Things That Sing: The Liveliness of Vessels in Early Greek Art and Poetry

Abstract

Abstract At the outset of Olympian 7, Pindar figures the ode currently being performed to the phorminx and pipes as an all-gold phiale ‘plashing within with the dew of the vine’ (1–12); elsewhere, the poetic voice addresses his chorodidaskalos as a ‘sweet kratēr of loudly-sounding songs’ (Ol. 6.91). This paper proposes that we take these equations between songs and cups, bowls, and containers more generally at the most literal level: as my discussion of protome cauldrons, kraters, and kylikes demonstrates, early Greek artists and craftsmen created a series of manufactured goods that through their materiality, their functions, modes of deployment, and their iconography invited viewers and users to perceive them as artefacts endowed with music- and song-making powers largely independent of human agency. Using the insights of New Materialism and Posthumanism, my close scrutiny of the three types of vessels, together with texts describing these, permits us to discern their musical emissions, vocal and instrumental both, and alerts us to the ways in which music was conceived while even prompting us to recreate something of its lost sonorities.