Rome and the spread of music

Rome, the Mediterranean, and the Spread of Music: The Great Inheritor

Rome invented almost nothing in music. And that, far from being a criticism, is perhaps its greatest musical virtue.

The Romans were the most voracious inheritors of the ancient world. They conquered Greece militarily, but were conquered by it culturally — as the poet Horace himself acknowledged with his famous observation that defeated Greece conquered its fierce conqueror. Philosophy, architecture, sculpture, literature, and of course music: all of it reached Rome from the Hellenistic world and was absorbed, adapted, and amplified.

But Rome did something Greece never could: it connected. It built a network of roads, ports, trade routes, and military garrisons stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Sahara. And through that network traveled not only legions and goods. Musicians traveled, instruments traveled, songs, rituals, and sonic ideas from dozens of distinct cultures.

In that sense, Rome was the first great system of musical diffusion in Western history. It did not create the music that flowed through its veins, but it set that music in circulation.

Music in Roman Life: From the Tavern to the Colosseum

To understand Roman music one must shake off the solemn image that the classical world sometimes projects and look at the everyday reality: Rome was a noisy, festive, and musically omnivorous city.

Music was everywhere. At aristocratic banquets, where ensembles of enslaved musicians played while guests ate and conversed. In taverns and brothels, where singers and players of every origin enlivened the nights. In military processions, where tubas and horns marked the step and terrified the enemy. At funerals, where tibicines — professional flute players — accompanied the cortege. In theaters, where music was an inseparable part of the comedies of Plautus and Terence. And, with particular spectacle, in the amphitheater, where gladiatorial combat unfolded with musical accompaniment marking moments of tension, triumph, or death.

There was no public event without music. No religious celebration without music. No ceremony of State without music.

The Instruments of the Roman World

Rome inherited many instruments from the Greek and Eastern worlds, but also developed its own, particularly in the military and ceremonial sphere.

The Roman tuba — nothing like the modern instrument — was a long straight bronze tube, up to a meter and a half in length, producing a powerful and penetrating sound. The cornu was similar but curved in a G-shape, and the bucina was the infantry's signal horn. These instruments were not for making music in the artistic sense: they were communication technology on the battlefield, equivalent to the radio systems of modern armies.

For more refined contexts, the Greek cithara and the aulos — called in Rome the tibia, literally 'leg bone' — dominated civil musical life. The harp, arrived from the East, enjoyed great popularity among the upper classes. And with the Empire's eastern expansion came new instruments: long-necked lutes from Mesopotamia and Persia, crotales and sistrums from Egypt, tympana and cymbals from the cult of Cybele.

Music and the Gods: Syncretism in Action

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the Roman world is religious syncretism: the tendency to identify gods from different cultures with one another, to absorb foreign cults, and to blend rituals of very different origins.

And that syncretism was deeply musical.

The cult of Isis, arrived from Egypt, brought with it the sistrum — a metal percussion instrument — and ritual chants of a melodic sophistication that astonished the Romans. The cult of Cybele, of Phrygian origin in Anatolia, was characterized by ecstatic, thunderous music, with cymbals, tympana, and auloi played in states of trance. The cult of Mithras, of Persian origin, had its own chants and ceremonies. And all of them coexisted — not without tensions — in a Rome that tolerated them as long as they did not threaten public order.

Boethius: The Bridge Between Two Worlds

When the Western Roman Empire crumbled in the fifth century AD, the musical traditions it had accumulated were at risk of being lost. The figure who became the principal bridge between classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages was a Roman philosopher named Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.

Boethius lived between 480 and 524 AD — at the precise moment when the Roman world was transforming into something new — and was the author of De institutione musica, a treatise that systematized and transmitted Greek musical thought — especially that of Pythagoras and Aristoxenus — in a format accessible to the centuries to come.

For Boethius, music was one of the four disciplines of the quadrivium — alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy — that constituted higher education in the late ancient world. His threefold classification of music — musica mundana (the harmony of the cosmos), musica humana (the harmony of body and soul), and musica instrumentalis (the music that actually sounds) — was the conceptual framework used by medieval theorists for centuries.

Boethius was neither a composer nor a practical musician. He was an intellectual who knew what was worth preserving. And he preserved it just in time: he was executed in 524 on the orders of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, accused of treason. He wrote his most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, in prison, awaiting death.

What Rome Left to the World

The Roman musical legacy is not a corpus of works — barely any fragments of Roman music have survived, and most are late or of doubtful attribution — but something more diffuse and more powerful: an infrastructure of transmission.

Rome created the conditions for music to travel. Its roads, its cities, its markets, its armies, its cults, and its schools were the channels through which centuries of musical accumulation flowed. When the Empire fell, that music did not disappear: it fragmented, transformed, took refuge in monasteries, in barbarian courts, in Jewish and Christian communities, in the cities of North Africa, and in the world being born on the other side of the Mediterranean.

"Music is to the soul what gymnastics is to the body." — Plato, recovered and cited by Boethius in De institutione musica

Listening Suggestions

• Ensemble Synaulia — specialists in the reconstruction of Roman music, using period instruments
• Musica Romana — Italian group dedicated to the sonic recreation of the Roman world
• Early Christian chants as a bridge toward medieval sacred music: first hymns of the Church in the Roman tradition