"If you consort with singers and harpists, you may trust your ears, but when
you go to philosophers, whose proper style is 'Silenorum nostri Alcibiadis',
you must withdraw from the senses, you must return into yourself, you must
penetrate into the depths of your soul and the recesses of your mind, you
must acquire the ears of the Tyanean with which, because he was no longer in
his body, he heard not the terrestrial Marsyas but the heavenly Apollo, who
on his divine lyre, with ineffable modes, tuned the melodies of the
spheres."
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: letter to Ermolao Barbaro, Opera p.354.
.......
Does one choose the instruments of Marsyas or the instruments of Apollo?
Steven J. Willett seems to have settled for one, while Shirley Sharon-Zisser
seeks another.
In the woodcut from "October", in SC, the instrument of Marsyas is offered
to the poet. Should he accept? Did he, indeed, accept? As in Theocritus,
the instrument is unplayed. And perhaps it is meant to remain unplayed (it
has, after all, nine stops, so how would one play that?). Carefully
constructed as it is, it is, nevertheless, nothing but a prize, a reward.
But shouldn't one refuse it, and look elsewhere?
Andy
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