Through their distinctive iconography and dedicated function as funerary vessels, Athenian white-ground lekythoi of the fifth century BCE serve as significant testimonials about attitudes toward and treatment of the dead. Although the images on lekythoi were not intended as documentary, they nonetheless grant insight into mortuary customs practiced by families and how Athenians conceptualized the deceased and his or her memory. Musical references, while never a predominant subject, can be found on lekythoi throughout their production history. Both living people (male and female) and spirits of the dead (eidōla) hold or play instruments on the vases; instruments can also appear as offerings left at tombs. The multivalence of musical instruments, especially the chelys lyre that is most often depicted, allowed painters to use them to their best symbolic advantage. They can reference a traditional musical education, the archaia paideia, but also evoke virtues like sōphrosynē and commemorative laments performed in honor of the deceased. Recent scholarship on mortuary theory and the deposition of actual instruments in Athenian graves helps support such readings. Whether “real” or pictorial, musical instruments – like the white-ground lekythoi themselves – served as performative objects of memory and mnēmata for the deceased.

This chapter explores the relationship between theatrical music, visual record, and audience memory as mediated by a group of Attic vases, mostly dated from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals, animal-riders, and/or men wearing animal costumes. I argue for a new interpretation of these sympotic vessels, whereby they are understood as objects that engage and participate in a viewer’s memory of choral performance. I emphasize the referential flexibility of such images of theatrical music-making, which can evoke one specific performance but also, simultaneously, multiple performances across various genres. The vases thus activate a viewer’s cultural repertoire of choreia, which could include his own bodily experience of singing and dancing in a chorus; in doing so, they draw him in as both spectator and performer within their own choral productions.

Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho ponders Sappho’s relationship with her other archaic poets and contemporary poetic traditions, including iambic poetry (Archilochus and Hipponax) and choral poetry (Alcman and Bacchylides).