Miscellanea
Published
December 15, 2023
Keywords
- Hermes; Satyrs; lyre; aulos; symposium
How to Cite
Provenza , A. (2023). Between violence and beauty: Hermes, music and the assimilation of the extreme. Una Κοινῇ - Magazine of Studies on the Classic and Its Reception in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, (4), 184-210. Retrieved from https://unakoine.it/index.php/unaK/article/view/128
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Abstract
The intertwining of techne and violence in the ancient Greek myth is reflected in the musical myths concerning the origins of the lyre on one side, and Marsyas, the aulos-player satyr that embodies hybris and the necessity to ‘tame’ it within the polis on the other. By means of the lyre, an invention of him, the god Hermes is a mediator between the ordering beauty of music and the Satyrs’ violent excesses. Although far away from the rules of the polis, such excesses are transformed in the ‘political’ context of the symposium.