摘要

Ancient Greek music has long been a research focus for classical scholars. Music in the ancient Roman world much less so, mainly because of two interrelated factors: (1) “it has generally been held, perhaps rightly, that music was much less important in Roman life than in Archaic or Classical Greece” (Andrew Barker in Oxford Classical Dictionary 2012); and (2) very few musical treatises written by Romans have survived. Harry Morgan in Music, Politics, and Society (2023), however, amassing a substantial body of evidence, hoped “to have made compelling case for integrating music into the broader scope of Roman social and political history’ (p. 248) — an objective which Leofranc Holford-Strevens judged the book had achieved in his review in Music and Letters (May 2024). Building on this foundation I examine the picture of music that we find in the poems of Tibullus, a Roman poet (c.55 BCE – 18 BCE), who worked in the tradition of Hellenistic Greek poets. Key questions include: what view of music, musical instruments and their origins do we find in his oeuvre and what picture does he give of the role of music in everyday Roman life? The lecture will start with a short introduction on ancient Greek and Roman musical instruments.