See how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Citation: Power, Timothy. Hellenic Studies Series Although he began his training much later in life than a professional citharode, who, typically brought up in a family of professional musicians, would have begun his vocational studies as a young boy, he likely devoted more energy to the music of the kithara than he did to anything else in his entire life. According to Suetonius Nero He had honed his relatively weak singing voice through the same grueling regimen of exercises and deprivations that the professionals followed, although the routine seems more appropriate for Olympic athletes than musicians.
Lying on his back, he balanced a heavy lead plate on his chest, a procedure intended to increase lung capacity and stamina of breath, and he habitually purged and maintained a strict dietβno fruit! Archaic and early Classical Attic vase paintings of citharodic scenes seem deliberately to invite confusion between divine model and mortal reenactor. The full story behind this comastic paraclausithyron must remain uncertain.
But in either case the anecdote confirms that the desires of Misgolas were hardly obscure. In both cases the romantic pursuit of citharode by king represents an eroticized expression of a traditional theme: the attraction of royal or tyrannical power to citharodic celebrity.
The rationalizing approach to mythical exegesis taken by Palaephatus typically results in silliness, and it does here as well. But as a metaphor, this explanation is not so far from the historical situation: star citharodes could move mass populations of cities to part with their time and money in exchange for the pleasure of their music.
This is surely not only a satirical theme, although it is that; Juvenal draws in some measure from real-life examples. There is no reason to doubt, for instance, the gossip that the wife of Emperor Pertinax ruled β CE , Flavia Titiana, conducted an open affairβthe emperor himself approvedβwith a citharode Historia Augusta, Life of Pertinax Cicero cites a saying, common among Greek musicians, that those who cannot succeed as citharodes become aulodes Pro Murena How very harmoniously the two sound together in unison!
