Symposium - AIC

Anne Gabriel Wersinger
138
“Orpheus, Calliope’s son, he of the intricate muse,
was the first to beget (eteknôsen) the tortoise-shell lyre in Pieria” (fr. 711, Page, 221-224,
trad. D.A. Campbell)
The birth of a lyre, an instrument of music being a technical and unnatural object, reflects the
assimilation of the two registers, the demiurgic and the procreative, and this reference is Orphic
(compare with Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, who is said to “make a singer
(tektènat'aoidon)” (v. 25).
But it looks too as if the assimilation of the idea of begetting and the idea of demiurgy implied
the female gender.
In Aristophanes' comedy The Thesmophoria, the poet-musician Agathon who, like Timothy,
is a follower of the New Music which feeds with Orphism a proven relationship, is in action. He is
currently composing a tragedy of the kind of the Phaedra, and needs the musical mode akin to tragedy
(a Mixolydian for example, which is said to be “feminine”). For this purpose, the creator must engage
in a mimèsis of a special type which is to get into the spirit (gnome) of female fashion, that is to say,
he has to “think like a woman” and to “feel like a woman” in his very body. This is the theory called
the Gunaikeîa Dramata, according to which a composer of dramas must impulse mimèsis so far that
his own ways and attitudes must conform with the feminine character he creates. That is why Agathon
has the feminine attributes of childbirth that Aristophanes caricatures. This does not mean that
Agathon is an effeminate man, and Aristophanes outlines the poet’s virility (v. 95-153).
The teaching of this passage is that a man, a male, who is explicitly a poet-musician, can be
said to give birth like a woman. Timotheus of Miletus’ dithyramb called the Birthpangs of Semele
was probably composed through this feminine mimetical device 20 . But it should immediately be added
that this birth metaphor is characterized by novelty. Agathon and Timotheus of Miletus both
emphasize the novelty of their music: Eros is a musician-poet that Agathon praises, and by calling
him neôtaton and aei neos (Symposium, 195c), he is obviously echoing Timotheus of
Miletus’Persians:
“I do not sing the old songs, because mine are new (kaina) and better.
A young Zeus reigns (neos) ...” (fr. 20, in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistes, 122c-d).
It is also known that music is likened to the birth of a newborn. Thus, according to Athenaeus, the
comic poet of the 4th century, Anaxilas has said in his Hyacinthus:
“Music, like Libya, thanks to the gods gives birth (tiktei) to a new creature each year
(kainon)”
(Deipnosophistes 623F).
The same testimony is offered about the comic poet of the fifth century, Eupolis:
“The comic poet Eupolis, my friends said that" Music is a thing (pragma) deep and complex
'and is constantly offering new discoveries (aiei te kainon hexeuriskei) for those who can
reach them” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistes 623F).
Such material constitutes the evidence of the background of what Diotima says about production
(poiesis):
“(…) a single section, disparate from the whole of creation (pasès tès poièseôs), —merely the
business of music and meters (to peri tèn mousikèn kai ta metra)—is entitled with the name of
the whole. This and no more is called creation (poièsis); those only who possess this branch of
creation (tès poièseôs) are creators (poiètas) “ Symposium, 205c4-c8).
According to Diotima, one came by synecdoche to denote by the word creator what we call, still
today, the poet, in fact the musician. The creator par excellence, is the musician, i.e. the melic poet.
But the musician illustrated by Agathon, is also, as we have seen, not only the one who gives
birth, but the one who always gives birth to something new, as a neo-musician. As Timothy or
20 Hordern, 2002, p. 249 ; Leitao, 2012, p. 65, 155.