Put another way, guests would likely be literate in flute music and its signification on pottery. Flute music meant something specific to listeners of the time it had a grammar, and had specific rhetorical qualities that would likely be familiar and persuasive to listeners at symposia. During a time when only a tiny fraction of the population was literate, both flute music and Attic vases featuring the flute players were “read” by a far larger population. Multimodal literacies are exceptionally prominent in the case of the flute girl. Ĭlassics has always been a multimodal field because texts communicate in more than one mode (oral lyrics, graffiti, symposia amphora, flute or lyre music, gesture, etc.) and different literacies (for example oral and visual, or visual and written) co-existed simultaneously. visual, aural, somatic), as well as their interaction and integration in constructing a coherent multimodal text (such as advertisements, posters, news report, websites, films).

language, gesture, images) co-deployed across various modalities (e.g.

Flute girl music was clearly considered low status.įocuses on the design of discourse by investigating the contributions of specific semiotic resources (e.g. Plato is not anti-music indeed in the Republic he argues for future leaders to learn mousikē as part of their ethical training, but he deliberately establishes a hierarchy. It was assumed music from the aulêtris reinforced a mind-body split, where women and flute music were distinctly separate from higher order thinking.

In an oft-cited passage from Symposium, the character of Eryxachus proposes that the flute girl entering the symposium with a very drunk Alcibiades be sent away so the men can have a conversation without distraction (Plato Symposium 176e). Surviving material artifacts such as images on red-figure pottery fragments and primary texts such as Plato’s Symposium presuppose flute girls held distracting, if not persuasive powers. Flute girls or more accurately, aulêtrides (female aulos players), are often considered mere prostitutes in classics scholarship due to their status as slaves, suggestive dress, and their signification of the presence of Dionysius due to playing at symposia where drunken excesses take place. The figure of the ancient “flute girl,” once thought to be merely an entertainer-prostitute, is problematic and complex.

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