CUP (2023) p/b 442pp £29.99 (ISBN 9781009161053)
Some years ago, I was asked by the commissioning editor of this book to write a report on the author’s proposal for it. I had met Charles Cosgrove a couple of times and was already an admirer and beneficiary of his writing on ancient music. Given the intense scholarly interest over recent years in ancient music, food, and the practice of symposia, I found his proposal to write a study that combined these different aspects timely and exciting.
The published result is a triumphant vindication of C.’s vision. This is a rich and illuminating study that explores a consistent aspect of ancient life too often treated as incidental, the role of music at meals. Spanning Greek antiquity to the age of Augustine, C. provides an amazingly comprehensive scholarly account of how music shaped, enhanced, and reflected social interaction across classes, cultures, and religious traditions.
One of the book’s distinctive contributions is its reassessment of elite song-making (‘gentlemanly lyrody’), the practice among Greek aristocrats in the archaic and classical periods of performing poetry to the lyre at symposia. This was more than simply fun and entertainment and could be viewed as a carefully cultivated performance of upper-class identity. Singing well was both a personal distinction and a mark of class belonging. The symposion as presented here becomes an arena for demonstrating cultural capital, one in which men proved their level of paideia to their peers with song and music. Cosgrove’s expertise in the technicalities of mousikê means that we even learn details about the sounds of the music that was sung, sometimes via examples in modern notation.
Equally compelling is the book’s attention to the political uses of music. In the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, rulers such as Philip II and Alexander the Great enlisted professional poets not only to celebrate their virtues but to humiliate rivals at banquets. Music served not only to entertain but also to assert authority, reinforce hierarchies, and subtly discipline the elite audience.
The scope of the study is not confined to the upper classes. Cosgrove demonstrates that music was both a pleasure and a marker of value across the social spectrum. We learn, for instance, that slave clubs in Ptolemaic Egypt, despite their limited resources, chose to hire pipers and dancers rather than improve their food or meeting spaces; music was as vital to their communal identity as it was to their social betters. The chapters on Jewish and early Christian meals add further texture and admirably extend the scope of the study well beyond the classical period. Clement of Alexandria, for example, praises Christians for singing ‘by turns,’ likening the practice to the best of Greek sympotic tradition while also asserting Jewish precedence. These moments of appropriation and redefinition reveal how music could be used for moral and religious self-fashioning as well as recreation.
There is less detail about cuisine, though C. notes how food could embody ideals of pleasure and power. A passage from the poet-philosopher Xenophanes (c. 500 BCE), for instance, conjures an image of a gleaming banquet: the floor and cups are washed, garlands and perfumes are distributed, the kratêr is filled to the brim. Meanwhile music, incense, and festivity accompany the table that is heaving with cheese, honey, and golden loaves. In the Roman context, the emperor Domitian’s public banquet in the Colosseum was celebrated by the poet Statius for its extravagant food and wine as well as the noisy musical shows (e.g. mimes and theatre displays) which served as tools of imperial display:
quis spectacula, quis iocos licentes,
quis convivia, quis dapes inemptas
largi flumina quis canat Lyaei?
‘Who could sing of the spectacles, the unbridled jests,
Who of the banquets, the feasts provided,
The lavish rivers of wine?’
Throughout the book, C. balances scholarly rigour with a sensitivity to how music will have been experienced by audiences and participants over centuries of antiquity. Drawing on literature, visual culture, and material evidence, he reconstructs with care and flashes of humour the many ways in which music shaped ancient conviviality. The detail is often dense but it is consistently rewarding. This book is a major contribution to the cultural history of antiquity.
Armand D’Angour