Summary Of Plato The Tyrant Of Sicyon

In the fourth century BCE Plato repeated the warning of Damon, a prominent musical theorist of the fifth century, that, “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions” (Resp. 424c). Plato, as Damon before him, relies here on a prevailing cultural predisposition towards the interdependency of music and politics, a notion that sounds quite foreign to modern ears but was to a fact an innate trait of ancient Greek society. The Greek world offered many venues for musical and political synergy, but their reciprocity presented itself most visibly in the religious sphere. In archaic and classical times, the cultic arena served as the main loci for public musical performances, and,

Respectively, acts of political reforms often coincided with the restructuring of customary musico-ritualistic practices and meanings. The Athenian Kleisthenes, as well as his maternal grandfather, Kleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, carried extensive political, social and religious reforms in their respective poleis. In both instances, the political reorganizations were supplemented by a remodeling of the established sacred soundscape, if through the introduction of musical competitions, the abolishment of older musical customs or via an exchange of customary musical practices between cults. For the Greeks, ritualistic musical performances were openly believed to be highly potent mechanisms for the resolution of social crises, the maintenance of political order and for the formulation of civic

I will focus on several areas of research that seems to me most likely to generate new perspectives for the study of ancient Greek culture. Thus, I will follow the accepted methods by which cultic musical practices served as signifiers for political authority; the uses of music in situations of political change (if during political reforms, the foundation of new poleis or in inter-polis political conflicts); and the lexical evidences for the interconnectedness of music and politics (the Greek word nomos, for instance, signified both a political `law` and a fixed musical