Cult-song and festival revival in Hellenistic Athens
Creators: name: Brandwood, Steven
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This embraces two central goals. In the first case, it seeks to demonstrate that the revival of civic religious festivals, an understudied element of ancient life, was a recognized category of religious activity during the Hellenistic period, similar to and influenced by the other changes in festival status that were common at the time. The second goal builds upon the first to examine the performance culture of these revived festivals and focuses especially on the music performed at the Pythaïs festival that the Athenians revived in 138/7 BCE and periodically celebrated at Delphi. Athenian performance at the Pythaïs is uniquely well-documented, as two hymns to Apollo that formed part of the celebration of 128/7 BCE were inscribed along with their musical notation on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, the only such example to have survived from the Greek world. This dissertation offers a reading of these hymns and their accompanying music in the context of their revived festival performance as calculated engagements with the city’s legendary and historical pasts that sought to position the city of Athens as the cultural leader of the Greek world in the shadow of the newly ascendant Roman empire.The first chapter assesses the language found in accounts and documents related to festival revival and delineates the semantic field within which festival revival took place, dominated by diplomatic and construction activity. The second chapter concerns the discourse related to festival revival that existed at Athens during the Archaic and Classical periods. This analysis settles initially on the origin myths of the four great Panhellenic festivals, before turning attention to the revived Athenian Delia festival on Delos in the late-fifth century BCE and the choral performances that it hosted and that serve as an important model for analysis of the Delphic Hymns. Finally, this chapter considers the dramatization of festival revival in Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Peace to show that festival revival was a recognized feature of Athenian religious culture throughout the Classical period.With some context established, the third chapter turns to the dossier of documents related to the celebrations of the Pythaïs in 138/7 and 128/7 BCE and focuses especially on how this dossier can inform an understanding of the Delphic Hymns. These documents demonstrate that the Athenians presented themselves in 128/7 as an embodiment of the democratic city of the Classical period and a preserver of its civic and military prowess and ideology. The city was joined in its self-presentation by the Athenian Dionysiac Artists, the musicians who composed and performed the two hymns for the festival. These hymns with their complementary musical notation — one instrumental and one vocal — served as evidence of Athens’ long history with Delphi, but were also a potent advertisement of Athenian musical, and hence cultural, expertise. The Hymns honored both the city of Athens and its musical elite and their acknowledgement of the revived performance setting of the Pythaïs endowed the compositions with a historical depth that masterfully exploited their position on the Athenian Treasury at Delphi.