“If I could have…
I would have gone down quickly to Plouto’s home
Descending into Tartaros like Orpheus or
Odysseus or Alkeides so I might see you and hear
What song you sing if you sing for Death.
But come, sing for Kore some Sicilian melody
And play some sweet country song.
She’s a country girl too and she also used to play
On the beaches near Aetna. She knows the Doric tune.
You won’t go without a prize for your melody
Just as once upon a time she gave Orpheus Eurydice
Because he played the lyre so sweetly, so too
To the hills, Bion, she will perhaps restore you.
And If I had any power in in my song
I would have sung for Plouto on my own.”
“Alcman, a Laconian from Messoa, contrary to Krates who mistakenly claims he was a Lydian from Sardos. The son of Damas or Titaros. He lived around the time of the 27th Olympaid [=672-668 BCE] when Alyattes’ father Ardys was the Lydian king. Alcman, who was especially lusty, was the inventor of love songs. He descended from enslaved peoples. He wrote six books, Lyric Poems and The Woman Who Dived. He was the first to try singing poems apart from hexameters. Like other Spartans, he used the Doric Dialect. There was also another Alcman. One of the lyric poets too, whom Messene produced. The plural of Alcman is Alcmanes.”
“So great a pile of purple
Isn’t enough to ward off danger,
Nor is that well-wrought snake
Of gold, nor the Lydian
Crown, that sweet joy of
The young women nor even
Nanno’s hair nor
Divine Areta or nor even
Sulakis and Kleêsisêra–
No! You won’t go to Ainêsimbrota to say
“If Astaphis were mine
And Philulla would look at me
Along with gorgeous Damareta and Wianthemis.
Oh, but Hagêsikhora watches me…”
I like Angela, Pamela, Sandra and Rita
And as I continue you know they getting sweeter
So what can I do? I really beg you, my Lord
To me is flirting it’s just like sport, anything fly
It’s all good, let me dump it, please set in the trumpet
A little bit of Monica in my life
A little bit of Erica by my side
A little bit of Rita is all I need
A little bit of Tina is what I see
A little bit of Sandra in the sun
A little bit of Mary all night long
A little bit of Jessica, here I am
A little bit of you makes me your man
Roman mosaic of Egypt representing the Greek poet Alkman drinking wine. Jerash, Jordan. (late 2nd-3rd century AD)
Editor’s note: We are happy to bring you this amazing guest post. SA is always open for posts about ancient literature and the modern world. Feel free to reach out over email if you have an idea
While visual arts have been synonymous with classics for centuries, substantial research has connected the field of classics to performing arts, specifically theater, dance, and music. In his paper, The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides, author Maurice P. Cunningham asserts that the originality of the Heroides lies in how they were written as “lyric-dramatic monologues to be presented on the stage with music and dancing.” I wish to take this argument one step further, for I believe that the Heroides are intrinsically connected to music, specifically the genre of lyrical jazz, through a shared emotional power that transcends language or form.
Jazz, a uniquely American folk art form, traces its lineage to the spirituals sung by enslaved Africans in the American South. Jazz arose organically from the experience of oppressed people, who had very little formal education, let alone access to classical literature. It seems ludicrous to compare the two art forms, but lyrical jazz resonates emotionally with Roman elegy. Whether it is Sulpicia or Etta James, artists reach into the abyss of the human experience to pull out captivating tales of loss and longing, considering how love and heartbreak are fundamental parts of the human condition. Both Ovid’s Heroides and lyrical jazz represent the vulnerability and heartache of the central female characters by portraying personal truth as reality, illustrating raw emotional reactions to abandonment, and appealing to shared common tropes.
The heroines of lyrical jazz narratives and of the Heroides both accept their own biased personal realities as the objective truth. In Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion, Edward M. Bradley notes how “the only formal expression of objective reality we encounter within each poem is defined exclusively by the turbulent flow of emotions running through the mind of the heroine” (159). We see this pattern clearly in Epistula V, a letter from Oenone to Paris, in which she acknowledges how he cruelly abandoned her in favor of Helen of Sparta, yet describes a scene featuring them together. She paints a picture of Paris and herself lying under a tree:
Epistula 5.15-18
Often you might gather between [where] we lay [under] the ceiling’s tree, And having been mixed when the grass presented the swelling to the leaves; Often above straw bedding and deep hay lying down the small wicker hut was kept off the frost”
Saepe greges inter requievimus arbore tecti
mixtaque cum foliis praebuit herba torum.
Saepe super stramen fenoque iacentibus alto
defensa est humili cana pruina casa
“Greges; you might gather,” a present subjunctive of characteristic, indicates that Oenone has built a fantasy world for herself in which Paris is still hers; she ascribes idealized behaviors to Paris that do not reconcile with his current actions. She describes a world that is peaceful, removed from the turbulent realities of her circumstances amidst the Trojan War, since she cannot cope with the loss of her idyllic life with Paris.
Paris and Oenone by Pieter Lastman, oil on panel, 1610, High Museum of Art
In accordance with Bradley’s observation, Ovid chooses to focus on Oenone’s emotional narrative, forgoing the objective sequence of events that his audience would be familiar with. Jazz lyricists have this exact focus. Jazz indeed is a “turbulent flow of emotions” represented in music, whose audience solely receives a subjective portrait of a story based on a highly emotional account rather than a clear factual report. In Nina Simone’s song “If I Should Lose You,” she presents numerous hypothetical scenes, describing what would happen if she lost her beloved. She cries that “If I should lose you, the stars would fall from the skies, if I should lose you, the leaves would wither and die.”
The lyrics do not provide the listener any information about Simone’s actual circumstances, but the listener does receive a rich portrait of Simone’s emotional landscape. In fact, the audience does not know that Simone’s beloved is actually gone until the song’s penultimate couplet: “I gave you my love, but I was living a dream.” Here, through the switch from conditional subjunctives earlier in the song to this indicative past tense, Simone recognizes that she deceived herself. The lyrics are too heavily invested in describing her heartache to give any tangible narrative details to the listeners until the end. Both Epistula 5 and this lyrical jazz piece are more interested in portraying emotional scenes with florid imagery than offering a clear sequence of events.
Another common theme between lyrical jazz and the Heroides is how women process abandonment in romantic relationships. Earlier in Phyllis’s letter, she relives the day her beloved abandoned her and wishes in hindsight that the night Demophoon left was her last night living. She cries, “Heu! Patior telis vulnera facta meis; Oh! I suffer wounds having been made by my own weapons!” (Epistula 2.48). Phyllis blames herself for Demophoon’s actions, and processes her own abandonment by punishing herself and assuming all responsibility. She further laments that “speravi melius, quia me meruisse putavi; I hoped for the best, because I thought that I deserved it,” (Epistula 2.61).
The sheer emotion in her speech clearly demonstrates the strength of her heartbreak and her overwhelming shame, especially when remembering her former naivete, her previous belief that merit would bring about ideal circumstances in love. The perfect tense of “speravi; I hoped,” “putavi; I thought,” and “meruisse; I deserved” alludes to a personal growth, as she reflects on a previous childish persona. Use of the perfect tense denotes completed past action, indicating that she is no longer the naive person who would trust traditional notions of love and relationships.
This type of character growth is also represented in Etta James’s “Fool That I Am,” where she regrets her past actions, calling herself a “fool that I am for falling in love with you and a fool I am for thinking you loved me too.” James laments her former naivete and her foolhardy belief that her beloved actually loved her back. The repetition of “fool that I am” and the past tense of “you loved me” both suggest feelings of shame surrounding her past innocence. Both heroines respond to abandonment by criticizing themselves; they are both ashamed of how they naively believed that their lovers would stay.
Beyond shared content, Ovid uses several direct tropes that carry over into jazz canon. In his paper Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes, Don L. F. Nilsen observes that “tropes function at the levels of semantics (meaning) and pragmatics (interrelationships between language and culture),” noting that “some tropes… become so developed and so extended that they actually become the discourse.”Not only do both elegy and lyrical jazz discuss the same emotions, they also portray the same reactions to those emotions and eventually become synonymous with those emotions. We see such in Dido’s letter to Aeneas, where the traditional trope of sleeplessness invokes Dido’s infatuation with the young hero: “Aeneas oculis vigilantis semper inhaeret, Aenean animo noxque quiesque refert; Aeneas clings always to my sleepless eyes, both the night and serenity bring Aeneas back to my mind,” (Epistula 7.25-26). She depicts herself as literally unable to sleep since Aeneas is constantly at the forefront of her mind.
Andrea Sacchi, “The Death of Dido”. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen. 17th CEntury
This image of the insomniac lover was a common trope in Roman elegy and remains a common representation of lovesickness in lyrical jazz. In Rodgers and Hart’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” many vocalists, including the likes of Ella Fitzegerald and Barbra Streisand, mourned how they “couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t sleep when love came and told me I shouldn’t sleep.” Similarly, in the song “Prisoner of Love,” Etta James sings about how “I’m not free, He’s in my dreams awake or sleeping.” Both representations of sleeplessness emphasize a lack of power; they cannot sleep because they are overwhelmed by the pressure of love. The representation of the sleepless nighttime lover contributes to the emotional landscapes of these women, and merges with the underlying messaging to such a deep degree that lyrical jazz reflects representations from antiquity.
While Roman elegy and lyrical jazz belong to two separate millenia, the similarities between the two art forms are overwhelming with regard to the heroines’ alternate perceptions of reality which lead to unfiltered emotional reactions to abandonment. Each heroine’s consuming emotions of love, fear, doubt, sadness, and anxiety are expressed in similar tropes. The narrators live in an emotionally skewed reality, fueled by tropes common to love, to heartache, and to abandonment.
Maya Martinez is a high school senior at Friends Seminary studying Latin and Spanish. She is particularly interested in the connections between antiquity and the modern world and aims to make the field of classics both accessible and exciting to the general public. She is fascinated by the way in which translation impacts the overall narrative and how history alters a work’s legacy, particularly: what is remembered, what is forgotten, and what is changed. In the fall semester, she will attend Brown University where she plans to continue her engagement with Classical Literature. This is her first publication.
Works Cited
“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Performance by Ella Fitzgerald. Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Verve Label Group, 1956. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Bradley, Edward M. “Ovid ‘Heroides’ V: Reality and Illusion.” The Classical Journal, vol. 64, no. 4, Jan. 1969, pp. 158-62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3295901. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Cunningham, Maurice P. “The Novelty of Ovid’s Heroides.” Classical Philology, vol. 44, no. 2, Apr. 1949, pp. 100-06. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/267476. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
D’Angelo, Frank J. “Prolegomena to a Rhetoric of Tropes.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 6, no. 1, fall 1987, pp. 32-40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/465948. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Farrell, Joseph. “Reading and Writing the Heroides.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 98, 1998, pp. 307-38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/311346. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“Fool That I Am.” Performance by Etta James. The Second Time Around, Argo Records, 1961. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
Fulkerson, Laurel. “Writing Yourself to Death: Strategies of (Mis)reading in Heroides 2.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, no. 48, 2002, pp. 145-65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40236218. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“If I Should Lose You.” Performance by Nina Simone. Wild Is The Wind, UMG Recordings, 1966. Spotify. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
Nilsen, Don L. F. “Discourse Tendency: A Study in Extended Tropes.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, summer 1989, pp. 263-72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885294. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
“Prisoner of Love.” Performance by Etta James. The Chess Box, UMG Recordings, 2000. Spotify. Accessed 14 Oct. 2023.
Apollonius Paradoxographus, Historiae Mirabiles 49
“These things are worth knowing. Theophrastos has explained them in is work On Enthusiasm. For he says that music heals when suffering afflicts the soul and the body such as desperation, phobias, and the madnesses of belief which are more serious. For instrumental flute music, he continues, heals both hip pain and epilepsy.
Similarly is the power attributed to Aristoxenos the musician when he came—for he was getting a prophecy from the prophet of his sister Pasiphilê—for resuscitated a person in Thebes who was bewitched by the sound of a trumpet. For when he heard it he yelled out so much that he behaved indecently. If someone at any point even in war should blow the trumpet, then he should suffer much worse in his madness. So, he exposed him bit by bit to the flute—and, as one might say, he used this as an introduction for him to endure the trumpet as well.
The flute heals even if some part of the body is in pain. When the body is subject to flute music, let the instrumental music persist for five days at least. The toil will be surprisingly less on the first day and the second. This application of the flute treatment is common even elsewhere, but especially so in Thebes up to this day.”
There are similar accounts from Pythagorean Traditions
Porphyry, On the Life of Pythagoras
30. “[Pythagoras] healed psychic and bodily sufferings with rhythm, songs, and incantations. He adapted these treatments to his companions, while he himself heard the harmony of everything because he could understand the unity of the spheres and the harmonies of the stars moving with them. It is not our nature to hear this in the least.”
32. “Diogenes says that Pythagoras encouraged all men to avoid ambition and lust for fame, because they especially inculcate envy, and also to stay away from large crowds. He used to convene gatherings at his house at dawn himself, accompanying his singing to the lyre and singing some ancient songs of Thales. And he also sang the songs of Hesiod and Homer, as many as appeared to calm his spirit. He would also dance some dances which he believed brought good mobility and health to the body. He used to take walks himself but not with a crowd, taking only two or three companions to shrines or groves, finding the most peaceful and beautiful places.”
33. “He loved his friends overmuch and was the first to declare that friends possessions are common and that a friend is another self. When they were healthy, he always talked to them; when they were sick, he took care of their bodies. If they were mentally ill, he consoled them, as we said before, some with incantations and spells, others by music. He had songs and paeans for physical ailments: when he sang them, he relieved fatigue. He also could cause forgetfulness of grief, calming of anger, and redirection of desire.”
“Pythagoras believed that music produced great benefits for health, should someone apply it in the appropriate manner. For he was known to use this kind of cleansing and not carelessly. And he also called the healing from music that very thing, a purification. And he used a melody as follows during the spring season. He sat in the middle someone who could play the lyre and settled around him in a circle people who could sing. They would sing certain paeans as he played and through this they seemed to become happy, unified, and directed.
At another time they used music in the place of medicine, and there were certain songs composed against sufferings of the mind, especially despair and bitterness—songs which were created as the greatest aids. He also composed others against rage, desires, and every type of wandering of the soul. There was also another kind of performance he discovered for troubles: he also used dancing.
He used the lyre as an instrument since he considered flutes to induce arrogance as a dramatic sound which had no type of freeing resonance. He also used selected words from Homer and Hesiod for the correction of the soul.”
“If I could have…
I would have gone down quickly to Plouto’s home
Descending into Tartaros like Orpheus or
Odysseus or Alkeides so I might see you and hear
What song you sing if you sing for Death.
But come, sing for Kore some Sicilian melody
And play some sweet country song.
She’s a country girl too and she also used to play
On the beaches near Aetna. She knows the Doric tune.
You won’t go without a prize for your melody
Just as once upon a time she gave Orpheus Eurydice
Because he played the lyre so sweetly, so too
To the hills, Bion, she will perhaps restore you.
And If I had any power in in my song
I would have sung for Plouto on my own.”
“I believe that it is sometimes not possible to tell if something is the true copy–for this impresses its own form on everything that uses it as an example so they they draw together in unity. Don’t you see how the chorus is made up of many voices? Still, a single voice comes from all of them. One voice is a soprano, another is a bass, and there’s a baritone too. There are women alongside the men; instruments join them. The voices of the individuals are hidden, they contribute to the whole.
I am speaking of a the chorus that the ancient philosophers knew. Our performances today have more singers than there were audience members in the theaters. A line of singers fills every aisle; bronze horns surround the whole theater and every kind of drum and instrument surrounds the stage. Still, a single song emerges from the different sounds.
This is how I want my mind to be: filled with many disciplines, a variety of precepts, and the examples of many ancient people, all balanced together to one end.”
Puto aliquando ne intellegi quidem posse, si imago vera sit; haec enim omnibus, quae ex quo velut exemplari traxit, formam suam inpressit, ut in unitatem illa conpetant. Non vides, quam multorum vocibus chorus constet? Unus tamen ex omnibus redditur; aliqua illic acuta est, aliqua gravis, aliqua media. Accedunt viris feminae, interponuntur tibiae. Singulorum illic latent voces, omnium apparent. De choro dico, quem veteres philosophi noverant; in commissionibus nostris plus cantorum est quam in theatris olim spectatorum fuit. Cum omnes vias ordo canentium inplevit et cavea aenatoribus cincta est et ex pulpito omne tibiarum genus organorumque consonuit, fit concentus ex dissonis. Talem animum nostrum esse volo; multae in illo artes, multa praecepta sint, multarum aetatum exempla, sed in unum conspirata
“A celebration is the best medicine
For labors completed well, and yet
Songs, those wise daughters of the Muses,
Bewitch our minds when they touch them.
Not even hot water makes the limbs as supple
As praise can when it’s partnered with a lyre.
For the word lives a longer life than deeds,
At least the one the tongue lures from the depths of thought
With the Graces’ good fortune.”
So those two yelled out to encourage the Greeks to fight
And just as waves of snowfall thick on a winter’s day
When Zeus the master of all urges it to snow
On human beings, showing them what his weapons are like—
And he reins in the winds to pour it constantly
So that he covers the high mountains and the jutting cliffs
As well as the flowering meadows and men’s rich fields,
Snowing onto the harbors and the promontories of the gray sea,
Even as the wave resists it when it strikes. But everything else
Is covered beneath it whenever Zeus’ storm drives it on.
That’s how the stones fell thick from both sides,
Some falling against the Trojans, others from the Trojans
against the Greeks and a great din overwhelmed the whole wall.”
COVID is so 2020. Let’s add Monkeypox and Marburg virus to the anxiety pool.
Plutarch, On Music (Moralia 1146c-d)
“The degree to which the best governed states have dedicated themselves to fine music finds ample testimony, especially in the case of Terpander who brought an end to the civil strife that was ruining the Spartans.
There’s also Thaletas of Crete who people say listened to the Delphic oracle and went Sparta and returned people to health with music, saving Sparta from the Pandemic that was gripping the land, as Pratinas claims.
Homer too says that the Greeks stopped a plague with music, for he says that “sons of the Achaeans propitiated the god with song and dance all day long / singing the noble paean and praising the / far-shooter who took pleasure in hearing the song.”
I’ll leave those verses as the final words in my argument about music, good teacher, since you started this discussion by quoting them to us. In truth, music’s first and finest labor is to give thanks back to the gods, and after that comes a cleansing of the soul, sure tone, and sustained harmony.”
“If I could have…
I would have gone down quickly to Plouto’s home
Descending into Tartaros like Orpheus or
Odysseus or Alkeides so I might see you and hear
What song you sing if you sing for Death.
But come, sing for Kore some Sicilian melody
And play some sweet country song.
She’s a country girl too and she also used to play
On the beaches near Aetna. She knows the Doric tune.
You won’t go without a prize for your melody
Just as once upon a time she gave Orpheus Eurydice
Because he played the lyre so sweetly, so too
To the hills, Bion, she will perhaps restore you.
And If I had any power in in my song
I would have sung for Plouto on my own.”
