The Cathartic Paeans of Telestes

Ἀριστόξενος ὁ μουσικὸς ἐν τῷ Τελέστου βίῳ φησίν, ᾧπερ ἐν Ἰταλίᾳ συνεκύρησεν, ὑπὸ τὸν αὐτὸν καιρὸν γίγνεσθαι πάθη, ὧν ἓν εἶναι καὶ τὸ περὶ τὰς γυναῖκας γενόμενον ἄτοπον. ἐκστάσεις γὰρ γίγνεσθαι τοιαύτας, ὥστε ἐνίοτε καθημένας καὶ δειπνούσας ὡς καλοῦντός τινος ὑπακούειν, εἷτα ἐκπηδᾶν ἀκατασχέτους γιγνομένας καὶ τρέχειν ἐκτὸς τῆς πόλεως. μαντευομένοις δὲ τοῖς Λοκροῖς καὶ Ῥηγίνοις περὶ τῆς ἀπαλλαγῆς τοῦ πάθους εἰπεῖν τὸν θεὸν παιᾶνας ᾄδειν ἐαρινοὺς [δωδεκάτης] ἡμέρας ξ´, ὅθεν πολλοὺς γενέσθαι παιανογράφους ἐν τῇ Ἰταλίᾳ.

δωδεκάτης exp. Müller et plerique Edd. (in mg cod. mendum lineola indicat): δώδεκα τῆς ἡμέρας <ἐπὶ ἡμέρας> ξ´ coni. West («CQ» 40, 1990, 286-287), δωδεκάτῃ prop. Catenacci («QUCC» n.s. 115, 2017, 67-71)

«The musician Aristoxenus in the Life of Telestes, whom he met in Italy, states that during that same period, prodigies occurred, one of which, extraordinary, happened to women. There were cases of such ecstasies that sometimes, while they were sitting at lunch, as if someone were calling them, they would dispose themselves to listen; then, becoming uncontrollable, they would leap to their feet and run out of the city. To the Locrians and people of Reggio who consulted the oracle for deliverance from the prodigy, the god prescribed singing the paeans of spring for sixty days. For this reason, there were many composers of paeans in Italy».

In the account attributed by the paradoxographer Apollonius to Aristoxenus of Tarentum, there is an example of community cure during the 4th century BC in the Magna Graecia colonies of Locri and Reggio. According to Apollonius, Aristoxenus, in the Life of Telestes, is said to have narrated a very singular episode linked to the activity of the composer of dithyrambs Telestes of Selinus, a prominent protagonist of the disruptive poetic-musical season of the 5th-4th century BC that goes by the name of ‘new dithyramb’, along with Melanippides, Phrynides, Timotheus and Philoxenus (Fongoni 2024). Telestes was certainly active in Athens as evidenced by the Marmor Parium, which attributes to him the victory in the dithyrambic agon that opened the Great Dionysia of 402/1 BC. He was a guest at the court of Aristratus of Sykion between 360 and 355 BC, but, according to Aristoxenus, he also travelled to southern Italy. As recorded in the critical apparatus, the testimony presents a textual problem concerning the term δωδεκάτης, expunged by Müller and most editors and then reinstated by West, who proposes to amend it to δώδεκα τῆς ἡμέρας <ἐπὶ ἡμέρας> ξ´: ‘twelve paeans a day for sixty days’, 720 paeans in total. According to the scholar, this would explain the great number of authors of paeans in Italy that is stated in the conclusion of the Aristoxenian testimony. Recently, Carmine Catenacci (2017) has suggested correcting δωδεκάτης to δωδεκάτῃ: ‘the god prescribed singing the paeans of spring on the twelfth day for sixty days’. In other words, the singing ceremony had to take place five times in the space of sixty days, i.e. every twelve days, a number that recurs very often in the Greek world, with a particular significance in the ritual, magical, and religious system and that, in the specific Magna Graecia context, appears to be closely linked to the Pythagorean environment. If the purification ceremony lasted for the whole day or a large part of it, as confirmed by the passage in the first book of the Iliad (472-474) in which the young Achaeans, in order to appease Apollo, perform a beautiful pean for an entire day (πανημέριοι), five days dedicated to the singing of the paean over two months would justify both the presence of many paean composers and the performance of a large number of songs, without, however, reaching the extraordinary number suggested by West (1990).
However, beyond the possible autoschediastic conclusion of the source, the content is very interesting and rich in information. As also noted by Wehrli (1967, 83), the meeting between Aristoxenus and Telestes to which the source alludes is chronologically unlikely, but it is clear that the testimony wants to link the ecstasy of the women with the composition of paean of the dithyrambic poet.
In archaic and classical times, the paean was a song addressed mostly to Apollo, but sometimes also to other deities, with the basic function of invoking succour or giving thanks for an escaped danger (Privitera 1972). The authors of dithyrambs were usually also composers of paeans, and Telestes is no exception: Rutherford (2014) advances the hypothesis that one of his works entitled the Asclepius (fr. 806 Page/Campbell) was a paean, because, in addition to Apollo, the paean was dedicated to other deities such as Artemis, Asclepius, Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, and Hygieia. To understand Aristoxenus’ account of the epidemic insanity of the women of Reggio and Locri, one must consider that the paean also had a cathartic and apotropaic purpose. As already mentioned, in the first book of the Iliad, precisely with regard to the paean, the idea of a musical catharsis is developed, i.e. the principle according to which music is able to liberate from evils. The episode is well known: following Agamemnon’s outrage at Chryses, Apollo’s priest and father of Chryseides whom the Atrid refuses to return to his father, the god unleashes a terrible epidemic on the camp of the Achaeans. It is the soothsayer Calchas who suggests the remedy: in addition to returning the girl and offering a slaughter (308-311), a general purification of the Achaeans is necessary to free themselves from the contamination of evil (313), before offering sacrifices to the god and throwing the contaminated remains of the purification itself into the sea (314); it will then be Apollo himself who will free them from the nousos, after his priest asks him to put an end to the epidemic (451-456). The Achaeans thus fulfil the ritual prescriptions (458-468) and ‘when they had taken away their desire to drink and eat, the young men filled the craters with drink and distributed the first wine to all, released in cups; all day long the children of the Achaeans placated the god with song, intoning a beautiful paean, and celebrated the Achaean; the latter, listening, rejoiced in his heart’ (469-474, transl. by G. Cerri). The performance of the paean performed by the young Achaeans, expressed in the passage from the Iliad with the term molpe, which implies a choral song accompanied by dance, has the effect of cheering the deity to put an end to the epidemic. Thus, the prolonged performance of paeans in this circumstance does not have a therapeutic function in itself, but is a means to appease Apollo and induce him to deliverance from the ruinous event. In other cases, however, it happens that the performance of paeans produces a musical therapeutic effect in the strict sense. One thinks, for example, of the paeans of Thales of Gortina, a Cretan musician who was called upon by the Spartans during the Messenian wars, on the advice of Apollo’s oracle, so that, through the performance of his paeans, he might free them from the loimos (pestilence or stasis) that afflicted them.
The same curative and cathartic power of Thales’ paeans is also present in the Pythagorean tradition on the therapeutic use of music. In fact, starting with the Pythagoreans, reflection on the psychagogic efficacy of music was born, which was recognised as having a curative effect: through music, emotions could be managed and individual behaviour controlled, and the paean, due to its therapeutic and cathartic power, was performed more in spring, the season in which various purifying ceremonies were celebrated (Provenza 2016, 129 ff.; 2022, 44-46). In the Life of Pythagoras (110), Iamblichus recounts that, during the spring, the Pythagoreans performed a musical exercise: they had a lyre player seated in the centre and all around them were distributed the singers who performed paeans, believed to bring joy, harmony and inner order. Further evidence for a greater diffusion of cathartic pean in spring are Pindar’s first and sixth paean, which seem to have been composed for a spring festival (Rutherford 2001, 38), as well as some elegiac verses by Theognides (775 ff.) from which we learn that spring festivals in honour of Apollo were celebrated in Megara, reminiscent of the Delphic Theoxenia (Hudson-Williams 1979, 225; Groningen 1996, 300 f.). There are not many known names of paeans composers from Magna Graecia; however, a passage in the pseudo-Plutarchan De musica attributes paeans to the authors of the second musical katastasis in Sparta, including Senocritus of Locri, while Timaeus of Tauromenius (FGrHist 566 F 32 = test. 140 Käppel) mentions that Stesichorus of Imera (fr. 212 Page/Davies) and Dionysius of Syracuse (TrGF 76 T 8 Snell) composed paeans. On the basis of these testimonies, one can therefore imagine that there were musical festivals that took place in the spring in the Western Greek colonies, during which paeans were performed in order to purify the participants. Indeed, the testimony of Iamblichus and that of Aristoxenus have in common not only the geographical location of the performance, namely the Magna Graecia colonies, characterised by the presence and spread of Pythagorean communities, but also the importance they attached to music and, in particular, to the performance of cathartic spring paeans. All in all, the Aristoxenian testimony on Telestes would constitute the oldest attestation of a therapeutic use of music among the Pythagoreans. The prescription to the communities of Locri and Reggio by the oracle of the performance of paeans is unique and, as Delcourt (1981, 235) also points out, may have been a suggestion proposed by the inhabitants themselves, an almost obligatory offering to Apollo, on the basis of a custom and ritual established following agreements between the Pythagoreans of the two poleis. We should remember that the link between Pythagoras and the Delphic oracle is already attested in the account of his birth, which was preceded precisely by a consultation of the oracle by his parents, as attested in Iamblichus and Diogenes Laertius (Delcourt 1981, 273 f.). Moreover Pythagoras (VP 110-111), along with other medical therapies, used music for curative and cathartic purposes, both in spring and at other times of the year.
Very significant in the Aristoxenian testimony is also the presence of women and their mania. In the Pythagorean communities, in fact, as emerges from another evidence by Iamblichus (VP 54-57), women were urged to maintain a moderate and balanced conduct, to respect silence and to lead a mostly withdrawn life. Hence, the insane attitude assumed by the women of Reggio and Locri in the Aristoxenian testimony constitutes a highly dangerous and destabilising element for the two communities, as it distances them from the administration of the oikos, which is considered their prerogative. The performance of cathartic paeans with their purifying function was therefore necessary to re-establish the previous order and reintegrate the women within their respective communities.

C. CATENACCI, ‘“Peani al dodicesimo giorno per sessanta giorni” (Apollon. Hist. Mirab. 40=Aristox. fr. 117 Wehrli)’, QUCC n.s. 115, 2017, 67-71; M. DELCOURT, L’oracolo di Delfi, tr. it. Genova 1998²; A. FONGONI, ‘La poetica di Teleste di Selinunte tra tradizione e innovazione’, FAeM n.s. VI, 1 (XXXIV, 57), 2024, 103-132; B. A. VAN GRONINGEN, Theognis. Le premier livre , Amsterdam 1996; T. HUDSON-WILLIAMS, The Elegies of Theognis and Other Elegies Included in the Theognidean Silloge, New York 1979; L. KAEPPEL, Paian. Studien zur Geschichte einer Gattung , Berlin-New York 1992; A. PROVENZA, La medicina delle Muse. La musica come cura nella Grecia antica , Roma 2016; EAD., Catarsi ed ethos. La musica tra formazione del carattere e cura dei mali nell’antica Grecia , Palermo 2022; I. RUTHERFORD, Pindar’s Paeans. A Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre, Oxford 2001; I. RUTHERFORD, Paeans, Italy and Stesichorus, in L. Breglia – A. Moleti (a cura di), Hesperia. Tradizioni, rotte, paesaggi , Paestum 2014, 131-135; G. A. PRIVITERA, ‘Il peana sacro ad Apollo’, Cultura e Scuola 41, 1972, pp. 41-49 (= C. CALAME (a cura di), Rito e poesia corale in Grecia. Guida storica e critica , Roma-Bari 1977, 17-24); F. WEHRLI Die Schule des Aristoteles. Texte und Kommentar , Heft II: Aristoxenos, Basel-Stuttgart 1967²; M. L. WEST, ‘Ringing Welkins’, CQ 40, 1990, 286-287.

Telestes, cure, catharsis, paean

[Adelaide Fongoni]