(fl 5th century bce). Greek dithyrambic poet and composer. Born on Melos, he died at the court of King Perdiccas II of Macedonia (c450413 bce), whom he had served as a musician. Xenophon and Plutarch rank him with the greatest artists of earlier times, among them Homer, Simonides and Euripides (Xenophon, Memorabilia, i.4.3; Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasurable Life Impossible, 1095d). In the Suda he is credited with extensive innovations in dithyrambic composition. The critical tone of this reference probably reflects the estimate given in a fragment from the Cheiron, a comedy ascribed to Pherecrates and preserved in Pseudo-Plutarch's On Music (1141d1142a). In this passage, Music (mousikē), personified as a woman, has suffered various outrages at the hands of modern composers, the worst of whom is Timotheus. Justice asks how this came to pass, and Music replies: My woes began with Melanippides. He was the first who took and lowered me, making me looser [chalarōteran] with his dozen strings [chordais dōdeka]. Yet after all I found him passable compared with the woes I suffer now. The passage continues with numerous plays on words, the precise meaning of which is not always certain, but the general imagery of the rape of Music by modern musicians and the expansion of the kithara to as many as 12 strings is unmistakable.
The controversy surrounding Melanippides' style is also discernible in Aristotle's explanation (Rhetoric, iii.9, 1409b2432) of an attack by a minor poet on Melanippides' use of the extended anabolē: he states that it had been substituted for metrical correspondence in the antistrophic portions of the dithyramb. From the time of Homer onwards, the anabolē had been an instrumental prelude; Melanippides pressed it into service as an interlude of some sort. The author of the Pseudo-Plutarch On Music associates him with the new importance accorded to the aulos and an increase in the number of chordai; in rapid succession he is categorized as a melopoios, that is, a lyric poet, and again as a dithyrambic poet (1141cd, 1136c). The first of these descriptions does not imply a lack of poetic content, as has been supposed. From a very early period Melanippides was regarded as one who made the text secondary to displays of virtuosity on the aulos. The term anabolē, which properly describes instrumental music, could therefore be applied to his interludes.
Melanippides was thought to have been the forerunner of such controversial dithyrambic poets as Philoxenus and Timotheus; the Cheiron passage strongly supports this conclusion. Surviving fragments of his works, not clearly identifiable as dithyrambs, have stilted diction and a mild degree of metrical slackness. They include lines from a Marsyas (Athenaeus, xiv, 616ef; Edmonds, frag.2), which portray Athena casting the double aulos from her: she calls the twin pipes an affront to my body, adding, I do not give myself to ugliness [kakotati]. This term regularly denotes moral rather than physical shortcomings. Here it stands in curious conjunction with the tradition (see Marsyas) that Athena's disgust was provoked by an awareness of the facial distortion resulting from playing upon the pipes. Athenaeus suggests that Melanippides meant to attack aulos playing when he made Athena speak thus, but the evidence indicates that he championed the aulos and the astrophic metrics that were a necessary consequence of its growing predominance in the dithyramb.
J.M. Edmonds, ed. and trans.: Lyra graeca, iii (London and Cambridge, MA, 1927, 2/1928/R), 23039
D.L. Page, ed.: Poetae melici graeci (Oxford, 1962), 392ff
D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, v (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993), 1429
A.W. Pickard-Cambridge: Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy (Oxford, 1927, rev. 2/1962 by T.B.L. Webster), 39ff
I. Dόring: Studies in Musical Terminology in 5th Century Literature, Eranos, xliii (1945), 17697
U. Knoche: Melanippides, Lexikon der alten Welt, ed. C. Andresen (Zόrich and Stuttgart, 1965)
W.D. Anderson: Ethos and Education in Greek Music (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 55
L. Richter: Zum Stilwandel der griechischen Musik im 5./4. Jahrhundert, Forschungen und Fortschritte, xliv (1967), 11416
E.K. Borthwick: Notes on the Plutarch De Musica and the Cheiron of Pherecrates, Hermes, xcvi (1968), 6073
L. Richter: Die neue Musik der griechischen Antike, AMw, xxv (1968), 118, 1347
M. Maas: Polychordia and the Fourth-Century Greek Lyre, JM, x (1992), 7488
W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 12734
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN