνιον εἶναι μεμηχανημένον), and that this is
really the best thing about it. Every man and woman
should spend life in this way, playing the noblest pos-
sible games, and thinking about them in a way that is
the opposite of the way they’re now thought about.
Cleinias: How’s that?
Athenian: Nowadays, presumably, they suppose the seri-
ous things are for the sake of the playful things: for it
is held that the affairs pertaining to war, being serious
matters, should be run well for the sake of peace. But
the fact is that in war there is not and will not be by
nature either play or, again, an education that is at any
time worthy of our discussion; yet this is what we assert
is for us, at least, the most serious thing. Each person
should spend the greatest and best part of his life in
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peace. What then is the correct way? One should live out
one’s days playing at certain games – sacrificing, sing-
ing, and dancing (θύοντα καὶ ᾄδοντα καὶ ὀρχούμενον) –
with the result that one can make the gods propitious
to oneself and can defend oneself against enemies and
be victorious over them in battle. The sort of things one
should sing and dance in order to accomplish both these
things have been described in outlines, and the roads, as
it were, have been cut along which one must go, expect-
ing that the poet speaks well when he says:
Telemachus, some things you yourself will think of

in your own thoughts,
And others a daimon will suggest; for I do not think
That you were born and raised without the good will
of the gods.
This is the way our nurslings (τοὺς ἡμετέρους τροφίμους)

should consider things: they should believe that, in
part, what’s been said has been adequately spoken,
and also that, in part, the daimon and god will suggest
things to them regarding sacrifices and choral perfor-
mances, thus indicating those whom they should offer
games and propitiate, and when they should play each
game for each, so as to live out their lives in accor-
dance with the way of nature, being puppets for the
most part, but having a share of some small portions
of truth (θαύματα ὄντες τὸ πολύ, σμικρὰ δὲ ἀληθείας
ἄττα μετέχοντες).
Megillus: Stranger, you are belittling our human race in
every respect!
Athenian: Don’t be amazed, Megillus, but forgive me!
For I was looking away toward the god and speaking
under the influence of that experience, when I said
what I did just now. So let our race be something that
is not lowly then, if that is what you cherish, but wor-
thy of a certain seriousness. (Laws 803c2–804c1; trans.
Pangle (1980) 193–4, slightly modified)
In the first place, we should note that here again the pup-
pet image is strongly associated with the activities of choral
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song and dance. Thus, the Athenian asserts that the fact that
we ‘have been fashioned as a plaything of god’ is ‘truly the
best thing about us’ and what necessitates that ‘every man and
woman should spend life in this way, playing the noblest pos-
sible games’ (803c4–8). And what are these? ‘One should live
out one’s days playing at certain games – sacrificing, singing,
and dancing – with the result that one can make the gods pro-
pitious to oneself and can defend oneself against enemies and
be victorious over them in battle’ (803e1–4). ‘Sacrificing, sing-
ing, and dancing’ here form a single radiant cluster of festival
offering and paideia that delight the gods even as they form
the human participants in perfect alignment with each other.
This seems to be the implication of the Athenian’s statement of
the twofold salutary effects of a life devoted to such activities:
it will make the gods ‘gracious’ or ‘propitious’ (ἵλεως) to each
citizen, and it will enable the combined citizenry effectively
to resist and to triumph in the cooperative efforts of warfare.
Thus it seems that, as in the passage in Book 2, the image of
dancing puppets suggests at once a direct vertical connection
between each puppet and the divine and a horizontal linkage
of a group of bodies in perfectly synchronised, coordinated
motion.
Still, the Athenian’s long riff here on human beings as pup-
pets is in many ways deeply puzzling. In context, it seems
to be a digression from the logical progression of topics the
Athenian had just proposed for himself at 803a, the ‘teaching
and transmission’ (διδασκαλία καὶ παράδοσις) of proper songs
and dances – ‘in what way and to whom and when one ought
to do each of these things’. Second, the Athenian’s unambigu-
ous identification of the human puppet as a mere ‘plaything
of god’, thus deciding or resolving the uncertainty he had
expressed in Book 1 (‘put together either for their play or for
some serious purpose – which, we don’t know’), has moti-
vated some scholars to read this ‘digression’ as deeply pessi-
mistic. Thus, Laks, for example, characterizes this passage as a
moment of ‘existential despair’: ‘Human affairs are unworthy
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of great attention despite the necessity of taking an interest

in them’.19
Let me start with the issue of form and structure and then
turn to the content and tone of this passage (though, as we
shall see, the two are really inseparable). Formally, the puppet
‘digression’ allows the Athenian to shut down the discussion
of choreia without endlessly proliferating specific prescriptions
and rules – indeed, he sidesteps thereby the need to constitute
an entire festival calendar and is able to shift immediately to
the topic of gymnastic education (starting at 804c2).20 In this
respect, we might say that this Platonic digression functions
very much like a Pindaric breakoff formula, in which the poet
often characterizes himself as overwhelmed by the amount of
material and therefore unable to go into all the particulars.21
Admittedly, poetic aporia has been transformed into a more
pervasive fatalism about the nonseriousness of the human con-
dition; nonetheless, we can say that, even if this is ‘existen-
tial despair’, it is strategically situated to speed the discussion
along.
Second, regarding content and tone (by which I mean what
the specifics of the puppet image positively allow the Athenian
to achieve), I am by no means persuaded that this passage is
in fact so unrelievedly bleak in its reflections on the human
condition (we should perhaps not take the dismayed reaction
of the Spartan Megillus as our guide).22 For the digression as
a whole seems to move from pessimism or despair to a more
positive affirmation. In the first place, we should note that this
passage achieves a radical deconstruction or reconciliation of
the terms ‘seriousness versus play’ that have figured so con-
sistently in the Athenian’s discourse – precisely through the
puppet image and its linkage with joyful chorality. This is
the work done in the Athenian’s statements before he quotes
the Odyssey, when he insists on a revaluation of the common
human ranking of war and peace. That is, most human beings
devote themselves seriously and mainly to the work of war
for the sake of peace; the Athenian would have them instead
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devote as much of their lives as possible to the best kinds of

‘play’ – sacrificing, singing, and dancing. The paradoxical con-
clusion: we should be most serious about ‘play’.23 This follows
from our being παίγνια θεοῦ, while it represents yet another
kind of paradoxical doubleness inherent in our nature as
thaumata. In context, this reconciliation of seriousness and
play serves to put the finishing touch on the Athenian’s cri-
tique of the war-obsessed constitutions of Sparta and Crete
(which he initiated at the very beginning of Book 1). Instead,
the Athenian asserts, (organised, cooperative) play in the form
of festival song and dance in honour of the gods is ‘the best
thing’ about human beings.
Then, after this positive revaluation of play, the Athenian
concludes his digression with the thought that ‘we are puppets
for the most part, though we do share some small portions of
truth’ – a formulation that suggests an element of the divine
leading, guiding, or inhabiting the puppet.24 Where does this
thought come from, and what exactly does it mean? This more
positive representation of the puppet (notice also the shift
from παίγνιον to θαύματα) is effected through the quotation
of three lines of the Odyssey. The Athenian quotes a passage
from the beginning of Odyssey Book 3, in which Athena in the
guise of Mentor encourages the young Telemachus before his
first encounter on his travels (with Nestor in Pylos). In this
context, the goddess reassures the young man at the begin-
ning of his public education by asserting that ‘some things
you yourself will think of in your own thoughts (νοήσεις), and
others a daimon will suggest’. Thus, this quotation articulates
another kind of doubling in the city’s young ‘nurslings’ – the
collaboration of human nous and divine inspiration allowing
them to intuit precisely which sacrifices and dances should
be instituted to which gods.25 And, of course, though the
Athenian quotes only these three lines, the immediate con-
text from which they are derived in the Odyssey is permeated
with the idea of the divine leading or guiding the human
youth; thus a few lines before the quotation, we are told, ‘Tele
machus disembarked from the ship and Athena was leading’
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Imagining Chorality
(ἐκ δ᾿ ἄρα Τηλέμαχος νηὸς βαῖν᾿, ἄρχε δ᾿ Ἀθήνη, Od. 3.12),

while immediately after Athena/Mentor’s speech of encourage-
ment, we find:
Having spoken thus, Pallas Athena led [him] swiftly; but he was
going after in the footsteps of the god. (Hom. Od. 3.29–30)
That Plato has these framing images of divine guidance
in mind is suggested by the road imagery with which he has
the Athenian introduce his quotation: ‘The sort of things
one should sing and dance . . . have been described in out-
lines (τύπων), and the roads, as it were, have been cut along
which one must go’ (καθάπερ ὁδοὶ τέτμηνται καθ᾿ ἃς ἰτέον,
803e4–6).
But the final line of the Athenian’s quotation also does impor-
tant work: what does it mean applied to the city’s ‘nurslings’
that they have not been ‘born and raised without the good
will of the gods’? As England notes, the Athenian’s τροφίμους
(nurslings) is clearly inspired by the Homeric τραφέμεν; both, I
would suggest, evoke the discussion of paideia as ὀρθὴ τροφή
in Books 1–2.26 Specifically, the Homeric οὐ . . . θεῶν ἀέκητι
. . . τραφέμεν recalls the Athenian’s lengthy disquisition at
653–4, in which he had asserted that ‘the gods have given us
the Muses, Apollo Mousagetes, and Dionysus as fellow cele-
brants . . . and [have given us] the nurturance occurring at fes-
tivals together with the gods’ (τάς τε τροφὰς γενομένας ἐν ταῖς
ἑορταῖς μετὰ θεῶν, 653d2–5). This last phrase, which locates
human ‘nurturance’ in festivals accompanied by the gods, is
almost a paraphrase of Athena’s final line to Telemachus. As
such, it clarifies the particular ‘nurturance’ the Athenian has
in mind; it is a lifetime of habituation in choral song and dance
at festivals that helps develop the human nous and simultane-
ously opens each of us up to the surreptitious promptings of
the divine (ὑποθήσεσθαι) – guiding each citizen to the fur-
ther specification and elaboration of the gods for whom he
should play and whom he should propitiate. It is thus that the
Athenian’s digression serves its function as a breakoff, since,
with proper choral interpellation and habituation, the city’s
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subjects/puppets will ‘work by themselves’ (in Althusser’s

memorable phrase).27 Given that, there is no need for legisla-
tion ‘down to the ground’ on every minute facet of religious
worship through choreia, so the Athenian can move on to the
next topic. That it is specifically habituation in choral dance
that primes the human puppet and opens him up for further
divine enlightenment or revelation (ἀλήθεια) is suggested by
the concrete imagery in the Athenian’s talk of τύποι and ‘roads
cut along which one must go’, for the terms τύποι and ὁδοί can
evoke (among other things) the shapes of choral dance.
To conclude this section, I’d like to suggest that Plato’s
modelling of choral paideia, closely linked to the imagery of
puppets, seems to apply on three levels at once – the politi-
cal, the individual, and the cosmic – and helps to suture all
three together. I have focussed mainly on the political in try-
ing to unpack the phrase ἀλλήλοις συνείροντας (‘linking us
one with another’), suggesting that it conjures up an image of
divine puppets, all the citizens together, responding in unison
in dance to ‘the golden cord of logismos’ which is ‘the common
law of the city’. Plato offers hints for how this choral puppetry
might work also on the individual and the cosmic levels (and
hints on the conjunction of those two). First, at the individual
level, it is worth focussing for a moment on the passage that
immediately precedes the long passage I considered earlier on
the pedagogic value of choral dance in Book 2:
Well, I say that the first infantile sensation in children is the

sensation of pleasure and pain, and that it is in these that virtue
and vice first come into being in the soul; as for understand-
ing, and true opinions that are firmly held, he is a fortunate
person to whom it comes even in old age. He who does possess
them, and all the good things that go with them, is a perfect
human being. Education, I say, is the virtue that first comes
into being in children. If pleasure and liking, pain and hatred,
become correctly arranged in the souls of those who are not
yet able to reason, and then, when the souls do become capable
of reasoning, if these passions sound in harmony with reason
(συμφωνήσωσι τῷ λόγῳ) because28 they have been correctly
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Imagining Chorality
habituated by appropriate habits, this sounding in harmony

(συμφωνία) in its entirety is virtue. But that part of virtue
which consists in being correctly trained as regards pleasures
and pains so as to hate what one should hate from the very
beginning until the end, and also to love what one should
love – if you separate this off in speech and call it education,
you will, in my view, name it correctly. (Laws 653a5–c4; trans.
Pangle (1980) 32–3, modified)
The Athenian uses the terms συμφωνήσωσι and συμφωνία

for the perfect alignment of pleasure and pain, affection and
hatred, with the hard-won reasoning faculties in the souls of
those who have been correctly educated and habituated. We
need to give the choral metaphor in these terms its due – not
just ‘consent to’ (R. G. Bury), ‘in consonance with’ (Pangle),
or ‘concord’ (Saunders). What the Athenian describes is the
pathe ‘sounding in harmony with’ reason like a perfectly coor-
dinated chorus singing in unison.29 This choral image repre-
sents the orderly alignment and cooperation of the parts of the
soul with each other, so that an interior chorus with logos now
installed (perhaps as ‘chorus leader’?) here replaces the image
of a ‘divine puppet’ whose golden string of logismos and the
strings of the passions move together, drawn in coordination
by a divine hand.30 That is to say, the puppet image and the
image of an interior chorus here appear to be allomorphs of
each other.
Third, the cosmic level. It is another instance of the pattern
of deferral in the Laws that the discussion of cosmic motions
(which serves as proof for the existence of the gods and their
engagement with human beings) appears only in Book 10; in
this respect, it stands in relation to the creation of a city in
words in Books 1–9 as the Timaeus stands in relation to the
Republic, providing the essential physical and cosmic under-
pinnings of the political order thus far conjured.31 And if we
may supplement the account of cosmic motions in Book 10
of the Laws with the fuller account in the Timaeus (which it
seems to presuppose), we find the ultimate ground for the
importance of choreia in the stable and rational motions of the
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heavenly bodies and the individual human soul’s imitation

thereof. Thus, with the cosmic level it finally becomes clear
why dance is so important in the Athenian’s conception of this
primary education within the city. The prominence of choreia
in education within the city is not adventitious, nor is dance
simply an image or allegory for all forms of mediation of the
rational and irrational within the ‘human prodigy’, as Laks at
one point suggests.32 For the orderly movements of dance bind
us intimately to the structure of the universe.
As we are told in the Timaeus and Book 10 of the Laws, the
first and best of all motions is stable circular rotation around a
fixed point. This motion, likened to ‘circular things turned on
a lathe’ (Laws 898a4–5; trans. Pangle (1980) 296; cf. 898b1–2),
characterizes the best Soul that drives all things, includ-
ing the orderly motions of the sun, the moon, and the fixed
stars. We can perhaps identify the Laws’ ‘best Soul’ with the
Timaeus’ Demiurge, who crafts the universe (τὸ πᾶν) as a per-
fect ensouled being, a sphere rotating around its axis. In the
Timaeus’ fuller and more differentiated account, the Demiurge
creates two classes of stars (ἄστρα) as ‘the heavenly race of
gods’ (Ti. 39e10): (1) the sun, moon, and planets with complex,
changing motions to be ‘the instruments of time’ (Ti. 38c3–
39e2, 40b6–8); and (2) the fixed stars (Ti. 39e10–40b6). The
latter, under the influence of the dominant circle or circle of
the Same, have only two motions:
The first was rotation, an unvarying movement in the same

place, by which the god would always think the same thoughts
about the same things. The other was revolution, a forward
motion under the dominance of the circular carrying motion
of the Same and the uniform. With respect to the other five
motions, the gods are immobile and stationary, in order that
each of them may come as close as possible to attaining perfec-
tion. (Ti. 40a8–b4; trans. Zeyl (1997) 1243)
With the final creation of the earth itself (Ti. 40b8–c3), the
‘heavenly race of gods’ is complete, and at this point Timaeus
refers briefly to the complex circuit of all the motions of the
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heavenly bodies as ‘their dances’ (χορείας δὲ τούτων αὐτῶν, Ti.

40c2–3). The brevity of Timaeus’ reference here suggests that
his image of the ‘dances of the stars’ is already a familiar one.33
And while Timaeus mainly uses this image to characterise the
complex motions and interactions of the ‘instruments of time’,
begging off having to explain them all without the help of
‘visible models’ (Ti. 40d2–3), his image of the choreia of the
heavenly bodies applies equally to the circular rotation of the
fixed stars, here imagined as a divine chorus, spinning and cir-
cling in a perpetual dance through the circuit of the Same.34
The Demiurge further fashions the souls of those mortal
beings whose embodied making he entrusts to the ‘created
gods’ of the Greek pantheon, compounding their souls of the
same mixture as the souls of the heavenly bodies, only less pure
(Ti. 41d4–7). These souls (which start out as [male] human)
are most akin to the fixed stars – they are equal in number
to the fixed stars and each soul is assigned to a star, mounted
on which it is given a view of the universe and its fated laws
before being implanted in a mortal body (Ti. 41d8–e4). Once
in a body, the soul is assaulted by perception, by ‘eros mixed
with pleasure and pain’, by fear, spiritedness, and their oppo-
sites. If the soul is able to rule these impulses and pass its entire
life justly, it ‘will return to its dwelling place in its compan-
ion star, to live a life of happiness that agrees with its charac-
ter’ (Ti. 42a5–b5; trans. Zeyl (1997) 1245, slightly modified).35
In order to achieve this self-control and life of justice, human
souls need to ‘imitate’ the unwandering divine motions of the
heavenly gods, thereby rectifying the ‘revolutions’ or ‘orbits’
of thoughts in our heads (Ti. 47b6–c4).
In the notion of the soul’s need to rule its impulses, this
account has much in common with the puppet image of the
Laws Book 1. At the same time, I would contend, the Timaeus
also attributes to dance part of the work of restoring the orderly
divine motions of our souls, thus helping to enable our eventual
‘likening to divinity’ (ὁμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ, Theaetetus 176b;
cf. Ti. 90b6–d7). The role of choreia in this process is implied
first in Timaeus’ account of the overwhelming disturbances of
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the ‘revolutions of immortal soul’ produced by the trauma of

birth into a body and the onslaught of bodily sensations (Ti.
43a4–44b1). All these disordering effects are particularly intense
at the start, so that ‘even today . . . whenever a soul is bound
within a mortal body, it at first lacks intelligence’ (Ti. 44a7–b1;
trans. Zeyl (1997) 1247). Nonetheless, Timaeus continues:
But as the stream that brings growth and nourishment dimin-
ishes and the soul’s orbits regain their composure, resume
their proper courses and establish themselves more and more
with the passage of time, their revolutions are set straight, to
conform to the configuration each of the circles takes in its
natural course. They then correctly identify what is the same
and what is different, and render intelligent the person who
possesses them. And to be sure, if such a person also gets
proper nurture to supplement his education (ἂν μὲν οὖν δὴ καὶ
συνεπιλαμβάνηταί τις ὀρθὴ τροφὴ παιδεύσεως), he’ll turn out
perfectly whole and healthy, and will have escaped the most
grievous of illnesses. But if he neglects this, he’ll limp his way
through life and return to Hades uninitiated and unintelligent.
(Ti. 44b1–c4; trans. Zeyl (1997) 1247)
In the formulation καὶ συνεπιλαμβάνηταί τις ὀρθὴ τροφὴ

παιδεύσεως, we should perhaps detect an allusion to choral
training as well as other forms of nurture and education. A. E.
Taylor, in his commentary on the Timaeus, insists that ‘right
nurture’ (ὀρθὴ τροφή) ‘is to be understood in the most literal
sense. He must be fed properly and his body must grow up in
the right way’. Yet we have observed the frequent association
of τροφή and its cognates with training in choreia through-
out the Laws (recall especially the ‘nurturance (τροφάς) occur-
ring at festivals together with the gods’ at Laws 653d5).36
Here, I suggest, it is the proper formation and habituation of
the young through choral dance that assists the straightening
or ordering of the circular revolutions within each soul, even
before various forms of paideusis – arithmetic, astronomy, and
ultimately philosophy – fully heal the disordered and trauma-
tised soul. Indeed, we may find confirmation for the partici-
pation of dance in this process in the imagery Timaeus uses
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Imagining Chorality
to characterise those who fail to restore this divine order in

themselves – they ‘go through a lame life’ (χωλὴν τοῦ βίου . . .
ζωήν) and depart from it ‘incomplete’ or ‘uninitiated’ (ἀτελής).
Lameness evokes by contrast the health, grace, and symme-
try of a body trained in choreia, while Plato frequently associ-
ates ‘initiation’ or ‘rites’ (τέλεα) with the therapeutic powers
of Corybantic dance (e.g., in Crito 54d, Euthyd. 277d–e, Symp.
215e, Laws 790e–791b, Ion 533e–534b).37
The hint of choreia in this passage is supported and elabo-
rated in Timaeus’ account of the ‘intelligent design’ of voice
and hearing (Ti. 45b–47e). After a lengthy account of the
divine creation and workings of the eye, Timaeus explains that
the power of sight was divinely contrived for the ‘supremely
beneficial function’ that it allows us to observe the movements
of the stars, sun, and heaven. From these observations have
arisen time reckoning, enquiry into the nature of the universe,
and ultimately philosophy, the greatest boon bestowed by the
gods on the mortal race. Precisely parallel to the gift of sight
and its effects in Timaeus’ account are the gifts of sound/voice
and hearing – and here again, dance plays its part:
Likewise, the same account goes for sound and hearing – these
too are the gods’ gifts, given for the same purpose and intended
to achieve the same result. Speech was designed for this very
purpose – it plays the greatest part in its achievement. And all
such composition that lends itself to making audible musical
sound is given in order to express harmony, and so serves this
purpose as well. And harmony, whose movements are akin to
the orbits within our souls, is a gift of the Muses, if our deal-
ings with them are guided by understanding, not for irrational
pleasure, for which people nowadays seem to make use of it,
but to serve as an ally (σύμμαχος) in the fight to bring order
to any orbit in our souls that has become unharmonised, and
make it concordant with itself. Rhythm, too, has likewise been
given to us by the Muses for the same purpose, to assist us
(ἐπίκουρος ἐπὶ ταὐτὰ). For with most of us our condition is
such that we have lost all sense of measure, and are lacking in
grace (διὰ τὴν ἄμετρον ἐν ἡμῖν καὶ χαρίτων ἐπιδεᾶ γιγνομένην
ἐν τοῖς πλείστοις ἕξιν). (Ti. 47c4–e2; trans. Zeyl (1997) 1250)
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In Timaeus’ account of the valuable work done by harmony

and rhythm to restore the orderly (celestial) orbits in our souls,
scholars have detected the influence of Pythagorean doctrines
of sacred harmony and the music of the spheres.38 That is,
when we hear the proper musical harmonies played, it helps
restore the order and kindred harmonies within our own souls.
This is certainly part of Timaeus’ account, but not the whole.
For with ‘rhythm’ as opposed to ‘harmony’ (as we know from
several passages in the Laws),39 the reference is predominantly
to motion and dance, and this is made clear by the fact that
when the discussion turns to ‘rhythm’, the mention of ἀκοή
(hearing or listening to music) disappears. Instead, the effect of
rhythmos works directly on each individual’s hexis, which in
most of us has ‘come to be unmeasured and lacking in grace’.40
The mention of ‘grace’ (χαρίτων) is another clear signal that
we are in the domain of dance, for throughout the Greek tradi-
tion χάρις is strongly attached to the physical grace or (erotic)
charm of dancers in motion.41 Thus, this passage identifies
three different effects of ‘sound and hearing’ that help restore
the perfect heavenly revolutions implanted in our immortal
souls before their birth into bodies: speech (which allows us
to engage in reasoned argument, dialectic, and philosophy);
‘musical sound’ and hearing (which enable the ordering effects
derived from hearing divine harmonies); and rhythm (which
inspires in us the orderly movements of dance). And, as we
have already been told in the earlier discussion of sight, all
these faculties achieve their salutary effects by ‘imitating the
entirely unwandering revolutions of god’ (μιμούμενοι).
Given that we have reason to see dance as well as music
and song in this account, we should pause to note its imag-
istic similarities to the Laws passages we have considered.
Thus, the characterisation of harmony and rhythm here as
‘allies’ or ‘helpers’ bestowed on us by the Muses (σύμμαχος,
ἐπίκουρος) recalls the ‘helpers’ of the golden cord of logismos
(ὑπηρετῶν) of the puppet image of Laws Book 1, as well as the
notion of the Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus as ‘fellow dancers’
(συγχορευτάς) given to us in Laws Book 2. I had suggested
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that we might understand these ‘helpers’ to be a lifetime of

training in choreia, which forms and inclines each individual
to the right pleasures, pains, and desires long before logos is
properly installed as the soul’s leader and guide. Here we can
see harmony and rhythm doing that same helping work, while
we can also detect the cosmic underpinnings of the endless
circling motion the lawgiver of the Laws enjoins on his popu-
lace. For this circle of dance helps order and restore the circular
orbits within the soul of each citizen, even while it links them
all together in a civic chorus that imitates the choral dance of
the fixed stars.42
I have thus picked out the points in the Timaeus’ account
where dance may be seen to contribute to the restoration of
orderly circular motions within the human soul. But what of
puppets? Is there any hint in the Timaeus of the Laws’ divine
puppetry, which I have argued is intimately associated for
Plato with choreia? We may find a dim echo of it in the remark-
able image Timaeus introduces close to the end of the dialogue,
when he characterizes the human being as a ‘celestial plant’:
Now we ought to think of the most sovereign part of our soul as
god’s gift to us, given to be our guiding spirit. This, of course,
is the type of soul that, we maintain, resides in the top part of
our bodies. It raises us up away from the earth and toward what
is akin to us in heaven, as though we are plants grown not from
the earth but from heaven. In saying this, we speak absolutely
correctly. For it is from heaven, the place from which our souls
were originally born, that the divine part suspends our head,
i.e., our root, and so keeps our whole body erect (τὸ θεῖον τὴν
κεφαλὴν καὶ ῥίζαν ἡμῶν ἀνακρεμαννὺν ὀρθοῖ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα).
(Ti. 90a2–b1; trans. Zeyl (1997) 1289)
This simile comparing the ‘most sovereign’ or ‘divine’ part
of our soul to a celestial root that pulls us upward is certainly
arresting, and we may feel it is entirely weird enough on its
own. But I cannot resist the suggestion that this image may also
be fleetingly overlaid with that of a divine puppet drawn heav-
enward by a golden cord, evoked by τὸ θεῖον . . . ἀνακρεμαννὺν
ὀρθοῖ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα. And if this is so, it may help us visualise or
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comprehend how precisely the mimesis of ‘what is akin to us in

heaven’ (τὴν ἐν οὐρανῷ συγγένειαν) is meant to work. Perhaps
we should imagine each of us as a puppet suspended by our
higher soul, linked to its ‘companion star’ (τοῦ συννόμου . . .
ἄστρου, Ti. 42b4). In that case, it is perhaps relevant that
the relation of the puppet to the puppet master is necessarily
a mimetic one: to move the puppet, the puppet master must
make the same motions himself, only more subtly. This offers
us a concrete image to think the kinship or attraction of like to
like. Thus, just as the chorus of fixed stars circles endlessly in
the heavens, human beings – each of us a puppet suspended
from his ‘companion star’ – circle below in the city’s dances,
which simultaneously rectify our internal revolutions of nous
even as they unite all the citizens in ordered harmony.43
II
Let me turn at this point from Plato to the imaginary of tradi-
tional Greek choreia. At first glance, the two seem very differ-
ent. My story about Plato has focussed mainly on dance as a
form of individual formation and civic habituation; the pup-
pet image works here to link together the individual (interior)
chorus, the civic chorus, and the cosmic dance. Traditional
poetic representations of choreia, by contrast, highlight trans-
figuration and the simultaneous assimilation of the choreuts
to divinity and craft. Yet Plato draws on these much older and
more broadly diffused symbolic resources to found his civic
and social account of choreia. Thus I have claimed that many
of the associations that progressively accrete around the pup-
pet image in the course of the Laws rely on and play out this
much broader cultural nexus of ideas about the powers, plea-
sures, and aesthetics of choral dance. Here again the key term
is thauma, as a chorus perfectly coordinated in song and move-
ment evokes wonder in response to the several kinds of trans-
figuration thereby achieved. For the choreuts of a perfectly
performing chorus are assimilated simultaneously to the divine
and to precious works of art or of uncanny crafting. And it is
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Imagining Chorality
this intimate linkage of artifice and divinity, which is so strik-

ing a feature of Plato’s ‘divine puppet’, that I would like to
ground in the traditions of Greek choreia.
For much of this discussion of chorality, I focus mainly on
three emblematic representations of choral activity in early hex-
ameter: the Delian festival of the Ionians and its Olympian pro-
totype in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, and the scene of young
men and women dancing together on the shield of Achilles in
Iliad 18. I will return to these passages several times but also
draw in other texts from early hexameter and melic poetry for
parallels on key points. And here I will present the argument
in two stages, somewhat artificially disentangling the strands
of divinity and craft for the purposes of exposition.
Choreia is a machine for the production of pure presence,
which, through mimesis links together and merges the gods,
the dancers, and the human spectators. This is what makes it a
thauma. The engine or motor of this mimetic chain is eros.44
Let me first unpack the elements of this claim briefly, focus-
sing mainly on the scene of the Ionian festival and the chorus
of Delian maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo:
But you, Phoebus, most of all delight your heart in Delos, where
the Ionians with their dragging chitons are gathered together
with their children and their reverend wives. And they, com-
memorating [you], delight you with boxing and dancing and
song whenever they set up their assembly. And someone might
think that they are immortal and ageless forever, whoever
would meet them when the Ionians were gathered together.
For he would see the grace of all and he would delight his
heart looking upon the men and the lovely girdled women and
the swift ships and their many possessions. And in addition,
there is this great wonder (τόδε μέγα θαῦμα), whose fame will
never perish, the Delian maidens, servants of the Far-darter.
And they, when they have hymned Apollo first of all, and then
Leto and arrow-shedding Artemis, they sing a hymn, remem-
bering ancient men and women, and they charm the races
of men. And they know how to represent the voices and the
rhythmical motion[s] of all men; and each one might think that
he himself is giving voice, so beautifully is their [choral] song
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fitted together. But come, [be] propitious, Apollo together with

Artemis, and you [maidens], all hail! (Homeric Hymn to Apollo
146–66)
By ‘machine for the production of pure presence’, I mean

first that the gods are imagined to be present at the festival,
conjured up by the choral song and dance, which is itself the
imitation or replication of the gods’ own perennial choral activ-
ity on Olympus.45 Apollo’s presence at the festival is registered
here by the opening references to his ‘pleasure’ (ἐπιτέρπεαι
ἦτορ at 146; τέρπουσιν at 150) and by the poet’s explicit invo-
cation of him together with Artemis in the midst of commemo-
rating the Delian maidens at line 165. And, as several scholars
have noted, the scene of festival on Delos is balanced in the
hymn by its prototype, the lengthy description of the gods’
own choral activity on Olympus, led by Apollo (186–206). But
this mimetic chain of presence also links and merges the festal
chorus and its human spectators, as the poet says explicitly
with reference to the Delian maidens:46
πάντων δ᾿ ἀνθρώπων φωνὰς καὶ κρεμβαλιαστὺν

μιμεῖσθ᾿ ἴσασιν· φαίη δέ κεν αὐτὸς ἕκαστος
φθέγγεσθ᾿· οὕτω σφιν καλὴ συνάρηρεν ἀοιδή.
And they know how to represent the voices and the rhythmi-
cal motion[s] of all men; and each one might think that he him-
self is giving voice, so beautifully is their [choral] song fitted
together. (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 162–4)
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi observes that ‘it is the beauty . . .

deriving from the skilfully joined together choral song . . .
that makes one feel one is speaking his or her own voice in
or through the Delian ensemble’s performance. In other words,
the concept connecting the last statement introduced with
“houto” to the previous one combines transgression and the
sublime: perfection and pre-eminence in performance . . . gen-
erate a powerful magnetic field between performers and audi-
ence. The power of this magnetic attraction is so strong that
the audience almost identify themselves with the performers,
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ultimately feeling that they themselves are speaking’.47 It is

this intersubjective fusion of choreuts and audience that justi-
fies the poet’s characterisation of the Delian maidens as a μέγα
θαῦμα right at the centre of the festival description (156).
Yet, in fact, the fusion of chorus and audience and the assim-
ilation of both to divinity have already surreptitiously begun,
even before the poet spotlights the chorus of Delian maidens,
through a certain strange slippage at the beginning of the festi-
val description. We are told that Apollo ‘delights his heart most
where the Ionians gather’ – the Ionians ‘who, commemorating
[you], delight you with boxing and dancing and song when-
ever they set up their assembly’ (146–50). Then, with the men-
tion of ‘dancing and song’ (ὀρχηθμῷ καὶ ἀοιδῇ) still hovering
in the air, the poet asserts that a man encountering the Ionians
all together ‘would think them immortal and forever ageless’
(ἀθανάτους καὶ ἀγήρως . . . αἰεί). This is the only instance in
all of early hexameter where this formula is applied to human
beings; normally it is reserved for the characterisation of immor-
tal creatures or for the description of precious objects of divine
crafting. Here, this powerful evocation of divinity feels like the
aura or after-image produced by the fleeting reference to choral
dance and song, and the connection of the two is confirmed by
the following half line, ‘for he would see the grace (χάριν) of
all’ (153).48 For, as we have already noted, charis is tradition-
ally an attribute of a chorus in motion. Admittedly, this vague
impression of all the festival participants dancing together and
thereby irradiated with a divine grace and beauty is quickly
dispelled by the following lines, which expand the view out-
ward to the full festival array of men and women, swift ships,
and many possessions (154–5). Yet there is a moment of fusion
or uncertainty – is our gaze directed at a dancing chorus, the
spectators, or both together? – that in the movement of these
lines itself replicates or enacts the potent identificatory effects
of choreia. The dancers as they sing and dance in unison are
transfigured, temporarily elevated to the divine, and the spec-
tators in their perfect identification with them are drawn along
into that halo of divinity.49
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I have also said that the motor of this mimetic chain is eros. By
that I mean that the expanding circles of pleasure and the per-
fect intersubjective identification provoked by choral activity
are fuelled by erotic desire, awakened by the uncanny, height-
ened beauty and grace of the dancers in motion. For this effect
on the human spectators, consider just the last few lines of the
description of the chorus that rounds out the teeming world
of the shield of Achilles as it takes shape under Hephaestus’
hands in Iliad 18: πολλὸς δ᾿ ἱμερόεντα χορὸν περιίσταθ᾿
ὅμιλος / τερπόμενοι· (‘And a great throng stood around the
desirable chorus rejoicing’, 603–4). Here we need to take seri-
ously the epithet of χορόν, ἱμερόεντα – not just ‘lovely’ but
‘erotically desirable’, for it is this quality that produces plea-
sure in the human spectators (τερπόμενοι) and draws them like
a magnet to form a larger circle around the circle of the danc-
ers. That dance has this same effect on the gods who witness it
is suggested by another Iliad passage, the genealogy of one of
Achilles’ troop commanders in Book 16:50
Of the second band, warlike Eudorus was the commander,

a maiden’s child, whom Polymele, beautiful in the dance,
bore, the daughter of Phylas. Her the mighty slayer of Argos
desired, when he caught sight of her among the girls singing
and dancing in the chorus of sounding, gold-spindled Artemis.
(Hom. Il. 16.179–83)
The synapse between choral activity and immediate, overpow-

ering erotic desire could not be more clearly articulated in this
passage – summarised in Polymele’s telling epithet χορῷ καλή
(‘beautiful in the dance’).
Indeed, one could proliferate passages that demonstrate
the potent erotic impact of choreia and its enduring mimetic
grip – which spreads outward from the chorus to the audience
like ripples from a stone thrown in a pond.51 But, instead, I
would like to turn back to the Laws to consider how Plato’s
puppet image very economically implies this same nexus of
associations. As I suggested at the end of the last section, we
can see this clearly once we realise that properly to manipulate
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Imagining Chorality
a puppet on strings, the puppet master has to mime the same

movements he wants to cause in the puppet with the corre-
sponding sides of his body – only his motions are more subtle.
That is to say, the tendons or cords that make the puppet move
and dance are literally mimetic chains.
Using a slightly different image, Plato articulates this same
linkage or fusion of spheres most fully in his Ion. Here, he
offers us the image of a magnetic stone with a chain of iron
rings suspended from it to account for the vivid mimetic grip
of Homeric and melic poetry in performance. According to this
image, the magnetic stone – the god or Muse – has the power to
draw iron rings to itself, but also to infuse the individual rings
with the same magnetic force, so that they in turn draw other
rings, ultimately producing long chains of rings suspended
from a single magnet (Ion 533d–536d).52 This, according to
Socrates, is exactly how the god or Muse works through the
poet (the first ring), on the rhapsode or choreuts (the second
ring), and thence ultimately on the audience (the final ring),
so that all the participants are drawn into vividly experienc-
ing the events narrated as if they were actually present. It is
noteworthy that Socrates’ long account of this process is per-
meated with references to melic poetry and chorality. In con-
text, these references seem entirely gratuitous – he is, after all,
talking to Ion, the rhapsode who performs Homer solo before
a large festival audience. And yet, especially toward the end of
Socrates’ great speech, the language of melic song and choral
dance invade his account of Homer:
And one of the poets is suspended from one Muse, and another
from another – and we call it ‘possessed’ (κατέχεται), which it
very nearly is, for he is ‘held’ or ‘gripped’ (ἔχεται). And from
these first rings, the poets, different men are suspended and
divinely inspired by different ones – some from Orpheus, oth-
ers from Musaeus, but the majority are possessed and gripped
from Homer. Of these, o Ion, you are one and you are pos-
sessed from Homer, and whenever someone sings [something]
of another poet, you nod off and you’re at a loss what to say,
but whenever someone utters a strain/tune (μέλος) from this
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poet, straightway you wake up and your soul dances (ὀρχεῖταί

σου ἡ ψυχή) and you have plenty to say. (Ion 536b1–c1)
Notice first the somewhat incongruous use of μέλος to char-

acterise Homeric ἔπη (which were presumably recited, not
sung) and then the climactic description of Ion’s soul respond-
ing to the performance of Homer by ‘dancing’. The image
of Ion’s soul dancing is reinforced in turn by the extended
comparison that follows immediately, of Corybants drawn
into ecstatic dance by a particular strain or tune (μέλος, Ion
536c1–7). All this choral language signals the proper sphere
and original source from which Plato has derived the image of
magnets and chains suspended from them: the potent mimetic
attraction of melic poetry chorally performed.
And with ‘attraction’, I get back to the idea of eros as the
motor for this powerful conjuring of presence through cho-
ral performance. This traditional notion is also exploited or
adapted by Plato in the Laws for his modelling of civic edu-
cation. Thus, recall how the language of eros shows up for the
proper attachment of pleasure and pain to their correct adult
objects and activities at 643b, and how a ‘liberal education’ is
said to make one a ‘desirer and lover of being a perfect citizen’
at 643e. While Plato introduces this notion of eros ‘drawing’
us to virtue very generally as a characteristic of all the forms
of play ( paidia) and of the education ( paideia) he develops
from them, we are now in a position to recognise that dance is
the Paradebeispiel (as it were) of this powerful work of erotic
suturing of one dancer to another, of dancers to audience, and
of all to their proper civic formation and habituation. In these
terms, the circuits of this erotic attachment to its proper objects
are forged through a lifetime of choral performance by a pro-
cess that even now we call in Freudian terms ‘cathexis’ – the
erotic ‘binding’ or ‘investment’ of the psyche in certain objects
(cf. κατέχεται, κατέχονται, and κατέχῃ in the passage from
Plato’s Ion just quoted). At the same time, it must be acknowl-
edged that the vector or directionality of eros seems signifi-
cantly different in the Platonic passages from the traditional
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Imagining Chorality
poetic choral representations I am claiming as (one of ) Plato’s

models. For in the traditional representations, the chorus itself
is the erotic magnet – the irresistible focus of all eyes, plea-
sures, and desires (human and divine) in a heady moment of
fusion or transfiguration. In Plato’s transformation of this tra-
ditional model in the Laws, the eros (desire) is that of the danc-
ers themselves, for there seems to be no audience per se.53 This
choral desire is implanted by proper habituation and consis-
tently draws the choreuts upward – to logos, to the law of the
city, to nous, and ultimately to the divine that informs all of
those. I will return to this significant divergence at the very
end of my discussion.
My second point starts from the transfiguring or transforma-
tive – even magical – qualities of dance; its power to break down
boundaries. I have already noted one sort of transfiguration:
chorus members and audience alike are, for the period of the
performance, assimilated to the divine. And this is one kind of
doubleness signified by thauma. But I want to consider a sec-
ond kind of transformation that certain texts of archaic Greek
poetry seem to suggest: in the dance, the dancers of a per-
fectly coordinated chorus are assimilated also to wrought or
fashioned precious art. Indeed, they are on occasion imagined
as moving statues (daidala or agalmata), the products of divine
or uncanny crafting.
Here, I start from two hexameter passages that share a strange
expression and thereby emphasise the flashing, shining, scin-
tillating qualities of dancers in motion. First, the description
of Apollo playing the cithara and dancing in the midst of the
divine chorus on Olympus:
But Phoebus Apollo plays the lyre in their midst, stepping
high and beautifully and a gleam (αἴγλη) shines about him
and the glintings of his feet (μαρμαρυγαί . . . ποδῶν) and of
his finely woven chiton [shine about him]. (Homeric Hymn to
Apollo 201–3)
The god in dance is radiant, giving off light or scintillat-
ing sparks (αἴγλη, μαρμαρυγαί). But a chorus of human
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dancers, too, at least according to the Odyssey, can produce the

same astonishing effect – thus we find in the description of a
Phaeacian chorus of young men dancing in Odyssey 8:
πέπληγον δὲ χορὸν θεῖον ποσίν. αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς

μαρμαρυγὰς θηεῖτο ποδῶν, θαύμαζε δὲ θυμῷ.
And they were beating out the divine dance with their feet. But
Odysseus was observing the glintings of their feet with won-
der, and he was marvelling in his heart. (Hom. Od. 8.264–5)
These are the only two occurrences of the noun μαρμαρυγή

in all of early hexameter, and they are deeply weird.
Commentators and translators have not appreciated how
bizarre the phrase μαρμαρυγαὶ/ -ὰς ποδῶν actually is, blunt-
ing its force by assimilating it to the English expression ‘twin-
kle toes’.54 But μαρμαρυγή, related to the verb μαρμαίρω,
properly denotes the ‘glint’ or ‘gleam’ of metal or highly pol-
ished crystalline stone.55 So here the choreuts seem to be trans-
formed in dance into daidala or agalmata fashioned of precious
metal or worked stone. And it is striking that this passage in
Odyssey 8 is also the only place in all of early hexameter where
θεῖος serves as an epithet for χορός. Twelve times this adjective
characterises ‘singers’ in the Odyssey, and in those contexts
we routinely translate it as ‘divinely inspired’. So here mem-
bers of the Phaeacian chorus, at the moment that their feet in
motion shimmer and glint like metal, are beating out a ‘divine’
or ‘divinely inspired’ dance.56 And of course, Odysseus’ reac-
tion to this remarkable fusion of elements – human and divine,
natural and artificial – is wonder, a point emphasised by the
two verbs θηεῖτο and θαύμαζε (265).
Even without the astonishing μαρμαρυγαί, other passages
could be cited to support the glinting, shimmering effect of
dancers in motion. Thus, we might look again at the descrip-
tion of the mixed chorus that rounds out Achilles’ shield –
specifically Iliad 18.593–8:
There the young men and maidens who bring their parents
many oxen were dancing, holding hands on each others’
wrists. And of these, the girls had thin linen garments, while
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Imagining Chorality
the young men were clothed in chitons fine spun and gleaming
with oil; and the girls had beautiful diadems, while the young
men had golden daggers (hanging) from silver belts.
Here the chitons of the male dancers shimmer or twinkle with

oil, while their golden daggers and silver belts flash in the
movement of bodies that are themselves (of course) fashioned
of gold and silver.
It might be argued that these passages do not, in fact, fig-
ure dancers as precious wrought objects; instead, they signify
simply a scintillating effect of light and shadow produced by
choral motion – an effect differently achieved by polished
metal or gleaming marble images. But there is another detail
that in a different way suggests dancers transformed into mov-
ing daidala or agalmata – and that is the language of choral
song or dance as a ‘fitting together’ of diverse elements. We
see this conception already in the last line of the description of
the chorus of Delian maidens in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo
(164, quoted earlier): ‘So beautifully is their [choral] song fitted
together’ (καλὴ συνάρηρεν ἀοιδή). Pindar is particularly fond
of this notion of integrated choral performance as the crafting
or joining together of disparate parts, and, in his handling this
‘fitting together’ already transmutes the perfectly synchro-
nised chorus into precious art. In one complex example from
Nemean 3, the poem begins with an invocation to the Muse to
‘come to the Dorian island of Aegina’,
O mistress Muse, our mother, I pray you, come to the hospitable

Dorian island of Aegina in the holy Nemean month; for young
men, craftsmen of honey-voiced revels (μελιγαρύων τέκτονες
κώμων), wait at the Asopian water [presumably a spring on
Aegina],57 seeking after your voice. (Pind. Nem. 3.1–5)
Then, a few lines later, the ego addresses an imperative to the

Muse:
Bestow an abundance of [song] from my metis and begin for the

lord of heaven, rich in clouds, the distinguished hymn, daugh-
ter [of Zeus]. And I will make it common to the soft erotically
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charged voices of those and to the lyre. And it [the hymn] will
have graceful toil as an ornament of the place (χώρας ἄγαλμα)
where the Myrmidons lived before, whose agora of ancient
fame Aristocleidas did not taint with reproaches in accordance
with your allotment. (Pind. Nem. 3.9–17)
Pindar here makes a name pun between the Muse Cleio

and the victor Aristocleidas and, on that basis, attributes the
victor’s success to the Muse’s special favour. Along the way,
the poet emphasises the disparate elements that constitute
choral performance when he says that he will share out the
ὕμνος, gift of the Muse from the treasure-house of his own
metis, to the erotically charged voices of young men (κείνων . . .
ὀάροις) and to the lyre.58 More remarkable still are the next
lines, where we are told that the hymn ‘will have graceful toil
as an ἄγαλμα of the place’. The exquisite oxymoron ‘graceful
toil’ (χαρίεντα . . . πόνον) I take to be the dance itself, which
in the movement of this line transforms the young Aeginetan
choreuts from ‘craftsmen of komoi’ to their own product –
moving statues as an agalma of the Aeginetan agora. Here,
where we might expect to find a statue (agalma) of the athletic
victor himself set up by his grateful city, we are given instead
a whole chorus of moving, breathing, singing statues.59
Indeed, this idea of the fitting together or perfect integra-
tion of different elements in choral performance as assimilating
the moving chorus to an object of divine or uncanny crafting
is already encoded in the archetypal chorus represented on the
shield of Achilles (a passage I have already considered a couple
of times). Here, notice first the simile the poet offers us for this
chorus in circular motion:60
And they were at times running with skilled feet, very

smoothly, as when a potter, squatting, tests the wheel fitted in
his hands (ἄρμενον ἐν παλάμῃσιν), [to see] if it runs. (Hom. Il.
18.599–602)
Thus, the skilled chorus, moving in perfect harmony as a single

unified organism, is assimilated to the potter’s wheel – itself an
object of skilled crafting (since it has to be perfectly balanced
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Imagining Chorality
and symmetrical to run smoothly) and the means to craft other

symmetrical and harmonious artefacts, when it is properly ‘fit-
ted’ to the craftsman’s hand.
In addition to this simile, it is tempting given all we have
seen to consider afresh the lines that introduce this scene on
the shield:
And on it, the very glorious bent-limbed one was elaborating

(ποίκιλλε) a χορός, like the one Daedalus once fashioned for
beautiful-haired Ariadne in broad Cnossus. There (ἔνθα μέν)
the young men and maidens who bring their parents many
oxen were dancing. (Hom. Il. 18.590–4)
These lines were something of a scandal in antiquity, causing

much consternation (as we can see from the Homer scholia)
because the poet here dares to compare the divine crafting of
Hephaestus to that of the merely mortal Daedalus.61 A second
problem that goes back to antiquity and still vexes scholars
commenting on this passage is the question of how we are
to understand χορός (which I have deliberately left untrans-
lated). The most popular solution is to translate it as ‘dancing
place’, imagining a beautifully elaborated circular floor fash-
ioned by the craftsman Daedalus.62 Another alternative, sup-
ported by a reference in Pausanias, is that Homer’s description
refers to a dance hall, adorned with a marble relief of danc-
ers carved by Daedalus.63 In a sense, as Françoise Frontisi-
Ducroux has argued, this ambiguity is impossible to resolve
and ultimately of secondary importance. We should instead
simply acknowledge how overdetermined are Daedalus’ asso-
ciations with dance in general and this χορός on the shield of
Achilles in particular.64 Thus, in addition to being the architect
of the Labyrinth, Daedalus, we are told by certain late sources,
was the one who taught Theseus and the Athenian youths and
maidens who survived the Labyrinth the Crane Dance on Crete
or on Delos.65 For Frontisi-Ducroux, all these associations help
explain Daedalus’ mention here within the last human scene
on the shield – in fact, this is the only mention of the crafts-
man Daedalus in all of Homer – as a figure for the poet in an
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ecphrastic scene that is powerfully metapoetic.66 And, while I

concur with Frontisi-Ducroux’s argument, I would add that this
is also importantly about the overlap between choral dance and
the products of uncanny artisanal crafting. Given that, I would
venture to propose one more alternative understanding of χορός
at Iliad 18.590. Perhaps fleetingly, we might even understand
this as a ‘chorus’ of animated statues that moved and danced
in unison, wrought of precious metal just like the dancers on
Hephaestus’ shield.67 For the fashioning of moving statues was
famously Daedalus’ particular art, so that he appears here as
an appropriate comparandum for Hephaestus, despite his mor-
tal status. Admittedly, at line 593 with its emphatic marker of
place (ἔνθα μέν), this fleeting possibility or fantasy dissolves, as
the represented dancers instead emerge as ‘real’ human beings,
only to be assimilated once again to objects of craft with the
diadems, golden daggers, and silver belts of lines 597–8, and
the simile of the potter’s wheel in lines 600–1.
In relation to all these shifting images of crafting play-
ing through Homer’s description of this mixed chorus on
the shield, it should be emphasised that this is not just one
or any chorus, but a kind of symbolic archetype of all human
choruses.68 For we must read every element on Hephaestus’
magnificent production as paradigmatic for the whole human
world – a city at peace, a city at war, the agricultural seasons –
and this is no less true of its crowning scene of a perfectly
ordered and harmonious chorus. Indeed, it is surely significant
that the chorus is the very last element described within the
great circuit of Ocean that forms the outermost edge of the cos-
mos of the shield. This may be a figuration, in our oldest Greek
poetic text, of the same cosmic potency and significance of cir-
cular dance that Plato will figure four centuries later through
the puppet image of the Laws and the astral choruses of the
Timaeus and Phaedrus.69
Thus it is my claim that these passages in archaic Greek
poetry figure dancers in motion as precious wrought objects –
daidala or agalmata. And in every case, the represented cho-
ruses also conform to Richard Neer’s characterisation, with
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Imagining Chorality
which I started, of ‘wonder’ as the goal or desired response

to archaic and classical Greek statuary: ‘The quintessential
wonder is a spectacle of brilliant radiance, flashing speed, and
radical “otherness”. Uniting these qualities is a basic effect
of twofoldness or doubleness in viewing: the statue should
seem simultaneously alien and familiar, far and close, inert and
alive’. Like statuary, the chorus is also significantly double or
twofold, as, for the brief period of the dance, the dancers seem
both human and divine, both living, breathing, and mechani-
cal – perfectly synchronised and put together of articulated
parts that all work in unison.
This pattern of wondrous twofoldness assimilates Plato’s
dancing puppets to an older cultural imaginary of choruses as
moving statues. But again, we must acknowledge significant
differences between these two phantasmatic systems. There
is first the refashioning of Homer’s and Pindar’s choruses of
splendid moving, breathing agalmata into the lowly puppets
of the Laws. This, we may say, is partly motivated (as England
contended) by a demotion or downgrading of human beings as
mere playthings, not worthy of serious concern. But I think it
would be a mistake to inflect Plato’s image so negatively, for all
the reasons I have presented. I would suggest instead another
purpose for the transmutation from precious statues to ‘divine
puppets’: for the latter image crucially includes the cords –
especially the golden cord of logismos that links each ‘human
prodigy’ (choreut and citizen) to the perfect divine, in steady
and continuous circular motion.
This distinction, in turn, gets us back to the different vector
or directionality of eros I acknowledged briefly earlier. Within
the traditional scheme, the choreuts themselves in dance are the
focus of all attention and all desires on the part of an audience
both human and divine – an eros directed to the moving, pul-
sating choral centre for the period of the dance performance.
Plato’s interest instead is in a kind of choral auto-eroticism that
permanently sutures each dancer’s perceptions of pleasure and
pain to their proper objects through a lifetime of choral habitu-
ation. In these terms, the circuit of eros runs vertically, along
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the cord that links the divine puppet to the cosmic dance.
We could say that in Platonic theology, the figuration of the
human as mechanical (a puppet) is in no way a demeaning or
negative image, because for Plato the entire cosmos is itself a
magnificent and perfectly ordered machine. Thus, the human
as puppet is sutured into that larger machine via mimetic cords
of reason and sympathy.
Finally, these formulations allow us to distinguish and artic-
ulate one more difference – that of the relevant models of tem-
porality. The traditional imaginary of chorality works within
an uneven timescape – moments of transfiguration via choral
performance – for it is precisely dance that sets off and haloes
ritual time from the quotidian and unmarked time of everyday
life. Thus, the transformative or transfiguring effects of dance
in the traditional system are evanescent, dependent as they are
on a particular synapse of pleasure and quasi-erotic identifi-
cation between dancers and audience for the duration of the
performance. Plato, by contrast, is interested in the long-term,
permanent ordering effects that a lifetime of choral habituation
installs within the soul of each dancer and among the dancers
as a citizen group. If at one level this is about Platonic theology,
at another it is about sociology: Plato is interested in theorising
the sociological effects of choral culture that traditionally lay
misrecognised or unarticulated (even as they were already at
work) within the Greek ritual system.
Not e s
1 Earlier scholarly literature mainly discussed the puppet image in
isolation, without connecting it to the broader cultural or philo-
sophical themes of the Laws: thus Rankin (1962); Sprague (1984).
In contrast, R. G. Bury (1937); Belfiore (1986) 425; Laks (1990,
2000, 2005); Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.231–6; Bobonich (2002)
260–7; Jouët-Pastré (2006) 38–54; Sassi (2008); and Frede (2010)
integrate the puppet image into broader philosophical read-
ings, but do not recognise or pursue continuities between this
image and older Greek modellings of choreia. The philosophical
readings I have found most helpful and congenial are those of
Laks (1990a, 2000, 2005). For the technology of ancient puppets,
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Imagining Chorality
marionettes, and automata, see Pugliara (2003) with abundant

earlier bibliography. Specifically, Pugliara (2003) 3–11, 62–75,
considers analogies drawn from puppets – and occasionally other
mechanai – in ancient philosophical texts (e.g., significant occur-
rences at Pl. Rep. 514b, Laws 644b; Arist. Metaph. 983a, Gen.
an. 734b, 741b, De motu an. 701b, [Mund.] 398b; Gal. De usu 48,
262). The exact context and language of Plato’s use of the image
of puppets in Book 7 of the Republic (514b, immediately after
introducing the analogy of the cave) show clearly that he is there
envisioning puppets worked by sticks from below (in contrast to
the puppets of the Laws, which are worked by strings or wires
from above).
2 The bulk of this argument (with the exception of the section
on the Timaeus) was conceived and written in early 2007. Only
several years later did I discover the wonderful essay by Tim
Power (2011), which (from a very different starting point) mar-
shals many of the same passages from archaic Greek poetry and
Plato’s Laws to argue for a Greek cultural imaginary of choruses
as magical or daidalic moving statues. I am delighted to find that
another scholar has independently detected the same pattern in
our sources, and I refer the reader to Power’s scintillating discus-
sion for complementary analysis and a fuller dossier of materials
than I could include here.
3 In general, I follow Burnet’s (1907) OCT text of the Laws, except
where otherwise noted. Translations from Greek are my own, if
not otherwise indicated.
4 Following England’s note ad loc. (1921) I.255, rather than Pangle’s
translation.
5 England (1921) I.256; cf. Rankin (1962). Against such pessimis-
tic readings, see Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.234–5; Jouët-Pastré
(2006) 48–54. The reading I offer here is close to that of R. G.
Bury (1937), although disappointingly, Bury winds up dismiss-
ing the ‘marionette’ image with the comment that ‘we must not
press the comparison of men to marionettes’ (p. 319).
6 Cf. Theophr. Char. 6.4 and 27.7; the former passage suggests the
social lowliness or degradation of puppet shows, the latter that
the young are their appropriate audience.
7 Thus Laks (2000) 277, 278, 285, 286, 290, appropriately trans-
lates thauma as ‘human prodigy’. Freud mentions the apparent
animation of wax-work figures, dolls, and automata as examples
of the Unheimlich (the uncanny); see Freud (1955) 226–7, 230–1,
233, 246.
8 Neer (2010) esp. 3–4, 57–103. In fact, it is not just statuary
that for the Greeks can provoke this effect of wonder based
on twofoldness, but all kinds of figured arts, such as other
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(nonanthropomorphic) precious objects and painted represen-

tations. Thus, although I focus mainly throughout this discus-
sion on puppets and statues, the argument applies (both for the
Greeks in general and for Plato in particular) to other art forms as
well. Painted representations especially seem for Plato to solicit
the effect of thauma through their apparent twofoldness as ‘inert
and alive’ (cf. Phdr. 275d; Ti. 19b–c) and in the Laws also to be
closely associated with choreia. Cf. Laws 656d–657b, where the
Athenian praises the legislated fixity of Egyptian dance moves,
as represented in both painted images and sculptural reliefs.
9 Neer (2010) 4; for doubleness and thauma, cf. Neer (1995) 123–5,
(2002) 47–9.
10 England (1921) I.255.
11 As Laks (1990a) 221 n. 54 nicely puts it, the elements of the pup-
pet image are ‘underdetermined’; he suggests that ‘the “auxilia-
ries” . . . may refer either to force (punishment) or to persuasion’.
Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.232 suggests two different ‘helpers’: (1)
the proper training of the souls of children to control pleasure
and pain (an interpretation close to my own), and (2) a ‘helper’
specific to the law would be the lawgiver himself. In contrast,
the philosophical argument of Bobonich (2002) that Plato has
in the Laws completely revised the psychology of the Republic
relies heavily on the puppet image of Laws Book 1 but does not
engage with most of the details of the image (including specifica-
tion of what the ‘helpers’ might be); cf. Sassi (2008) for critique
of Bobonich.
12 Laks (2000) 263–6 (‘postponement’); Laks (2005) 26–30
(‘report’).
13 For general discussions of choreia and choral education in the
Laws, see Moutsopoulos (1959) 97–156, 198–228; Morrow (1960)
302–18, 352–77; W. D. Anderson (1966) 64–110; Lonsdale (1993)
21–48; Kowalzig (2004) 39–49; Belfiore (2006) 207–11; Prauscello
(2011).
14 Note that this is the only occurrence of χαλάω in the Laws.
Admittedly, it is not the adult himself who is the subject of
χαλᾶται; in fact, according to strict grammar, χαλᾶται has no
subject at all. I follow England (1921) I.274–5 in deriving an
implied subject from the genitive absolute; thus it is the human
being’s proper education that ‘tends to slacken’ with time. See
Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.258–9 for an exhaustive catalogue of
possible interpretations of the grammar here, though in the end
he does not commit himself to any particular possibility. However
exactly we construe the grammar, I would contend that the con-
juring up of the puppet image by χαλᾶται is almost irresistible
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Imagining Chorality
here and that the further imagistic resonances of ἐπανορθῶνται

and συνείροντας link it closely to human beings.
15 I follow Burnet’s OCT text here and England’s commentary,
reading a comma after ἐπανορθῶνται and then τάς τε τροφὰς
γενομένας ἐν ταῖς ἑορταῖς μετὰ θεῶν (τε is in all the manuscripts).
This latter phrase I interpret (with England (1921) I.275) as a
second object of the verb ἔδοσαν linked by τε, the construction
interrupted by ἵν᾿ ἐπανορθῶνται as its own clause. But I diverge
from England (1921) I.275, R. G. Bury, and Pangle in taking
human beings as the implied subject of ἐπανορθῶνται (which I
understand as passive rather than middle). Saunders (1997) 1344
also translates with human beings as the subject but obscures
the image in the verb (‘men were to be made whole again’). My
understanding of the grammar and meaning of the sentence is
thus close to that of Kannicht (1996) 91 n. 58 (thanks to Lucia
Prauscello for this reference); for somewhat different interpreta-
tions of key features of this vexed passage, see Schöpsdau (1994–
2003) I.259–61.
16 This is R. G. Bury’s Loeb translation of this clause; Pangle omits
the crucial ἀλλήλοις and so fails to appreciate that ᾠδαῖς τε καὶ
ὀρχήσεσιν is instrumental dative.
17 Indeed, I am tempted to suggest that this is part of the reason
that this paragraph moves in reverse chronological order – that
the progressive development of the imagery of puppets drives
the sequence, overriding the strict logic of chronology.
18 For this retrospective interpretation of the ‘helpers’ in the puppet
image of Book 1, cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2003) II.548–9. Another
important passage that tends to confirm this interpretation of
Laws 644 and 653–4 by contrast is 732d–e (thanks to Fran Spaltro
for calling my attention to it). Here the Athenian uses an image to
characterise all mortal creatures’ subjection to ‘pleasures, pains,
and desires’: ‘It is necessary that every living creature is sim-
ply (as it were) hung up and suspended (οἷον ἐξηρτῆσθαί τε καὶ
ἐκκρεμάμενον εἶναι) from these in the most serious ways’ (732e).
Here the verbs ἐξηρτῆσθαι and ἐκκρεμάμενον εἶναι vividly con-
jure the picture of a puppet dangling helplessly from the cords
of its impulses. By the use of this image, the Athenian implies
that it is not just human beings who are puppets but all mortal
creatures, who are ‘hung up from’ – and jerked around by – their
pathe. The significant difference then is that only human beings
are divine puppets, endowed with soul and with the ‘golden cord
of logismos’. Or perhaps better: what sets human beings apart is
their ‘perception of rhythm and harmony’, which allows them
to order and coordinate the tugging of all their strings in dance.
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It is this that links them to the divine, and thereby makes them
thaumata – wondrous double creatures (cf. Laks (1990a) 227,
(2000) 277, (2005) 47).
19 Laks (2000) 268 (cf. (2005) 46–7).
20 As England (1921) II.273 notes, ‘in what way and to whom and
when’ of 803a is picked up and echoed by ‘to whom and when’ at
804b, thus signifying that the ‘digression’ is coming to a close.
21 For examples of this kind of breakoff in Pindar, in which the ego
claims to be overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of material,
cf. Ol. 2.95–100, 13.44–8, 112–15; Pyth. 2.81–4, 8.29–32, 9.76–9;
Nem. 4.33–8, 69–72, 7.48–53, 10.19–22, 45–6; Isth. 1.60–3,
5.46–8, 6.22–5, 55–6; and see Bundy (1986) 12–15. Perhaps even
more relevant to Plato’s rhetorical strategy here is Pindar’s use
of the theme of fate or vicissitude (often within a prayer to the
gods) to transition from one topic to another or to end a poem:
cf. Ol. 6.100–2, 7.94–5, 8.28–9, 84–6, 13.24–8; Pyth. 1.46–7,
5.117–21, 7.19–21, 8.71–2, 10.20–7, 63, 12.30–2; Nem. 1.29–33,
2.23, 6.53–7; Isth. 3.18–18b, 4.5–6, 7.39–44. Cf. also Richard
Martin’s observation that the Homeric formula θεῶν ἰότητι, with
the fatalism and lack of human control it registers, functions as
a device Homeric speakers use to change the topic (e.g., at Il.
19.9–12; Od. 7.208–15; see Martin (forthcoming)).
22 Thus already England (1921) II.274: ‘At all events it is no good
trying to explain his thoughts to the commonplace Megillus’.
We might note that it is only Megillus who constitutes the
opposition here as spoude vs. to phaulon (in his use of the verb
διαφαυλίζεις at 804b), whereas for the Athenian it is always
spoude vs. paidia.
23 To my knowledge, the best exegesis of this somewhat confusing
passage is still R. G. Bury (1937) 311–15. Cf. Schöpsdau (1994–
2003) II.547–51; Jouët-Pastré (2006) 12–13, 96–109.
24 Thus England (1921) II.273, following Ritter (1896) 205, explains
ἀλήθεια here by reference to the Athenian’s praise of truth at
730c: ἀλήθεια δὴ πάντων μὲν ἀγαθῶν θεοῖς ἡγεῖται, πάντων δ᾿
ἀνθρώποις.
25 Of course in Platonic terms, both nous and ‘the daimon or god’
are divine entities, but notice how, in the transposition of the
quotation to the city’s ‘nurslings’, nous is replaced by or closely
aligned with civic nomos at 804a.
26 England (1921) II.273. For paideia as ὀρθὴ τροφή, see Laws
643c–d: κεφάλαιον δὴ παιδείας λέγομεν τὴν ὀρθὴν τροφήν; cf.
Ti. 44b: ὀρθὴ τροφὴ παιδεύσεως (discussed in text).
27 Althusser (2001) 123.
28 I follow Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.256–7 in inserting <τῷ>
immediately before ὀρθῶς εἰθίσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν προσηκόντων ἐθῶν
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Imagining Chorality
at 653b. Although it makes no difference to the specific argu-

ment presented here, this minor supplement (presumably omit-
ted through haplography) improves the philosophical logic and
flow of the passage.
29 Cf. Rep. 3.401b–d and 9.590d–591d (thanks to Andrew Barker
for calling my attention to the former passage, and to G. R. F.
Ferrari for the latter passage).
30 It is beyond the scope of my argument here to track all the
steps by which, according to the Athenian, logos comes to be
installed as the ‘chorus leader’. This is obviously a crucial issue,
but it would take us far beyond the topic of puppets and cho-
ral habituation in the Laws. Still, cf. Laws 659d–660a, a pas-
sage that clearly refers back to 653a–c and suggests the intimate
connection between the guidance of logos in the individual soul
and that of the ‘old men’ (of the Nocturnal Council?) endorsing
nomos within the city. Cf. Laks (2000) 283–4, suggesting that the
Nocturnal Council comes to play the role of the ‘golden cord of
logismos’ for the city as a whole.
31 Admittedly, the Athenian’s full course of education in Book 7
(dance, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy; 814e–822c) points for-
ward to this discussion; nonetheless, the full exposition of the
divine nature of cosmic motions (or, better, of cosmic motions as
proof of the existence of divinity) is deferred to Book 10. Only at
this point, then, do we fully understand the deeper rationale of
the Athenian’s prescribed curriculum.
32 Thus Laks (2000) 277, (2005) 47. While I agree with Laks that
dance stands as a figure for all such mediations, I think such
an account underestimates the specific, concrete efficacious
functions of choreia within Plato’s cosmology, thus making his
account seem less culturally strange and more suited to our own
notions of rationality.
33 Thus J. Miller (1986) 23. For earlier or contemporary occurrences
of the image of the stars as a celestial chorus circling around
the pole, see Soph. Ant. 1146–52; Eur. El. 467–9, Ion 1077–80;
Critias DK II, 88 [81] B fr. 19; Epin. 982e and other fifth- and
fourth-century literary texts and images collected in J. Miller
(1986) 19–55; Csapo (2008); G. Ferrari (2008).
34 We might note that the distinction in the Timaeus between the
movements of the planets and the fixed stars, respectively, is
more or less that of a virtuoso professional chorus of dancers
versus a circular chorus constituted of amateurs, all the citizens
together; or alternatively, as J. Miller (1986) 25–8, 42–3, suggests,
we might imagine the more complex and elaborate motions of the
‘instruments of time’ in relation to the fixed stars as analogous to the
soloists or tumblers in a choral representation like Iliad 18.604–6.
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35 Very similar to this notion is Socrates’ account in the Phdr.

(245c–249a), that human souls who have cultivated perfect vir-
tue through love and philosophy eventually return to the ‘divine
chorus’ of their leader-god and the supracelestial viewing of the
Forms in the god’s train (especially given, as Rowe (1986) 178
notes, that the eleven Olympian gods of the Phaedrus are tradi-
tionally understood to be equivalent to the astral chorus). For
discussion of the Phaedrus myth, see Belfiore (2006).
36 A. E. Taylor (1928) 273. I agree with Taylor’s account of the
grammar: the genitive παιδεύσεως depends on the verb
συνεπιλαμβάνηται, rather than on ὀρθὴ τροφή. (Hence Taylor’s
translation: ‘If right nurture is seconded by education’.) That
is to say, in this context (as opposed to Laws 643c–d), ‘nurture’
and ‘education’ are conceived as two different elements in the
process.
37 Cf. Belfiore (2006) 204–11. Indeed, Belfiore (2006) 206 cites Lucian
(Salt. 15) to the effect that ‘all ancient initiations included danc-
ing’ (τελετὴν οὐδεμίαν ἀρχαίαν ἔστιν εὑρεῖν ἄνευ ὀρχήσεως).
38 Thus, e.g., A. E. Taylor (1928) 295–7; cf. Pelosi (2010) 65–113.
Taylor cites Laws 653d–654a without additional commentary to
gloss the last sentence on rhythmos, but otherwise focusses his
remarks exclusively on Pythagorean theories of music and har-
mony; likewise Pelosi, in his extended discussion of Ti. 47c–e,
focusses entirely on the effects of music on the soul, with no
consideration of dance.
39 When the Athenian offers a strict definition of choreia in both
its vocal and bodily aspects at Laws 672e–673a, he articulates
clearly that rhythmos is a quality of movement of both voice/
sound and body. Still, in most instances in the discussion, the
Athenian aligns rhythmos implicitly or explicitly more closely
with bodily motion and dance: thus at 653d–654a, 655a–b,
664e–665a, 669c, 670d, 673d.
40 Note that this shift in our passage corresponds precisely to the
point made by Peponi (Chapter 8 in this volume) for the Laws: at
the moment that the topic turns to choreia, the audience disap-
pears. It is no longer about their experience but instead about
the experience of the dancers themselves.
41 For the Charites, χάρις and its derivatives associated with song
and dance, cf. Hom. Od. 18.194; Hes. Theog. 64–5; Alcman fr. 27
PMG; Stesichorus fr. 212 PMG; Adespot. fr. 936 PMG; Pind. Ol.
14.8–10, 13–17, Pyth. 12.26–7, Nem. 3.12, Isth. 1.6–10, Pae. 6.3,
Pae. 12.7; Eur. HF 673–86, IT 1143–51, Phoen. 788; Xen. Symp.
7.5 and see the discussion of Lonsdale (1993) 58–60, 165, 199,
273–5.
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Imagining Chorality
42 Again, Socrates’ lengthy myth in the Phaedrus (245c–257a) pro-

vides a significant parallel for this whole nexus of ideas: there we
are told that each soul follows in the train of its leader-god, who
seems simultaneously to be a member of the astral chorus (see
note 35). Two aspects of the Phaedrus myth in particular are rel-
evant for the parallel: (1) The souls of lover and beloved achieve
their final winged ascent by assiduous mimesis or imitation of
their leader-god (252d–253c; for eros as the source or motor
for the chains of mimesis in traditional models of choreia, see
Part 2). (2) Throughout the myth, the divine host is referred to as
a ‘chorus’ (247a, 250b) and each god’s human-soul follower as a
χορευτής (252d). We should pause to note how odd and overde-
termined this choral imagery is here, given that all the divinities
and their human-soul followers are simultaneously (and neces-
sarily, for the purposes of the myth) represented as charioteers
driving chariots. That is to say, it almost seems that the image of
the astral chorus is primary, and asserts itself here even against
the surface logic and needs of Plato’s myth of the tripartite soul
as charioteer and two horses. For an excellent discussion of the
choral elements in the Phaedrus myth, see Belfiore (2006).
43 This is, of course, only an image (eikon), since, as the Timaeus
makes a point of telling us, the fixed stars imitate in their circular
form the universe as a whole, which itself has no hands and feet,
as it has no need of them (Ti. 40a; cf. 33d–34a). For arguments
that this parallelism of human and cosmic choruses is not just a
philosophical model but a more common and widespread Greek
idea, see J. Miller (1986) 3–55; Csapo (2008); G. Ferrari (2008).
44 My formulations ‘machine for the production of presence’ and
eros as the ‘engine’ of the process are inspired by Neer’s (2010)
46–57 discussion of ‘embodiment’ and ‘desire’; tellingly for my
second point, in both instances these formulations are applied by
Neer to archaic and classical Greek statuary.
45 The notion that the gods are present at a religious festival, con-
jured up by choral song and dance, is pervasive in archaic Greek
poetry; for passages that make this connection particularly clear,
see Alcaeus fr. 307 LP; Pind. Ol. 3.34–5, Pyth. 10.34–41, 11.1–10;
and Eur. Bacch. 114–19, and see the scholarly discussions of
Mullen (1982) 75–89; Burnett (1985) 6–14; Lonsdale (1993) 66,
(1995). Plato is surely drawing on this older concept when he
characterises the Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus as συνεορταστάς
and συγχορευτάς at Laws 653c–654a. For the related notion that
festival song and dance briefly and intermittently replicate the
gods’ own perennial choral activity on Olympus (as depicted
in the two parallel scenes of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo), see
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A. M. Miller (1986) 68–9; Clay (1989) 49, 53–4; Lonsdale (1993)

51–66, (1995) 25, 28–32, 38. Peponi (2004b) also notes the par-
allels between Delian and Olympian choral performances but
properly calls attention to the features that distinguish the two
as well.
46 I follow Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi’s interpretation of these lines;
see Peponi (2009).
47 Peponi (2009) 62; cf. pp. 67–8.
48 For the formula ‘immortal and ageless’ applied to the condition
of divine beings (the Olympian gods, Achilles’ immortal horses,
Circe), see Hom. Il. 8.539, 12.323, 17.444; Od. 5.136, 218, 7.257,
23.336; for the same formula used for precious objects of divine
crafting, see Il. 2.447 (Athena’s aegis) and Od. 7.91–4 (the gold
and silver dogs fashioned by Hephaestus to guard the palace of
Alcinous in Phaeacia). For the uniqueness of the formula ‘immor-
tal and ageless’ applied to human beings in this passage, see
Herington (1985) 6–7 and Lonsdale (1995) 30. For the charis of
choruses, see note 41.
49 Indeed, we might even suggest that the phrasing of line 156
(‘And in addition, there is this great thauma’) implies that the
whole festival scene in which the Ionians appear ‘immortal and
ageless’ is itself a first thauma; cf. A. M. Miller’s (1986) 59 rhetor-
ical reading of πρὸς δὲ at line 156 as ‘cap’ and ‘climax’. See also
Peponi (2004b, 2009) on the complete empathetic identification
between chorus and audience in this festival scene.
50 Cf. Lonsdale (1993) 264 on this passage.
51 Some examples: Hymn. Hom. Ven. 117–20; Alcman fr. 27 PMG;
Sappho fr. 16 LP (if we assume, with Burnett (1983) 280 n. 5, that
Sappho remembers Anactoria dancing); Xen. Symp. 9.5–7.
52 Greg Nagy points out to me the coincidence of the Ion’s
‘Magnesian stone’ (ἐν τῇ λίθῳ ἣν Εὐριπίδης μὲν Μαγνῆτιν
ὠνόμασεν, Ion 533d) and the name of the Laws’ Cretan city. Is
the magnet at the centre of Magnesia choreia?
53 Thanks to Håkan Tell for emphasising this point to me in discus-
sion after an oral presentation of the argument. My point here
about eros is very closely related to that of Peponi (Chapter 8
in this volume), that as soon as Plato shifts to talk of choreia,
the conventional aesthetic subject-object dyad disappears and
the focus is entirely on the ‘pleasure’ of the dancers themselves
rather than that of an audience.
54 Cf. Stanford (1971) I.338; also Cunliffe’s translation of μαρμαρυγή,
‘a twinkling or flickering’.
55 The verb μαρμαίρω occurs frequently in the Iliad for the glint-
ing of armour, weapons, or bronze (Il. 12.195; 13.22, 801; 16.279,
664; 18.131, 617; 23.27; also of Aphrodite’s eyes, giving her away
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Imagining Chorality
as divine even in mortal disguise – Il. 3.397); cf. Alcaeus fr.

357 LP; Bacchyl. fr. 20B SM, l.13. Cf. also the noun at Bacchyl.
3.17–18 for the scintillating gleam of golden tripods in the sun.
For the radiance of marble as ‘shining stone’, see Stewart (1990)
36 and Neer (2010) 73–7.
56 For the formula θεῖος ἀοιδός, cf. Od. 1.336; 4.17; 8.43, 47, 87, 539;
13.27; 16.252; 17.359; 23.133, 143; 24.439. For χορός here as the
dance rather than the dancing place, see Stanford (1971) I.338
(commenting on Od. 8.260), Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth
(1988) 363 (commenting on Od. 8.264); vs. Cunliffe (1977) 421,
s.v. χορός.
57 Thus already J. B. Bury (1890) 45; Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
(1922) 277 with n. 2; now I. L. Pfeijffer (1999) 247–8.
58 ὄαρος (usually in the plural ὀάροι) in poetry sometimes signifies
just intimacy (e.g., Hymm. Hom 23.3), but very often carries an
erotic tinge; thus Hymn. Hom. Ven. 249; Hes. Theog. 205; Callim.
Hymn 5.66. Cf. LSJ s.v. ὄαρος: ‘in later Poets mostly of lovers’.
Pindar uses the noun four times of speech or song in the epinicia
(Pyth. 1.98, 4.137; Nem. 3.11, 7.69), and I would contend that all
of these instances carry nuances of ‘erotically charged, seduc-
tive, persuasive’.
59 For a syntactic interpretation along the same lines as mine, see
J. B. Bury (1890) 47; Slater (1969) s.v. ἄγαλμα (which he translates
here as ‘glory, delight’ – not ‘statue’); differently I. L. Pfeijffer
(1999) 268–9. For the broader interpretation, my reading here is
close to that of Steiner (2001) 260, 273, although for Steiner it is
the poem that is transformed into a statue, not the moving chorus
that performs it (thus already J. B. Bury (1890) 47). In fact, this
is syntactically a little difficult, since ὕμνος is then both subject
and object of the sentence in lines 12–13. For the oxymoronic
χαρίεντα . . . πόνον as a way of describing ritual dance, cf. Eur.
Bacch. 64–7. For other contexts in which Pindar represents inte-
grated choral performance as the crafting or joining together of
disparate parts, cf. Pyth. 10.55–9; Nem. 7.77–84, 8.13–16.
60 That the gesture of χείρ ἐπὶ καρπῷ (as at Il. 18.594) signifies cir-
cular dance is argued by Lonsdale (1993) 66, 214–17 and (1995)
30 based on literary texts and visual representations.
61 Cf. the Homeric Scholia A, b, T ad Σ 591–2 (Erbse IV.564–5).
62 E.g., Cunliffe (1977) s.v. χορός (2) (p. 421); thus also Lattimore in
his translation (1951). We find this interpretation already in the
Homer Scholia A, b, T ad Σ 590 (Erbse IV.564).
63 Cf. Paus. 9.40.3 and Homer Scholia T ad Σ 590 (c).
64 Frontisi-Ducroux (1975) 136–7, (2002) 482.
65 For the Crane Dance, see Callim. Hymn 4.307–15; Plut. Thes. 21;
Poll. Onom. 4.101; for Daedalus as the one who taught Theseus and
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his troupe the dance, see Schol. Venet. ad Il. 18.590; Eustathius
ad Il. 18.590–606, 1166, lines 18–22 (= p. 267, lines 21–5 van der
Valk). According to the Homer scholia and Eustathius, this was
the first time men and women ever danced together, so that it is
precisely the Crane Dance that is being represented on the shield
of Achilles (cf. Homer Scholia b, T ad Σ 591–2, Erbse IV.565–6).
66 Frontisi-Ducroux (2002) esp. 482–3. As Frontisi-Ducroux (2002)
482 n. 67 observes, the legend of Daedalus is ‘without doubt
elaborated later, but this text [Iliad 18] indicates already certain
components of it’. I find this structuralist approach more con-
vincing than the developmental model proposed by S.P. Morris
(1992).
67 For this possibility, cf. Frontisi-Ducroux (1975) 135–7, cit-
ing Callistratus Stat. 3.5 (χορὸν ἤσκησε κινούμενον Δαίδαλος),
Lucian Salt. 13; Philostr. Imag. 10. Cf. also Paus. 7.4.5, [Daedalus]
‘made statues (ἀγάλματα) for Minos himself and the daughters
of Minos, just as Homer also made clear in the Iliad’.
68 Cf. Herington (1985) 6 on the paradigmatic quality of the Ionian
festival described in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. This same
paradigmatic quality a fortiori characterises the elements on the
shield of Achilles; cf. Redfield (1975) 186–9.
69 For a suggestive reading of the Homeric shield scene along these
lines, see J. Miller (1986) 24–8.
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��
C hap t e r S e ve n
B ro k e n R h y t h m s i n
Ma t e r i a l i s i ng So c i a l Ti me i n
t h e C h o ru s
Barbara Kowalzig
I rhythm, therefore I am.

M. Jousse, L'anthropologie du geste
Int ro d uc t ion
The exposition of the fundamental ethical questions in Plato’s
Laws, Books 1 to 3, seeks ‘to find out what would be the ideal
way of administering a state, and the best principles the indi-
vidual can observe in running his own life’.1 The stated aim
of Magnesia’s laws is therefore to regulate civic welfare and
private conduct – put differently, to integrate individual and
collective concerns. The point recurs frequently as we wade
through the long and heavy stream of argument.2 It stands in
Many thanks to Danielle Allen, Andrew Barker, Helene Foley,

Andrew Ford, Brooke Holmes, SeungJung Kim, Anastasia-Erasmia
Peponi, Philomen Probert, David Sider, Tim Rood, and the two anon-
ymous referees for their helpful comments on drafts of this chapter. I
am greatly indebted to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
and the Herodotus Fund for invaluable support while I was working
on this paper in 2007–8.
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Barbara Kowalzig
the service of the treatise’s much grander agenda, which tackles

in a fundamental way the question that underlies much or all
political philosophy to that date – that of how to account for
and, more importantly, how to prevent change, particularly
social change. Numerous recommendations in the Laws stress
the necessity of a stable order for the polis and suggest mea-
sures for its undisturbed continuity; references to Sparta and
Egypt, famously resilient to change, assist the treatise’s institu-
tional imaginaire in setting up a city resisting the test of time.3
The integration of individual and collective on the one hand
and political stability and prevention of social change on the
other represents two prominent themes in the dialogue. It is
much less clear, however, how they connect conceptually. I ten-
tatively suggest here that choreia (choral song-dance), and spe-
cifically an innovative conceptualisation of rhythmos (rhythm),
are employed to construe this link. Choreia as a whole is not
only a political instrument but also a conceptual necessity for
the Laws’ overall argument. ‘Rhythm’ in particular, broadly
conceived as bodily movement through time, is key not just
to Plato’s musical sociology, but more importantly to his philo-
sophical visions for a long-lasting city-state.
The Laws, with its burgeoning imagery of chorality,4 is
obsessed with ideas of movement, specifically with rhythmos:
a blunt count of occurrences of this word alone in the Platonic
oeuvre yields no less than two-thirds from this one dialogue.
Ever since 1951, Plato has been cited as the inventor of the mod-
ern notion of ‘rhythm’, the orderly sequence of regular tem-
poral intervals in bodily movement. The French linguist Emile
Benveniste came to this conclusion on the basis of a sweeping
study of the word and its meanings in early Greek thought.5 I
argue here that we can go much further than Benveniste and
uncover an ‘anthropology of rhythm’ in the Laws that is central
to the treatise’s wider projects, or at least one of them: that pro-
ject is to achieve a full integration of individual and collective as
a basis for stability in the city-state and, more intriguingly, as a
bastion against civic and social change. For, firstly, the dancing
rhythm creates bodily affinity between citizens and lies at the
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Broken Rhythms in Plato’s L aw s
juncture of individual and collective self; it thus has an impor-

tant social dimension. Furthermore, rhythm is movement in the
body through time: in developing rhythm as a social factor, the
Laws engages in a fundamental way the category of ‘time’, and
thus ‘change’, for the conceptualisation of civic life. In particu-
lar, rhythm underlies what I shall call the ‘bodily social’, a physi-
cal property of community while it dances, a transcendent force
realised in the convergence of individuals’ rhythmic impulse
in the chorus. The key point is that the physical properties of
the individual body merge with those of collective rhythmic-
ity; in a somewhat materialist turn, this collective rhythmicity
becomes the nexus where ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ meet in society.
It is this integration of nature and culture, of individual and
collective rhythmic feeling, in the ‘bodily social’ that ultimately
affords the permanence of the city-state in the Laws.6
The choros forms the primary, tangible context through which
rhythm is conceived. It is therefore necessary to expand briefly
on choreia as a social tool in Plato’s dialogues before embarking
on the specific issues arising from the Laws. From very early
on, the chorus in Greek culture symbolises social solidarity,
group unity, and, later, civic cohesion.7 Plato throughout his
works uses musical terms to express harmony and disharmony
within the city;8 the Laws ties the earlier allusions into issues
concerning the chorus. That in the Laws the law code is a set of
communal songs (nomoi) suggests that choreia has both norma-
tive and explanatory force in social matters. If these nomoi are
to be diffused ‘emanating from a choros’, the image is one of the
enchanted city where symphonia (consonance) symbolises una-
nimity. And to enable symphonia, this choral space is imagined
as being circular: for example, the Timaeus argues that circular
progression of sound contributes to the unity of sounds.9 The
circularity of the chorus is much more than just a physical for-
mation; it carries significant potential for social integration of
the singing community.
Studies of Greek song-culture take it for granted that
choreia is aimed at civic integration, but how exactly choral
dancing operates in the service of social accord in the polis has
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Barbara Kowalzig
received less attention. The chemistry of choral communality

is discussed or alluded to throughout the Laws and to a degree
in other dialogues.10 The intertwining of religious and social
cohesion in the chorus is a central factor here: worship of the
gods in choral form is depicted as a prime form of individual
socialisation and at the basis of social relations between indi-
viduals and within a group. Choreia is thought to be sponsored
by the gods; they are the source of, and provide the imagery
for, socialisation experienced through dancing. For exam-
ple, the often-cited aetiology of choreia claims that the gods
gave the Muses, Apollo, and Dionysus to humanity as their
synchoreutai (fellow dancers) and their choregoi (leaders of the
chorus, 653c–654a). This does not encourage men literally to
imitate the divine; rather, the idea is that humans’ relationship
to their gods helps humans to assimilate to, and create emo-
tional ties between, each other. This behaviour is typical of the
Greek gods, who routinely descend into the world in order to
foster communality among humans, lending their divine socia-
bility to the human world.11
Similarly, a puzzling passage in the Phaedrus suggests that
affectionate bonds, and in particular ‘love’ (ἔρως), between
humans, specifically philosopher and boy, are envisioned as a
form of choral worship and are modelled on the relationship of
the choral worshipper to the divine:
And so it is with the follower (χορευτής) of each of the other
gods; he lives, so far as he is able, honouring and imitating that
god (τιμῶν τε καὶ μιμούμενος) . . . now each one chooses his
love from the ranks of the beautiful according to his character,
and he fashions him and adorns him like a statue (ἄγαλμα), as
though he were his god, to honour and worship him (τιμήσων
τε καὶ ὀργιάσων). The followers of Zeus desire that the soul of
him whom they love be like Zeus; so they seek for one of philo-
sophical and lordly nature, and when they find him and love
him, they do all they can to give him such a character. (Phdr.
252d–e, trans. Fowler (1999))
Here the experience of the divine in the chorus forms the con-
ceptual framework for imagining intense human relations, as if
174 �
love between two individuals were perfect synchoreia in a tri-

angular relationship between two dancers and a god. Similarly,
the doctor Eryximachus in the Symposium envisages love as an
overtly musical affair, as a matter of joint harmony (harmonia)
and rhythm (rhythmos): because of its capacity of bringing into
consonance (symphonia) and agreement (homologia) the differ-
ent pitches of harmony and the opposing speeds in rhythm,
the art of mousike induces mutual love and unanimity (ἔρωτα
καὶ ὁμόνοιαν ἀλλήλων); mousike is the ‘science’ (episteme) of
love matters related to harmonia and rhythmos. It is ambiguous
whether this last passage refers specifically to choreia, but there
is no doubt that it keenly stresses the importance of mousike
in social relations.12 Harmony and rhythm lie at the basis of
social relations, held together by emotional attachment, and
can make up the perfect choros. While I do not want to under-
estimate harmonia, it is the role of rhythm in keeping these
relations together that interests me here.13
Let me conclude this introduction with a couple of com-
plex but necessary broader methodological remarks on Plato’s
philosophy before launching into my fuller argument. The
Laws have often been termed a minor kind of epistemology, a
‘practical philosophy’, to be ‘used’ in actual social contexts as
opposed to philosophical teaching. The Laws sometimes fea-
ture as ‘philosophy with limitations’, limited because of their
religious framework, their setting in the context of theoria as
an offering to the gods (theoi), reprojecting the modern antago-
nism between philosophy and religion onto the ancient text.14
The distinction is beginning to break down in current schol-
arship; for example, Andrea Nightingale has shown how the
philosophy in the Laws is religion, how it is formulated in,
and carried out through, the language and imagery of religious
practice.15 Philosophical and religious reflection notably con-
verge in the complex concept of theoria, an integrated religious
and philosophical viewing.
I hope that the argument that follows will encourage us fur-
ther to rethink what may be a false distinction between the
philosophical and the pragmatic, and thus also go beyond
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Barbara Kowalzig
the question of whether the Laws was conceived with imple-

mentation in mind. A ‘practical philosophy’ – social setting
and the immediate applicability of the thought experiment on
the one hand and religious framing and formulation on the
other – characterises a lot of Plato’s work and makes it diffi-
cult to identify what exactly qualifies as a ‘philosophic dis-
course’ as opposed to ‘religious discourse’. In a broader way,
therefore, I hope to suggest that the pragmatic dimension may
open up windows for understanding Plato more widely. Of
particular interest to this chapter is that Plato’s conceptual
world is deeply intertwined with traditional religious think-
ing of the Greek polis-state even when the issue at stake is
not overtly religious: this is, for example, how the god Adonis
with his short-lived, artificial, gardens grown at the festival
of the Adoneia, so prominent in the religious experience of
fifth-century Athenians, can represent the seedlessness of the
written word in the Phaedrus.16 And often this religious think-
ing is social thinking: Plato’s gods provide a mental framework
through which to imagine the social and the cultural. We are
well aware that religious practice and the cultural imaginary
are intrinsically interlinked in ancient Greece, that the gods
and their stories form an integral part of the social imagina-
tion and collective psychology.17 Lived religion often underlies
the manner in which thoughts are formulated – gods are good
to think with. And in the case of the Laws, this imaginative
spur comes, unsurprisingly, from Dionysus, the god embody-
ing rhythmos and the choros.18
Th e Sto ry o f R h y t h m o s
So why rhythm? Rhythm pinpoints the Laws’ concern of inte-
grating the individual and the collective. It is no coincidence
that, in the history of early twentieth-century thought, rhythm
notoriously turns up when the opposition or juxtaposition of
individual versus collective is at stake, which in turn has an
impact on intellectual or academic belonging. Modern preoc-
cupations with rhythm go back to Emile Durkheim and Marcel
176 �
Mauss, who, according to a contemporary scholar, lived in

an age where they felt ‘confrontés à une fluidification brutale
de leur monde soit en sciences sociales, soit en sciences phy-
siques’.19 The study of rhythmicity then had a short glimpse
of life from the late 1960s, also a period of interlocking social
and intellectual change, in the work of Henri Meschonnic and
Gilles Deleuze.20 It has very recently reemerged in the social
sciences in France, not least in the context of a felt need for a
reformulation of the disciplinary remits of the social sciences
in the so-called age of globalisation, perceived not only as an
economic but also as a cultural phenomenon with important
intellectual repercussions. Pascal Michon’s Rythmes, pouvoir,
mondialisation (2005) brings several of these aspects together:
the basic idea is that in our own fluid world, characterised
by globalisation and the accompanying set of economic and
cultural choices with a lasting impact on personal identity,
long-standing social rhythms undergo a profound transforma-
tion and fundamentally reconfigure the relationship between
individual and collective. This is in part a consequence of the
disappearance of a straightforward ‘collective’ to be a part
of (e.g., the family, the nation); our contemporary society’s
emphasis on multiple identities has consequences for who the
individual thinks he or she is, for the process of what in French
is called individuation, the defining of the self. Michon issues
a call for the invention of a new ‘rhythmicity’ in the social
sciences, for new tools and approaches matching the social
changes cognitively.21
The broad sweep of issues involved in the study of rhythm
in a long-term perspective might at first seem a little abstruse.
But there is a striking analogy between the fervent desire
within academic milieus of the early twentieth century, the
late 1960s, and the early 2000s striving to anchor contempo-
rary social and intellectual patterns in a theory of rhythm on
the one hand and the fourth-century Athenian context produc-
ing Plato’s anthropology of rhythm in the Laws on the other.
What they all share is a feel for being in the midst of important
changes of the rhythms of social life, which goes together with
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Barbara Kowalzig
a perceived paradigm change in thinking about society. Plato’s

concern with collective identity and social cohesion, and how
the individual relates to both, can easily be seen as a response
to a perceived erosion of the boundaries of the polis and the
civic community, and the underlying moral fundamentals.
What is rhythm? Like many universal concepts, it is as
elusive as its study is underdeveloped.22 As in other areas of
religious sociology, the Durkheimian starting points rightly
or wrongly have shaped our modern thinking and remain an
important clue for understanding the role of rhythm in the
Laws. Durkheim, it is well known, was profoundly concerned
with the convergence of individual and collective conscious-
ness in religious practice, notably through ecstatic ritual, which
he thought fundamentally underlies social cohesion. Rhythm’s
modern history thus intriguingly begins with arrhythmia:
according to Durkheim, rhythm underlies all ecstatic experi-
ence, of ek-stasis in the literal sense of ‘standing outside of
oneself’. In the endeavour to identify a basic link between
communal religious practice and social morality, The elemen-
tary forms of religious life deals with the problem of collective
spatial and temporal representations in ritual; it postulates
that intense religious feeling and a sense of community can be
brought about only by effervescence and ‘psychical exaltation
not far removed from delirium’, in which rhythmic feelings are
central. Durkheim offers the following hypothesis:
Of course it is only natural that the moral forces they [i.e., the
delirious images] express should be unable to affect the human
mind powerfully without pulling it outside itself and without
plunging it into a state that may be called ecstatic . . . a very
intense social life does a sort of violence to the organism, as
well as to the individual consciousness, which interferes with
its normal functioning. Therefore it lasts only a limited length
of time.23
In other words, ek-stasis describes disturbances of the rhyth-

mic balance, felt both physically and mentally, and such a
disruption is thought necessary for moral effect. The frenzy
178 �
of song, dance, and procession that orchestrate and facilitate

such ‘interior transformation’, Durkheim argues, shapes col-
lective rhythms. His important inference is that the temporal
experience of moral transformation through ecstasis is socially
rhythmic. More sweepingly, he concludes that the experience
of time itself obeys social rhythmicity. His often-repeated claim
that the category of time has its basis in the rhythms of social
life laid the foundations for many future studies on the anthro-
pology of time; it frames his own treatise from beginning to
end:
The category of time does not consist merely in a commemora-

tion, either partial or integral, of our past life. It is an abstract
and impersonal frame which surrounds, not only our individ-
ual existence, but that of all humanity. . . . The rhythm of col-
lective life dominates and embraces the varied rhythms of all
the elementary lives from which it results; consequently the
time which it expresses dominates and embraces all particular
durations. It is time in general.24
That time is not individual but social finds its expression in the
representation of time, which Henri Hubert, a contemporary
of Durkheim, calls ‘essentially rhythmic . . . rhythms of [social]
time are not [merely] modelled on the natural periodicities
verified by experience; rather, societies themselves have the
need and means to institute the rhythm’.25 The most immedi-
ate expression of social time is the communal calendar, where
days, weeks, months, and years ‘correspond to the periodical
recurrences of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies . . . [and the
calendar] expresses the rhythm of the collective activities while
at the same time its function is to assure their regularity’.26
On these views, rhythm has to do with the often socially
regulated passage of time; such social temporality assists the
process of individuation within a moral framework. Marcel
Mauss’ famous essay on the cycles of Eskimo life has unequivo-
cally shown how notions of rhythm contribute to the socialisa-
tion of the individual. His Eskimos in summer tended to live in
small groups or clans, in tents, and as nomads. In turn, during
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Barbara Kowalzig
winter, families came together and lived in stone, leather, or

igloo houses. Winter was the festive season, of communal cel-
ebrations, feelings of collectivity, times for the establishment
of social relations through forms of exchange – Mauss’ basis
for his seminal Essai sur le don. So, in Eskimo life, periods
of extreme isolation alternate with those of intense socialisa-
tion and moments of greatest display of personal identity. An
important conclusion to draw is that the mutual integration of
individual and collective is not linear, homogeneous, and con-
tinuous but follows a social morphology: sometimes individual
members are highly autonomous, sometimes heavily integrated
in society.27 The seasonality of social and religious life features
prominently in Plato’s Laws.
So rhythm and the perception of time are intrinsically inter-
twined, our temporal experience is essentially social, and
rhythm structures this social time. That rhythm and percep-
tions of the (regular) passage of time are close associates is a
familiar notion. Rhythm develops in and through time, and
structures time through patterns of periodicity and recurrence:
it repeats something that has already been in the expectation
of something to come. In its repetitiveness in as much as in its
anticipation, rhythm is linked to past, present, and future.
However, the recognition of rhythmicity as something
social entails that trying to regulate rhythm is attempting a
form of control over the individual, and being in command
of the rhythms of social life is a form of power. It is this set of
links that Plato’s Laws focusses on: essentially, the treatise is
concerned with the control of social time, and of the rhythms
of communal life, as a basis for political and moral stability and
for preventing change. In turning the management of rhythm
into a form of social power, Plato is in this sense a premature
Durkheimian in construing a link between the rhythmic expe-
rience of man and the passage of time, and in fundamentally
tying it to society.
Importantly, Plato also introduces the body (soma) into the
equation and so tries to fix the materiality of rhythm, in a man-
ner recalling a famous passage in Mauss: ‘A primitive chorus
180 �
presupposes . . . a group of men who manage to agree in their

voices and their gestures, forming one and the same dancing
mass. A community animated by rhythmic movements, there
you have a condition that is immediate, necessary and sufficient
for the rhythmic expression of the feelings of a community’.28
The choral body here is a physical mechanism for the integra-
tion of individual and collective, a means of materialising col-
lective rhythmicity and of embodying social time.
It is for this reason that choreia plays such an important role
in the Laws and that rhythm in particular is so scrutinised.
Magnesia’s chorality is Plato’s most explicit target in trying
to impose permanence on his state: the insistence, for exam-
ple, on polytheistic purism, where each god is offered songs
specific only to him or her, and the consecration to the gods
of choral laws on the Egyptian or Spartan model in order to
retain their ancestral form are just the most general measures to
immobilise chorality through time.29 By contrast, a constantly
self-renewing choreia – as Plato would have witnessed in con-
temporary Athens – could fundamentally alter ‘rhythmic’ and
hence temporal notions of the individual and therefore the
greater rhythms of social life. Choral innovation is conducive
to social change; specifically, then, the treatise’s dwelling on
collective bodily movement in the choros reflects a concept of
social change intimately linked to human nature, in a biologi-
cal and a physical sense. We might call this the discovery or
the definition of ‘the bodily social’, a tangible form of lasting
communal integration and stability that goes beyond the cog-
nitive or metaphysical into the very physicality of human life.
B e nve niste and Plato’s Inve ntion

o f Rh y t h m
To illustrate this we need to delve a little deeper into the con-
cept of rhythmos in Greek thinking. Plato has sometimes been
thought to establish our modern idea of rhythm, with its asso-
ciations of order and measurability, regularity and periodicity,
and predictability. The point is at the heart of Emile Benveniste’s
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Barbara Kowalzig
much-cited essay ‘The notion of “rhythm” in its linguistic

expression’.30 This claims that the Greek word rhythmos origi-
nally had nothing to do with our notion of rhythm. Ῥυθμός
derives from ῥεῖν, ‘to flow’, and its original meaning is ‘flow’ or
‘shape’. The word underwent a change in meaning after its first
occurrences in early Greek lyric and the Pre-Socratics, ushered
in by none other than Plato himself. The article argues in par-
ticular against the perception common at Beneviste’s time, that
the word’s associations of periodicity had been borrowed from
the ‘regular movements of the waves of the sea’, an association
made in many modern languages. By contrast, Benveniste goes
on, rhythmos, rheo, and their derivatives are not used of the
movements of the sea in antiquity. What flows is a river or a
stream, but we would not associate that with ‘rhythm’. It is a
peculiar point to make, but it deserves mentioning as it will
reemerge in a curious way later on.31
Benveniste’s analysis of the early meanings of ῥυθμός may
need revision in some of its detail, but his main points make
intriguing suggestions about the social (and hence philosophi-
cal) function of rhythmos in the context of choreia in the Laws.
Rhythmos/rhusmos, he observers, is absent in the epics but is
a key term in Pre-Socratic philosophy. Until the fifth century
the word means ‘form’ or ‘shape’, often in the sense of ‘config-
uration’ or ‘proportion’ of particular physical bodies to each
other. So Democritus can think that water and air differ in the
rhythmos (‘form’) that their constituent atoms take, or talk about
the rhythmos (‘form’) of a state’s constitution. Μεταρρυθμίζω,
μεταρρυθ/σμόω build on the same meaning of ‘shape’ when
education can transform man, and subsequently his physical
nature, or Xerxes change the shape of the Hellespont.32
However, rhythmos does not denote fixed shape. It is dif-
ferent from, and often contrasted to, σχῆμα, used to describe
a rigid, unmovable form. Rather, rhythmos designates the
form when it is moving, faithful to its etymology from rhein;
it is fluid, and Benveniste terms it ‘the particular manner of
flowing’.33 Something of this usage comes across beautifully
when Herodotus talks about the early alphabet: ‘At first the
182 �
Phoenicians [who had settled in Greece] used the same let-

ters as all the other Phoenicians; but as time went on, as they
changed their language, they also changed the shape (rhyth-
mos) of the letters. The Greeks . . . learned the alphabet from
the Phoenicians, and, having made a few changes in the form
of the letters (metarrhythmisantes), used these letters’.34
The form that rhythmos captures is often improvised, momen-
tary, and changeable: rhythmos acts in time. So Archilochus
concludes a list of recommendations of how to react to ups
and downs in life with γίνωκσε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει
(learn to know which flow holds mankind).35 Rhythmos also
refers to physical composition; for example, the arrangement
of a garment falls into this category of fluid, and ultimately
unseizable, physical configuration.36 Xenophon tackles the elu-
siveness of this changeable form by making rhythmos the qual-
ity of a fine cuirass, which is eurhythmos as long as it is adapted
to the human body, while in other instances rhythmos is used in
a more abstract sense of the ‘manner’ of doing something, or of
‘composure’, ‘attitude’.37
Before the late fifth century, Benveniste concludes, rhythmos,
deriving from rhein, was the most appropriate ‘term for
describing “dispositions” of “configurations” without fixity
or natural necessity and arising from an arrangement which is
always subject to change’. This, he claims, was characteristic of
the Pre-Socratic philosophy that inspired the use, one where
the universe is constituted of configurations of movement, of
fluctuations.38
Benveniste credits Plato with having ‘fixed’ the notion of
rhythm and introduced a sense of ‘order’, and first applied
it to the human body. The Philebus, a dialogue chiefly con-
cerned with the correlative body-soul, confronts harmony
and rhythmos; describing harmonia as the high and low of the
voice, the dialogue also gives a precise definition of Platonic
rhythmos: ‘There occur other analogous qualities (πάθη),
inherent this time in the movements of the body, which are
numerically regulated (δι’ ἀριθμῶν μετρηθέντα) and which
must be called rhythms and measures (ῥυθμοὺς καὶ μέτρα)’
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Barbara Kowalzig
(trans. Benveniste). The measurability is further defined in the

Symposium, where, in the passage mentioned already, rhythm
emerges from the ‘fast and slow elements, at first contrasted,
then in accord’.39 In the Laws, computing rhythm is intimately
linked to the sense of taxis, ‘order’; taxis occurs frequently in
musical and other social contexts, and in particular reflects a
greater, cosmic order, which civic laws mirror and reproduce.40
Taxis features conspicuously in one of the passages central to
Plato’s definition and understanding of choreia:
. . . we said at the beginning that all young things, being fiery
and mettlesome by nature, are unable to keep their bodies or
their tongues still (ἡσυχίαν οὐχ οἵα τε ἄγειν οὔτε κατὰ τὸ
σῶμα οὔτε κατὰ τὴν φωνήν) – they are always making uncoor-
dinated noises and jumping about (φθέγγοιτο δ’ ἀεὶ ἀτάκτως
καὶ πηδῷ). No other animal, we said, ever develops a sense of
order (τάξεως δ’ αἴσθησιν) in either respect; man alone has a
natural ability (φύσις) to do this. Order in movement (κινήσεως
τάξει) is called ‘rhythm’, and order in the vocal sounds (τῆς
φωνῆς) – the combination of high and low notes – is called
‘harmony’; and the union of the two (τὸ συναμφότερον) is
called choreia. (Laws 664e–665a)
The traditional sense of rhythm as ‘form in flux’ is still main-
tained here, but what is new is the application to the ‘form of
movement’ of the human body, the changing configurations
that the body makes in dancing. The ‘embodiment’ of rhyth-
mos alluded to in this passage will occupy us at length later
on, but the crucial point for the moment lies in the attempt at
putting ‘order’ to movement, calculating these bodily forms,
lending them defined periodicities and recurrences. Benveniste
stops here when he thinks the modern notion of rhythm has
been invented, describing everything that ‘presupposes a con-
tinuous activity broken by meter into alternating intervals’.
Having started from rhythmos as a fluid spatial configuration
characterised by a discrete arrangement and proportion of the
elements, we arrive at rhythm as a ‘configuration of movements
organised in time’.41
184 �
I think we can go substantially beyond Benveniste and the

introduction of ‘time’ to the ‘body’ through rhythm and turn
Plato into one of the first somatologists, anthropologists of
dance or performance theorists. For the attempt to introduce
temporal order, that is, controlled rhythm, into the choros in the
Laws stands in the larger service of the dialogue’s concern with
both social integration and civic permanence as mentioned at
the beginning. In grasping the bodily quality of rhythm, Plato
lays the foundations for a link between individual and social
rhythms on the one hand, between social rhythms and social
change on the other; and, moving on a different epistemolog-
ical level, he develops an intimate association between the
physical nature of man and the form of society produced. The
dynamic resulting from the combination of these different ele-
ments is what I tentatively term the ‘bodily social’.
Plato’s obsession with bodily matters chimes well with a
recent reconsideration of his construction of the relationship
between mind and body and its consequences for human
ethics.42 That said, crediting Plato alone for Benveniste’s evo-
lutionary model for the notion of rhythm is problematic: the
idea of organising rhythm and tying music into social moral-
ity is already found in the mid-fifth-century musical theorist
Damon of Oa and in Aristophanes’ many musical allusions, still
in need of thorough investigation.43 How and when rhythmos
received its structured temporality and periodicity is there-
fore an intricate affair, which we can only start to unravel
here. But it will emerge that a modification in meaning from
fluid and elusive to a more rigid and measurable sequence of
bodily shapes is central to a chorality that is understood as
profoundly intertwined with the structure of social time in
the Durkheimian and Maussian sense. I can also anticipate
myself here in saying that linear and circular time produced
in the chorus seem to help in the conception of, respectively,
change through time and lack of change: circular time avoids
change; circularity and repetition ban the danger of rhythm
unfolding randomly.
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Barbara Kowalzig
Rh y t h m and t h e B o d i ly So cial
Let me start with a few more facts from Plato about the impor-
tance of the ‘particular manner of flowing’ in the Laws’ cho-
rus before analysing its transformation into the ‘bodily social’.
Choreia, as we gathered from the passage cited in the preceding
section (p.184), consists of the right combination of harmonia
and rhythmos, the former being the order (i.e., ‘pitch’) of the
voice (high and low) and the latter being the order (i.e., ‘speed’)
of movement (rapid and slow). Successful inasmuch as appro-
priate, choreia combines the two in suitable and proportioned
manner, according to what is apposite to mood, situation, or age
of the choristers.44 In Lonsdale’s words, ‘voice and body are in
perfect accord . . . an idealised and stylised form of ordinary ver-
bal and nonverbal communication’.45 It is important to note that
both harmonia and rhythmos throughout remain broad abstract
concepts that seem to embrace several others: the physical man-
ifestation of harmonia is melos (song or tune) and that of rhythm
schema (again, fixed as opposed to fluid form),46 executed by
both phone (voice or sound) and soma (body).
A great deal of energy is expended on ensuring that the con-
figuration of these elements remains in due proportion and fur-
thermore relates appropriately to words (logos, rhema, lexis). It
is a commonplace to talk of Plato’s fear of mixing musical genres
such as hymn, paean, and dithyramb; famous passages in the
Republic and the Laws critique the fusion of traditional cho-
ral forms in tragic song.47 His related fear of tainting harmonia
and rhythmos of choristry (i.e., body shapes and performance
manners) in the Laws is just as striking and explicitly drawn
out in its ethical consequences and impact on social order. The
most explicit of an array of passages polemicising against the
harmonic-rhythmic mix is the following:
The Muses would never make the ghastly mistake of composing
the speech of men (ῥήματα ἀνδρῶν) to a musical idiom suitable
for women (γυναικῶν . . . μέλος), or of fitting rhythms (ῥυθμούς)
appropriate to the portrayal of slaves and slave-like people to
186 �
the tune and bodily movements (μέλος . . . αὖ καὶ σχήματα) used
to represent free men (or again of making rhythms and move-
ments (ῥυθμοὺς καὶ σχῆμα) appropriate to free men accompany
a combination of tune and words (μέλος ἢ λόγον) that con-
flict with those rhythms (ἐναντίον ἀποδοῦναι τοῖς ῥυθμοῖς)).
Nor would they ever mix up together into one production the
din of wild animals (φωνάς) and men and musical instruments
and all kinds of other noises and still claim to be representing
a unified theme (ὡς ἕν τι μιμούμεναι). But human authors, in
their silly way, jumble all these things together into compli-
cated combinations (τὰ τοιαῦτα ἐμπλέκοντες καὶ συγκυκῶντες
ἀλόγως) . . . and in the midst of all this confusion, he will find
that the authors also divorce rhythm and movement from the
tune (διασπῶσιν . . . ῥυθμὸν μὲν καὶ σχήματα μέλους χωρίς)
by putting unaccompanied words (λόγους) into metre, and rob
tune and rhythm of words (ἄνευ ῥημάτων) by using stringed
instruments and pipes on their own without singers. When
this is done, it is extraordinarily difficult to know what the
rhythm and harmony without speech (ἄνευ λόγου) are sup-
posed to signify and what worth-while object they imitate and
represent . . . all such practices are full of much agroikia (rustic-
ity, boorishness). (Laws 669c–e)48
The passage alludes in part to the practices of New Music,

often accused of privileging melos over the rest; and of going
for musical acrobatics (thaumatourgia) of voice or instrument –
particularly the aulos – over due proportion of mousike’s com-
ponents.49 Change and, in particular, confusion of musical
conventions, we keep being reminded throughout the Laws,
unwittingly entail a change in social and moral manners, and
they put the civic symphony at risk.50 So in insisting on think-
ing in a stable configuration of the different elements of chor-
eia, Plato does much more than reveal a ‘classical’ taste for
proportion. At stake in his recurrent request to keep musical
change at bay are the rhythms of social life. Keeping a check on
rhythm is pivotal to preventing social change. What the Laws
are trying to regulate socially is the fundamental irregularity
of individual, human rhythmos.
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Barbara Kowalzig
6. Arrhythmia in the geometric Greek chorus. Geometric Hydria from Aegina ( late
eighth century b.c.). Berlin Antikensammlung 31312; drawing CVA Berlin 1 [Germany 2]
10 fig. 1.
The key to command over social rhythms lies in what the

Laws construe as the ‘bodily social’, the integration of the indi-
vidual into collective rhythmicity in a physical sense, and the
exploitation of that for communal solidarity. In this context
we may return to arrhythmia, which I already implied is a con-
stituent of rhythm in the brief sketch of Durkheim’s approach:
Durkheim generally argued that ek-stasis, stepping out of
rhythm, is a necessary element of getting into it, of the pro-
cess of integration of the individual and the collective in the
shared ritual dance. It is possible to give this role of arrhyth-
mia a slightly different twist: for interestingly, rhythm, when
scrutinised more closely, is not mindless repetition. It is itself a
form of variety: it is the succession of the quasi-identical. It is
variety within a regularity – there is an element of progression
in it because of the passage of time. In its choral representa-
tion, I am tempted to think that it looks like a scene of a Greek
chorus on a late eighth-century geometric hydria from Aegina
(Fig. 6).51 The first impression is that this is a group of people
doing one and the same thing. But the third dancer from the
188 �
7. Chorus members ‘strung’ together in their arrhythmic garment. Tomb painting from
Ruvo (fourth century b.c.). Naples, Mus. Naz. 9352–57. Drawing after L. Séchan, La
Danse grecque antique (Paris, 1930), 58 fig. 4.
right looks different: her skirt is chequered in a different way,

singling her out amongst her fellow dancers, as if through this
element of variety she brings movement into the otherwise
monotonous line of dancers.
The same can be observed in the beautiful depiction of a
women’s chorus in a tomb at Ruvo in Apulia (Fig. 7).52 The com-
plicated arrangement of the women’s clothing gives impulse
to the image: the second dancer from the left is marked out
by the different colour of her dress’ edging, while the dark
braid continuing into the dress of her neighbour sutures her
back into the collective strung together by the dancing move-
ment. Such pictorial variation seeks to represent the chang-
ing dynamic of the dance, preventing the image from freezing
in its medium, from making it atemporal. At the same time,
this also makes a sociological point about the communal group
movement.
A passage of the Philostratean tableau Hymnetriai (The
Singers) puts into words what is at stake:
ᾄδουσι γὰρ αἱ παῖδες, ᾄδουσι, καὶ ἡ διδάσκαλος ὑποβλέπει

τὴν ἀπᾴδουσαν κροτοῦσα τὰς χεῖρας καὶ ἐς τὸ μέλος ἱκανῶς
ἐμβιβάζουσα.
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Barbara Kowalzig
For they sing, the young girls, they sing: and one of them is
losing the tune, the choir mistress looks at her, clapping her
hands so that she may suitably rejoin the chorus. (Philostr.
Imag. 2.1.3)
Firstly, the interdependence of tune and rhythm, voice and

body, recalls Plato’s attempt at capturing operative chorality.
But more importantly, Philostratus’ may come out as a texted
image of the pictorial representations. It seems that the girl has
lost the collective tune, and the apostate (apaidousan, literally
the ‘away-singing one’) needs to be pulled back into the group,
literally to ‘step (back) into the song’ (embibazousa). But rather
than depicting an imperfection of the individual dancer, I won-
der whether these various figurations of choreia in image and
text actually represent a perception of rhythm itself, as a suc-
cession of the quasi-identical, as movement through time. The
girls are not literally a-rhythmic, ‘off beat’; they are a represen-
tation of change integral to rhythm, which we saw was inher-
ent in the usage of the word rhythmos by the Pre-Socratics. The
girl(s) may seem ‘out of rhythm’, in the state of arrhythmia,
yet arrhythmia is considered a constituent of rhythmos in the
first place, and it is for this reason that individual dancers are
singled out in these images. In having a necessary element of
arrhythmia, rhythm is precisely not about sameness but about
variety through time.
The intriguing consequence is that rhythmos bears in itself
a transformative element, an element of change, and of poten-
tial innovation. If we wanted to put this conceptual problem
graphically, what if Philostratus’ hymnetria were not to step
back into the anonymity of the collective dance? Arrhythmia
is highly elusive and can develop in two ways, achieving full
integration in, or full exclusion from, and even undermining
of, the communal movement. And this is where rhythmos must
become of central importance to the Laws: rhythm does on the
one hand imply repetition and homogeneity, but on the other
it also implies change: there is a subversive element to rhythm
because it is a movement that develops through time.53
190 �
By contrast, Plato seems to try to impose ‘order’ – taxis – on

rhythm, so that it unfolds through time in a calculated manner.
He seeks to tame the element of change and limit its ambiva-
lence. In the attempt to integrate such individual arrhythmia
and collective rhythmos, the organisation of conjoined body
movement is central. Plato’s aetiology of choreia, briefly alluded
to above (664e–665a), makes it strikingly clear that choreia is a
form of collective time management on the one hand and con-
figures body shape on the other – and rhythm is the feature
that they share.
Education, then, is a matter of correctly disciplined feelings of

pleasure and pain. But in the course of a man’s life the effect
wears off (χαλᾶται), and in many respects it is lost altogether
(διαφθείρεται). The gods, however, took pity on the human
race, born to suffer as it was, and gave it relief in the form of
religious festivals to serve as periods of rest from its labours
(ἀναπαύλας τε αὐτοῖς τῶν πόνων ἐτάξαντο). They gave us
the Muses, with Apollo their leader, and Dionysus as fellow
celebrants (συνεορταστάς); by having these gods to share their
holidays, men were to be made whole again (ἵν’ ἐπανορθῶνται),
and thanks to them, we find refreshment (τάς τε τροφάς) in the
celebration of these festivals. Now, there is a theory which we
are always having dinned into our ears: let’s see if it squares
with the facts or not. It runs like this: virtually all young
things find it impossible to keep their bodies still and their
tongues quiet (τοῖς τε σώμασι καὶ ταῖς φωναῖς ἡσυχίαν ἄγειν
οὐ δύνασθαι). They are always trying to move around and cry
out (κινεῖσθαι . . . καὶ φθέγγεσθαι); some jump and skip and do
a kind of gleeful dance (οἷον ὀρχούμενα μεθ’ ἡδονῆς) as they
play with each other, while others produce all sorts of noises
(φθεγγόμενα πάσας φωνάς). And whereas animals have no
sense of order and disorder in movement (αἴσθησιν τῶν ἐν ταῖς
κινήσεσιν τάξεων οὐδὲ ἀταξιῶν) – ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’, as
we call it – we human beings have been made sensitive to both
and can enjoy them. This is the gift of the same gods who we
said were given to us as companions in dancing; it is the device
which enables them to be our chorus leaders and stimulate
us to movement (κινεῖν τε ἡμᾶς), making us combine to sing
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Barbara Kowalzig
and dance (ᾠδαῖς τε καὶ ὀρχήσεσιν ἀλλήλοις συνείροντας) –

and as this naturally ‘charms’ us, they invented the word
‘chorus’ (χορούς τε ὠνομακέναι παρὰ τὸ τῆς χαρᾶς). (Laws
653c–654a)54
The passage, extensively discussed by Leslie Kurke in this vol-

ume, superbly talks us through the making of a ‘bodily social’,
as it elaborates the crucial nexus of individual bodily control
and collective time management. The language emphasises
physical control and shaping of the body and charts the sug-
gestive image of lifeless body against the body full of energy
through the introduction of time and periodicity. Things hap-
pened when human affairs, or perhaps humanity itself, ‘grew
slack’ – khalatai – in other words ‘lost shape’ (as if playing
with the traditional meaning of rhythmos).55 The gods intro-
duced periodic festivals as a pause – an interval – in men’s
troubles (anapaulas) and to straighten them up again (epan-
orthontai). These festivals when humans could mingle with the
gods became the ‘nurses’ (trophas) of men.
First of all, this indicates how choreia regulates socialisation
through communal time. Socialisation here is seasonal, comes
in regular intervals at festivals, just as Mauss’ Eskimos expe-
rienced different degrees of socialisation throughout the year.
Plato is not alone in this idea of a seasonal chorality: the chorus
leader in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai also makes a point
about periodically integrated choroi, suggesting that the peri-
odicities of socialisation through music were a topic of interest
at the time. The serial occurrence of festivals structures this
socialisation – and thereby controls the flow of time, and hence
the passage of social time. In fact, horai play a central role in
the Laws’ institutions more widely; the horai are often referred
to as κατὰ φύσιν (according to nature), and much space is
expended on the development of the calendar.56
The passage then continues with the already cited human
privilege over animals in being able to develop ‘order’ (taxis) in
their movement, and on its way sets out the rules for body man-
agement.57 It needs to be read together with two later passages,
192 �
which make the same claims (664e–665a, quoted earlier; 672c).

Children have neither body nor voice under control but make
uncoordinated noises and skip around randomly; in this they
are like animals. But humans differ from animals in their abil-
ity to develop reason (νοῦς, φρόνησις 672c) and a perception of
order (taxis) and disorder (ataxia) in movement, and this sense
of pleasure (hedone) in harmony and rhythm has been given
to men by their divine fellow dancers (synchoreutai). Thus the
gods make them move and lead their choirs, tying them tightly
to one another (allelois syneirontas) through songs and dances.
The pleasure felt in shared rhythm and harmony produces
emotional, affective bonds between fellow dancers, crafting
the powerful image of the collectivity strung together in a cho-
rus, which at a different point evokes the image of the puppet
chorus whose efficacy as a social machinery Leslie Kurke anal-
yses so succinctly. Plato was clearly fascinated by the mecha-
nism of collective bodily movement and by the aesthetics in
operation for the creation of a lasting sense of communality.
Choreia is understood as a collective ‘particular manner of flow-
ing’, a communally acted and embodied form in motion. What
I call here the bodily social is thus much more than the con-
vergence of individual and collective rhythmicity; it is itself
a creative force within society transcending the personal but
also the biological: rhythm brings together nature and culture,
the physical and the culturally acquired.
Choreia thus understood provides the fundamental frame-
work for the integration of individual and collective body time,
itself at the heart of communal integration. Plato is so worried
about choral innovation and disproportion of the rhythmic ele-
ment because this upsets these carefully crafted rhythms of
social life; it reconfigures social time and risks social change.
Controlling choreia means mastering the passage of social time,
while altering the dancing pace inevitably loosens the grip
and can thus provoke social change – as if the wild element
in rhythm were set free. In view of the overall preoccupations
in the Laws, such conceptualisation of rhythmos stands in the
direct service of the creation of the ‘state beyond history’, where
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Barbara Kowalzig
lack of change is pictured as ensuring civic constancy. With his

emphasis on the bodily social, enacted as collective rhythmicity
in the chorus, Plato seeks to freeze the passage of time.
Diony siac Time s and Rhythm ic

Integration: From ‘Flowing’
to ‘ Sai ling ’?
It is striking how persistently the theme of the bodily social,
of collective rhythmicity, is upheld throughout the dialogue.
At this point we may return to the divine orchestration of key
concepts in the Laws as suggested in the introduction: the idea
that gods and their mode of action provide the intellectual tools
and imagination for social thinking. Gods play an important
role in the conceptualisation of rhythm and its regularisation.
That Dionysus is so present a divinity in the dialogue is per-
haps due less to an envisaged reduced polytheism in the Cretan
city than to the imaginative properties that this most rhythmic
of gods can supply. Without wanting to introduce too blunt
a Dodds-like complementarity of rationality and irrationality
in the cult of Dionysus, we find that the Laws develop a miti-
gated version of the Durkheimian picture of controlled rhyth-
mic ekstasis as part and parcel of a moral transformation. It has
been pointed out that, whereas in the Republic nonrationality
endangers reason, in the Laws the irrational, particularly the
bodily irrational, is consciously evoked and used.58 The long
discussion on wine drinking in Books 1 and 2 analyses the
effects of Dionysus’ drink on body control – not to condemn
it but to conclude that if applied in measure, it has a posi-
tive effect on social solidarity by tickling out natural rhyth-
mic impulse. The more developed man’s reason is with age,
the more wine may be enjoyed: while children have arbitrary
rhythmicity that needs to be kept in check, old men are at the
other end of the extreme, complete masters of their physique
but lack the ability of bodily relaxation. They therefore need
to be urged back into it, the rhythmic movement artificially
produced, through Dionysus’ gift, the wine.59
194 �
While this might at first sight sound like a Platonic idiosyn-

crasy, the positive enforcement of rejuvenation through wine
actually has a currency in late fifth-century Athenian imagi-
nation, and this is the background against which the Laws’
interest in the subject should be held. Quite apart, for exam-
ple, from Cadmus and Teiresias in the Bacchae rewinding the
clock of age, it is well known that worshippers of Dionysus,
formerly depicted as old and ugly satyrs, from the mid-fifth
century onwards turn into a mixture of young men and boys.60
These thiasoi may represent not so much a real change in the
Dionysiac chorus as the Athenians’ sensitivity towards the
social potential of private fantasies afforded by Dionysiac illu-
sion. That there should be a comic play Old Age, one of whose
few extant fragments is precisely on rhythm, similarly hints
that dancing for Dionysus had its own perceived role in the
sociology of the late fifth-century Athenian chorus.61
A key passage from the Laws (not so much on old age but
on wine and socialisation) is the story of how Dionysus’ cult
arrived into the city. It curiously illustrates how the god
induces social solidarity sought in rhythmic bodily agreement.
Dionysus and his rituals seem to float into the polis of the Laws
as if put straight onto Exekias’ barge:62
There is somehow a secret stream of story and a rumour cur-

rent (λόγος τις ἅμα καὶ φήμη ὑπορρεῖ) saying that Dionysus
was robbed of his soul’s judgement by his step-mother
Hera, and that he therefore introduced the Bacchic rites (τὰς
βακχείας) and all the frenzied dancing (τὴν μανικὴν χορείαν)
as a revenge. With the same aim he also bestowed the gift of
wine. (Laws 672b)
This follows a further allusion to the aetiology of choreia that

we know already, of how no one is ever naturally born (πέφυκε)
with an innate sense of reason (νοῦς) and until this develops
over time ‘continues all in frenzy and cries out in a disorderly
manner’ (πᾶν μαίνεταί τε καὶ βοᾷ ἀτάκτως) and leaps around
uncoordinatedly (ἀτάκτως αὖ πηδᾷ). We note in passing again
the contrast between order and disorder in bodily movement
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Barbara Kowalzig
emphasised here. At the end of the passage, wine is held up not

as a means of vengeance, as the myth claims, but instead ‘as a
medicine given for the purpose of securing modesty of soul and
health and strength of the body’.63 We are led to believe that
Dionysus is not a disorderly god, but helps to create order in
chaos, to turn natural instinct to (what we now call) ‘rhythm’.
Dionysus features here as the divine force of socialisation, as
the one who regulates the common dancing pace. Intriguingly,
the process of rhythmic integration is tied to a particular type
of movement, the moment where, it seems, rhythmic ‘flowing’
turns into ‘sailing’. I recall what I singled out earlier as a pecu-
liar streak in Benveniste’s argument, his firm denial of a link
between rhythm and the ‘regular movement of the waves of the
sea’.64 In a different passage also concerned with the cultiva-
tion of individual rhythmicity, Plato maintains that to achieve
the balance of body and soul, babies should be kept in con-
tinuous motion, day and night; and he describes how nurses
lull their babies into regular movement ‘as if they were gently
sailing on the sea’ (οἷον ἀεὶ πλέοντας), rocking them and sing-
ing to them just as the frenzied healing rites [of the Corybants]
employ the combined movements of dances and song (καθάπερ
ἡ τῶν ἐκφρόνων βακχειῶν ἰάσεις, ταύτῃ τῇ τῆς κινήσεως ἅμα
χορείᾳ καὶ μούσῃ χρώμεναι).65 And indeed, a little later in the
dialogue, when the young have been appropriately educated,
‘all goes swimmingly’ in the English translation, but really
what the text says is that ‘everything is sailing in the right
measure’: πάντα ἡμῖν κατ’ ὀρθὸν πλεῖ.66 Dionysus is the god
who ensures smooth sailing through the vagaries of life: might
this after all be predictable movement taking its cue from the
‘regular rhythm of the waves’?
We may witness here an important transition from rhein to
plein, from ‘flowing’ to ‘sailing’ in the perception of rhythm.
Although I launch what follows very tentatively, Plato’s recon-
ceptualisation of rhythm does seem to play with the metaphors
of ‘flowing’ versus ‘sailing’ in describing rhythmic processes
of social life.67 To elaborate on this, we need to return to the
broader context of Greek song-culture. While Plato can
196 �
probably be credited with having first conceptualised the dif-

ference in writing, and used it for social theory, earlier images
of Greek chorality already show an awareness of the difference.
For I could imagine that Plato exploits here a traditional image
of social integration: that of the kyklios choros, the circular cho-
rus, and perhaps even the dithyramb for Dionysus, which in
certain contexts is indelibly linked to the movement of the sea.
A spectacular ‘change of rhythm’ happened to this song, which
was formerly performed in a straight line ‘stretched out like a
rope’ and turned by sixth-century Lasus of Hermione into its
kyklic form. We do not necessarily need to believe in a historical
Lasian invention: the circular chorus is an old representation for
group integration in Greek culture.68 Rather the Lasian legend
seems to cultivate a memory of when the ‘manner of flowing’ of
the dithyramb was still that of a procession, perhaps with all its
inbuilt hierarchies as contrasted to the later more ‘egalitarian’
kyklios choros. Above all, the linear chorus line has a beginning
and an end, developing through time – as opposed to continu-
ous movement in a timeless circle. Should this transformation
from linear to cyclical movement in the dithyramb constitute a
change in the perception of communal rhythm at a time of grad-
ually increased social integration in the late sixth century?
It is intriguing that the first depictions of the imaginative
world of the kyklios choros on vases have a clear Dionysiac asso-
ciation (as has convincingly been shown by Eric Csapo), and
these choroi are also floating on the wine-dark sea. The objects
in question are a group of vases representing choruses of men
and choruses of dolphins, and often a hybrid chorus of dancers
half man, half dolphin. While these are clearly not literal rep-
resentations of actual choruses, they unmistakably allude to
the world of Dionysiac dance and notably the dithyramb.69 The
most conspicuous of the set and the most condensed represen-
tation of this particular musical imaginary is the Oltos Psykter
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Fig. 8).
The vase shows a group of dolphin riders armed as hoplites
circling the walls of the vase and riding the waves of the oinops
pontos if we picture the vessel in its original use, swimming
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Barbara Kowalzig
8. Hoplites on dolphins circling the rounds of the vase. Attic red-figure psykter attrib-
uted to Oltos (520–510 b.c.). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Norbert
Schimmel Trust, 1989, inv. 1989.281.69. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
in a mixing crater placed at the centre of a symposium.70 This

sailing hoplite phalanx may well communicate the idea of the
kyklios choros (or the dithyramb) as a metaphor of civic inte-
gration and solidarity, just as the hoplite phalanx can stand
for social cohesion in the city. Interestingly, the equivalent of
integrated dancing and warrior rhythm recurs in the Laws’
insistence on integrated musical and military education.71
198 �
Within this imaginative world, a circular (dithyrambic)

choros ‘sailing’ or ‘swimming’ on the wine-dark sea is some-
thing like an image of controlled and predictable civic
rhythmicity. (If Plato himself compares the state to a mix-
ing crater, in which wine’s ‘mad’ character is corrected by
(kolazomenos) water to become community (koinonia), this
is part of the same set of associated images).72 The intrigu-
ing integration of choral circularity and the sea under the
aegis of Dionysus and his wine suggests that seaborne collec-
tive rhythmicity in Plato (‘sailing’ as opposed to ‘flowing’)
is not a random and idiosyncratic image but forms part of
a larger, traditional cultural imaginary feeding into philo-
sophical thinking. This is interesting because the sea itself
was for the Greeks associated with circularity and an unbro-
ken continuity.73 Labyrinthine and disfiguring, the ‘bound-
less sea of dissemblance’ is in constant movement, which we
know from other dialogues the Platonic kybernetes attempts
to get under control.74 The plentiful maritime imagery for
statesmanship in Plato perhaps goes deeper than we are used
to think and implies that when the ship of state sails safely
along with the ‘regular rhythm of the waves’ things in the
polis are socially rhythmic.75 Shall we surmise, then, that
against Benveniste, the association of rhythm with the ‘regu-
lar movement of the waves’ is after all a classical Greek crea-
tion, emerging from a religious and musical imagination and
its integration with the social? The chorus dancing its circles
as if ‘sailing’ to the ‘regular movement of the waves of the
sea’ perhaps constitutes a potent mental image of civic inte-
gration – the bodily social keeping together the rhythms of
civic life. ‘Regular rhythm of the waves’ is when the subver-
sive element in rhythm is under control, when the rhythms
of social life are cyclical, or else seasonal. The bodily social
in the circular chorus experiences the passage of time as a
continuous motion without change.76
So the regulation of the Laws’ chorality is an attempt at con-
trolling the fluidity of social rhythms: to turn the form in con-
tinuous forward movement into the patterned regularity of a
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Barbara Kowalzig
9. The walled chorus. Black-figure kylix from Argos. Berlin Antikensammlung F 3993
(600–550 b.c.). Photo courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Antikensammlung.
circle. Circularity seems to denote stability, while in a ‘flowing’

(linear) world social power is elusive. Certainly the correlation
of circularity and social unity reigns elsewhere in the Laws, for
example, in city planning:
Temples should be built all round the market-place (πέριξ . . .

χρὴ κατασκευάζειν), and in a circle round the whole city (ὅλην
ἐν κύκλῳ) on the highest spots, for purposes of protection and
sanitation. Next to them should be administrative offices and
courts of law. This is holy ground, and here – partly because
the legal cases involve solemn religious issues, partly because
of the august divinities whose temples are nearby – judgement
will be given and sentence received. (Laws 778d–e)
In view of the sacred bastion the Athenian then goes on to

renounce the necessity of walls. Applying a little lateral imag-
ery tongue-in-cheek at the end, we might think that in choral
terms this could look like the image on a black-figure kylix
from Argos (Fig. 9)!77
200 �
C onc lud ing Re marks

These reflections on the intertwining of music and the rhythms
of social life and the construction of the bodily social proba-
bly need to be seen as part of a longer intellectual tradition
exploring the conceptualisation of social change in archaic and
classical Greek thought. Society’s stability or the lack thereof is
a constant, nagging preoccupation for the ancient polis world.
It is difficult to say whether the Pre-Socratics with their curi-
osity about movement and material transformation essentially
had society in the back of their minds; but it seems clear that
by the time of Plato models of intertwined physical and meta-
physical causation could be explanatory of social phenomena
and could represent social processes, dynamics, and change.78
In the Laws in particular, such intercausality is construed
as a self-contained dynamic within society in order to be on
top of the flow and keep change at bay. Perhaps the mobility
and fluidity of the ‘aristocratic’ archaic polis world, in con-
stant motion and nourishing itself with ever new impulses,
strangely contrasts here with that of the overtly integrated and
self-sufficient democratic polis of Plato’s time, a society virtu-
ally terrified of change.
However, the history of Greek mousike is from the very
earliest records onwards a history of social change and
interlinked with civic order; musical and social innovation
are inseparable.79 The story of Greek music can perhaps be
described as an incessant flow of new attempts at different
forms of civic integration or exclusion, a story suggesting that
the power of music in social contexts in ancient Greece does
not lie in self-perpetuating conservatism but in music’s lasting
creativeness. By constructing its choral city in the way it does,
the Laws tries to impose an order (taxis), even a hold, on such
musical creativity, banning its potential for social change and
literally stopping the passage of time in an attempt to create a
timeless state.
It is because of this preoccupation with time and change that
rhythm, the social experience of the passage of time, is one of
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Barbara Kowalzig
Plato’s principal concerns. The conceptualisation of rhythmos as

a social force – in what I called the bodily social – allows him to
materialise, effectively to embody, the ordered passage of time.
Rhythm in the Laws becomes the point where individual and
collective temporalities meet, in the motion of the communal
dancing body physically and emotionally strung together in a
shared set of moral and ethical attitudes and values. An under-
standing of the physicality of the individual body is key to this
enterprise: in an intriguing set of links, communal dancing
turns into civic body management and the chorality into a prac-
tice where the biological and the culturally acquired converge.
Thus the Laws manipulate private and public temporalities
through the invention of the transcendent force of the bodily
social, which can uphold the stability in the state. Disturbance
of this conjoined flow of movement upsets the rhythmic balance
of society, and puts at risk the periodicities of social time and
this ethical communality. The effort of fixing rhythm, by tying
it to specific tunes and by making it measurable, is a reaction
to the recognition of the transformative force in rhythm. It is
an intriguing possibility that this regularisation of rhythm also
goes with a reconceptualisation of how rhythm unfolds, away
from a linear image of flow into a repetitiveness that only circu-
larity allows: I have suggested that there is a notion of timeless-
ness – eternal stability – built into the circular chorus in honour
of Dionysus, the god of rhythm and the dancing pace. Although
I have not dealt with the metaphysical dimension of these obser-
vations, I surmise that the treatment of rhythmos is only one
elaboration of Plato’s wider philosophical concern with ‘motion’
and the temporality of a universal existence, where circularity
and infinite reiteration are equally important principles.80
In trying to put taxis on rhythm, however, Plato can be
thought to disregard two fundamentals in the anthropology
of rhythm. As stated, the notion of rhythm is, firstly, deeply
intertwined with the complex interaction of individual and
collective. However, our chorus leader in the Aristophanic
Thesmophoria herself suggested that Greek chorality is per-
ceived as seasonal (and circular), of greater or lesser intensity
202 �
and occurring in regular periodicities similar to the life cycles

of Mauss’ Eskimos. On this interpretation, a fully choralised –
in other words, socially fully integrated – state is an anthro-
pological impossibility. Secondly, an important consideration
here was that rhythm is after all the succession in time only of
the quasi-identical, and one wonders whether the attempt at
its regularisation must, in Greece at least, ultimately be abor-
tive, and rhythmos remain elusive. We have seen that from the
earliest perceptions of rhythmos (and arrhythmia) in Greece the
emphasis lies on the transformative element in rhythm, that
rhythm always bears an element of, and a potential for, change.
This element is expressed in the notion of rhythmos’ fluidity,
the idea of lack of fixity, of the always moving, and in rhyth-
mos’ linearity, by some of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, and is
equally communicated in the earliest representations of choral
dance on vases. It is worth pointing this out again since just a
quick glance at the rhythmic balance of the Egyptian chorus –
glossing for a moment over all obvious difference between the
two visual cultures vastly apart in time – reveals not a quasi-
identical line of dancers, but a group of interchangeable figures
building up an impressive machinery and contrasting mark-
edly with a standard Greek choral image (Figs. 10A and 10B).81
Individual and collective do not merge partially or seasonally
in the Egyptian representation; rather, these images converge
single dancer and community. They congeal movement, and
hence the passage of time, which is part of an ideology of ‘no
change’ emerging from the Egyptian reality as much as the
Greek ideology, examined for the Laws by Ian Rutherford in
this volume.82
It is perhaps significant that the Greek images I have dis-
cussed dwell particularly on the paradox of rhythm, where
sameness and transformation are constantly charted against
each other, where rhythmos and arrhythmia are complementa-
ries. Perhaps we can conclude that in trying to bend the fluid
chorus line into a circle of the identical, muzzling the element
of transformation, Plato’s Laws may have attempted to control
the uncontrollable. Plato may have introduced the Western
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Barbara Kowalzig
10A. Movement in the Greek chorus. Red-figure kalyx-krater from Falerii. Museum of the
Villa Giulia 909 (ca. 450 b.c.). Photo courtesy of Sopraintendenza per i Beni Archeologici
dell’Etruria Meridionale, Rome.
notion of rhythm in the sense of something regular and mea-

surable; but he did not change the Nomoi (laws or customs)
of chorality, nor perhaps the periodicities of social change, in
ancient Greece.
Not e s
1 Laws 702a: ταῦτα γὰρ πάντα εἴρηται τοῦ κατιδεῖν ἕνεκα πῶς
ποτ’ ἂν πόλις ἄριστα οἰκοίη, καὶ ἰδίᾳ πῶς ἄν τις βέλτιστα τὸν
αὑτοῦ βίον διαγάγοι. Translations are based on Saunders (1970),
often modified; a recent edition with commentary is Brisson and
204 �
10B. The static Egyptian chorus. Egyptian relief, painted, from the tomb of Urienptah (Fifth
Dynasty, third millennium b.c.). British Museum 1904, 0217.1; AN756748001. Image ©
British Museum.
Pradeau (2007). For ease of argument in what follows, I do not

distinguish between ‘the Athenian’ and ‘Plato’.
2 See, e.g., 626d–627a, 641a–d, 780a–c, 788a–c, 796d, 807b. On con-
ceptions of the self in relation to the collective (or the Law), see, e.g.,
the recent essay Sassi (2008); cf. also Bobonich (2002) 409–19.
3 Preventing change (metabole) in the Laws, including the vocabu-
lary of change: see esp. 676, correlating the passage of ‘time’ and
‘social change’, also 782a. On change in general, see 797d–798d,
889e–890a etc., and notes 40, 63. See further, e.g., 656d–657b;
660b (on unchanging Egyptian, Spartan, and Cretan chorality);
700a–701c (on interlinked musical and social change at Athens);
772a–d (on changing musical and other laws (κινεῖν)); 796e–800b
(musical education and children’s games 797a–c). Cf. also notes
29 and 50. The (im)mutability specifically of Magnesia’s laws is
debated: Bobonich (2002) 395–408. For Egypt see Rutherford,
Chapter 3 in this volume; for a wide-ranging treatment of Plato
and the arts in a contemporary context, see now Catoni (2008)
ch. 4, which appeared after the Stanford conference.
4 E.g., Reverdin (1945) 77–88; Lonsdale (1993) 21–43; Panno (2007)
135–78. Prauscello (2011), focusses on the interaction of Platonic
and tragic chorality.
5 Benveniste (1971 [1951]); cf. Chantraine (1968–80) s.v. The essay
is often quoted as authoritative in modern studies of rhythmos,
as a social, a literary, or a Platonic phenomenon: Brisson (1994)
88–90.
6 The anthropological dimension of rhythm has received little
attention from classicists; cf., e.g., Calame (1993). See Naerebout
(1997) 203–5 on the relationship between Greek music and poetic
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Barbara Kowalzig
metre; for the technical aspects of rhythm within music and

metre, see Barker (1984–9) I, index; Der neue Pauly s.v. Lonsdale
(1993) 38–43 offers broader remarks on choreia in an anthropo-
logical perspective of dance and body movement.
7 As discussed by Calame (2001 [1977]); G. Nagy (1990a) 339–81.
8 Csapo (2004) 235 and n. 116, esp. on symphonein and its
cognates.
9 On the circularity of sound, see Wersinger (2003) 191; on the
Timaeus, Wersinger (2001) 53–5; and Laws 799e–800b on laws as
song. For an intriguing link between the circular chorus and the
creation of sacred space and movement in Byzantine theology,
see the suggestive essay by Isar (2006).
10 See note 4.
11 The practice of Theoxenia, where gods assist human conviviality
by their presence, is a prominent example; in this festival social
hierarchies can be especially pronounced and can also stand in
the way of communality: Kurke (2003); Kowalzig (2007b) 188–201.
For Plato’s choral aetiology in the context of poetic conceptions
of choreia’s origins, see Prauscello (2011).
12 Symposium 187b–c, c–d raises the issue of ‘making use of
rhythm and harmony in human (= social?) matters (πρὸς τοὺς
ἀνθρώπους)’ and continues discussing education and the dif-
ferent dispositions of men, which might lead one to think that
choreia might be alluded to here, too.
13 On (much less neglected) harmonia, see Barker (1984–9) I.163–8.
14 ‘Philosophy with limitations’: Schofield (2003, 2006), for Plato as
a political philosopher.
15 Nightingale (1993).
16 Nightingale, Chapter 9 in this volume. On the Adoneia, see
Parker (2005) 283–9.
17 E.g., Vernant (1991) with the introduction by F. I. Zeitlin.
18 Traditionally treatments of Plato’s polytheistic legacy are more
concerned with theodicy and epistemology: Solmsen (1942);
Reverdin (1945). The collection Laurent (2003) begins to correlate
social issues and religious imagery in Plato, e.g., Bruit Zaidman
(2003); Castel-Bouchouchi (2003); Lefka (2003); Pradeau (2003);
cf. now Schofield (2006) 282–331.
19 Michon (2005d); cf. (2005a–c, 2005e, 2006).
20 Deleuze (1994 [1968]); see also Meschonnic (1982); Deleuze and
Guattari (1987 [1980]) esp. ch. 11.
21 The recent popularity of ‘the individual’ as a subject of study
in a context of perceived rapid change is remarkable, e.g., in the
colloquia L’individu et ses identités. Perspectives sociologiques,
anthropologiques et discursives (École des hautes études en sci-
ences sociales Paris, 8 February 2007); Personne, individu, sujet:
206 �
perspectives anthropologiques (EHESS Paris, 16 November 2009).

The medievalist Jean-Claude Schmitt has a major book project
on the rhythms of medieval life; it is through talking to him that
I first came to think about rhythm in the Laws. A first foray is
published as (2007); a workshop ‘Les rythmes de la vie au Moyen
Age’ was held in Paris in June 2006.
22 I have found useful a preliminary survey on the scholarship by
You (1994), with ample bibliography; see also Barba and Savarese
(2006) s.v. ‘rhythm’.
23 Durkheim (1915 [1912]) 258–9.
24 Durkheim (1915 [1912]) 23 (with n. 6: ‘the category of time . . .
expresses social time’); 488ff., here 490. Gell (1992) is a standard
work on the anthropology of time, but see the helpful survey of
approaches in Munn (1992); cf. Young and Schuller (1988).
25 Hubert and Mauss (1909) 219.
26 Durkheim (1915 [1912]) 23.
27 Mauss (1967 [1923], 1979 [1904–5]).
28 Mauss (1968–9) I.252. Cf. Durkheim (1915 [1912]) 247: ‘And since
a collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on
the condition of observing a certain order permitting coopera-
tion and movements in unison, these gestures and cries naturally
tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and
dances. But in taking a more regular form, they lose nothing of
their natural violence; a regulated tumult remains tumult’.
29 See Kowalzig (2004) 44–9; esp. Laws 828b–d, 816c–d, 799a–b,
656c–657b.
30 Benveniste (1971 [1951]).
31 Benveniste (1971 [1951]) 281–2, citing Boisacq; see Boisacq (1950)
845 s.v. ‘le sense du mot ayant été emprunté au mouvement régu-
lier des flots de la mer’. Note that the emendation in Aesch. Ag.
1408 water coming ῥυτᾶς ἐξ ἁλός (originating in the flowing sea)
might undermine Benveniste’s point about Plato; cf. also Aesch.
TrGF 78.
32 Democr. A 38, B 266; B 33 DK (cf. DK index. s.v.; cf. C. C. W.
Taylor (1999) 11–12 n. 4). Xerxes: Aesch. Pers. 747, where rhoos
and metarrhythmizo are nicely combined.
33 Benveniste (1971 [1951]) 285–6; cf. Sandoz (1971). For schema
as derived from skhein, cf. Aristox. Rhythm. 2.4–5. See also
Chantraine (1968–80) s.v.
34 Hdt. 5.58 (trans. Grene (1987), modified). The shape of letters is
often described as rhythmos: Arist. Metaph. 985b4.
35 Archil. fr. 128 W; cf. Anacr. PMG 415; Theognis 964.
36 Eur. Heracl. 130; Supp. 961.
37 Xen. Mem. 3.10.10. Eur. Cyc. 563, for the grace of human bearing;
El. 772, for the ‘manner’ in which Aigisthos was murdered; cf.
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Barbara Kowalzig
Theoc. Id. 26.23; for composure in mourning, Eur. Suppl. 94; for
musical disposition, Hipp. 529; for ‘discipline’, Aesch. Prom. 243.
38 Benveniste (1971 [1951]) 286.
39 Pl. Phlb. 17d; Symp. 187b–c (cf. note 12): ‘When a thing varies
with no disability of agreement, then it may be harmonized; just
as rhythm is produced by fast and slow, which in the beginning
were at variance but later came to agree’ (ὥσπερ γε καὶ ὁ ῥυθμὸς
ἐκ τοῦ ταχέος καὶ βραδέος, ἐκ διενηνεγμένων πρότερον, ὕστερον
δὲ ὁμολογησάντων γέγονε).
40 E.g., Laws 653e, 657b, 764e, 802c, 816c, 835a–b (music), 673e
(drink), 809d (calendar), 780 (importance of law and order in the
state, public and private), 782a ((dis-)order and social change),
898a–b, 904c–e, 966e–967a (cosmic order, movement and change);
cf. also 875c (superiority of episteme over law and order).
41 Benveniste (1971 [1951]) 287: ‘that “form” is from then on deter-
mined by “measure” and numerically regulated. . . . The notion
of rhythm is established. Starting from ῥυθμός, a spatial config-
uration defined by the distinctive arrangement and proportion
of the elements, we arrive at “rhythm”, a configuration of move-
ments organized in time’ (cf. Arist. [Pr.] 882b).
42 Holmes (2010a, b).
43 Damon is quoted in Republic 399e–400c (with Wallace (2004)
esp. 257–8) for a series of ‘feet’ (baseis) in relation to character.
It is not clear to what extent Damon may have anticipated Plato’s
enquiry into the bodily social; Barker (1984–9) I.168–9 (who also
cites Thesmophoriazousai 146ff. as among the first passages link-
ing music and character quality). Aristophanes’ Clouds 636–55
may refer to Damon’s ‘feet’, possibly well known already then.
One wonders what was discussed in Sophocles’ Περὶ χοροῦ;
Demokritos allegedly wrote ‘On rhythms and harmony’ (fr.
15c1). Cf. Arist. Poet. 1447a, where dancers are defined as prac-
tising mimesis of human dispositions through ‘rhythms given
(fixed?) shape’ (διὰ τῶν σχηματιζομένων ῥυθμῶν μιμοῦνται καὶ
ἤθη καὶ πάθη καὶ πράξεις); on rhythm and mimesis, see Halliwell
(1998) 68 n. 29. The fifth-century morality of schemata is now
well discussed in Catoni (2008) 213–40. For rhythm as the foun-
dation of dance, see the recent argument by Peponi (2009).
44 Cf. Laws 664e–665a and notes 12, 39, 48. I cannot go into the
details of Plato’s choral morality here, i.e., the emotional affects,
the harmonisation of pleasure and pain (Book 2), though see sub-
sequent discussion on 669b–670a and Kowalzig (2004) 44–9.
45 Lonsdale (1993) 30; see also Peponi (2009) 55–60 on the integra-
tion of voice and body in the chorus.
46 As Andrew Barker points out to me, the word regularly used
to describe rhythmically determined moments in the dance is
208 �
schema, describing a well-ordered pattern of bodily postures and

transitions between them (cf. Aristox. Rhythm. 2.4–5; Aristid.
Quint. 3.24–7). On schemata (figures) in dance in poetry and art,
see the excellent treatment by Catoni (2008) esp. ch. 3, 124–261,
now the most comprehensive study on the subject.
47 Laws 700a–1b (mixing of genres); 659c (mousike orthe) with
G. Nagy (1990a) 109–10; Ford (2002) 258–61; Kowalzig (2004)
44–9. Cf. Republic 394b–398b, on the problem of (un)mixed
mimesis in drama (esp. 397d).
48 The theme of the intimate union of rhythm and harmony, and
their relationship to any number of the other elements, recurs
frequently, e.g., 655a–b, 661c, 669b–671a, 672c–d, 800d, 802d–
e, 812b–c, 835a; Rep. 397b–c, 398d, 400d–e, 401d, 601a; Prt.
326b; cf. Grg. 502c. Rhythm is under individual scrutiny in the
Rep. 399e–401a.
49 Csapo (2004) esp. 236 for a list of Plato’s targets. A particular
worry was also that performance would take over and hide logos,
speech (Rep. 400d). On Plato and New Music, see Ford (2002)
259–60. As Ford comments to me, not all allusions in this passage
can unambiguously be referred to New Music. On the role of the
poet in the Laws, see now Mouze (2005).
50 Musical and social change: Rep. 424b–d, quoting Damon, with
P. Murray (1996); Laws 701b–d (on the social consequences),
816c–d (prevent innovation). Cf. notes 3, 29.
51 The following examples, taken from a variety of different peri-
ods and media, simply serve as an evocative demonstration
of how visual representations participate in some of the cen-
tral ideas of my argument. An involved historical and stylistic
analysis deserves a study in itself and cannot be achieved here.
The imagery of Greek dance has been collected on several occa-
sions – Lawler (1964); Prudhommeau (1965) – but much research
has gone into dancing steps rather than the psychology, or
somatology, of collective movement. An exception is Catoni
(2008) ch. 3. See Naerebout (1997) 209–53 for a full overview of
scholarship on dance images. A helpful collection of objects can
be found in ThesCra (2004) II; 4b, 299–343; Kleine (2005) 11–86;
Tölle-Kastenbein (1964) for geometric vases.
52 See Di Palo (1987) 72–83 for a discussion of the entire tomb and
good photographs of the paintings.
53 The notion of dancing against the rhythm as opposed to ‘with
the rhythm’: Ar. Thesm. 121; 955/6; 985 with Austin and Olson
(2004) ad loc.; Plut. 759; Plato Com. PCG 47.2. Cf. Pratin. TrGF
4 F 3.13 παραμελορυθμοβάταν in the context of Dionysiac song;
for the actual words of arrhythmia, arrhythmein, used in Plato in
a narrower sense, see, e.g., Laws 802e; Rep. 400d, 401a.
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Barbara Kowalzig
54 Kurke, Chapter 6 in this volume, also discusses this passage in

detail.
55 The slack versus the healthy body recurs frequently: Laws
724a–b, 761c–d; cf. 788c–790c.
56 Ar. Thesm. 947–1000 (note that the choroi are circular, on which
see the following section); Nub. 636ff.; Horai in Laws: 809d (sea-
sons and festivals to be observed κατὰ φύσιν), 782a, 797d, 828,
835a–b, 886a, 889c, 906c. The calendar: Book 8. On festivals as
anapaulai (pause, refreshments), cf. Thuc. 2.38.1 and Aristotle’s
Politics, with Ford (2004) 335–6.
57 Charting man against animal is a frequent theme in the Laws;
apart from the ones discussed here (653c–654a, 664e–665a,
672c), see, e.g., 807a–b.
58 Belfiore (1986); the issue is much discussed: Panno (2007) esp.
154–71 is the most recent comprehensive treatment of the role
of Dionysus in the Laws; on wine, cf. also Mouze (2005) 168–70,
247–62.
59 The main passages are in Books 1 and 2: 636e ff., 640d, 641d–e,
645d ff., 671e–672a etc. Rejuvenation: 645d–646a, 665d–666c.
60 Eur. Bacch. 204–9; Lissarrague (1998); contrast the chorus of Old
Silens with the age-mix in the chorus on a vase at the Villa Giulia
discussed here. Prauscello (2011) discusses the relationship
between the rejuvenation motif and the choruses of the Laws
and tragedy.
61 Ar. Geras PCG 147; cf. 130, 150, where Dionysus and the aulos
feature also. See also Ran. 345–9.
62 The allusion is to the famous Exekias bowl depicting Dionysus
lying comfortably on a boat decorated by wine and ivy (Munich
8729 (2004)), possibly hinting at the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus
(Lissarrague (1990) ch. 6 and 121 fig. 94).
63 That the body, as well as bodily pleasures, can be tricked into
socialisation is a frequent theme in the Laws. Medicine/drugs
( pharmaka and iaseis), including wine, is as often the real as it
is the metaphorical trigger to ‘change’ the body: 645d–e, 646c,
647e–648a, 666b, 672d, 720a–e, 797e–798a, 902d, 932e–933c.
The analogy of music and medicine as ‘changing’ the body is
striking and requires further analysis. See, e.g., Symp. 186; Laws
659d–660a, 666a–c; and for a modern approach McCarren (1998).
See also Provenza (2006).
64 Benveniste (1971 [1951]) 281.
65 Laws 790e. For the analogous effect of the application of music
and medicine to the body, see note 63.
66 Laws 813d.
67 Though not charted against each other, both images recur sev-
eral times in the Laws, see note 75.
210 �
68 D’Angour (1997); Pind. fr. 70b1–3. Cf. D’Alessio (2013) on the

long tradition of the circular chorus in Greek song-culture.
69 Csapo (2003), integrating visual with literary evidence, such as
the story of Arion and the dolphin in Hdt. 1.23–4; Hymn. Hom.
Bacch.; Ael. NA 12.45; PMG 939 etc. I examine these images and
how they manage to merge landed and maritime cultures in the
civic chorus in Kowalzig (2013).
70 Lissarrague (1990) ch. 6.
71 Pl. Laws 814e ff.; cf. 832e ff. For the link, see also 834e and
Kowalzig (2013).
72 Laws 773c–d.
73 Kaplan (1975) 135; for Okeanos cf. Hdt. 2.23, 4.36.
74 Pl. Pol. 273d–e; for Plato and the disfiguring sea, see Wersinger
(2001) 7–14; for ambiguous attitudes towards the sea, Purcell
(2003).
75 Maritime and shipping imagery for political processes in the
Laws: e.g., 639b, 758a (the ship of state sailing on the sea),
803a–b, 906d–e, 945c, 961e. Note also analogy between ship,
body, and soul in 691c.
76 One might tentatively adduce Pl. Phdr. 247a ff. and its visions of
eternity in circular motion. Danielle Allen points out to me that
fluid dynamics may represent a fundamental framework of thinking
about social change in political philosophy from Plato onwards.
77 The vase – often referred to as the Sabouroff Kylix – is an
extreme example of the large group of pieces showing two to
nine women wrapped together under a shared coat, often in reli-
gious or erotic contexts: see Buchholz (1987) for a catalogue, 32
n. 50 and fig. 22a (with further bibliography; the vase is clas-
sified under ‘Prozessionsschema’); Koch-Harnack (1989) 111–85
(111 fig. 1) discusses the full range of suggested interpretations;
Kleine (2005) 89–162 examines terracotta figurines of individual
‘Manteltänzerinnen’.
78 Nightingale (1995, 2004). The Pre-Socratics on ‘change’: e.g.,
G. Lloyd (1966); Barnes (1979) I, chs. 10 and 11.
79 See, e.g., P. Murray and Wilson (2004); Kowalzig (2007b).
80 E.g., Laws 893b ff.; the Timaeus engages with these questions.
81 As SeungJung Kim points out to me, the variety of poses in
Fig. 10A, while reflective of movement in the chorus, to some
degree will also have been inspired by contemporary vase paint-
ers’ delight in experimenting with the representation of different
bodily activities.
82 On Egyptian chorality see also notes 3 and 29. Although the
relief shown here dates to as early as the third millennium
b.c., representations of choruses seem in fact to undergo little
transformation.
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��
C hap t e r E i g h t
C h o ra l A n t i -
A e st h e t i cs
C h o r e i a and S pe c tatorship
As any modern spectator of highly skilled dance productions
knows, a large, coordinated group of dancers moving harmo-
niously can be enthralling. There is no reason to doubt that
Greek choruses of the archaic and the classical periods –
usually nonprofessional groups trained by professionalised
chorus teachers – provided a similarly enticing spectacle. For
one thing, in Greek choral shows the blending of kinetic with
vocal action would further enhance the overall musical glam-
our. Although audience responses to choral performances are
very rarely mentioned in extant Greek texts, there is some evi-
dence to suggest that a taste for delightful choral productions
was well developed in a large part of the archaic and classical
Greek world.1 Athenian spectators, in particular, must have
cultivated an advanced connoisseurship for things choral,
since a considerable number of civic performances (including
dramatic ones) relied to a large or full extent on effective choral
execution.2 Moreover, the inclusion of choral performance in
prestigious Athenian contests indicates that some criteria for
choral excellence must have been devised and applied.
Political and social investment in the large number of
Athenian dithyrambic productions in particular is a good
indicator of the attention that was paid to choral activity, as
212 �
Choral Anti-Aesthetics
the spectacle put on by the tribal dithyrambic choruses had

to prove worthy of the generous choregic expenditures.3
Audiences of the last quarter of the fifth century b.c. especially
must have experienced an outburst of instrumental, vocal,
and most probably kinetic experimentations in modernising
dithyrambic practices that seem to have affected dramatic cho-
ral trends as well.4 Although the fourth century provides less
evidence about the practices and the imaginary of Athenian
choreia, there is no question that an Athenian citizen of this
century as well, including Plato, would have been repeatedly
exposed to choral productions in his life-span, possibly as per-
former but, for the most part, customarily as spectator.5
But what made a choral show enjoyable and pleasing for both
audience and judges? In other words, what was the aesthetics
of the frequently performed choreia in Athens? Unfortunately,
no description and evaluation of choral dance as perceptive as
the well-known one in the eighteenth book of the Iliad sur-
vives from the classical period. The analogy between the airy
dance of youths and the maidens who hold each other’s hands
while running on their ‘skilled feet’, and the seated potter
who tests his wheel, remains a unique illustration of the way
a choral spectacle could be envisioned and appreciated from
the viewpoint of a fascinated spectator.6 Yet, from the scanty
and disappointingly brief references to choral performances in
fourth-century b.c. sources, we can still get a sense of allure-
ment in the spectacle that a large party of choreuts provided to
its audience. Kosmos, for instance, a term with deep roots in the
Greek conceptualisation of beauty, depicting at the same time
fine structure, ornamentation, and appropriateness, comes up
in at least two texts of the fourth century that refer to different
aspects of choral practices. ‘The golden crowns that I ordered
as ornaments (kosmos) for the chorus he plotted to destroy’,
says Demosthenes with both pride and anger, when referring to
his ambitious but ill-starred dithyrambic choregia that became
the target of Meidias’ envy.7 Although this passing reference to
the ornamentation of the dithyrambic chorus lacks the vivid-
ness with which Homer describes the costumes enhancing the
� 213
spectacle of the dancing maidens and youths in the Iliad (light

robes, fine tunics, pretty crowns, golden knives), it neverthe-
less indicates that fourth-century choral performances strove
to be awe-inspiring for their audiences and that embellishing
accessories were still considered a noticeable part of the overall
choral glamour.8
There is another, quite idiosyncratic, reference to the
kosmos of the choral show in fourth-century sources. In a rather
compulsive manifesto on the significance of orderliness in one’s
household, Xenophon claims that not only cloaks, blankets, and
table furnishings but also pots and pans, when nicely arranged,
are beautiful to look at. ‘There is nothing, in short, that does
not gain in beauty when set out in order (kata kosmon)’.9 For
in this state of orderly perfection, he adds, not only does each
‘chorus’ of utensils make a clear impression on the viewer, but
also the empty space among the various household sets looks
more appealing, precisely the way an orderly circular chorus
(kyklios choros) not only provides a beautiful spectacle in itself
but also enhances the beauty of its empty centre.10
At least two points can be made about this astonishing
osmosis between choral and household aesthetics. First, the
point of view of Xenophon’s speaker is none other than that
of a spectator, very likely one sitting in an elevated construc-
tion, the theatre, and looking down at the choral show as a
visual, almost geometric, structure. The faultless circle defined
by the perfectly shaped outline of the performing choreuts
can be seen from there as accentuating the clear blankness of
the interior open space. Second, the structural beauty of the
choral spectacle (apparently quite traditional in this case) is
evoked as a handy, easily shared paradigm.11 It is likely that
the immediate visual appeal of Xenophon’s choral example
underscores its commonly shared field of reference: choral per-
formance perceived – and enjoyed – as a spectacle, essentially
a theatrical one.
Much beyond the strictly dramatic enterprises, spectator-
ship and theatricalisation, apparently typical traits of Athenian
214 �
culture in the fourth century, seem to have played a decisive

role in the overall musical activity of the city.12 Although the
term ‘theatricalisation’ is used here to underline the impor-
tance placed by a given culture on spectatorship, regardless
of whether a performance is taking place in a theatrical con-
struction strictly speaking (‘theatre’ meaning originally a
place for viewing), it is nevertheless important to recall that
at the Great Dionysia the dithyramb was danced and sung
in the theatre of Dionysus by all ten tribes competing for
victory.13
In the context of the present examination, then, it is par-
ticularly important to note that the theatrocracy Plato talks
about in a much-discussed passage of the Laws (700–701b)
refers not to dramatic performances in particular but to what
the Athenian interlocutor considers the damaging effects of
the overall theatricalisation of the city’s musical culture with a
remarkable focus on choral genres. It is mainly choral genres,
namely paeans, hymns, laments, and dithyrambs (with a sig-
nificant reference to a genre traditionally executed solo, the
kitharodic nome, soon to be blamed by the Athenian as imitat-
ing aulodia in current vogue) that are explicitly named by the
Athenian as having been clearly distinguished in the deeper
past, yet mixed up and overly complicated in more recent
times. This remarkable reference to the notion and practice of
musical genres, for which both the term eidos (category, type)
and the term schema are used, suggests the continuing effec-
tiveness of some forms of chorality in fourth-century musical
culture and their perceived relevance to the phenomenon of
theatrocracy.14 At the same time the emphasis on the increased
role of spectatorship in what the Athenian considers musi-
cal degeneration and cultural decline is illuminating. It is the
mob’s unmusical yelling and uproar (amousoi boai plethous)
that have taken the place of strict and authoritative judgement,
he says, and the applause by means of clapping (krotoi epainous
apodidontes) has trumped the educated silence of disciplined
listeners of the past. It is because of this increased prevalence
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of spectatorship that the poets, possessed by a spirit of plea-

sure (katechomenoi huph’ hedones), capitalised on excessive
musical innovation, while considering the pleasure of the lis-
tener (hedone tou chairontos) the best criterion for their music.
This is how the theatres became vocal instead of voiceless and
how theatrocracy replaced aristocracy.15
The political connotations of this hapax Platonic coinage,
pointing at democracy, are evident and much discussed. But
on the level of pure denotation, the term ‘theatrocracy’ con-
cisely emblematizes what Plato conceived of as the predomi-
nance of spectatorship in overall musical matters, with choral
categories and variations at its core. It thus foregrounds the
decisive role that an impulsively pleased audience might have
played not only in the generally prevailing musical taste but
also, and more specifically, in choral trends.
Re d e f ining C h o ral Pleasure

In stark opposition to this intense theatricalisation of cur-
rent musical practices, an alternative and opposed model of
communal musical delight seems to be suggested in the Laws.
Although, as I wish to show, this diverse type of pleasure is con-
sistently inferred (and thus affirmed) in crucial passages of the
dialogue, it is never openly addressed as such by the Athenian,
and thus has remained largely unnoticed.16 This quite deviant
model appears to be the following: although almost all other
performance genres that are discussed in the Laws are treated
as objects of spectatorship and consequently as the objects of
the audience’s pleasure, the endorsed choral performances
and the type of pleasure attached to them are consistently not
thought of and described in these terms. On the contrary, in
cases where choral practices are discussed in some detail, spec-
tatorship tends to recede and the pleasure of choreia, though
usually affirmed, comes with substantial and often intriguing
ambiguities. This interesting Platonic approach to choral plea-
sure, which appears prominently in the second book of the
Laws, calls for detailed description.
216 �
A programmatic statement about the pleasure of choreia is

made close to the beginning of the second book of the Laws:
We, in contrast, have been given the aforementioned gods as

fellow-dancers, and they have given us the pleasant (meth’
hedones) perception of rhythm and harmony. Using this they
move us, and lead us in choruses, joining us together with
songs and dances; and that is why they bestowed the name
‘choruses’ – from the joy (chara) which is natural to these
activities. (654a)17
In Chapter 6 in this volume, Leslie Kurke discusses several

important aspects of this crucial passage. The particular aspect
I focus on is the interesting etymology offered by the Athenian,
by which the term choreia is presented as associated semanti-
cally with the word chara ( joy). With this inventive linguistic
twist, joy becomes not just essential for the Platonic view of
choreia but also embedded in it.18 Chara ( joy) has to be under-
stood as an organic part of choros. Furthermore, it is worth
noticing that in this programmatic statement joy (chara) and
pleasure (hedone) are seen as intertwined, complementary, and
almost identical conditions of choral activity. Gods give them
both to mortals. And while they name the song and dance
activity choreia, from the chara implanted therein, they also
provide the sense of rhythm and harmony to be enjoyed with
pleasure (meth’ hedones). In the following sections of the text,
the twin concepts chara ( joy) and hedone (pleasure) will alter-
nate with no significant semantic differentiation.19
Joy and pleasure are thus established as inherent aspects of
Plato’s approach to choreia. At this early stage of the discus-
sion, however, there is vagueness as to whose joy and pleasure
the Athenian refers. This ambiguity becomes sharper when
the Athenian raises a crucial question: ‘Do we all feel a simi-
lar joy in every choral performance?’ (655b–c). The verb used
here is chairomen, and the discussion will now focus on the
ethical component of choral pleasure as a criterion of judge-
ment. But as for the identity of the agents of this judgement
and the physical bearers of joy, there is still a remarkable lack
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of specificity. For the Athenian’s statement, ‘Most people, how-

ever, do say that the criterion for correct music is its power to
provide pleasure (hedonen) to the souls’ (655c), with its gen-
eral formulation leaves wide open the question of the identity
of the pleased subject. Whose pleasure and whose soul is the
Athenian referring to?
It is the immediately following and remarkably intricate
passage that will eventually give the answer to this question
(655d–656a). The passage is one of the most comprehensive
yet complex descriptions of the function of choreia as mimesis
(enactment of general disposition, character, and emotion) and
deserves separate detailed analysis. From the many important
issues it raises, I focus specifically on the problem of the iden-
tity of those depicted by the Athenian as experiencing plea-
sure in choral performances.
Ἐπειδὴ μιμήματα τρόπων ἐστὶ τὰ περὶ τὰς χορείας, ἐν πράξεσί

τε παντοδαπαῖς γιγνόμενα καὶ τύχαις, καὶ ἤθεσι καὶ μιμήσεσι
διεξιόντων ἑκάστων, οἷς μὲν ἂν πρὸς τρόπου τὰ ῥηθέντα ἢ
μελῳδηθέντα ἢ καὶ ὁπωσοῦν χορευθέντα, ἢ κατὰ φύσιν ἢ κατὰ
ἔθος ἢ κατ’ ἀμφότερα, τούτους μὲν καὶ τούτοις χαίρειν τε καὶ
ἐπαινεῖν αὐτὰ καὶ προσαγορεύειν καλὰ ἀναγκαῖον, οἷς δ’ ἂν
παρὰ φύσιν ἢ τρόπον ἤ τινα συνήθειαν, οὔτε χαίρειν δυνατὸν
οὔτε ἐπαινεῖν αἰσχρά τε προσαγορεύειν. οἷς δ’ ἂν τὰ μὲν τῆς
φύσεως ὀρθὰ συμβαίνῃ, τὰ δὲ τῆς συνηθείας ἐναντία, ἢ τὰ μὲν
τῆς συνηθείας ὀρθά, τὰ δὲ τῆς φύσεως ἐναντία, οὗτοι δὲ ταῖς
ἡδοναῖς τοὺς ἐπαίνους ἐναντίους προσαγορεύουσιν· ἡδέα γὰρ
τούτων ἕκαστα εἶναί φασι, πονηρὰ δέ, καὶ ἐναντίον ἄλλων
οὓς οἴονται φρονεῖν αἰσχύνονται μὲν κινεῖσθαι τῷ σώματι τὰ
τοιαῦτα, αἰσχύνονται δὲ ᾄδειν ὡς ἀποφαινόμενοι καλὰ μετὰ
σπουδῆς, χαίρουσιν δὲ παρ’ αὑτοῖς.
Choral performances are acts mimetic of character, exhibited
in all sorts of actions and circumstances, and each brings to
bear both his habitual disposition and his capacity to imitate.
Now those whose character is in accord with what is said and
sung and in any way performed – because of nature or habit
or both – are accordingly delighted by the performed acts, and
praise them and pronounce them fine. Those, however, who
find that the performed acts go against nature, character, or
218 �
a certain habituation, are unable to delight in them or to praise

them, and pronounce them ugly. Then there are some whose nat-
ural predisposition is correct but whose habituation is adverse,
and others whose habituation is correct but whose natural pre-
disposition is adverse, and these make pronouncements contrary
to their pleasure. They claim that each of these performances is
pleasant but wicked, and in the presence of others, whom they
think prudent, they are ashamed to move their bodies in such
ways and ashamed to sing as though they seriously approved
of them. Yet they do delight in them when they are all by them-
selves.20 (655d–656a)
Pleasure is the central topic of the passage, marked out by the

verb chairein (enjoy), the noun hedone (pleasure), and the adjec-
tive hedea (pleasurable). Furthermore, the passage consists of
two long sections. The first one, with its remarkable combi-
nation of passive verbs and impersonal expressions, leaves
entirely – if not deliberately – obscure the identity of the
pleased subjects to whom the Athenian is referring.21 Equally
obscure is the identity of those referred to as ‘these persons’
(houtoi) in the second long section. It is only in the last part
of this long passage that the identity of the individuals the
Athenian is referring to is revealed. Only here does it finally
become clear that the ones experiencing choreia as a pleasur-
able (yet harmful) activity are none other than the choral per-
formers themselves and that Plato’s real concern throughout
the passage is oriented towards the citizens who participate in
choral enactments.22 As this last clause has a concluding func-
tion, one realises that the Athenian is explicitly referring here
to the same category of individuals he was alluding to in the
first section of this long passage.
Two points need to be underlined. First, the Athenian’s
interest is clearly placed on the performer of choreia, the per-
former’s contradictions or internal conflicts in relation to his
own pleasure. And, second, although the presence of the audi-
ence does indeed emerge here – notice the phrase in front of
others (enantion allon) – it does so only from an unexpectedly
reversed point of view. In other words, what appears to be
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crucial in this case is not the audience looking at the performer

and enjoying or disapproving of his performance. On the con-
trary, it is the choral performer who, while looking at the audi-
ence, or just sensing its presence, is unable to take pleasure
in his own performance. Forced by his internal conflict, the
performer takes pleasure in his own performance in private
(notice the expression at the very end of the passage: chairousi
par’ autois). This strikingly reversed image of the spectators,
perceived from the point of view of the choral performer as
affecting the terms of his own pleasure, is a remarkably rare
instance in Greek approaches to choral – and, more broadly,
musical – pleasure and is very indicative of Plato’s priorities in
his discussion of things choral.
The Athenian’s interest in the pleasure of the choral
performer becomes even more intriguing when one realises the
following pattern: in the upcoming sections of Book 2, when-
ever the dialogue touches on other issues relevant to mousike
and performance, the discussion about pleasure focusses on
spectatorship and on the pleasure of the audience. Conversely,
whenever the Athenian brings the discussion back to choreia
in particular, his interest returns to the pleasure of the per-
former himself. This pattern becomes evident in the passage
where the Athenian introduces the topic of the criteria of vic-
tory in the mousikoi agones:
Μῶν οὖν οἰόμεθα καὶ κομιδῇ μάτην τὸν νῦν λεγόμενον λόγον
περὶ τῶν ἑορταζόντων λέγειν τοὺς πολλούς, ὅτι τοῦτον δεῖ
σοφώτατον ἡγεῖσθαι καὶ κρίνειν νικᾶν, ὃς ἂν ἡμᾶς εὐφραίνεσθαι
καὶ χαίρειν ὅτι μάλιστα ἀπεργάζηται; δεῖ γὰρ δή, ἐπείπερ
ἀφείμεθά γε παίζειν ἐν τοῖς τοιούτοις, τὸν πλείστους καὶ
μάλιστα χαίρειν ποιοῦντα, τοῦτον μάλιστα τιμᾶσθαί τε, καὶ
ὅπερ εἶπον νυνδή, τὰ νικητήρια φέρειν.
Then do we think that the account the many give about cel-
ebrators of holidays is completely vacuous, when they say that
the person who as much as possible gives us joy and delight is the
one who should be considered wisest and judged victorious? For
since we give ourselves over to play on such occasions, the one
who makes the most people enjoy themselves the most should be
220 �
the one who is most honoured and, as I just now said, given
the victory prizes. (657e)
The subject of pleasure remains central but the point of view is

now different. For it is the spectator’s, the audience’s, pleasure
that becomes the issue in question. Certainly, the Athenian’s
goal is to problematise the common perceptions regarding the
audience’s pleasure in mousike. But, given the focus of the pres-
ent discussion, it is interesting that, exactly at the point where
performance reappears as an ‘object’ of the audience’s pleasure,
choreia disappears. The one whose exclusive goal is to compete
only for the pleasure of the audience is at the moment a generi-
cally unspecified performer.23 Yet, in the immediately follow-
ing section, specific genres of performance are finally named.
These are: Homeric rhapsody, kitharody, tragedy, comedy, and
puppet shows (658b).
And although the broader frame and cause of the discussion
is choreia, references to choral genres are absolutely absent from
this quite extensive list. One could perhaps claim that choreia
may be implied in the Athenian’s references to tragedy and
comedy. If so, it is latent rather than thematised, especially if
one recalls that Platonic discussions of drama hardly ever seem
to focus on the choral parts. To make this point even clearer:
one should at least wonder why in this discussion about the
audience’s pleasure in the mousikoi agones, and in this other-
wise detailed list of performance genres, the Athenian never
mentions the choral and agonistic genre par excellence: the
dithyramb.24
Although absent from this crucial section of Plato’s
approach to mousike, choreia resurfaces later in his discussion
when the Athenian returns to the topic of the relationship
between choreia and paideia (659). Practicing choreia reappears
there as the way to cultivate in society an acceptable vehicle
of pleasure. In this broader frame the Athenian proposes the
establishment of three citizen-choruses based on age-class: the
children’s choruses, the young people’s choruses, and the older
people’s choruses. Indeed, a theatrical setting is evoked here,
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albeit momentarily: the children’s chorus is said to ‘come for-

ward first to sing these things before the whole city’ (664c). Yet
there is no further reference to the children’s performance as a
theatrical event to be enjoyed by its spectators, whereas both
the presence and the pleasure of the audience recede when
the Athenian makes a vital statement on choral pleasure in a
following passage. The statement, to which I shall return sev-
eral times in the course of this chapter, is emblematic of Plato’s
overall view of chorality in the Laws:
Τὸ δεῖν πάντ’ ἄνδρα καὶ παῖδα, ἐλεύθερον καὶ δοῦλον, θῆλύν

τε καὶ ἄρρενα, καὶ ὅλῃ τῇ πόλει ὅλην τὴν πόλιν αὐτὴν αὑτῇ
ἐπᾴδουσαν μὴ παύεσθαί ποτε ταῦτα ἃ διεληλύθαμεν, ἁμῶς γέ
πως ἀεὶ μεταβαλλόμενα καὶ πάντως παρεχόμενα ποικιλίαν,
ὥστε ἀπληστίαν εἶναί τινα τῶν ὕμνων τοῖς ᾄδουσιν καὶ
ἡδονήν.
That every man and child, free and slave, female and male –
indeed the whole city – should never cease chanting to (and
enchanting) the entire city, itself to itself, these things we have
described, which must in one way or another be continually
changing, presenting variety in every way, so that the singers
will take insatiable desire and pleasure in their hymns. (665c)
The transgression of gender, age, and class boundaries (man

and boy, slave and free, man and woman) seems to be essential
for the Athenian’s vision of choreia. Even more, the image of
the entire polis singing to the entire polis, itself to itself, makes
the Athenian’s formulation striking. For in this case the line
separating the sender from the receiver, the performer from
the audience, is deliberately blurred. As the polis itself sings
to itself, the act of listening becomes totally absorbed by the
act of performing. Moreover, given that Plato plays with the
double meaning of epaidein as both chanting and enchanting,
the enchantment of the listener, that is, his superlative plea-
sure, completely overlaps with that of the performer: it is the
singing city that enchants itself. Thus, again, in the Athenian’s
conceptualisation of choral pleasure, the pleasure of the per-
former prevails. This becomes even more explicit in the last
222 �
clause: modification and variety will guarantee insatiable

desire (aplestia) and pleasure (hedone) for the singers (notice:
tois aidousin). Although modification and variety are in fact
deeply compromised in Magnesia by mechanisms of censor-
ship, it is nevertheless important to note how in this passage
the Athenian is strongly endorsing a notion of continual plea-
sure for the choral performers.25
Before I move on to an attempt to interpret the phenomenon
I have been describing, I would like to adduce two more inter-
connected instances that further corroborate my observations
so far. Both instances come from the Athenian’s analysis of the
chorus of the elders. In the first instance (665d), the discussion
focusses once again on the pleasure of the performer – albeit in
a negative way. Because of his advanced age, the older citizen
is described as taking less pleasure in singing (hetton chairei).
Furthermore, there is an explicit reference to the theatre and
its audience as the natural place of choral performances (en
theatroi kai pantoiois anthropois, 665e). Yet spectatorship
is brought up only as an inversion, similar to the one men-
tioned earlier.26 That is, the theatre setting and the audience
turn out to be viewed only as the factors that embarrass the
elder choreut. They deprive him of his own pleasure and make
him unwilling to perform. Eventually, however, the Athenian’s
entire analysis of the relationship between pleasure and musi-
cal knowledge restores the elder performer’s pleasure. While
playing a leading role in the musical education of the youth,
the elder performers, still in their choral identity – yet in an
intimate and private setting – can now sing and thus delight
undisturbed in their own harmless (asineis) pleasures (670d).
De -a e st h e t ic ising C h o r e i a
I have traced an interesting pattern in the second book of the
Laws as regards the recurrent theme of pleasure in mousike.
Whenever the Athenian refers to or analyses other genres
of mousike, he focusses on the pleasure these genres do – or
should – provide to their audiences. On the contrary, whenever
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he refers to or analyses choreia, the audience’s response to the

choral act is passed over in silence, while the Athenian shifts his
point of view to the pleasure of the choral performer himself.
Even in a few cases where the audience or the theatre is men-
tioned in the broader context of choreia, they are mentioned
either parenthetically or, more importantly, with a remarkable
inversion, that is, as mere impediments to the enjoyment of the
choral act by the choral performer.
This pattern becomes even more intriguing when one thinks
not only of the overall theatricalisation of mousike in fourth-
century Athens, which (as I mentioned in the first section of my
chapter) Plato criticises as overly dependent on the audience’s
pleasure, but also of the way in which choral performances are
represented in earlier poetry as well. It is not accidental that
in the famous description of Achilles’ shield, also mentioned
earlier in this essay, the depiction of the spectacular dance of
the young boys and girls is concluded with the reference to a
large audience ( pollos homilos, 603) that is watching the desir-
able dance (himeroenta choron, 603), and taking pleasure in it
(terpomenoi, 604).27 That is, not only is the entire scene of the
dance clearly supposed to stimulate our visual imagination –
‘us’ being the external audience of the poem – but an internal
audience is explicitly staged as taking delight while watching
the dance. Similarly, in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the chorus
of the Delian maidens is represented as a virtuoso ensemble,
able to provide to its audiences, with both song and dance, the
superlative pleasure denoted by the verb thelgousi (enchant).28
In other words, in Greek thought choral performances fulfil
their social and cultural function when the communication act
between senders and receivers, between choreuts and audi-
ence, comes full circle. Choral performances become fully
meaningful as aesthetic objects to be offered to, and enjoyed
by, their viewers, actual or imagined, humans or gods.29
Certainly, it is in modern times that the term aesthetic
object emerged as a quintessential (yet debated) concept in
the area of aesthetics. The point made here, however, is that,
although lacking such terminology, archaic and classical Greek
224 �
conceptualisations of the choral were indeed prone to focus-

sing on the experience of chorality as an ‘object’ of an audi-
ence’s viewing, as a spectacle with aesthetic qualities to be
appreciated and enjoyed by a given individual or collective
‘subject’. In such cases, then, we need not understand the
aesthetic ‘object’ as requiring a strictly detached and ‘merely
contemplative judgement’, as Kant, preeminently, understood
the process of aesthetic experience in modern times. Yet, as
mentioned previously, there is evidence from Greek texts that
a contemplative process, with varying grades of detachment,
was indeed key to discourses about musical attendance. By
using the term ‘aesthetic object’ in relation to choreia, then,
I refer to quite complex modes of looking at and taking plea-
sure in choral acts from the standpoint of a viewer.30 Despite
its modern origins, Beardsley’s general, moderate, and explan-
atory formulation, according to which aesthetic experience
takes place when ‘the greater part’ of one’s mental activity ‘is
made pleasurable by being tied to the form and qualities of
a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended object on
which his primary attention is concentrated’, presents inter-
esting affinities with the broader mind-set through which chor-
eia is contemplated as a spectacle in Greek texts.31
How are we, then, to explain Plato’s remarkable focus on
choreia as a pleasurable act for the choral performers themselves,
a pleasure almost incompatible with the presence of a watch-
ing audience? I suggest that Plato’s treatment of choreia in the
Laws is part of a broader strategy on his part to de-aestheticise
it.32 In other words, precisely because choreia is not anymore
a spectacle supposed to be heard, seen, and appreciated from
outside but only an action to be performed and enjoyed by its
enacting agents, its effect as an aesthetic object recedes and
vanishes – hence, Plato’s depiction of the entire polis sing-
ing to and enchanting the entire polis in a remarkably self-
reflexive way.33
This de-aestheticisation of choreia can be best interpreted
as Plato’s final and novel response to the musical practices he
had been criticising in all his previous works, eminently in
� 225
the Republic.34 Interestingly, though, his well-known struggle

with the modes of audience response elicited by musical per-
formances in Athens, especially with epic and dramatic poetry,
usually passes over in silence choral practices. Thus, the exten-
sive discussion of choreia in his last work, the Laws, emerges as
his way of fully redeeming mousike, while essentially depriving
it of exactly what he considered a major cause of its decline:
its function as an object of the audience’s pleasure and, conse-
quently, its utter theatricalisation. One may object that a cre-
ative mode of attending and taking delight in performances,
on the one hand, and the unexamined excessive pleasure Plato
talks about in the Laws, on the other, are far from identical.
Indeed, if Plato had been willing to entertain the possibility
of a moderate aesthetic attitude to be practised by audiences
at large, he would have been more likely to address choreia not
only as a fulfilling enactment for the performers but also as
a pleasing spectacle for the viewers. Such an approach, how-
ever, would result in perplexities similar to those we encoun-
ter in the third book of the Republic, where in the context of
the discussion about mousike it eventually becomes clear that
even the most purified experience of beauty may run the risk
of causing vehement impulses.35 That is to say, aesthetic expe-
rience is understood by Plato as an essentially liminal state,
inherently prone to transgressing the boundaries between rea-
son and impulse.36 Even if the effects of this liminality can be
handled by the guardians of the Republic, could they ever be
modulated by the entire body of citizens of the Laws?
Hence, in the Laws the pleasure of the audience is ques-
tioned in multiple ways. In cases where it is directly addressed,
its legitimacy is distrusted, while an inevitably ideological
principle of correctness (orthotes), explicitly opposed to the
audience’s pleasure, emerges as the sole criterion of musi-
cal excellence.37 One suspects that it is upon this decorum of
orthotes that choral competitions (about the organisation of
which we learn later in the Laws, with no references to attend-
ing audiences) are to be founded.38 Correctness, the Athenian
says, can be certified only by those with profound knowledge
226 �
and acute perceptiveness of rhythms and harmonies, a type of

musical proficiency that the ‘choric Muse’ is insufficient to pro-
vide all by itself.39 Moreover, ‘it is ridiculous of the big crowds
to believe they can adequately understand what is harmoni-
ous and rhythmical’, the Athenian adds.40 Unquestionably,
such straightforward precepts shed light on the reasons why
Plato’s discussion of an all-participatory choreia emphasises the
choreuts’ own delight while largely circumventing the audi-
ence’s pleasure.41
The peculiarity, even bizarreness, of a fourth-century b.c.
vision of an all-participatory yet essentially untheatrical and
de-aestheticised model of musical practice through civic choreia
can be better understood if juxtaposed with Aristotle’s views
on mousike in his Politics.42 In the eighth book of the Politics –
which is likely to have been composed earlier than other parts
of the Politics and thus to reflect debates within the Academy –
Aristotle discusses the proper education of the young, while
focussing specifically on musical training.43 Several claims for-
mulated in his analysis can be compared and contrasted with
Plato’s views on the same subject in the Laws, a most striking
one being Aristotle’s emphasis on music as a social good to be
apprehended and enjoyed mainly, if not exclusively, in atten-
dance, in direct and explicit opposition to performance. The
following passage is indicative of this view:
ἀλλ’ ἴσως ἂν δόξειεν ἡ τῶν παίδων σπουδὴ παιδιᾶς εἶναι

χάριν ἀνδράσι γενομένοις καὶ τελειωθεῖσιν. ἀλλ’ εἰ τοῦτ’ ἐστὶ
τοιοῦτον, τίνος ἂν ἕνεκα δέοι μανθάνειν αὐτούς, ἀλλὰ μή,
καθάπερ οἱ τῶν Περσῶν καὶ Μήδων βασιλεῖς, δι’ ἄλλων αὐτὸ
ποιούντων μεταλαμβάνειν τῆς ἡδονῆς καὶ τῆς μαθήσεως;
καὶ γὰρ ἀναγκαῖον βέλτιον ἀπεργάζεσθαι τοὺς αὐτὸ τοῦτο
πεποιημένους ἔργον καὶ τέχνην τῶν τοσοῦτον χρόνον
ἐπιμελουμένων ὅσον πρὸς μάθησιν μόνον. εἰ δὲ δεῖ τὰ τοιαῦτα
διαπονεῖν αὐτούς, καὶ περὶ τὴν τῶν ὄψων πραγματείαν
αὐτοὺς ἂν δέοι παρασκευάζειν.
But perhaps it might be thought that the serious pursuits of
boys are for the sake of amusement when they have grown up
to be men. But if something of this sort is the case, why should
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the young need to learn this accomplishment themselves, and

not, like the Persian and the Median kings, participate in the
pleasure and the education of music by means of others perform-
ing it? For those who have made music a business and a profes-
sion must necessarily perform better than those who practice
only long enough to learn. But if it is proper for them to labour
at accomplishments of this sort, then it would be also right for
them to prepare the dishes of an elaborate cuisine. (1339a–b;
trans. Rackham (1932))
Mousike, then, fulfils its goal when enjoyed by a body of adult

listeners who are in all possible ways marked as other than the
performers. Thus, instead of Plato’s emblematic imagery of the
unceasing choreia of the polis, where all age, gender, and social
groups participate actively in the chant (and in the enchant-
ment) of the entire city, Aristotle seems to model his musical
ideal upon the Median and Persian kings who participate in
the pleasure of music by means of others performing it. Musical
artefacts are like culinary masterpieces: they are meant to be
consumed, appreciated, and judged not by those who create
them but by others.
Another passage in the eighth book of the Politics (1341b)
further illuminates Aristotle’s views on musical culture in rela-
tion to Plato’s in the Laws:
ἐπεὶ δὲ τῶν τε ὀργάνων καὶ τῆς ἐργασίας ἀποδοκιμάζομεν τὴν

τεχνικὴν παιδείαν (τεχνικὴν δὲ τίθεμεν τὴν πρὸς τοὺς ἀγῶνας·
ἐν ταύτῃ γὰρ ὁ πράττων οὐ τῆς αὑτοῦ μεταχειρίζεται χάριν
ἀρετῆς, ἀλλὰ τῆς τῶν ἀκουόντων ἡδονῆς, καὶ ταύτης φορτικῆς,
διόπερ οὐ τῶν ἐλευθέρων κρίνομεν εἶναι τὴν ἐργασίαν,
ἀλλὰ θητικωτέραν· καὶ βαναύσους δὴ συμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι·
πονηρὸς γὰρ ὁ σκοπὸς πρὸς ὃν ποιοῦνται τὸ τέλος· ὁ γὰρ
θεατὴς φορτικὸς ὢν μεταβάλλειν εἴωθε τὴν μουσικήν, ὥστε καὶ
τοὺς τεχνίτας τοὺς πρὸς αὐτὸν μελετῶντας αὐτούς τε ποιούς
τινας ποιεῖ καὶ τὰ σώματα διὰ τὰς κινήσεις), σκεπτέον ἔτι περί
τε τὰς ἁρμονίας καὶ τοὺς ῥυθμούς.
And since we reject professional education in the instruments
and in performance (and we count performance in competi-
tions as professional, for the performer does not take part in it
228 �
for his own improvement, but for his hearers’ pleasure, and that
vulgar pleasure, owing to which we do not consider performing
to be proper for free men, but somewhat menial; and indeed
performers do become vulgar, since the object at which they
aim is a low one, as vulgarity in the audience usually influences
the music, so that it imparts to the artists who practice it with
a view to suit the audience a special kind of personality, and
also a bodily frame because of the movements required), we
must therefore give some consideration to tunes and rhythms.
(trans. Rackham (1932))
No doubt, Aristotle’s reference to the uncontrolled power of the

audience’s pleasure over things musical is an accusation against
musical trends very similar to Plato’s major concerns, those cap-
tured very concisely in the Laws through the term theatrokratia.
In other words, the elder Plato and the much younger Aristotle
were very likely diagnosing, perhaps over approximately the
same time, the same problem in Athenian musical matters. But
although sharing the same diagnosis, the two philosophers seem
to come up with diametrically opposite solutions. Aristotle
takes the theatricalisation of musical culture as a given, nega-
tive, condition, only to be controlled by a further differentia-
tion, in fact total separation, between professional performers
and an audience of citizens. If, as he claims, the performer does
not take part in performance for his own improvement, but for
his hearers’ pleasure, and that vulgar pleasure, then perform-
ing should not be considered anymore the activity of free men.
In brief, theatrokratia prompted him to envision and encour-
age a total schism between performance and attendance, while
further establishing mousike as an aesthetic object to please a
knowledgeable audience. The same phenomenon, theatrokratia,
prompted Plato to conceive of a universalised, all-participatory
civic choreia to please the performers themselves, while passing
over in silence the presence and the role of spectatorship and,
along with it, the conceptualisation of choral performance as an
aesthetic experience for the viewer.44
If de-aestheticisation is a reasonable way to understand
Plato’s vision of choreia in the Laws, then a parallel reading
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of the second book of the Laws with the tenth book of the
Republic might illuminate further the interpretation suggested
here. In crucial passages of his analysis of choreia in the Laws,
the Athenian tends to use the terms epoide and epaidein.45 Both
terms seem to imply the performance of enchanting speech
acts, possibly akin to prayers. Furthermore, the act of simply
aidein (chanting) is many times deliberately blurred with that
of epaidein (enchanting), even presented as almost identical to
it.46 If one takes into account this interesting association and
the almost mutual interchangeability between choral aidein
and epaidein in the Laws, then it seems that the tenth book of
the Republic can be a great help for our interpretation of the
phenomenon described in the Laws:
Εἰ δέ γε μή, ὦ φίλε ἑταῖρε, ὥσπερ οἱ ποτέ του ἐρασθέντες, ἐὰν
ἡγήσωνται μὴ ὠφέλιμον εἶναι τὸν ἔρωτα, βίᾳ μέν, ὅμως δὲ
ἀπέχονται, καὶ ἡμεῖς οὕτως, διὰ τὸν ἐγγεγονότα μὲν ἔρωτα
τῆς τοιαύτης ποιήσεως ὑπὸ τῆς τῶν καλῶν πολιτειῶν
τροφῆς, εὖνοι μὲν ἐσόμεθα φανῆναι αὐτὴν ὡς βελτίστην
καὶ ἀληθεστάτην, ἕως δ’ ἂν μὴ οἵα τ’ ᾖ ἀπολογήσασθαι,
ἀκροασόμεθ’ αὐτῆς ἐπᾴδοντες ἡμῖν αὐτοῖς τοῦτον τὸν λόγον,
ὃν λέγομεν, καὶ ταύτην τὴν ἐπῳδήν, εὐλαβούμενοι πάλιν
ἐμπεσεῖν εἰς τὸν παιδικόν τε καὶ τὸν τῶν πολλῶν ἔρωτα.
ᾀσόμεθα δ’ οὖν ὡς οὐ σπουδαστέον ἐπὶ τῇ τοιαύτῃ ποιήσει
ὡς ἀληθείας τε ἁπτομένῃ καὶ σπουδαίᾳ, ἀλλ’ εὐλαβητέον
αὐτὴν ὂν τῷ ἀκροωμένῳ, περὶ τῆς ἐν αὑτῷ πολιτείας δεδιότι,
καὶ νομιστέα ἅπερ εἰρήκαμεν περὶ ποιήσεως.
But if not, my friend, even as men who have fallen in love, if
they think that the love is not good for them, hard though it
be, nevertheless refrain, so we, owing to the love of this kind
of poetry inbred in us by our education in these fine polities
of ours, will gladly have the best possible case made out for
her goodness and truth, but so long as she is unable to make
good her defence we shall chant over to ourselves as we listen
the reasons that we have given as a countercharm to her spell,
to preserve us from slipping back into childish loves of the
multitude, for we have come to see that we must not take such
poetry seriously as a serious thing that lays hold on truth, but
that he who lends an ear to it must be on his guard fearing for
230 �
the polity in his soul and must believe what we have said about
poetry. (Rep. 607e–608a; trans. Shorey (1930–5))
The passage is well known and important for many reasons,

including the depiction of the listener’s response to poetry as
eros.47 For the needs of the present discussion, however, I would
like to focus specifically on the way the dynamic between lis-
tening and performing is represented and ultimately trans-
formed in this case. Socrates is talking about two distinctive
functions. On the one hand, he refers to the function of lis-
tening to poetry (akroasometha, akroomenoi). But while this
condition of attending to poetry as external listeners is clearly
stated in his argument, a striking transmutation takes place at
the same time. That is, according to Socrates the only way for
the listener to not get seduced qua listener is his chanting of
epoidai, the very type of utterance repeatedly mentioned in the
Laws. In this statement, then, where oddly enough the listener
is in effect turned into a counterperformer, the act of listen-
ing is clearly abolished. Counteracting poetry’s charm means
undermining the very condition in which its peculiar seduc-
tive power flourishes: the condition where poetry is an entity
sensed and theorised from the point of view of an attentive
listener – in other words, the condition in which poetry can be
approached as an aesthetic object.
In the passage of the Republic, the chanting of epoidai seems
to have as its content the Socratic type of philosophical dis-
course and is thus used in a rather metaphorical manner; by
contrast, in this part of the Laws, the performance of epoidai
is fully redeemed and rehabilitated as an act of true chanting,
now transfused into the choral song of the polis. And one can-
not resist drawing attention to an intriguing detail: the self-
reflexive chanting of the epoidai in the Republic (notice the
expression hemin autois) sounds like the kernel that gener-
ates the self-reflexivity of the entire polis’ song to itself in the
Laws. In the Republic the listener is recommended to turn him-
self into a counterperformer and to become a singer of epoidai
to himself, in effect cancelling his position as a listener. In the
� 231
Laws, choreia becomes the model for a universal all-participa-

tory chanting of a limited range of poetry approved by the
authorities, where the spectator and the listener have silently
disappeared, yielding to a world of performers. Lacking active
listeners and spectators, this choral world does not lend
itself to contemplation anymore. This is choreia’s remarkably
de-aestheticised moment.
C h o ral M at r ix
And yet, despite this eclipse of the spectator of choreia, despite
the obliteration of the spectator’s pleasure in watching the
choruses performing, the topic of pleasure, with its remark-
able emphasis on the pleasure of the choral performer, is still
brought up, as we saw, in all crucial passages of Plato’s discus-
sion of choreia. But what does this pleasure consist of ? One
may claim that the pleasure of actively participating in choreia,
the pleasure of being a choral performer, could be described
as the result of inner inclination and impulse rather than one
of contemplation.48 In the key passage of the Laws referring to
the choreia of the polis, the whole city is described as infinitely
chanting to (and enchanting) the entire city, itself to itself,
while continual change, providing variety, helps the singers
take insatiable desire and pleasure in their hymns.49 As men-
tioned earlier, the Laws is actively hostile to real innovation
in things musical; therefore, ‘change’ and ‘variety’ in this case
must be simply understood as referring to alternating hymnic
or encomiastic compositions to be chosen strictly among those
approved by the authorities.50 Interestingly, the word used for
insatiable desire is aplestia, a term that in Greek texts, and espe-
cially in Plato, is usually associated with the desire for material
goods or physical needs.51 This passage, then, is as close as we
can get to choreia’s pleasure as an almost physical gratification
that obeys the laws of bodily consumption and the process of
emptying out and replenishment. It is as close as we can get to
the choral performer’s pleasure as a means of satisfaction simi-
lar to that one finds in lovemaking, eating, or drinking.52
232 �
This peculiar condition that establishes a primary asso-

ciation between choreia and the physical gratification of the
choral performers themselves is quite similar to the type of
pleasure mentioned in Hesiod’s description of the archetypal
choral performers, the Muses. It involves the representation
of the divine chorus in a quasi-processional dance movement,
while they sing hymns:
ἐρατὴν δὲ διὰ στόμα ὄσσαν ἱεῖσαι

μέλπονται, πάντων τε νόμους καὶ ἤθεα κεδνὰ
ἀθανάτων κλείουσιν, ἐπήρατον ὄσσαν ἱεῖσαι.
αἳ τότ’ ἴσαν πρὸς Ὄλυμπον, ἀγαλλόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ,
ἀμβροσίῃ μολπῇ· περὶ δ’ ἴαχε γαῖα μέλαινα
ὑμνεύσαις, ἐρατὸς δὲ ποδῶν ὕπο δοῦπος ὀρώρει
νισομένων πατέρ’ εἰς ὅν·
Lovely are their voices when they sing
and extol for the whole world the laws
and wise customs of the immortals.
Then they went to Olympus, delighting in their beautiful
voices,
and their heavenly song. The black earth resounded with
hymns,
and a lovely beat arose as they pounded their feet
and advanced towards their father.
(Hes. Theog. 65–71; trans. Athanassakis (2004))
The phrase ἀγαλλόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ, ἀμβροσίῃ μολπῇ (delight-

ing in their beautiful voices, / and their heavenly song, 68–9)
is remarkable and absolutely relevant to the point in question
here. The chorus of the Muses is depicted as delighting in
their own beautiful voice and song while performing.53 In this
instance, then, choral pleasure is indeed represented as the
pleasure of the choral performers themselves. More impor-
tantly, these are divine performers, establishing an archetypal
choral matrix. Yet, although one would be tempted to think
that in this musical matrix choral performance is concep-
tualised as a totally self-contained act, independent from its
potential listeners and viewers, it is worth noting that even
� 233
in this case the presence of a viewer and listener is tactfully

and subtly implicated. This is none other than the one whose
imagination is perceiving the musical action of the divine cho-
ral group as a source of desire. The emphatic repetition of the
word eratos/eperatos (lovely, desirable) in the passage, attrib-
uted to both the vocal (65, 67) and the kinetic (70) action of
the Muses, hints precisely in this direction. In other words,
the prototypical choral act is not conceived of only as delight-
ful for its active agents but also as enticing for its potential
viewers. It is the simultaneity and the mutual dependency
of both facets of pleasure that the Hesiodic matrix subtly
explores.
If so, then Plato’s almost exclusive focus on the pleasure
of the choral performer cannot be explained just as a nostal-
gic return to an archetypal model of choreia starkly opposing
itself to the alleged omnipotence of Athenian spectatorship.
For even in these musical archetypes, Greek thought seems to
have consistently made room for the pleasure of the viewer.
It is more likely that, despite his remarkable establishment of
choreia as an all-encompassing model of mousike in his last
work, Plato remained till the end sceptical about and uncom-
fortable with the broader implications of musical artefacts
as objects of aesthetic contemplation. Perhaps he sensed
that even the strictest musical regime he aspires to, the one
founded on notional and moral correctness (orthotes), cannot
guarantee the elimination of an active aesthetic imaginary.54
Once the aesthetic viewer exists, he can forever indulge in
contemplating, that is to say in dreaming anew and reinvent-
ing, performance.
Not e s
1 See, e.g., Hymn. Hom. Ap. 156–64 and Peponi (2009) with fur-
ther bibliographical references.
2 On Athenian audiences and choreia, see, e.g., Revermann (2006)
esp. 107–9.
3 Pickard-Cambridge (1962) 31–59; Wilson (2000) 93–5.
4 See, e.g., Lawler (1950); Csapo (2004, 2008).
234 �
5 As a boy Plato would have performed early in the penultimate

decade of the fifth century. It is worth recalling that according
to Diogenes Laertius, who in his Lives of eminent philosophers
(3.5) refers to Dicaearchus’ testimony, Plato had composed in his
youth dithyrambs along with other poetry. Despite the prestige
attached to dithyrambic choregia (see for instance Alcibiades’
case in Wilson (2000) 148–55), one wonders if some elite youth
in the last quarter of the fifth century and in the fourth century
would resist participating as performers in communal dance. For
instance, Charmides’ self-presentation in Xenophon’s Symp. 19 as
totally lacking dance education could perhaps be read as a sign of
elitist negligence of tribal dance training. As far as the term imag-
inary is concerned, I employ it in order to refer to verbal mecha-
nisms through which choral action is fantasised in choral song.
This includes modes of literal and metaphorical self-reference as
well as of projection, both encountered in fifth-century choral
poetry, about which see Henrichs (1994–5, 1996).
6 Il. 18.590–606. On interesting aspects of this scene, see also
Kurke, Chapter 6 in this volume.
7 Meid. 16.
8 See also Isocrates’ Areopagiticus 54; Kosmopoulou (1998) 165.
9 Oec. 8.20; translation by E. C. Marchant in Marchant and Todd
(1923).
10 For a similar approach, see also Oec. 8.3.
11 About the vocabulary of order as part of elitist conservatism in
things musical, see Csapo (2004) 237–42. It is not unlikely that
new musical trends had come up with choreographic variations
and elaborations on the circular formation, about which see, e.g.,
Lawler (1950).
12 See, e.g., Wallace (1997).
13 About the theatre of Dionysus used for the Great Dionysia
performances, including dithyrambic ones, see, e.g., Pickard-
Cambridge (1962) 32; Wiles (1997) 49; D’Angour (2006) 270–1.
14 Laws 700a–e. For schema used in the meaning of dance posture in
the Laws, see, e.g., 654e, 655a, 656a–e, 660a, 669c, 672e. In this
context, where the Athenian discusses the evolution of musical
genres, it is quite likely that the word schema refers inclusively
to this meaning as well. For a different view, see, e.g., England
(1921) ad loc. For a broader discussion of Plato’s approach to
monody and choral performance in the Laws, see recently
G. Nagy (2009) 386–92. It has been repeatedly noted, e.g., Davies
(1988) 58, that in this famous passage Plato does not make an
explicit distinction between monodic and choral genres. While
this is certainly true, there is no question that for an Athenian of
Plato’s era the names of these poetic genres would spontaneously
� 235
bring up associations of their current performance status, and

thus would be promptly identified as performed predominantly
either in choral or in solo configurations.
15 Laws 700e–1a. On the audience’s reactions in this well-known
Platonic passage, see Wallace’s (1997) enlightening approach.
16 Although the discussion of the concept of pleasure in the Laws
involves an expanded and thorough analysis that exceeds plain
references to the term hedone, it is indicative that this term is
abundantly used in the first two books of the Laws (more than
ten times in each one), whereas it is sparsely used in the other
ten books – with a slightly increased appearance in Books 5 and
7. What makes the discussion of pleasure in the Laws unique is
the interlocutors’ – and especially the Athenian’s – interest not
in the nature of pleasure in general but rather in its social func-
tion and its manipulation through training and cultural practice.
For the concept of pleasure in the Laws, see Gosling and Taylor
(1982) 169–74; Laks (1990); more recently Bobonich (2002) 350–
73; Mouze (2005) 149–210; Frede (2010).
17 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the Laws passages
are Pangle’s (1980), in some cases with limited modifications.
18 For the possible etymologies of choros, which are unrelated to
Plato’s ad hoc etymological play, see Chantraine (1968–80) s.v.
19 The noun chara is very rarely used in Plato’s works. In the Laws
it is used only once, in the passage under discussion. It is the
verb chairein that Plato uses repeatedly in the Laws, often asso-
ciated with choral pleasure in particular. See, e.g., 654c, 655c,
655e, 656a, 657c, 665e.
20 The translation of this perplexed passage is a hybrid. It com-
bines Pangle’s (1980) and R. G. Bury’s (1926) solutions with sev-
eral suggestions of mine. Text as in Burnet (1907).
21 The formulation of the passive forms τὰ ῥηθέντα ἢ μελῳδηθέντα
ἢ καὶ ὁπωσοῦν χορευθέντα (literally: what is said, what is sung
or put into melody, and in whatever way danced/performed) cre-
ates an ambiguity as regards the identity of those underlying
the pronouns οἷς (for those) and τούτους (those). Also note the
impersonal syntax in ἀναγκαῖον and δυνατὸν.
22 Because of its difficulty and ambiguity this passage has often
been interpreted differently. For instance, England (1921) 282 ad
loc. thinks that in the first section of the passage ‘the perform-
ers here spoken of are not professional actors, but every reader
or reciter of a poem with all its accompaniments’. England is
right that the passage is not referring to professional actors. Yet
it is not referring to readers and reciters either. It is referring
to citizen (thus nonprofessional) choruses of unspecified (and
thus wide-ranging) choral genres. Similarly, England (1921)
236 �
283 thinks that it is only in the last section of this long passage
‘that the Athenian has had in mind not spectators, but choreutai
themselves’. The agents of choreia, the performers, seem to be
consistently the main focus of the Athenian’s concern, from the
beginning to the end of this crucial passage. In the beginning of
the passage, however, there is indeed a certain vagueness that
is gradually clarified. Benardete (2000) 64–5, possibly based on
England’s commentary, further elaborates on a similar reading
of the passage.
23 This becomes even clearer when the Athenian challenges his
interlocutors in 658a–b to suppose that somebody could pro-
claim a victory prize, open to anyone who may want to compete
‘regarding pleasure alone’ (ἀγωνιούμενον ἡδονῆς πέρι μόνον).
24 For the Dionysian aspect in the Laws, see Kowalzig (2004) 60–5
and Panno (2007). For the possible implicit references to the dith-
yramb, see Kowalzig (2013).
25 For the Athenian’s attack on innovation and for institutions of
censorship, see esp. Laws 798b–799c.
26 For the Athenian’s notional interweaving of theatron with choral
practices in current cultural activity, see also 667a–b. For the
chorus of the elders, see Prauscello’s (2011) recent analysis and
O. Murray, Chapter 5 in this volume.
27 Il. 18.604–5. On other aspects of this Homeric passage, see also
Kurke, Chapter 6 in this volume.
28 On these lines, see Peponi (2009).
29 For the gods as spectators of musical (and choral) performances,
see, e.g., Homeric Hymn to Apollo 146 and 204–6.
30 See Peponi (2004a) where I discuss the conceptualisation of
viewing choral acts as an intense mode of theorein especially in
Alcman’s Louvre partheneion.
31 Beardsley (1982) 81.
32 This can be seen as a broader strategy in the Laws. See, e.g.,
the Athenian’s claims in 654c–d, where performing according
to one’s ethical composure is clearly declared as more important
than the purely aesthetic accomplishment of the choral act.
33 See discussion of this passage (665c) in a previous section of this
essay.
34 On the Republic, see, e.g., Nehamas (1999b).
35 Rep. 401b–403c.
36 For a detailed discussion of this issue in Plato’s Republic, see
Peponi (2012) 144–53.
37 Laws 668b–670d.
38 Laws 764c–765d.
39 Laws 670a–b.
40 Laws 670b–c.
� 237
41 Plato’s general tendency to circumvent the pleasure of the viewer

in the case of choral performances has some interesting excep-
tions. See, for instance, 657d, where the elders are watching the
dancing youth with nostalgia – interestingly, nostalgia for the
days when the elders could perform themselves.
42 In 779d we learn in passing that Plato’s imagined polis includes
a theatre. Yet his untheatrical conception of choreia relies on his
much deeper understanding of the dynamic of choral perfor-
mance as such, no matter whether it is supposed to take place in
a theatrical construction or not. On theatre in Plato’s Laws, see
also Penelope Murray, Chapter 11 in this volume.
43 On the early composition of Books 7 and 8 of Aristotle’s Politics,
see Oswyn Murray, Chapter 5 in this volume and O. Murray
(2005) 202–3 with reference to Jaeger. On the problems of coher-
ence in Aristotle’s Politics, see, e.g., Rowe (1977). On the pas-
sages that are relevant to the specific point made here, see, e.g.,
Kraut (1997) 40–6.
44 As Folch shows in Chapter 13 in this volume, in the Laws the
Athenian discusses the possibility of establishing performances
that included choral acts by professionals and by lower classes
or noncitizens. But this arrangement involves only the ‘lower’
genres of performance, namely comedy and lament. The choreia
Plato talks about in detail, especially in the second book of the
Laws, is remarkably all-inclusive.
45 On epoide in the Laws, see Helmig (2003) 75–80. See also Mouze
(2005) 165–8.
46 On the conceptual affinity of the two verbs, see also Laws 666c.
47 On this passage, see, e.g., Halliwell (1988) 156–7; P. Murray
(1996) 232–3. See most recently Halliwell (2011) and Peponi
(2012) 128–53.
48 Thus, Plato’s programmatic statement about chara being embed-
ded in the word choreia may be understood better as a concept
closer to what, many centuries later, has been identified by Kant
as the agreeable, as opposed to the beautiful. That which is agree-
able is understood by him as producing an inner ‘inclination’,
which tends to cancel the essentially contemplative character of
the purely aesthetic judgement, while providing gratification and
enjoyment. On these concepts, see Kant (1987 [1790]) § 3, Ak.
205–7 and §5, Ak. 209–10. For a discussion of the concept of the
agreeable in Kant, see Zangwill (1995) 167–76. On broader issues
regarding ancient Greek and modern approaches to aesthetic
pleasure, see Peponi (2012).
49 Laws 665c.
50 On this issue see note 25 and Calame’s approach in Chapter 4 of
this volume.
238 �
51 For aplestia in Plato, see, e.g., Grg. 493b; Rep. 555b, 562b; Ti.
73a; Laws 831d.
52 If my understanding of this statement is correct, that is, if the
pleasure of the choral performer is conceptualised as obeying
the laws of emptying out and replenishment, similar to a thirsty
person who seeks gratification through drinking, one can per-
haps see an interesting parallel in Pindar’s Pythian 9: ἐμὲ δ’ οὖν
τις ἀοιδᾶν | δίψαν ἀκειόμενον πράσσει χρέος, αὖτις ἐγεῖραι | καὶ
παλαιὰν δόξαν ἑῶν προγόνων· (103–5). Here the chorus refers
to its remedying, quenching, its ‘thirst’ for song.
53 One encounters a similar case in the description of yet another
archetypal chorus, the Nereids, in Bacchylides 17.107–8. The
Nereids are described there as taking pleasure in their own per-
formance: χορῷ | δ’ ἔτερπον κέαρ ὑγροῖσιν ἐν ποσίν.
54 For musical orthotes (correctness) in the Laws, see esp. 642a, 655d,
657a–b, 667b–c, 668b, 670b. See also Hatzistavrou (2011) and
Calame’s Chapter 4 in this volume, as well as Barker’s approach in
Chapter 15. On the problem of musical purity and the aesthetic
in the Republic, see Peponi (2012).
� 239
��
P art T h r e e
Redefining Genre
��
C hap t e r N i n e
T h e O rpha n e d Wor d
Th e Ph a r m a k o n o f Fo rge t f u l n e s s
i n P l a t o ’s L a w s
Andrea Nightingale
In the Laws, Plato claims that the mixture of traditional genres

of music and poetry in Athens has made the city increasingly
anarchic (698a–701c). As the Athenian Stranger puts it,
After [the Persian wars], as time passed, there arose as leaders of

an unmusical lawlessness poets who, though poetic by nature,
had no knowledge of what is just and lawful in the domain
of the Muses. These people . . . blended together (κεραννύντες)
dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs and imitated
songs for the flute in cithara tunes, mixing (συνάγοντες) all the
genres with one another. On account of their ignorance, these
men unwittingly slandered art, saying that it does not have
any standard of correctness, and that it is judged correctly by
the pleasure of the listener, regardless of whether he is a good
or a bad man. (700d–e)1
Here, Plato identifies the generic mixture of poetry and music

as one of the primary causes of lawlessness in the city. In order
to avoid this degeneration into anomia, Plato claims, the good
lawgiver should take his cue from the Egyptians: he should
legislate – and, indeed, ‘consecrate’ (καθιεροῦν) – the correct
genres of music and literature to ensure that there will be no
‘alteration or innovation’ in the established forms (656d–657b).
� 243
Andrea Nightingale
Yet Plato’s Laws is itself a generic hybrid. It mixes together

philosophy, cosmology, historiography, rhetorical speeches,
and mythic narratives. Plato organises these different dis-
courses around the central genre in the Laws: the law code
(which includes the preludes to the laws and the laws proper).
How does the law code interact with the other genres and dis-
courses in the text? I argue that the discourses that surround
the laws invite us to read and accept the authority and sacral-
ity of the law code. Indeed, all of the many voices in the dia-
logue serve to promulgate a single and overarching ideology.
The ‘intermingling’ of genres in the Laws, then, does not lead
the citizens of Magnesia to abandon ‘correct’ ethical standards
or fall into political anarchy. Rather, as Plato indicates, the
diverse discourses in the Laws work together to offer a philo-
sophic and divine ‘truth’. But how can Plato achieve this sin-
gular ‘truth’ in so many different discourses? And how can
this ‘truth’ be contained in a written text? Given his attacks
on writing in the Phaedrus, Plato’s surprising embrace of the
written word in the Laws deserves careful investigation.
I want to focus, first, on the written word as a ‘bastard’ or
‘orphaned’ discourse. I begin by looking at these metaphors in
Plato’s Phaedrus and Isocrates’ Panathenaicus. This examina-
tion will provide the context for analysing the ‘fathering’ of a
written law code in Plato’s Laws. Plato’s lawgiver, I argue, can
be seen as a father who deliberately distances himself from his
child so that the written text can take on an authority that is
greater than that of a single, human author. In the Phaedrus,
Socrates identifies the written word as a pharmakon or drug
that destroys one’s ability to remember the truth – it produces
forgetfulness (λήθη) and cultivates rote memorisation rather
than true memory (274e–275a). In the Laws, by contrast, Plato
identifies the written law code as an alexipharmakon – an
‘antidote’ that wards off false discourses and wrongful claims
to truth. In this dialogue, Plato sets out to create a written text
that is designed to destroy the citizens’ memory of earlier, dif-
ferent cultural practices. Of course, this forgetfulness can occur
only if the rulers of Magnesia use the law code to regulate all
244 �
The Orphaned Word
acceptable discourses and actions in the city. By memorising

the law code and ‘internalising’ its ideology, the citizens fall
into a certain kind of oblivion – they forget to think for them-
selves. The Laws, I claim, offers a ‘lethic’ text that claims to
contain aletheia.
Th e Bastar d Wo r d in t he P h a e d r u s
Many scholars have meditated on Plato’s conception of the
written word in the Phaedrus. I focus on several key passages
in this section, looking in particular at the ‘seed’ metaphor
found in the farming analogy (276b–c) and in the discussion of
the dialectician (276e–277a).2 Consider first Socrates’ compar-
ison of the written text to a painting: both are fixed texts that
cannot converse. Paintings do not talk and a written text keeps
saying the same thing again and again (275d–e). As Socrates
puts it, ‘writing has this unusual effect, and in truth is similar
to painting. For the offspring of painting stand there as though
they are alive (ὡς ζῶντα), but if you ask them a question, they
maintain a solemn silence. The same is the case with written
texts. You would think that they speak as though they pos-
sessed knowledge, but if you ask a question about something,
wishing to learn, they indicate one thing alone, the same thing
again and again’ (275d). This metaphor suggests that the writ-
ten text is, in some sense, dead. I call this the ‘dead-letter’ met-
aphor. Still, even in its lifeless state, the text does have an effect
on the reader. Although it says the same thing repeatedly, it
nonetheless generates different interpretations in different
readers. A written text can get into the wrong hands, and this
can have a bad effect (275e).
We come now to the metaphors of paternity. As Socrates
suggests, ‘when a text is ill-treated and unjustly attacked, it
always needs its father to help it (τοῦ πατρὸς ἀεὶ δεῖται βοηθοῦ),
for it is not able to defend or help itself’ (275e). Socrates has
already introduced the metaphor of the father in the Egyptian
tale, where Thamus identifies Theuth as the ‘father’ of writ-
ing (τεκεῖν, 274e). Here Socrates develops the metaphor by
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identifying the written text as the bastard child and spoken

dialogue as the legitimate child (γνήσιον, 276a). The father’s
spoken words are his ‘legitimate’ children; the written text is
his illegitimate offspring. Plato now mixes this metaphor of
paternity with the dead-letter metaphor. The legitimate child,
Plato says, is ‘living and ensouled discourse’ (λόγον . . . ζῶντα
καὶ ἔμψυχον); the written text is a mere eidolon of spoken dis-
course (276a). This image of the written word as an ‘eidolon’
conjures up the dead shades in Hades (Od. bk. 11): the written
word, as it seems, is a skia or dead child. We may ask: Is the
written word an illegitimate child, a dead child, or both? The
metaphors here are slippery. On the one hand, one could say
that creating a written text is a form of infanticide (the expo-
sure or abandonment of the child). Alternatively, one could say
that the written text is a bastard child because its father does
not take care of it once it is published and thus, in a sense,
disowns it. Of course, we do not need to choose between these
options – we are dealing here with a semantic surplus.
In this rich, polysemic passage in the Phaedrus, Socrates
mixes his metaphors even further. Consider the analogies of
the gardener and farmer, which foreground a new aspect of the
notion of paternity: the seed (sperma). In this passage, Socrates
presents two scenarios: a person who creates a transitory gar-
den, and a farmer who plants and reaps a mature crop. The first
person plants his seeds ‘in the gardens of Adonis’ (276b). Here,
Socrates refers to the gardens produced in the Adonia festi-
val. As the paroemiographer Zenobius explains, the gardens of
Adonis ‘are sown in clay vessels and grow only to the point of
becoming green; they are carried away along with the dying
god and are thrown into springs’.3 In the gardens of Adonis,
one grows baby plants that are thrown away before they mature
and produce fruits and seeds. In the Phaedrus, Socrates com-
pares these gardens of Adonis to written discourse: written
texts, we may say, are words without seeds.
We turn now to the practice of farming, which Socrates
places in opposition to the planting of a transient, ‘seedless’
garden. The farmer plants his seeds ‘in the place that is fitting’
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and tends them for eight months until they reach maturity.
A mature crop contains plants that bear fruits and seeds.
Socrates glosses this point by comparing the philosopher to
the farmer. As he claims, ‘a [philosophical] man, using the
art of dialectic, taking hold of a fitting soul, plants and sows
discourses there that are accompanied by knowledge (λαβὼν
ψυχὴν προσήκουσαν, φυτεύῃ τε καὶ σπείρῃ μετ’ἐπιστήμης
λόγους), which are able to defend themselves and the man who
planted them, and are not fruitless but contain a seed (οὐχὶ
ἄκαρποι ἀλλὰ ἔχοντες σπέρμα), from which other logoi grow-
ing in other minds are able to make [the seed] immortal for-
ever’ (276e–277a).4 The philosopher begins by developing his
own logos, which produces discursive ‘seeds’ that are produc-
tive and life-giving. He then plants these ‘seeds’ into the right
fields – philosophical souls – which generates logoi that bear
further fruit and seeds.
Although it is impossible to stabilise the metaphors in this
passage into one fixed meaning, it does seem clear that the
philosopher cultivates in another person’s soul mere seeds.
He does not hand over a logos that is fixed and complete (or,
to continue the farmer analogy, a logos that is fully grown).
The student can achieve wisdom only if he cultivates the dis-
cursive seeds of his teacher and rears them up himself. As
Socrates says later in the passage, the philosopher’s mature,
dialectical discourses are his legitimate sons (υἱεῖς γνησίους).
From these legitimate ‘sons’ of the philosopher, ‘children and
brothers grow up in the souls of other men’ (ἔκγονοί τε καὶ
ἀδελφοὶ . . . ἐνέφυσαν) (278a–b). The seed of the philosopher
is therefore ‘immortal’, since it produces words and seeds that
grow in other souls, from one generation to another. To sum-
marise, the philosopher is a father who produces legitimate
discursive children (his own logos) and implants his seeds into
philosophic souls via spoken dialectic – seeds that carry on
the life of the logos. The written text, by contrast, contains
words without seeds; it is an illegitimate child that has been
abandoned by its father and does not have the capacity to bear
legitimate offspring.
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th e aut h o r as ab se nt litigant
Isocrates uses a different but related metaphor in his discussions
of writing. In his Letter to Dionysius (1.3), Isocrates remarks on
the difficulty of speaking persuasively to someone in a letter
rather than in person: ‘In a personal conversation, if some of
the things said are either misunderstood or not believed, the
man being present, going through the discourse in detail, can
defend it in either case; but in discourses that are written down
and sent as a letter, if such a thing happens, there is no one to
correct it. For when the author is absent, the discourses are
bereft of their defender’ (ἐν μὲν ταῖς συνουσίαις ἢν ἀγνοηθῇ
τι τῶν λεγομένων ἢ μὴ πιστευθῇ, παρὼν ὁ τὸν λόγον διεξιὼν
ἀμφοτέροις τούτοις ἐπήμυνεν, ἐν δὲ τοῖς ἐπιστελλομένοις καὶ
γεγραμμένοις ἤν τι συμβῇ τοιοῦτον, οὐκ ἔστιν ὁ διορθώσων.
ἀπόντος γὰρ τοῦ γράψαντος ἔρημα τοῦ βοηθήσοντός ἐστιν).
Note in particular Isocrates’ claim that his written discourses
are erema. Among its many meanings, the word eremos can
mean ‘orphaned’. So, for example, in his discussion of the
treatment of orphans in the Laws, Plato identifies the orphan
as ‘πατρὸς ἢ μητρὸς ἔρημον’ (927d). Here in Isocrates, the
written logos is bereft or orphaned because its author/father
isn’t there to defend it.
The identification of the written word as eremos also has a
legal meaning in this text. In order to clarify this point, I need
to provide some context. Let us consider Isocrates’ discussion
of how he composed and revised his text in the Panathenaicus.5
Here is a brief account of this scene in the Panathenaicus
(which takes up the last quarter of the speech). Isocrates says
(speaking in the first person) that he had finished writing a
speech in praise of Athens and was revising it (ἐπηνώρθουν
. . . τὸν λόγον) with three students who were spending time in
his school (200). He then decides to send for one of his former
students ‘who had lived under an oligarchy and had elected
to praise the Spartans’ to see what he would think (200). The
pro-Spartan student arrives, and he and the other students
listen to the speech read aloud. The pro-Spartan praises the
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speech, but argues that Isocrates has not fairly represented the
Spartan laws and their unique way of life. The student then
offers a brief defence of Sparta. Isocrates proceeds to criticise
his student, rather vociferously, claiming that his defence of
Sparta is wrong and inaccurate. Isocrates goes on to attack the
Spartans in several more arguments, and ends up ‘silencing’
the student. At this point, Isocrates’ other students applaud
their teacher’s arguments, and they all depart. Isocrates then
relates that he decided to add the back-and-forth conversation
that he had with the pro-Spartan to the speech, thus mak-
ing the speech longer (and also implanting a dialogue into a
speech that was formerly a monologue). Isocrates then says
that, as the days went by, he began to feel troubled by the
things that he had said about the Spartans; he worries that
‘he had not spoken of them with moderation . . . but with con-
tempt and excessive bitterness, and in a foolish way’. Isocrates
now says that he was on the verge of ‘blotting out or burning’
the speech, but he decides instead to call his students back
in so that they can help him decide what to do with the
speech (232).
The students return, and the speech is read aloud again,
now with the added material. The students praise it to the
skies. Then the pro-Spartan proceeds to offer a very sophis-
ticated reading of the speech – a reading quite different from
the one he had offered in his former remarks.6 He points out
that Isocrates’ discourse, which is written in the genre of the
Panathenaic speeches, is designed to ‘gratify the multitude of
the Athenian citizens’ (236–7); at the same time, the student
adds, Isocrates is known to have ‘praised the government of
the Spartans [in other speeches] more than any other man’
(239).7 The student now says to Isocrates that ‘seeking such
an effect, you [Isocrates] easily found arguments of double
meaning (λόγους ἀμφιβόλους), which are no more associ-
ated with those who praise than with those who blame, but
can go in both directions and leave room for much debate
(ἀλλ’ ἐπαμφοτερίζειν δυναμένους καὶ πολλὰς ἀμφισβητήσεις
ἔχοντας)’ (Panathenaicus 240). The student goes on to identify
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two different kinds of discourse – one a demotic or ‘dicanic’

discourse, and the other a ‘cultured’, philosophic discourse:
‘When one contends in court over contracts and tries to gain a
personal advantage, it is shameful and a sign of wickedness [to
use “double-meaning” language], but when one discourses on
the nature of man and of human affairs, it is noble and philo-
sophical to speak this way’ (240–1). In short, dicanic discourse
should be simple and straightforward, whereas philosophic
discourse should be subtle, artistic, and polysemic. The dicanic
discourse speaks to a single (collective) demotic jury, whereas
philosophic discourse speaks to cultured audiences using lan-
guage that operates on multiple levels.
The student now makes a crucial and quite fascinating
point. He claims that his own interpretation of Isocrates’ speech
is rendering it an orphan. The student says that, by exposing
Isocrates’ clever tactics and by revealing that it covertly praises
both Athens and Sparta, he may be doing his teacher a disser-
vice. As the student says to Isocrates, ‘in seeking both to explain
the force of your words and to set forth your true intentions, I
thereby lessen the reputation of your speech by making it more
clear and intelligible to its readers’. As the student goes on to
observe, ‘for by implanting knowledge in those who are igno-
rant, I render your speech an orphan unable to defend itself
(ἐπιστήμην γὰρ τοῖς οὐκ εἰδόσιν ἐνεργαζόμενον ἔρημον τὸν
λόγον με ποιεῖν)’ (247). Here, the word eremos can be under-
stood on several levels. First, it indicates that the written text
is an orphan that has lost its father. But, perhaps even more
important, the student uses this word in a specific legal sense.
In Athenian legal discourse, the phrase ereme dike refers to a
court case in which the defendant does not show up, and thus
the case goes undefended. When this occurs, the case is ereme
(bereft) of one of its litigants.8 What Isocrates’ student suggests,
then, is that his interpretation of the text is the sole ‘litigant’ in
the case since Isocrates did not show up as a defendant: the
interpreter effectively supplants the author. Metaphorically
speaking, the author does not show up at his own court case
and cannot defend his speech against his interpreters. Isocrates
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drives this point home by showing a single person offering two

radically different interpretations of the same text.
Of course, Isocrates has put his student’s interpretation into
his own text: the student, after all, is a fictional character who
has the function of saying things that the author does not want
to say in his own voice. Nonetheless, we should take seriously
the claim that the student as interpreter is orphaning the dis-
course. In ‘taking over’ the text, the student robs Isocrates of
his authorial presence. This could be true of any interpreter
of a written text: by definition, the author is not there when a
person reads and interprets a text. To be sure, in this fictional
story the author, Isocrates, is there when the student offers his
interpretation. But Isocrates makes a point of refusing to say
whether his student’s interpretation is true or false; at the end
of the speech, Isocrates maintains an ironic silence. In refusing
to have the last word, Isocrates indicates that the text belongs,
in part, to the interpreter. The author, as he indicates, does
not fully show up in a written text. Even in texts written in
the first person and, as in many Isocratean speeches, adopting
an autobiographical persona, the author is not fully present to
the reader. The reader must interpret the text, and in so doing,
he ‘orphans’ the text. This eremos logos loses his father, who
does not show up at the trial to defend him. Isocrates makes
an excellent point here: he dramatises the way that the writer
and interpreter conflict with one another over the meaning(s)
of the text. Whereas Plato focussed primarily on the written
text itself – a dead or illegitimate child who cannot defend
his father or preserve the patrilineal seed – Isocrates offers a
sophisticated response to Plato: the written text is ‘orphaned’
by the interpreter; it loses its paternal authority and is, in some
sense, in the custody of the reader.
Th e Law C o d e in P lato’s L a w s
This examination of the orphaned written text brings us now
to the Laws. In the opening line of the dialogue, the Athenian
Stranger asks his Spartan and Cretan friends: ‘Was it a god or
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a man who was responsible for the composition of your laws?’

The Cretan Cleinias and the Spartan Megillus trace their law
codes back to the gods: the semimythical lawgivers, Minos and
Lycurgus, are said to have received direct aid from Zeus and
Apollo, respectively. The Athenian quickly avails himself of
this illustrious heritage by creating an ideal lawgiver, whom
he conflates with Minos and Lycurgus (meanwhile, he suggests
that these lawgivers actually agreed with his own ideology). At
the very beginning of the dialogue, then, Plato confronts the
problem of the authorship of his own law code: how can this
new law code pretend to utter timeless and divine truths?
As I argue, Plato very deliberately set out to confer divine
authority on his law code. Take, for example, the dramatic set-
ting of the dialogue: the three aged interlocutors embark upon
a day-long journey from Cnossus to ‘the cave and sanctuary
of Zeus’.9 The men do not specify their reasons for walking to
the sanctuary of Zeus, but one can safely assume that they are
undertaking a pilgrimage that reenacts the one made by the
ancient Cretan king Minos, who visited his father Zeus every
ninth year in order to receive oracles concerning the legisla-
tion of Crete (as the Athenian says on the first page of the text,
624a). In Plato’s dialogue the Minos – which some scholars have
argued was a sort of preface to the Laws – we learn that it was
precisely ‘the cave of Zeus’ that Minos visited every nine years
(319e3).10 We may infer, then, that the journey of the interlocu-
tors in the Laws to the cave of Zeus is symbolic: like Minos,
the men will seek the sanction of Zeus for their legislation.
This is borne out by Cleinias’ claim at 968b10–11 that they
‘must journey where the god leads us’ (πορευτέον ᾗπερ καὶ ὁ
θεὸς ἡμᾶς σχεδὸν ἄγει). As the Athenian remarks a number of
times, their discussion is both inspired and aided by the gods
(e.g., 682e, 722c, 811c).
The actual text of the law code in the Laws is incorporated
into the dialogue as a distinct genre. This is especially obvi-
ous in passages where the Athenian sets forth the laws and
their penalties in legalistic discourse. We must note, however,
that the Athenian argues that the preludes to the laws must be
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written down and included in the written law code. We are

thus dealing with a very unusual and lengthy legal text. As
Cleinias reminds us in his discussion of the long prelude to
impiety in Book 10,
This [prelude] gives the greatest support to intelligent legisla-

tion, since injunctions that pertain to the laws, when put into
writing (ἐν γράμμασι τεθέντα), remain permanently on record
so as to offer a proof for all time to come. As a result, one need
not worry if these things are difficult on a first hearing, since it
will be possible for even the slow learner, going back to them
often, to study them. (890e–891a)
Here, Cleinias reveals that the preludes for the legislation will,
like the legal statutes themselves, be encoded in writing. We
must remember that the discourse of the preludes is explicitly
identified as that of persuasion, which features in particular
the rhetoric of praise and blame.11 The discourse of the pre-
ludes is radically different, then, from that of the legal statutes
and commands. The combination of the preludes and the laws
themselves transforms the standard law code into a new and
hybrid genre.
This long and fulsome law code, then, contains a great deal
of rhetorical, nonlegal discourse. The Athenian makes this
point many times in the dialogue. For example, in Book 7 he
says that ‘it is necessary for the lawgiver not only to write
down the laws but, in addition to the laws, to write down all
those things that he thinks are good and bad, mixing these
together with the laws’ (ὅσα καλὰ αὐτῷ δοκεῖ καὶ μὴ καλὰ
εἶναι νόμοις ἐμπεπλεγμένα γράφειν, 823a). In this passage, the
Athenian claims that many rules for everyday life should not
be enacted as laws per se, but should be formulated and put in
writing all the same (822d–e). As he goes on to say, the good
citizen is the person ‘who passes his life in perfect obedience
to the written rules of the legislator, as given in his legisla-
tion, in his praise and in his censure’ (ὃς ἂν τοῖς τοῦ νομοθέτου
νομοθετοῦντός τε καὶ ἐπαινοῦντος καὶ ψέγοντος πειθόμενος
γράμμασιν διεξέλθῃ τὸν βίον ἄκρατον, Laws 822e–823a). It is
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worth noting that, in this passage, the Athenian refers back to

his discussion of ‘unwritten laws’ (ἄγραφα νόμιμα) in Book 7
(793a–d). There, he indicates that ‘unwritten laws’ are ‘ances-
tral customs’ (πατρίους νόμους) that function to hold the law
code together; indeed, they form the very foundation for the
constitution. None of this extralegal material, the Athenian
declares, should be left out of the text of the law code, even if
it is not enacted as actual law. In the Athenian’s law code, then,
the preludes and the ‘unwritten laws’ are written down and
given the authority of law.12
In the Laws, Plato has much to say about the status and
authority of his law code. As the Athenian says in Book 9, ‘is
it not necessary that, of all the writings circulating in cities,
those written on laws should be seen, when unfolded, to be the
finest and best by far, and that all other writings either must
be in conformance with them [the laws] or, if they are disso-
nant, should be seen as ridiculous?’ (858e–859a). Again, as the
Athenian puts it in Book 12, ‘of all other modes of discourse –
those spoken in praise or censure in poems, or those in prose,
whether they are in writing or uttered from day to day at all
the other gatherings . . . – of all these, the writings of the law-
giver will be a clear touchstone (βάσανος σαφής, 957d)’.13 The
Athenian also suggests that the rulers in Magnesia must put the
law code in the hands of the minister of education ‘so that he
can order the instructors to teach these things to the children,
as well as things that are in accord with and similar to these’
(811d–e). The law code, then, forms the paradeigma for all of
the discourse used in education (811b). In fact, the Athenian
claims that if the minister of education should find ‘poems or
writings in prose, or verbal and unwritten discourses that are
akin to the law code, then he must get them written down’
(γράφεσθαι, 811e). Only the text of the law code and language
that harmonizes with this will be used in the educational cur-
riculum and in the discourse of the city as a whole.
How, then, should we understand and interpret the dis-
course of the written law code? As the Athenian suggests,
although poets may say different and inconsistent things on
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a single subject, ‘it is not possible for the lawgiver to say two
things about one matter in his law code, but he must always
publish one statement about one thing’ (ἕνα περὶ ἑνὸς . . . λόγον;
719c–d). Recall Socrates’ claim in the Phaedrus that a written
text says one and the same thing again and again. There, as we
have seen, he acknowledged that a written text – even though
it says one thing again and again – can be interpreted in differ-
ent ways by different readers. In the Laws, Plato wants to cre-
ate not only a written law code that says ‘one thing about each
matter’ but a text that can be interpreted only in one way. He
wants to minimise, if not eliminate, multiple interpretations.
R e me mb e r ing to Forget
Consider Thamus’ claim in the Egyptian tale in the Phaedrus:
‘[Writing] will produce forgetfulness (λήθην) in the souls of
its learners because they will neglect to exercise their mem-
ory (μνήμης ἀμελετησίᾳ); indeed, on account of the faith they
place in writing they will recall (ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους) things
by way of alien marks external to themselves and not from
within (ἔξωθεν ὑπ’ ἀλλοτρίων τύπων οὐκ ἔνδοθεν), them-
selves by themselves’ (275a). In this passage, written discourse
is identified as an ‘alien’ (allotrios) discourse that imposes itself
on an individual from the outside; having established itself in a
person’s psyche, it precludes internal and autonomous thought
and speech.14 This passage suggests that the written text cre-
ates intellectual laziness and, indeed, forgetfulness (lethe) in
the reader. The reader forgets to rely on his own voice and
to test his ideas in philosophical dialogue; instead, he accepts
the authority of the writer and internalises alien language and
ideas that are not his own. The written text is thus a drug –
a pharmakon – that induces forgetfulness. It is a ‘lethic’ dis-
course that prevents a person from discovering aletheia.
In the Laws, Plato recurs to this issue but approaches it from
a new angle. As we have seen, the Athenian claims that every
citizen of Magnesia must learn the laws in school by memoris-
ing the fixed text of the law code (811d–e). But how does this
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act of memorisation affect the soul of the learner? The Athenian

spells this out when he describes the duties of judges:
The man who is to be a fair and just judge must look to these
things [i.e., the law code] and, possessing the written texts on
these issues, learn them (χρὴ . . . κεκτημένον γράμματα αὐτῶν
πέρι μανθάνειν). For of all of branches of learning, the study of
the things written in the law code . . . will be the most efficacious
in making the learner a better man (πάντων γὰρ μαθημάτων
κυριώτατα τοῦ τὸν μανθάνοντα βελτίω γίγνεσθαι τὰ περὶ
τοὺς νόμους κείμενα); otherwise, this divine and wondrous
nomos could scarcely possess the name that is akin to nous. . . .
And the good judge, by possessing these writings within him-
self as antidotes against other kinds of discourse (κεκτημένον ἐν
αὐτῷ καθάπερ ἀλεξιφάρμακα τῶν ἄλλων λόγων), must regu-
late both himself and the city. (957c–d)
Here, the Athenian not only endorses the memorisation of

the law code as a special branch of learning but explicates
the precise goal of this activity: the good judge must interna-
lise – ‘possess within himself’ – the text of the law code. Once
this text has lodged itself within his soul, it can function as an
alexipharmakon or ‘antidote’ against alternative (oppositional)
discourses. The law code, as an alexipharmakon, wards off dis-
sonant discourses and implants its univocal discourse in the
reader and learner.14
This conception of the written law code as an alexiphar-
makon, I believe, is quite similar to the notion of writing as a
pharmakon articulated in the Phaedrus: the law code induces
forgetfulness by implanting alien discourse in the soul. The
citizens of Magnesia are not allowed to articulate alternative
ideas or values; otherwise they will be subject to penalties. For
example, in Book 10 of the Laws, the Athenian suggests that
an atheist – even if he exhibits just behaviour in his life – will
be put to death if he denies the existence of gods. Because the
law code claims that good gods exist and manage the cosmos
(which the prelude to the laws of impiety in Book 10 ‘proves’ –
a prelude that is also identified as the prelude to the entire law
code [887b–c]), any person who articulates his own unorthodox
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ideas about the gods – even a good and just man – will face the
death penalty. Note that many scholars have compared the good
atheist to Socrates: both are good men who challenge the soci-
ety’s religious beliefs and values. A philosopher like Socrates,
as it would seem, would not last long in Magnesia.
In the Laws, then, the law code is identified as a good
pharmakon – one that produces the right kind of forgetfulness.
What makes this a good drug rather than a bad drug, a legit-
imate son rather than a bastard written text? Plato makes the
law code legitimate by identifying it with divine discourse: his
nomoi directly reflect the nous of the gods and therefore have a
divine status (714a, 957b–c). Insofar as his law code is a sacred
text, it is proper that it induce forgetfulness of false ideas and
values. The law code contains divine aletheia – an aletheia that
is predicated on the production of lethe. It is a ‘lethic’ discourse
that implants aletheia – a text that makes the citizens forget to
think for themselves.
Of course, the law code can be identified as a good drug only
if it indeed has a divine status. The reader, of course, watches
three men create a law code from scratch. Why should we iden-
tify this law code as divine truth rather than human inven-
tion? Who is the ‘father’ of the law code in the Laws? Note
that a fixed law code differs from other written texts in that it
gains authority precisely by the disappearance of its author.
Consider the narratives of lawgivers like Solon and Lycurgus,
both of whom (according to tradition) went abroad after insti-
tuting law codes in their respective cities.15 Solon, as is well
known, left Athens for ten years after establishing his laws. In
Herodotus’ account, he is said to have departed ‘in order that
he would not be compelled to repeal any of the laws that he
had instituted; for the Athenians themselves were not able to
do this because they were bound by powerful oaths to obey
for ten years whatever laws Solon should make’ (1.29).16 In the
narrative of Lycurgus, the lawgiver is said to have gone abroad
after making the Spartans take an oath that they would not
alter his code until his return; the code remained permanently
binding since Lycurgus never returned home.17
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As Szegedy-Maszak observes about these and other stories

of the early Greek lawgivers, ‘the fact that the lawgiver himself
retained the power to change the code made him a potential
threat to its operation. In the legends, the danger is relieved
in two ways, by the death of the lawgiver or by his departure
into self-imposed exile’.18 Plato addresses this issue explicitly
in his dialogue the Statesman. In this text, Plato champions
the statesman using his own techne over the rule by writ-
ten law.19 In particular, Plato constructs a situation where a
statesman has to depart from the country and decides to leave
behind written laws; he returns, however, sooner than he had
planned and finds that his laws are not working. In this case,
the stateman’s authority collides with that of his own written
prescriptions. This clearly conjures up the narratives of Solon
and Lycurgus. What happens when the statesman who has
left behind written laws comes home to find that they are not
working properly?
In analysing this situation, Plato compares the activity of
the statesman to that of a good doctor:
When a doctor or trainer is intending to go abroad and he
thinks that he will be separated from his charges for a long
time, if he believes that his patients or pupils will not remem-
ber his orders, he would want to leave written instructions for
his charges. . . . But what if he comes back sooner than he had
planned? Would he not venture to lay down rules that differ
from the written ones, if these happened to be better for the
patients? (295c–d)20
Just as the good doctor will change his written prescriptions
when he returns, the good statesman who has left behind writ-
ten laws for his city will change these laws when he returns,
since his own wisdom is better than that of written laws. Like
the good doctor, the good statesman will override written rules;
he will, in short, choose to govern by the techne of statesman-
ship. A bad doctor, by contrast, is one who believes that
it is not right for anyone to transgress the ancient laws (τἀρχαῖά
ποτε νομοθετηθέντα), neither he himself by instituting new
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ones nor the sick person by venturing to do anything con-

trary to the written rules, on the grounds that these rules are
medicinal and conducive to health, and that any other course
of action is unhealthy and unscientific. (295d)
The bad doctor will defer to the written prescriptions, which

are here referred to as ‘ancient laws’. Although the Statesman
clearly privileges the techne of statesmanship over the use of a
written law code, it also indicates that, in the absence of a good
statesman, rule by written law is the next best thing.21
In the Laws, Plato offers us this second-best option. He con-
structs a law code that is predicated on the disappearance of
the good statesman or lawgiver. Indeed, the human lawgiver
not only disappears, but his text is effectively authorised by
the gods. Plato builds divine authority right into his dialogue,
thereby creating a text that claims for itself the status of divine
wisdom. Plato accomplishes this by constructing an ideal and
near-divine lawgiver, who is located above the human char-
acters in the text.22 The ideal lawgiver, as we have seen, pos-
sesses divine nous, which is the foundation of nomos (e.g.,
742d). By deflecting the authorship of the Laws away from the
Athenian, Plato makes his law code appear objective, imper-
sonal, and timeless. It is perhaps for the same reason that he
decided to leave the Athenian nameless: if a particular individ-
ual had unveiled this code, it would have been less impersonal.
This law code, Plato urges us to believe, is not simply a human
invention. As the Athenian asserts in Book 4 (713c–714a),
‘those cities whose ruler is a mortal, not a god, will have no
escape from evils and toils’. The best path for humans, he con-
tinues, is to ‘imitate life in the time of Cronus – when human
beings were ruled by gods’. The citizen ‘imitates’ the age of
Cronus by ‘being obedient to that within us which is immor-
tal (athanasia) . . . giving the name of nomos to the ordering of
nous’. Since nous is the immortal element in human beings, its
enactments are divine. In the Laws, the text of the law code
not only is elevated above all other modes of discourse but is
accorded an almost scriptural status.
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Plato believes that his law code will hold good at any or
all times – that its truths will transcend history. Indeed,
he is adamant that the law code, when completed, will be
‘unchangeable’ (ἀκίνητα). As the Athenian puts it, ‘if by some
divine good fortune the laws under which men are brought up
remain unchanged for many long ages, so that no one possesses
the memory or the report (μνείαν μηδὲ ἀκοήν) of things that
were once different from what they are now, then the whole
soul feels reverence and is afraid to change any of the things
established of old’ (798a–b).23 The law code, then, becomes a
fixed and unchangeable text, immune to innovation24 – a writ-
ten text that effaces memory of alternative ideas or values. The
law code in Magnesia is a ‘lethic’ text that implants the truth
in unphilosophic souls. Using the metaphors that describe the
written text in the Phaedrus and Isocrates’ Panathenaicus, we
may say that Plato contrives to create a written law code that
is not the illegitimate orphan of a human author but rather the
legitimate child of a divine father. The law code of a divine
father regulates and controls all human discourse in the city.
It is thus an alexipharmakon that makes the citizens forget
falsity.25
Not e s
2 On Plato’s passage on writing, see Derrida (1981 [1972]) 63–171;
Griswold (1986) chs. 5–6; G. R. F. Ferrari (1987) ch. 7; Berger
(1994). None of these texts deals extensively with the seed meta-
phor in relation to the gardens of Adonis. For discussions of the
spread of literacy in ancient Greece and the uses of literacy in
classical Athens (especially in relation to legal texts), see Harris
(1989); Thomas (1989, 1994, 1996); Hedrick (1994).
3 Zenobius 1.49 (Leutsch and Schneidewin (1965 [1839]) 19). For
some recent discussions of the Adonia festival, see Detienne (1977
[1972]) 64–6, 78–80; Winkler (1990a) 189–93. Winkler points out
that Plato’s discussion of the gardens of Adonis in the Phaedrus
ignores the fact that these gardens are part of a women’s rite
(p. 192). Of course, the ancient Athenian reader could readily pic-
ture the women climbing onto the rooftops with their miniature
gardens and (as they are said to do in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
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393–6) drunkenly shouting, ‘Woe for Adonis!’ and ‘Beat your

breasts for Adonis!’
4 The passage at 276e–277a does not mention that part of the pro-
cess where the philosopher rears up the crop in his own soul,
since it starts at the point where he is sowing the seeds of his
logoi in other souls. To understand this fully, we must include
the earlier stage in the process, described in 278a, which makes
it clear that the philosopher must first ‘discover’ logoi about jus-
tice, beauty, etc., for himself; only then can he offer his seeds to
others.
5 For a discussion of Isocrates’ practice of reading, writing, and
revising a text, see Goldhill (1999) 93–100.
6 He prefaces this interpretation with the following claim: ‘I won-
der whether you were as distressed and uncomfortable about
the things you had said about the Spartans as you allege . . .
and whether you really brought us together to help you decide
whether to publish the speech. . . . I believe, rather, that you
wanted to test us to see if we were true to the philosophic and
cultivated life, and if we remembered what you had taught us’
(236).
7 On Isocrates’ ways of addressing different audiences, see Ober
(1998) ch. 5, (2004); Morgan (2003).
8 Too (1995) 120–7 discusses Isocrates’ use of ereme dike, though
she offers a different interpretation of this term.
9 See Morrow (1960) 27–8 on the possible locations of this Cretan
cave; he argues that the cave is on Mount Ida.
10 Minos 319e. The parallel is significant whether or not one
accepts the authenticity of the dialogue. For a useful account of
the arguments for and against the authenticity of the dialogue,
see Morrow (1960) 35–9. He suggests that the Minos is authen-
tic and, given its unfinished state, perhaps even an attempted
introduction to the Laws that Plato later came to reject. Note
that the Minos is a dialogue that addresses the question of the
law but also eulogises Minos as a good and semidivine lawgiver,
in opposition to the negative things said about King Minos in
tragedies. Again, we see the elevation of the lawgiver to a divine
status.
11 On the preludes, see Nightingale (1993) 279–300; cf. Bobonich
(1991). On praise and blame in the Laws, see further Morgan,
12 On the topic of unwritten and ancestral laws, Detienne (1986
[1981]) esp. 98 argues that an oral mythology circulates through
the city and is handed down over generations, thus controlling
oral discourse (φήμη) in the city of Magnesia; he fails to note how
the written text of the law code grounds this ‘oral mythology’.
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13 The metaphor of the basanos involves the testing of a coin against

a ‘touchstone’, to determine its quality. In this passage, since
the law code has effectively colonized the citizens’ minds, we
are not dealing with philosophical ‘testing’ of one idea against
another. Rather, an indoctrinated person will be able to tell
right away whether oppositional discourses are ‘counterfeit’ or
whether they are in keeping with the ideology of the law code.
The citizens in Magnesia (with the exceptions of the members
of the Nocturnal Council), are not philosophers; indeed, this is
precisely why they must internalise the law code and ‘forget’ to
think for themselves.
14 Cf. Pl. Prt. 347e–348a: ‘Thus gatherings of this kind, if they
include men such as many of us claim to be, have no need of
alien voices (ἀλλοτρίας φωνῆς) or of the poets, whom it is impos-
sible to question concerning the things that they say. . . . But
[men such as we are] eschew such gatherings, associating instead
directly with each other and using their own logoi to test and be
tested by one another’.
15 For an excellent discussion of the narratives surrounding the
ancient lawgivers, see Szegedy-Maszak (1978) 199–209.
16 See also Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 7.2, 11.1; Plut. Sol. 25.1.
17 See esp. Plut. Lyc. 29. As MacDowell (1986) 18 suggests, there is
a very great probability that Plutarch’s primary source for the
life of Lycurgus was the Lacedaimonion Politeia of Aristotle.
18 Szegedy-Maszak (1978) 207.
19 Note that when the Stranger asks at 299e what a city would be
like if all its activities ‘were done in accordance with written pre-
scriptions and not by techne’, his interlocutor responds that ‘it is
clear that all the arts would be utterly destroyed’. According to
the Stranger, these rules cannot deal with the particularities and
vicissitudes of human life (294a–b). For this reason, the rule of
law is ‘like a stubborn and ignorant man (ὥσπερ τινὰ ἄνθρωπον
αὐθάδη καὶ ἀμαθῆ) who does not permit anyone to do anything
contrary to his orders or to ask any questions, not even if some-
thing new occurs to someone that is better than his own injunc-
tions’ (294c).
20 I analyse this passage in greater detail in Nightingale (1999)
100–22. See Jouanna (1978) on the analogy of the lawgivers to
the doctors in Plato.
21 Plato’s analogy of the doctor in the Statesman thus takes its place
in a contemporary debate about written law – a debate in which
antidemocratic thinkers like Plato were using the Egyptian med-
ical practices to bolster their criticism of rule by written law. As
Aristotle observes in the Politics: ‘Those of the opinion that it is
advantageous to be governed by a king think that laws articulate
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only general principles but do not give directions for dealing

with particular circumstances; so that in an art of any kind it is
foolish to proceed in strict accordance with written rules (and,
indeed, in Egypt physicians may alter their prescription only
after four days, and if anyone alters them before this he does
so at his own risk)’ (1286a). Aristotle criticises rule by written
law: ‘There seems to be no truth in the use of the arts (technai)
as a paradigm for governance; [this paradigm devalues the rule
of law saying that] it is a bad thing to “doctor in accordance
with a book” (τὸ κατὰ γράμματα ἱατρεύεσθαι), but preferable
to use men who possess scientific expertise. For doctors never
act contrary to principle because of friendship, but earn their
fee when they have healed their patients, whereas men in politi-
cal offices make it their custom to do many things out of spite
or to win favour’ (Politics 1287a). See also Diod. Sic. (1.82.3):
‘The [Egyptian] physicians draw their support from public funds
and administer their treatments in accordance with a written
law that was composed in ancient times by many famous physi-
cians. If they follow the rules of this law as they read them in
the sacred book (ἐκ τῆς ἱερᾶς βίβλου) and yet are unable to save
their patient, they are absolved of any charge and go unpun-
ished; but if they disobey the law’s prescriptions in any respect,
they must submit to a trial with death as the penalty, since the
lawgiver holds that few physicians would ever show themselves
to be wiser than the mode of treatment that had been closely fol-
lowed for a long period and had been originally prescribed by
the ablest practitioners’.
22 Note, e.g., that the Athenian often pretends as though the law-
giver is speaking to the three of them (such as at 719a–e, where
the three of them address the lawgiver). Cf. Arist. Pol. 1287a: ‘He
who urges that the law shall rule seems to recommend that God
and reason alone shall rule, but he who urges that a man rule
adds a wild animal also; for appetite is of this nature, and passion
misleads even the best men when they are rulers; therefore the
law is wisdom without desire’.
23 See also 656d–e, 816c, 846c, 957b.
24 Note that the law code is represented as not only capable of
finalisation but as being very near to that goal already. For the
Athenian insists at 772c–d that a mere ten years after the original
founding of the city is needed for the magistrates to ‘perfect’ the
law code by adding statutes and introducing amendments sug-
gested by experience; at that point, ‘they should declare them
incapable of modification and thereafter enforce them with the
rest of the laws originally established by the legislator’s imposi-
tion’. Morrow (1960) 570–1 rightly observes that the Athenian
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shows at least some awareness that his law code will need to be
filled out, supplemented, and in extreme cases amended. But
he is quick to acknowledge that Plato ‘seems to have no idea
of indefinite progress; one cannot improve upon perfection, and
like Bentham he is apparently so confident of his science of legis-
lation as to think that perfection is not far distant’. This approach
to the law code stands in stark contrast to Athenian laws and
legal texts; see, e.g., Rhodes (1985); Sealey (1987); Humphreys
(1988); Ober (1989); Cohen (1991, 1995).
25 We may ask how a written text can achieve this status. How
can any discourse avoid the problem of polysemy? Indeed, as I
have suggested, the law code is a subgenre in the Laws: it is put
inside of a philosophical dialogue. To be sure, it is a very dog-
matic dialogue. But we need to enquire how the genre of the law
code interacts with the other genres and discourses of the text.
These other discourses surround the discourse of the law code
per se. I believe that they prepare the reader to read the law code
in a certain way. If one had only the law code plus preludes, one
would not know how to receive or interpret it. The dialogue,
then, aims to persuade us to read and accept the sacrality of the
law code.
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C hap t e r T e n
P raise an d
P e r f o r mance in
Kathryn A. Morgan
A broad-ranging aspect of performance in the world of Plato’s

Laws concerns the institutionalisation of structures of praise
and blame in the planned city of Magnesia. That praise and
blame should be important polarities in the Cretan city does
not, of course, surprise. Greek society had been agonistic from
early times, and the poetry of praise and blame had a pedigree
stretching far back into the Indo-European past. More par-
ticularly, the motifs of epinician poetry (which had enjoyed
its heyday in the first half of the fifth century) had found their
way into a variety of different genres; Thucydides, as Simon
Hornblower has recently suggested, was influenced in import-
ant ways by epinician, and the Athenian genre of the funeral
oration merged praise of the war dead with glorification of
civic institutions.1 The pervasiveness of an agonistic cultural
structure and its associated poetic genres receives added prom-
inence, however, because of the Athenian Stranger’s views on
education and poetry. In his perfect city, both the form and
content of poetry will be regulated, but, even more crucially,
he assures us that the art of the chorus (choreia) as a whole
is the same as the whole of education ( paideusis 672e5–6).2
Education in Magnesia will be an ongoing process. Not only
will the young be carefully trained, but the law code itself,
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both its preludes and its laws, is conceived as a tool for teach-
ing and indoctrination.3 Other chapters in this volume have
explored the importance of choral dance in the life of the city.
My task is to follow up the implications of a universal and
ongoing education and its connections with poetic structures
of praise and blame. These structures both exist in formal
competitive settings and (less formally) pervade civic life. We
need, then, to expand our notion of performance for this dia-
logue to include not only the choral performances that are so
large a part of life in the imagined Cretan city but also life itself
as a performance, one that is musical in a large sense, including
both formal choruses that develop physical and moral grace in
the citizen and informal performances, ranging from commen-
dation of fellow citizens to reporting malefactors to the proper
authorities.
Issues of performance, and indeed of poetry, run deep.
The entire dialogue is figured as a prose performance, and it
seems clear that its reception among the interlocutors of the
dialogue is a model for its wider potential reception. The
Stranger signals his ambitions on behalf of his performance.
When he considers, in Book 7, what kind of poetic or prose
text the young should be given to study, he remarks ‘when I
look at the course our conversations have followed between
dawn and now I think that they have in all ways been spoken
like poetry, and an experience came over me that was perhaps
nothing amazing, namely to be exceedingly pleased when I
looked at them as a group’ (811c6–d2). The dialogue and mate-
rial in moral conformity with it is to be set up as an object of
study for the young. It is meant to rival previous poetry and
prose, and does so, as we shall see, by dismissing the claims of
other genres and setting itself up as an authoritative standard
(cf. 810e–812a).4 Moreover, taken as a whole, it is supposed
to generate approval, if we follow the lead of the Athenian,
who is thus a critic of his own performance. Like the perfect
citizen, the Athenian Stranger is devoted to virtue himself and
tries to make others virtuous too. What is more, the conversa-
tion of the interlocutors employs the same tools of assessment
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Praise and Performance in Plato’s L aw s
that will operate within the city described by the Athenian. As

Andrea Nightingale has remarked, the relationship between
the Athenian and the other interlocutors is analogous to that
between the lawgiver and the citizens.5 It follows that readers
of the dialogue should take their cue from the evaluative tools
used by the interlocutors, as well as from the structures of the
city. Even though the Spartan and the Cretan contribute little
of intellectual weight to the discussion, their presence as an
evaluating audience that clarifies and intensifies the approval
and disapproval of the Athenian is crucial.
My analysis proceeds in several stages. First, I examine the
Athenian Stranger’s critique of the Spartan and Cretan con-
stitutions in Book 1, where Plato suggests that the choice of
constitutions and constitutional values may be expressed as
a choice between different types of poetry. The lawgiver will
emerge as a poet of a particular kind of praise and blame.
Second, I suggest that a dominant model for life within the city
is that of competition, particularly in sporting events. This sort
of competition had its own praise genre, epinician, and Plato
appropriates aspects of this genre while simultaneously dispos-
ing of it as a competitor in the struggle to express preeminent
value. A third section surveys the structures of praise and
blame in operation in the imagined city, where Plato activates
the political language of time, citizen prerogatives and hon-
ours, as a discourse of praise. I show both how fundamental
these structures are and how they stack on top of one another,
as the performance of civic life generates praise or blame when
it is observed by others and is compelled to engage in such
discourse itself.
Evaluat ing C on st it ut ion s and Ge nre s

The tools that provide the framework for the generation of the
law code, praise and blame, structure the intellectual progress
of the Stranger and the interlocutors as they review constitu-
tions in Book 1, commending the commendable and, as Pindar
would say (N. 8.39), ‘sowing blame upon sinners’.6 The dialogue
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opens with a consideration of the constitutions of Sparta and

Crete and the unreflective assumptions of Cleinias and Megillus
that the default condition of human existence and the basis
for their own constitutions is a state of warfare: city against
city, village against village, household against household, and
person against him or herself (625e–626e). Associated with
this position is Tyrtaeus, the eulogist of excellence in warfare
(629a–630d). The Athenian, however, thinks that another kind
of warrior is superior. Just as internal strife, stasis, within the
city is a more difficult kind of warfare, so he who can engage
successfully in that sort of warfare is superior. He connects
this warfare with Theognis’ ethic of group solidarity within
the city; Theognis’ loyalty in time of danger is characterised as
‘perfect righteousness’ (630c–d). This opening move is signifi-
cant in several respects. It emphasizes the role of the poet as
the crystalliser of social values, and underlines the important
function of eulogy. If eulogy is misjudged, society will take
the wrong direction, and Tyrtaeus has engaged in excessive
praise.7 Thus, when the Athenian asserts that ‘the excellence
that Tyrtaeus praised most of all, although it is beautiful and
has been opportunely adorned by the poet, would neverthe-
less be most correctly spoken of as fourth in rank and in its
power to be honoured’, Cleinias responds, ‘Sir, we are cast-
ing our [Cretan] lawgiver into the class of inferior lawgivers’
(630c6–d3). Denigrating the object of Tyrtaeus’ praise is seen
as equivalent to a low evaluation of the Cretan lawgiver.
The discussion pits two types of poetry against each other
as representative of constitutional values: Tyrtaean war elegy
(glossed as encomium, 629c2) and the elegy of Theognis,
switching focus from martial excellence to more generalised
civic ethics. Here the Athenian Stranger has appropriated the
strategy of sympotic poetry that dismisses a problematic or
rival genre. A recent essay by Oswyn Murray reminds us how
lyric poets often reflect on the themes appropriate to their songs
(particularly wine, women, and song) but may also focus on a
rejection of war and strife. Thus Anacreon F2 West declares ‘I
do not like him who, drinking wine by the full krater, talks of
268 �
strife and bloody war, but him who, mingling the shining gifts
of the Muses and Aphrodite, recalls delightful euphrosyne’.8
Another important forerunner is Xenophanes, whose account
of a proper symposium at DK 21B1 surely influenced Plato’s
meditations on symposia in Books 1 and 2. This elegy depre-
ciates accounts of titanomachies, centauromachies, gigant-
omachies, and stasis at a drinking party; one should rather
‘praise the man who brings to light good things when he has
drunk’9 and celebrate the gods with ‘propitious stories and
pure accounts’ (DK 21B1.13–19). A different elegy (DK 21B2)
expresses irritation that athletes get more honour in the city
than a man of wisdom. Plato has noted Xenophanes’ concern
to privilege wisdom over athletic victory, disparage stasis, and
engage in close supervision of the kind of stories told at sym-
posia. Xenophanes’ rejection of war as a subject for discussion
matches up with the rejection of war as a basis for society by
the Athenian in the Laws. Although he is not mentioned expli-
citly in the Laws text, Xenophanes illustrates perfectly a com-
bative elegiac stance that has implications for broader social
and political organisation.
The foray into Tyrtaeus and Theognis results in a prelimin-
ary sketch of the lawgiver’s task at 631b–632d that creates the
first of many hierarchies of goods. The evaluation and rank-
ing that took place among the interlocutors is now transferred
to the lawgiver. In this hierarchy, Tyrtaeus’ object of praise
(courage) will come fourth. First of all come divine goods,
ranked in the following order: wisdom ( phronesis), intelligent
moderation, justice, and courage. Human goods are ranked
with health in first place, then beauty, bodily strength, and
wealth (wisely employed).10 The lawgiver’s job is to make sure
that all the citizens know the rankings. His supervision con-
sists largely of a right distribution of honour and dishonour,
praise and blame. Superintendence of every stage of life is
exercised by ‘honouring and dishonouring correctly’ (τιμῶντα
ὀρθῶς . . . καὶ ἀτιμάζοντα, 631e2–3), and the lawgiver must
‘censure correctly and praise’ (ψέγειν τε ὀρθῶς καὶ ἐπαινεῖν,
632a2) through the laws the pleasures and pains that arise in
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social relationships. Those who obey the laws will receive hon-
ours (timas, 632b8, c3); those who do not will be punished.
We are left in no doubt, even before the later discourse on pre-
ambles towards the end of Book 4, that the lawgiver is a poet of
praise and blame and that, like the Athenian Stranger and his
elegiac forbears, he will review and criticise other genres and
the activities associated with them.
Th e Ag onist ic City
Praise and blame provide the framework for life in the designer
city; in Magnesia, everyone is a performer and everyone should
be a critic.11 We must be careful here. Performance and criti-
cism in Magnesia will be light years removed from their debased
counterparts in Athens, described in Book 3 (700a–701b). There,
the tyranny of the audience and an insatiate lust for pleasure
precipitated the decline of musical forms, the promiscuous mix-
ing of genres, a general disrespect for tradition, and thence the
end of civilisation as we know it.12 In the city of the Laws, how-
ever, the conduct of a virtuous life in conformance with the laws
and the intentions of the lawgiver is a full-time pursuit analo-
gous to athletic training. An evaluating audience is, moreover,
omnipresent. As David Cohen has remarked, in the Laws ‘Plato
entirely collapses the private sphere into the public’; there is no
area of activity immune from intrusion by the state.13 Perfect
civic performance, therefore, involves not just individual accom-
plishment but continual supervision and judgement of others.
This performance absorbs and synthesizes the diverse spheres
of war, athletics, mousike, and political and private life and is
judged by ubiquitous structures of evaluation, structures that
often become formalised through poetic performances. Because
life as a whole is the object of praise or censure, discourses of
praise that set their sights any lower must be dismissed or put in
their place. The standards that generate praise or blame must be
internalised; we must, as it were, live the genre.14
Living the virtuous life, then, involves conformity with
the lawgiver’s ranked lists of goods. Focussing eulogy and its
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opposite on the presence or absence of the lawgiver’s most val-

ued qualities will, however, require a shifting of priorities.
We have already seen how martial excellence, courage (and its
associated eulogistic poetry), had to be demoted: fourth in the
scale of divine goods. Third in the scale of human goods was
strength for racing and other bodily movements (631c3–4),
and this brings to the fore another area of endeavour that was
preeminently significant in the attribution of praise and blame
in the classical period: gymnastic and equestrian competition.
For many Greeks, victory in such competition was the pinnacle
of achievement (it was against such attitudes that Xenophanes
inveighed in DK 21B2), and the Athenian Stranger as lawgiver
must therefore ensure that his citizens are in no doubt about
the place of athletic achievement in his model.15 He does so by
casting athletic victory as an inferior analogue for the life of
virtue – an effective comparison precisely because most would
account such victory the supreme accomplishment. Thus the
‘moral prelude’ at the beginning of Book 5 (726–729d) laments
that no one ‘honours, so to speak, correctly’ (τιμᾷ δ’ ὡς ἔπος
εἰπεῖν ἡμῶν οὐδεὶς ὀρθῶς, 727a2–3 – note the ‘so to speak’
that points up the importance of the metaphor involved) and
explores how truly to do honour to one’s soul. The answer
is to pursue goodness in compliance with the commands of
the legislator, and the method is a correct estimation of what
one should prefer. One should not strive to live at all costs or
prefer beauty to goodness because this implies that one has
judged body to be more important than soul.16 One should not
love wealth ignobly acquired, for all the gold in the world is
not worth excellence (arete, 728a4). One must rank things in
the right order, first the gods, then the soul, then the body.17
Note that this passage has a structure analogous to that of a
priamel: ‘Some people say that such-and-such is important;
they honour wealth or beauty. I, however, say that it is (moral)
excellence’. Granted a correct ordering, the Stranger proceeds
to ask what honours (timas) one should pay to the body. The
body to be honoured is not the excessively strong or swift
or beautiful one, nor its opposite, but the intermediate one,
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because that puts the soul into a better state. As far as the
city and its citizens are concerned ‘by far the best is he who,
instead of winning in the Olympic contests and all contests of
war and peace, receives the reputation of serving the laws at
home, that in his lifetime he served them of all men the most
beautifully’ (729d4–e1).
The motif of what we might call the psychic Olympics is not
an unfamiliar one for Plato. As the myth of the charioteer draws
to a close in the Phaedrus, Socrates predicts that philosophic lov-
ers have a happy fate after death, ‘having won one of the three
truly Olympic wrestling bouts’ (τῶν τριῶν παλαισμάτων τῶν
ὡς ἀληθῶς Ὀλυμπιακῶν, 256b4–5), the aim being to regain
one’s wings in three successive philosophical incarnations.
The close of the Republic also speaks of going to receive one’s
postmortem rewards ‘as the victors go around and collect their
prizes’ (621c7–d1).18 Athletic contest offered a rich analogue for
the philosophical life: events such as wrestling required a series
of victories, while the number of contests and possible victories
also evoked the idea of progression – the philosophical victor
must be a periodonikes, one who wins the prize in all the major
contests. In the Laws passage we are considering, the compari-
son is seemingly straightforward. Law-abiding behaviour is
better for the city than athletic victory, and we think again of
Xenophanes. Yet the idea of the contest for virtue and its prizes
also pervades the larger context (730b), using epinician themes
to present a vision of civic education.
What is not covered explicitly by the law may be instilled,
we learn, by praise and censure (ἔπαινος παιδεύων καὶ ψόγος,
730b5). The first necessity for a happy life is the presence
of truth. Those who are attached to deception, willingly or
unwillingly, are not to be emulated, because as time passes they
are recognised for what they are and contrive for themselves a
lonely and difficult old age (730c4–8). It is worth quoting the
passage that follows at length:
Now, the man who commits no injustice is also worthy of hon-

our (timios), but the man who does not even allow wrongdoers
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to commit injustice is worth more than twice as much honour

as the former. For the former is equivalent to one man, while
the latter is equivalent to many others when he reports the
wrongdoing of others to the magistrates. But he who joins the
magistrates in their work of chastisement to the extent of his
powers, the great and perfect man in the city, let that man be
proclaimed the prizewinner (nikephoros) in virtue (arete). This
same praise (epainon) must be applied in the case of moderation
and wisdom and as many other goods as one possesses that
one can not only have oneself but communicate to others. We
must honour the one who communicates them as the highest,
and put in second place the one who wishes to communicate
them but cannot. We must, however, censure the one who is
jealous and unwilling to share his goods with anyone through
friendship, although we must not dishonour the good he pos-
sesses but acquire it to the extent we can. Let everyone engage
in rivalry with regard to virtue but without envy (φιλονικείτω
δὲ ἡμῖν πᾶς πρὸς ἀρετὴν ἀφθόνως). This kind of person glori-
fies the city both when he contends himself and because he
does not prevent others through slander. The envious man
( phthoneros), thinking that he must prevail through his slander
of others, strives less himself towards true virtue, and discour-
ages his fellow competitors through unjust censure. Because
of this he makes the entire city unpractised in the contest for
virtue (ἀγύμναστον τὴν πόλιν ὅλην εἰς ἅμιλλαν ἀρετῆς) and,
as far as he is concerned, makes it lesser in respect to a fair
reputation. (730d2–731b3)
This passage is saturated with the themes of epinician poetry,

as though the mention of the psychic Olympics has activated
the genre. We note first the notion of time and the competitive
situation as the revealers of truth, and think back to Pindar’s
Olympia, mistress of truth (O. 8.2), and to ‘time, which alone
reveals genuine truth’ (O. 10.53–55). The lonely and fruitless
old age of the one who does not strive for excellence recalls
Pelops’ picture in Pindar’s Olympian 1 of the man who sits in
the darkness in a nameless old age with no portion of good
things (O. 1.81–4). Finally, the danger of slander, almost
omnipresent in Pindar (P. 2.76–83), again rears its head in
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Magnesia, although the slanderer will be less of a threat in the

well-regulated state.
Even more notable, however, is the presence of a broad ago-
nistic structure. The city is engaged in a ‘contest’ for virtue in
which all citizens must compete and practise (note the athletic
metaphor in agymnaston, 731b1).19 The result of this contest is
a fair reputation for the city,20 but the project is endangered
by the slanderous and envious citizen. Those who success-
fully compete are praised, while those tainted by envy are
blamed. There will even be prizewinners: those who join the
magistrates in their task of chastising the unjust. The passage
is characterised by more quasi priamels: the man who does
no wrong is honourable, more honourable is he who does not
allow others to do wrong (by reporting it to the magistrates),
but the ‘great and perfect’ man, the ‘prizewinner’ in virtue, is
the one who joins in the project of the lawgiver by chastising
the guilty.21 Possessing a virtue is not enough; one must also
communicate it to others, and this is what is implied by the
activity of joining the magistrates in chastisement (730d6). The
lines immediately following again engage in tripartite ranking
(this time in reverse order): he who communicates virtue is
best; second comes one who is willing to communicate it but
cannot, while last of all is the envious citizen who keeps his
virtue to himself.
André Laks correctly highlights the importance in this pas-
sage of diffusing virtue throughout the city.22 Praise and blame
are a method of communicating virtue and vice.23 In terms of
athletic culture, one could express this by saying that the per-
fect citizen combines the role of victorious athlete and trainer
or, more broadly, by saying that the ideal performer must also
be a teacher and a critic. This combination of performance and
evaluation of performance marks a crucial difference between
the world of athletic competition and civic excellence. This
difference is also brought out by the Stranger’s treatment of
envy, phthonos. In the world of epinician, the achievement of
the victor is regularly threatened by the envy of fellow com-
petitors, as well as nonparticipants.24 In Magnesia, where
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everyone is a contestant, competition must take place without

envy (φιλονικείτω . . . ἀφθόνως, 731a2–3). Contrary to what we
might expect, the possessor of excellence, generally the last
person who would need to feel envy, is the very person who is
in danger of falling prey to the vice. The ultimate victor tries
to have everyone else share the prize, possessing the desire
for victory ( philonikia) but no jealousy. The agonistic struc-
ture of athletic competition is thus reworked and combines the
previously separated roles of athlete, trainer, and poet.
The Stranger thus goes out of his way to bar phthonos from
the agonistic world of Magnesia – the contest is entered by
all, but given the competitive commitment to virtue and truth,
slander is barred, and we are asked to believe that the com-
petitor in virtue who comes in second place will not cast dark
looks at the one who comes in first. We may or may not be
satisfied with this tension, but it does focus our attention on
a remarkable aspect of this competitive society: it is emotion-
ally disengaged. In the quoted passage, citizens are instructed
to censure the one who does not share his virtue with oth-
ers but without dishonouring the virtue itself and his attain-
ment of it. The underpinnings of censure are explored again in
Book 11 (934c–936a) in the discussion of mockery and insults.
Here, the Stranger criticises citizens who have a disposition
that leads them to speak badly of each other for no good rea-
son and thus stipulates that there shall be a law on defamation,
kakegoria: no one shall speak evil of anyone else (934e1–3). The
culprit is anger (thumos), and the results are dire; men become
like wild beasts.25 Because mockery is frequent in exchanges
of insults, no one shall be allowed to say anything laughable
( geloion, 935b1) about another person in a public place on pain
of being disqualified from the aristeia; insults and mockery
are unacceptable when accompanied by anger (935b8–c7). But
should the lawgiver then allow people to write comedy with-
out passion, so that such compositions can be written in play?
Only partly. Because mockery is so damaging, no poetic com-
poser shall be allowed to mock, whether seriously or in ear-
nest. Certain poets will be given the licence to mock, but they
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can only do so without passion, and the piece must be pre

approved before performance (935d3–936b2). When we praise
and blame, then, and even when we compose comedy, we must
do it without emotional engagement. Slander, insults, comedy
and mockery, and envy are grouped together as dangerous
and clearly have no connection with dispassionate censure. A
counsel of perfection indeed – a city where passion has been
disengaged.26
Let us return to the paradigm of athletic competition, where
we will be reinforced in the (epinician) belief that models of
correct speech are intimately connected with an accurate
appreciation of what sorts of contest deserve our supreme
effort, and where both the ignorant and the jealous are prone
to ‘speaking bad’. My next exhibit of athletic themes is 807c.
No citizen should be sluggish. The ordinary citizen has ‘not
the smallest or the meanest task. Rather the greatest task of
all has been assigned to him by just law. The life that has been
spoken of most correctly as a life, the one dedicated to the pur-
suit of excellence in all ways on the part of the body and the
soul, involves double – and even more – the engagement of
the person who strives for Olympic or Pythian victory and has
no time at all for all the other tasks of life’ (807c2–d1). Once
again, athletic victory is conjured and superseded because
it does not give primacy to the soul. The Olympic athlete
in training focusses on only one aspect of life, the physical,
and so ignores other parts, whereas the good citizen aims at
all-around excellence and is thus much busier. Success in this
contest is victory indeed. Here the paradigm of athletic com-
petition is useful because it evokes the commitment needed
and thus justifies the Athenian’s upcoming point that every
free man should have a timetable for his activities during every
waking hour (807d–e).
Finally, we may note the use of the Olympic games at 822b–c.
Human misapprehensions of the truth of astronomy (the out-
rageous notion that the planets actually wander) results in a
false report that will not be pleasing to the gods (822c4–5). ‘If
we thought like this about men running the long-distance race
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or horses running at Olympia and we addressed the fastest as

the slowest and the slowest as the fastest, and when we made
encomia we sang that the loser had won, I think that we would
be applying our encomia neither correctly nor agreeably to the
runners – and they are only men’ (822b2–7). This passage on
correct encomia occurs shortly before the Athenian meditates
yet again on the proper format of a law code and returns to the
question of eulogising the perfect citizen. Because not all the
demands of the lawgiver can be formulated as a law, the law-
giver must create a paradigm through praise and blame:
The perfect praise (τέλεος . . . ἔπαινος) of an exceptional citi-

zen for virtue is not when somebody says that the good man
is the one who served the laws best and obeyed them most.
It’s more perfect when spoken of like this: that the best citi-
zen is whoever passes through his life purely in obedience to
the writings of the lawgiver when he lays down the law and
when he praises and when he blames (νομοθετοῦντός τε καὶ
ἐπαινοῦντος καὶ ψέγοντος). This saying is most correct with
regard to the praise of a citizen, and in truth the lawgiver must
not only write the laws but, in addition to the laws, must write
the things that seem to him to be fine and not fine, woven
in with the laws, and the supreme citizen must endorse these
no less than what is checked with punishment by the laws.
(822e5–823a6)
The discourse of epinician poetry is used in the first pas-

sage to clarify the correct application of praise. We would be
embarrassed if we sang an epinician only to find out it was
not the winner we were praising. In not giving the victor his
due but praising someone else, we would be committing the
Pindaric sin of slander, kakagoria (ψευδῆ φήμην, 822c4).27 This
is bad enough in the case of men but, as Olympian 1 teaches
us, even worse in the case of gods (O. 1.52–3). For Pindar, as
for Plato, the divine realm is supreme, and improprieties there
are the worst. The discourse of praise and blame then extends
to the strategy of the lawgiver. The lawgiver is a poet of praise
and blame, and his code contains these as well as the laws.
The most perfect praise is awarded to a citizen who is not just
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obedient but proactive.28 As suggested earlier, one must inter-

nalise the code, so that one conforms to the lawgiver’s mod-
els, and it follows also that a perfect citizen would be able to
extrapolate from the passages of praise and blame that the law-
giver actually writes.
It is perfectly clear then that Plato’s presentation of the
methodology of the Stranger’s law code is deeply implicated
in the strategies of epinician, just as it seeks to pass beyond
them.29 By evoking praise poetry, Plato can focus our atten-
tion on scales of value and also appropriate the kind of meth-
odological self-awareness that is so obtrusive in Pindar. We
should devote to the life of physical and more importantly
spiritual virtue all the attention – and more – we pay to the
Panhellenic contests. We have a conceptual priamel: physical
excellence is good, better is pursuing virtue under the guid-
ance of the laws, best is obedience to laws while internalising
their ethos and joining in the task of community discipline.
Even more crucially, we become convinced that life is a con-
test, one in which victory is the only thing that matters and
defeat a matter of shame. Victory, however, is more than
adherence to rules and completion of a set of tasks; it is a
matter of internalising an attitude, living the rules of a genre.
The summit is receiving honour, being acclaimed nikephoros,
being the object of perfect praise. As we shall see, this acclaim
can be offered reliably only at the end of one’s life; the agon is
lifelong, a performance that integrates soul and body, sport,
war, festivals, and dance.
Pe rforming Praise and Blame

in t h e C ity
This brings me to my third area of concern: the pervasive oper-
ation of structures of praise and blame in the daily life of the
city. If the lawgiver is a poet of praise and blame and the law
code his poiesis, living in the city in obedience to the laws is a
poetic performance obeying the same generic rules. At 711b–c,
an autocrat sets his city on the path to virtue by the example of
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his own person, honouring and praising some things, directing

censure towards others, and dishonouring the one who dis-
obeys (τὰ μὲν ἐπαινοῦντα καὶ τιμῶντα, τὰ δ’ αὖ πρὸς ψόγον
ἄγοντα, καὶ τὸν μὴ πειθόμενον ἀτιμάζοντα, 711c1–2). In
Magnesia, a city that lacks a virtuous autocrat, the language
of honour, time, covers a semantic range that represents, at one
end, feelings of respect towards an object or person, progresses
through honour and dishonour manifested in the praise and
blame of citizens, and ends with formal expressions of civic
honour and dishonour.30 The latter include deprivation of citi-
zen rights with varying degrees of severity (corresponding
to contemporary Athenian atimia, deprivation of some or all
civic privileges).31 It is the job of the legislator to construct in
detail the orderly succession of honours (timas) that will oper-
ate in the polis. We have seen this principle in operation at
631e–632a, and it is repeated at 697b2, where the happiness of
society depends on distributing honours and dishonours cor-
rectly (τιμάς τε καὶ ἀτιμίας διανέμειν ὀρθῶς; cf. 831a1).
In several places the language of citizen prerogatives is
mapped onto that of encomium; disciplinary action against a
citizen becomes praise and blame. The continuum between a
social discourse of praise and reputation and that of legal sanc-
tion is well represented by the arrangements for the regulation
of marriage at the end of Book 6. A board of supervisors shall
examine the conduct of married couples, encourage reform
where necessary, and report to a higher authority failure to
comply. Failure to reform means that a male offender shall be
‘without honour’ (atimos, 784d1) and barred from attending
weddings and other feasts. A female offender shall similarly
be barred from ‘honours’ (784d6). Once past the age of child-
bearing, the well-behaved shall have a good reputation (eudo-
kimos, 784e6), while those who misbehave shall ‘be honoured
in the opposite fashion – or rather dishonoured’ (ἐναντίως
τιμάσθω, μᾶλλον δὲ ἀτιμαζέσθω, 784e6–7). It is clear that in
the case of the middle-aged, misbehaviour does not result in
legal sanction, that is, being deprived of citizen ‘honours’. Yet
the same language of honour is used; the virtuous shall have
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a fair reputation (people will praise them), while the opposite

will be the fate of those who lack self-control.
The convergence of civic discipline with the discourse of
praise occurs again at 838e–841e in connection with the prohi-
bition of same-sex intercourse and adultery. The lawgiver shall
deter such practices by declaring them an abomination. There
will also be punishments for the sexually self-indulgent; if a
citizen engages in extramarital intercourse, ‘perhaps we would
seem to legislate correctly if we made a law that declared him
excluded from the honour of praises in the city, in the belief
that he is really a foreigner’ (τάχ’ ἂν ἄτιμον αὐτὸν τῶν ἐν τῇ
πόλει ἐπαίνων νομοθετοῦντες ὀρθῶς ἂν δόξαιμεν νομοθετεῖν,
ὡς ὄντως ὄντα ξενικόν, 841e2–4). This formulation is some-
what difficult to interpret. At stake, once again, seems to be a
forfeiting of citizen privileges since the culprit has in a sense
made himself a foreigner. We are later told (855c), however, that
no one shall ever be made entirely atimos for just one crime.32
The insertion of the word ‘praises’ (ἐπαίνων) into the sentence
is significant. The criminal shall have no honourable share of
civic praises. Does this mean merely that he will not be in the
running for the awards of excellence? Surely not, since this is
a crime the lawgiver takes very seriously. Whatever the actual
punishment envisaged, the collocation of loss of civic privi-
leges with exclusion from praise shows how legal sanction is
envisaged as an outgrowth of a fundamental discourse of hon-
our and dishonour.33
Formal awards of distinction and praise balance out the
threat of reproach and loss of privileges. Athenian honorary
decrees of the fifth and fourth centuries praise a civic benefac-
tor as a ‘good man’ (aner agathos) and award him a crown.34 For
Plato and the Athenian Stranger, the question of who counts
as a ‘good’ man is the focus of considerable analysis, as the
various classifications of moral and physical goods in the Laws
make evident. We have already seen how the goods of the soul
are privileged over those of the body, and the life of the fully
realised citizen over that of an athlete. It comes as no surprise,
then, that there is a clear scale of distinction in the city, with
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civic perfection honoured above achievement in athletics and

war. Let us examine these honours, noting how physical or
military prowess is always placed in a larger civic context, and
how the praise of civic excellence is broadened beyond formal
celebratory contexts to become a way of life.
The supreme award in Magnesia (with one exception, to be
considered shortly) is for lifetime achievement. In the discus-
sion of poetry in Book 7, the Athenian establishes that poetry
should conform to community morals and the language of
hymns and prayers should be appropriate. The gods shall be
the recipients of hymns and encomia mixed with prayers; so
too shall heroes (801e1–4). After these, the Athenian passes
on to a law on poetry concerning mortals, specifying that it
should be made ‘without jealousy’ (ἄνευ φθόνων, 801e6).Those
who have come to the end of their lives ‘having accomplished
noble and laborious deeds with respect to either their bodies
or their souls and who have been obedient to the laws’ shall
receive encomia (801e7–10). It is not safe, however to honour
people with ‘encomia and hymns’ until they have brought
their lives to a satisfactory conclusion. These honours are
open to all those who have manifestly shown themselves to
be ‘good’ men and women (802a1–5). The Greek in this last
phrase (ἀγαθοῖς καὶ ἀγαθαῖς διαφανῶς γενομένοις) is pointed.
The Athenian funeral oration, as Nicole Loraux has shown us,
‘endlessly repeated’ the notion that the dead had been/become
good men by dying for the city in battle.35 Loraux identifies a
fifth-century ‘debate on the definition of arete (identified with
fine death or crowning a fine life)’ in which the funeral ora-
tion most often takes the conservative position that it is a fine
death that makes a man good, even though contemporary prac-
tice, such as honorary decrees, recognised a broader notion of
arete.36 The contrast of the Laws passage with the ideology of
the funeral oration is clear: praise after death shall be given
only if one has lived in obedience to the laws, whatever one’s
other merits. Praise shall, moreover, be given to deserving
men and women; the greatest glory of the latter in Athens, we
remember from Pericles’ funeral oration (Thuc. 2.45.2), was to
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be least talked about ‘either for praise or for blame’. There is no

collective praise in Magnesia as there was in Athens, but the
city of the Laws does mediate between Loraux’s two alterna-
tives of individual renown versus collective glory.37 Individual
praise in Magnesia is nevertheless an expression of community
values.
Only one class of citizens receives higher honours. At 945b
the Athenian turns to the election of auditors who will super-
vise the magistrates, and the structures of praise and of pol-
itical office and honours converge. These auditors are to be
amazing (thaumastous) in virtue (arete, 945e2). Each citizen
shall vote for the man whom he considers the best in every
way (excluding himself ), and the voting shall continue in
stages until three are chosen. No draws will be acceptable.
There will be a first, second, and third place finisher, and each
will receive an olive crown (945e4–946b5). Then, ‘after they
have given out the awards for excellence [aristeia; probably to
be identified with the olive crown], they will proclaim to all
that the city of the Magnesians has, according to the will of
god, achieved salvation once again and has displayed to Helios
its three best men. It dedicates them to Apollo and to Helios as
a common firstfruits offering, according to the ancient law, for
as long as they follow their office of judges’ (946b5–c2). They
will themselves be subject to scrutiny and will judge and be
judged in turn. While they are alive, they shall be priests of
Apollo and the sun and will be allowed to wear laurel wreaths,
alone of all the citizens, since they have been thought worthy
of the community’s aristeia. They shall receive proedria and be
the state ambassadors to Panhellenic festivals (946e5–947a6).
When they die they shall not be lamented with dirges, but
choirs of boys and girls shall sing a eulogy in the form of a
hymn, and this song of praise shall continue throughout the
prothesis (θρήνων δὲ καὶ ὀδυρμῶν χωρὶς γίγνεσθαι, κορῶν δὲ
χορὸν πεντεκαίδεκα καὶ ἀρρένων ἕτερον περιισταμένους τῇ
κλίνῃ ἑκατέρους οἷον ὕμνον πεποιημένον ἔπαινον εἰς τοὺς ἱερέας
ἐν μέρει ἑκατέρους ᾄδειν, εὐδαιμονίζοντας ᾠδῇ διὰ πάσης τῆς
ἡμέρας, 947b5–c2).38 Annual contests of music, athletics, and
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horse racing shall be held in their honour – that is, they have
been awarded hero cult.39 In this instance, judgements of pre-
eminence are made during a man’s lifetime and are intimately
connected with the political process as well as the religious
life of the city. The structures of praise start with an award
of aristeia, a judgement that someone has proved himself the
‘best’ (ariston, 946a2), and culminate with formal poetic cele-
bration at the funeral. The auditors, crowned with olive, are
themselves dedicated as an offering to a god, not just the crown,
as was the case with military heroes. They are monumentalised
as the city’s achievement even as they receive praise for their
devotion to the laws.
Encomia are not restricted to the end of one’s lifetime and to
political and ethical performances. Life in the city, we learn in
Book 8, will also be marked by festival combats, designed to
prepare the citizen-warriors for war. ‘They should distribute
victory prizes (niketeria) and awards for preeminence (aristeia)
in each of these contests and compose encomia and censures
for each other, about what sort of person each one is in the
contests and in the whole of his life, adorning the one who
seems to be best and blaming the one who is not’ (νικητήρια
δὲ καὶ ἀριστεῖα ἑκάστοισι τούτων δεῖ διανέμειν ἐγκώμιά τε
καὶ ψόγους ποιεῖν ἀλλήλοις, ὁποῖός τις ἂν ἕκαστος γίγνηται
κατά τε τοὺς ἀγῶνας ἐν παντί τε αὖ τῷ βίῳ, τόν τε ἄριστον
δοκοῦντα εἶναι κοσμοῦντας καὶ τὸν μὴ ψέγοντας, 829c2–5).40
The award of prizes here parallels the composition of formal
encomia and invectives, and one notes the reciprocity implied
by the reciprocal pronoun ‘each other’ (allelois); we are deal-
ing here with communal discourse. Crucially, moreover, the
Athenian stipulates that, even when these athletic prizes are
awarded, the focus must broaden beyond the physical to the
ethical: evaluation is not restricted to the contests but also
extends to what sort of person the honorand is ‘in the whole
of his life’. Not everyone can be a ‘poet’ of these compositions,
only those who are over fifty and are ‘good’ and ‘honourable’
(timioi) and have been ‘craftsmen of fine deeds’, even if their
poetry has no real musical quality (829c6–d4). These are the
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only ‘poets’ whose poetry will be uncensored and free. The

requirement that civic composition is restricted to those who
have achievements themselves addresses a Platonic objection
about poetry that a good poet should be expert in the subject
matter of his poetry.41 In the context of the Laws, it looks back
to the opening of Book 5, where classes of civic goodness are
ranked, and we learn that it is not enough merely to be good
oneself but that one must participate in making others so. The
successful ‘athlete’ becomes both trainer and poet.
In Book 11, after a discussion of contracts, conversation
turns to the subject of those who are ‘craftsmen of preserva-
tion’ in war: generals and military experts.
When one of these takes on a public work, whether willingly

or because he has been commanded to do so, and executes it
well, the law will never cease to praise the citizen who pays
him honours (timas), which are wages (misthoi) for a man of
war. But if he (the citizen) has been the recipient of one of the
actions that are noble in the sphere of war, and does not render
honour, then the law will blame him. So this law, mingled with
praise, should be laid down by us for the mass of the citizens,
an advisory rather than compulsory one, to honour good men
who are saviours of the whole city, either through courage or
through the mechanisms of war – to honour them second, that
is. For the greatest prize must be given first to those who have
been able to give exceptional honour to the writings of the
good lawgivers. (921d8–922a5)
This passage showcases once again the reciprocal system of

praise, blame, and honour in Magnesia. As we might expect
in a society that has the dialogue’s negative attitude to wealth
and the complicity I have suggested with epinician values,
the wages of the soldier are honours rather than money. We
may well compare Pindar I. 1.41–51: ‘If a man devotes every
impulse to excellence . . . we must offer a lordly boast with
ungrudging mind to those who have found it . . . whoever in
contests or at war wins luxurious glory, receives the highest
profit when he is well spoken of’. Leslie Kurke’s discussion of
this passage demonstrates how these lines explain ‘why song
284 �
is the appropriate wage for victors’ and displaces money to a

lower level than achievement for the community.42 The Laws
passage transfers these motifs to Magnesia but complicates
them. As in Pindar, those who have achieved arete in wars and
contests are to be honoured, but the Stranger assigns them only
second-place honours, since first place goes to those who have
lived a life in obedience to the laws. As previously, the scope
of honour extends beyond individual victory to the whole life
and uses the latter to trump the former.
The opening of Book 12 makes one of the dialogue’s strong
est statements on the nature of life in the Cretan city: no one
can live without an officer set over them; no one must perform
a spontaneous act, whether in play or seriously; all must fol-
low their commander (942a–b). The Athenian then turns his
attention to military conduct and awards. After a campaign,
officers will first consider charges of cowardice. One convicted
of cowardice will no longer be allowed to compete for aristeia,
nor will he be allowed to charge another with cowardice
(943a4–b7). Next comes the judgement of claims for prizes of
valour (aristeia). Evidence for these claims is to be restricted
to the current campaign – the candidate will not be allowed
to refer to previous actions, and the prize (niketerion) will be
a crown of olive leaves. This must be dedicated in a temple
and may be used as evidence for a later lifelong achievement
award and the grant of first-, second-, or third-place honours
there (943b7–c8). The strategy is familiar; awards for mili-
tary and athletic excellence are contextualised in terms of a
whole lifetime, and awards for military merit are not cumula-
tive for judgements of military excellence. By this I mean that
although past military excellence may not be used as evidence
for a present prize, all such awards may later be considered
when in the evaluation of one’s whole life. Plato again trans-
forms epinician motifs. Whereas a Pindaric ode will often use
past victories of the victor and his family as evidence of merit,
this move is blocked for Magnesian prize competitions except
the one that comes at the very end of life.43 Each act will be
judged on its own merits. This law, moreover, preemptively
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Kathryn A. Morgan
blocks any use of the epinician motif of vicissitude, whereby

life is full of ups and downs but past pain and failure can be
cancelled by present victory. In Magnesia, a person can be
praised without reservation only once the chance for failure
and vicissitude is past.
The structures of praise permeate the lives of citizens in the
Cretan city. Provision is made for differing sorts of accomplish-
ments, but they are all considered within the framework of a
complete life. Even more striking is that this network of praise
and blame exists in a second order also.44 In one of the passages
considered earlier (921d8–922a5), we saw the arrangements
made to honour military expertise. Citizens who have been the
recipients of such benefits must honour the donors. If they do
not, the law will blame them: a careful reciprocity of benefit
and honour. Yet this task of praise is itself the object of assess-
ment on the part of the ‘law’, which will praise those who give
honour correctly and blame those who do not. This ‘second
order’ of assessment recurs in the discussion of the meetings of
the council for the supervision of the laws (951d–952b). These
meetings will include younger associates invited by the senior
members. If any of these younger guests proves unworthy, the
whole council will blame (memphesthai, 952a8) the one who
invited him. The invitees who enjoy a good reputation (eudoki-
mountas, 952b1) will be observed by the rest of the city, which
will honour them (timan, 952b3) when they succeed and dis-
honour them (atimazein, 952b4) more than others if they turn
out worse than others. Once again we note the ordered struc-
ture of praise whereby not only is the young associate judged,
but the one who invited him may also be censured (and, we
presume, praised). The case of those who supervise funerals
is similar. When someone dies, he or she shall receive a mod-
est funeral (958e–959d). In particular (959e), the household of
the deceased shall call a guardian of the law to supervise the
funeral. If the funeral is lawful, it shall be a fine thing (kalon,
959e4) for this supervisor, but if not, a disgrace (aischron,
959e5). Note that it is the credit and disgrace of the supervis-
ing official that is in question.45
286 �
At every stage official arrangements for scrutiny are rein-

forced by and mapped onto formal and informal institutions of
praise. Citizens who spend their lives both obeying the laws in
the strict sense and praising and blaming in the way suggested
by the lawgiver will in turn praise or blame other citizens who
are praising and blaming correctly or incorrectly. Nor should
we think that this hierarchy of judgement ends in the mortal
world. The discussion of the gods and atheism in Book 10 shows
that the gods are interested spectators of mortal performances
and will be handing out their own prizes in the afterlife. No
human activity is too insignificant to escape their notice. They
instantiate a perfected mechanism of evaluation (902–5).
C onc lu sion
This survey of the structures of praise in Magnesia presents a
coherent picture. Plato sets up the discussion of the law code
in the Laws as a response to the values implicit and explicit in
the poetry of battle and of agonistic competition. The Stranger
rejects the privileging of military virtues in the construction of
his law code and at many places in the Laws conjures the spec-
tacle of athletic competition, only to judge success in this arena
as inferior. Although Plato appropriates some of the topoi of
epinician for praise in Magnesia, he rejects epinician’s privil-
eging of wealth and its reduction of arete to questions of her-
edity and momentary achievement in the realms of the body.
The life of virtue in Magnesia is assimilated to a life of athletic
competition. Just as the victor in the games receives praise and
prizes, so should the virtuous citizen. The competition lasts an
entire lifetime, and although one may win aristeia and niket-
eria along the way, authoritative assessment comes later. Both
the discussion of the interlocutors and the law code generated
by it are obsessed with rankings, and this in turn generates a
civic discourse that resonates with priamel structure. While
prizes are awarded formally, praise is issued both formally and
informally. Occasions of formal praise are specified in the law
code, yet the law code also provides ‘generic’ guidance: certain
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Kathryn A. Morgan
sorts of actions are to be praised (or blamed) by all citizens on

an ongoing basis. The structures of praise are stacked one on
top of the other. Virtuous actions call for praise, praise that
is enjoined by the law code. Failure to praise or blame is an
offence, and one may be praised or blamed in turn for such
offences. Plato takes the epinician chreos motif (‘my duty is
to praise’) very seriously indeed. It is not enough merely to
achieve oneself; one must also communicate value. One does
this by teaching others to conform to the model set up by the
lawgiver. The means are chastisement and reward, praise and
blame. The victor becomes a poet and critic.
Plato’s Ion describes, perhaps ironically, the process of
poetic inspiration and performance through the metaphor of
a sequence of magnetised iron rings (Ion 533d–536d), wherein
the Muse is the loadstone and poet, rhapsode, and audience
are the magnetised rings that hang in a chain from it. Similarly,
in the Laws the Lawgiver’s creative performance in framing the
constitution has been ‘magnetised’ by his contact with divine
goodness, which he attempts to spread through the city. He cre-
ates a lower level of performers, the magistrates, who will com-
municate his code to the population. From these rings, clusters
of other rings are suspended, as citizens take part in contests
of virtue in different arenas: athletics, war, civic duties, family
life, and so on. The sequence of rings will, in fact, be unend-
ing, as citizens become inspired by the force of civic perfor-
mance and attempt, for so they must, to pass the ‘inspiration’
on while remaining aware of a hierarchy of absolute value. Yet
their ‘inspiration’ will not be the irrational urge presented in
the Ion but an ordered process grounded in the internalised
text of the law code. Because the process is rational, each ring
(again, unlike the Ion) will be able to evaluate both its own
performances and those of others. If no area of life in the city
remains private, each act, and speech act, is public, performed
for one’s own benefit and that of one’s fellow citizens. Life in
Magnesia is one vast choral performance orchestrated by the
lawgiver. This performance, with model efficiency, generates
its own song of praise as it goes and simultaneously praises
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the good gods who have generated the world and assess its
operation.
Not e s
1 Loraux (1986 [1981]); Hornblower (2004) 44–51, 273–353. The
funeral oration is particularly significant, because it celebrates
citizens for exemplary conformity with the ideals of the city.
2 On the relationship between chorus, festival, and education, see
Mouze (2005) 221–42. All translations are mine unless otherwise
indicated.
3 On the law code as school text, see Bobonich (1991) 377;
Nightingale (1999) 102. Opinions differ vigorously on whether
the preludes are examples of rational persuasion (Bobonich
(1991)) or ‘a fixed and authoritative voice that can neither be
questioned nor contradicted’ (Nightingale (1993) 291, cf. 293).
4 Nightingale (1993) 289–90.
5 Nightingale (1993) 295.
6 Mouze (2005) 327–32 sees the structures of praise and blame as
underlying all of Books 1 and 2, not only in the evaluation of
constitutions and poets but in the consideration of the role of
wine and the drinking party.
7 Cf. 629d8: ‘You have praised excessively’ – an indication that
Tyrtaeus has engaged in the epinician sin of praising too much.
On Plato’s use of Tyrtaeus and Theognis here, and on his use of
poetic citation more generally, see des Places (1942).
8 O. Murray (2008) 171 including translation.
9 Cf. O. Murray (2008) 171. Xenophanes thus takes on the role of
the ruler (archon) of the drinking party recommended by the
Athenian Stranger at 640c4. Depending on what reading one
adopts at B1.19, it is possible that the following line reads ‘as
memory and a striving for virtue bring to him’. This is the trans-
lation of Lesher (1992) 13 (cf. his commentary at 53–4 and Bowra
(1938) 361–2).
10 For the wise use of wealth as a major concern of Pindaric epini-
cian, see Kurke (1991) 225–39.
11 Cf. Mouze (2005) 327 (‘la catégorie essentielle par laquelle les
discours tant poétiques que législatifs se laissent analyzer’).
12 Wallace (1997); Mouze (2005) 379–90.
13 Cohen (1995) 55.
14 On the internalisation of standards, see further Cohen (1995) 48;
Nightingale (1999) 103.
15 Cf. his later discussions at 795e–796d, 814d–e, 832d–e: the only
physical contests encouraged are those which improve the skills
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Kathryn A. Morgan
connected with actual warfare. Physical activities that cater only

to a ‘useless desire for victory’ (φιλονικίας ἀχρήστου χάριν,
796a2) will find no place. Cf. Tarrant (2003) 352.
16 O’Sullivan (2003) 86–7 notes how the privileging of intellectual
and moral over bodily gifts recurs in Isocrates, who is himself
deeply indebted to Pindaric discourses of praise.
17 The prelude represented by the beginning of Book 5 rests, as
Laks (2005) 141 has noted, on an implicit ranked classification of
goods.
18 See Silk (2001) 33–8 for an instructive comparison of Plato’s
Myth or Er with Pindar’s Pythian 8.
19 Cf. 830a, where the lawgiver is said to produce ‘athletes in the
greatest contests, against whom countless antagonists compete’.
Goldschmidt (1970) 184 also envisions life in the city as agonistic,
a ‘peaceful struggle like a contest’ (‘La vie politique est conçue
comme une lutte pacifique, comme un concours. L’enjeu de cette
rivalité est la vertue et celle-ci, à son tour, fournira le critère
à l’opinion publique pour designer aux charges electives’).
He connects this struggle for virtue, however, with the practice
of denunciation, rather than following up on the athletic reso-
nances. Bertrand (1999) 258–61 gives a more balanced appraisal
of the system of honours.
20 As if Plato has taken the strand of Pindar’s thought that impli-
cates the athletic victor’s achievement with that of the city (Kurke
(1991) 163–94) and has reworked it.
21 Cf. Morrow (1960) 276; Goldschmidt (1970) 180 (connecting
Plato’s vision of ‘joining in chastisement’ (συγκολάζων) with
Pythagorean thought).
22 Laks (2005) 142. Cf. Detienne (1986 [1981]) 93–5, 100; Bertrand
(1999) 329–35 on the broad diffusion of ‘rumour’ ( pheme) in
Magnesia.
23 Goldschmidt (1970) 180–4 suggestively links the passage to con-
temporary Athenian practices of sycophancy and denunciation.
He proposes that Plato wants to rework the figure of the syco-
phant in accord with virtue and then casts the rejected version
of the sycophant as the envious man ( phthoneros). While Plato
may well be concerned to reconfigure contemporary denunci-
ation, I think that Goldschmidt’s focus on censure leads him to
ignore the more positive side of the equation.
24 On phthonos as the paradigmatic concept for negative emotions
and behaviours in Pindar, see Bulman (1992) esp. 8. For phthonos
in the Laws, see Brisson (2000b), esp. 16–20 and 22 (the last ref-
erence dealing with the ‘honour-loving’ ( philotimos) disposition
at Laws 870).
290 �
25 The Stranger speaks of the ‘heaviest hatreds and enmities’ that

are created by defamation and says that when a speaker gives
way to his thumos, he fills his disposition with ‘evil banquets’
(μίση τε καὶ ἔχθραι βαρύταται γίγνονται· πράγματι γὰρ
ἀχαρίστῳ, θυμῷ, χαριζόμενος ὁ λέγων, ἐμπιμπλὰς ὀργὴν
κακῶν ἑστιαμάτων, 935a2–4). Might we suggest that behind this
portrayal lies the Archilochus of Pindar’s Pyth. 2.53–6? In that
ode, the poet must ‘flee the bite of evil-speaking’ and has seen
‘Archilochus the censorious fattening himself on heavy-worded
hatreds’. For the eating imagery associated with invective here,
and its association with bestial traits, see Steiner (2002) 300–2.
26 There seems, indeed, to be an unresolved tension in the cre-
ation of an agonistic city from which envy is barred (though one
might press into service the positive and competitive strife from
Hesiod’s Works and Days 19–25). This tension resurfaces in the
myth of the charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus (246a–248c), where
mortal souls, represented by a two-horse chariot with charioteer,
attempt to follow a patron god to a ‘place beyond the heavens’.
Any soul can follow a god, for there is no envy ( phthonos) in the
divine chorus. But problems ensue since the chariots of mortal
souls have imbalanced horses: ‘Although all are eager to reach
the heights and follow, not all are able, sucked down as they
travel they trample and tread on one another, this one striving
to outstrip that’ (248a–b). The use of the chariot image brings
with it such an agonistic charge that the ascent to the hyperura-
nian place involves trampling, laming, broken bodies, and a kind
of competition that is certainly noncooperative. Agonistic bag-
gage cannot be easily shed, and the attempt to disable phthonos
is not the least utopian aspect of the city of the Laws (so also
Goldschmidt (1970) 184–5, similarly drawing attention to the
Hesiod passage).
27 For kakagoria as the ultimate epinician sin, see Morgan (2008).
28 Laks (2005) 136 positions praise and blame as intermediate
between law and admonition and in commenting on this passage
stresses perceptively the possibilities of praise as a universal dis-
course (‘l’universitalité potentielle du discours de l’éloge’).
29 A good example of the notion of Platonic ‘transposition’ is dis-
cussed by Diès (1927) esp. 268, who identifies as a fundamental
Platonic rhetorical strategy the practice of bringing up a dis-
course of popular culture and then reworking it into an image of
philosophy and the philosophic life.
30 Goldschmidt (1970) 178 with n. 38 and Laks (2005) 144 both
differentiate between applications of honour and praise (relying
partly on a distinction made by Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1.12). Honour
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Kathryn A. Morgan
is paid to the gods and the soul, while the virtues are praised.
Without disputing that gods and the soul are preeminent objects
of honour, I still maintain that the language of honour and praise
in the Laws converges in the evaluation of citizen life (and even
in the case of the gods, who are to receive ‘hymns and encomia’,
801e1).
31 On the complexities of atimia in Athens, see Wallace (1998).
32 Stalley (1983) 138.
33 Compare also the encouragement of childbearing through ‘honours
and dishonours’ at 740d7–8 and punishment for citizens who
engage in a craft by ‘reproaches and dishonours’ at 847a6.
34 For the close connection between formulae for crowning and
praising in honorary decrees, see Henry (1983) 1–12, 42–4. The
explanation of the honorand’s virtues often focusses on his good-
ness. Thus, IG i3 110.6–12 runs ‘since Oiniades is a good man
(ἀνήρ . . . ἀγαθός) with regard to the city of the Athenians and is
eager to do whatever good he can (πρόθυμος ποιεῖν ὅτι δύναται
ἀγαθόν) . . . [it is resolved] to praise him (ἐπαινέσαι)’. Other
decrees (from later in the fourth century and after) praise honor
ands for their excellence (arete), their justice (dikaiosune), and
their ambition for honour ( philotimias). For the contrast between
the relatively expansive conception of ‘goodness’ expressed in
Athenian honorary decrees and that implicit in the genre of the
funeral oration, see Loraux (1986 [1981]) 109. Bertrand (1999)
261–2 makes valuable, though brief, comments on the function
of praise and blame in contemporary cities, with an apt quota-
tion of Lycurgus, Leoc. 10: ‘Two things educate the young: the
punishment of the guilty and the reward given to good citizens.
They fix their eyes on each of these, avoid the one through fear
and desire the other because of its glory’. Because Lycurgus was
a pupil at the Academy, we may suspect the influence of the
Laws here.
35 Loraux (1986 [1981]) 99. It is instructive to note how many of
the citations she lists for the phrase aner agathos genomenos
(99 n. 126) come from Plato’s parodic Menexenus (13 of 31).
36 Loraux (1986 [1981]) 52, 106–13. Again, the Menexenus emerges
as a valuable indication of Plato’s dissatisfaction with the sys-
tems of praise operating in the funeral oration: ‘There seem to be
many advantages in dying in battle; one is given a magnificent
burial, even if one ends one’s days in poverty, and a eulogy, even
if one has no worth’ (Menex. 234c, quoted on 52).
37 Loraux (1986 [1981]) 50–2 (with a survey of the roots of the
funeral oration in older genres, including the poetry of Pindar
and Bacchylides).
292 �
38 For the distancing of funeral praise from lamentation, see Loraux

(1986 [1981]) 43–7.
39 Morrow (1960) 465 with n. 218.
40 Morrow (1960) 271 n. 65 rightly draws a distinction between
political and military awards, but I cannot see that the distinc-
tion is reflected (as he suggests) in any contrast between niketeria
and aristeia in this passage.
41 Rep. 598e, 599b–600e. The worry also lies behind the critique of
the rhapsode’s expertise at Ion 539d–541d.
42 Kurke (1991) 235–7.
43 Family and past victories in Pindar (e.g.): Nem. 2.17–24, 5.40–6;
Isth. 4.25–9, 69–71b.
44 I omit here detailed consideration of the discussion of property
at 913b–914c, where the law decrees that a free man who informs
the authorities when someone appropriates a treasure trove will
receive a reputation for virtue, whereas one who fails to inform
will receive a reputation for baseness. The same dynamic is at
work, however.
45 Bertrand (1999) 151–2 narrates how, in the election of the guard-
ians of the laws, public nominations for the office contain both
the name of the candidate and that of the nominator. Anyone
who disagrees with a nomination may remove it from the tem-
ple and display it in the marketplace (753b–d). Bertrand aptly
remarks that this process stigmatises not only the rejected candi-
date but his nominator.
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��
C hap t e r E l e ve n
Pa i d e s M a l a ko n
Mou s o n
T r a g e d y i n P l a t o ’s L a w s
Penelope Murray
The status of tragedy in the Laws is a notorious problem:

does it, or does it not, have a place in Plato’s Cretan city? In
this chapter my concern is with Plato’s attitude to tragedy as
it appears in this, his final work, particularly in comparison
with the Republic. As we know, the Laws is ostensibly much
more hospitable to poetry, and mousike is seen as the great
instrument of paideia for both children and adults alike. All
the city must sing (665c), and we hear in detail about the cho-
ruses and festivals that will provide the basic structure of the
cultural life of the citizens. In the contemporary world, Plato
says, mousike has become dangerously corrupt because it is
judged solely by the criterion of pleasure (655c–d), that is, by
the indiscriminate pleasure of the masses, rather than by the
pleasure of the virtuous few. This is the context in which trag-
edy is first mentioned in the Laws. Supposing they were to
devise a pleasure contest in which contestants could compete
in whatever way they wanted in order to win the prize for giv-
ing the most pleasure (658b). The result would depend on who
would be doing the judging: the smallest children would give
the prize to a puppet show, and the older children to comedy,
whereas the educated women, the young men, and the mass of
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Paides Malakon Mouson
the people in general would choose tragedy. However, ‘we old

men’, says the Athenian, ‘would probably be most gratified to
listen to a reciter doing justice to the Iliad or the Odyssey, or
an extract from Hesiod: we’d say he was the winner by a clear
margin’ (658d).1 Comedy, tragedy, and epic are here arranged
in a hierarchy according to the criterion of pleasure, with epic
given the first prize by those most competent to judge, that is,
the old men. For, as he goes on to say, the best music (Mousan
kallisten) is that which pleases the best and most highly edu-
cated men. Their choice is epic, specifically the works of Hesiod
and Homer.
What has happened to ‘the original master and leader of
the tragic poets’, ‘the most poetic and first of the tragedians’?
I refer, of course, to the Homer of Plato’s Republic, the Homer
who had to be banished from the ideal state because of the
terrible power of his poetry to corrupt even the best of men.2
Nowhere in the Laws is it implied that Homer’s poetry is threat-
ening to the well-being of the citizens or the state. Indeed,
whenever Homer is mentioned or quoted, it is apparently with
deference and approval. So, for example, in the discussion of
the origins of government and the different kinds of consti-
tution, Homer is praised for his description of the household
system of the Cyclopes (Od. 9.112ff.), Cleinias comments on
the fineness of his verses, and Megillus on his preeminence
amongst poets (680b–c). Similarly, Homer’s verses on Dardania
(Il. 20.216ff.) are quoted as an example of divinely inspired
truth: ‘He composed these lines, and those about the Cyclopes,
under some sort of inspiration from God’, says the Athenian.
‘And how true to life they are! This is because poets as a class
are divinely gifted and inspired when they sing, so that with
the help of Graces and Muses they frequently hit upon how
things really happen’ (682a). I suppose one might want to see
irony here, but it is by no means obvious. One might compare
776e where Homer is quoted and referred to as the ‘wisest of
poets’, words that one would not hesitate to take at their face
value if one were reading the Laws without prior knowledge
of the Republic.3 Again, at 711d–e we find Nestor held up as a
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Penelope Murray
role model, not only for his eloquence but also as a paragon of
moderation and restraint (he surpassed all men toi sophronein).
Similarly, Hesiod, who is castigated in the Republic as the per-
petrator of the ‘biggest lie about the most important matters’
(Rep. 377e–378a), that is, Cronus’ castration of his father and
the whole succession myth which follows, and who, together
with Homer, is held responsible for all the false ideas about the
gods that dominate Greek culture, appears in the Laws as an
authority on ethical matters: how wise he was when he con-
trasted the smooth and easy path to wickedness with the steep
and rugged path to virtue, how truly was Justice named the
daughter of Reverence, and so on.4 Homer and Hesiod appear
to be presented in the traditional manner as the source of wis-
dom and authority.5
In fact, as Richard Martin argues in Chapter 12, Plato’s treat-
ment of Homer is not as straightforward as a naive reading
might suggest. There are comparatively few explicit references
to Homer, and the performance of epic is barely mentioned.
But at the same time we are made aware of Homer’s hidden
presence. Indeed, the choice of epic as the preferred form of
entertainment for the old men at 658e, quoted earlier, comes
near to subverting the entire educational project of the Laws:
if the recitation of Homer and Hesiod is valued highest by
those best able to judge, why isn’t rhapsody the canonical art
form in the city? Homer is both central and marginal, a cul-
tural phenomenon whose influence is acknowledged, yet sub-
tly undermined. But in contrast with the Republic, there is no
open confrontation with Homer.
Tragedy, on the other hand, is a different matter. From the
passage I started with, it is clear that tragedy is the most popu-
lar of the poetic genres, giving pleasure to the mass of people
in general; but it is also the one type of poetry to which Plato
remains consistently hostile. Although there is not much
explicit discussion of tragedy in the Laws, what there is is pre-
dominantly negative. Theatre buildings will be part of Plato’s
Cretan city (see, e.g., 779d, where the essential buildings of
the city are listed: walls, houses, the agora, gymnasia, schools,
296 �
and theatres), but will tragedies be performed in them? This

question is raised in the famous passage at 817, which I shall
consider shortly. The passage follows on from the discussion
of the types of dancing that will be allowed in the city, in
which the citizens themselves will participate: dances that are
peaceful, and expressive of well-being, that are in harmony
with what a good man would feel, dancing (choreia) in a man-
ner appropriate for men with beautiful bodies and noble souls
(816d) will be the essential means of educating the citizens
about what really matters, ta spoudaia (serious things). But
since the serious cannot be properly understood without ref-
erence to its opposite, the ridiculous or the comic, the dances
of comedy, which represent ugly bodies and vulgar ideas, will
also have their place. Indeed, comedy as a whole is given an
educational role in Plato’s city because it shows people how
not to behave: if you do not know what is ridiculous how
can you avoid being ridiculous yourself ? But free men and
women will not themselves take part in performances of com-
edy, as that would be too risky; they might find themselves
inadvertently adopting the habits of the characters they play.
Instead they will be spectators of comedies performed by
slaves and hired foreigners.6 Citizens themselves won’t pay
serious attention to what they see, and performances should
always contain something new, presumably in order to avoid
the reinforcement of any particular type of vulgar behaviour
(816d–e). But watching comedies seems to be a necessary part
of their education.7
Plato’s treatment of comedy here perhaps alludes to the
Spartan practice described by Plutarch in the Life of Lycurgus;
speaking of the callous and brutal treatment of the helots,
he says:
The Spartiates would force them to drink quantities of unmixed
wine and then they would bring them into messes (sussitia) to
show the young men what drunkenness was like. They would
also force them to perform songs and dances which were vul-
gar and ludicrous, while excluding them from ones fit for free
men. (Plut. Lyc. 28; trans. Talbert (1988))8
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The implication of this passage is that, just as the young men

will learn what drunkenness is by watching the drunken
behaviour of the helots, so they will become acquainted with
the vulgar and ridiculous as spectators, whilst avoiding such
behaviour themselves. But Plutarch also brings out an essential
aspect of humour in ancient Greece, its connection with humil-
iation: forcing the helots to perform these ridiculous dances
is a way of humiliating them, of turning them into laughing-
stocks. This kind of laughter is essentially laughing at rather
than laughing with, and it seems to be characteristic of Greek
conceptions of comedy. Plato himself refers in the Philebus (50)
to the pleasure we feel when we laugh at the ridiculous quali-
ties of our friends. The psychology of laughter, the psychol-
ogy of comedy is thus very different from that associated with
tragedy, where what is emphasised, particularly by Plato, is
sympathy: comic laughter is from the outside and so less dan-
gerous than tragedy with its irresistible effect of involving the
audience in the sufferings of its characters. With comedy the
spectator retains a degree of self awareness, even of superior-
ity, as he witnesses the ridiculous antics of the performers on
stage. In the Republic, it is true, comedy is treated in the same
way as tragedy in terms of its deleterious effect when Plato says
at 606c that enjoying a comic performance at the theatre might
lead you to play the buffoon at home without realising it; but
in general there is less emphasis on the perils of audience iden-
tification with characters in comedy than in tragedy. I wonder
also if the metatheatricality of comic mimesis might be relevant
here: comedy draws attention to its own status as comedy: it
does not create the illusion that what we are witnessing is real,
indeed it makes a feature of its own theatricality so that its
power to corrupt is less insidious than that of tragedy.9
But what about tragedy? Let us look at the only place in the
Laws where the status of tragedy is explicitly considered:
τῶν δὲ σπουδαίων, ὥς φασι, τῶν περὶ τραγῳδίαν ἡμῖν

ποιητῶν, ἐάν ποτέ τινες αὐτῶν ἡμᾶς ἐλθόντες ἐπανερωτήσωσιν
οὑτωσί πως· ‘ὦ ξένοι πότερον φοιτῶμεν ὑμῖν εἰς τὴν πόλιν
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τε καὶ χώραν ἢ μή, καὶ τὴν ποίησιν φέρωμέν τε καὶ ἄγωμεν,

ἢ πῶς ὑμῖν δέδοκται περὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα δρᾶν;’ τί οὖν ἂν πρὸς
ταῦτα ὀρθῶς ἀποκριναίμεθα τοῖς θείοις ἀνδράσιν; ἐμοὶ μὲν
γὰρ δοκεῖ τάδε· ‘ῶ ἄριστοι’, φάναι, ‘τῶν ξένων, ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν
τραγῳδίας αὐτοὶ ποιηταὶ κατὰ δύναμιν ὅτι καλλίστης ἅμα
καὶ ἀρίστης· πᾶσα οὖν ἡμῖν ἡ πολιτεία συνέστηκε μίμησις
τοῦ καλλίστου καὶ ἀρίστου βίου, ὃ δή φαμεν ἡμεῖς γε ὄντως
εἶναι τραγῳδίαν τὴν ἀληθεστάτην. ποιηταὶ μὲν οὖν ὑμεῖς,
ποιηταὶ δὲ καὶ ἡμεῖς ἐσμὲν τῶν αὐτῶν, ὑμῖν ἀντίτεχνοί τε καὶ
ἀνταγωνισταὶ τοῦ καλλίστου δράματος, ὃ δὴ νόμος ἀληθὴς
μόνος ἀποτελεῖν πέφυκεν, ὡς ἡ παρ’ ἡμῶν ἐστιν ἐλπίς· μὴ δὴ
δόξητε ἡμᾶς ῥᾳδίως γε οὕτως ὑμᾶς ποτε παρ’ ἡμῖν ἐάσειν
σκηνάς τε πύξαντας κατ’ ἀγορὰν καὶ καλλιφώνους ὑποκριτὰς
εἰσαγαγομένους, μεῖζον φθεγγομένους ἡμῶν, ἐπιτρέψειν ὑμῖν
δημηγορεῖν πρὸς παῖδάς τε καὶ γυναῖκας καὶ τὸν πάντα
ὄχλον, τῶν αὐτῶν λέγοντας ἐπιτηδευμάτων πέρι μὴ τὰ αὐτὰ
ἅπερ ἡμεῖς, ἀλλ’ ὡς τὸ πολὺ καὶ ἐναντία τὰ πλεῖστα. σχεδὸν
γάρ τοι κἂν μαινοίμεθα τελέως ἡμεῖς τε καὶ ἅπασα ἡ πόλις,
ἡτισοῦν ὑμῖν ἐπιτρέποι δρᾶν τὰ νῦν λεγόμενα, πρὶν κρῖναι
τὰς ἀρχὰς εἴτε ῥητὰ καὶ ἐπιτήδεια πεποιήκατε λέγειν εἰς τὸ
μέσον εἴτε μή. νῦν οὖν, ὦ παῖδες μαλακῶν Μουσῶν ἔκγονοι,
ἐπιδείξαντες τοῖς ἄρχουσι πρῶτον τὰς ὑμετέρας παρὰ τὰς
ἡμετέρας ᾠδάς, ἂν μὲν τὰ αὐτά γε ἢ καὶ βελτίω τὰ παρ’ ὑμῶν
φαίνηται λεγόμενα, δώσομεν ὑμῖν χορόν, εἰ δὲ μή, ὦ φίλοι, οὐκ
ἄν ποτε δυναίμεθα’.
But what about our ‘serious’ poets, as they’re called, the tra-
gedians? Suppose some of them were to come forward and
ask us some such question as this: ‘Gentlemen, may we enter
your state and country, or not? And may we bring our work
with us? Or what’s your policy on this point?’ What would
be the right reply for us to make to these inspired geniuses?
This I think: ‘Most honoured guests, we’re tragedians our-
selves, and our tragedy is the finest and best we can create.
At any rate, our entire state has been constructed so as to be
a representation of the finest and noblest life – the very thing
we maintain is most genuinely a tragedy. So we are poets like
yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors
as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone
has the natural power to produce to perfection (of that we’re
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quite confident). So don’t run away with the idea that we shall
ever blithely allow you to set up stage in the market-place and
bring on your actors whose fine voices will carry further than
ours. Don’t think we’ll let you declaim to women and children
and the general public, and talk about the same practices as
we do but treat them differently – indeed, more often than
not, so as virtually to contradict us. We should be absolutely
daft, and so would any state as a whole, to let you go ahead as
we’ve described before the authorities had decided whether
your work was fit to be recited and suitable for public perfor-
mance or not. So, you sons of the charming Muses, first of all
show your songs to the authorities for comparison with ours,
and if your doctrines seem the same as or better than our own,
we will grant you a chorus;10 but if not, friends, that we can
never do’. (817a–d)
I had always assumed that in this passage at 817 tragedy is

being banned from the city, just as it is in the Republic. But this
is by no means a universally accepted view. Glenn Morrow, for
example, in his discussion of the lines comes to the following
conclusion:11 ‘Tragedy is permitted in Plato’s state, but grudg-
ingly, as it were, and under strict control. Plato recognises its
power to mould public opinion and manners (658d, 838c).
Unlike the comedians, the tragic poets are serious (spoudaioi)
and inspired (theioi); and Plato the law-giver pays them the
high compliment of regarding them as his rivals’. A propos
the tragedians being required to display their works before the
officials, Morrow comments, ‘Despite this appearance of dras-
tic censorship, the procedure Plato proposes is – formally, at
least – quite similar to that followed at Athens . . . the use of
the familiar phrase “granting a chorus” suggests that in Plato’s
state, as at Athens, the chorus and actors would be citizens;
and if this is so, it implies that tragedy of the proper sort is
not unworthy of study by the citizen’. (This raises the crucial
question of what might be meant by ‘tragedy of the proper
sort’). At the same time, Morrow comments in a note that ‘the
graphic language in which Plato describes the tragic poets as
enquiring whether they will be permitted to enter the city
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with their poetry would, if taken literally, imply that tragedies,

like comedies, are to be written and performed by foreigners. It
is tempting to interpret it thus. . . . But in the light of the other
details in the text it is more plausible to take this as merely a
dramatic touch, parallelling the very similar passage in Rep.
398a–b’.12
So what scenario is being envisaged here? Peter Wilson com-
ments judiciously that Plato’s image may well ‘draw on con-
temporary practice whereby visiting poets and actors might be
supported by a locally recruited and supported choros’.13 But
as so often with Plato’s writing, it is impossible, and indeed
counterproductive, to draw a sharp dividing line between
metaphor and ‘reality’. Here I think the precise mechanics mat-
ter less than the general tone of the imagery. Morrow, I think,
is too kind to Plato, and perhaps too literal-minded, especially
in his interpretation of 817d: ‘If your doctrines seem the same
as or better than our own, we will grant you a chorus’. Morrow
understands this to imply ‘that a tragic poet might actually
present a conception of life loftier than that embodied in the
legislator’s drama’. And, he goes on, ‘so far has Plato retreated
from the position he took in the Republic. To understand Plato’s
assertion that the teaching of the tragic dramatists is “for the
most part” utterly contradictory to his own (817c) we need
only refer to his criticism of the poets in the Republic, substi-
tuting references to the dramatists for his citations of Homer’.
The question I want to ask concerns the relationship between
Homer and tragedy: what has changed between the Republic
and the Laws to make tragedy the most dangerous of poetic
genres or, rather, to make tragedy the focus of hostility rather
than Homer?
But first a word on the tone of this passage at 817. To call
these poets ‘divine’, theioi, is hardly an unequivocal compli-
ment, especially in view of the qualification at the beginning
of the passage, the ‘so-called serious poets’. Poets can some-
times hit on the truth through divine inspiration, as Homer
is said to have done in the passage I referred to earlier (682a),
but at the same time, because the poet is inspired he has no
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idea of what he is doing. The imagined conversation with the

tragic poets here surely links back to the earlier prohibition
on poets saying whatever they like at 719c: in contrast with
the lawgiver who must always be consistent and say only one
thing, whatever it is that is true, poets are always contradicting
themselves. Again in an imagined conversation (as at 817) the
Athenian speaks on behalf of the poets to the legislator:
There is an old proverb, legislator, which we poets never tire of

telling and which all laymen confirm, to the effect that when a
poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control
his thoughts. He’s like a fountain where the water is allowed
to gush forth unchecked. His art is the art of representation
(mimesis), and when he represents men with contrasting char-
acters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he doesn’t
know which of the opposing speeches contain the truth.
This, the only passage in Plato where the notions of mimesis,

techne, and inspiration are brought together in relation to
poetry, looks very like a description of the tragic poet’s experi-
ence. The emphasis is much more on the contradictory nature
of the mimesis that he produces, on the poet’s ignorance rather
than on any truth that he might hit upon in his inspired state.
This is, I think, what we need to have in mind when the
Athenian addresses the ‘divine’ poets at 817a.
More difficult to interpret, however, are his words to the
tragic poets: in what sense are the interlocutors of the Laws the
authors of a tragedy themselves? What conception of tragedy
lies behind the claim that its truest exemplar is the mimesis of
the finest and noblest life? In what does the rivalry between
tragedians and lawgivers consist?14 No one would dispute that
tragedy is concerned with ta spoudaia, with questions of jus-
tice and relations between gods and human beings. Tragedy
shows us what is supremely valuable about human life, but
it does not do so by showing us the good prospering and the
wicked being punished. Nor does it demonstrate that the just
life brings happiness, the cardinal principle on which the Laws
is founded. On the contrary, tragedy shows us the cruelty of
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the gods, the suffering of human beings, and the compas-

sion that can exist even in the most terrible of circumstances.
The tragic poets present us with a vision of human life that is
totally at odds with the dreary unanimity that characterises
the passionless existence of the inhabitants of Plato’s city,15 and
in this general sense we can understand the rivalry between
tragedians and lawgivers of which the Athenian speaks. But
to describe the truest tragedy as the ‘mimesis of the finest and
noblest life’ is to redefine the idea of tragedy itself.16
In her very thorough and detailed study of poetry in the
Laws, Létitia Mouze argues that tragedy is treated no differ-
ently from any other genre of poetry in the dialogue. Like
Morrow, she believes that this passage at 817 allows for the
possibility of admitting tragic poets to the city; indeed, she
goes further, maintaining that tragedy has an educational role
to play in the lives of the citizens and not only can but should
be used by the legislator.17 Contrasting the Republic and the
Laws, she points out that the latter is concerned not with an
ideal state, but a second best, a city of men, and therefore
necessarily imperfect. Its inhabitants are ordinary people (as
opposed to the elite group of guardians in the Republic), peo-
ple with emotions who need to be trained in the right way so
that they perceive the necessary connection between happi-
ness and justice. Given tragedy’s ability to arouse the emotions
and its traditional concern with what really matters in human
life, ta spoudaia, it is the ideal instrument for the legislator to
use for the inculcation of right beliefs. It does not matter that
the poet does not know what he is doing because he will be
subject to the dictates of the legislator; it does not matter that
tragedy appeals to the emotions, because it will do so in accor-
dance with the law.18 But if tragedy were subject to this kind
of control, it would no longer be tragedy. Whereas it might
be possible to revise the contents of other types of poetry so
as to conform to the pattern required by the legislator with-
out destroying their essential characteristics (something that
would be possible in the case of epic, for instance), it seems to
me impossible to do this with tragedy. The essence of tragedy
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is suffering, suffering that is undeserved or at least dispropor-

tionate: to remove human suffering from tragedy would be to
redefine the very nature of the genre.
Such a re-definition of tragedy is also implied by the rivalry
between tragedian and lawgiver. In what sense are the Athenian
and his companions composers of the truest tragedy? Again
Mouze starts from the premise that the Laws is concerned with
the real world: even though human life is not actually worth
taking very seriously (803b), the only object worthy of serious
attention being god, nevertheless it is inevitable, because we
live in an imperfect world, that we do take our lives seriously.
The problem with tragedy, from the legislator’s point of view,
is that it presents us not simply with a serious view of human
life but, more importantly, with one that is false: it imitates
the wrong objects, men who are passionate, contradictory,
and governed by their emotions, and it corrupts the souls of
its audience. The truest tragedy, on the other hand, would be
one that reduced as far as possible the seriousness accorded to
human existence, whose hero would be a just man obeying the
dictates of reason. This is what we find in the Laws: a represen-
tation of the just life governed by reason, in which law occu-
pies the place of ananke in the plays of the Greek tragedians.19
Such is the gist of Mouze’s argument. But I would object that
if reason were to replace the emotions as the guiding principle
in human life, if a harmonious and ordered kosmos were to
replace the inscrutable purposes of the Olympian gods and the
cruel hand of fate or ananke, we would no longer be dealing
with tragedy.
What we have in the Laws is a displacement of tragedy, not
an incorporation of the tragic poets into the city. As Christopher
Janaway has said, ‘Plato steals the epithets “tragedian” and
“poet” and the language of dramatic production, but this
should not lead us into thinking that a kind of poetry or a
kind of art is here given approval’.20 The rivalry between the
lawgiver and the poets has to be seen in the context of the earl-
ier discussion about the types of literature that will be used for
educational purposes in the city (810e ff.), when it is said that
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all such literature must conform to the pattern set down by the
Laws itself: as the Athenian Stranger says,
When I look back now over this discussion of ours . . . a discus-
sion in which I sense the inspiration of heaven – well, it’s come
to look, to my eyes, just like a literary composition. Perhaps not
surprisingly, I was overcome by a feeling of immense satisfac-
tion at the sight of my ‘collected works’, so to speak, because,
of all the addresses I have ever learned or listened to, whether
in verse or in this kind of free prose style I’ve been using, it’s
these that have impressed me as being the most eminently
acceptable and the most entirely appropriate for the ears of the
younger generation. So I could hardly commend a better model
than this to the Guardian of the Laws in charge of education’.
Plato’s own text is the model against which all other texts are
to be measured; and it is itself inspired. (811c–d)21
Of course, one can never be dogmatic in the interpretation of

Plato, and there are several places in the Laws that suggest the
possibility of an educational use of tragedy. Thus, when speaking
of the importance of respect for one’s parents (931), the Athenian
says that the gods always take the side of parents against children
who have mistreated them: Oedipus, when he was insulted by
his sons, called down a curse on them – and people have never
stopped relating how the gods heard and answered his prayers.
Similarly, Amyntor fell into a rage with his son Phoenix and
cursed him (the reference is to Iliad 9.448ff.), as did Theseus with
Hippolytus (cf. 687e). ‘No man can curse anyone as effectively
as a parent can curse his child; and that’s absolutely right’, says
the Athenian. Examples from tragedy, and Homer, as it happens,
demonstrate only too well the truth of this statement.
Tragedy is used in a similar way in the discussion of the reg-
ulations about sex in Book 8. At 838 the Athenian says that in
general incest is shunned: ‘The desire for this sort of pleasure
is stifled by a few words’. ‘What words do you mean?’ asks a
baffled Megillus, to which the reply is:
The doctrine that ‘these acts are absolutely unholy, an abomi-

nation in the sight of the gods, and that nothing is more
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revolting’. We refrain from them because we never hear them

spoken in any other way. From the day of our birth each of us
encounters a complete unanimity of opinion wherever we go;
we find it not only in comedies but often in the high serious-
ness of tragedy too, when we see a Thyestes on stage, or an
Oedipus or a Macareus, the clandestine lover of his sister. We
watch these characters dying promptly by their own hand as a
penalty for their crimes’. (837c)
Oedipus and Thyestes as cautionary tales – we have here a

rather different view from that of the Republic, where these
tragic figures are linked with the very worst type of human
being, the tyrant. You will remember the graphic description of
the tyrant in Republic 9: completely at the mercy of his desires,
there is nothing that he will not do, behaving as badly in his
waking life as other men do in their dreams, when the sav-
age and bestial part that exists in all of us is released from the
control of reason (571b–572b). This bestial part ‘doesn’t shrink
from attempting intercourse with a mother or anyone else,
man, beast or god’ (571d) ‘or from murder or eating forbid-
den food’. These are the very crimes that the tyrant will com-
mit, but the allusion to Oedipus reminds us that such crimes
are also the stuff of tragedy. Thomas Gould suggested, rightly
in my opinion, that the reference to ‘eating forbidden food’
alludes to the tragic figure of Thyestes and, further, that ‘Plato
gives us a list of dream-fulfilments that is actually a list of the
plots of the best-loved and most admired tragedies . . . Oedipus,
Orestes, Thyestes and so on’.22 The graphic description of the
tyrant’s bestial desires foreshadows the critique of tragedy
in Book 10, where tragedy is banished because it appeals to
the lowest part of the soul, arousing the hidden desires that
would enslave us all were we to spend our time wallowing in
the appalling fantasies that tragic theatre puts before us. This
is indeed a different view of tragedy from that we find in the
Laws, at any rate in the two examples I have discussed of its
educational use in that dialogue.
It might then be possible to construct an argument that
would allow the tragic poets to enter Plato’s Cretan city after
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all; but, as I have said, to do that in earnest, one would need

to rewrite the plays in such as way as to render them no longer
tragic. Besides, one cannot ignore the tone in which Plato
speaks about the tragic poets: ‘So don’t run away with the
idea that we shall ever blithely allow you to set up stage in the
market-place and bring on your actors whose voices will carry
further than ours. Don’t think we’ll let you declaim to women
and children and the general public’. These actors with their
beautiful-sounding voices, drowning out the lawgivers and
currying favour with the crowd are pleasure givers par excel-
lence, pleasure givers who are ignorant of the true criteria of
judgement, whose performances are both symptom and cause
of the degenerate theatrocracy that holds sway in contempor-
ary society (701a).
As for the address to the tragic poets as ὦ παῖδες μαλακῶν
Μουσῶν ἔκγονοι, μαλακῶν can mean no more than ‘gentle’,
‘soft’, ‘mild’, but it also has connotations of moral weak-
ness, effeminacy, and lack of self-control. In the Republic, for
example, in the description of the transition from oligarchy to
democracy, the rot sets in when the young become spoilt and
unaccustomed to hard work, whether mental or physical, too
soft to resist pleasure and pain (μαλακοὺς δὲ καρτερεῖν πρὸς
ἡδονάς τε καὶ λύπας) and mere idlers.23 From the Symposium
we learn that Apollodorus was known as malakos, a nickname
that suited his emotional nature:24 he was the person who so
upset everybody by his uncontrollable crying at Socrates’
death as recounted in the Phaedo (117d). Softness, emotion-
ality, and lamentation are brought together in the Republic’s
discussion of music and the characteristics of the various har-
moniai: at 398e the malakai and sumpotikai harmoniai are said
to be of no use to the warriors of the ideal state, though at 411a
it is conceded that a hard temperament might be softened by
the ‘sweet, soft, mournful modes’ (γλυκείας τε καὶ μαλακὰς καὶ
θρηνώδεις ἁρμονίας). What interests me here is the association
with mourning. One of Plato’s strongest objections to tragedy
in the Republic concerns its ability to make us feel pity, to join
in with the suffering and grief expressed by its protagonists.
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And I think there are echoes of this here. Several passages in

the Laws refer to the importance of controlling grief. At 732d–e
we are told that extremes of emotion are to be avoided, and this
applies to both laughter and tears; dirges and lamentation are
to be forbidden at funerals (947b, 960a), and, as Morrow points
out, it is tantamount to blasphemy at a public sacrifice to have
a chorus rack the souls of listeners with dolorous words and
melodies (800d).25 Of course, this restriction on public displays
of mourning does not necessitate a ban on tragedy, but to use
the term malakos of the tragic poet cannot but remind us of the
softening effects of tragedy, of tragedy’s ability to arouse the
emotions, and of the expression of grief that is essential to its
nature.26
There is a further aspect of tragedy that I cannot deal with
fully here, but which seems to me relevant to its absence in
the Laws. All tragedies dramatise conflict, particularly intrafa-
milial conflict; as Aristotle says (Poetics 1453b), the most suc-
cessful tragic plots (in that they are the best at arousing the
emotions of pity and fear) are those in which sufferings involve
those who are near and dear to each other, for instance, where
brother kills brother, son father, mother son, or son mother.
This is why tragedies are about very few families. In the case of
the Republic, I think it is possible to see a connection between
the banishment of tragedy and the abolition of the family, and
I wonder if there might not be a similar dynamic at work in the
Laws.27 Its treatment of the family is, of course, different, but
the ideal of a society in which there existed a community of
wives and children remains.28 One of the characteristics of such
a society, indeed one that it is specifically designed to foster,
is the unanimity concerning pleasures and pains. If the ideal
is a harmonious world in which everyone feels the same plea-
sures and pains, what room would there be for the multifarious
conflicts of tragedy, which characteristically involve familial
strife? The family spells individuality for Plato, and certainly
conflict: it may be a necessary evil in an imperfect world, but
one could well imagine that he might not want the inhabit-
ants of his Cretan city to be exposed to the representation of
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dysfunctional family relationships that lie at the heart of so

much of Greek tragedy.
In my view, then, there is no tragedy in the city of the Laws.
But there is something very odd about its absence. As Peter
Wilson has said, tragedy is a significant omission in Plato’s
detailed programme: the question of drama is raised as an after
thought, but an affected one, ‘as though hoping to suppress
the importance of the matter it recalls’.29 For, after all, in Plato’s
day tragedians and their actors were the ‘most prestigious of
all the city’s many cultural practitioners’.30 Plato refuses to
tackle the problem head-on (in contrast with the Republic,
where the cultural prestige of Homer is openly acknowledged);
but can he really get away with the elimination of tragedy from
his city merely by means of his imagined conversation with the
paides malakon Mouson? Plato’s strategy is similar to that which
Richard Martin has detected in relation to Homer. Avoidance
is his tactic, and yet tragedy seems to have a subliminal pres-
ence in much of the discussion of mousike, where the model of
theatre predominates. Take, for example, the famous passage
on theatrocracy at 700–1 on the mingling of genres, the lust
for pleasure, and the breakdown of all standards that ensued.
In the jumbling together of laments and hymns, of paeans and
dithyrambs, the Apollonian and the Dionysiac merge: surely
tragedy must be implicated in this picture of the degeneracy
of mousike? This suspicion is confirmed if one compares the
theatrocracy passage with the scene in Aristophanes’ Frogs
in which Aeschylus and Euripides attack each other’s choral
lyrics. Aeschylus claims (1298ff.) that he took his songs ‘from a
good source for a good purpose: so I wouldn’t be caught culling
the same sacred meadow of the Muses as Phrynichus, whereas
this one [Euripides] takes material from everywhere: whore
songs, drinking songs by Meletus, Carian pipe tunes, dirges
and dances’.31 Aeschylus then proceeds to summon the Muse of
Euripides onto the stage to accompany his parody of Euripides’
lyrics, a Muse who appears as a vulgar castanet-playing pros-
titute. Can it be mere coincidence that Plato’s graphic descrip-
tion of musical degeneracy at Laws 700–1 attributes the origins
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Penelope Murray
of the problem to poets who were ‘gripped by a frenzied and

excessive lust for pleasure’, in thrall to their audiences and
ignorant of ‘the correct and legitimate standards laid down by
the Muse’?
Other examples where tragedy, or at any rate theatre, seems
to be present in the conception of mousike implied by the Laws
include the image of the inspired poet sitting on the Muses’
tripod and continually contradicting himself as he represents
contrasting types of character in his speeches (719c, quoted
earlier). With that one could compare 655e: ‘Performances
given by choruses are representations of character, and deal
with every variety of action and incident. The individual per-
formers enact their roles partly by expressing their own char-
acters, partly by imitating those of others’.
There seems to be a certain tension between the two dif-
ferent images of mousike that pervade the Laws: mous-
ike as theatre, and mousike as choreia. And this ties up with
Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi’s observation in this volume about
the double perspective on musical pleasure that the dialogue
presents: when it discusses choreia, the focus is on the plea-
sure of the performer, whereas in relation to other genres and
indeed to mousike in general, the emphasis is on spectatorship
and the pleasure of the audience. Where does tragedy fit in?
Theatre and choreia obviously merge if theatrical performance
is envisaged as choral, but Plato seems not to represent tragedy
in this way. Tragedy is treated predominantly from the point of
view of the spectator rather than from the point of view of the
performer, which adds to the sense of aporia one feels about
the place of tragedy in this monologic dialogue. Tragedians are
politely banished from the city; but the absence of explicit dis-
cussion of this most prestigious of contemporary genres only
serves to remind us of its hidden presence.32
Not e s
1 Trans. Saunders (1970), which I have used for all quotations
from the Laws in this chapter. All other translations are my own,
unless otherwise stated.
310 �
2 See Rep. 595c, 607a, with P. Murray (1996) ad loc., and cf. 598d,
605c. On Plato and Homer, see P. Murray (1996) 19–24.
3 For other references to Homer, see 706d–707a, 803d–804b, 904e,
906c–e.
4 The references are to Hes. Op. 287ff. at Laws 718e; Op. 192ff. at
Laws 943e; and cf. 690e, 901a.
5 On Homer’s place in the Laws, see further Martin, Chapter 12 in
this volume and G. Nagy (forthcoming).
6 On foreigners as performers, see further Griffith, Chapter 2, and
Folch, chapter 13 in this volume.
7 Cf. 935d–936a, where comic poets will be forbidden from ridi-
culing citizens. But those who have been given permission will
be allowed to ridicule others, provided it is done in jest and not
in earnest. On this, see further Nightingale (1995) 185; Jouët-
Pastré (2006) 94–6.
8 On the treatment of the helots, see further Ducat (1974); on more
general issues concerning comedy in Sparta, see David (1989).
9 Similar observations on the psychology of comedy and its place
in the Laws are made, quite independently, by Jouët-Pastré
(2006) 89–96. See also Folch in this volume. On Plato and com-
edy in general, see Patterson (1982); Brock (1990); Nightingale
(1995) 172–92. Fehr (1990) is interesting on comedy and the
sense of social superiority. On Greek laughter in general, see now
Halliwell (2008).
10 I have substituted this more literal translation of the Greek for
Saunders’ ‘we’ll let you produce your plays’.
11 Morrow (1960) 374–7.
12 Morrow (1960) 375 n. 272.
13 Wilson (2000) 289, 292.
14 For a recent discussion of these questions, see Sauvé Meyer
(2011).
15 See Nussbaum (1986) 378–94; Halliwell (1984, 1996).
16 For what such a redefinition might entail, see Laks (2010), who
argues for a literal reading of the claim that the constitution of
the Laws itself is the truest tragedy.
17 Mouze (2005) 333, 353. For the view that tragedy has a place in
the Cretan city, see also Giuliano (2005) 43, 50–6.
18 Mouze (2005) 351–3.
19 Mouze (2005) 349–50.
20 Janaway (1995) 181.
21 As G. Nagy (forthcoming) argues, the virtual city of Magnesia
is inspired ultimately by the Muses of philosophy, not by the
Muses of poetry. On this theme, see further P. Murray (2002).
22 Gould (1990) 29–30. On the association between tragedy and tyr-
anny in the Republic, see P. Murray (2003) 14–19.
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Penelope Murray
23 Rep. 556b–c, cf. 429c–d; Laws 633d.

24 Symp. 173d with Dover (1980) ad loc.
25 Morrow (1960) 368.
26 On tragedy and lamentation, see especially Loraux (1998 [1990],
2002 [1999]). On lamentation in the Laws, see also Folch in this
volume, especially 346–9.
27 See P. Murray (2011).
28 739c–e, cf. 732e, 807b; on 739d, cf. Rep. 464a and Guthrie (1978)
333 n. 2; Nussbaum (1986) 159–60. More generally on women in
the Laws, see Saunders (1995); Samaras (2010).
29 Wilson (2000) 24.
30 Wilson (2000) 2.
31 Trans. Henderson (2002). The similarity between these two pas-
sages was pointed out to me by David Fearn.
32 For a similar conclusion concerning the treatment of Homer in
the Laws, see Martin, Chapter 12 in this volume.
312 �
��
C hap t e r T w e lve
T h e R h e toric o f
R h apsody in P lato ’ s
L aw s
Richard Martin
Three old men walk steadily uphill on a road that they may or
may not know is too long, arguing in exquisite detail about a
city they will never see.1 If we were to hire someone to dra-
matise Plato’s Laws – or rather reimagine for the stage the
antidrama that it already is – the author of Waiting for Godot
would be the obvious choice. But there is another among his
productions perhaps more relevant to our theme: Krapp’s Last
Tape. Now, Samuel Beckett was not a great quoter of Plato –
his coinage of the word ‘platotudinous’ encapsulates an ironic
attitude towards the philosopher that he adapted early on, as
his notebooks show.2 On the other hand, some of his better-
known characters, like Murphy in the eponymous novel, dwell
in splendid Platonic autarky and in a state of theoria that could
only have delighted the master of the Academy, perhaps making
Beckett better bedtime reading than his beloved Antimachus.
Murphy, we are told, studied with Neary, a Pythagorean from
Cork – so he could well have been a man after Plato’s own
heart.3 Krapp’s Last Tape is not a meditation on Plato but an
analogue to the Laws, one that can work on several levels.
Recall the anecdote from Diogenes Laertius about Philip of
Opus, who ‘transcribed (metegrapsen) the laws which were in
wax’.4 Apparently Philip performed this reinscription, from
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the notebooks of the philosopher, after the death of Plato

in 347 b.c. This alleged transcription, with its broad allow-
ance for unknown amounts of editing, slippage, and revi-
sion, excuses a multitude of alleged sins in Platonic prose
style and compositional structure. The continued existence
of such problems means we have to assume Philip was not a
particularly good editor, though he may have been an excel-
lent transmitter of Plato’s will or words. We can picture
Philip, with his waxed wood proto-gramophone, playing,
and replaying the Plato of his past, trying to set down once
and for all the master’s voice. In the Beckett play, the lonely,
banana-chomping Krapp obsessively revisits his own past by
replaying onstage a tape-recording made by his thirty-nine-
year-old self. That Krapp, in turn, recalls earlier experiences
in love and death of yet earlier Krapps, faithfully taped on a
series of earlier birthdays, things at which the thirty-nine-
year-old and sixty-nine-year-old Krapps now laugh, thanks
to technology, simultaneously. Pathos eventually outweighs
comedy, as Krapp in the present, hunched over his machine,
peels away his past and comes to realise the abiding presence
of great loss.
Reading portions of Book 5 of the Laws, we might feel a sim-
ilar twinge over times past. The general prologue to the Laws
constructed at this point tackles the issue of personal morality
but in a small – even shrunken – way. Instead of the vast proj-
ect of the Republic some thirty years earlier to provide a ratio-
nal basis for moral conduct, the Laws settles for an old man’s
shrug; people lie, but what can you do? ‘The untrustworthy
man is one who finds the voluntary lie congenial; he who finds
the involuntary lie congenial’, says the Athenian ‘is without
intelligence’. The worst that happens is that neither ends up
having friends. ‘As time goes on, such a man is discovered, and
in the hard times of old age, near the end of life, he makes
himself completely deserted, so that whether his comrades
and children are living or not he lives almost as if he were an
orphan’ (Laws 730c).5 In short, character becomes fate, and the
untruthful man’s fate is to become – a Krapp. The pathos lies in
314 �
The Rhetoric of Rhapsody in Plato’s L aw s
the distance between the younger Plato’s struggle to avoid this

sort of solution and the aged Plato’s surrender.
If the Laws gives us Plato like Krapp obsessively revisiting
his philosophical past, it is also, like Krapp’s Last Tape, a play
of various voices, layered by time, but all audible. The music
of such orchestration has at its core one subsection of Muse-
activity or mousike, namely the chorus. In effect, the layering
technique produces a choral effect on its own, albeit one with
sometimes dissonant voices. At the same time, there is one voice
that still stands out, either because it is central or marginal,
or (as I shall argue here) both of these. That voice is Homer’s.
One would think, given the attacks in Republic Book 3 and the
magnificent demolition job of Plato’s Ion, that the master of
epic poetry, by the time we reach the Laws, would simply not
matter any more. And at first sight, the late dialogue seems to
bear this out. It is difficult to find traces of Homer in the Laws.
By that I mean not just citation of the poetry attributed to
Homer, but even a recognition either that such poetry exists in
the real Athens or that it will figure at all in the imaginary state
for which the trio of old men plays at legislation. In one way,
this is understandable. Because at the heart of the constitu-
tion of the new Cretan colony there lies the chorus, as building
block and facade of the community, most attention in the con-
struction of the constitution is paid to music and dance. Choral
poetry is the direct gift of the gods, Apollo and the Muses,
deriving its name (choros) from the divine intent to counterbal-
ance suffering with joy (chara).6 The proper coordination and
alignment of gestures, words, movement; the proper assign-
ment of particular dances and songs by age-group, festival,
and divinity worshipped; the oversight for training in dance,
even the problem of dealing with sexual urges that may arise
in a community of healthy and well-exercised youths – this is
the stuff of legislation. The poetry of choral performances is a
functional, participatory, educational art form. In a number of
features, therefore, Homeric poetry is its binary opposite.
We see the distinction drawn a few times in a quite generic
way, without the words ‘Homer’ or ‘epic’ being mentioned.
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Richard Martin
One of the most prominent dismissals, one that includes by

implication the genre of epic, comes in a passage in Book 2
(669c–e), where the topic is correctness of representation by
artistic means. Faulty poets, says the Athenian, incorrectly
combine elements. The Muses would never make mistakes like
joining men’s words to feminine colouration or melody (χρῶμα
γυναικῶν καὶ μέλος), or slave rhythms with the postures or
the tune of free men (μέλος ἐλευθέρων … καὶ σχήματα). Nor
would they mix together human, animal, instrumental, and
other sounds while pretending to imitate some thing. From this
observation, which is really centred on inappropriate or per-
verse blending within the act of representation, the Athenian
slides without pause into a quite different category, concern-
ing the separation of artistic means, rather than their misuse as
to objects imitated. The transition is accomplished by allusion
to the reactions of an allegedly refined audience (‘the humans
who, in the words of Orpheus, “are at the age when pleasure
blooms”’). These, says the Athenian, not only would laugh
at the commingled effects produced by the faulty poets but
would also see ‘that the poets are guilty of separating rhythm
and postures from melodies (διασπῶσιν οἱ ποιηταὶ ῥυθμὸν
μὲν καὶ σχήματα μέλους χωρίς) – that they write bare words
(λόγους ψιλοὺς) in metre without any accompaniment, and
create melody and rhythm without words, to be played on
kithara or aulos all alone (ψιλῇ κιθαρίσει τε καὶ αὐλήσει), and
thus make it very difficult to know what is intended and which
of the worthwhile imitations are being imitated by this rhythm
and harmony presented without words’ (633d–e).
As the passage goes on to focus exclusively on just one dis-
reputable side of this separation – that in which music alone
is employed in solo performances to provide imitations – we
can begin to understand why the ‘separation’ of music from
words is taken as a misuse of the medium: it no longer sub-
serves dance and song, and furthermore, without words, you
cannot tell what the object of imitation is supposed to be. The
Athenian thus merges two targets here. What we might iden-
tify as Homeric poetry, or any simply recited genre (logoi psiloi),
316 �
is seen as unnaturally divorced from rhythmos and schemata,

the basic components of song and dance. On the other hand,
instrumental music by itself (without words, psilei) is equally
problematic, and it is on the badness of this latter phenom-
enon that the Athenian chooses to expatiate (669e). What is
most counterintuitive, to us, of course, is the assumption that
the total package (words-dance-music) somehow ontologically
precedes the individual elements. Whereas we might think
of dance, poetry, and music as three distinct and coequal art
forms, the Athenian sees them instead as the disiecta membra
of a medium once cohesive and intact in some distant golden
age. Given time to explore, one could perhaps identify ele-
ments of a sparagmos myth (Orphic?) underlying this scenario.
It happens that Indic and Norse myths offer parallels for what
we might call a primal scene of the Division of Arts, where
body parts are spun off, so to speak, into distinct media.7 More
immediately relevant is the fact that both solo instrumental
performance, whether on aulos or kithara, and the solo recita-
tion of verse without musical accompaniment were prize events
at various mousikoi agones in historical times. Most conspicu-
ously, they were events at the Panathenaic festival. Gregory
Nagy has already explicated the relevance of the Panathenaia to
Plato’s systematising, in his essential book Plato’s rhapsody and
Homer’s music. He concentrates on the Timaeus and Critias,
not discussing this particular passage.8 But the general picture,
from these dialogues and the Ion as well, is that rhapsoidia,
the recitation of unaccompanied verse, whether epic or iambic,
in actuality qualified as genuine mousike (i.e., generally ‘Muse
activity’) for the purposes of Athenian contests. What must
be stressed is that it does not qualify, conceptually, in Plato’s
totalising scheme as presented in the Laws.
Notice that the implied rejection is this passage of the Laws
does not in fact depend on the morally suspect mimetic abil-
ities of epic performers. In the Republic, such depiction and
imitation, by means of direct speech, of mourning women or
emotionally overpowered men was the most dangerous aspect
of Homeric art.9 By contrast, in the Laws it is at least implicitly
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the uncontrolled nature of the modality of rhapsodic (i.e.,

recited) poetic art – resembling, in Plato’s view, unanchored,
solo musical performance – that presents problems.
We can speculate on further problems that Homeric art
might cause for the civic organisation of Magnesia, if we con-
sider mentions of it elsewhere in Plato and Xenophon. As it
does not require expensive sponsorship (unlike choregia), there
is no monetary or social control limiting performances; as it is
not dedicated to a particular god at particular festival events,
it can be heard often, everywhere in town; it is potentially
dangerous since it is part of elementary schooling; and, as it
often features performers from abroad (like Ion of Ephesus),
it introduces a dangerous foreign element.10 Let me stress that
Plato in the Laws does not himself use any one of these reasons
to demean Homeric epic or to distance himself from it. Instead,
he simply writes Homer out of the picture.11
Another passage can sum up the marginalisation process
at work in the Laws. This is the famous passage where the
Athenian traces the degeneration that has given rise to the-
atrokratia – the rule of audiences (700a–701a). The original
golden age of rule-governed genres and performance modes,
when paean and lament, dithyramb composition and kithar-
ody were each kept separate and distinct (διῃρημένη … κατὰ
εἴδη τε ἑαυτῆς ἄττα καὶ σχήματα), collapsed under the pres-
sure of the pleasure principle, as we might call it. Carried away
by hedone, these composers jumbled together all the genres, to
produce new pleasing effects. And they accompanied this with
explanations to the effect that mousike had no innate ‘correct-
ness’ but could be judged on the basis of the hedone of one
who enjoyed it – no matter what that person’s moral condi-
tion might be (καταψευδόμενοι ὡς ὀρθότητα μὲν οὐκ ἔχοι οὐδ’
ἡντινοῦν μουσική, ἡδονῇ δὲ τῇ τοῦ χαίροντος, εἴτε βελτίων
εἴτε χείρων ἂν εἴη τις, κρίνοιτο ὀρθότατα).
If, as I have said, Plato has already decided that rhapsoidia is
not truly a constituent part of mousike, then the failure to men-
tion it explicitly here is not surprising. And yet there are signs
that he is including it for dismissal, even while refusing to
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give it the dubious honour of having a central role in corrupt-

ing Athens. He adopts a completely passive-aggressive stance
towards Homer. In this passage, the use of the word poietai
or ‘composers’ is usefully ambiguous. It can include poets, in
their role as verbal artists, as well as purely musical composers.
Of course, makers of paeans, dithyrambs, and the rest are both
musical and verbal composers, whereas Homer is imagined as a
nonmusician. Another ambiguous touch here is the detail that
the earlier crowds who listened intently to the clinically clean
genres in performance were controlled by the rod (rhabdos) –
as if audiences themselves were like the contestants whom we
see in early fifth-century vase paintings that depict musical
agones:12
The authority that knew about these things and used its
knowledge to judge them, penalising anyone who disobeyed,
was not, as is the case today, whistling, nor the majority, with
its unmusical shouts (τινες ἄμουσοι βοαὶ πλήθους), nor the
clapping that bestows praise. Instead it was accepted prac-
tice for the educated to listen in silence until the end, while
the children and their attendants and the general mob were
kept in order by the threat of a beating (ῥάβδου κοσμούσης ἡ
νουθέτησις ἐγίγνετο). (700c)
Of course, the rhabdos was in addition the well-known signa-

ture accessory of the rhapsode; it may even have provided an
etymology for his name.13 Pindar certainly uses it in describing
Homeric art so as to suggest rhapsodic performance, and the
ongoing reperformance of epic by future generations:14
ἀλλ’ Ὅμηρός τοι τετίμακεν δι’ ἀνθρώπων, ὃς αὐτοῦ
πᾶσαν ὀρθώσαις ἀρετὰν κατὰ ῥάβδον ἔφρασεν
θεσπεσίων ἐπέων λοιποῖς ἀθύρειν.
But Homer, to be sure, has made him honoured among man-
kind, who set straight his entire achievement and declared it
with his staff of divine verses for future men to enjoy. (Pind.
Isthm. 4.37–9; trans. Race (1997))
We should note in particular that this passage in Isthmian 4
associates the Homeric rhabdos with correctness in the
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performance of the stories about Ajax: the poet is engaged in

‘putting his excellence right’ (orthosais aretan, line 37). The
same concept and word stem crops up in our passage of the
Laws after Plato’s mention of the rhabdos. In contrast to
the controlled crowds of yore, the composers of Athens’ cor-
rupt period do not allow that mousike possesses ‘correctness’
(orthoteta, 700e). To make the contrast sharper, we might say
that, whereas Pindar sees the performer Homer getting his
story straight with the rod (kata rhabdon), Plato’s Athenian
sees the recipients of poetry themselves needing straightening
with the rod: their ‘performance’ in being attentive listeners
represents the other end of the poetic exchange and must be
equally controlled. An interesting criterion of correctness in
performance (orthotes) underlies both scenarios. But it is as if
Plato has dismissed or erased the capability of Homeric poetry,
on its own, to be both ‘correct’ and ‘correctional’.15 Once more,
this is entirely implicit, but the use of key words nevertheless
summons up thoughts of the missing poet. Finally, before we
move on from this passage, it is worth recalling that one of the
primary functions of poetry – according to both Homeric and
Hesiodic metapoetic passages – is the production of pleasure
for an audience, whether human or divine.16 In other words,
these composers, if we take them at their word, must run the
risk of resembling those corrupting poietai who endorse the
pleasure principle. Although he is not named, Homer must fig-
ure in this crew. If Homeric art was for Socrates in the Republic
a virulent disease, in the Laws it is as if Homer has gone into
remission.
It is perhaps a mark of the casual dismissiveness with which
Plato treats rhapsodic art that in another passage, this time from
Book 6, it is routinely conceded that Magnesia will, after all is
said and done, end up having contests, including rhapsoidia:
In contests, the same men can be judges, whether the competi-

tion be among human beings or horses. But in music it would
be fitting that those who award prizes to solo singing and imi-
tation (τοὺς περὶ μονῳδίαν τε καὶ μιμητικήν) – such as rhap-
sodes, kitharodes,17 aulists, and all such – should be different
320 �
from those who award prizes to choral singing. First, I suppose,

magistrates should be chosen to judge the play of the choruses
of children, men, and young women, which consists of dances
and the whole ordered arrangement that is music. (764d–e)
Rhapsodes are here categorized with kitharodes, auletes ‘and

all such characters’ under the heading of monody and mimetic
art. Then, typically, the focus shifts to the more important art
of choroidia. As if in recognition of its higher status, the judge
for this art form has to be at least forty years old, while he who
introduces and makes critical decisions about the lesser forms,
those of the monodic performers, can be ten years younger
(765a). Actually, this passage is the only one to my knowl-
edge that explicitly mentions a competition between choruses.
While we hear elsewhere in detail about the rigid assignment
of choruses to gods and age-groups, the fact that they will
also compete – as the tribal choruses did with dithyrambs at
the Dionysia and Thargelia in historical Athens – has simply
been passed over.18 No doubt there is an implicit link in Plato’s
mind between musical novelty – which the Athenian regularly
decries – and competition, the prime motivation for novelty. So
perhaps it goes without saying that the latter is to be avoided
as much as possible. Nevertheless, the real agonistic Athenian
situation seeps through no matter how hard the Athenian of
the Laws tries to imagine a better-legislated polis.19
Thus far, I have looked at evidence for performance of
Homeric epic in the Laws and found, frankly and rather sus-
piciously, not much. I have suggested that a kind of erasure
is at work. (A somewhat similar erasure is found by Penelope
Murray when it comes to tragedy in the Laws, as detailed in
her chapter in this volume.) We could leave the analysis at
that – just another one of those things (cf. Beckett) that do not
happen in the Laws, as the tape of Plato’s life winds to an end.
But that would be to ignore another, and I would argue, more
important use of Homeric poetry in this dialogue. We have to
change our view a bit to find it. Let us shift stance in order
to look at ‘Homer’ not as a live art form in the Laws but as
an inherited cultural phenomenon. We might think of treating
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‘Homer’ not as an event but as talk about the event, a var-

iety of social discourse. This revised concept of ‘Homer-in-Use’
will extend far beyond actual Homeric poetic performance,
which, as we have seen, is hardly at issue in the Laws. While
Homeric performance as encapsulated in rhapsodic art seems
to have been marginalised in the Laws, another sort of Homeric
‘performance’ – the contemporary citation and manipulation
of Homeric poetry and poetics – is central to the construction
of the dialogue. This art of citing Homer motivates key argu-
ments and underwrites rhetorical strategies. Ultimately, how-
ever, it threatens to undercut some of the very advances made
by the work. Homeric art, seen in this way, is central to the
Laws but in a mode that ends up exposing the Laws to a fun-
damental critique. It is a damnosa hereditas.20
The centrality of Homer is highlighted, paradoxically, by
images of his absence. Let us start with the shocking realisation
that for some Greeks in antiquity, Homer was a distant coun-
try. Book 680b–d is a prime passage, one to which we shall
return. For now, notice the reaction of the Cretan Cleinias to
the citation of the Homeric Odyssey by the Athenian:
Athenian. I think everyone calls the regime of that
epoch ‘dynasty’, and even now it still exists in many
places, among Greeks as well as barbarians. This is
presumably the regime Homer speaks of in connection
with the household of the Cyclopes when he says:
Among these people are neither deliberative assem-
blies nor clan-rules,
But they dwell on crests of lofty mountains
In hollow caves, and each gives the rule to
His own children and wives, and they don’t trouble
themselves about one another.
Cleinias. This poet of yours seems to have been quite
charming (χαρίεις). We’ve gone through other verses of
his and found them very urbane. But we’re not familiar
with much of what he says because we Cretans don’t
make much use of foreign poetry (οὐ γὰρ σφόδρα
χρώμεθα οἱ Κρῆτες τοῖς ξενικοῖς ποιήμασιν). (680b–c)
322 �
Strange as it may sound to the modern reader accustomed to

taking all of Greek poetry as a national literature, in light of
the localism of premodern societies, this scenario makes better
sense. It can be argued that Crete in fact does occupy an idio-
syncratic position when it comes to the reception and produc-
tion of epic poetry. That is true over the past several millennia,
from Homer to World War II.21 In many ways, Crete has always
resisted incorporation into the mainstream of Greek culture. It
had and has its own cultural traditions, from alternate versions
of the life (and death) of Zeus, down to epics about the Nazi
invasion.22 Given the picture we get in the Laws, it is ironic that
living epic traditions have always been prominent in Crete and
(as I can personally attest) are still continued not far from the
western edge of the Messara Plain where Plato’s Cretan says the
city state of Magnesia is going to be constructed. At any rate,
we should pay attention to the signals already radiating from
this passage: Homer is not a universal poet; Panhellenisation
has met pockets of resistance. Homer can be used to make a
debating point, but even that marks out a cultural disequi-
librium – it is somewhat like making arguments on the basis
of ‘San Francisco values’ to persuade people in the Bible Belt.
What shared cultural traditions there are do not exactly coin-
cide. Furthermore, Homeric poetry is overtly an Athenian pos-
session.23 Compare the next intervention in the same passage,
the response of the Spartan Megillus, coming right after the
Cretan’s:
Megillus. We, however, do; and he is probably the chief

of such poets, although he portrays in each case a way
of life that is not Laconian but rather sort of Ionian
(τινα μᾶλλον Ἰωνικὸν βίον διεξέρχεται ἑκάστοτε). He
certainly seems to be a good witness now to your argu-
ment (εὖ τῷ σῷ λόγῳ ἔοικε μαρτυρεῖν), since through
his myth he attributes their ancient ways to savagery.
Athenian. Yes, he is a witness (συμμαρτυρεῖ), so let’s
take his word for it (λάβωμέν γε αὐτὸν μηνυτὴν) that
such regimes do sometimes arise.
Cleinias. Fine. (680c–d)
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Given the Spartan’s reservations, and the Cretan’s lack of

expertise, in this trio when it comes to the poetry of Homer,
the Athenian is the odd man out. He is the only person who
cites the poetry and feels comfortable, or so it would appear,
with its representations.
Even more interesting at this point is what the Spartan
does not say – another sort of haunting absence. At the risk of
sounding like Samuel Beckett: there are several points when he
doesn’t say what he might have said, but this is the most obvi-
ous instance of his not-saying. The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus
was mentioned early in the dialogue, at 630d. As Andrea
Nightingale has shown, Plato finesses the roles of human law-
givers, merging them with the divine collaborators of Cretan
and Spartan legislation, Zeus and Apollo respectively, and,
more importantly, with the voice of the Athenian Stranger.24
But the ordinances mentioned as current in Sparta – from
the common meals to the ritual thievery – are clearly those
attributed elsewhere to the heroic lawgiver Lycurgus. A cen-
tral source for this legislation is, of course, the Life of Lycurgus
by Plutarch. Yet one of the essential leading facts we learn
from Plutarch’s account has been gapped out in the account
of Lycurgan activities that we hear from the mouth of Plato’s
Spartan interlocutor:25
From Crete he sailed to Asia, with design, as is said, to exam-

ine the difference betwixt the manners and rules of life of
the Cretans, which were very sober and temperate (εὐτελέσιν
οὔσαις καὶ αὐστηραῖς), and those of the Ionians, a people of
sumptuous and delicate habits (πολυτελείας καὶ τρυφάς), and
so to form a judgement, just as physicians do by comparing
healthy and diseased bodies. Here he had the first sight of
Homer’s works, in the hands, we may suppose, of the posterity
of Creophylus; and, having observed that the few loose expres-
sions (πρὸς ἡδονὴν) and actions of ill example which are to be
found in his poems were much outweighed by serious lessons
of state and rules of morality (τὸ πολιτικὸν καὶ παιδευτικὸν),
he set himself eagerly to transcribe and digest them into order,
as thinking they would be of good use in his own country.
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They had, indeed, already obtained some slight repute amongst

the Greeks, and scattered portions, as chance conveyed them,
were in the hands of individuals; but Lycurgus first made them
really known (γνωρίμην). (Plut. Lyc. 4.2–4)
Now one could play against me some simple chronology and

claim that Plato just did not happen to know this bit of lore
that we find in Plutarch, that it was made up after his time by
Laconophiles, for whatever purpose. My suggestion is clearly of
the dog-that-failed-to-bark-in-the-night variety. Nevertheless,
it fits a pattern. Not only is Lycurgus not celebrated for the pro-
motion of Homer as a way to benefit his polis with political and
educational lessons (to politikon kai paideutikon). Another poet
who is celebrated for his great significance to Sparta – namely
the elegiac composer Tyrtaeus – is said by Plato’s Athenian to
have originally come from Athens (629a). This genealogical fac-
toid appears in several sources, so we cannot risk saying that
Plato invented it.26 It does, however, fit a pattern of Athenian
poetic monopolising. Either option – to admit that Sparta had
independent and crucial foundational access to the poetry of
Homer, via Lycurgus, or to admit that it had a right-thinking
homegrown bard, Tyrtaeus – threatens Athenian hegemony.27
It would certainly make Homer more of a presence in the dia-
logue than Plato would ever want. If Megillus knows Homeric
passages – as well he might, given Plutarch’s scenario about
the heritage of Homer in Sparta – then he becomes a potential
challenger to the Athenian when citations start to fly. Homer,
in other words, is central enough as an intellectual presence to
deserve obliteration.
If we keep these later developments in mind when reading
the opening pages of the dialogue, the Athenian emerges as
even more of a city slicker. To whom do you attribute your law
codes, he asks. ‘Among us Zeus’, replies the Cretan, ‘and among
the Lacedaimonians, from whence this man here comes, I think
they declare that it’s Apollo’ (624a). Megillus concurs. The
Athenian follows up by addressing the Cretan: ‘Don’t you peo-
ple follow Homer (μῶν οὖν καθ’ Ὅμηρον λέγεις), and say that
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Minos got together with his father every ninth year and was
guided by his oracles in establishing the laws for your cities?’
To this Cleinias agrees, adding that Rhadamanthys, the brother
of Minos, was also known as most just (δικαιότατον). Apart
from the interesting authorial move that presents the Athenian
instantly providing a ready textual basis for what might after
all be simply a Cretan oral tradition, on second reading the dis-
equilibrium mentioned earlier must also be taken into account.
The comment ‘No doubt you say what you do about Minos in
accordance with Homer’ to a man who, by his own admission,
does not know Homer very well, is not designed to elicit a real
answer. It is more of a phatic utterance (‘are you with me?’
‘right?’) designed to keep the Athenian’s rhetorical flow going,
to give him the upper hand. In fact, if Cleinias had recalled
Book 19 of the Odyssey, he would see that this ‘Homeric’ infor-
mation about Minos actually derives from Odysseus, disguised
as a character Aithon, who claims the Cretan lawmaker was
his own Cretan grandfather, in the course of his most elaborate
(Cretan) lie in the poem. The irony may be lost on Cleinias, who
thinks that Rhadamanthys, too, ‘correctly got praise’ (orthos
epainon eilephenai) as if all traditions were as straight-shooting
as Pindar’s poetry. But is the irony supposed to be lost on us?
It is not inconsequential that the very first strategy on the
part of the Athenian in the whole dialogue is to get the Cretan
to agree that his epichoric version matches the Panhellenic ver-
sion of Homer. If local traditions are thus immediately co-opted
or trumped by the Athenian through the use of Homer as an
Athenian cultural weapon, we might wonder what his other
uses of Homer intend, and what Plato intends us to hear in
them. I will turn to my reading of them, but first we have
to take into consideration two other ways in which Homeric
poetry is unobtrusively central to the Laws.
First, there are the famous proems to the legislation, the
explanatory prefaces that are to distinguish Magnesian laws
(719–22). A good deal of work has been done on these, particu-
larly in their relation to the laws themselves.28 We owe again to
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Andrea Nightingale the observation that despite being framed

as direct two-way conversations with the prospective citizens,
the proems to the laws are in fact just as unidirectional, pre-
scripted, and authoritative as the legal texts they introduce.29
Their immediacy is a fiction. What I have not seen in the sec-
ondary literature is a genealogy of these proems.30 Or perhaps
because the Athenian gives us two genealogies, interpreters are
less eager to explore the issue. At 722d, the Athenian suggests
that everything he and friends have said up to this point in the
dialogue comprises just prooimia ‘preludes or prefaces’ to the
real work:
What I wish to say is this: all speeches, and whatever pertains

to the voice, are preceded by preludes – almost like warming-up
exercises – which artfully attempt to promote what is to come.
It is the case, I suppose, that of the songs sung to the kithara,
the so-called ‘laws’ or nomoi, like all music, are preceded by
preludes composed with amazing seriousness. Yet with regard
to things that are really ‘laws’, the laws we assert to be politi-
cal, no one has ever either uttered a prelude or become a com-
poser and brought one to light – just as if it were a thing that
did not exist in nature. (722d)
Expatiating on the metaphor, he calls to mind prefaces both

verbal and musical. The irresistible pun on nomoi meaning
‘laws’ and nomoi meaning musical tunings or melodic patterns
leads the Athenian to dwell on the musical analogue, rather
than the verbal. Yet these novel prooimia are in fact meant to be
verbal artefacts, not musical. I would argue that, as such, they
can be better compared to the prooimia of rhapsodes, the intro-
ductory compositions that functioned both as prayers and as
means of persuasion about their own skills. Pindar applies this
word to the rhapsodic art of the Homeridai when he compares
an athlete’s victory to their practice of starting ‘from Zeus of
the prooimion’ (or ‘a prooimion of Zeus’):
Ὅθεν περ καὶ Ὁμηρίδαι

ῥαπτῶν ἐπέων τὰ πόλλ’ ἀοιδοί
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ἄρχονται, Διὸς ἐκ προοιμίου, καὶ ὅδ’ ἀνήρ

καταβολὰν ἱερῶν ἀγώνων νικαφορίας δέδεκται πρῶτον,
Νεμεαίου
ἐν πολυϋμνήτῳ Διὸς ἄλσει.
Just as the sons of Homer, those singers of verses stitched
together, most often begin with a prelude to Zeus, so has this
man received his first installment of victory in the sacred games
at the much-hymned sanctuary of Nemean Zeus. (Pind. Nem.
2.1–5; trans. Race (1997))
When Thucydides, in discussing various cleansings of

Delos, wants to provide historical context, he cites verses from
what he calls the ‘prooimion of Apollo’ and attributes them
to Homer (3.104.4: δηλοῖ δὲ μάλιστα Ὅμηρος ὅτι τοιαῦτα
ἦν ἐν τοῖς ἔπεσι τοῖσδε, ἅ ἐστιν ἐκ προοιμίου Ἀπόλλωνος).
His citations match, with several formulaic variants, the text
we know as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (verses 146–50 and
165–72). In short, although Plato in the Laws describes his
legal prooimia as akin to the kitharodic, if we look in the fifth
and fourth centuries b.c. for compositions that are explicitly
verbal prooimia – and yet show some affiliation to music – the
Homeric ‘hymns’ are the best candidates.31 This might send us
off in further speculative directions. If hymns (as composed
in the real world) are what provide the underlying parallel to
Plato’s legal prooimia, as I am arguing they do, that is rather
disturbing, especially because hymns were themselves subject
to competition, and contestation, as shown by the ending of
the shorter Hymn 6 in our collection (6.19), as also testimo-
nia that represent Archilochus, Hesiod, and Homer competing
with hymnoi.32 I have argued elsewhere that the Homeric Hymn
to Apollo is itself the reflex of a contest – real or imagined –
between practitioners of Homeric and Hesiodic rhapsodic tra-
ditions.33 The irony here is that the introduction of prooimia in
the Laws occurs precisely in the context of a desire for some-
thing unlike poetic variation, in favour of controlled, univocal,
authoritative speech: the Athenian at 719c even takes on the
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voice of the poets (as he says) to make this very point.34 So the
medium of prooimia, given its agonistic heritage, subtly tugs
against the messages they will contain.
Let us turn to the second facet of Homer in the Laws that I
have termed unobtrusively central. For all their intense focus
on choral activity in the new polis, we must remember that
the three old men of the Laws have a different preference
when it comes to their own entertainment. In Book 2 (658a–e),
the Athenian proposes the thought experiment of an all-out
contest of pleasure. If any one group could perform in this
contest, what would they do? And which would be judged
best? Children would vote for puppet shows; older children
for comedies; young men, women, and nearly everybody else
for tragedies. But we old men, suggests the Athenian, would
be pleased by and vote for ‘the rhapsode who gave a beau-
tiful recital of the Iliad or the Odyssey or something from
Hesiod (Ῥαψῳδὸν δέ, καλῶς Ἰλιάδα καὶ Ὀδύσσειαν ἤ τι τῶν
Ἡσιοδείων διατιθέντα)’.35
What might seem odd about this passage is the continu-
ation. For it appears that all the old men agree that their own
choice is that of those best educated in such things, those
with the best taste. ‘Clearly’, says the Athenian at 658e, ‘for
me at least and the two of you, it’s necessary to declare that
the ones chosen by men of our age are the ones who are the
correct winners (ὑπὸ τῶν ἡμετέρων ἡλικιωτῶν κριθέντας
ὀρθῶς ἂν νικᾶν)’. So why – we might ask – don’t the would-
be legislators require their choice, rhapsody, to be the canon-
ical poetic art form for Magnesia? The sequence of thought
is obscure but seems to rely ultimately on an unstated con-
cession to majority rule. Since dramatic productions are
what most of the people already think most pleasurable, the
best the old men can hope is that the judges share their own
level of taste and education. Thus – the Athenian now pivots
around this topic of education – it is the young who need
to be charmed and led. With this thought, we are suddenly
swept off to the topic of epoidai. In sum, it is only through
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a series of abrupt shifts that the dialogue avoids the disas-

ter of finding that Homeric and Hesiodic poetry are in fact
the paradigmatic genres. One sort of backwards confirmation
for this – the hidden centrality of Homeric art in the Laws –
comes in the passage of Book 7 (810e–811b) about education
in literature, where the Athenian discovers that his own pres-
entation – that is, what he has said in our text of the Laws
up to now – is in fact the best text to assign to students.
And what will it replace? Nothing other than the antholo-
gies, recitations, and forced memorisation of hexametre verse
(as also, it must be said, trimeters). If rhapsody seems to lose
out to chorody in the legislation of the Laws, at the level of
the Athenians’ own composition (and perhaps Plato’s), it is
Homeric poetry that constitutes the real paradeigma, the one
that must be ousted by something new.
I did not set out to deconstruct the Laws, reading it in this
way against itself. And yet, as I have stressed, the text itself
invites us to hear the multiple voices that it contains, whether
or not they chime together. I have pointed out two dissonant
notes in the choir: the Homeric, out of place in the new world
but somehow still central; and also the Athenian – so differ-
ent really from his Doric interlocutors. We should remember
that the dialogue makes a point of talking about his accent and
also about his manner of speaking, that is to say his volubil-
ity, qua Athenian, versus the Laconic tendencies of Cleinias
and Megillus (641e). If the Laws therefore invites us to take on
the role of an ethnographer of speaking – to pay attention to
a community’s speech habits – we should take this seriously.
When the Athenian cites Homer, as he does at key points in
the argument, we should hear him not just as a mouthpiece
for epic, but as an Athenian of the late fifth or fourth century
b.c. citing Homer. That is to say, while one can benefit reading
the work of Labarbe and others, treating Platonic quotation of
Homer in terms of likeness or variation from a ‘vulgate’ text,
such analyses will always remain at the level of philological
rather than sociolinguistic comparison. What we need are
examples of quotation in social use.36
330 �
As it happens, we have comparanda for this habit of speak-

ing. Both Casey Dué and Andrew Ford have investigated the
way in which the fourth-century orator Aeschines cites Homer
in a forensic situation. Dué’s analysis demonstrates how con-
ventional text-critical methods fail to account for the flexi-
bility and appropriateness of a long quotation from Iliad
23.12ff. in the speech Against Timarchus (49). She follows
T. W. Allen in suggesting that such flexible variation itself
stems from rhapsodic traditions of performance. The repetition
of lines within Aeschines is then itself something like a second-
ary recomposition in performance.37 Ford goes further to enu-
merate the social benefits of the ability to quote Homer. These
range from an ability to interpret difficult language and hunt
down precedent, to a display of sophistication and taste, all
the way up to what Ford calls ‘disingenuous glossing’ – a skill
nicely exhibited by Callicles in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. It is a
skill also shown by Aeschines in his Timarchus speech, deliv-
ered most likely in the year after Plato’s death. Here, as Ford
points out, the text of Iliad 23 is cited in such a way that it can
be used to praise Homer as one who endorsed an ideal homo-
erotic relation between Achilles and Patroklos – just the sort of
relation of course that Aeschines is claiming for himself, in the
face of scurrilous accusations by his enemies. Not only does
Aeschines get himself off the hook through adept citation of
Homer; he also flatters the audience by assuming that they too
have internalised the whole of Homer and can appreciate sub-
tle interpretation. It is worth noting, finally, that the Homeric
interpretation offered by Aeschines from the bema forms a part
of an even larger interpretive effort that involves glossing any
number of laws and the poetry of Solon. His whole speech is a
literary-critical tour de force in the service of personal attack
and defence.38
We can add an even more striking observation about the
rhetoric and poetics of quoting Homer from a brief look at a
later speech, this one by Lycurgus (the fourth-century Athenian
statesman) against Leocrates, who was indicted in 330 b.c. for
having fled after the battle of Chaeronea. The passage is most
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familiar for the precious information it provides about rhap-

sodic practice at the Panathenaia.39 But another sentence inter-
ests me more at the moment. For here Lycurgus draws exactly
the sort of contrast made by the Athenian in the Laws:
I want also to recommend Homer to you. In your fathers’ eyes he

was a poet of such worth that they passed a law that every four
years at the Panathenaea he alone of all the poets should have
his works recited (μόνου τῶν ἄλλων ποιητῶν ῥαψῳδεῖσθαι
τὰ ἔπη); and thus they showed the Greeks their admiration
for the noblest deeds. They were right to do so. Laws are too
brief to give instruction: they merely state the things that must be
done; but poets, depicting life itself, select the noblest actions and
so through argument and demonstration convert men’s hearts.
(Lycurg. Leocr. 102; trans. Burtt (1954); emphasis added)
To make this match exactly the Athenian’s point of view in

the Laws, we would of course have to substitute, for the poet’s
imitation of life, those persuasive compositions, the prooimia,
the explications that fill out the laconic brachyology of the law.
Yet, as I have observed, there is something already Homeric
or rhapsodic about the prooimia in the Laws. Lycurgus con-
tinues with stirring patriotic words from the Iliad (15.494–9)
and then, in summation, says that the ancestors of his con-
temporaries took to heart such words when they defended
all of Greece – not just their own fatherland. The Panhellenic
perspective offered by Homer is thus played up in a way that
we have also discovered in the discourse of Plato’s Athenian.
Finally, one wonders whether it is accidental that Lycurgus
the orator, soon after this Iliadic quotation, turns to another
poet, Tyrtaeus, whom, he says, the Spartans took away from
Athens – precisely the genealogy for Tyrtaeus given by Plato
(In Leoc. 106; cf. Laws 629a). It may just be that there is his-
torical truth in the tradition about Lycurgus having been a
pupil of Plato’s before he studied with Isocrates.40 If so, per-
haps Lycurgus has read the Laws – at least in the waxen ver-
sion. What he gives us is an impression of Athenian discourse
that is more direct than what we hear in the philosophical dia-
logue. We see his Panhellenic appeal to the Iliad actually put
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to use as a way of shaming his opponent Leocrates and calling

for the man’s punishment.
To sum up: the observation of actual Athenian rhetorical
usages puts a darker edge on the citation of Homer by the
Athenian in Plato’s work. How dark? I would not call it pes-
simistic; although his framing device might be similar, Plato
is not Aristophanes, whose Utopian builders in the Birds,
Euelpides and Peisthetairos, are displayed as caged forever by
their own Athenian sensibilities, no matter how far they flee
the city.41 We can take the Platonic usage as simply a radical
variation, as does Mauro Tulli, who compares the citation in
Book 3 of the Odyssey passage about the Cyclops (680b) with
the way in which Thucydides uses Homer. Tulli observes that
Thucydides mines Homer to reconstruct the past while Plato
uses Homer to underwrite an entire line of speculative argu-
mentation about the origin of law and community.42 What I
would stress, however, is the irony of that move – surely the
Athenians in the audience must see themselves and their
forensic habits mirrored in this mode of self-interested Homer-
quotation, a mode that demands and gets immediate assent
from its auditors in order to prove a point. It seems highly
ironic that a crucial crescendo of Book 7, the beautiful pas-
sage at 803e that says ‘a man should spend his life “at play” –
sacrificing, singing, dancing’ – culminates with a quotation
from the other end of the poetic spectrum, epic. The man who
lives the life of choreia, says the Athenian, must go on his way
confident that Homer’s words (actually, Athena’s to Telemachus
in Od. 3.26–8) are true:
Telemachus, some things you yourself will think of in your

own thoughts
And some things a daimon will suggest; for I do not think
That you were born and raised against the will of the gods.
What are we to think of these probative Platonic quotations?

First and foremost, I suggest, that they are not (merely or
mainly) Platonic. Rather, they are superb pieces of character
isation, depicting the precise rhetorical strategies of the average
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Athenian citizen, who is not the author Plato. Furthermore,

the citizen is emphatically an Athenian litigator – in fact, in
Athens, as the old joke goes, the two groups are almost coex-
tensive, since the city is that nightmare phenomenon, a nation
composed of lawyers.43 Magnesia, in Plato’s vision, is not the
invention of a philosopher, but is being spun out, in improvised
fashion, of one such freelance lawyer’s mind. Of course, the
correlate of this characterisation is that the Athenian Stranger
is not Socrates, either. And in fact, from extant depictions of
Socrates, Platonic and other, Homer is not to my knowledge
cited by him as an authority precisely in the manner used by
our Athenian.44 Homer is of course quoted, hundreds of times,
with interesting variations, as the lists in Labarbe and Howes
can show. Homeric citations can offer grace notes, provide social
lubricant, or make for graceful segues in the dialogues, and –
most often – provide the backboard for those ironic jump shots
that Socrates arcs over the heads of his smaller interlocutors.
In the Laws, by contrast, Homeric poetry, rather than being a
foil, is a proof. We saw the terms marturei, summarturei, and
menutes already in the passage cited earlier, about the Cyclops
community (680d): Homer is a witness and informant; the
terms applied to him are entirely in the realm of Athenian legal
procedure.
What strikes one as further ironic is that the rhetoric of
rhapsody helps construct Magnesia but will not ultimately
matter once the choric city is danced into being. Put another
way, the generation that discovers rhetorical usefulness and
power in using and abusing Homeric texts – that is, the gen-
eration of our Athenian interlocutor – will soon pass away,
rightly in the view of the notoriously antirhetorical Plato.
Magnesia is no country for old men. Will the pueri virginesque,
for whom the old men busily construct a future, themselves
end up, when old, with a hankering for Homer? Will they rel-
ish rhapsody? Will the Magnesians (nomen omen) be magne-
tized at a distance, like the iron rings in the Ion?45 On this
point, the Laws are prudently silent. Or rather, like Krapp,
with another sort of rings – those circles of magnetic tape that
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he obsessively rewinds – the philosopher, perhaps for similar

reasons, refuses to give us his final word. Neither Krapp nor
Plato ever records a last tape.
Not e s
1 It is not clear that they ever do arrive at their destination cave; if
it was the Idaean, the pilgrimage would have taken, by one esti-
mate, about twelve hours (unless a shepherd’s track was used):
Morrow (1960) 26–8.
2 Fletcher (1965) 45.
3 Fletcher (1965) 43–4.
4 Diog. Laert. 3.37. On the alleged transcription, see Stalley
(1983) 2–3.
5 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are from Pangle (1980).
6 Laws 654a.
7 Closest is the Indic story of the sacrificial division of the giant
Purusha (Rig-Veda 10.90), whose body parts become, among
other things, poetic genres, distinguished as recited vs. sung
(10.90.9–10) including the Vedas themselves; more cosmically,
the ritual cutting of the Norse giant Ymir provides the basic
materials of the world (Lay of Grímnir 40–2). On these and related
Roman myths, see Puhvel (1987) 146–7. For the continued motif
of sacrificial division in the metalanguage of Greek poetics, see
Svenbro (1984).
8 G. Nagy (2002) 36–69. But see now the excursus on the Laws in
G. Nagy (2009) 386–92.
9 Cf. Rep. 387ff. Naddaf (2007) gives a careful overview of what is
and is not objectionable about poetry in the Republic and Laws.
10 On hexametre and other metres, also on schooling, see Laws
810d–811a. On foreign performers, see Chapter 2, Mark Griffith’s
contribution to this volume.
11 On Plato’s very similar strategy of avoidance when it comes to
tragedy in the Laws, see Chapter 11 by Penelope Murray in this
volume.
12 See Shapiro (1992, 1993, 1995) on depictions of agones. On actual
Athenian rhabdoukhoi as ‘eine Art Theaterpolizei’, see citations
at Schöpsdau (1994–2003) I.511. It may be relevant that the topic
of rhabdoukhoi was important enough in the later fifth century
to feature as the subject of an eponymous play by Plato Comicus
(PCG VII.488): see R. M. Rosen (1989).
13 On the connection, see Ford (1988).
14 On this interpretation of the line, see Farnell (1932) 352–3 and
Privitera (2001) 180. This translation by Race (1997) 167 fails to
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capture the specific valence of athurein, in its meaning ‘to per-

form’ or ‘to sing’: cf. LSJ s.v. athuro.
15 A further question involves the extent to which Homeric per-
formers themselves may have stressed the correctness of epic.
Such passages as Il. 2.484ff. imply that the poet’s information
comes directly from the Muses, who were eyewitnesses to the
events recounted. Ironically, Pindar’s association of Homer with
the rhabdos recalls the authority claims foregrounded most
memorably by Hesiodic poetry: see Theog. 22–34, where the
Muses grant Hesiod the gift of song and a skeptron; the empha-
sis on ‘straightness’ of kingly justice throughout the poem (e.g.,
Theog. 86); and the implicit parallel between kingly speech and
the activity of the singer (Theog. 79–103).
16 See Il. 9.189 (Achilles sings klea andron), Od. 1.347, 370; 8.45;
17.385; and the telling patronymic for the bard Phemios,
Terpsiades (Od. 22.330). The name of the other bard prom-
inent in the Odyssey – Demodokos, ‘received by the people’ –
encapsulates the notion that the best singers do accommodate
themselves to audiences, something to which Plato should
object. Further: Grandolini (1996) 40, on the god Apollo pleased
by paeans. In Hesiod, cf. the terpsis created by the Muses’ hym-
nos (Theogony 37).
17 Correcting Pangle’s inaccurate translation ‘kitharists’ at this
point.
18 On the festivals, see Ieranò (1997) 49–86 and 233–87 and Pickard-
Cambridge (1962) 3–38.
19 There is also the evidence of Laws 800d that Athenian competi-
tion by choruses calls to mind tragic – and therefore blasphe-
mous – choruses for the Athenian interlocutor.
20 Naddaf (2007) is right to see the function of the poet in the Laws
as central, and even as a model for the legislator himself, but fails
to distinguish between the roles of the all-important choral-song
composers and other poetic types, like rhapsodes. He makes this
significant observation (344): ‘The twenty or so references to
Homer and Hesiod in the Laws are overwhelmingly positive, in
stark contrast to Plato’s diatribes and offensive arguments in the
Republic’. But as I will suggest, the positive spin given Homeric
citation is offset by other negative factors.
21 See Martin (2005).
22 P. Perlman (1992) finds a real basis for ancient stories of
Cretan idiosyncrasy in political structures, beyond the fourth-
century philosophical systematising that made use of such
exceptionalism.
23 According to Maximus of Tyre (17.5a), both Crete and Sparta
were in fact latecomers in staging rhapsodic recitation of Homer;
336 �
see further G. Nagy (1990a) 22. Panno (2007) 91 sees the uses of
Homer by both the Cretan and the Spartan (Homer as unfamiliar,
or as talk about the past) as evidence of attitudes that defuse or
ignore the mania-inducing power of rhapsodic performance and
are thus congenial.
24 Nightingale (1993) 282–5.
25 Translation from Dryden.
26 Further testimonia: Philochorus FGrHist 328 F 215 and
Callisthenes FGrHist 124 F 24 apud Strabo 8.4.10.
27 This is not to dismiss the possibility (raised by G. Nagy (1990b)
272–3, with reference to the traditions about other imported
poets: Thaletas, Alcman, Terpander) that the Athenian prove-
nience of Tyrtaeus was a native Spartan tradition. If it was, their
cultural strategy might then be seen as co-opted and reshaped
by Athenian sociopolitics of the fourth century b.c.
28 See Nightingale (1999) 117–22, with further bibliography. Most
recently, Panno (2007) 136–46 has analysed the combination
of musical and social meanings represented by nomos in the
Laws.
29 Nightingale (1993) 289–90; on the merging of the dogmatic and
un-Socratic Athenian with the figure of the lawgiver in tone and
voice, see p. 295 and Laws 662–4.
30 Costantini and Lallot (1987) suggest that the rhapsodic prooimium
is the primary referent for the word, but they do not focus on
the Laws, or further explain this connection. See also Brisson
(2000a) 236–7.
31 As with Homeric epic and Hesiodic verse, any effort to pin down
precisely how Homeric hymns were performed is subverted by
the tendency of the genre to align itself (or suggest an affiliation)
with performances from a mythic age that are explicitly sung –
even though the actual epics (and most likely, hymns) were
recited in rhapsodic practice. Cf. Hymn. Hom. Merc. 52–62 and
418–33: sung hymns that closely resemble in content the nar-
rative bent of the actual Hymn to Hermes that enshrines them.
Furthermore, the evolutionary relationships among sung mon-
odic lyric, quasi-lyric ‘kitharodic nomes’, and hexametre verses
(eventually recited) have been obscured by successive reinter-
pretations of the history of Greek musical practices, already in
antiquity. For full analysis, especially of the relation of form to
function in prooimia, see G. Nagy (1990a) 353–60. On Terpander’s
prooimia and nomes, see Plutarch [De mus.] 1132c–1133d and the
comments of Gostoli (1990) 91–100.
32 Homer and Hesiod: Pseudo-Hesiod fr. 357 MW; Archilochus:
scholia to Ar. Av. 1764.
33 Martin (2000).
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Richard Martin
34 It is true that a direct connection to the notion of divine inspi-

ration and a functional address to the gods might be intended
by linking these preludes to hymns, as implied by Nightingale
(1999) 121 and Brisson (2000a) 244–51.Yet it remains problematic
that the sort of hymns chosen are the rhapsodically elaborated
contest hymns called prooimia.
35 Note that the fantasy exceeds the bounds of the actual Panathenaic
contest, in which only Homeric (not Hesiodic) poetry was per-
formed: Lycurgus In Leocratem 102. That Hesiodic poetry could
be performed rhapsodically elsewhere is clear from Plato’s Ion
531a–c; on the possibility that an organisation of rhapsodes par-
allel to the Homeridai existed to transmit Hesiodic poetry, see
the analysis by G. Nagy (1990a) 29 n. 66. For further analysis of
the relative rankings in this passage, and the role of Homer, see
Penelope Murray, Chapter 11 in this volume.
36 Howes (1895) 176–210 and Labarbe (1949) focus on details of
Platonic variation, whereas Benardete (1963) and Mitscherling
(2005) explain Plato’s ‘misquotations’ (including Laws 777a and
706e) as intentional efforts to inflect the Homeric citation for his
own argumentative purposes.
37 Dué (2001).
38 Ford (1999); see also, on Aeschines, Dorjahn (1927) 87–8 and
S. Perlman (1964) 166–8, both of whom note that poetry, beyond
its entertainment value, was acceptable as evidence in Athenian
courts. The habit of citing Homer should in addition be read
within the larger context of the use of Homeric (and tragic)
speeches as models for oratory, real or fictional, on which, see
Schmitz (2000) esp. 53–4.
39 For this aspect, see G. Nagy (2002) 10–13.
40 Diog. Laert. 3.46, citing Chamaeleon and Polemon.
41 Whitman (1964) 167–99 remains one of the clearest examinations
of this dilemma.
42 Tulli (2003).
43 Again, Aristophanes offers the best circumstantial evidence:
Clouds, Wasps.
44 Dorjahn (1927) 85 discusses Socrates’ citations of Homer in
Pl. Ap. 28c and 34d.
45 On the dynamics of the image, see Cavarero (2002) 48–51, and on
the semantic association between Magnesia and the Ion’s mag-
nets, see G. Nagy (2009) 386.
338 �
��
C hap t e r T h i rt e e n
Unideal Genres and

th e I d e a l C it y
C o m e d y, T h r e n o d y, a n d t h e M a k i n g
o f C i t i z e n s i n P l a t o ’s L a w s
Marcus Folch
Int ro d uc t ion
Popper notoriously claimed that in fashioning a closed society
in the Laws Plato ‘compromised his integrity with every step.
He was forced to combat free thought, and the pursuit of truth.
He was led to defend lying, political miracles, tabooistic super-
stition, the suppression of truth, and ultimately brutal vio-
lence. In spite of Socrates’ warning against misanthropy and
misology, he was led to distrust man and to fear argument’.1
Popper’s assertions now seem tendentious and unfair; schol-
ars today attribute to Plato a more sophisticated (though not
unproblematic) approach to the place of argument, freedom of
thought, and persuasion in politics.2 It is nevertheless undeni-
able that Plato seems as concerned to police the intellectual
boundaries of the city as he is to rear citizen-soldiers to guard
its geopolitical borders.3 Thus freedom of speech is curtailed,
I wish to thank Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Andrea Nightingale, and

Eirene Visvardi for reading and commenting on several drafts of this
essay.
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Marcus Folch
those few permitted to travel abroad are vetted before being

readmitted into the community, the presence and activities
of foreigners are restricted, and atheists – the most alien of
thinkers – are to be sequestered and, if irremediable, jailed in
the countryside, tended by slaves, never again to speak with
their kinsmen and fellow citizens.4 Their bodies are to be cast
in the barren hinterland; their burial is a permanent, posthu-
mous expatriation.
How does Plato’s antipathy to alien ideas translate into his
treatment of music?
Because Magnesia’s musical culture is systematically inte-
grated into its political culture, one might expect the former
to replicate the latter’s hostility to external values. It has been
claimed that Plato’s second-best city follows the Republic in
banishing all but a limited range of ethically sound and (some
say) artistically impoverished ‘hymns to the gods and enco-
mia of good men’.5 Magnesia’s songs and dances, we are told,
reaffirm the values of its law code.6 Some have even argued
that Magnesia’s poets are literally to set the law code to music.7
Must we conclude that Magnesia’s songs merely repeat the
city’s foundational ethical doctrines in poeticized form and that
genres which do not conform are to be purged from the city?
In addressing these questions, we must begin from the
observation that Magnesia’s political institutions are designed
to be more adaptive, more capable of integrating imperfect
cultural practices than the Republic’s. Such capaciousness is
necessitated by the work’s central project: fashioning a semi-
ideal (‘second-best’) city from extant political institutions.8 The
same holds for its musical institutions. As the contributions in
this volume demonstrate, Magnesia’s system of song and dance
is composed of well-orchestrated generic hybridity.9
But can the same be said of the genres that are overtly hos-
tile to any society’s dominant values, genres that, like comedy,
threnody, and invective, are inherently, even programmatically,
subversive?10 In addressing this question, I shall make two inter-
related claims. First, the principles that subtend political hier-
archy within the citizen community inform Plato’s treatment
340 �
Unideal Genres and the Ideal City
of genres that potentially conflict with the law code. In each

instance that Plato discusses subversive genres, he is also com-
menting on and crafting what it means to be a citizen of the ideal
city within the contexts in which those genres are performed.
At times, of course, this entails expelling potentially dangerous
discourses from the ideal city, but more fundamentally it means
that Plato’s treatment of music offers an exploration of citizen-
ship – that is, of what it means to belong within a polis – as it is
manifest in the city’s musical institutions. Secondly, the genres
that conflict most with the lawmaker’s designs play an indis-
pensable role in constituting the citizen community, and it is
precisely their incompatibility with the law code that renders
them most useful. Though each genre is made to guide the citi-
zens towards virtue, Plato would not censor or rewrite every
poem as an iteration of the law code. Nor does the Laws offer
a model of performance in which all songs and dances slav-
ishly rebroadcast the law code’s values and dictates. Rather,
Plato develops a sophisticated approach to deviant genres that
employs transgressive, alien performances as contexts within
which to define sociopolitical statuses within the ideal commu-
nity. The key term here is statuses, in the plural: Plato’s ideal
society, like his contemporary Athens, consists of enfranchised
citizens ordered by age, wealth, and sociopolitical authority,
as well as various noncitizen subclasses and citizen women
whose gender and curtailed privileges effectively demarcate a
semienfranchised citizen population.11 These variations in sta-
tus are reflected and affirmed by the Laws’ approach to devi-
ant song and dance. Unideal genres are retained to naturalise
degrees of citizenship and noncitizenship and to project the
principles by which the city distributes political authority and
entitlement into musical contexts.
My approach emphasises the context of performance as a
heuristic by which to interpret the principles that subtend the
Laws’ political community. In doing so, I build on the now
widely held belief that circumstances of performance (i.e.,
mechanisms of organisation and funding, audiences, and ritual
and politicised occasions with which poems are in dialogue)
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illuminate the sociopolitical structures of the society in which

a given work is shaped and that it shapes in turn. The phe-
nomena that attend live performance may be interpreted, in
Connor’s words, as ‘part of the symbolic expression of civic
concerns and . . . [an] eloquent text about the nature of civic
life’.12 I shall be concerned with the nature of Magnesia’s
‘civic life’ as expressed symbolically through its treatment of
unideal genres. This is not the only perspective from which to
analyse mousike in the Laws,13 but it is a view that has been
brought fruitfully to bear on the study of ancient Greek the-
atre and choral poetry.14 Plato, too, treats contexts of perform-
ance as symbolic, synecdochic projections of the city, and one
of the programs in the Laws is to transform genres, whether
they affirm or transgress its philosophical values and ethical
ideals, as reenactments in the theatre of principles that govern
Magnesia’s political institutions. Comedy is especially prom-
inent in this respect as the archetypical deviant genre, the
measure by which Plato assesses both the challenges and con-
tributions alien discourses might present in the ideal city.
S e t t ing the Stage: Diffe re nt Ge nre s,

Dif f e re nt M e n
Let us begin with the very first mention of comedy, intro-
duced as symptomatic of a society turned against itself. In the
second book of the Laws, Plato envisions a festival at which
competitors from each of the major genres participate. Should
success be determined by ‘pleasure alone’ (hedones . . . monon,
658a9–658b1), Plato claims, the results would be entirely
predictable:
If the very small children were to judge, they would judge in

favour of the one displaying puppet shows. . . . But if the older
children [ judged, they would judge in favour of ] the one dis-
playing the comedies; and the educated women and the youth
and probably the majority of almost everyone [would judge in
favour of ] tragedy. . . . And we old men, listening most sweetly,
342 �
would very much say that a rhapsode beautifully reciting the

Iliad or Odyssey or something of Hesiod’s is the winner. Who
would have won correctly? That is the next question. . . . It’s
clear that we must say that those judged victorious by per-
sons of our age win correctly. For [our] habit appears to us to
be the best by far of those now everywhere and in every city.
(658c10–e4).15
The hypothetical competition between genres, which, as
Goldhill notes, trivialises Athenian theatre culture and theatre-
goers, sets the stage for the exploration of the role of pleasure in
poetic criticism, a question with broader significance for Plato’s
utopian project.16 Trivialising as it may seem, this representation
of theatrical pleasure gestures towards the serious discussion of
the interrelation of aesthetic judgement and moral sentiments.
Pleasure and pain are not simply matters of personal prefer-
ence; they are at the centre of human motivation and moral
judgement.17 Plato’s concern is that contemporary attitudes
towards pleasure are too diverse to provide a unified frame-
work with which to regulate a city’s musical culture. Moreover,
because, as Plato argues elsewhere, the correct orientation of
pleasure and pain, when complemented by reason, constitutes
virtue, aesthetic disunity is symptomatic of ethical disunity.18
A lack of consensus regarding aesthetic pleasure is indicative of
fundamental disagreements in the citizen population over the
preferences and habits that subconsciously direct moral reason-
ing. The problem, then, to which the hypothetical musical com-
petition points is that in the interlocutors’ cities (and especially
Athens) infantilised and misguided attitudes towards pleasure,
and by extension towards moral judgement, predominate and
are perpetuated by a variety of contemporary genres.
The hypothetical competition should also be read in light of
what the Laws says elsewhere regarding the influence of diver-
sity in musical forms on a city’s constitution. It is a recurring
theme throughout the Laws that aesthetic pleasure is directly
linked to forms of government.19 One relevant passage among
many (which is also reminiscent of the account of constitutional
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change in Republic 8–9) appears in Plato’s criticisms of legisla-

tors who neglect children’s ‘games’ ( paidia):
They [the lawmakers] all think that nothing of great conse-

quence comes of changing children’s games, because, as we
were saying earlier, they are merely games. So they do not
restrain them, but, yielding, they follow along, and they are
not cognizant of this: the children who innovate in their games
become different kinds of men from the children before them,
and having become different, they seek another kind of life, and
having sought it, they desire different kinds of institutions and
laws. After this none of them fears the arrival into the cities of
what was just described as the greatest evil. (798b6–d1)
The ‘greatest evil’ that the Athenian fears is the arrival of poets
whose innovations alter the youth’s bodily schemata and souls,
leading them to disdain traditional forms of music and to praise
and blame different values. The context makes it clear that
‘play’ refers to activities associated with singing and dancing.20
Plato’s claim is that citizenship springs from the psychology
of aesthetic pleasure and pain. Should the members of a soci-
ety develop diverse tastes in music and other types of ‘play’,
they risk becoming fundamentally different kinds of persons
(heterous andras) who will revolt against the customs of their
forbearers and invent novel paradigms of life and political
institutions (allon bion, heteron epitedeumaton kai nomon) to
correspond to their aesthetic preferences. The implication is
that a city’s laws and political institutions are manifestations of
the paradigms of pleasure that its cultural institutions foster;
as tastes in music evolve, political structures shift.
There is, then, a concern – expressed throughout the Laws
but most fully developed in the discussion of Athenian theatroc
racy (700) and the intergeneric competition (658) – regarding the
connection between a city’s musical forms and its constitution,
and especially regarding the influence of the former on the lat-
ter. The intergeneric contest provides, inter alia, a vivid illus-
tration of a polis that by enabling generic diversity, encourages
variegated (and perverse) paradigms of aesthetic pleasure and
moral sentiments. It represents one defective model of musical
344 �
culture that the Laws’ institutions of mousike are designed to

correct, and it pinpoints a single weakness in Athenian musical
customs: the impossibility of determining aesthetic superiority
on the basis of a population’s diverse tastes. But insofar as a
society’s genres, popular ethics, and constitution are in essence
interconnected as discrete expressions of its citizens’ training
in pleasure and pain, the contest also portrays a city turned
against itself, one in which diversity in musical taste invites
political instability. This larger claim about the relationship
between music and politics is among the primary reasons that
Plato concludes his discussion of the contest by insisting that
poetry be judged according to the pleasure of ‘the one man who
excels in virtue and education’ and that the citizens enchant
themselves with ‘songs’ (oidas) and ‘incantations’ (epoidai) that
bring their tastes and dispositions towards pleasure into ‘har-
mony’ (symphonian) with those of their moral superiors (658a1,
658e1–4). Aesthetic unanimity not only establishes secure stan-
dards of poetic judgment; it also ensures that the city will not
become populated by different kinds of men (heterous andras),
men who will alter its political institutions and introduce unor-
thodox ethical principles.
Come dy, Thre nody, and the

P e r f o r manc e o f Alte rity
Against the backdrop of societies that allow aesthetic dishar-
mony and political instability, the Laws develops a number of
strategies to ‘harmonize’ the ideal city. Again, these strategies
are not limited to the purging of potentially problematic genres.
Instead, the ideal city’s musical institutions appropriate and con-
vert deviant forms into occasions for the enactment of citizen-
ship. The first, which I treat for the remainder of this section,
is the manipulation of the relationship between performer and
spectator. Roles in performance that construct participants as
adherents of the values shared by the political community are
reserved exclusively for citizens; those which define the partici-
pants as devotees of beliefs that deviate from the city’s ethics are
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imposed upon noncitizens and slaves. The compromised role that

Plato reserves for noncitizens is that of the performer, whereas
the citizen’s role is spectatorial, spatially demarcated in oppos-
ition to the noncitizens’ performance. The second – allotting the
privilege to compose according to the principles that determine
political authority – is discussed in the next section.
Plato’s attention to the status relationships between per-
former and spectator first appears in a lengthy treatment of
choral lament as part of a larger section on ‘laws of mousike’
that are to apply to all performances. The discussion begins
with an example of music gone awry, a situation in which
musical conventions conflict with the city’s religious and ethi-
cal conventions:
Athenian: It is safest first to fashion some models

(ekmageia) in our conversation, and I say that one of
the models is of this sort: when a sacrifice is taking
place and the offerings are being burnt according to
custom (kata nomon), let us imagine, if someone in pri-
vate (idiai), standing by the altars and sacrifices, a son
or even a brother (huos e kai adelphos), should utter
sheer blasphemy (blasphemian), wouldn’t we say that
his speech would bring a sense of despair and ill omen
upon his father and his other relatives ( patri kai tois
allois an oikeiois)?
Cleinias: Of course.
Athenian: In our part of the world this happens in
virtually every city ( polesi . . . pasais), so to speak.
Whenever an official (arkhe) holds a sacrifice in public
(demosiai), a chorus – no, not one but rather a crowd of
choruses – comes and standing not far away from the
altars, but sometimes right next to them, they pour out
sheer blasphemy against the sacrifices as they strain
the souls of the audience with words, rhythms, and
mournful harmonies, and whichever [chorus] makes
the city ( polin) immediately cry the most during the
sacrifices, this one takes the victory prize (ta niketeria).
Will we not vote down this law (ton nomon ar’ ouk apo-
psephizometha)? And if the citizens (tous politas) must
346 �
be the audience of such lamentations, whenever there

are certain impure and ill-omened days (hemerai me
katharai tines alla apophrades), then it would be nec-
essary for some choruses hired as singers from abroad
(exothen memisthomenous) to come, such as those who
are hired (misthoumenoi) on behalf of the deceased to
lead funeral processions with Carian music. It would
be appropriate for something like this to occur in the
case of those sorts of songs. The clothing befitting such
funerary songs would not be wreaths or gold-plated
ornaments, but the opposite. [800b4–e6]
There is much in this model of sacrifice and choral lament

against which to define the ideal city’s civic performances –
worrisome lyrics, throbbing rhythms, harmonic witchcraft,
indulgence of the basest passions, and, worst of all, the city’s
enthusiastic response. However, I should like to draw attention
to the description of the context, as opposed to the content,
of performance, to what occurs around the altar, which Plato
finds as flawed as the blasphemy the choruses sing. It is in the
treatment of the context that we may discern intimations of
how Plato will later propose to transform deviant genres into a
training in citizenship.
The example develops a contrast between private ritual and
public sacrifice accompanied by choral competitions. Though
the two sacrifices are marred by analogous forms of ritually
inappropriate discourse, and though both are in some sense
expressions of nomos (custom or law), Plato differentiates their
scope and social implications. Blasphemy in the first occurs
within the oikos; the occasion is private, the speaker and those
offended are the family and nearest of kin. In the second, the
description of the choruses’ performances is replete with polit-
ical symbols. As suggested by the victory prizes, the occasion
is agonistic and the singers are semiprofessional or sufficiently
trained to invite comparison to professional Carian mourners.
Nomos in this context is employed with its full legislative, as
opposed to customary, denotation. Plato twice gestures to the
polis as the context, suggesting that the sacrifice stands in a
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synecdochic relation with the city. It is a portrayal of ‘polis

religion’, an occasion upon which ‘the religious body carrying
the religious authority and the social body, acting through its
political institutions, deployed cult in order to articulate itself
in what was perceived to be the natural way’.21 The point is
made all the more forcefully by the presence of political offi-
cials, the language of voting, an audience explicitly identified
as citizens, and the festival’s organisation in public or, equally
possible, at public expense (demosiai). Comparison should be
made to the usage in Thucydides’ (2.34.1) discussion of the
Athenian burials of those who died at war with a funeral
‘at public expense’ (demosiai). The contexts in the Laws and
Thucydides are sufficiently akin, particularly in the anxiety
over the political dimensions of funerary performance and the
effort to curtail ritual lament, to suggest that demosiai bears
a similar semantic range in both. The overtly politicized set-
ting of the choral festival should alert us that the purpose of
this example is not merely to criticise problematic music but to
address its wider political context. Whereas the private sacri-
fice in the first part of the example affirms, to borrow a phrase
from Nagy’s study of iambos, the ‘institutional and sentimental
bonds’ of the oikos, the institutional and sentimental bonds
fostered through public funerary commemoration are those
of the citizen community.22 In Plato’s critique, choral lament
offers a window into the life of the polis as it articulates itself
through its religious institutions, and it is a window into a
society that delights in blasphemy.
One might then expect the genre to be banished from the
ideal city, but Plato’s solution is not the complete elimination
of lament. It is rather to quarantine the ritual by framing it
within a context that stigmatises the performance and perform-
ers as politically and ethically alien. If dirges must take place,
citizens are to remain in the audience while nonnative choruses
are hired from abroad to participate in the actual lament. The
emphasis on professionalism and remuneration for services
furthers the sense that the mourners are to be alienated from
the citizen community. Trucking, bartering, and trading in
348 �
Magnesia are the occupation of metics; citizens are forbidden

from performing wage labour that would brand them as illib-
eral banausoi.23 Lament will not form part of the regular festi-
val calendar; it occurs only on ritually impure days specifically
designated as the inversion of the city’s normal religious order
and similarly calls attention to the genre’s alien status. Even
the style of dress is made to signify separation; for while Plato
insists that the lamenters not wear wreaths or gold-encrusted
jewellery, celebrants at funerals for Magnesia’s religious and
governmental officials dress in visually lavish, festival style.24
A division is thereby introduced into the context of perform-
ance between foreign, professional, and politically disenfran-
chised performers, on the one hand, and the citizen audience,
on the other. It is that division, which depends largely on pol-
itical and economic distinction, that transforms choral lament
into a useful technology of statecraft.25
The discussion of choral lament provides a first glimpse of
an approach to performance that is central to the Laws’ treat-
ment of ethically deviant genres. This approach is most fully
articulated in the second discussion of comedy, in which the
genre is given an essential role in the city’s educational system
and festival calendar. According to the Athenian,
It is necessary to spectate and understand (theasasthai kai gno-

rizein) the matters that pertain to shameful bodies and ideas (ta
de ton aiskron somaton kai dianoematon) and those devoted to
laughter such as comedic performances produce (ta tou gelotos
komoidemata), in regard to word, song, dance, and the comedic
representations (mimemata kekomoidemena) of all these things.
For without the ridiculous ( geloion) it is not possible to learn
the serious (ta spoudaia) or opposites without their opposites,
if one is to be discerning ( phronimos); but it is also impossible
to practise both ( poiein de ouk au dunaton amphotera), if some-
one is to partake even slightly in virtue (aretes methezein). For
this reason one must study those things: to avoid ever doing
or saying anything humorous ( geloia), through ignorance
(agnoian), when one should not. Furthermore, we must order
slaves and hired aliens to represent such things (doulois de ta
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toiauta kai xenois emmisthois prostattein mimeisthai), and there

will be no seriousness (spouden) regarding them; nor will any
free person (ton eleutheron) be found learning them, neither
woman nor man. And there must always appear to be some-
thing novel (kainon de aei ti) in these mimetic representations.
Let such, then, be the rules in both law and speech (nomoi kai
logoi) for that which pertains to the funny entertainments we
all call comedy (komoidian). (816d5–817a1)
The first thing to note is that comedy is representative of a

larger family of genres; when Plato speaks of the comedic and
the laughable, he includes a range of generic forms of which
comedy is the most recognizable. The defining characteristic of
the members of this family is their mimetic content, a debased
humour that is antithetical to the noble choral songs and
dances that are central to the city’s educational and religious
system. This passage thus establishes a framework for integrat-
ing a variety of formally distinct but substantively interrelated
genres.
The approach to funerary genres sketched earlier reappears
here as well: aliens and disenfranchised slaves are required to
bear the stigma of performance. In this respect, the effects are
analogous to those of ritual lament. But instead of merely shield-
ing the citizen community from foreign values by shouldering
the burden of performance, in comedic genres the noncitizens
are on display; they have become the object of spectatorship that
gains its value precisely by being alien. Citizens learn the values
they are expected to uphold through spectacles of otherness,
mimed failings of actors drawn from abroad and from the polit-
ical margins. The effect is to normalise relationships of political
power by projecting values that transgress the city’s ethics onto
(performances by) those who occupy its periphery. By conflat-
ing ethical and artistic deviance with political marginality, the
Laws superimposes an interpretation on comedy that reinforces
the social hierarchies, moral priorities, and sentimental bonds
of the citizen community. Unlike choral lament, which is a
departure from the city’s normal religious calendar, comedy in
Magnesia is essential and customary: without it, Plato claims,
350 �
the citizens will remain stunted, ignorant, and susceptible to

corruption. As theatrical paradigms of moral abnormality, non-
citizens, slaves, and the morally alien genres they perform are as
indispensable to the flourishing of the second-best city as their
labour is to its economic prosperity.26
It is important to read this passage against a discussion in
the Republic in which Socrates forbids youth from mimicking
base character types.27 Because poetic imitations impress pat-
terns of action and belief on the soul and because guardians
must be practitioners of a single craft, they must represent the
one paradigm that most befits them: ‘brave, sober, pious, free
men and all such things’ (Rep. 3.395c4–6). They must never
imitate women or ‘male or female slaves doing that which
is servile’ (doulas te kai doulous prattontas hosa doulon, Rep.
3.395e4), because the ill-fitted gender, servility of the charac-
ters, and the multiplicity of personae render them unsuitable
models for citizen men. When the young guardian encounters
poetry that represents someone unworthy of himself, he will
feel ashamed ‘because he is untrained to imitate such persons
and is unable to endure moulding and placing himself into the
models of baser things or men’ (Rep. 3.396d8–10). In this, then,
there is continuity between the two dialogues: the precept in
the Laws against citizens’ learning or performing comedies
applies the Republic’s general prohibition against imitating
base characters.
But the discontinuities are as telling. The discussion in the
Republic pertains to the education of the youth, whereas the
Laws addresses the moral formation of the adult citizen. In the
Republic, furthermore, exposure to degenerate representations
is unnecessary, while it is essential to the moral education of
Magnesia’s citizens. As importantly, the nature of the citizen’s
exposure to base poetic representations differs in each dia-
logue. In the Republic, Plato forbids the youth from imitating
ignoble characters, and the prohibition against mimetic poetry
ensures that the citizens of Kallipolis would have very little or
no contact with ethical deviance in poetic form. The citizens
of Magnesia likewise are never given the opportunity to take
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on the personae or feel moral revulsion directed towards them-

selves as they assume alien identities. Whereas ethical knowl-
edge in the Republic develops from internal, self-reflexive
awareness of the inappropriateness of certain character types,
in the Laws that knowledge springs from an externalised act
of gazing on the political other. In Magnesia, comedy and the
essential knowledge that comes from it – the knowledge of what
it means to be a citizen by virtue of recognising the other –
are spectatorial rather than empirical: even within their native
polis, Magnesia’s citizen spectators conduct a sort of theoria, a
viewing of alterity.28
Strangeness remains fundamental to the experience of
Magnesian comedy. Most commentators interpret the ‘novelty’
of comedic representation as having an estranging effect akin
to the shame felt by the guardians in the Republic when they
encounter debased poetry.29 Plato elsewhere provides an argu-
ment for insisting that comedy incorporates an element of the
novel.30 Through an analogy with dietary regimens, he argues
that musical tastes and moral habits are in principle mallea-
ble, but, once set, they harden and become inflexible; and,
he claims, the lawgiver must take advantage of such psychic
plasticity to ensure that the city’s laws and institutions remain
unchanged from one generation to the next. Against a back-
drop of unaltered poetic traditions carved into temple walls
and etched through repetition into the citizens’ souls, come-
dic genres, marked by disconcerting irregularity, are to remain
forever an alienated and alienating spectacle. Novelty in verse
will prevent the citizens from developing a sense of pleasure in
degenerate genres.
In treating comedy as an alien genre, Plato builds upon and
intensifies numerous practices that were already in place in
Athens and abroad. I draw attention to four that are especially
telling:
1. The exclusion of noncitizens from Athenian festivals
coincided with an emphasis on the performance as an
expression of the citizen body’s political identity and
hierarchies. The more overtly political the festival was
352 �
perceived to be, and the more closely it was designated

as a space for the actualisation of the citizenship, the
more noncitizens were marginalised.31 Such margin-
alisation took many forms. It was, for example, illegal
for metics, nonresident aliens, and disenfranchised
citizens (atimoi) to participate in certain religious cel-
ebrations.32 Moreover, legal restrictions also prevented
noncitizens from performing in or paying the liturgies
for the premiere civic festival, the City Dionysia, and the
Thargelia.33
2. At other festivals (e.g., the Lenaia, in which comedies
featured prominently) citizens did participate as spon-
sors and members of the chorus, and this points to a
second connection between Athens and Plato’s ideal the-
atre: it is debatable whether this was accidental or part of
a conscious strategy to reduce the symbolic significance
of activities associated with metics and noncitizens (as it
is in the Laws), but there appears to have been a correla-
tion between the presence of noncitizens and the relative
political and cultural marginality of the festival itself.
As Pickard-Cambridge puts it, ‘That the Lenaian festival
was less highly regarded than the City Dionysia is prob-
ably the reason why at the former, but not at the lat-
ter, aliens might sing in the choruses and resident aliens
could be choregoi’.34 The greater prominence of nonciti-
zens, the less esteemed the festival appears to have been.
The City Dionysia stands out precisely as favouring the
political community, while the prominence of noncit-
izens at the Lenaia may be taken as a sign, as Wilson
argues, of its being ‘less concentratedly focussed around
the politai’.35
3. Where noncitizens did participate, their roles often
appear to have been designed to call attention to their
inferior political statuses. Wilson suggests that funding
and participation in major Athenian festival processions
‘fell as obligations on a particular, minority status-group
outside the Athenian citizenry, and they consisted in
large part in placing that collective in a markedly infer-
ior status-position. The point is made all the more force-
fully by the fact that the metics were probably excluded
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from participation in the sacrifice in which this process

culminated’.36 Non-Athenians were required by law to
dress, perform, and subsidise the celebrations, and they
did so in ways that trumpeted their subordinate political
status and denied the cultural clout typically afforded to
citizens fulfilling similar duties.
4. Where noncitizens were coerced to perform before
citizen audiences outside Athens, their performances
were employed as object lessons of how not to behave,
thereby naturalising sociopolitical hierarchy by humili-
ating low-status performers. Plutarch (Lyc. 28.4) claims
that Spartiates ‘ordered Helots to perform ignoble and
comical choral songs and dances (choreias . . . agenneis
kai katagelastous) and commanded them to abstain
from those that befit free men (ton eleutheron)’.37 When
the Thebans ordered captured Helots to sing works of
Terpander, Alcman, and Spendos, they refused because
they claimed their masters forbade it. For Plutarch this
custom seemed so harsh that he could not attribute it to
Lycurgus, but he takes the Helots’ behaviour as proof
of the adage that ‘the freeman (ton eleutheron) is most
free in Sparta and the slave (ton doulon) most enslaved’
(Lyc. 28.5). The verbal and conceptual parallels with
the Laws are striking. In both, comical genres of choreia
erect aesthetic, moral, and political boundaries between
citizens and slaves.
The historical comparanda suggest that the Laws refines

extant conventions of marginalising noncitizens in performance.
Just as (1) participation in Athenian performances marked
metics as secondary members of the polis and defined citizen
identity through opposition and privilege, comedic genres in
the Laws reproduce the boundary between those within and
those outside the political community. In Magnesia’s ideal com-
edy, which is programmatically concentrated on slaves and
metics and away from the politai, the disenfranchised perform-
ers and the deviant genres (2 and 3) marginalise the festival
and the values it presents on stage. Finally, in keeping with
Spartan custom (4), Plato would sacrifice the ethical well-being
354 �
of the noncitizen population in performance to the benefit of

the citizen community.
Magnesia’s comic genres, moreover, are but one example of
a larger strategy. The theatrical coupling of ethical and polit-
ical marginality, Plato claims, is to be a permanent approach
to every choral genre that would otherwise subvert the law
code:
Regarding all choral song and dance and the learning thereof
( pasan choreian kai mathesin touton), let these be the customs
ordained in the laws – keeping those for slaves apart from those
for masters (choris men ta ton doulon, choris de ta ton despoton).
(817e1–4)
As the context indicates, this injunction is meant to apply to

tragedy as well, which suggests that relations of power and
dominance offer an interpretive filter that applies to all genres.
The institutionalised interaction between ‘despotic’ citizen
spectators and servile performers predetermines the meaning
of the poetry even before it is performed. Importantly, this fil-
ter is part of the fabric of the social context of performance,
rather than the words or lyrics performed. Plato’s earlier dia-
logues show a keen awareness of the influence of the setting of
spoken discourse on its reception and as a source of meaning
in itself.38 Now, in the Laws, by manipulating the scenario of
performance and arranging the status relationships between
alien performers and citizen audiences, Plato proposes the
production of an utterance that is ritually correct within an
occasion that delegitimises the performers and the works they
perform. Appropriate to the stigmatising frame, deviant genres
are admissible with the proviso that the event construe the
performance and performers as ethically and politically other.
As Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi suggests in this volume,
spectatorship is one of the Laws’ foci of innovation. Gazing is
at the centre of this study as well: through a series of visual
and social cues, the Laws positions deviant genres as an
aberration from the philosophy that underlies the law code;
it is against this aberration that citizenship is defined. By
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Marcus Folch
recasting the relationships between performer and audience

as representations of the power dynamic between nonciti-
zen and citizen, Plato fashions a culture of mousike in which
genres banished from the Republic are repackaged as rituals
in which citizenship is played out as an act of spectatorial
self-definition against the political alien on stage. The legal
category of citizen spectator coincides with that of agent of
virtue, and of noncitizen and servile performer with that of
vice. Rule of the spectator would seem justified by the moral
flaws of the noncitizens onstage. Ironically, the Laws offers
its own theatrocracy, one in which, as in Athens, authority in
performance remains centred on the citizen-spectator whose
viewing reenacts the political principles that obtain beyond
the theatre.
F ro m Antithe sis to Ide ntity: Come dic

and Iamb ic Inve ctive
We have explored Plato’s willingness to employ song and dance
to differentiate civic identity through opposition, but negative
exemplarity is not the whole story, for comedic discourse is more
than merely risible. It includes elements of invective ( psogos)
which, together with praise (epainos), define civic behaviour
from within the enfranchised community.39 Plato is keen to
appropriate invective in its comedic instantiations, but he is
simultaneously wary of its potential for unbridled vitriol. His
approach to invective exploits the discursive possibilities and
navigates the ethical challenges presented by the many genres
in which it is found. This requires that invective be entrusted
not to those who are estranged from the city’s political and
philosophical values. Rather, when comedy and iambos (with
which comedy is closely associated in the Laws)40 are treated as
instances of invective, Plato insists they serve as official state
discourse and that the right to compose be granted solely to
Magnesia’s most morally distinguished citizens. In this sense,
Plato organises the city’s musical culture not according to the
structural antithesis of enfranchised and disenfranchised but
356 �
by another fundamental political principle, what he calls ‘the

truest and most noble form of equality’ (ten . . . alethestaten kai
aristen isoteta, 757b5–6): the principle of allotting political sta-
tus according to virtue and education.41
Plato’s final discussion of comedy appears as part of a series
of regulations on defamation. The Laws outlaws slander (kake-
goria, loidoria), because the person who slanders indulges his
‘passion’ (thumoi), thereby ‘brutalising (exagrion) as much of
the soul as was once cultivated by education’ (935a4–6). A
similar rule applies to poetic invective:
We are now saying that it is impossible for one who is embroiled

in reviling not to employ it without seeking to speak ridicule
( geloia), and that we [i.e., the interlocutors and legislators]
revile this whenever it happens with passion. What then? Do
we accept the comedians’ willingness to ridicule people, if, as
they compose comedies against our citizens (tous politas . . .
komoidountes), they attempt to say such things without anger
(aneu thumou)? Or shall we make a distinction between playing
and not playing, and allow the one who is playing to speak
ridicule without anger, but, like we said, not to allow any one
who is intent and impassioned [to do so]? This must in no way
be retracted, but we must legislate to whom it is and is not
allowed. It is forbidden to the poet of comedy or one of iam-
bic poems or of songs of the Muses, with either word or fig-
ure, with or without anger, in any way to compose comedies
about any of the citizens (ton politon). If, furthermore, someone
refuses to obey, the judges shall banish him entirely from the
land on the same day or they shall be fined three minas dedi-
cated to the god in whose honour the festival is held. However,
those who it was earlier said have permission in respect to
composition (exousian peri tou poiein) shall be allowed [to com-
pose comedy] against one another (eis allelous) without anger
and in jest, but they shall not be allowed to do so with seri
ousness or when impassioned. Judgement over this shall be
assigned to the director of the whole education of the youth.
What he approves, the poet may produce in public, but what
he rejects (the poet) shall not display to anyone, nor shall he be
seen teaching it to anyone else, either slave or free (medeni mete
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allon doulon mete eleutheron), or he shall be reputed to be evil

and disobedient to the laws. (935c7–936b2)
Though Plato is concerned with the emotions to which citi-

zens are exposed, and while the members of the ideal city are
not to indulge in, or goad others to, excessive anger, the inspi-
ration for legislating against impassioned invective is not, as
some have suggested, that citizens might prove touchy.42 Nor,
as has also been suggested, does Plato wish to suppress the
laughter of all but a few, though he does contend that humour
is debasing when it becomes habitual.43 Rather, comedic invec-
tive distils into music and induces in the participants particu-
lar psychological states – those in which the educated psyche
regresses into a bestial condition – that undermine the citizens’
moral training and thus have no place in the ideal city.
Plato’s misgivings regarding comedic invective are attribut-
able to the nature of the poetic medium itself. As Nightingale
has explored at length, Plato ‘genres are not merely artistic
forms but forms of thought, each of which is adapted to repre-
senting and conceptualising some aspects of experience bet-
ter than others’.44 Just as only certain attitudinal stances and
psychological constitutions befit the ideal citizen, only certain
genres are amenable to the articulation and evaluation of the
type of civic identity Plato seeks to fashion. Citizenship in the
ideal city may be inscribed only within a delimited range of
discourses and modes of representation. In Plato’s estimation,
invective genres crystallise forms of thought that are base,
irrationally passionate, and slanderous; these genres are inher-
ently incapable of expressing the values upon which the city is
founded. A similar suggestion is made in the Republic, where
Socrates argues that theatrical poetry cannot render the suffer-
ings of a virtuous man in any way comprehensible to a mass
audience.45 The Laws has already forbidden citizens from per-
forming comedy and thereby assimilating themselves to comic
character types. Now it ensures that they not see themselves
satirised by noncitizens on stage or scripted into genres that
were known in Plato’s (and Socrates’) day for antagonism with
philosophers and philosophical ways of living.
358 �
Yet once again, for all its inadequacies, invective is not ban-
ished from the second-best city, as is clear from the reference
to an earlier discussion of those whom the city authorises to
compose new poetic works.46 There Plato insists that Magnesia’s
poets be chosen not for their musical talent; rather, they must be
over fifty and both ‘virtuous’ (agathoi) and ‘honoured’ (timioi) as
craftsmen of good works (ergon . . . demiourgoi kalon)’ (829d1–2).
These select elders have demonstrated the moral fortitude to
remain untainted by the comical characters they pen and the
requisite dispassionate restraint when parodying others. Plato
recognises that invective poets hold a position of cultural influ-
ence and that poetic blame, particularly when sponsored by
the polis, is a powerful form of normative commentary on civic
behaviour. It is no surprise then that he entrusts the ‘privilege’
to compose well-tempered invective – as he does with the high-
est political offices – to those citizens who have distinguished
themselves as exemplars of the city’s ideals.
What are we to make of Plato’s insistence that eminent
citizen-poets parody ‘each other’? This would seem to impose
severe limitations on the possible subjects of comedic and iam-
bic invective (though nothing precludes their writing com-
edies about noncitizens and slaves). Nor does it sit well with
the claim at 828 that all citizens are subject to other forms of
psogos. One might conjecture that for once Plato is express-
ing a sentiment in keeping with contemporary theatrical sen-
sibilities: the fourth-century trend away from Old Comedy’s ad
hominem poetics.47 He may also be acknowledging the long-
standing tradition among iambic and comedic poets of lam-
pooning rival artists. Poetic invective, moreover, served as a
regulatory discourse on behaviours that appeared so base as
to be beneath the dignity of a political equal or so lofty as
to verge on hubris.48 It is in keeping with the Laws’ practice
of encouraging both competition and equality among citizens
that comedy and iambos ‘sportively and playfully’ bring the
city’s illuminati down a notch, thereby moderating the dif-
ferentiation in social status that the privilege to compose is
designed to signal.49
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C onc lu sion s
This study of unideal genres has led in many directions. Thus,
by way of conclusion, it may help to sum my main contentions.
I have made two overarching claims: that Plato’s handling of
subversive genres is informed by and replays the principles
that underlie his notion of what it means to be a member of
a polis, and that the Laws shows Plato appropriating contem-
porary unideal musical practices and institutions to realise
an ideal form of citizenship. It is perhaps to be expected that
membership in a polis has many meanings. But in transgressive
generic contexts, citizenship emerges along three axes: as an
aesthetic orientation towards pleasure that manifests itself in a
city’s diversity of genres, popular morality, and political insti-
tutions; as a principle of opposition defined against nonciti-
zenship that parallels the relationship between spectator and
performer; and as a geometric distribution of authority within
the enfranchised community in the form of the privilege to
compose poetry. Throughout this study I have approached
poetry, song, and dance as sociopolitical phenomena that
involve much that is ‘outside the text’ – scenarios of perfor-
mance, relationships among performers, audiences, poets,
and judges. For Plato, these externals are constitutive of the
genre, frame the text, and ultimately determine its meaning.
By orchestrating the sociopolitical dimensions of performance,
the Laws answers the challenge posed in the Republic and ren-
ders transgressive poetry ‘not only sweet but beneficial to the
city and to human life’.50
Not e s
1 Popper (1966) 200. Popper’s comments here apply to Plato’s oeu-
vre as a whole, not just the Laws.
2 Some commentators have viewed the Laws as endorsing rational,
intellectual freedom: see, e.g., Bobonich (1991) 366–87, (2002)
8–9, 97–106; Samaras (2002) 305–25; Irwin (2010) 97. Others
have seen Plato as favouring a less free or rational conception of
consent to rule of law: see Morrow (1953) 236–43; Stalley (1983)
360 �
43, (1994) 164–77, (1998) 154–7; Nightingale (1993, 1999). For

recent surveys of approaches, see Laks (2005) 286–90, (2007)
57–8, 70–1; Buccioni (2007) 263–80; Annas (2010) 71–80, 84–9.
3 On the training of citizen-soldiers, see 828b–835b.
4 Laws 829d–e, 850b–d, 907d–909d, 915b–c, 951c–952d.
5 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 2–3: ‘Plato’s low valuation of mimesis
as the techne of poetry, together with the idea that the only really
inspired, “philosophical” poetry was the non-mimetic kind (with
its extremely limited possibilities – the dithyramb, and hymns to
gods or to men), led the philosopher, both in the Laws (817b–c)
and in the tenth book of the Republic, to banish poetry virtually
entirely from the ideal State’. See also Rep. 10.607b with Janaway
(1995) 131–1; Halliwell (2002) 108; Naddaff (2002) 119–20.
The bibliography on Plato’s treatment of poetry is seemingly
endless, but on the claim that Plato banishes almost all poetry,
especially the kinds of poetry that expressly reject his ethics,
there is virtually universal consensus. Annas (1981) 344 asserts
that ‘Plato is enough of a creative artist himself to know that
such productions [i.e., hymns and encomia] are not real poetry’.
Partee (1970) 215 claims, ‘The art Plato seems to accept . . . is not
actually poetry, but philosophical and didactic discourse’. For
general studies of poetry and mimesis in Plato, see Tate (1928),
(1932) 61–4; Elias (1984) 5–13; Else (1986) 17–46, 61–4; G. R. F.
Ferrari (1989) 92–134; Janaway (1995) 106–57; P. Murray (1996)
introduction. For discussions of the relationship between poetry
and philosophy, see Halliwell (1984) 50–8; Gould (1990) 20–1,
29–34; M. H. Miller (1999) 254–6; Levin (2001) 127–71. On mime-
sis, imitation, and representation (particularly of abstract Ideas),
see Belfiore (1983, 1984); Dyson (1988); C. Osborne (1987) 55–62;
S. Rosen (1988) 1–26; Nehamas (1999a) 253–67, (1999b) 280–91.
On aesthetics, see Halliwell (2002) 37–117. On poetic or liter-
ary criticism, see Ford (2002) 209–26, 258–61. For the educative
and psychological effects of tragedy, see Salkever (1986) 278–85;
Lear (1992) 185–214; Croally (1994) 23–6. Burnyeat (1999) 222–6,
239–324 presents a novel departure from the communis opinio:
‘Plato is famous for having banished poetry and poets from the
ideal city of the Republic. But he did no such thing. On the con-
trary, poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a pervasive pres-
ence in the life of the society he describes. Yes, he did banish
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes – the
greatest names of Greek literature. But not because they were
poets. He banished them because they produced the wrong sort
of poetry’ (255).
6 See 659d–660a, 798b–800a, 801c–d, 802d, 816c–d, 817c–e,
829c–e. As Detienne (1986 [1981]) 96 argues, mousike in the Laws
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is designed ‘to instill [the] hallowed voice [of the lawgiver] in the
minds of all; slaves, freemen, children, the whole city’.
The bibliography on music in the Laws is vast and varied.
For studies that emphasise anthropological or religious aspects
of music in the Laws, see Amar (1971) 263–86; Lonsdale (1993)
21–43; Kowalzig (2004) 44–9. For studies of the politics of music
in the Laws, see Strauss (1975) 22–37, 100–15; Detienne (1986
[1981]) 93–101; Welton (1993) 56–116; Benardete (2000) 54–87;
Helmig (2003) 81–6. Sargeaunt (1922–3) 493–502, 669–79 justi-
fies the most authoritarian features of the Laws’ performance cul-
ture according to Christian doctrine. More generally, see Grote
(1875) 376–92; Tate (1936) 48–9; Gernet (1951) lvi–lxi; Morrow
(1960) 297–388; Stalley (1983) 123–36. W. D. Anderson (1994)
145–66 makes insightful observations on performance in the
Laws. Bertrand (1999) 400–5 succinctly summarises the function
of poetry in Magnesia. Wersinger (2003) connects music theory
and harmonics in the Laws to the harmonious movements of the
stars and to the unity of the virtues, a position Benardete (2000)
56 rejects. Bobonich (2002) 357–61, 403 argues persuasively that
the goodness of songs and dances in the Laws is determined by
both the content of the lyrics and the pleasurable perception of
the quasi-mathematical qualities of rhythms and harmonies. For
discussions of aesthetics and mimesis in the Laws, see Vanhoutte
(1954) 99–133; Schipper (1963) 200–2; Welton (1993) 56–116;
Halliwell (2002) 67–9. R. B. Clark (2003) 33–8 considers the func-
tion of song as medicine and magic. See also Whitaker (2004)
21–38 who dramatically concludes that the Laws presents ‘a
state-run system of administering drugs (i.e., wine) and requir-
ing public sing-a-longs in order to brainwash people with fear of
public opinion and to get them to swallow stories about justice
and pleasure that the old story-tellers themselves may doubt in
more sober moments’ (36).
7 Naddaf (2000) 347–8 argues that laws and preludes are to be
performed by Magnesian choruses. Naddaf’s argument is,
however, based on a misreading of 811a–812a, which claims
that laws and preludes must be learned and memorised in
school but says nothing of choral or any other sort of musical
performance.
8 For Magnesia as a ‘second-best’ constitution, see 739b–e with
see Stalley (1983) 8–10, 22, and Laks (1990a) 209–29, who dis-
cusses the relationship between the Republic and Laws.
9 This seems to fly in the face of Plato’s insistence on generic
purity, for which see 669b–670a, 700a–e. In these passages, as
in other dialogues, Plato’s own practice belies his rhetoric: the
word hymnos in the Laws is used to describe Homeric poetry
362 �
(682a); the works of Orpheus and Thamyras (829e); songs and

rumours in general (812c, 931b, 960c); the ‘preludes’ to the laws
(871a); songs in honour of gods (700b, 799b, 801e, 822c); and
praise of men and women (802a, 829c, 947b). The semantic range
of encomion is comparably capacious: general commendation of
an act or quality (753e–754a); the poetry of Tyrtaeus (629c); com-
memorative inscription in ‘heroic’ metre, that is, elegiac couplets
(958e); songs in honour of men and women (801e, 802a, 822b,
829c); songs in honour of gods, daemons, or heroes (801d–e).
The Laws similarly proves inconsistent in its legislation regard-
ing encomia: although the Athenian insists at 801e that encomia
be performed solely in honour of those who have died, at 829c
we find that state officials honour victorious athletes with enco-
mia while still alive. In several of the passages cited here, hymnos
and encomion are used interchangeably regardless of celebrandi.
The critique of generic cross contamination at 669b–670a and
700a–e is at odds with the Laws’ otherwise loose generic termi-
nology – fittingly in passages that are programmatically overpre-
cise in their treatment of genres. It is more likely that the type of
generic purity Plato is concerned with pertains primarily to the
meaning, emotion, and mood of a work and only secondarily to
its form. See Kowalzig (2004) 44–9.
10 The contributions these genres are to make in the Laws has
remained largely underappreciated. Thus Brock (1990) 39 char-
acterises the philosopher’s attitude toward comedy as simplistic
and ‘straightforward’. An exception is Nightingale (1995) 172–92
who acknowledges the Laws’ complicated stance towards com-
edy. On Socrates as a comedic and iambic figure, see Worman
(2008) 153–212 with bibliography.
11 For a general discussion of degrees of citizenship and servile sta-
tuses in ancient Athens, see Finley (1989) chs. 7–8.
12 Connor (1987) 41. My approach to performance as a window into
the politics and culture of the society in which it is engendered
is indebted to Todorov’s work on genre, esp. (1990 [1978]), and
Geertz’s work on cultural ritual (see esp. (1973) 412–53). I have
found the following discussions of the context of ancient perfor-
mance especially helpful: G. Nagy (1994–5) 13–14; Fantuzzi and
Hunter (2004) 31; Rutherford (2001) 4.
13 We might, e.g., approach poetry as a medium of communication
or as an aesthetic as opposed to a social or political phenom-
enon. Thus, Halliwell (2002) 40–1 claims that Plato treats poetic
language in the Ion as a medium of ‘constative, declarative dis-
course – discourse “about” ( peri) the subjects it deals with’ that
is to be judged by the standards of ‘systematically informative
truth’. See also Halliwell (2002) 49, 53–8.
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14 On the relationship, e.g., between Athenian theatre and politics,

see Pickard-Cambridge (1968) ch. 6; Connor (1989) 8–25; Ober
(1989) 152–3; Goldhill (1990) 98–115, (1994) 352, (1997) 57–67;
Longo (1990) 13–16; Winkler (1990b) 21–58; Ober and Strauss
(1990) 238–40; Rehm (1992) 1–11; R. Osborne (1993) 34–7; Csapo
and Slater (1995) 287–90; Saïd (1998) 275–84, with a useful sur-
vey of differing approaches to and bibliography on politics and
tragedy; Wilson (2000) 11–70; Nightingale (2004) 50–2; Farenga
(2006) 4–12.
16 Goldhill (1994) 349–50 attempts to dismiss Laws 658c–e and
later 798b–d as evidence for the presence of women in the
theatre. For counterarguments, see Podlecki (1990) 26–42 and
Henderson (1991a) 138–47. See the judicious comments by
Pickard-Cambridge (1968) 263–5.
17 See Carone (2002, 2003); and Kurke’s contribution in this volume
(Chapter 6).
18 Laws 653b–c.
19 As Wallach (2001) 364 argues, a city’s system of song and dance
is indicative of ‘the relative receptivity of a culture to an edu-
cation in virtue’ and it ‘predisposes a society for a particular
politeia’. For the connection between aesthetic and political pref-
erences, see also 659d–660a, 700a–e, 798b–d.
20 On the connections between ‘play’, musical performance, and
education, see Lonsdale (1993) 25–43. See also 643c–644b,
653b–c, 655d–656a, 656b–c, 657c, 666b, 667e, 673c–e, 764d–e,
796b–e, 797b–c, 798d–799d, 803c–804b.
21 Sourvinou-Inwood (1990) 300–1. Burkert (1985 [1977]) 332–7
sees the Laws as the fullest expression and analysis of the syn-
thesis of polis and religion. As he states, ‘Religion [in the Laws]
is not tuned to the religious needs of the individual; it shapes the
community of the polis, pointing out and verbalising its func-
tions through its gods. . . . the essential divisions and functions
of society in family and public life, in administration, commerce,
and the courts are granted their status and thus their perma-
nence by religion’ (335).
22 G. Nagy (1985) 28.
23 Laws 918a–920c.
24 On funerals for state officials, see 946e–947e. The typical citizen,
however, will have no elaborate performances for his or her own
funerals; cf. 958e–960a. Plato’s concern with public displays of
wealth appears to respond to a fourth-century trend in Athens
and throughout the Mediterranean towards increasingly lavish
funerals, on which see Morris (1998) 59–86.
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25 Whether or how regularly sorrowful dirges are to take place in

Plato’s ideal city in the first place is less certain, but the argu-
ment of the passage here does not preclude the possibility. At
828a–d we find that the religious calendar of the city remains
to be determined by future lawmakers and must include days
devoted to chthonian deities, whom, Plato assumes, citizen sol-
diers will tend not to honour and whose worship must be kept
separate from that of celestial gods. Of importance in the current
analysis is not merely which genres are to be performed in the
ideal city or on how many days, but rather the innovative strate-
gies that Plato develops in the Laws to render them useful to the
success of the polis. It is clear from 817e that these strategies
apply to a large number of genres typically thought incompat-
ible with Plato’s political project.
26 For the status and economic contributions of slaves and metics,
see 777c–e, 850a–c, 914a–915c. For discussion of Plato’s views
of slavery, see Vlastos (1941) 147–53; Morrow (1960) 148–52;
Stalley (1983) 102, 106–11; Bobonich (2002) 378, 578 n. 109. On
his treatment of metics, see Morrow (1960) 144–8; Stalley (1983)
108.
27 See generally Rep. 395b–396e. See Burnyeat (1999) 279.
28 For a discussion of viewing alterity in Greek religious practice
and philosophy, see Nightingale (2004) 40–52.
29 England (1921) I.306 discusses various interpretations of
‘novelty’ in this passage; cf. Schöpsdau (1994–2003) II.596–7
who differentiates the Laws’ treatment of comedy and tragedy.
There appears to be a distinction between estranging ‘novelty’
(kainon) mentioned here and the artistic ‘embellishment’
(poikilia) at 665c.
30 Laws 797d–798b.
31 On the synthesis of religion and politics in the ancient Greek
city-state, see Butz (1996) 76–95, who argues on the basis of
epigraphic evidence that access to or exclusion from civic cult
activities was a function of one’s status as citizen or noncitizen.
Cole (1995) 295–309 explores the varied and inconsistent criteria
by which to determine which religious activities qualify as civic
cult and are thus coextensive with and expressions of political
identity. Jameson (1998) 172–87 points out numerous instances
in which official state cult remained unaffected by changes in
political structure and in which aristocratic priests in Athens in
fact benefitted from the democracy.
32 As discussed by MacDowell (1989) 72–7, while the force of such
laws appears to have been felt strongly, they were followed
selectively, and more severe punishments were imposed on
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disenfranchised citizens who participated in the festivals than

on aliens.
33 Wilson (2000) 21–2. As MacDowell (1989) 68–9 argues, the ‘city
chorus’ mentioned by the scholiast is that of the City Dionysia
at which tragedy and the dithyramb were the preeminent choral
genres. MacDowell (1989) 68 further argues that in the Thargelia,
in which the choruses where chosen by phylai, ‘the choristers
and choregoi had to be members of those phylai, so that aliens
were not eligible’.
34 Pickard-Cambridge (1968) 41. For discussion of the Lenaia and
Dionysia, see Pickard-Cambridge (1968) 25–42, 57–101. See
also the scholium on Aristophanes’ Wealth 953: ‘It was not per-
mitted that an alien (xenon) perform in the city chorus (astikoi
choroi) . . .; but in the Lenaion it was permitted; for <there> met-
ics were also choregoi’ (translated in MacDowell (1989) 68–9).
35 Wilson (2000) 27–8; cf. 22.
36 Wilson (2000) 26.
37 Briefly discussed in Morrow (1960) 373.
38 See Phdr. 228e–230d with G. R. F. Ferrari (1987) 4–9.
39 For further discussion of praise and invective in the Laws, see
Morgan’s contribution in this volume (Chapter 10). On archaic
terminology for praise and blame, see G. Nagy (1999) 223–4.
Gentili (1988 [1985]) 108 notes that the ‘semantic field [of the
term psogos] embraces the whole realm of the humorous ( geloion)
or serio-comic’ (108), as well as the iambos, a range that includes
vitriolic polemic and the celebratory mood of the komos. See
Gentili (1988 [1985]) 107–10 on the social function of praise
and blame, especially Doric communities in which ‘the con-
trast between the two types of discourse was even integrated
into the institutional system, functioning specifically to further
the greater good of the community by praising the worthy and
censuring the unworthy’ (108). See also Detienne (1996 [1967])
43–52, 154 n. 40 who detects Doric influences in Plato’s use of
praise and blame.
40 Aristotle similarly connects comedy and iambos at Poetics
1448b–1449a, where he claims that comedy developed from
poetic blame, with iambos as an intermediary step in its evolu-
tion. At Politics 1336b – a passage that responds intricately to
the Laws’ treatment of performance – he insists that the youth
not be spectators of comedy or iambos before being old enough
to join ‘military communal dining halls’ (sussitia, 1336b). See
Pickard-Cambridge (1962) 89–97, 132–5; Janko (1984) 204–6;
Heath (1989) 347–8; Halliwell (1998) 267–70.
For discussion of stylistic, formal, and rhetorical features
shared by iambos and comedy, see R. M. Rosen (1988) 9–35;
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Henderson (1991b) 17–19. G. Nagy (1976) 194–5 notes that both

comedy and iambos are forms of invective associated with the
komos; he also posits that the two genres serve comparable social
functions as the antitheses of praise poetry. On ritual origins and
social function of iambos, see West (1974) 27–37; Carey (1986)
64–6; G. Nagy (2004) 33–42.
41 See 756e–758a with Bobonich (2002) 440–5. As Bobonich (2002)
440 argues, Plato appears committed to the belief that the ‘dis-
tribution of political offices to persons is just if and only if it dis-
tributes offices to persons in direct proportion to each person’s
virtue’.
42 Benardete (2000) 327 claims that here the ‘Stranger assumes that
the citizens are thin-skinned, and it cannot be left up to the
butt of a joke whether he takes it in good part or not, and does
not mind, as Socrates would not and Euthyphro does, whether
everyone laughs at him’.
43 Benardete (2000) 327, 935b.
45 Rep. 603c–605a.
46 Laws 829c–e.
47 For a critical view of this trend, see Csapo (2000) 132–3.
48 As Smith (forthcoming) argues, invective played a key role ‘as a
form of social control’ especially in contexts where the ‘speech
community is composed of notional equals through a set of either
religious ties or socio-political norms’.
49 As Morgan argues in this volume, competition within constraints
is an essential structuring principle in Magnesia.
50 Rep. 607d.
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P art F o u r
P o e t ry a n d M u s i c i n
the Afterlife of
t h e L aw s
��
C hap t e r F o u rt e e n
D e r e g u l at i n g P o e t ry
callimachus’ response to
p l a t o ’s l a w s
Susan Stephens
Plutarch, writing On the Fortunes of Alexander, remarks that,

‘although few of us read Plato’s Laws, yet hundreds of thou-
sands have made use of Alexander’s’ (328e5–8). His choice for
contrasting figures was not fortuitous. Plutarch continues by
observing that Plato’s was a culturally homogeneous audience,
whereas Alexander brought Greek culture (including the phi-
losophers) to a wide range of non-Greek peoples. Plato belonged
to the world that predated Alexander’s conquests (he died in
347), and even then a central feature of his writing, especially
in the Laws, was the need to stabilise Greek social and aes-
thetic practices, to resist external pressures for change.
Callimachus lived and wrote in the immediate aftermath
of Alexander’s conquests, and in the most important city of
his legacy, Alexandria in Egypt. This city was a new founda-
tion in a non-Greek location, and it lacked traditional gods,
cults, or foundation myths. Its growing population consisted
of Greeks emigrating from various locations throughout the
Mediterranean but also non-Greeks. To the extent that the
new city was Greek, it was not the homogeneous Greekness of
Plato’s Athens but a shifting amalgam of social and religious
practices. Confronted with this new world, Callimachus has
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Susan Stephens
been characterised as belated and reactionary, an artist devoid

of grand ideas, who engaged in a nostalgic preoccupation with
the literary achievements of the past.1 Elsewhere I have argued
that, on the contrary, Callimachus was crafting a new poetic
idiom to affirm the importance of poetry in the collective cul-
tural imagination of a new type of state.2 As part of his ambi-
tious agenda, he also tried to rescue poetry from the restrictions
imposed upon it by Plato and his successors, as articulated in
texts like the Laws.
To be sure, much of Callimachus’ poetry has been lost. But
his continued use of the authorial voice to delimit an aesthetics
is obvious even from the fragments that do survive: he articu-
lates a relationship between art and inspiration, the relation-
ship of the artist to his mimetic subject, and the importance
of generic mixing and of composition in more than one genre
(his so-called polyeideia); however, the overarching context for
these assertions is his concern about who has jurisdiction over
poetic practice. In contrast, when these issues surface in other
Hellenistic poets, they lack the personal investment or the
urgency found in Callimachus. Moreover, he consistently situ-
ates his aesthetic positions not just as an individual poet react-
ing to another poet’s personal attacks (though this tends to be
the way in which his work is read), but as a defender of poetry
in the face of criticism categorized generally (even abstractly).
Callimachus critiques his opponents for their limited aes-
thetic imaginations and need to impose rules in the Aetia pro-
logue and the thirteenth iambus, for their moral bankruptcy in
the first iambus, and for their sterility and envy in the sphragis
of the Hymn to Apollo. If later commentators are correct, his
critics are rarely poets. In the Aetia prologue, for example,
Callimachus refers to them as ‘Telchines’, pre-Olympian wiz-
ards with chthonic associations, the complete antithesis of his
patron deity Apollo’s clarity and light. The Florentine scholia
(lines 1–9 ad fr. 1 Pfeiffer) identify these Telchines as two epi-
grammatists, one philosopher, and two men named Dionysius,
one of whom was probably the Euhemerist mythographer,
Dionysius Scutobrachion.3 In his first iambus, Callimachus
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Deregulating Poetry
ventriloquises the archaic iambicist Hipponax to chastise the

critics in Alexandria for their abusive quibbling. According to
the diegesis, the ancient summaries of Callimachus’ poems, these
were not poets at all: the original text labelled them philoso-
phoi, but another hand emended the original text to philologoi.4
In fact, the opening salvo of the iambus singles out the atheist
Euhemerus for his unrighteous books,5 thus guaranteeing that
we are in the realm of philosophers and prose writers, not fel-
low poets. We have moved well beyond the literary quarrels
that occasionally appear in earlier Greek poetry. This is not
the rejection of poetic rivals, but of those who would make up
rules, and insist that poets should obey them.
Criticism of poetry that was external to a practitioner’s poet-
ics seems to have been a relatively late phenomenon in Greek
art, and the growing culture of writing undoubtedly fuelled
it. One certain place where it occurred frequently, if not sys-
tematically, was in Plato: the Protagoras, the Ion, the Republic,
and the Laws all encode rules for setting poetic standards and
adumbrate guidelines for what becomes the practice of criti-
cism.6 At stake in Plato’s assessments is what constitutes the
best poetry and who knows best how to judge it. His verdict,
whenever the topic comes up, is that the judgement of philoso-
phers is to be preferred to that of poets. Callimachus seems to be
reversing the process by focussing on the shortcomings of crit-
ics, and it is significant in this regard that modern critics turn
to Plato, especially the Ion and the Laws, in an effort to con-
textualise or explain these critical interludes in Callimachus.
Section 700–1 of the Laws, for example, has been invoked to
illustrate the status quo ante: namely that generic mixing was
not an innovation of the Alexandrians but was already a fea-
ture of fourth-century poetics.7 Section 719c of the Laws has
been invoked to shed light on the poles of inspiration and art:
Plato identifies the problem with poets as too much inspiration
(enthousiasmos), and a reason for them not to be trusted:
. . . ποιητής, ὁπόταν ἐν τῷ τρίποδι τῆς Μούσης καθίζηται,

τότε οὐκ ἔμφρων ἐστίν, οἷον δὲ κρήνη τις τὸ ἐπιὸν ῥεῖν ἑτοίμως
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Susan Stephens
ἐᾷ, καὶ τῆς τέχνης οὔσης μιμήσεως ἀναγκάζεται, ἐναντίως

ἀλλήλοις ἀνθρώπους ποιῶν διατιθεμένους, ἐναντία λέγειν
αὑτῷ πολλάκις, οἶδεν δὲ οὔτ’ εἰ ταῦτα οὔτ’ εἰ θάτερα ἀληθῆ
τῶν λεγομένων.
A poet, whenever he sits on the Muse’s tripod, then he is not
in possession of his senses but he is like a spring that readily
allows the outward rush of water, and since his art consists in
imitation, when he creates characters that differ from each other
he is frequently compelled to contradict himself and he does
not know which of the things they say are true. (719c3–d1)
Commentators point out that for Plato generic purity or fixity
takes on a moral imperative – a guarantee of appropriate mimetic
examples for the many, while supposedly in Callimachus these
same questions are stripped of any moral content and reduced
to justifying an ‘art for art’s sake’.
Using Plato in this way to ‘explain’ Callimachus has its
pitfalls. Plato had been dead for nearly seventy years when
Callimachus began writing (in the late 280s b.c.). Generic mix-
ing (for example) was a sufficiently well-established phenom-
enon that it hardly seems worth taking it up as a signature
cause. Even more problematic is that in Laws 700–1 Plato is
talking about mousike in the restricted sense of poetry with
a performance component – dithyramb, hymn, paean, dirge,
nome. Plato’s concerns are modal and linguistic propriety –
when a poet (ruled not by correctness but by the pleasure
principle) ‘mixed dirges with hymns, paeans with dithyrambs,
and imitated flute tunes with harp tunes, and blended every
kind of music with every other’.8 But Callimachus, whatever
the performance status of his poetry, was exploiting the poten-
tial of writing as a poetic medium, and intertextuality, par-
ticularly intergeneric intertextuality, was a key component.
However, modern critics are correct about the coincidence of
Callimachus’ interests with Plato’s, and there are two ways of
accounting for the convergence.
It is certainly possible that Callimachus was doing no
more than responding to the critical (if not poetic) concerns
of his age. By Callimachus’ time, philosophers had addressed
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Deregulating Poetry
themselves to various aspects of literary criticism, as debates

centred on the technical effects of composition (language and
word arrangement, genre, and sound) and how the mimetic
effect was produced became subject to ever increasing ana-
lysis and rules.9 For example, Peripatetic writings attributed
to Theophrastus and Praxiphanes have titles like On poets and
poetry, though none has been transmitted intact.10 Callimachus
himself is credited with a tract Against Praxiphanes.11 Later
Academics, such as Heraclides Ponticus and Crantor of Soli,12
are known to have imitated Platonic dialogue in which they
took up subjects that included literary matters, which makes
them, at least theoretically, the kind of critics that Callimachus
could have been inveighing against. The direct descendants of
these philosopher critics were the figures in the second cen-
tury and after (like Aristarchus and Crates of Mallos) who came
to be labelled kritikoi or philologoi. There is, however, another,
more straightforward option: that Plato himself was the main
target for Callimachus’ rejection of the authority of critics, and
that Callimachus’ attempts to wrest poetry from the hands of
critics, was a calculated response to Plato’s own attempts to
remove or control the poet’s influence within the state.
This proposition may be novel, but it is not far-fetched.
There is no doubt that Callimachus knew Plato’s works: he
even introduced one dialogue by name into his own poetry.
This is his epigram on the death of Cleombrotus, who ‘leapt off
of a wall’ after reading Plato’s On the soul.
Εἴπας ‘Ἥλιε χαῖρε‘ Κλεόμβροτος ὡμβρακιώτης

ἥλατ’ ἀφ’ ὑψηλοῦ τείχεος εἰς Ἀΐδην,
ἄξιον οὐδὲν ἰδὼν θανάτου κακόν, ἀλλὰ Πλάτωνος
ἓν τὸ περὶ ψυχῆς γράμμ’ ἀναλεξάμενος.
Having said, ‘Farewell Sun’, the Ambraciot Cleombrotus leapt
from a high wall to Hades, not that he had seen some evil that
merited death, but rather because he had read one writing of
Plato’s – On the soul. (Callim. Epigr. 23 Pfeiffer)
By introducing Cleombrotus, a member of Socrates’ cir-

cle who (according to the Phaedo) was absent at the deathbed
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Susan Stephens
scene, Callimachus suspends us between the recollected narra-

tive of Plato’s Phaedo and Cleombrotus’ reading of that narra-
tive. Do we read the epigram as a tribute to the sheer power of
Plato’s text, as a pointed example of Plato’s fear of the dangers
of misreading since the Phaedo disallows suicide, or perhaps
as a comment on the foolishness of some who pretend to phil-
osophy? Elsewhere Callimachus seems to have taken exception
to Plato’s critiques of poetry. Proclus, in his commentary on
the Timaeus (21C), states that Plato was an excellent judge of
poetry and that Callimachus and Duris spoke nonsense when
they claimed that he was not. This remark in a commentator
can make sense only if Callimachus had explicitly engaged in
critique of Plato (one assumes in his prose works). In addition,
modern scholars have long noted Platonic elements or allusions
in Callimachus’ poems, particularly in the Aetia prologue and
the thirteenth iambus where poetics is discussed.13 Following
up on their work, Benjamin Acosta-Hughes and I, in a recent
book,14 have argued not for occasional allusions, but for a much
more pervasive influence from the Phaedo and Phaedrus (in
the Aetia prologue), and the Protagoras, Ion, Symposium, and
Phaedrus in the Iambi. Here I want to explore potential connec-
tions in the first and second books of the Aetia and the Laws.
Although much of what Plato says in the Laws about regulat-
ing poetry can be found also in his earlier works, specific fea-
tures of the Laws are unique: his emphasis on Egypt’s stability
in the arts and as a model of good aesthetic practice, the pai-
deutic function of the symposium as a means of transmitting
cultural values, and the Athenian Stranger’s fascination with
and enquiry into differing contemporary practices, allegedly in
search of a best model. All of these features have analogues in
Callimachus’ own poetic formulations within the Aetia.
There are two passages of relevance to our discussion, Laws
656–7 and 657–8, which fix on Egyptian practice as a ‘good’
example of how to maintain artistic stability. The Athenian
Stranger first tells us:
Θαῦμα καὶ ἀκοῦσαι. πάλαι γὰρ δή ποτε, ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐγνώσθη

παρ’ αὐτοῖς οὗτος ὁ λόγος ὃν τὰ νῦν λέγομεν ἡμεῖς, ὅτι καλὰ
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Deregulating Poetry
μὲν σχήματα, καλὰ δὲ μέλη δεῖ μεταχειρίζεσθαι ταῖς συνηθείαις

τοὺς ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν νέους· ταξάμενοι δὲ ταῦτα, ἅττα ἐστὶ
καὶ ὁποῖ’ ἄττα ἀπέφηναν ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς, καὶ παρὰ ταῦτ’ οὐκ
ἐξῆν οὔτε ζωγράφοις, οὔτ’ ἄλλοις ὅσοι σχήματα καὶ ὁποῖ’
ἄττα ἀπεργάζονται, καινοτομεῖν οὐδ’ ἐπινοεῖν ἄλλ’ ἄττα ἢ
τὰ πάτρια, οὐδὲ νῦν ἔξεστιν, οὔτε ἐν τούτοις οὔτε ἐν μουσικῇ
συμπάσῃ. σκοπῶν δὲ εὑρήσεις αὐτόθι τὰ μυριοστὸν ἔτος
γεγραμμένα ἢ τετυπωμένα – οὐχ ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν μυριοστὸν
ἀλλ’ ὄντως – τῶν νῦν δεδημιουργημένων οὔτε τι καλλίονα
οὔτ’ αἰσχίω, τὴν αὐτὴν δὲ τέχνην ἀπειργασμένα.
It is a marvel even to hear. For in times past, as it seems, the
principle that we are now discussing was acknowledged by
them, namely that the cities’ youth must habituate themselves
to postures and tunes that are excellent. By order they posted
these, whatever kind they were, in the temples, and apart from
what was posted it was not possible for painters or other kinds
of artists to innovate or invent anything beyond the traditional
forms in their arts or in any kind of mousike at all. If you look,
you will find there that what was painted or carved 10,000
years ago – not 10,000 metaphorically, but in fact – are no bet-
ter or worse than what is made today, but produced with the
same art. (656d5–657a3)
A few lines later Egyptian practice is summarized:
τοῦτο δ’ οὖν τὸ περὶ μουσικὴν ἀληθές τε καὶ ἄξιον ἐννοίας,

ὅτι δυνατὸν ἄρ’ ἦν περὶ τῶν τοιούτων νομοθετεῖσθαι βεβαίως
θαρροῦντα μέλη τὰ τὴν ὀρθότητα φύσει παρεχόμενα.
In regard to mousike this is true and worthy of note, namely
they were able about such matters to legislate securely tunes
boasting an inborn correctness. (657a7–10)
To what extent this represents the real state of Egyptian liter-

ary or musical aesthetics in the fourth century b.c., I leave to
others in this volume.15 Though it is important to recognise that
even if Plato’s assessment was inaccurate, he certainly could
have extrapolated his ideas from the static quality inherent in
almost all Egyptian visual representation. Official Egyptian art
cultivated a style that was intended to appear unchanged over
time. Andrea Nightingale explains what this may have meant
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Susan Stephens
for Plato. She argues that Egyptian artistic stability functioned

in the Laws as a model of writing analogous to Plato’s hopes
for written laws, namely that it might be possible to create
‘a new kind of text in which interpretative ambiguities are
minimized’.16
Callimachus’ own aesthetic practice, on the contrary,
seems often to embrace interpretative ambiguity, especially
when it involves divergent social or ritual logics.17 A case in
point is the ‘Egypt’ created in the Aetia prologue. As other
scholars have noted, a series of intertexts seems to collo-
cate Egypt and bad poetry. Bad poetry includes loud, harsh
sounds: trumpeting cranes, braying donkeys. In a vivid meta-
phor adapted from the opening of Iliad 3, where the Trojan
army is compared to the cranes that leave Thrace to winter
in Egypt, Callimachus dismisses the noisy birds from Egypt,
sending them on their long flight back to Greece; a few lines
later, unwelcome sounds are likened to the braying of the
donkey – the donkey brays in a memorably onomatopoetic
line that is deformed by its spondaic ending: onchesaito. The
donkey was the central beast of burden in Egypt, where it
was associated with the Egyptian deity of disorder, Seth.
Callimachus insists that poetry should not be measured by
the Persian schoinos, a land measure in common use in Egypt.
In another memorable moment, Callimachus weighs poetry
imitating a passage in Aristophanes’ Frogs, where Aeschylus
has just beaten Euripides with words ‘so weighty not even a
hundred Egyptians could lift them’ (1406). Thus the ‘Egypt’
of Callimachus’ prologue is associated explicitly and intertext-
ually with the noise, weight, and length that represent the
worst features of traditional poetry. On one level, Callimachus’
‘Egypt’ was certainly a new creative space, from which he
might well have desired to banish an outmoded aesthetics.
That would explain sending the cranes back to Greece, but
the other anti-Egyptian elements are not so straightforward,
nor can they be dismissed as cultural chauvinism, since the
‘Egypt’ to which Callimachus is opposed is not the native but
the previous Greek literary or cultural practice.
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Why does Callimachus construct and then reject this Egypt?

A partial answer may lie in the response to complaints placed
in the mouths of Callimachus’ critics, the Telchines: they object
that he ‘did not complete hen aeisma dienekes in many thou-
sands of lines’. Hen aeisma is a remarkable expression:18 it is
not an obvious locution for epic or even elegiac poetry – the
two forms that critics assume it must refer to. The form aeisma
is Ionic, and there are very few examples of it to be found that
are not dependent on this passage of Callimachus. The fact that
hen seems redundant with dienekes has led scholars to assume
that it must refer to a totalising concept (a poem as ‘one’), and
they usually associate it with an Aristotelian concept of unity.
Callimachus was, so they infer, criticized for not writing a long
poem that had a unified plot or thematic development.19 But
there is another possibility: the phrase aeisma hen occurs in
Herodotus’ Egypt book (2.79), explicitly to describe Egyptian
musical practice.20 Herodotus tells us the Egyptians had just
one song (aeisma hen), the dirge or the linos song, which was
subsequently borrowed throughout the Mediterranean. In
Herodotus, hen has the clear and straightforward meaning of
one song only. This should not be regarded as coincidence.
The Aetia prologue contains an overwhelming number of allu-
sions to previous Greek discourse on literary themes – from
Homer to Pindar, Hesiod, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Plato,
while Linus and linos song occur explicitly or intertextually in
at least three places in Aetia Book 1.21 Callimachus alludes to
Herodotus elsewhere,22 so his presence here can occasion no
surprise; moreover, from the perspective of someone writing
in the third century, Herodotus’ understanding of Egypt as a
culture with fixed and unchanging artistic norms would have
belonged to the intellectual continuum that included Isocrates,
who wrote at length about Busiris as a good lawgiver and the
stability of Egyptian classes as a model for Greek philosophers
(§ 17), and that culminated in Plato’s very similar projection of
Egypt. Herodotus’ aeisma hen, both the phrase and the idea,
was thus readily accessible as the reductive example of Plato’s
desire to stabilise poetry. Herodotus describes an Egyptian song
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form that is single and unchanging over time, though seduc-

tive enough to insinuate itself into many other Mediterranean
cultures, including Greek. Plato’s desire to stabilise poetic
forms is located in a framework of preventing foreign influ-
ence – of transmitting the best of Greek poetry intact to subse-
quent generations. I submit that Callimachus, by his choice of
this anomalous phrase (hen aeisma), is ironising the aesthetics
of stability that was a central premise for Plato’s Laws.
There also seems to be a convergence with Plato and the
Laws in the subtext at the opening of the second book of the
Aetia. The mise-en-scène of the Laws is Crete, where three men,
a Cretan (Cleinias), a Spartan (Megillus), and an Athenian are
making a pilgrimage to the Idaean cave where Zeus was born
or reared. They pass their time in conversation about various
aspects of Spartan and Cretan behaviour and end with a dis-
cussion of appropriate laws for city foundations. Integral to
that discussion, especially in the opening books, is an ide
alised notion of the symposium, not as a place for stupefy-
ing drunkenness or a licence for excess, but – lubricated by
only moderate drinking – as a place for the proper exchange
and inculcation of moral values. The Athenian Stranger takes
the lead in this discussion because, he claims, he has made an
extensive survey of contemporary cultural practices:
ΑΘ. ταύτην οὖν μῶν ὀρθῶς γιγνομένην ἤδη τις πώποτε

ἐθεάσατο; καὶ σφῷν μὲν ἀποκρίνασθαι ῥᾴδιον ὡς
οὐδεπώποτε τὸ παράπαν· οὐ γὰρ ἐπιχώριον ὑμῖν
τοῦτο οὐδὲ νόμιμον· ἐγὼ δὲ ἐντετύχηκά τε πολλαῖς
καὶ πολλαχοῦ, καὶ προσέτι πάσας ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν
διηρώτηκα, καὶ σχεδὸν ὅλην μὲν οὐδεμίαν ὀρθῶς
γιγνομένην ἑώρακα οὐδὲ ἀκήκοα, μόρια δ’ εἴ που
σμικρὰ καὶ ὀλίγα, τὰ πολλὰ δὲ σύμπανθ’ ὡς εἰπεῖν
διημαρτημένα.
Athenian: Has anyone ever seen this institution [the

symposium] properly conducted? And it is easy for you
both to answer ‘never at all’. Since this [the symposium] is
neither native nor customary for you. But I have encoun-
tered many and in many places, and furthermore I have
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enquired, into nearly all of them, and scarcely even one

have I seen or heard conducted correctly; if somehow a
few, small number were conducted correctly, the most
almost completely missed the mark. (639d5–e3)
To the query, ‘Are you telling us that the common gathering

for drinking is a great part of education if it takes place cor-
rectly?’ the Athenian answers: ‘Assuredly’, with the proviso
that the event needs a leader to ‘command friends in friendly
association in peace’ (640b9–10; 640d). In contrast to this
sympotic ideal, the immediately preceding passage provided
examples of inappropriate sympotic behaviours, including an
Athenian festival of Dionysus (637a–b) and, of course, the
Thracians, the proverbial example of slovenly drunks. We
are told:
Σκύθαι . . . καὶ Θρᾷκες ἀκράτῳ παντάπασι χρώμενοι, γυναῖκές

τε καὶ αὐτοί, καὶ κατὰ τῶν ἱματίων καταχεόμενοι, καλὸν καὶ
εὔδαιμον ἐπιτήδευμα ἐπιτηδεύειν νενομίκασι.
Scythians and Thracians, with their wine completely unmixed,
both women and men, and pouring it over their clothes con-
sider it a fair and propitious behaviour. (637e2–7)
If we return to Callimachus, the second book of his Aetia

seems to continue the scheme of the poet’s interrogation of
the Muses that he began in Book 1, but with a new develop-
ment. Callimachus is now exchanging with the Muses what he
learned earlier in conversation at a symposium. There are two
long sequences that very likely belong to Book 2: fragment 43,
which is securely placed at the opening, and fragment 178,
which scholarly consensus now links with fragment 43 as part
of the same symposiastic frame.23 The latter fragment is prob-
ably the source for the information on the Sicilian cities that
Callimachus exchanges with the Muses. It begins:
ἠὼς οὐδὲ πιθοιγὶς ἐλάνθανεν οὐδ’ ὅτε δούλοις

ἦμαρ Ὀρέστειοι λευκὸν ἄγουσι χόες·
Ἰκαρίου καὶ παιδὸς ἄγων ἐπέτειον ἁγιστύν,
Ἀτθίσιν οἰκτίστη, σὸν φάος, Ἠριγόνη,
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ἐς̣ δ̣α̣ίτη̣ν̣ ἐκ̣άλ̣ε̣σσεν ὁμηθέας, ἐν δέ νυ τοῖσι 5

ξεῖνον ὃς Α[ἰ]γύπτῳ καινὸς ἀνεστρέφετο
μεμβλωκὼς ἴδιόν τι κατὰ χρέος· ἦν δὲ γενέθλην
Ἴκ̣ιος, ᾧ ξυνὴν εἶχον ἐγὼ κλισίην
οὐκ ἐπιτάξ, ἀλλ’ αἶνος Ὁμηρικός, αἰὲν ὁμοῖον
ὡς θεός, οὐ ψευδής, ἐς τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει. 10
καὶ γὰρ ὁ Θρηϊκίην μὲν ἀπέστυγε χανδὸν ἄμυστιν
οἰνοποτεῖν, ὀλίγῳ δ’ ἥδετο κισσυβίῳ.
τῷ μὲν ἐγὼ τάδ’ ἔλεξα περιστείχοντος ἀλείσου
τὸ τρίτον, εὖτ’ ἐδάην οὔνομα καὶ γενεήν·
‘ἦ μάλ’ ἔπος τόδ’ ἀληθές, ὅ τ’ οὐ μόνον ὕδατος αἶσαν, 15
ἀλλ’ ἔτι καὶ λέσχης οἶνος ἔχειν ἐθέλει.
τὴν ἡμε̣ι ς̑ ̣ – ο̣ὐκ̣ ἐν̣ γ[ὰ]ρ ἀρυστήρεσσ̣ι̣ φορεῖται
οὐδέ μι̣ν ε̣ὶς̣ ἀ̣τ̣[ενεῖ]ς ̣ ὀφρύ̣ας οἰνοχόων
αἰτήσεις ὁρόω[ν] ὅ̣τ̣’ ἐλεύθερος ἀτμένα σαίνει –
βάλλωμεν χαλεπῷ φάρμακον ἐν πόματι, 20
Θεύγενες· ὅσσ[α] δ̣’ ἐμεῖο σ[έ]θεν πάρα θυμὸς ἀκοῦσαι
ἰχαίνει, τάδε μοι λ[έ]ξον [ἀνειρομέν]ῳ·
Μυρμιδόνων ἑσσῆνα τ[ί πάτριον ὔ]μμι σέβεσθαι
Πηλέα; κῶς Ἴκῳ ξυν[ὰ τὰ Θεσσαλι]κά;
The day of the Pithoigia did not pass unheeded nor when the
Choes of Orestes bring a white day for slaves. And when he
[the Athenian] kept the yearly ceremony of Icarius’ child, your
day, Erigone, most lamented by the women of Attica, he invited
his friends to a banquet, among whom was a stranger, a recent
visitor to Egypt, having come for some private business. He
was Ician by birth, and I shared a couch with him. Not by
design, but the adage of Homer is not false: god brings like to
like. [My Ician companion] also despised the Thracian goblet
to be drained in one gulp, and preferred the small cup. I said
to him as the beaker went around for the third time, after I had
learned his name and background: ‘It is truly said that that wine
requires not only a portion of water but also of talk. We do not
pass conversation around in ladles, nor seek it on the haughty
brows of the cup bearers, when the free man is subservient to
the slave. Let us, Theogenes, cast talk into this harsh cup as a
pharmakon, and do tell me what my heart most desires to hear:
why is it your custom to honour the leader of the Myrmidons,
Peleus? What does Icos have to do with Thessaly?’
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This is a very peculiar event. The Athenian, whose name is

given in Athenaeus (477c) as Pollis, apparently had the habit
of celebrating his native Athenian festivals in Egypt. These
events have no civic grounding in their new location, and in
contrast with the rich variety of festival options that the new
city did offer, Pollis provides the audience with an extreme
example of cultural conservatism. The three identifiable par-
ticipants in this event are the Athenian, now relocated to
Egypt; Callimachus, from Cyrene, a Spartan foundation; and
Theogenes, from Icos, which was said to have been a Cretan
foundation.24 Callimachus does not use geographical indicators
casually. They are frequently a reminder that the centre has
shifted from old Greece to the southern Mediterranean and
Egypt, and he emphasises the role of migration and colonisa-
tion in this shift.25 We should be alert, then, to the fact that in
this fragment we find citizens from or colonists of the vener-
able locations featured in Plato’s Laws – Athens, Sparta, and
Crete – now converging in the new world of Alexandria. What
should we make of the fact that one of them might legitimately
be labelled ‘an Athenian stranger’?
Our Athenian stranger, Pollis, invites his friends to cele-
brate three events: the Pithoigia and the Choes, which were the
first and second days of the Attic Anthesteria, and the Aiora,
which may or may not have been the third day of that same
festival.26 These days appear to have been chosen (at least in
part) for their subtending myths that encode habits of drink-
ing that Callimachus rejects: the Aiora commemorates Erigone,
the daughter of Icarius, to whom Dionysus first gave the gift
of wine. When he shared it with his friends and they expe-
rienced drunkenness for the first time, believing themselves
to have been poisoned, they killed him. Therefore, Dionysus’
gift of wine, when unmediated, is the originary example of
the Dionysiac sympotic behaviour that Plato has condemned.
Orestes the matricide was entertained in Athens, but his out-
cast status led to deep drinking in silence, an event celebrated
as part of the Choes. The ‘white day’ in which slaves need not
be subservient, also part of the Choes, is equally at odds with
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Callimachus’ model of a good symposium, since the status

reversal to which the day gives licence is in no way conducive
to informed conversation. We see Callimachus, as the cup came
by for the third time, with the requirement to drain it in one
gulp (amustin), turn away from deep drinking, a practice he
labels ‘Thracian’ (line 11). Rather, he introduces a more sober
model – modest drinking, seasoned with conversation, and
specifically enquiry into other cultural practices.
In addition to the resemblance to aspects of the Laws just
mentioned, fragment 178 exhibits other points of contact with
Plato’s dialogues more generally: (1) Callimachus prefaces his
request with a comment on the truth of Homer’s saying ‘God
brings like to like’, a sentiment that Socrates spends consider-
able energy disputing in the Lysis (214–15).27 (2) The Athenian
Stranger in the Laws claims to have travelled widely to have
examined the practices of cultural institutions; Callimachus’
Aetia performs the same function, ranging over the whole of the
Mediterranean, and it serves to recall and record various cultic
practices; in this section alone one Ician and three Athenian
events are described. (3) In the Laws (666b6–8) wine is said to
be a pharmakon against old age, and a lubricant for conversa-
tion and music, particularly when done in moderation. Here
conversation is the pharmakon introduced as a lubricant for
wine (line 20). (4) It is also worth noting that the text opens not
with any symposium, but the commemoration of an Athenian
festival rather tendentiously marked as ‘in Egypt’.28 In the
Timaeus Plato introduces an Egyptian priest who claims that
Egypt and Athens were related because the goddess Athena
established them both (Athens first, then Saïs), and that the
two shared many laws and customs (23–4). And certainly one
of the festivals that Pollis commemorates, the Aiora, has a myth
with serious Egyptian analogues.29
The second fragment (fr. 43 Pfeiffer) for consideration opens
with a long dialogue between Callimachus and the Muses. It
begins, after ten broken lines, as follows:
καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ τὰ μὲν ὅσσα καρήατι τῆμος ἔδωκα

ξανθὰ σὺν εὐόδμοις ἁβρὰ λίπη στεφάνοις,
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ἄπνοα πάντ’ ἐγένοντο παρὰ χρέος, ὅσσα τ’ ὀδόντων

ἔνδοθι νείαιράν τ’ εἰς ἀχάριστον ἔδυ, 15
καὶ τῶν οὐδὲν ἔμεινεν ἐς αὔριον· ὅσσα δ’ ἀκουαῖς
εἰσεθέμην, ἔτι μοι μοῦνα πάρεστι τάδε.
And as the many rich amber ointments with sweet smelling
crowns that I gave to my head, all are completely lifeless, as
much as I poured past my teeth into my ungrateful belly, noth-
ing remained for the morrow, but as much as I absorbed with
my ears, these things alone now remain with me.
The colloquy with the Muses that Callimachus began in Book 1
was apparently renewed, but now by rejecting ephemera and
the indulgence of banquets, and with an assertion that Plato
would clearly approve of, namely, that conversation alone
would not perish because it could be stored in memory. In add-
ition, the banquet that Callimachus narrates had clearly func-
tioned as a site of education, as the place where he has learned
what he can later share with the Muses.
The dialogue appended to this sympotic frame recalls events
surrounding the establishment of a number of Sicilian cities.
After Callimachus sketches what he already knows about their
foundations, Clio, the Muse of history, compliantly responds
with further details. The narrative sequence begins:
οἶδα Γέλα ποταμοῦ κεφαλῇ ἔπι κείμενον ἄ̣στυ

Λίνδοθεν ἀρχαίῃ [σ]κ̣ιμπ[τόμενο]ν̣ γενε[ῇ,
Μινῴη[ν] καὶ Κρῆσ[σ]αν, ἵ[να ζείον]τ̣α λοετ̣[ρὰ
χεῦαν ἐ[π’] Εὐρώπης υἱέϊ Κ̣[ωκαλί]δες·
I know about the town that lies at the head of the river Gela,
boasting of an ancient lineage from Lindos; and [I know about]
Cretan Minoa, where the daughters of Cocalus poured a boil-
ing cauldron upon Europa’s son [sc. Minos]. (fr. 43.46–9)
The Muse then relates the story of Zancle, in which the found-
ers failed to pay heed to the portents and ended up in a dis-
agreement that led to neither being celebrated as the city’s
oikist. One feature is relevant to this discussion:
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ μόσσυνας ἐπάλξεσι [καρτυνθέ]ντας

οἱ κτίσται δρέπανον θέντο πε[ρὶ Κρόνιο]ν,
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– κεῖθι γὰρ ᾧ τὰ γονῆος ἀπέθρισε μήδε’ ἐκεῖνος

κέκρυπται γύπῃ ζάγκλον ὑπὸ χθονίῃ, –
But when the builders strengthened the wooden towers with
battlements and placed them around Cronus’ sickle – for there
that with which he cut off his father’s genitals is hidden in a
hollow in the earth. (fr. 43.68–71)
The continuous fragment ends with broken lines that mention

Rhadamanthys:
Κ]ισσούσης παρ’ ὕδωρ Θεοδαίσια Κρῆ̣[σσαν ἑ]ο̣ρ̣τὴν

ἡ] π̣όλις ἡ Κάδμου κῶς Ἁλίαρτος ἄγ[ει
κ]α̣ὶ στυρὸν ἐν μούνοισι πολίσμασι [. . . . .].ι̣..τω̣.
κ]αὶ Μίνω μεγάλοις ἄγγεσι γαῖα φ[ορεῖ,
]ωθεδετι κρήνη Ῥαδαμάνθυο[ς. . . . .] τ̣[. . .]ν̣
ἴ]χ̣νια τῆς κείνου λοιπὰ νομογραφ[ίης
By the waters of the Kissousa, why does the city of Cadmus,
Haliartus, celebrate the Cretan festival, the Theodaisia? And
why incense only in the cities . . . and the land of Minos brings
it in great vessels . . . spring of Rhadamanthys . . . remaining
traces of his legislation. (fr. 43.87–91)
The next series of fragments (frr. 44–7) feature Perillus, the

tyrant of Acragas, with a lead-in that mentions the Egyptian
king Busiris and his habit of sacrificing strangers.
Let us consider more closely what Callimachus chooses to
include in his narratives of Sicilian foundations. The open-
ing anecdote is actually about Minos. Callimachus gives us
the demise of Plato’s model Cretan lawgiver, as the result of
events in his dysfunctional family. When Minos’ wife Pasiphae
conceived a passion for the most beautiful bull in the herd,
the resident artist, Daedalus, built a wooden cow that allowed
Pasiphae to couple with the bull. The result was the Minotaur.
Daedalus subsequently fled Minos’ wrath to Sicily and to
Cocalus’ court, where Minos pursued him. There daughters of
Cocalus, in aid of Daedalus, killed Minos by pouring boiling
water on him, thus violating the rules of guest friendship. Next
Clio instructs us on Zankle: ‘When the builders strengthened
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the wooden towers with battlements and placed then around

Cronus’ sickle – for there that with which he cut off his father’s
genitals is hidden in a hollow in the earth’. In the Republic
(377e–378), the story of Cronus castrating Uranus is singled out
as the greatest of all lies told by the poets, one that should not
be repeated to young and thoughtless persons, and would be
better buried in silence. For Plato, Cronus is the divine proto-
type of the excellent human lawgiver, and in the Laws (713a–e)
the Athenian Stranger extols the age of Cronus as ‘a time of
prosperous settlement, as a mimema or model for the best of the
states that now exist’. But Callimachus records a dysfunctional
foundation commemorating by its very name (Zancle) an item
that Plato would bury in oblivion, and implicit in that foun-
dation is a condemnation of Cronus as a just and fair lawgiver,
since it records his barbaric behaviour towards kin. The frag-
ment continues with Callimachus’ request for more informa-
tion, this time on Minos’ brother, Rhadamanthys, who was also
known for his just judgements, but who was not particularly
linked to Sicily. In fact, the spring of Rhadamanthys was in
Boeotia. According to Apollodorus (2.4.11), Rhadamanthys fled
in exile to Boeotia, where he married Alcmene, after the death
of Amphitryon. From Tzetzes’ commentary on Lycophron (50),
we learn that he went into exile for killing his brother. Then,
of course, there is Busiris.
This is not a particularly enlightening set of stories about
Sicilian foundations, but it is a deft display of the dark side
of three human lawmakers who were the darlings of philos-
ophers – Minos and Rhadamanthys (from Plato), and Busiris
(who is held up for admiration by Isocrates). To them we can
add Cronus, Plato’s divine template of the ideal lawgiver. We
have, therefore, an inversion of philosophical exempla, and a
manifestation of the power of poetry: it is after all the Muse
(presumably the source of enthusiasmos) who collaborates with
Callimachus in producing this edifying catalogue. It is inter-
esting to note that in the Minos (a ‘Platonic’ dialogue that is
now considered spurious) Socrates himself warns about the
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dangerous aspect of poetic power by specific recourse to the

example of Minos:
ΕΤ. Διὰ τί οὖν ποτε, ὦ Σώκρατες, αὕτη ἡ φήμη

κατεσκέδασται τοῦ Μίνω ὡς ἀπαιδεύτου τινὸς καὶ
χαλεποῦ ὄντος;
ΣΩ. Δι’ ὃ καὶ σύ, ὦ βέλτιστε, ἐὰν σωφρονῇς, εὐλαβήσῃ,
καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ἀνὴρ ὅτῳ μέλει τοῦ εὐδόκιμον εἶναι,
μηδέποτε ἀπεχθάνεσθαι ἀνδρὶ ποιητικῷ μηδενί. οἱ
γὰρ ποιηταὶ μέγα δύνανται εἰς δόξαν, ἐφ’ ὁπότερα
ἂν ποιῶσιν εἰς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, ἢ εὐλογοῦντες ἢ
κακηγοροῦντες.
Companion: Then why is it, Socrates, that this report of

Minos has been spread, namely that he was boorish
and cruel?
Socrates: My good friend, if you are wise, and every-
body else who cares for his reputation, beware of quar-
relling with any poet at all. For they have the greatest
power over one’s reputation for good or ill, as they cre-
ate it in the minds of men. (320d7–e6)
There is one final aspect of these two fragments that again

draws us to Plato. He was closely associated with Sicily for
his attempts to instil more philosophical practices into the
rule of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius, but in this endeavour
he was a dismal failure. Diogenes Laertius (3.20) provides us
with a thought-provoking anecdote from Plato’s biography:
Dionysius, in anger at Plato’s strictures on his tyrannical behav-
iour, wanted to put him to death. However, he was dissuaded
from doing so, and instead he handed him over to the Spartan
ambassador, one Pollis, and commanded Pollis to sell Plato
into slavery, which he did. Subsequently, at least according to
Diogenes Laertius, Plato was ransomed by Anniceris of Cyrene,
and Anniceris seems to have been an ancestor of Callimachus.30
In other words, Sicily is a place of Plato’s failures as a law-
giver, failures that reduced him to the status of a slave. Can it
be a coincidence that Callimachus’ Athenian in Egypt has the
same name as Plato’s owner – Pollis? Callimachus’ own family
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background and polymatheia makes the coincidence unlikely.

If it is a deliberate allusion to Plato’s distressed circumstances,
it is tempting to think that the slave with a haughty demeanour
(fr. 178.18–19) is a sly allusion to Plato himself.
There is more going on in these texts than a simple send-up

of Plato, even if for the salubrious purpose of reasserting the
autonomy of poetry. We are no longer in Athens. Events that
might have been viable there in the fourth century like the
Aiora take on an aura of hollow nostalgia when replicated in
Egypt in the third. Plato and Callimachus begin from oppos-
ite sides of the great Alexander divide, but they do converge
in valuing the importance of preserving and transmitting cul-
tural norms. Plato would eliminate the ambiguity and change;
ambiguity and change were integral features of the world
for Callimachus. Plato connects generic mixing with cultural
instability, and the institution of the symposium, properly
conducted, as one means of combating it, of guaranteeing that
one generation transmits intact and unchanging the correct
values of the past to the next. Callimachus’ world is one of
cultures transformed – of old institutions like the Pithoigia in
new places, of migrating figures like Pollis or Theogenes – a
world whose multiplicity of voices and behaviours cannot be
stabilised and can be aligned and transmitted only through the
imagination and the text of the poet. Herodotus’ aeisma hen
(the linos dirge) both instantiates the Platonic ideal of fixity of
mode in performance and confounds it, as the barbarian arte-
fact migrates and infects the authentically Greek culture that
Plato legislates fixity to preserve. Writing that Plato viewed
with suspicion is for Callimachus a mode of expression that
allows the poet to transcend time and place, that is, the ephem-
eral and the transitory nature of performance – whether in rit-
ual, song, or symposium. Callimachus’ generic mixing allows
him not just to contaminate hymns with paeans but to interact
with prose writers like Plato or Herodotus, and thus to achieve
a fuller expression of Greekness in what had become a largely
non-Greek world.
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Not e s
1 Most of those writing on Callimachus share this perspective to
some degree. See, e.g., Schwinge (1986) 23; Hutchinson (1988)
76–84; even Selden (1998) 410.
2 Stephens (2003) 254–7.
3 References to fragments of Callimachus are to Pfeiffer (1949–53).
What unites this range of ‘opponents’ (at least we must assume in
the mind of the commentator) is their fondness for Antimachus’
Lyde. A fifth-century epic and elegiac poet, Antimachus was
much admired by Plato for his lofty expression and seriousness
of purpose; he was thus an example of good poetry. The words
most commonly associated with Antimachus are semnotes, ogkos,
ischus, and sophron. Callimachus, on the other hand, found the
Lyde ‘turgid and opaque’ (fr. 398 Pfeiffer). See the discussion in
Matthews (1996) 69–76.
4 Dieg. VI 3 ad fr. 191 Pfeiffer.
5 adika biblia, fr. 191.11 Pfeiffer.
6 See P. Murray (1996) 2–19 for a useful summary.
7 See, e.g., Zanker (1987) 137–9 or Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004)
18–19.
8 Laws 700d7–e1: κεραννύντες δὲ θρήνους τε ὕμνοις καὶ παίωνας
διθυράμβοις, καὶ αὐλῳδίας δὴ ταῖς κιθαρῳδίαις μιμούμενοι, καὶ
πάντα εἰς πάντα συνάγοντες.
9 See Weineck (1998) 38 for a thoughtful discussion of the role of
‘criticism’ in Plato’s Ion.
10 Janko (2000) 152–3.
11 Fr. 460 Pfeiffer, and see Brink (1946). For recent discussions of
Hellenistic literary criticism, see Gutzwiller (2010) and Romano
(2011).
12 See Dillon (2003) 204–31 on these figures.
13 Hunter (1989, 1997); Kerkhecker (1999) 210–11, 244, 261–3.
14 Acosta-Hughes and Stephens (2012) 23–80.
15 On this issue, see esp. Ian Rutherford’s views in Chapter 3.
17 See Selden (1998) 353 and Stephens (2003) 9–10.
18 The phrase is discussed more fully in Stephens (2002) 243–5.
19 See, e.g., the discussion in Hunter (1993) 190–5.
20 Hdt. 2.79: τοῖσι ἄλλα τε ἐπάξια ἐστι νόμιμα καὶ δὴ καὶ <ὅτι>
ἄεισμα ἕν ἐστι, Λίνος, ὅς περ ἔν τε Φοινίκῃ ἀοίδιμός ἐστι καὶ ἐν
Κύπρῳ καὶ ἄλλῃ, κατὰ μέντοι ἔθνεα οὔνομα ἔχει, συμφέρεται
δὲ ὡυτὸς εἶναι τὸν οἱ Ἕλληνες Λίνον ὀνομάζοντες ἀείδουσι· . . .
καὶ ἀοιδήν τε ταύτην πρώτην καὶ μούνην σφίσι γενέσθαι (They
have other notable customs and especially that there is one song,
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Deregulating Poetry
the linos, which is sung in Phoenicia and in Cyprus, and else-

where, and whose name differs in accordance with the nations,
but it is agreed that it is the same song that the Greeks sing, call-
ing it linos. . . . [They say that] this was the first and only song
they had).
21 See Stephens (2002–3).
22 E.g., the ants in iambus 12 are found also in Hdt. 3.102.2.
23 For the relationship of the two fragments, see Zetzel (1981) 31–3;
Fabian (1992) 137–40, 315–18; Cameron (1995) 133–40; and
Harder (2012) 2.956–57.
24 Pseudo-Scymnus, Periodos Ges, 580–5. The poem dates from the
last quarter of the second century a.d. Marcotte (2000) 11–17.
25 Acosta-Hughes and Stephens (2012) 149–54.
26 Unfortunately, the best evidence for linking of the Aiora and
the Anthesteria is this passage of Callimachus. If the examples
were chosen for poetic reasons, however, the identification is less
cogent. See Hamilton (1992) 119–21.
27 See also the Symposium 174b–c: Homer nearly got it wrong
in saying ‘good men go unbidden to the feast of a good man’
(Od. 17.218). For the Homeric aspects of this fragment, see
Harder (2002) 212–17.
28 Fr. 178.6. The participants are usually taken to be in Alexandria,
though in fr. 228.51 Pfeiffer (the Apotheosis of Arsinoe),
Callimachus locates the city more correctly in Libya, as does
Posidippus in his epigram on the Pharos (116.3 A–B).
29 Erigone searched for her dead father, Icarius, in the company of
her dog. Later all three were catasterized. Her story has many
parallels with Isis’ search for her dead husband, Osiris, con-
ducted in the company of the jackal-headed god, Anubis. See
Merkelbach (1996).
30 Meillier (1979) 336–7, who prints Chamoux’s hypothetical family
tree, based on inscriptional data, but see Cameron’s caveat (1995)
8 n. 31; and Williams (1996) 40–2.
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C hap t e r F i f t e e n
T h e L aw s a n d
A r i s tox e n u s o n t h e
C r it e r ia o f M u s ica l
Judgement
Andrew Barker
Laws 667b–671a contains an intricate discussion of the criteria

by which a piece of music can properly be assessed as ‘correct’
or ‘incorrect’ and as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Plato’s treatment of the sub-
ject is worth exploring in its own right, but it would become
even more interesting if we could compare it with parallel dis-
cussions by his non-Platonist contemporaries. Comments in
Book 8 of Aristotle’s Politics (e.g., 1341b, 1342b) suggest that
such discussions did indeed exist, but unfortunately none sur-
vives. It would be possible to draw some comparisons with the
Politics passage itself, but this does not engage directly with
the issues that take centre-stage in these pages of the Laws,
and I shall not consider it here. The fourth-century discus-
sion whose agenda most closely parallels that of the Laws was
written some twenty years after Plato’s death. It is a study by
Aristoxenus, probably taken from his Peri mousikes, preserved
in paraphrase in chapters 31–6 of the Pseudo-Plutarchan De
musica (1142b–1144f ). The striking similarities between the
structures and central themes of the two discussions make it
very likely indeed that Aristoxenus not only knew the rele
vant passage in the Laws but was consciously using the agenda
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On the Criteria of Musical Judgement
that Plato sets up as a framework for his own investigation.

In that case it would be reasonable to conclude that where
Aristoxenus’ treatment conflicts with Plato’s – and we shall see
that it does so at several crucial points – he was well aware of
the fact and was deliberately proposing an alternative view.
At any rate, I shall try to show that there is something to be
learned from a comparison of the two writers’ approaches.
By seeing how the issues were addressed by a non-Platonist
musical expert in the late fourth century, and by setting his
treatment beside that of the Laws, we may be able to iden-
tify more clearly the features of the latter that are peculiarly
Platonic, and those which are not.
The question that Plato’s Athenian is trying to answer is
announced at 666a–d.1 What sort of music will be suitable for
the educated and respectable elders of the community, those
over the age of forty? ‘What music’, he asks, ‘would be appro-
priate to godlike men?’ He goes on to describe it as ‘the best
kind of song’ (666d–e), and as ‘better than that of the cho-
ruses and that of the public theatres’ (667a–b). But instead of
trying to say what this music will sound like or how it will
be composed and performed, he goes on to set out, in rather
abstract terms, the criteria by which any music proposed for
this purpose should be assessed, that is, the conditions that it
must satisfy if it is to qualify as music of the very best sort. His
prescriptions can therefore be treated as laying down criteria
by which music of any kind whatever can properly be judged,
not (as in some earlier passages) for its suitability in some par-
ticular social niche, for instance in the education of the young,
but on an absolute scale of excellence, for its conformity to the
highest standards there can be.
He begins by distinguishing three aspects of anything that
brings with it some delight (χάρις), any one of which might be
regarded as its most important feature or the one most worthy
of respect (τὸ σπουδαιότατον). One is the χάρις itself, which
can also be called ἡδονή (pleasure); the second is ‘some sort of
correctness’ (τινα ὀρθότητα); and the third is the thing’s use-
fulness (ὠφελία) (667b). This neat set of distinctions becomes
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a little confused in the immediate sequel (667c), where the

Athenian offers examples to clarify his meaning, because,
although the delight or pleasure offered by food and by learn-
ing is sharply contrasted with their correctness and usefulness,
in both examples the factors that constitute their correctness
and their usefulness are apparently the same. In the case of
learning, furthermore, the truth of what is learned not only
makes it useful and correct but also constitutes what he calls
τὸ εὖ καὶ τὸ καλῶς, an expression that can broadly be para-
phrased as ‘its excellence’; and it will become clear at a later
stage that the criteria by which such ‘excellence’ is to be judged
are different from any that have so far been mentioned. But for
the present we can ignore these complications. The criterion of
usefulness plays little part in what follows, and we shall tackle
‘excellence’, τὸ εὖ καὶ τὸ καλῶς, in due course. Throughout
the next stretch of text, the spotlight is turned firmly on the
contrast between the criterion of pleasure and the criterion of
correctness.
The Athenian’s concern here is with the τέχναι εἰκαστικαί,
the arts that produce things in the ‘likeness’ of other things
(667c–d). If they do so successfully, he says, their products can
indeed give pleasure or delight, but it is not their delightfulness
that constitutes their correctness. Rather, it is their ‘equality in
quantity and quality’ with the things whose likenesses they
are. Hence, he concludes, by what seems some rather slippery
logic, it is only things that produce no likeness, truth, useful-
ness, or harm that can correctly, ὀρθῶς, be judged by the cri-
terion of pleasure (667d–e). Because things of that sort are mere
playful trivialities, we need pay them no further attention.
It is here, in connection with the issue of ὀρθότης (correct
ness) that the familiar word μίμησις (imitation) first appears on
the scene. It follows from what has been agreed, we are told,
that no μίμησις and no equality should be judged by the cri-
teria of ‘pleasure and false opinion’, since it is not because of
these that ‘an equal thing is equal or a proportionate one pro-
portionate, but because of what is true’. And now we come
directly to the topic of music. ‘Don’t we say’, asks the Athenian,
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‘that all music is εἰκαστική (likeness-making) and μιμητική

(mimetic)?’ (668a). Cleinias agrees; and a few sentences later the
Athenian hammers the point home with a remarkably confi-
dent assertion: ‘Now this is a claim about music with which
everyone would agree’, he says, ‘that all its compositions con-
sist of μίμησίς τε καὶ ἀπεικασία (imitation and likeness-mak-
ing). Wouldn’t everyone agree to that, composers, listeners, and
performers alike?’ (668b–c). This emphatic repetition evidently
underlines the importance that Plato attaches to the thesis; and
perhaps it is also designed as a rhetorical substitute for the rea-
soning that would establish its truth. Plato may have thought
such argumentation inappropriate to the conversational style
of the Laws, but in sober fact it is needed, since we know from
other texts that by no means everyone would have accepted
it in this unqualified form,2 and we shall return to the matter
later. Even the Athenian speaker himself displays some uncer-
tainty shortly afterwards, at 669e, in his criticisms of purely
instrumental music. He does not go so far as to say that it is
not mimetic at all, but he insists that it is utterly crude and
inartistic (πολλῆς ἀγροικίας μεστόν) on the grounds that the
absence of words makes it extremely difficult (παγχάλεπον)
to decide what it means (ὅτι βούλεται), and what worthwhile
object of imitation (μίμημα) it represents. There are very trou-
blesome problems here which I shall not pursue.3
If all music is μίμησις, and if the right way to assess any
‘imitation’ is by the criterion of correctness and not that of the
pleasure it gives us, then the fact that a piece of music gives
pleasure is not enough to assure us that it is music of the best
sort, or even that it can properly be described as ‘good’. It has
to be ‘correct’, in the sense that it displays ‘equality in quan-
tity and quality’ with whatever it is that it ‘imitates’. It will
shortly turn out that a piece of music will in fact be ‘good’ only
if it meets another criterion in addition to this sort of correct-
ness; but at this point the Athenian’s main focus shifts, away
from the criteria by which a composition should be assessed
to the qualifications that a person will need if he is to apply
the criteria rightly. What kinds of knowledge or skill must we
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possess in order to be reliable and authoritative judges of musi-

cal excellence?
One thing that a reliable judge must know, we are told
(668c), is καθ’ ἕκαστον τῶν ποιημάτων ὅτι ποτ’ ἐστίν (what
each of the compositions is). Taken by itself this might mean
almost anything. But what has happened here, as quite com-
monly elsewhere in the dialogues, is that the speaker has first
presented a compressed, obscure, and often rather technical
formulation of the idea he wants to convey, and he will then
proceed – sometimes after a bewildered interjection from his
respondent – to explain it more clearly and at greater length.
It is a strategy that Plato seems to use in order to stop the
respondent and the reader in their tracks for a moment, so
that they are forced to concentrate closely on the point and to
recognise its importance. The explanation given here is that
what the composition ‘is’, described in the reformulation as its
‘being’ (οὐσία), can be glossed as ‘what its intention is (τί ποτε
βούλεται) and of what it is really an image (εἰκών)’. If a per-
son does not know that, the Athenian goes on, ‘he can hardly
distinguish the correctness or erroneousness of its βούλησις
(intention)’; I interpret this as meaning that he will be unable
to determine whether its intention is correctly realised or not.
At the next step we stumble over another of Plato’s favour
ite literary manoeuvres. The speaker raises a completely new
question, but then immediately backtracks so as to arrive at
the same question by a longer route; once again, as it seems to
me, the technique is used to give the question full emphasis,
in this case by raising it twice in quick succession. ‘Would a
person who does not understand what is correct (τὸ ὀρθῶς)
ever be able to distinguish what is good and bad about it (τὸ εὖ
καὶ τὸ κακῶς)?’ the Athenian asks; and then immediately adds:
‘But I’m not putting this very clearly; perhaps it would be bet-
ter expressed in the following way’ (668d). To cut his explan-
ation short, his point is that a person may know perfectly well
what is being represented and what it is like, and can see, in
cases where the μίμησις is in the visible form of a statue or a
painting, that the artist has portrayed it accurately in all its
396 �
parts; but we may still ask whether these abilities qualify him
to judge reliably whether the artefact is καλόν (fine, beautiful,
excellent) or in what way it falls short of that standard. Cleinias
agrees that they do not. If they did, he says, pretty well every-
one would be able to judge which pictures are καλά; and he
evidently assumes that this is patently false.
As we are all well aware, the adjective καλός can only be
feebly translated in contexts like this; ‘beautiful’, for example,
will capture only part of its connotation. Along with ἀγαθός
(good), and in this part of the Laws the adverbial noun-
formation τὸ εὖ (which might be approximately rendered as
‘goodness’), it represents the highest kind of excellence that a
musical or other work of art can attain. It therefore designates
the attribute whose presence or absence is indicated by those
‘absolute’ evaluative judgements that I mentioned at the start,
and for whose presence or absence we are seeking reliable cri-
teria. If the criterion of ‘correctness’ is not enough, we still
have not discovered what a sufficient criterion would be.
The Athenian picks this point up at 669a. A person who
is to make an intelligent judgement on the merits of any indi-
vidual ‘image’ (εἰκών), whether it is a painting or a piece of
music or anything else, must have the following three quali-
fications. First, he must know ‘what it is’, in the sense previ-
ously explained – that is, ‘what its intention is and of what
it is an image’. Secondly, he must know ὡς ὀρθῶς εἴργασται,
which might mean either ‘how correctly it has been made’ or
‘that it has been made correctly’; finally, he must know ὡς εὖ
εἴργασται, literally ‘how well it has been made’ or ‘that it has
been made well’. But we must be careful about this last expres-
sion, ὡς εὖ εἴργασται. As the previous occurrences of the
adverb suggest and the sequel amply confirms, the Athenian
does not mean that we must be able to assess the degree of skill
that the artist has exercised, or anything like that; this would
merely repeat the second criterion, ὡς ὀρθῶς εἴργασται, and
the Athenian has made it crystal clear that knowing ὡς εὖ
εἴργασται is a third accomplishment, quite distinct from the
second. Given that we are already clear about a composition’s
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level of technical perfection as a ‘correct’ μίμησις of the rele-

vant original, we must also be capable of making the additional
judgement that it is or is not καλόν, and does or does not pos-
sess the top-grade attribute that he calls τὸ εὖ.
The business of assessing the merits of a piece of music
therefore involves judgements of three sorts: about ‘what the
εἰκών is’, about its ‘correctness’ as a likeness of its original,
and about whether it is καλόν. We cannot make the second
kind of judgement until we have made the first; and it seems to
be implied that we cannot make the third until we have made
the second. But while we have by now a pretty definite idea of
what is meant by ‘what the εἰκών is’, and of what is involved
in its being made ‘correctly’, we have still been told nothing
about the criteria to be applied in deciding whether it pos-
sesses τὸ εὖ and τὸ καλόν, or about the qualifications we need
in order to judge reliably whether it does so or not.
We expect the Athenian to address that crucial issue next;
but he does not. Instead, he launches into a long disquisition
on the reasons why it is essential for ethical and educational
purposes that these judgements about music should be soundly
based, and why the task is so difficult in the case of music in
particular (669b–670a). It is a fascinating passage, but I shall
not discuss it here. When it is over he returns to questions
about the qualifications that the musical judges need; but it
turns out that even now he is not focussing on judgements
about τὸ καλόν. He is still concerned with what they must
know in order to decide whether the melodic and rhythmic
elements of a piece of music are or are not correct.
His comments on this matter, however, now become a good
deal more specific. The judges, he says, must have good per-
ception and understanding (εὐαισθήτως ἔχειν καὶ γιγνώσκειν)
in respect of both rhythms and harmoniai;4 and he contrasts
their condition with that of people who have merely learned
to sing to an accompaniment and to step in rhythm, and who
do so ‘without understanding each one of them’ (ἀγνοοῦντες
αὐτῶν ἕκαστα) (670b–c). It is important, I think, to give each
of the expressions εὐαισθήτως ἔχειν and γιγνώσκειν its full
398 �
weight; they are not synonymous, and the phrase as a whole

is not a hendiadys. The first refers to perception, αἴσθησις,
and the second to a cognitive capacity, γνῶσις, knowledge or
understanding. Perception is of particulars, in this case of the
notes and rhythmic units of the particular composition under
scrutiny; these are the ‘particulars’ (ἕκαστα) of which ordin-
ary people have no understanding, and the items referred to at
670c5 as ‘what the composition contains’ (ὅτι ποτ’ ἔχει). But it
is, of course, not enough merely to perceive them (as no doubt
the ‘ordinary people’ do too); they must be understood, and
this will involve knowledge of a broader and more ‘scientific’
sort, a kind that deals with universals such as the interval struc-
ture of the Dorian harmonia or the rhythmic structure of the
choriambus. The judges, in short, must be experts in the sci-
ences of harmonics and rhythmics. But the purpose of having
this expertise is not mere intellectual satisfaction; they must
apply it to the particular cases they are called on to assess, so
that, when they are engaged in the business of judgement, the
immediate objects of their understanding and of their percep-
tion are the same. In perceiving and, as he puts it, ‘following
(συνακολουθεῖν) each thing in the movements of the rhythms
and the notes of the melodies’ (670d), their theoretical or sci-
entific knowledge enables them also to understand what these
things are and how they are related to one another. This is
why it is appropriate to describe the nonexperts as ἀγνοῦντες
αὐτῶν ἕκαστα, ‘failing to understand each particular one of
them’ (rather than failing to perceive these particulars), even
though understanding or knowledge is in the first instance of
the universal, and not of particulars as such.
The Athenian insists that people who are not qualified in
this way will be in no position to judge whether a composition
is ‘correct’; and he seems to imply that those who have these
qualifications will be fully equipped to do so. If that is what
he means, he must be presupposing that a proper understand-
ing of the Dorian harmonia, for instance, will not only tell us
about its strictly musical characteristics but also inform us, in
his words at 670b, about what it is or is not ‘appropriate’ for
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(ᾧ προσῆκεν ἢ μή). If we connect this with what he has previ-

ously said about the ‘correctness’ of images, εἰκόνες (and the
Athenian’s reversion to the language of ‘correctness’ at 670c
guarantees that we should make this connection), it will mean
that we will thereby be equipped to identify the ‘object’ of
which a melody in the Dorian harmonia is a likeness; perhaps it
is a likeness of the voice or the character of a brave man facing
danger, as we are told in the Republic (399a; cf. 400d–e). We
will then be in a position to say whether this harmonia is being
used ‘appropriately’ or ‘correctly’ in any particular case.
But to know that in some particular case the Dorian harmonia
is being used in this sense ‘appropriately’ still seems to leave us
at the second stage of the process of judgement. We know that
it is an appropriate or ‘correct’ μίμησις of its intended object,
but this is not enough to assure us that the music is καλόν and
good. Yet the Athenian seems to think that this goal has in fact
been reached. ‘The object’, he says at 670d, ‘is to enable them,
when they survey harmoniai and rhythms, to select things
that are appropriate (προσήκοντα) and such that it is fitting
(πρέπον) for people of their age and character to sing them’;
and he said at the outset that the music ‘appropriate’ for them
will be the very best. ‘If they were educated up to this level’,
he continues, ‘they would have had a more thoroughly detailed
training than that of the mass of the people, or indeed than
that of the composers themselves. For though a composer must
understand harmonia and rhythm, the third issue, whether the
imitation is or is not excellent (εἴτε καλὸν εἴτε μὴ καλὸν τὸ
μίμημα), is one of which he need have no knowledge; but these
people must understand all three’ (670e).
To our surprise and disappointment, this is in effect his last
word on the subject. He adds nothing that would enlighten
us further about the criteria these musical judges will use
or the qualifications they need in order to decide whether
a given μίμημα is not only correct but καλόν. We are left to
reflect on two points that may be relevant. One is that the verb
προσήκειν (to be appropriate) seems to be doing double duty
in this passage, first indicating music that is ‘correct’ in the
400 �
sense that is now familiar and, secondly, in company with an

allusion to what is ‘fitting’ (πρέπον), referring to music that is
‘appropriate’ to people of elevated status and character. There
seems to be some slippage between these two uses, and we
are not told explicitly how we are to make judgements about
‘appropriateness’ in the second sense, which would give us
access to τὸ καλόν. But the transition from the first usage to
the second is mediated by the other point I have in mind. This
is that the people in question are the elders of the community,
men of wisdom and experience; and it is evidently assumed
that when they have been trained to perceive the elements of
a piece of music accurately, and to understand ‘what they are’
and what they are likenesses of, they will immediately grasp
whether the things of which they are likenesses, nonmusical
things like characters and actions, are or are not things that
people of their sort can ‘appropriately’ evoke in song. This
final level of judgement, then, does not depend on a specifi-
cally musical form of understanding, but on the capacity to
make reliable ethical judgements about the kinds of character,
behaviour, and so on that are the objects of musical μίμησις. It
is a capacity that may indeed be fostered by musical training,
but which, so the Athenian seems to believe, is developed pri-
marily through the experience of living for many years within
the institutions of a well-ordered community. Thus the highest
level of judgement about musical excellence falls outside the
sphere of musical expertise as such; and it also has little to
do, of course, with what we would nowadays call ‘aesthetics’.
What it demands is authority in the ethical domain, which in
the Republic is the exclusive preserve of philosophers, but is
now (as in pre-philosophical tradition) the prerogative of age.
The passage at 669b–670a, which I did not discuss, evokes
vividly the confusion that Plato detected in the contemporary
musical scene; and when the Athenian says that professional
musicians such as composers do not need the capacity to judge
whether the imitation is ‘excellent’ or not, εἴτε καλὸν εἴτε μὴ
καλὸν τὸ μίμημα (670e), he should probably be taken to mean
that they are very unlikely to possess it.
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We can now turn to Aristoxenus.5 I shall not pursue the dis-

cussion paraphrased in the Plutarchan De musica through all
its twists and turns; this will only be a survey of its principal
landmarks. It is worth noting before we begin that although
the compiler of the De musica has presumably condensed
Aristoxenus’ treatment of the issues and has not always done
so very skilfully, the argument as he presents it is consistent
and in its outline seems more or less complete. We can also
have some confidence that the most important features of its
vocabulary are authentically Aristoxenian. Where compari-
sons can be made, the language matches that of texts we know
to be his; more generally, the significant changes in vocabulary
that occur as the compiler shifts from one source to another in
the course of the De musica make it clear that he regularly pre-
served substantial elements of the terminology of the authori-
ties on which he was drawing.6
The first point we need to be clear about is Aristoxenus’ insis-
tence that a genuine competence in musical studies requires a
thorough knowledge of the relevant technical disciplines, of
which the most important are harmonics and rhythmics. The
student must learn to understand such things as the structures
of the three harmonic genera and the kinds of composition
that use each of them; he must become able to give a ‘complete
enumeration’ (ἐξαρίθμησις) of the systems that the writer calls
τρόποι, and so on. Without all this technical knowledge, musical
μάθησις (learning) is no more than randomly acquired habitua-
tion (ἐθισμός) (1142d–e). Comments of this sort, usually couched
as criticisms of earlier theorists whom he calls harmonikoi, are
familar from Aristoxenus’ Elementa harmonica.
Aristoxenus now proceeds to a theme that is certainly pres-
ent in his harmonic treatise – on its very first page, in fact7 – but
which does not bulk large in that context. Here, by contrast,
he gives it more prominence and more space than anything
else, and presses it home with arguments, explanations, and
examples. Summarily, it is that although a knowledge of the
technical disciplines is necessary for sound musical judge-
ment, it is by no means enough; in order to assess the merits
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and faults of a composition or a performance, we need skills

or capacities that such knowledge by itself cannot give. Thus
in his first statement of the thesis, where he takes harmonics
as an example, he points out that, while it gives an under-
standing of the melodic genera, of intervals, scales, notes, tonoi
(roughly ‘keys’), modulations, and so on, πορρωτέρω δὲ οὐκέτι
ταύτῃ προελθεῖν οἷόν τε (beyond this point it is unable to
advance). It cannot tell us, for instance, whether the composer
of the dithyramb called the Mysoi,8 that is, Philoxenus, chose
‘appropriately’ (οἰκείως) when he used the Hypodorian tonos
for the beginning of his piece or the Mixolydian and Dorian
for the end or the Hypophrygian and Phrygian for the central
section. Harmonics, he sums up, is ignorant of the attribute
of appropriateness (τὴν γὰρ τῆς οἰκειότητος δύναμιν ἀγνοεῖ)
(1142f–1143a).
Now in statements of these sorts we may think we hear the
voice of Plato loud and clear. Technical knowledge can take us
so far and no further, and in particular there is something very
important called ‘appropriateness’ (οἰκειότης), which falls out-
side its province; there seems to be little difference in meaning
between Aristoxenus’ οἰκειότης and Plato’s τὰ προσήκοντα or
τὸ πρέπον. But we should not jump to the conclusion that the
two writers’ theses are identical. For one thing, Aristoxenus
makes no use at all, either here or elsewhere, of the crucial
Platonic conceptions of ‘imitation’ and ‘images’, μίμησις and
εἰκόνες, and correspondingly he can have no exact counterpart
of Plato’s notion of ‘correctness’, ὀρθότης, since that is parasitic
on the notions of likeness and ‘imitation’; a melody is ‘correct’
if and only if it is a true likeness of the intended original.
Secondly, Aristoxenus’ next remarks seem quite at odds
with ones given emphasis by Plato. ‘Neither the chromatic
genus nor the enharmonic’, he says, ‘will come bringing with it
the complete attribute of appropriateness (τὴν τῆς οἰκειότητος
δύναμιν τελείαν) in accordance with which the character (ἦθος)
of the melody which has been composed becomes apparent; but
that is the work of the artist (τεχνίτης)’ (1143a). A little later,
at 1143b, he says that whenever we speak of appropriateness,
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τὸ οἰκείως, it is always with an eye to some ‘character’, πρὸς

ἦθός τι βλέποντες. There is nothing to disturb a Platonist
in the appearance here of a reference to ἦθος, of course, or
not immediately, or in its association with ‘appropriateness’;
but two other aspects of the statement at 1143a should give
us pause. First, if we generalise the comment about the chro-
matic and the enharmonic to other kinds of technically defin-
able structure, as the sequel shows that we should, we can see
that Aristoxenus would reject the position adopted by Socrates
in the Republic (398e–399d), which is precisely that each of
the structures called harmoniai ‘comes bringing with it’ an
attribute that expresses an ἦθος; and this thesis is still alive
and well in the Laws, as is clear from a passage we glanced at
earlier, at 670b.9 In the Aristoxenian passage, however, it is
flatly denied. Secondly, the Athenian in the Laws asserts that
composers need all the relevant kinds of technical knowledge,
but that they do not need to be able to judge whether a com-
position is or is not καλόν, a kind of judgement that is dir-
ectly linked to an understanding of what is ‘appropriate’. Yet
here Aristoxenus explicitly assigns to the τεχνίτης the capacity
to create appropriateness and ἦθος, and the τεχνίτης must
be a practical musician, whether a composer or a performer.
Aristoxenus is not contrasting a musician with a philosopher
or the wise elders of the community, but a student of nothing
but musical theory with a qualified practitioner of the musical
arts (τέχναι). We cannot yet be sure that the composer or per-
former is being credited with precisely the same capacities of
judgement as Plato’s elderly singers, but it is at any rate clear
that Aristoxenus’ line of thought and Plato’s are not exactly
the same.
Aristoxenus’ point emerges more clearly from a second
example, which he prefaces with the statement it is designed
to confirm: ‘We say that this [i.e., the ἦθος of a composition
or of some part of it] is caused either by some combination
(σύνθεσις) or by some mixture (μῖξις) or by both’ (1143b). In
Aristoxenus’ regular usage, which is followed here for the
most part but not quite consistently, there is a σύνθεσις when
404 �
several musical elements are put together in sequence, and a

μῖξις when two or more ingredients such as a rhythm and a
pattern of notes are blended simultaneously. In his example,
the composition called the Nomos of Athena attributed to the
semilegendary musician Olympos, the ἦθος of the opening sec-
tion is created by ‘mixing’ the Phrygian tonos with the rhythm
called the paion epibatos. This sounds fairly straightforward,
but it soon becomes clear that the ἦθος does not just arise auto-
matically from this mixture; it depends also on the particular
ways in which the mingled ingredients are deployed. In this
composition, he says, the ἦθος undergoes a major change even
in a section of the piece where the same genus, the same tonos,
and the same scale-pattern have been preserved, since the sec-
tion called ‘Harmonia’ in this nomos is completely different in
ἦθος from the introduction (1143b–c).
The upshot is that ἦθος does not arise directly from for-
mal structure as such, nor can we predict it immediately from
knowledge about specified combinations or mixtures of rhyth-
mic and melodic structures. Everything hangs on the way in
which the composer has put them to use. ‘A person who knows
the Dorian without knowing how to judge the appropriateness
of its use (τὴν τῆς χρήσεως αὐτοῦ οἰκειότητα) will not know
what he is doing [or perhaps ‘what he is composing’, ὃ ποιεῖ].
He will not even preserve the ἦθος’ (1143c). Aristoxenus goes
on to say that it is an open question whether, as some peo-
ple think, the science of harmonics is capable of marking the
distinctions between one Dorian form of composition and
another. He apparently means that some Dorian compositions
have one kind of ἦθος while the ‘characters’ of other Dorian
pieces are completely different; and this must evidently be
true if we accept a statement made earlier in the De musica,
probably on Aristoxenus’ authority, that pieces in the Dorian
tropos included many that were not warlike or solemn, among
them partheneia, processionals, paeans, lamentations, and even
love songs (1136f–1137a). However we construe the notion of
ἦθος (an issue I shall say something about later), we can hardly
suppose that the ἤθη of all these kinds of composition were
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the same. Aristoxenus is raising doubts about the possibility

of giving systematic theoretical descriptions of the musical
differences between them. If these doubts are justified, and
his language suggests that they are, the subtleties of χρῆσις
(usage), which are responsible for them, will not be susceptible
of theoretical analysis at all. (This is a conclusion we might also
draw from a little story recounted on Aristoxenus’ authority
at 1142b–c.)
I am now going to elide a good deal of the text, in particu-
lar a fascinating discussion at 1143f–1144c on the skills and
capacities we need in order to ‘follow’ (παρακολουθεῖν) all the
combinations and mixtures of elements that come into play
as a piece of music unrolls. (We may note incidentally that
Plato uses the verb συνακολουθεῖν in a very similar context at
Laws 670d, though he does not examine in so detailed a way
as Aristoxenus the perceptual and intellectual challenges that
the task of ‘following’ music presents.) We do need to notice,
however, the way in which Aristoxenus concludes this part
of his discussion, at 1144b–c. In order to grasp what is wrong
with a piece of music and what is not, we have to be able to
untangle from one another, by ear, the distinct but simultan-
eous elements it presents to us as a ‘mixture’ (i.e., specifically,
its notes, its rhythmic units, and its linguistic syllables); and
we must also be able to make sense of the role that each of them
plays in the continuous sequence of such elements in which it
occurs, so producing a melody based on a coherent scale struc-
ture, a rhythmic pattern, and a meaningful series of words.
The business of critical judgement (ἡ κριτικὴ δύναμις) depends
crucially on this latter ability, since it is in these continuous
sequences, not in isolated notes, rhythmic units, or articulate
sounds (γράμματα, literally ‘letters’) that ‘excellence and its
opposite’ (τὸ εὖ καὶ τὸ ἐναντίως) are to be found (here again we
seem to have an echo of Plato’s language).
All this seems intelligible, and broadly consistent with what
has been said before. But there is a problem to be solved at the
beginning of chapter 36, at 1144c. The first words of the pas-
sage, τὸ δὲ μετὰ τοῦτο ὲπισκεπτέον (the next thing we must
406 �
consider after this), make it clear that Aristoxenus is moving

on to something new; and I see no reason to think that the com-
piler has altered the arrangement of thought that he found in
the original text. But it is not immediately clear what the new
point is, since the thesis we are now asked to consider looks
thoroughly familiar, at least in outline. It is that people who
know about music (οἱ μουσικῆς ἐπιστήμονες) are not as such
fully equipped for the task of critical judgement. One cannot
become a complete μουσικός τε καὶ κριτικός (a musical person
and a competent judge) simply from expertise in the fields that
are treated as the ‘parts of music as a whole’, of which we are
now given a list of examples: experience with instruments and
in singing, the training of the ear necessary for an understand-
ing of attunement and rhythm, the disciplines of harmonics
and rhythmics, the study of instrumental accompaniment and
of verbal diction, and, Aristoxenus adds, any other disciplines
of these kinds that there may be (1144c–d). He seems merely to
be elaborating the points he made earlier about the inadequacy,
for critical purposes, of the technical disciplines of harmonics
and rhythmics. All he has added is a fuller list of the kinds
of study that are necessary but not sufficient, individually or
jointly, to equip us for the judge’s task, and to indicate that the
list is open-ended.
This impression is not altogether mistaken, but Aristoxenus
is not revisiting these theses merely for the sake of emphasis.
A person with the knowledge and skills he has listed is not
the mere student of theory who was considered earlier. He has
experience (ἐμπειρία) in using instruments and singing, not just
an observer’s familiarity with them or an organologist’s know-
ledge, and he knows all about such matters as word setting and
accompaniment and ‘any other such subjects there may be’, as
well as being well versed in harmonics and rhythmics. A person
who answers this description will not be simply a theorist; on
the contrary, he has all the qualifications of a competent prac-
tical musician. He is in fact, I suggest, the ‘artist’ (τεχνίτης) who
was previously said to be responsible, among other things, for
the ἦθος of a composition. The apparent continuity between
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this passage and its predecessor will identify such experts also
as people who can isolate the elements embedded in musical
‘mixtures’ and can understand the harmonic, rhythmic, and
linguistic dynamics of the sequences to which these elements
belong. Despite everything that has been said so far, even these
fully trained musical specialists and practitioners do not have
all the qualifications a person needs if he is to formulate sound
critical judgements on musical compositions.
These assertions would be incomprehensible if we had
really been told that the τεχνίτης knows all about ἦθος, and
that the person who can distinguish the musical elements and
understand the sequences in which they are set will thereby be
able to identify both the appropriate and τὸ εὖ καὶ τὸ ἐναντίως
(excellence and its opposite). But in fact we have not; and I
think that the aim of this passage is to clear up any possible
misunderstanding on that matter. The point about people who
can distinguish the elements and so on is straightforward;
Aristoxenus has said that these skills are essential instru-
ments in a critic’s tool kit, but he has certainly not said that
no other accomplishments are needed. As to the τεχνίτης, the
composer or performer, what we were told at 1143a is that he
is responsible for creating the ἦθος of a piece of music; this
is his function, his ἔργον. The point has been illustrated for
the case of people whose musical expertise is in composition
by the examples of Philoxenus’ Mysians and Olympos’ Nomos
of Athena, and at 1144d–e we are shown how it applies also
to performers. Their task, he says, is to perform ‘the compos-
ition entrusted to them’ (τὸ παραδοθὲν ποίημα), faithfully
and accurately, so that for instance the interplay (διάλεκτος)
between the two pipes of the aulos is clear, and to do so in
such a way that the ἦθος of the interpretation is appropriate
(οἰκεῖον) to the piece in question. What Aristoxenus has not
said and (I think) does not mean is that these τεχνῖται will be
reliable judges in their own cases, that is, that because of their
qualifications as composers or performers they will necessar-
ily have the competence to decide authoritatively whether the
appropriate ἦθος has in fact been produced by their efforts.
408 �
It would be very surprising if he meant anything of the sort.

One would have to be remarkably naive or optimistic about the
accomplishments of professional musicians, even those with
exceptional technical skills, to imagine that all of them have
impeccable capacities for musical judgement.
It is in fact made perfectly clear in the passage at 1144d–e
that the person who is envisaged as passing judgement on
performances and compositions is someone else altogether. In
ancient Athens, as we hear from Plato and from many later
anecdotes, any member of an audience would form his own
critical opinions about the compositions and performances
on offer and would often voice them emphatically;10 but
Aristoxenus may be thinking in the first instance of the com-
petitive character of all major occasions of Greek music making,
and of the people designated as the official judges. His theme is
that, at least in an ideal world, such people would have all the
technical knowledge that musicians and musical theorists pos-
sess, but would also have another kind of understanding that
cannot be acquired through the musical studies those people
have mastered. Aristoxenus calls this kind of understanding τὸ
κριτικόν (the capacity for ‘critical judgement’); and it is this,
when combined with a knowledge of the disciplines of har-
monics, instrumental accompaniment, and the rest, that will
equip us to make reliable assessments of a piece’s appropriate-
ness and its ἦθος.
But how is this critical faculty acquired, and how does it
work? If Aristoxenus went on to answer these questions, the
De musica, most unfortunately, does not tell us what he said.
The only hints that might be relevant are back at the beginning
of the passage, in 1142d. Aristoxenus has just been cited as the
source of the story I mentioned earlier, which is designed to
demonstrate that a composer’s capacity to compose successfully
in a particular style depends crucially on the styles of music he
studied and absorbed in his youth. This seems to tell us only
about the kind of training needed to create compositions of spe-
cific sorts and says nothing about the development of the cap-
acity for critical judgement (in which the composer in this story,
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a certain Telesias, seems in fact to have been seriously lacking,

at least by Aristoxenus’ standards). But the moral the text goes
on to draw is not just that if one is to compose good music, one
must model one’s work on the noble compositions of the past.
If we are to treat music καλῶς καὶ κεκριμένως (admirably and
judiciously), we are told, we must also supplement these studies
with the other disciplines (μαθήματα), and we should set phil-
osophy over us as our teacher (παιδαγωγός); for it is philoso-
phy that is competent to judge what is appropriate and valuable
in music (τὸ μουσικῇ πρέπον καὶ τὸ χρήσιμον).
We face several problems in interpreting these remarks. In
the first place, the ‘other μαθήματα’ are not identified, and we
are not told how they will help. Secondly, the word φιλοσοφία
is notoriously slippery; different authors can have quite rad-
ically different conceptions of what ‘philosophy’ is and how
it is to be pursued. Thirdly and most worryingly, the passage
sounds very much like a dim echo of ideas set out by Plato in
Book 7 of the Republic, a work that the compiler has already
discussed and defended at 1136b–1137a and indirectly in much
of the sequel, though he concentrates there on Book 3. We may
fairly suspect that this is a Platonist intrusion inserted by the
compiler into the Aristoxenian material and has nothing to do
with Aristoxenus himself. We should remember, on the other
hand, that Aristoxenus had an extensive training in philosophy
and μαθήματα of various sorts, first with Pythagorean teachers
and later with Aristotle; he became a permanent fixture in the
Lyceum; he wrote on philosophical as well as musical topics, and
his Elementa harmonica shows the influence of quite recondite
Aristotelian ideas on every page. According to a well-known
anecdote retailed in the entry under his name in the Suda, he
regarded himself as sufficiently eminent in the mainstream
activities of the Lyceum to have a lively expectation of suc-
ceeding Aristotle as the head of the school. It seems altogether
clear that he thought very well of philosophy, and there is no
reason to suppose that the thesis propounded in this passage
would have been alien to his thought. The description of a per-
son who has mastered all the practical and theoretical musical
410 �
disciplines, has studied other μαθήματα (perhaps Pythagorean

mathematics, for example) and finally has immersed himself in
philosophy fits no one better than Aristoxenus himself. It is a
pity that the compiler develops the suggestion no further.
Let us turn, finally, to the comparisons between Plato and
Aristoxenus, which I promised at the beginning. There are
some clear similarities. Both authors seem convinced that a
knowledge of the technical musical disciplines is necessary for
anyone who is to make sound critical judgements, and both are
equally certain that this by itself is not enough. The Athenian
in the Laws takes the trouble to explain why this kind of know-
ledge is needed at the first two levels of judgement, where we
are to grasp ‘what the composition is’ and whether it is a ‘cor-
rectly’ constructed image of its original; but he does very little
to explore the reasons for its inadequacy at the third level.
Aristoxenus, by contrast, concentrates heavily on the task of
demonstrating first that theoretical knowledge of disciplines
such as harmonics and rhythmics cannot by themselves give
insight into a piece’s appropriateness and its ἦθος and, sec-
ondly, that even when these disciplines are supplemented by
all the skills and experience of a practical musician, they still
do not amount to an adequate basis for reliable judgements
about the excellence of a composition or a performance. But
both the negative and the positive theses, in rather different
forms, can be found in each of the two discussions. Both writ-
ers agree also that composers and other qualified τεχνῖται will
possess all the technical knowledge that a competent judge
needs too, even though they cannot take the further step of
identifying authoritatively the presence or absence of musical
‘excellence’, τὸ καλὸν καὶ τὸ εὖ. That step can be taken only
by people with additional qualifications, which are not of a
strictly musical sort; but both writers leave us largely in the
dark about what these qualifications are. The best guess I was
able to make about the Laws is that they come with the wis-
dom of old age; the De musica seems to suggest, as we have
just seen, that in Aristoxenus’ thought they may arise from the
study of philosophy.
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But there are substantial differences too. One of them is

that Aristoxenus explicitly denies that ἦθος arises directly
from the formal structures underlying a composition, a thesis
adopted both by the Athenian in the Laws and by Socrates in
the Republic. Secondly, Aristoxenus shows no sign of accepting
Plato’s central contention that pieces of music are ‘imitations’ or
‘images’ of something else; no such suggestion and no such lan-
guage appear anywhere in the passage we have been studying,
or anywhere else in the remnants of his work. As a consequence,
thirdly, Aristoxenus makes no use of the notion of a piece’s ‘cor-
rectness’ in Plato’s sense, since this is precisely the correctness of
fit or the ‘equality in quantity and quality’ between the musical
εἰκών and the original it is designed to resemble.
But he has another way of talking that seems to serve
roughly the same purpose. Plato’s spokesmen argue, in both
the Republic and the Laws, that the εἰκών acquires its char-
acter, its ἦθος, from that of the original whose likeness it is.
When Aristoxenus discusses ἦθος, he associates it with what
he calls τὸ οἰκεῖον, ‘the appropriate’. The critic is required to
identify the ἦθος to which a composition or a performance or
some one of their parts is ‘appropriate’; and in the case of a
performance he has to judge whether or not it is appropriate to
the ἦθος of the composition that the performer is tackling. In
these prominent phases of their discussions, then, despite the
large differences between the conceptions they deploy, both
writers are concerned with the way in which a musical pattern
of sounds may or may not be ‘fitting’ for the ἦθος it is designed
to possess or convey.
Here, however, we stumble on a fourth distinction, perhaps
the most important of all. In Plato’s writing, music is signifi-
cant from what we would call an ‘ethical’ point of view. ‘Good’
music is fundamentally music that is good from an ethical
perspective, and such music is ethically, psychologically, and
socially beneficial. But music can carry ethical attributes only
parasitically, that is, by borrowing them from the actions and
characters of which it is an εἰκών or μίμημα. In Aristoxenus’
nonmimetic conceptual system, however, no such parasitism is
412 �
possible; and this should lead us to wonder whether the notion

of ἦθος that stalks through his writings really carries the same
implications as its Platonic counterpart.11
There are cogent reasons for thinking that it does not. In
Aristoxenus’ treatment, compositions, performances, and their
parts possess ἤθη in their own right. The question whether
these ἤθη are ‘appropriate’ or not is always a question about
their appropriateness to their musical context, about the rela-
tions between the musical ‘combinations’ and ‘mixtures’ pres-
ent in different parts of a composition, for instance, or between
the ἦθος of a composition and that of some performer’s rendi-
tion of it. It is never concerned with their suitability for some
social or educational niche, or for improving the characters of
their listeners. It is true, certainly, that Aristoxenus occasionally
expresses something close to moral disgust at the perversities of
modern music, and uses powerful superlative adjectives such
as κάλλιστος, which can have ethical resonance, to describe
the more time-honoured musical styles of which he approves.
But there is only one brief and enigmatic remark, anywhere
in his surviving work, to suggest that the values to which he
is appealing are relevant to the judgement of human charac-
ter or of anything outside music itself; and even that remark
is heavily qualified.12 Elsewhere in the Elementa harmonica
there are cases where the word ἦθος refers unambiguously to a
‘character’ of a strictly musical kind with no counterpart in the
sphere of human ethics, as in the allusion to τὸ χρωματικὸν
ἦθος (the character of the chromatic) at 48.31–3, which is said
to be apparent or perceptible (ἐμφαίνεται) whenever intervals
of a certain sort are used. There can be no doubt that an ἦθος in
this sense is a musical attribute directly accessible to our ears,
and that when we recognise the ‘chromatic ἦθος’ in a melodic
sequence, we are placing it in an aesthetic and not in an ethical
category. I see no reason to think that Aristoxenus’ usage in
the De musica is substantially different. Music is to be judged
by the standard of its own intrinsic values, and the criteria by
which we judge human character and behaviour are irrelevant
and inapplicable.
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If this conclusion is correct, it marks a very important dif-

ference between Plato’s and Aristoxenus’ conceptions of the
criteria by which music should be judged; and it goes hand in
hand with Plato’s championship and Aristoxenus’ rejection of
the thesis that music is μίμησις. We are all so used to finding
references to μίμησις and to the ethical attributes of music in
sources where these matters are discussed that we might easily
assume that it is Aristoxenus and not Plato who is out of step
with mainstream educated opinion. But I am not convinced. It
is true that almost all the relevant writers of later periods whose
work survives approach the topic in Plato’s manner; but they
do so precisely because they take Plato’s works as their starting
point. By and large they either are Platonists themselves or have
an allegiance to the revived Pythagoreanism of the Hellenistic
and Roman periods, in which Platonism is a central ingredi-
ent. It is true too that we can find plenty of passages in fifth-
century comedy, where Plato’s influence cannot be suspected,
in which musical styles are linked very closely with ethical
values. But comedy is a special case, where anything whatever
to which characters on the stage object – a political view, an
interest in philosophy, an artistic attitude, or anything else – is
regularly represented as a moral perversion, usually of a sexual
sort. There is no good reason to believe that educated people
took such associations seriously, let alone that musical special-
ists did so – unless, that is, they belonged to the fourth or later
centuries and were persuaded by Plato’s arguments. Readers
may be forgiven for imagining that I have forgotten about one
crucial fifth-century figure, the famous Damon of Oa, whose
ideas about musical ethics are often treated as massively influ-
ential. I have not forgotten him, but I take the heretical view
that the extent of his work and his cultural significance have
been absurdly exaggerated. The Damon of later writings is in
my opinion very largely a myth, whose roots are partly in mis-
interpretations of Plato’s comments in the Republic (and to a
lesser extent in the Laches and the first Alcibiades), and partly
in uncritical readings of a fictional work of the later fourth
century. But I shall not attempt to justify my heresy here.13
414 �
All I want to say by way of conclusion is that the differences

we have found between Aristoxenus’ views and Plato’s are at
least as likely to bring out the peculiar idiosyncracies of Plato’s
approach as they are to demonstrate eccentricities in the work
of Aristoxenus.
Not e s
1 For a recent and very perceptive study of major issues in Plato’s
views on musical ethics and education in the Republic and the
Laws, see Pelosi (2006) 4–50 and (2010) 14–67.
2 See, e.g., Arist. [Pr.] 19.15, 918b, which distinguishes the
‘mimetic’ songs of professional soloists from the simpler, nonmi-
metic pieces for amateur choruses, which could not be expected
to perform the complex variations or ‘modulations’ (metabolai)
involved in ‘imitation’, and whose task was only ‘to preserve
the ethos’. Clearly the writer understands the notion of mimesis
quite differently from Plato, but this does not alter the fact that
Plato’s claim that all music is mimetic was disputable. We shall
find solid grounds for thinking that Aristoxenus rejected it.
3 The importance of the words, presumably, is that they give us
direct access to the nature of the character, emotion, or whatever
it may be that the melody and the rhythm can be expected to imi-
tate. Melody and rhythm should ‘follow the words’, as Socrates
puts it in the Republic (399e–400a, 400d). The central problem is
that if we are to decide whether they do so satisfactorily or not,
we have first to be able to judge what it is that they themselves
imitate independently of their association with words, and can
only then assess the degree to which they agree with the words
in doing so. In that case there should be no more (though also
no less) difficulty in identifying what is imitated by a piece of
purely instrumental music.
4 The word harmonia has a wide range of meanings, but when it
appears in the plural, as it does here, it is almost always used,
as for instance at Rep. 398d–400a, to designate the systems of
attunement (corresponding very roughly to different forms of
musical scale), any one of which could form the skeleton of a
melody, and to which a performer on a stringed instrument
would tune his strings before setting off to play. These are the
systems named as Dorian, Phrygian, and so on in the Republic
and often elsewhere. For a study of the history and semantics of
the term, see Ilievski (1993); on this and many other elements of
Greek musical terminology, see Rocconi (2003). Among the many
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discussions of the harmoniai in Plato’s ethical and educational

theories, see particularly Pagliara (2000), an essay whose scope is
considerably broader than its subtitle suggests.
5 For a detailed survey of the evidence for Aristoxenus’ work on
music outside the Harm. and the Rhythm., see Gibson (2005)
99–127, though I do not share the writer’s confidence in the
authenticity of all the material cited. For the main fragments and
testimonia, see Wehrli 1967. Some issues raised by the passages
examined here but not considered in the present essay are dis-
cussed in Barker (2007b).
6 A useful study of Aristoxenian passages in the Plutarchan De
musica is Meriani (2003) 49–81.
7 Harm. 1.22–2.7. The passage poses formidable problems of inter-
pretation; for my reading of it, see Barker (2007a) 138–40.
8 Like most editors, I accept the emendations of the text here
and at Arist. Pol. 1342b, which present it as an allusion to this
composition.
9 Aristotle is less explicit about his view of the matter, but
Pol. 1340a–b is most naturally read as implying that in this
respect he agreed with Plato.
10 For an entertaining and valuable discussion of the audience’s
role in performance, see Wallace (1997).
11 A convenient overview of theories of musical ἦθος in their
‘ethical’ guise is West (1992) 246–53. I would dispute some of his
observations (particularly on Damon), but they may be said to
represent, in outline, a widely accepted scholarly consensus on
the matter. For an interesting and unusual slant on the concept,
see Rossi (1988).
12 The passage is at Harm. 31.16–29. For fuller discussion of it and
the whole issue under consideration here, see Barker (2007a)
249–59. The tone of Aristoxenus’ criticisms of ‘decadent’ modern
music is well conveyed in a passage of his writing preserved at
Ath. 632a (fr. 124 Wehrli); an illuminating essay on it is Meriani
(2003) 15–48.
13 We all await eagerly the long-promised book on Damon by Robert
Wallace. In the meantime, see Wallace (1991) for a perceptive dis-
cussion of the sources. Damon’s alleged theories about harmoniai
are re-created, rather overimaginatively to say the least, in the
introduction to Lasserre (1954), which too many later scholars
have taken as a guide. My own opinion about the value of the
ancient sources that allude to them is thoroughly sceptical, more
so than Wallace’s (insofar as his views have been published); but
on most issues we are broadly in agreement, and I am only pur-
suing a little further some of the implications I find in his work.
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442 �
G e n e ra l I n d e x
actor, 47, 49, 65n71, 65n75, 236n22, 165n30, 194, 295–6, 313, 315, 329,
299–301, 307, 309, 350 334, 342
Adonis, 43, 176, 246, 260n2, 260n3 agon, 220–1, 278, 317, 319, 335n12
adultery, 101, 280 Alcaeus, 113, 167n45, 168–9n55
aeisma, 379–80, 389 Alcman, 23, 25, 26, 49, 57n24, 58n29,
Aelianus 97, 102–3, 107n19, 108n28, 117,
NA, 82n23, 211n69 166n41, 168n51, 237n30, 337n27,
VH, 56n20, 64n58 354
Aeschines, 338n38 aletheia, 245, 255, 257
In Tim., 331 alexipharmakon, 244, 256, 260
Aeschylus Amphion, 24
Ag., 207n31 Anacreon, 17, 58n30, 103, 207n35, 268
Cho., 66n76 Anatolia, 27, 30, 32–4, 41, 43, 53–4n9,
Pers., 66n76, 207n32 54n10, 56–7n21, 58n28, 58n30,
PV, 208n37 58–9n36
Sphinx, 115 anthropology, 2, 6, 11, 58n36, 77, 87,
aesthetic(s), 5–11, 12n3, 19, 35, 43, 45, 89, 97, 104–5, 171–2, 177, 179,
54–5n10, 58n30, 59–60n37, 92, 94, 185, 202–3, 205–6n6, 206n21,
96, 126–7, 146, 168n53, 193, 212– 206–7n21, 207n24, 361–2n6
14, 224–7, 229, 231–2, 234, 237n32, Antimachus, 313, 390n3
238n48, 239n54, 343–5, 354, 360, Antipater Thessalonicensis, 25
361n5, 361–2n6, 363n13, 364n19, aplestia, 223, 232, 239n51
371–2, 376–8, 380, 401, 413 Apollo, 23, 70, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 104,
aesthetic practice, 371, 376, 378 106n2, 114, 130–1, 137, 144,
age-groups/age-classes, 6, 46, 69, 104, 147–9, 153, 167n45, 174, 191, 252,
106n7, 114, 221, 315, 321 282, 309, 315, 324–5, 328, 336n16,
old age, 109, 114, 138, 195, 272–3, 372
314, 384, 411 Apollodorus
old men, 65n72, 76, 114–17, 125, Bibl., 106n2, 387
� 443
General Index
Arion, 17, 211n69 auloi (double-pipes), 16, 28, 30, 31,

Aristophanes, 89, 210n61, 379 33–4, 44, 52n1, 52–3n4, 53–4n9,
Av., 333, 337n32 58–9n36, 60n38, 60n41, 187,
Lys., 115, 260–1n3 210n61, 316–17, 408
Nub., 106n5, 208n43, 210n56, 338n43
Pl., 209n53, 366n34 Bacchylides, 115, 168–9n55, 239n53,
Ran., 53–4n9, 66n76, 210n61, 309, 378 292n37
Thesm., 192, 202–3, 208n43, 209n53, beauty, 96–7, 102–3, 105, 148–50,
210n56 213–14, 226, 261n4, 269, 271
Vesp., 338n43 Beckett, Samuel, 313–14, 321, 324
Arcadia, 28–9, 60n40 blame, 9, 99–100, 108n24, 249, 253,
Archilochus, 183, 207n35, 291n25, 328, 261n11, 265–71, 274, 276–9,
337n32 282, 284, 286–8, 289n6, 291n28,
arete, 90, 101, 271, 273, 281–2, 285, 287, 292n34, 344, 359, 366n39, 366n40
292n34, 349 blasphemy, 48, 308, 346–8
Aristotle, 1, 20, 39, 61n43 bodily social, 173, 181, 185–6, 188,
De motu an., 161n1 192–4, 199, 201–2, 208n43
Eth. Nic., 118, 291n30 body, 3, 10, 49, 54–5n10, 69, 73–4,
Gen. an., 161n1 90–1, 95–6, 100–1, 105, 107n14,
Metaph., 161n1, 207n34 110–12, 130, 141–3, 145, 151,
[Mund.], 161n1 166n39, 173, 176, 180–1, 183–6,
Poet., 94, 208n43, 308, 366n40 190–6, 202, 205–6n6, 208n45,
Pol., 11n1, 23, 52n1, 62n47, 63n58, 210n55, 210n63, 210n65, 211n75,
64n66, 65n70, 66n77, 75, 82n25, 226, 228, 237n23, 271, 276, 278,
118–19, 210n56, 228–9, 238n43, 280, 287, 317, 335n7, 348
262–3n21, 263n22, 366n40, 392, Boeotia, 30, 44, 60n41, 387
416n8, 416n9
[Pr.], 83n35, 208n41, 415n2 Callimachus, 10, 371–89, 390n1, 390n3,
Aristarchus, 375 391n26, 391n28
aristeia, 275, 282–3, 285, 287, 293n40 Aet., 372, 376, 378–89
Aristides Quintilianus, 208–9n46 Epigr., 375–6
Aristoxenus, 10, 20, 58n30, 58n35, Hymn 2, 372
207n33, 208–9n46, 392, 402–15, Hymn 4, 169n65
416n6, 416n7, 416n12 Hymn 5, 169n58
Athenaeus, 58n30, 58–9n36, 66n76, Callisthenes, 337n26
117, 383, 416n12 Callistratus
Atlantis, 67–8, 75 Stat., 170n67
audience, 9, 19, 37, 43, 46–8, 65n75, canon, 73, 76, 79, 81–2n23, 296, 329
127–8, 148–53, 159–60, 161n6, Caria, 27, 34, 43, 48–50, 53–4n9, 60n38,
166n40, 168n49, 168n53, 212–14, 62n47, 66n76, 309, 347
216, 219–27, 229, 234n2, 236n15, chara, 91–2, 130, 217, 236n19, 238n48,
250, 261n7, 267, 270, 288, 298, 315
304, 310, 316, 318–20, 331, 333, charis, 149, 168n48
336n16, 341, 346–9, 354–6, 358, China, 120, 122n9
360, 371, 383, 409 choral matrix, 95, 107n17, 232–3
444 �
General Index
choreia, 6–8, 43, 70, 79, 90–1, 93–5, Damon of Oia, 20, 185, 208n43, 209n50,
104, 107n14, 123–4, 127–32, 135, 414, 416n11, 416n13
138–43, 145–7, 149–50, 160n1, dance (see also orchesis), 4, 6–7, 16, 18,
161–2n8, 162n13, 165n32, 166n39, 20, 31–2, 34, 36–8, 43–4, 46–7,
166n40, 167n42, 168n52, 168n53, 49, 51, 52n1, 54n10, 55–6n15,
172–5, 181–2, 184, 186–7, 190–3, 57n24, 61n44, 61–2n45, 64n66,
195, 205–6n6, 206n11, 206n12, 65n69, 65n72, 66n78, 70–8, 83n40,
212–13, 216–34, 234n2, 236–7n22, 91, 93–4, 96–8, 106n8, 107n20,
238n42, 238n44, 238n48, 265, 297, 108n26, 114–17, 120–1, 123,
310, 333, 354 130–4, 136–8, 140–60, 161–2n8,
cithara, 16, 54, 125, 153, 243, 316–17, 327 163n18, 165n31, 165n32, 165n34,
citizenship, 129, 341, 344–7, 352–3n1, 166n38, 166n39, 166n40, 166n41,
355–60, 363n11 167n45, 168n53, 169n56, 169n59,
Clement of Alexandria, 72, 81n14, 169n60, 169–70n65, 172–5, 179,
82n23 185, 188–93, 196–7, 203, 205–6n6,
comedy, 9, 16, 47, 115, 125, 221, 238n44, 207n28, 208n43, 208–9n46,
275–6, 294–8, 311n8, 311n9, 314, 209n51, 212–13, 215, 217, 224–5,
339–40, 342, 345, 349–59, 363n10, 233, 235n5, 235n14, 236n21,
365n29, 366n40, 414 262–3n21, 266, 278, 297–8, 309,
contemplation, 110, 232, 234 315–17, 321, 334, 340–1, 349–50,
Corpus Hermeticum, 81n21 354–6, 360, 361–2n6, 364n19
Corybants, 43, 143, 152, 196 dance, cosmic, 146, 160
correctness (see also orthotes), 36, 70, Delian maidens, 147–9, 155, 224
95, 99, 226, 234, 239n54, 243, 316, Demosthenes
318–20, 336n15, 374, 377, 394, Meid., 213, 235n7
398–400, 403, 412 Demetrius
Crantor of Soli, 375 Eloc., 81–2n23
Crates of Mallos, 25, 375 Democritus, 182, 207n32, 208n43
Crete, 5, 15, 23, 26–7, 30, 31–4, 37–40, deviance, 350–1
44–5, 51, 61n43, 62n46, 63n55, dialect, 17, 35–6
63n58, 64n68, 66n79, 79, 90, Dictaean Cave, 64n60
97, 101, 105, 136, 157, 252, 268, Diodorus Siculus, 56n20, 80–1n12,
323–4, 336n23, 380, 383 81n17, 82n23, 82n27, 262–3n21
Critias, 71, 112–13, 165n33 Diogenes Laertius, 58n32, 235n5,
criticism, 11, 12n13, 77, 119, 121, 313–14, 335n4, 338n40, 388
262n21, 270, 301, 343–4, 361n5, Dionysius Scytobrachion, 372
372, 373, 375, 390n9, 390n11, 395, Dionysus, 26, 45, 47, 57n23, 65n71,
402, 416n12 65n72, 81n23, 91–2, 109–10, 114,
Curetes, 32, 47, 57n23, 97 117, 121–2n4, 130–1, 137, 144,
Cybele, 43, 60n38 167n45, 174, 176, 191, 194–7, 199,
Cyprus, 22, 31, 116, 390–1n20 202, 210n58, 210n61, 210n62, 215,
235n13, 237n24, 309, 381, 383
Daedalus, 24, 157–8, 169n65, 170n66, Diotima, 105
170n67, 386 dithyramb, 16, 47, 65n72, 98, 104,
Daktyls, 25, 32, 57n23 186, 197–9, 212–15, 221, 235n5,
� 445
General Index
dithyramb (cont.) encomium, 92, 98, 100, 102, 232, 268,

235n13, 237n24, 243, 309, 318–19, 279–83, 362–3n9
321, 361n5, 366n33, 374, 403 Ephorus, 39, 57n24, 61n43, 63n57,
Dorian, 16, 20, 23–5, 27–8, 31, 39–40, 64n59, 75, 82n27, 83n33, 89, 106n6
44, 46, 52n1, 53–4n9, 59–60n37, epic, 9, 93–4, 98, 182, 226, 295–6,
61n43, 63n56, 64n66, 76–7, 79, 303, 315–19, 321, 323, 330, 333,
111, 155, 399–400, 403, 405, 415n4 336n15, 337n31, 379, 390n3
drink/drunkenness, 65n72, 65n74, 109, Epimenides, 23–4, 26, 40–1, 49
111–17, 119–20, 124–5, 128, 194, epinician, 265, 267, 272–8, 284–8,
208n40, 232, 239n52, 268–9, 289n6, 289n7, 289n10, 291n27
289n9, 297–8, 309, 380–1, 383–4 epoide, 92–3, 95, 222, 230–1, 238n45,
Durkheim, Émile, 176, 178–80, 185, 329, 345
188, 194, 207n23, 207n24, 207n26, eremos, 248, 250–1
207n28 eros, 101, 103, 105, 124, 129, 141, 147,
150, 152–3, 159, 167n42, 167n44,
education (see also paideia), 7–8, 11n3, 168n53, 231
18, 21, 35, 55n11, 57n25, 63n58, Eteocretan, 38
65n70, 69–70, 72, 88–91, 93, 95–6, ethnomusicology, 27, 32, 53n7, 58n36
98–106, 106n4, 107n22, 108n24, ethos, 278, 415n2
114, 116, 118, 123, 125, 127, 129, Euhemerus, 373
132, 135–6, 138–40, 142, 152, Euripides, 17, 309, 361n5, 379
162n13, 162n14, 165n31, 166n36, Bacch., 53–4n9, 167n45, 169n59, 195,
182, 191, 198, 205n3, 206n12, 223, 210n60
227–8, 230, 235n5, 254, 265–6, Cyc., 60n38, 207n37
272, 289n1, 297, 305, 329–30, 345, El., 165n33, 207n37
351, 357, 364n19, 364n20, 381, Hel., 58–9n36
385, 393, 415n1 Heracl., 207n36
Egypt, 5–6, 21–4, 26, 27–33, 38, HF, 166n41
41–2, 44–5, 49–50, 56n19, 56–7n21, Hipp., 207–8n37
57n25, 58–9n36, 61n44, 62n46, IA, 60n38
62–3n52, 64n61, 67–79, 80n6, Ion, 165n33
80n9, 80–1n12, 81n20, 81n21, IT, 88, 106n3, 166n41
81–2n23, 82n24, 82n26, 83n35, Phoen., 166n41
83n37, 83n39, 83n41, 83n45, 83n46, Supp., 207n36, 207–8n37
95, 161–2n8, 172, 181, 203, 205, Tro., 66n76
205n3, 211n82, 243, 245, 255, 262 Eustathius
3n21, 371, 376–9, 382–4, 386, 388–9 Il., 169–70n65
ekstasis, 194 excellence (see also arete), 212, 226, 268,
elegy, 23, 112, 115, 268–70, 325, 320, 393–4, 396–7, 401, 406, 408, 411
362–3n9, 379, 390n3
emotion, 47–9, 52n1, 59–60n37, 65n74, festival, 17, 19, 44, 53n6, 71, 73, 76, 78,
91–2, 103, 110–11, 113, 174–5, 80–1n12, 83n38, 88, 91, 93,
193, 202, 208n44, 218, 275–6, 97–100, 105, 106n2, 115, 117,
290n24, 303–4, 307–8, 317, 358, 130–2, 134–7, 142, 147–9, 151,
362–3n9, 415n3 167n45, 168n49, 170n68, 176,
446 �
General Index
191–2, 206n11, 210n56, 246, 260n3, Hephaestus, 150, 157–8, 168n48

278, 282–3, 289n2, 294, 315, 318, Heraclid. Pont., 375
336n18, 342, 348–9, 352–4, 357, Hermes, 28, 81–2n23
365–6n32, 381, 383–4, 386 Hesiod, 17, 19, 23, 125, 295, 328–30,
Panathenaia, 35, 41, 100, 107n20, 337n31, 337n32, 338n35, 379
244, 248–9, 260, 317, 332, 338n35 Op., 291n26, 311n4
Anthesteria, 383, 391n26 Theog.166n41, 169n58, 233–4,
Dionysia, 215, 235n13, 321, 353, 336n15, 336n16
366n33, 366n34 hieroglyph, 73–4, 78
forgetfulness, 73, 79, 113, 243–4, 255–7 Hipponax, 373
funeral, 48, 66n76, 283, 286, 293n38, Hittite, 27, 32–4, 37, 50, 56–7n21,
308, 347–9, 364n24 58–9n36, 60n38, 61n44, 61n45
funeral oration, 265, 281, 289n1, neo-Hittite, 33, 34, 58–9n36, 60n38,
292n34, 292n36, 292n37 61n45
Homer, 9, 17, 25, 30, 41, 46, 92, 125–6,
Ganymede, 40 151–2, 221, 295, 314–35, 337n31,
generic mixing, 372–4, 389 337n32, 338n35, 338n38, 379
generic purity, 362–3n9, 374 Il., 22, 63n53, 63n55, 147, 150, 154–5,
genre, 6, 8–10, 45–7, 77, 98–9, 105, 156–8, 164n21, 165n34, 168n48,
107n13, 186, 209n47, 215–16, 221, 168–9n55, 169n60, 170n66, 170n67,
223, 235n14, 236n22, 238n44, 243– 213–14, 224, 235n6, 237n27, 305,
4, 249, 252–3, 264n25, 265–70, 273, 331–2, 336n15, 336n16, 378
278, 292n34, 292n37, 296, 299, 301, Od., 38–9, 40, 61n43, 135–7, 154,
303–4, 309–10, 316, 318–19, 330, 164n21, 166n41, 168n48, 169n56,
335n7, 337n31, 339–60, 362–3n9, 246, 326, 329, 333, 336n16, 391n27
363n10, 363n12, 365n25, 366n33, horai, 192, 210n56
366–7n40, 372, 375 Hubert, Henri, 179, 207n25
Gorgias humiliation, 298, 354
Hel., 92, 107n10 hybrid, 7–8, 20, 28, 36–7, 45, 197,
Greekness, 58n28, 371, 389 236n20, 244, 253, 340
hymn, 4, 71–3, 78, 81–2n23, 95, 97–100,
harmonia, 59–60n37, 61–2n45, 175, 183, 107n19, 107n21, 186, 215, 222,
186, 206n13, 307, 398–400, 404–5, 232–3, 243, 281–2, 291–2n30, 309,
415–16n4, 416n13 328, 336n16, 337n31, 338n34, 340,
harmonics, 52–3n4, 361–2n6, 399, 361n5, 362–3n9, 374, 389
402–3, 405, 407, 409, 411 h.Ap., 97 107n14, 107n20, 147–9, 153,
Hecataeus Abderita, 75, 80–1n12, 155, 167n45, 170n68, 224, 234n1,
81n17, 82n26, 82n27 237n29, 328
Herodotus, 22, 40, 63n58, 75, 80n12, h.Bacch., 210n62, 211n69
82n24, 82n25, 82n26, 182–3, h.Hom.
207n34, 211n69, 211n73, 257, #23, 169n58
379–80, 389, 390n20, 391n22 h.Merc., 28, 337n31
hedone (see also pleasure), 110, 193, h.Ven., 168n51, 169n58
216–19, 223, 236n16, 318, 342 hymnos (see also hymn), 107n21,
helot, 44, 64n65, 114, 297–8, 311n8, 354 336n16, 362–3n9
� 447
General Index
iambus, 98, 317, 348, 356–7, 359, 363n10, Lycurgus, 23–4, 26, 32, 40, 61n43,
366n39, 366n40, 372–3, 376, 391n22 63n58, 75, 102, 252, 257–8,
Idaean Cave, 41, 380 262n17, 292n34, 324–5, 331–2,
initiation, 6–7, 47, 87–90, 92, 102, 338n35, 354
104–6, 106n1, 136, 142–3, 166n37 Lydia, 20, 25–7, 34, 43, 50, 52n1,
innovation, 8, 10, 16–17, 21, 23–4, 53–4n9, 58n28, 58n30, 59n37,
35, 42, 44–5, 69, 71–2, 79, 181, 59–60n37, 61n45, 64n66, 112
190, 193, 201, 209n50, 216, 232, lyre, 16, 28–30, 33–4, 52–3n4, 60n39,
237n25, 243, 260, 344, 355, 373 63n58, 65n70, 153, 156
Ionia, 16, 20, 41, 52n1, 57n26, 59–
60n37, 60n38, 63n56, 64n66, 97, malakos, 307–8
147, 149, 168n49, 170n68, 323–4 marriage, 41, 102, 115–16, 279
inspiration, 103, 136, 288, 295, 301–2, mathematics, 26, 42, 50, 55n11, 64n61,
305, 338n34, 358, 372, 373 68–9, 72–3, 75, 77, 81–2n23,
invective, 9, 283, 291n35, 340, 356–9, 361–2n6, 411
366n39, 366–7n40, 367n48 Mauss, Marcel, 176–7, 179–80, 185, 192,
Isis, 22, 45, 70, 80n9, 81–2n23, 391n29 203, 207n25, 207n27, 207n28
Isocrates, 261n5, 261n7, 261n8, 290n16, Maximus of Tyre, 336n23
332 melos, 91, 93–4, 107n13, 107n14,
Areopagiticus, 235n8 186–7
Bus., 75, 379, 387 memory, 9, 73, 79, 112–13, 197, 244,
Ep., 248 255, 260, 289n9, 385
Panath., 244, 248–51, 261n6 metanastic poetics, 19, 49, 58n34
metics, 51, 349, 353–4, 365n26, 366n34
judgement, 283–5 Michon, Pascal, 177, 206n19
aesthetic, 225, 238n48, 343 migration, 15–16, 18–20, 27–8, 32, 42,
ethical, 217, 343, 401 51, 383
musical, 307, 392–413 mixture (musical), 243, 404–13
mimema, 95, 349, 387
Kant, Immanuel, 225, 238n48 mimesis, 9, 95–6, 126, 146–7, 167n42,
kosmos, 213–14, 304 208n43, 209n47, 218, 298, 302–3,
361n5, 361–2n6, 415n2
lament, 9, 22, 47, 51, 60n38, 63n53, Minoan, 30–3, 58–9n36, 61n43, 61n44,
81n23, 98, 215, 238n44, 271, 385
282, 293n38, 307–9, 312n26, 318, Minos, 23, 30–2, 38, 40, 50, 61n43,
346–50, 405 170n67, 252, 261n10, 326, 386–8
Lasus of Hermione, 197 mockery, 275–6
laughter, 112, 298, 308, 311n9, 349, 358 mousike, 3–8, 42–3, 49, 67, 69–72,
Linus, 22, 379 74–9, 81–2n23, 128, 175, 187, 201,
Li Po, 121 209n47, 220–1, 223–4, 226–9, 234,
logos sympotikos, 111 270, 294, 309–10, 315, 317–18, 320,
Lucian 342, 345–6, 356, 361n6, 374, 377
Salt., 166n37, 170n67 movement, 16, 19–21, 69, 90–1, 96, 102,
Lycurgus 132, 140, 143–4, 146, 149, 151,
Leoc., 292n34, 331–2, 338n35 155–6, 165n34, 166n39, 172–3,
448 �
General Index
181–204, 205–6n6, 206n9, 207n28, Isthm. 4, 164n21, 293n43, 319–20

208n40, 208n41, 209n51, 211n81, Isthm. 5, 164n21
229, 233, 271, 315, 361–2n6, 399 Isthm. 6, 164n21
Isthm. 7, 164n21
New Music, 18, 35, 62n47, 105, 108n32, Nem. 1, 164n21
187, 209n49, 235n11 Nem. 2, 164n21, 293n43, 328
Nile, 68–9 Nem. 3, 155–6, 166n41, 169n58
Nem. 4, 164n21
Olympic Games, 115, 272, 276 Nem. 5, 293n43
Olympus, 17, 24–5, 49, 57n27, 405, 408 Nem. 6, 164n21
orchesis (see also dance), 47, 71, 76, 90, 96 Nem. 7, 164n21, 169n58, 169n59
Orpheus, 24–6, 60n38, 151, 316, 362–3n9 Nem. 8, 169n59, 267
orthotes (see also correctness), 36, 70, 79, Nem. 10, 164n21
99, 226, 234, 239n54, 320 Ol. 1, 273, 277
Ol. 2, 164n21
paean, 92, 95, 98, 104, 117, 186, 215, Ol. 3, 167n45
243, 309, 318–19, 336n16, 374, Ol. 6, 164n21
389, 405 Ol. 7, 164n21
paideia, 2, 89–91, 93, 96, 98, 128, 134, Ol. 8, 164n21, 273
137–8, 152, 164n26, 221, 294 Ol. 10, 273
paidia, 91, 93, 97–8, 106n8, 128, 152, Ol. 13, 116, 164n21
164n22, 344 Ol. 14, 166n41
Pan, 28, 60n40 Pae. 6, 82n32, 166n41
Pausanias, 40, 57n26, 58n32, 61n43, Pae. 12, 166n41
63n58, 106n2, 157, 169n63, 170n67 Pyth. 1, 164n21, 169n58
perioikoi, 44, 51 Pyth. 2, 164n21, 273, 291n25
Phaeacians, 154, 168n48 Pyth. 4, 169n58
pharmakon, 243–4, 255–7, 382, 384 Pyth. 5, 164n21
Philochorus, 337n26 Pyth. 7, 164n21
philonikia, 275 Pyth. 8, 164n21, 290n18
Philostratus Pyth. 9, 164n21, 239n52
Imag. 170n67, 189–90 Pyth. 10, 164n21, 167n45, 169n59
Philoxenus, 403, 408 Pyth. 11, 167n45
Phoenician, 22, 31, 36, 42, 183, Pyth. 12, 60n41, 164n21, 166n41
390–1n20 fr. 122, 116
Phrygia, 16, 20, 25, 27, 33–4, 43–4, Plato Comicus, 209n53, 335n12
49–50, 52n1, 53–4n9, 58–9n36, pleasure (see also hedone), 7–8, 10,
59–60n37, 60n38, 61n45, 63n53, 91–9, 107n17, 109–14, 121n2, 125,
64n66, 403, 405, 415n4 127–31, 138–60, 162n11, 163n18,
phthonos, 274–5, 290n24, 291n26 168n53, 191–3, 208n44, 210n63,
Pindar, 17, 115, 135, 159, 278, 285, 216–34, 236n16, 236n19, 237n23,
290n20, 290n24, 292n37, 326, 238n41, 238n48, 239n52, 239n53,
36n15, 379 243, 269–70, 294, 296–8, 305–10,
Isthm. 1, 164n21, 166n41, 284 316, 318, 320, 329, 342–5, 352,
Isthm. 3, 164n21 360, 361–2n6, 374, 393–5
� 449
General Index
Pliny the Elder, 26 91–7, 100, 117, 121, 130–1, 143–8,

HN, 82n23 163n18, 166n38, 166n39, 171–203,
Plotinus 205n5, 205–6n6, 206n12, 206–
Enn., 73, 81n21 7n21, 207n22, 207n28, 207n32,
Plutarch, 75 207n34, 208n39, 208n41, 208n43,
De Fortuna Alexandri, 371 208n46, 209n48, 209n53, 217,
De gen., 82n23 227, 229, 316–17, 346–7, 361–2n6,
De Is. et Os., 82n23 398–402, 405–8, 411, 415n3
[De mus.], 25, 58n30, 58n32, 58n33, rhythmics, 399, 402, 407, 411
58n35, 61n43, 63–4n58, 82n30,
337n31, 392, 402–15, 416n6 Sappho, 17, 26, 58n30, 103, 108n29,
Lyc., 40, 58n32, 63n58, 64n65, 82n26, 168n51
82n27, 106n7, 117, 262n17, 297, satyr, 17, 26, 29, 43–4, 47, 60n38,
324–5, 354 64n62, 64n65, 65n74, 115, 195
Mor., 64n65 schema, 62n45, 69, 71–3, 77–8, 91,
Sol., 262n16 93, 95, 98, 186, 207n33, 208n43,
Thes., 169n65 208–9n46, 215, 235n14, 317, 344
Pollux, 25, 66n76, 169n65 sculpture, 22, 58–9n36, 95
Polybius, 60n40, 63n57 Scymnus, 391n24
polyeideia, 372 Simonides, 17
praise, 9, 83n38, 93, 98–100, 108n24, slave, 10, 25, 34, 37, 43, 48–9, 51, 52n1,
164n24, 218–19, 248–9, 253–4, 64n65, 95, 112, 114, 186, 222, 297,
261n11, 265–88, 289n6, 290n16, 306, 316, 340, 346, 349–51, 354–5,
291n28, 291–2n30, 292n34, 292n36, 357, 359, 361–2n6, 365n26, 382–3,
293n38, 319, 326, 331, 344, 356, 388–9
362–3n9, 366n39, 366–7n40 Solon, 64n61, 67, 80n12, 110, 331
Pratinas, 17, 209n53 Sophocles, 361n5
Praxiphanes, 375 Ant., 165n33
Presocratics, 182, 190, 201, 203, 211n78 Περὶ χοροῦ, 208n43
priamel, 271, 274, 278, 287 Sosibius, 117–18
Proclus Sparta, 4, 6–7, 23–7, 39–42, 44, 52n1,
In Ti., 376 54n10, 57n24, 57n25, 61n43,
prooimion, 327–8 63–4n58, 64n65, 75–7, 79, 81–2n23,
Pronomos, 44, 49, 62n47, 64n62 82n24, 82n26, 88–90, 94, 97, 101–3,
Pythagoras, 20, 144, 313, 410–11, 414 105, 106n7, 111–15, 117–19, 135–6,
puppet(s), 7, 94, 123–51, 158–60, 160– 172, 181, 205n3, 248–52, 257, 261n6,
1n1, 161–2n8, 162n11, 162n14, 267–8, 297, 311n8, 323–5, 332, 336–
163n17, 165n30, 193 7n23, 337n27, 354, 380, 383, 388
puppet show, 161n6, 221, 294, 329, 342 spectator(s), 114, 147–50, 212–14, 220,
222, 232, 236–7n22, 237n29, 287,
rhabdos, 319–20, 336n15 297–8, 310, 345–6, 352, 355–6,
Rhadamanthys, 23, 31, 38, 326, 386–7 360, 366n40
rhapsoidia, 317–18, 320 spectatorship (see also audience), 8, 10,
rhythm, 7–8, 20–1, 35–6, 43, 46, 48, 212–16, 220, 223, 229, 234, 310,
50–1, 54n10, 56n16, 62n51, 63n58, 350, 355
450 �
General Index
spoudaia, ta, 297, 302–3, 349 Timotheus, 17

stasis, 178, 188, 268–9 time, 279
Stesichorus, 56n20, 166n41 atimia, 279, 292n31
Strabo, 57n24, 58n32, 61n43, 63n58, tragedy, 9, 16, 52n1, 60n38, 71n65,
64n59, 81n14, 82n23, 82n27, 83n33, 106n3, 115, 125, 210n60, 221,
337n26 294–310, 311n16, 311n17, 311n22,
Suda, 25, 57n26, 410 312n26, 321, 335n11, 342, 355,
sympathy, 114, 160, 298 361n5, 364n14, 365n29, 366n33
symphonia, 173, 175, 345 transformation, 9, 72, 153, 177, 179,
symposion, 7, 42, 44, 90, 100, 103, 186, 194, 197, 201, 203, 211n82
108n28, 109–16, 120, 121n3, 198, tyrant, 42, 112, 116, 306, 386, 388
269, 376, 380–1, 384, 389 Tyrtaeus, 24, 42, 57n26, 77, 83n34, 268,
sympotic, 7, 58n30, 58–9n36, 60n39, 289n7, 325, 337n27, 362–3n9
109–16, 268, 381, 383, 385
synchoreutai, 91, 174, 193 victory, 102, 115–16, 215, 220–1,
237n23, 269, 271–2, 275–6, 278,
taxis, 184, 191–3, 201–2 283, 285–6, 289–90n15, 327–8,
techne, 258–9, 262n19, 302, 361n5 346–7
Terpander, 17, 23, 25, 26n4, 49, 58n28,
76, 337n27, 354 wine, 46–7, 60n38, 61n44, 65n72,
Thales, 26, 58n32, 63n58, 64n61 66n78, 109–14, 117, 120, 124, 194–
thauma, 124, 126–7, 136, 146–7, 153, 7, 199, 210n58, 210n62, 210n63,
161n7, 161–2n8, 162n9, 163–4n18, 268, 289n6, 297, 361–2n6, 381–4
168n49, 187, 282 medical effects of, 116–17
theatre, 16–17, 43, 99, 111, 214–16, wisdom, 15, 19, 40, 42, 58n34, 63n58,
223–4, 235n13, 238n42, 296–8, 64n61, 247, 258–9, 263n22, 269,
306, 309–10, 342–3, 353, 356, 273, 296, 401, 411
364n14, 364n16, 393
Thebes, 24, 34, 94 xenelasia, 76, 82n29
Theocritus xenoi, 16, 51, 63n54, 350
Id., 207–8n37 Xenophon, 183, 214, 318
Theophrastus, 375 Lac., 90, 106n7
Char., 161n6 Mem., 207n37
Hist. pl., 60n41 Oec., 235n9, 235n10
Thera, 31, 33, 61n43 Symp., 126, 166n41, 168n51, 235n5
Theognis, 24, 42, 103, 108n28, 113, Xenodamus of Cythera, 76
207n35, 268, 289n7 Xenophanes, 269, 271, 289n9
Thucydides, 210n56, 265, 281, 328, 333, xenophobia, 20, 80n6
348 Xenophon Ephesius, 82n23
� 451
I n d e x o f P l ato n i c
Pa s s ag e s
Ap. 625e–626e, 268

28c, 338n44 626d–627a, 205n2
34d, 338n44 629a, 23, 24, 42, 325, 332
629c, 362–3n9
Cri. 629a–630d, 268
54d, 143 629d, 52n1, 289n7
630a, 24, 42
Epin. 630d, 61n43, 324
982e, 165n33 631b–632c, 269–70
631c, 271
Euthd. 631e–632a, 279
277d–e, 143 632c, 61n43
633d, 311n23
Grg. 633d–e, 316
493b, 239n51 636e, 210n59
502c, 209n48 636c–d, 40
637a–b, 381
Ion 637e, 381
531a–c, 338n35 639b, 211n75
533d, 168n52 639d–e, 380–1
533d–536d, 151, 288 640b, 381
533e–534b, 143 640c, 289n9
535c, 107n21 640d, 210n59, 381
536b–c, 152 641a–d, 205n2
539d–541d, 293n41 641b, 128
641d–e, 210n59
Leg. 641e, 330
624–625a, 61n43 642a, 128, 239n54
624a, 252, 325–6 642d–e, 41
� 453
Index of Platonic Passages
Leg. (cont.) 656d, 95

643a–644a, 11n6 656d–e, 263n23
643b, 128, 152 656–657a, 376–7
643c–d, 129, 164n26, 166n36 656d–657b, 69–70, 162n8, 205n3, 243
643c–644b, 364n20 656e, 74
643e, 129, 152 657–8, 376
644, 163n18 657a, 80n6, 377
644d, 127 657a–b, 56n18, 239n54
644d–645c, 123, 125 657b, 208n40
645d, 210n59 657c, 236n19, 364n20
645d–e, 210n63 657c–d, 106n8
645d–646a, 210n59 657d, 238n41
646, 117 657e, 221
646c, 210n63 658a, 345
647e–648a, 210n63 658a–b, 237n23, 342
653–4, 137, 163n18 658a–e, 329
653a–c, 139, 165n30 658b, 221, 294
653b, 90, 165–6n28 658b–c, 125
653b–c, 364n20 658c, 343
653c–654a, 131, 167n45, 174, 191–2, 658c–d, 125
210n57 658c–e, 364n16
653d, 91, 142 658d, 295, 300
653d–654a, 166n38, 166n39 658e, 296, 345
653e, 208n40 659, 221
654a, 90, 217, 335n6 659c, 209n47
654a–b, 129 659d, 93
654b, 90, 121 659d–660a, 165n30, 210n63, 361n6,
654c, 236n19 364n19
654c–d, 237n32 659e, 93
654e, 235n14 660a, 93, 95, 235n14
655a, 235n14 660b, 76, 205n3
655a–b, 166n39, 209n48 661c, 209n48
655b–c, 217 662d, 93
655c, 218, 236n19 664a, 94
655c–d, 294 664b, 92, 161n1
655d, 239n54 664b–666, 65n72
655d–656a, 218–19, 364n20 664c, 92, 222
655e, 236n19, 310 664c–d, 114
656–7, 376 664e–665a, 166n39, 184, 191, 193,
656a, 236n19 208n44, 210n57
656a–e, 235n14 665a, 236n19
656b–c, 364n20 665b, 72, 114
656c, 93 665c, 95, 222, 237n33, 238n49, 294
656c–657a, 21, 41 665d, 95, 223
656c–657b, 64n61, 207n29 665d–666c, 210n59
454 �
666a–c, 210n63 677c–e, 23, 24

666a–d, 393 680b, 333
666b, 117, 210n63, 364n20, 384 680b–c, 295, 322
666c, 238n46 680c, 41, 63n54
666d–e, 393 680c–d, 323
666e, 77 680d, 334
667a, 77 682a, 295, 301, 362–3n9
667a–b, 237n26, 393 682e, 252
667b–c, 239n54 687e, 305
667b–671a, 392 690e, 311n4
667c, 394 691c, 211n75
667c–d, 394 697b, 279
667d–e, 394 698a–701c, 243
667e, 364n20 700, 344
668b, 239n54 700–1, 309–10, 373
668b–c, 95, 395 700a, 79, 98
668b–670d, 237n37 700a–b, 270
668c, 396 700a–e, 235n14, 362n9, 364n19
669–70, 53–54n9 700a–701a, 318
669a, 397 700a–701b, 209n47, 215
669b–d, 45 700a–701c, 205n3
669b–670a, 208n44, 362n9, 398, 401 700b, 65n72, 362–3n9
669b–671a, 209n48 700c, 319
669c, 48, 166n39, 235n14 700d, 99
669c–e, 187, 316 700d–e, 390n8
669e, 317, 395 700e, 99, 320
670a, 121n4 700e–701a, 236n15
670b, 239n54, 399, 404 701a, 45, 307
670a–b, 237n39 701b–d, 209n50
670b–c, 52n1, 237n40, 398 702a, 204n1
670c, 399–400 702b, 12n12
670d, 166n39, 223, 399–400, 406 702c–705c, 40
670e, 400 704a, 108n34
671d–e, 114 706a–b, 61n43
671e–672a, 210n59 706d–707a, 311n3
672b, 195 706e, 338n36
672c, 92, 193, 210n57 707e–708d, 40
672c–d, 209n48 708a, 46
672d, 210n63 711b–c, 278–9
672e, 90, 91, 235n14, 265 711d–e, 295
672e–673a, 166n39 713a–e, 387
673c–e, 364n20 713c–714a, 259
673d, 166n39 714a, 257
673e, 208n40 718e, 311n4
676, 205n3 719–22, 326
� 455
Leg. (cont.) 778d–e, 200

719a–e, 263n22 779d, 238n42, 296
719c, 302, 310, 328–9 780, 208n40
719c–d, 255, 373–4 780a–c, 205n2
720a–e, 210n63 782a, 205n3, 208n40, 210n56
722c, 252 784d–e, 279
722d, 327 788a, 96
722d–e, 8, 107n22 788a–c, 205n2
724a–b, 210n55 788c, 96
726–729d, 271 788c–790c, 210n55
730b, 272–3 790e, 65n72, 210n63
730c, 164n24, 314 790e–791b, 143
730d, 274 793a–d, 254
730d–731b, 272–3 795d, 96
731a, 275 795d–796e, 106n8
731b, 274 795e–796d, 289n15
732d–e, 163n18, 308 796, 344
732e, 312n28 796a, 289–90n15
739b–e, 362n8 796b, 97
739c–e, 312n28 796b–e, 364n20
739d, 312n28 796c, 97
740d, 292n33 796e–800b, 205n3
742d, 259 797a, 98
745d–e, 83n39 797b–c, 364n20
747b, 42 797d, 210n56
747b–c, 64n61 797d–798b, 365n30
747c, 42 797d–798d, 205n3
747e, 69 797e–798a, 210n63
753b–d, 293n45 798a–b, 260
753e–754a, 362–3n9 798b–d, 344, 364n16, 364n19
756e–758a, 367n41 798b–799c, 237n25
757b, 357 798b–800a, 361n6
758a, 211n75 798d–799d, 364n20
761c–d, 210n55 798e–799a, 71
764c–765d, 108n25, 237n38 799a, 81n12, 97, 98
764d–e, 321, 364n20 799a–b, 23, 42, 207n29
765a, 321 799b, 98, 362–3n9
764e, 208n40 799e, 98
772a–d, 205n3 799e–800b, 206n9
772c–d, 263n24 800b, 44
773c–d, 211n72 800b–e, 48, 53–4n9, 347
775b, 107n22 800d, 49, 209n48, 308, 336n19
776e, 295 800d–e, 23
777a, 338n36 801c, 98
777c–e, 365n26 801c–d, 361n6
456 �
801d, 98 816d–817a, 350

801d–e, 362–3n9 816e, 48
801e, 281, 362–3n9 817, 297, 302–3
802a, 281, 362–3n9 817a–b, 298–300
802c, 208n40 817a–c, 53–4n9
802d, 361n6 817b–c, 361n5
802d–e, 209n48 817c–e, 361n6
802e, 209n53 817c–d, 301
803a, 134, 164n20 817e, 355, 365n25
803a–b, 211n75 819a, 72
803b, 304 819a–b, 64n61
803c, 126, 134 819a–c, 68
803c–804b, 364n20 822b, 362–3n9
803c–804c, 123, 133 822b–c, 276
803d–804b, 311n3 822c, 277, 362–3n9
803e, 98, 134, 137, 333 822d–e, 253
804a, 164n25 822e–823a, 277
804b, 164n20, 164n22 823a, 253
804c, 135 828, 210n56, 359
807a–b, 210n57 828a, 99
807b, 205n2, 312n28 828a–d, 365n25
807c–e, 276 828b, 83n39
809d, 208n40, 210n56 828b–d, 207n29
810d–811a, 335n10 828b–835b, 361n3
810e–811b, 330 829c, 283–4, 362–3n9
810e–812a, 266, 304 829c–e, 361n6, 367n46
811a–812a, 362n7 829d, 359
811b, 254 829d–e, 361n4
811c, 252, 255, 266 829e, 362–3n9
811c–d, 305 830a, 290n19
811d–e, 254 831a, 279
811e, 254 831d, 239n51
812b–c, 114, 209n48 832d–e, 289n15
812c, 362–3n9 832e, 211n71
813d, 210n63 834e, 211n71
814d–e, 289n15 835a, 209n48
814e, 211n71 835a–b, 208n40, 210n56
814e–816d, 46 835c, 100
814e–822c, 165n31 836a, 100
815c, 65n72 836c, 101
815c–d, 47, 53–4n9 836d, 101
816c, 208n40, 263n23 836e, 101
816c–d, 207n29, 209n50, 361n6 837a, 101
816d, 297 837c, 306
816d–e, 47, 53–4n9, 297 838, 305
� 457
Leg. (cont.) 935b–c, 275

838c, 300 935c–936b, 358
838e–841e, 280 935d–936a, 311n7
840c, 102 935d–936b, 276
841d, 101 942a–b, 285
842a, 102 943b–c, 285
846c, 263n23 943e, 311n4
847a, 292n33 944c, 81n12
848d, 108n34 945b, 282
850a–c, 365n26 945c, 211n75
850b–d, 361n4 945e–946c, 282
855c, 280 946e–947a, 282–3, 364n24
858e–859a, 254 947b, 308, 362–3n9
870, 290n24 947b–c, 282
871a, 362–3n9 951c–952d, 361n4
875c, 208n40 951d–952a, 286
886a, 210n56 953d–e, 69, 76
887b–c, 256 957b, 263n23
889c, 210n56 957b–c, 257
889e–890a, 71, 205n3 957c–d, 256
890e–891a, 253 957d, 254
893b, 211n80 958e, 362–3n9
898a, 140 958e–959e, 286
898a–b, 208n40 958e–960a, 364n24
901a, 311n4 960a, 308
902–5, 287 960c, 362–3n9
902d, 210n63 961e, 211n75
904c–e, 208n40 966d, 102
904e, 311n3 966e, 102
906c, 210n56 966e–967a, 208n40
906c–e, 311n3 967d, 102
906d–e, 211n75 968b, 252
907d–909d, 361n4 969a, 108n34
913b–914c, 293n44 Ly.
914a–915c, 365n26 214–15, 384
915b–c, 361n4
918a–920c, 364n23 Menex.
921d–922a, 284, 286 234c, 292n36
927d, 248 [Min.]
931, 305 318b, 25
931b, 362–3n9 319, 252, 261n10
932e–933c, 210n63 320d–e, 387–8
934d–936a, 275
934e, 275 Phdr.
935a, 291n25, 357 228e–230d, 366n38
458 �
245c–249a, 166n35 395e, 351

245c–257a, 167n42 396d, 351
246a–248c, 291n26 397b–c, 209n48
247a, 167n42, 211n76 398a–b, 301
248a–b, 291n26 398b–d, 107n14
250b, 167n42 398d, 209n48
252d, 167n42 398d–e, 16
252d–e, 174 398d–400a, 415n4
252d–253c, 167n42 398e, 307
256b, 272 398e–399c, 52n1
274e, 245 398e–399d, 404
274e–275a, 244 399a, 400
275d, 162n8 399c, 107n14
275d–e, 245 399c–d, 53–4n9
276a, 246 399e–400a, 415n3
276b, 246 399e–400c, 208n43
276b–c, 245 399e–401a, 209n48
276d, 245 400a–c, 107n14
276e–277a, 245, 261n4 400d, 209n49, 209n53, 415n3
277a, 247 400d–e, 209n48, 400
278a, 261n4 401a, 209n53
278a–b, 247 401b–d, 165n29
Phd. 401b–403c, 237n35
117d, 307 401d, 209n48
Phlb. 411a, 307
17d, 208n39 424b–d, 209n50
50, 298 429c–d, 311n23
Plt. 451c–457c, 66n78
262c–e, 52n1 464a, 312n28
294a–c, 262n19 469c–471c, 52n1
295c–d, 258 514b, 161n1
295d, 258–9 531d, 107n22
299e, 262n19 555b, 239n51
Prt. 556b–c, 311n23
326b, 209n48 557d–599b, 107n15
342a–d, 64n58 562b, 239n51
347e–348a, 262n14 571b–572b, 306
590d–591d, 165n29
Resp. 595c, 311n2
377e–378a, 296, 387 598d, 311n2
387, 335 598e, 293n41
394b–398b, 209n47 599b–600e, 293n41
394d, 107n12 601a, 209n48
395b–396e, 365n27 602c–603c, 107n15
395c, 351 603c–605a, 367n45
� 459
Resp. (cont.) 176b, 141

605c–d, 107n12 Ti.
606c, 298, 311n2 19b–c, 162n8
607a, 12n10, 107n21, 108n24, 22d, 68
311n2 24a, 67
607b, 361n5 24a–b, 76
607c–e, 12n11 24a–d, 82n25
607d, 367n50 26a, 68
607e–608a, 231 29d, 107n22
621c–d, 272 33d–34a, 167n43
Symp. 38c–42a, 140–1
173d, 312n24 40a, 167n43
174b–c, 391n27 42b, 146
186, 210n63 43a–44b, 142
187b–c, 208n39 44a–c, 142
187b–d, 206n12 44b, 164n26
197d, 108n33 45b–47e, 143
211a–e, 108n33 47b–c, 141
212b, 108n33 47c–e, 143, 166n38
215e, 143 73a, 239n51
Tht. 90a–b, 145
147d, 80n4 90b–d, 141
460 �

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more information - www.cambridge.

Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi is Professor of Classics at Stanford University. She

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

ISBN 978-1-107-01687-3 Hardback

List of Illustrations page vii

Part One. Geopo l i t i c s of P e r fo r man ce

Part T wo. Con cep t ua l i si ng C ho ra l i ty

6 Imagining Chorality: Wonder, Plato’s Puppets,

Part T hree . Red efi n i ng Gen re

Andrew Barker is Professor of Classics Emeritus at the Institute of Archaeology

Andrea Nightingale is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at

This volume arose from a conference on ‘Mousike, Performance, and Culture

by those working in the broader area of literary, cultural, and

of citizens, even though nonphilosophers, has the potential to

banishing poetry. Interestingly, however, in this book Socrates

Plato’s specific references to all three aforementioned cultures

the way in which the Laws presents Egyptian mousike (and

as utterly disoriented and disorderly in his native city, his

rhythmos (rhythm) helps Kowalzig interpret Plato’s vision of

tool, meant to destroy the citizen’s memory of earlier cultural

genres can be attended by the body of Magnesia’s citizens, yet

imaginary, permeate all individual contributions and set up

7 See especially Bobonich’s (2002) study of these issues at length

I am very grateful to Giovanni Ferrari, Crawford H. Greenewalt Jr.,

deserving of preservation and admiration. Also under scrutiny

the Panhellenic festivals, architectural and sculptural styles,

Vocal and instrumental music and dance are among any

standardised musical-cultural identity for his Magnesians.

traditionalising, account in the Laws. Where does Magnesian

‘ Ear ly Mu sic ’, Plato and the Gre e ks

Athenian: Now where laws are, or will be in the future,

Here is a community, it is stated, where for ten thousand

This primeval Egyptian dirge is thus supposed to be ‘just the

Plato’s point, however, is obviously to contrast the extreme

contemporary with Lycurgus himself – choruses (or ‘herds’) of

Yet, even in the same breath in which he first mentions

1. Olympus: According to the Suda, he was ‘a Phrygian, an

4. Sappho of Mytilene: She too was said to have obtained some

but also music; and she is credited with inventing (or

musical identity – even its most quintessentially and proudly

At the same time, side-by-side with all these stories of musical

of the music-loving satyrs/silenes), was also an Arcadian.

in another set of traditions, the auloi were said to be a thor-

One more possible (imaginary or real) geographical origin for

dance floors, and legislation as a precursor to later, even finer

Age monarch, or as an archaic lawgiver, almost contemporary

Obviously we are in no position ourselves (and it is unlikely

4. Neo-Hittite/Phrygian musicians in ceremonial procession for sacrifice, including double

Bronze Age or during the archaic and early classical periods.

performance cultures.44 Whatever name(s) the Greeks may

that a liberal education for citizens should not be geared to the

We might hypothesise, then, a development in Greek musics

The Greek language first began seriously to concern itself

Even when two races of different culture are in constant eco-

But this, it must be said, is almost complete nonsense.51 For

of those colonised peoples (except as occasional ‘exoticising’

The Ide ntity of the Magne sian

The Multiple Musics of Magnesia

List of Illustrations page vii

As a result, there will be quite a few non-Magnesian, non-Cretan,

statements about it are partly accurate and partly inaccurate.