This paper was presented at a conference in Oxford, July 11-13 2004, entitled Song Culture and Social Change: The Contexts of Dithyramb, organized by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson, and will be published in the proceedings subject to final revisions.

The title is taken from an ancient commentator on Aristophanes' Clouds, according to whom 'the ancients believed that dithyrambs caused the "Demise of Music"'. The verse of Aristophanes which elicited this pronouncement is kukliôn khorôn aismatokamptas, the ‘song-benders of circular choruses’ whom the poet lists among the quack sophists patronized by the nebulous goddesses. Although it would make for a less mellifluous title, the ‘Ruin of Music’ would be a better translation of diaphthora mousikês, getting at the moral dimension which dominates in the ancient critics, and especially the poets of Old Comedy, who loved to portray the New Muse as a Little Em’ly led astray, or a debauched working girl blowing auloi at a symposium.

In this paper I test the limits of the scholiast’s claim. It should not be surprising if such a bald statement were found to be overly simplistic, and of course the idea of a musical ruin is already one-sided. It is amusing to reflect that Plato's entire elaborate theory of musical morality rests on the assumption that 'the best music is that which delights the best and, best educated, men’ (Leg. 659e-659a). This sentiment itself, however, is no mere theory, but the echo of a reactionary position which must have been held by many of the Athenian élite in the second half of the fifth century. Thus the Old Oligarch attributes the ruin of music to the fact that the dêmos was ignorant of 'the good' (to kalon) in music ([Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.13).

But to what degree was the dithyramb itself responsible, as the scholiast claims? Since less extreme versions of this accusation, with or without the moral judgement, are found both in post-classical authors as well as modern scholarly literature, it is important to establish how, and how much, this quintessentially demotic genre was, and was seen by contemporaries as being, especially to blame for the Demise of Music.

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