ABSTRACT
Music and dance were not quite ubiquitous in Greece and Rome: ancient artisans did not dance through their workshops, though workers might sing, and the discussions in the Senate were not accompanied by music. But most of the cultural forms that define classical culture for us had an important musical and often choreographic component, and that component is all but lost to us. The singers in Homer, and probably Homer himself, sang poems to the accompaniment of a phorminx, Sappho to a lyre, Solon very possibly to a pipe. Both in Greece and in Rome, music and dance were an essential part of religion; hardly any festival lacked them. Our own modern life is suffused with music that is electronically reproduced: background music accompanies us as we shop, as we drive and even as we walk in the street. The Greeks and Romans had only the music they made themselves, but they made much more of it than we do.
