[Brief discussion]
In a diachronic and nostalgic perspective of a past in which the aristocracy guaranteed beauty, Plato – as detractor of the New Music – laments the degeneration in the aesthetic-musical field of his times, which led to the judgment of beauty by crowds of listeners gathered at the theatre, and therefore to a bad “theatrocracy” (θεατροκρατία τις πονηρὰ): for the entire passage (Plat. Leg. III.700a-701b) see the entry Musical Demagogy in the section Testimonies about Music. The strong connections which bind music, masses of supporters and theatre, stand out as central elements of the New Music detractors’ argumentation. The term “theatrocracy” recalls not only the theater crowd, with its noise, its acclamations, and its penchant for ἡδονή (which becomes a yardstick for aesthetic judgment, to the detriment of ethics), but also – in the eyes of Plato and of those who reject the most salient features of the New Music – the theater as a place of production and “mass consumption” of the flourishing poetic-musical offering. Similar to the term θεατροκρατία are the adjectives σκηνική and θεατρική, referring to μουσική in Arist. Pol. 8.1342a17–21, Aristox. fr. 70 Wehrli, [Plut.] De mus. 1140d–e, 1142c, in reference to New Music. Cf. also Bélis 2007; LeVen 2014, 71 n. 1; D’Angour 2020, p. 410 with n. 9.
[Bibliography]
A. BÉLIS, ‘Mauvaise musique‚ mauvaises mœurs’, in F. MALHOMME – A.-G. WERSINGER (edd.), Mousikè et aretè : La musique et l’éthique de l’Antiquité à l’âge moderne, Paris 2007, pp. 77-86; A. D’ANGOUR, ‘“Old” and “New” Music. The Ideology of Mousikē’, in T.A.C. LYNCH – E. ROCCONI (edd.), A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music, Newark 2020, pp. 409-420; S. GASTALDI, ‘La «teatrocrazia»: cattiva educazione e degenerazione politica nelle “Leggi” di Platone’, in G. FURNARI LUVARÀ (ed.), Filosofia e politica: studi in onore di Girolamo Cotroneo, Soveria Mannelli 2005, pp. 159-171, in part. pp. 165, 167, 169; P. LEVEN, The Many-Headed Muse. Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry, Cambridge 2014.
[Keywords]
Theatrocracy, Music and theatre, Vulgar music.
[Francesco Buè]