Mesomedes

(b Crete; fl early 2nd century ce). Greek kitharode and lyric poet. He was a freedman and favourite of Emperor Hadrian, who made him his chief musician; he also served under Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius. It was probably Mesomedes whom the emperor Caracalla honoured with a cenotaph a century later and not a later poet who appropriated a famous name of the past.

Only 15 of his poems have come down to us, four of them with musical notation; information about the metre and musical settings of two other poems has also been preserved. Together they provide insight into the metrics and rhythmics of lyric poetry during the imperial period; until the discovery of the Epitaph of Seikilos (Pöhlmann, no.18) in the late 19th century, the poems with notation were the only authentic evidence of late classical vocal music.

Two poems from the Palatine Anthology (xiv.63; xvi.323) have been attributed to Mesomedes since antiquity. The first, The Sphinx (Heitsch, 1961, no.12), employs a special form of the anapestic dimeter ( - - | - -) and its catalectic form, the paroemiac. West (1982, p.172), following Aphthonius (H. Keil, ed.: Grammatici latini, vi, Leipzig, 1874/R, p.75.23), has described the metre used by Mesomedes as apokroton (‘sonorous’). The second poem, Glass (Heitsch, 1961, no.13), employs trochaic dimeters with and without catalexis.

In 1581 Vicenzo Galilei, from a manuscript provided by Girolamo Mei, published three hymns with Greek musical notation which he attributed to one Dionysius (Pöhlmann, nos.1–5). Quotations from these hymns in secondary sources (Synesius; Ioannes Lydus; the Suda), and the use of the rare apokrota, make an ascription to Mesomedes possible. Recent scholarship has arranged these materials into three proöimia (Pöhlmann, no.1, To the Muse; no.2, To Calliope; no.3, To Apollo) and two hymns in apokrota (Pöhlmann, no.4, To Helios; no.5, To Nemesis). Where the setting has come down to us, it is the Lydian tonos that is used. To the Muse and To Calliope contain a transition to the chromatic Hypolydian with C. To Apollo consists of four spondaic catalectic dimeters followed by two hexameters, but except for a solitary note mark (C = a) the setting has been lost. To Helios is preceded by a metric and rhythmic skolion, which makes no sense in this context, since it describes choriambic dimeters in twelve-time; a poem by Mesomedes in this verse metre has therefore been lost. To Helios and To Nemesis employ apokrota. In so far as they are catalectic, the omitted short element is usually replaced by a lengthening sign; in two cases (To Helios, lines 23 and 25) there is a three-note melisma at the catalexis. Line 25 repeats the melody of line 23 exactly, so that the hymn ends with a kind of refrain. All the poems with musical notation show imitation of the verbal accentuation in the melody, a feature that first appears in the Delphic hymns of 128 bce (Pöhlmann, nos.19–20). In 1903 Horna discovered eight poems without notation (Heitsch, 1961, nos.4–11) in a 13th-century manuscript (I-Rvat Ottob.gr.59; reproduced in Merkelbach and van Thiel, 25–8) after Ariphron’s hymn to Hygieia (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 494–5) dating from the 4th century bce. These poems have been ascribed to Mesomedes on stylistic and metrical grounds.

Characteristic of Mesomedes are the arbitrary nature of his subject matter, evident even from the titles of the poems, his wish to vocalize his poems in the Dorian dialect (except for Pöhlmann, no.1), his preference for apokrota, and his confining himself to stichic lyric poetry. In the settings it is noticeable that he restricts himself to diatonics and the Lydian or Hypolydian tonoi. The rhythmical and musical skolia in two of the three sources suggest that a collection of Mesomedes’ works with all the poems set to music existed in later classical times. A comparison of the style and metre of Mesomedes and Synesius shows the former’s significance for the late literary hymn (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, 606). Synesius prefigured the first evidence of Greek Christian community singing (Pöhlmann, no.34 and p.108).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

V. Galilei: Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Florence, 1581/R)

J.F. Bellermann: Die Hymnen des Dionysios und Mesomedes (Berlin, 1840)

C. von Jan, ed.: Musici scriptores graeci (Leipzig, 1895–9/R), 454ff; suppl., 40ff

U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: Griechische Verskunst (Berlin, 1921/R), 494–5, 595–607

J.U. Powell, ed.: Collectanea alexandrina (Oxford, 1925/R), 197–8

K. Horna: Die Hymnen des Mesomedes (Vienna and Leipzig, 1928), 3–45

G. Martellotti: Mesomede (Rome, 1929)

W. Vetter: ‘Mesomedes’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, xv/1 (Stuttgart, 1931), 1103

R.P. Winnington-Ingram: Mode in Ancient Greek Music (Cambridge, 1936/R), 41ff

E. Wellesz: A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography (Oxford, 1949, enlarged 2/1961), 152ff

I. Henderson: ‘Ancient Greek Music’, NOHM, i (1957), 336–403, esp. 371

E. Heitsch: ‘Die Mesomedes-Überlieferung’, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, iii (1959), 35–45

E. Heitsch: Die griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit, i (Göttingen, 1961, 2/1963), 24ff

R. Merkelbach and H. van Thiel, eds.: Griechisches Leseheft zur Einführung in Paläographie und Textkritik (Göttingen, 1965), 25–8

E. Pöhlmann, ed.: Denkmäler altgriechischer Musik (Nuremberg, 1970)

M.L. West: Greek Metre (Oxford, 1982), 165, 167 n.11, 170, 172–3

M.L. West: Ancient Greek Music (Oxford, 1992), 209, 302–8

EGERT PÖHLMANN