Phrynis a famous dithyrambographos of fifth-century Athens was at the time very well-known in the Greek world, and as a quote of Aristotle more or less contemporary with the vase brilliantly illustrates: “It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we would have been without much of our lyric poetry (melopoia); but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus.”24 As a musical innovator, Phrynis was as famous as Timotheus, or as his friend and colleague Euripides, all of whom, according to anecdotes, suffered criticism and mockery for their innovations. If Phrynis had not been a well-known poet of the generation before Timotheus, then Aristotle could not have used the similarities between Phrynis and Timotheus as an analogy to construct the story of a masterpupil relationship: the philosopher’s views reflect opinions of all his predecessors. The figure of Phrynis the musician appears several times in Attic Old Comedy. The Suda adds that comic poets often mentioned Phrynis’ numerous musical innovations by which he “diverted music away from its traditional forms”.25 The reasons for Phrynis and other fifth-century musical reformers’ identification in the ongoing comic polemic against the New Music Revolution with the figures of the sophist and the sycophant26 became clear only after the “Warwick turn” in Greek music studies.27 It was in the intellectual milieu of Athenian politics of New Music, that the figure type of the new musician and poet, a radical, over-the-top, extravagant person exemplified in the Cinesias (1373–1409) and the Poet (737–84, 903–57) of the Birds, appeared in comic theatre. He is mentioned in Clouds (333) as a “songbender of kyklioi choroi”,28 and he shares at least one important trait, that of musical extravagancy with Aristophanes’ caricatures of Agathon (Thesm. 39–174) and Euripides (Frogs 1119–363). This helps to explain why musical allusions and jokes occur so frequently in the surviving plays and fragments of Attic old comedy.29 Apart from making the audience laugh, they also mark the character’s political attitude. If he attacks musical innovations or New Music composers, the audience can be certain that he stands on the side of aristocratic conservatives. Plato sketches similarly the character of Laches (Lach. 188d): his role as an aristocratic military commander befits to disparage the Ionian, Phrygian and Lydian harmoniai, and to praise the only “pure” Dorian scale. The audience was able to comprehend jokes that alluded to the double meanings implicit in musical terms. In the Knights, Aristophanes coins a name for a musical scale from the verb “to bribe” (“dorianising” harmonia: dorodikisti, 996): the only one, naturally, that Cleon was ever able to learn. In a famous fragment of Pherecrates’
Cheirôn (fr. 155 PCG) Mousikê complains, in sexualised puns on musical language, about the New Music composers, including Phrynis, who have subjected her to violent abuse. The joke is funny not because the audience was aware of the specialised musical terminology,30 but rather because, as Csapo has shown,31 New Music itself politicised the vocabulary of music as a weapon in the ideological struggle.
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