Music, Politics and Society in Ancient Rome

Harry Morgan’s Music, Politics and Society in Ancient Rome examines how musical thought intersected with political life from the second century BCE to the reign of Nero. Across four case studies, from the triumph of L. Anicius Gallus to the theatrical self-fashioning of emperors, Morgan argues that music served not simply as entertainment but as a medium through which Romans explored ideas of order, virtue, and power. Changing attitudes toward sound, he suggests, mirrored the transformation of political authority. Drawing on a wide range of literary and philosophical texts, he situates Roman musical discourse within a moral and civic framework shaped by Greek precedent yet distinctively Roman in tone. The result is an erudite and tightly argued study that is attentive to the ways Romans theorized sound as political language.The book unfolds across four chronologically organized chapters that trace the shifting politics of musical meaning. The opening study (chapter 1) reinterprets Polybius’s description of Gallus’s Illyrian triumph as a performance of Roman dominance over Greek culture, in which sound becomes a metaphor for conquest and imitation. Chapter 2, on late republican “popular music,” turns to Cicero, Varro, and Philodemus to show how debates about theatrical sound and moral order reflected anxieties about hierarchy and civic decline. Under Augustus (chapter 3), the symbolic association of Apollo’s lyre with political harmony emerges as a carefully managed instrument of imperial ideology. The final chapter (chapter 4) examines Nero’s self-presentation as singer and instrumentalist, reframing performance as an assertion of autocratic power. Taken together, these case studies trace how musical values were reshaped as Rome’s political structures evolved.Morgan’s work is strongest in terms of intellectual and cultural history. His command of Roman literary sources is extensive, and he reads them with sensitivity to rhetoric. The discussion of Gallus shows his ability to draw wide implications from a single anecdote. By setting Polybius’s account against the broader context of Rome’s appropriation of Greek performance culture, Morgan demonstrates how musical spectacle could serve as an early expression of imperial ideology. His treatment of Cicero’s De Legibus and De Re Publica is similarly attentive, revealing how terms such as modus, harmonia, and flexiones entered Roman political vocabulary as ways of imagining social order. These readings illuminate how Roman authors invoked musical concepts to express moral balance, civic discipline, and cultural identity.The Gallus chapter (chapter 1) also reveals where the book might have benefited from closer engagement with musical practice. Polybius describes the combined sound of brass and auloi as “confused,” yet this need not reflect acoustic disorder. Natural brass instruments such as the cornua and tubae operate through the spacing of the harmonic series, giving them a melodic vocabulary different from that of the aulos but no less significant. Ensembles that combine instruments with contrasting capacities can perform with complete coherence, as shown by the virtuosic natural trumpet line in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2. Rather than clashing as Polybius suggests, the two instrumental families would have produced a layered texture shaped by their distinct ranges and timbres. The “confusion” may therefore reflect Polybius’s moralizing perspective rather than the acoustic reality of the performance.At the same time, Morgan cites Polybius’s description of a striking moment of coordinated action: “And when, right on cue, one of the dancers gathered up his robes, spun around and raised his fists in boxing-style against the piper who was advancing towards him, the spectators erupted in rapturous applause” (p. 43). I would propose that nothing that happens “right on cue” is likely to have been spontaneous. The alignment of dancers, boxers, and musicians suggests a staged and practiced routine, reinforcing the possibility that the performance was choreographed rather than chaotic.Viewed together, could these details point not to confusion but to an organized composition in which each group occupied a defined register? The coordination required between musicians, dancers, and boxers suggests rehearsal, and the aulētai themselves, named by Morgan following Polybius and Athenaeus as Theodorus of Boeotia, Theopompus, Hermippus, and Lysimachus, were celebrated members of the technitai of Dionysus rather than captives. As Morgan observes, Polybius casts the event as a confused spectacle, yet Polybius’s narrative contains moments of synchronicity that imply a choreographed performance. The continued participation of the world-renowned aulos players indicates collaboration rather than coercion. In this light, the event appears less a parody of Greek music than a negotiated display in which Greek musicians crafted a hybrid idiom of Roman celebration. Considering Polybius’s report as an eyewitness account of sound and movement, rather than a purely moral allegory, would have strengthened Morgan’s already compelling interpretation.1At several points, the book’s focus on ideology leaves the music itself somewhat remote. Morgan relies almost entirely on textual testimony. Although this is an inevitable constraint for the study of ancient Roman music, his interpretative lens might at times have widened to address the sound worlds that these texts only gesture toward. His claim that Cicero’s opposition between “old” and “new” music reproduces Greek debates on musical ethos could have been supplemented with reference to recent reconstructions of melodic and harmonic practice or the organological evidence for Roman instruments. The assertion that “song came before poetry” (p. 1) is rhetorically vivid but conceptually uncertain without engagement with evidence for the coevolution of song and verse.2 Such moments reveal the limits of treating music largely as metaphor and intellectual construct, a choice that brings coherence to the argument but occasionally narrows its historical resonance.This textual emphasis becomes more pronounced in the chapters on imperialism. The analysis of Augustan ideology, particularly the image of Apollo’s lyre as an emblem of civic harmony, is persuasive, but Morgan sometimes blurs the line between symbolic and performative registers. The metaphor of the harmony of the Principate (chapter 3) captures Augustus’s moral program effectively, yet it risks naturalizing the power relations it seeks to analyze. Likewise, the discussion of Nero’s self-fashioning as performer relies heavily on accounts by elite historians Morgan describes as hostile to his displays, and it does not fully consider how those descriptions relate to the acoustic environments in which imperial performance took place, such as theaters, banquets, and the imagined sound of the imperial body. These are not major shortcomings, but they do show how difficult it remains to integrate musical evidence of ancient Rome into a coherent historiography. A closer dialogue with experimental and material approaches could have complicated the dichotomy the book sometimes draws between ideology and sound.Morgan’s methodological strength lies in treating ancient moralism as historical evidence rather than as unexamined prejudice. His central insight, that shifts in musical discourse tracked transformations in political authority, gives coherence to a wide range of material. Yet it can also produce a sense of linearity, as though Roman history moved from the disciplined music of the republic to the excesses of imperial display. Recent work on local and ritual sound cultures suggests a more varied and complex landscape of musical practices. Morgan acknowledges this in his introduction, citing material and performance-based studies by scholars such as Ellen Swift and John Franklin, but the structure of his argument ultimately privileges rhetorical continuity over diversity of practice.For musicologists, the book’s most significant contribution may lie in its methodological provocation. By showing how ancient Roman writers theorized music as a moral technology, Morgan prompts scholars of other periods to reconsider the political imagination of sound. Yet his study also illustrates the limits of reading music solely through text. The sources that sustain his argument also constrain the audibility of the musical worlds he describes. The challenge his work poses is therefore not only to historians of Rome but to those seeking to integrate philology, performance, and acoustic reconstruction into a shared inquiry.Morgan’s book is a learned and ambitious contribution to the cultural history of the ancient Roman world. It brings sustained attention to music’s political vocabulary and to the ways Romans used sound to articulate ideas of virtue and governance. If its emphasis on discourse sometimes eclipses the sensory dimensions of performance, it nonetheless opens a broad field for further exploration by historians, philologists, and musicians. By showing how ideas about music could mirror, and at times manufacture, ideas about rule, Morgan reminds readers that the politics of sound remains central to the Roman past.