Sound and the Ancient Senses

Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, even though it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the spheres. Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities. This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series,The Senses in Antiquity.

List of figures and audio List of contributors Introduction: Sounding Hearing Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter Part I. Ancient Soundscapes 1. The Sound of the Sacred Timothy Power 2. Hearing AncientSounds Through Modern Ears Armand D’Angour 3. Sounding Out Public Space in Late Republican Rome Erika Holter, Susanne Muth, and Sebastian Schwesinger 4. Vocal Expression in Roman Mourning Valerie Hope Part II. Theories of Sound 5. Sound: An Aristotelian Perspective Stephen Kidd 6. Greek Acoustic Theory: Simple and complex sounds Andrew Barker 7. The Soundscape of Ancient Greek Healing Colin Webster 8. Lucretius on Sound Pamela Zinn Part III. Philology and Sound 9. Gods and Vowels Joshua T. Katz 10. The Song of the Sirens Between Sound and Sense Silvia Montiglio 11.Auditory Philology Sean Gurd 12. Sounds of the Stage Sarah Nooter 13. The Erogenous Ear Pauline LeVen 14. Principles of Sound Reading Shane Butler Bibliography Index

Shane Butler is Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is the author, most recently,of The Ancient Phonograph (2015), and editor of Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016). He is also co-editor, with Mark Bradley, of this series, as well as being co-editor, with Alex Purves, of its first volume, Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013). Sarah Nooter is Associate Professor of Classics, and of Theater and Performance Studies, at the University of Chicago, USA. She is the author of When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (2012) and The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (2017).