Already by the late thirteenth century, the laudes ceremony had become a weekly feature of civic life on the island, performed each Tuesday in the capital city of Candia in a ritual that symbolized interfaith relations on the island. It was folded into the veneration of icons and encounters with the miraculous, became a site for resolving personal disputes, and was referenced and represented deep within the rugged interior of the island in the decorative programs of rural chapels. Each of these configurations, explored in Chapter 2, reveals a different facet of a political imagination that gave music the power to represent the state in all its members, local and far-flung, visible and invisible, human and divine. Studying the performance of laudes in all its variety gives us glimpses into the chaotic reality out of which Venice’s project of empire was forged in the early years. Both Latin and Greek populations on the island adopted the laudes as a space to negotiate and contest colonial identity. Far from expressing unanimous agreement, the laudes had, by the fourteenth century, become a spectacular arena of dispute on the island.

Chapter 1 focuses on the practices and policies of music instituted in the earliest days of Venice’s empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and on the wide-reaching ramifications of music’s use as a technology of political representation on the island of Crete, the largest, longest-held, and most commercially profitable of Venice’s maritime colonies. Records from the first century of Venetian rule in Crete document the use of song as a bureaucratic tool, in which the singing of laudes—a genre with ambivalently political and liturgical usage—legitimized state contracts of taxation, transfer of property, and vassalage. The starting point of this chapter is a document known as the Concessio insulae Cretensis, drawn up by Doge Pietro Ziani in September 1211, one of the earliest records of Venice’s investment in music as an element of statecraft, and the origin of the laudes ritual on the island. This chapter uncovers the enormous and long-lasting importance of the laudes within the Venetian imperial enterprise, arguing that it served as the sounding image of the state’s claim to romanitas on which its legitimacy as an empire depended.

In this chapter we extend our analysis of the lena to the poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, where the narrative focus is not as much on her appearance or her poetic skill. Tibullus concentrates his readers’ attention on the grotesque actions that the poet–lover visualizes the lena performing, while Ovid focuses on her intention to degrade elegiac love itself. Though they do not have the profile of Acanthis, these lenae are grotesque figures integral to the Tibullan and the Ovidian conceptions of elegy. The images of ugly, sinister, and disgusting actions with which they are associated are for the reader scripts of aversion integral to elegy. Tibullus constructs his script in the subtle manner typical of his style, by making effective use of the reader’s literary memory, which, through a dynamic play of inter- and intra-textual allusion, he engages in the creation of his elegiac grotesque. Ovid constructs his more economically and with bold strokes, presenting his lena with powerful grotesque images– nocturnal, and savage, under the canopy of a bleeding sky – that leave no doubt concerning his intent to use her to subvert with horrid imagery the idealizing purport of love elegy itself.