Aristophanes’ Phrynichos and the Orientalizing Musical Pattern

Over the past sixty or so years, there has been an increasing awareness of archaic Athens’ receptivity to the Eastern lifestyle and culture. The insistence of scholars on reading the earlier evidence about orientalia through the lens of fifth-century anti-Persian obsessions has been overcome, to a great extent, by the recent investigation of the αβpoσυvη — the luxurious style of life (and clothing) “consciously taken over from the East and embraced by a segment of the population to differentiate themselves and assert their pre-eminence” (Kurke 1992: 98). The elites of archaic Athens felt that they belonged to the vast Ionian world — the Solonian Iaovia, which included East Ionia, Attica and Euboea (Mazzarino 1989: 72–78, 227) — and borrowed from the Ionians, who were heavily influenced by their Lydian neighbors, sumptuous garments and other attributes indicating status. As Thucydides notes: “The elder men of the nobility…only recently stopped wearing linen chitons and binding their hair up in a bun with the insertion of golden crickets” (1.6.3; trans. by Kurke 1992: 95). Linen chitons and golden crickets were part of a luxurious Eastern clothing adopted by noblemen to distinguish and define themselves; but after the Persian Wars the negative judgment of αβpoσυvη became commonplace, and such luxurious items were identified as markers of effeminacy (Lombardo 1983; Kurke 1992). The dominant ideology of the Athenian polis evolved from aristocratic to democratic; the Orient, contrasted with the isonomic Spartan model, was connoted with stereotypes of cowardice and effeminacy (Miller 1997: 243–258), and the Athenian elite choose to discredit the Eastern luxuriance by connecting it with despotism and tyrannical ambition — a connection that, in turn, “influenced the modern scholarly association of αβpoσυvη with political vβpi~” (Kurke 1992: 103).