Moody Music
The Problem With Ancient World Playlists
This article is part of our music special.
Whenever I listen back to the playlist from my first term of university, I’m instantly transported back to the time I was making new friends, learning new things, and living away from home for the first time, all while blissfully unaware of the Coronavirus-shaped hole that was about to be torn into my university experience in just a few months’ time. The accumulation of songs I listened to during those first few weeks reminds me of a place in my memory, a place which has been idealized in my imagination. Sound is one of the most evocative and immersive mediums, so naturally it’s often the first thing people turn to when trying to create an immersive aesthetic experience. Aesthetic playlists have done the rounds on Tumblr, and this post in particular has a collection of playlists designed to recreate or amplify a feeling. It seems that any aesthetic or feeling — whether it’s “Night Time Punk” or the feeling of leaving for college, can be catered to by music.
And so naturally, as a wannabe-Classicist and a wannabe-DJ (oh the duality of man!), I’ve been drawn to the steadily growing number of “Ancient Greece” playlists that have cropped up over the past few years. On my last check, there are over 85 playlists (made by different people, and not counting aulos music) with the words “Ancient Greece” in the title or the description, and many more which draw on Ancient Rome or Classical Antiquity more nebulously. These playlists, apart from their titles and cover art, almost never directly connect to the classical world, but all seem to involve very similar artists — chiefly Hozier, Florence and the Machine, Lorde, Fleet Foxes and Peach Pit dominate — and a very similar sound.
The uniformity of these playlists leads me to ask: if my “Freshers” playlist transports me to an idealized version of my first term at university, what are these “Ancient Greece” playlists doing? What feelings and images are they evoking, and what sonic landscape are they inviting us into?
Though a Greco-Roman pastoral aesthetic is not explicit in most of these songs (perhaps Hozier draws more from the aesthetic of Celtic nature than from any sense of the “nature” of the Greco-Roman ancient world), these playlists explicitly link their contents to the ancient world with their titles: “Ancient Greece gay and in love,” “running barefoot through ancient greece,” “peace in a lifetime of war,” “greece lightning,” “what if we kissed but in ancient greece,” “studying ancient Greece and Rome,” and “ancient greece.” They create a self-described “Greco-Roman aesthetic” through layer upon layer of songs that evoke the natural world.
The appearance of the outdoors, of yearning, and of cursed lovers in the lyrics of these songs reflects the idea of a pastoral haven, a theme which has been an intrinsic part of classical reception since at least the 16th century, and which informs how the ancient world occupies the popular, modern imagination. That’s not all: there’s also an element of something newer in these playlists, found in the elements of “Dark Academia” that run through them and epitomized by wine, burning candles, elitism, and learning.
Based around literature such as Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, Dark Academia characterizes itself on “Aesthetics Wiki” as “revolving around classical literature, the pursuit of self-discovery, and a general passion for knowledge and learning.” It tends to draw on murder and hedonism, but crucially also the classical world and classical education, both of which have been historically largely inaccessible to the non-white and non-wealthy. The Secret History is about Classics students who attend an elite college, and who are predictably white, wealthy, and standoffish. The narrator of the novel, Richard Papen, is noticeably excluded by his background from much of the plotting and conniving his wealthier colleagues undertake. The aesthetic built off this novel fetishizes Classics by romanticizing its study and the white marble of its art.
Though classical reception is never without its thorny brambles and pitfalls, this hybrid aesthetic should be handled with caution. Aesthetics are by nature exclusionary, in the sense that any curation of a visual and sonic collection necessitates the curator excluding whatever is deemed not to “fit.” These playlists uncritically conflate Classics as a discipline with the aesthetics of pastoralism and Dark Academia, elements with a huge bias towards whiteness and wealth. This contributes to the image of anglophone Classics as a discriminatory and exclusionary discipline — something that is certainly true, and that many are struggling and striving to repair. The UK organization Advocating Classics Education and the U.S. Classics Everywhere project both sponsors public events and programs that bring Classics to a wider audience. It is true that Classics has been, for hundreds of years, a discipline for rich white people to study ancient white people and to revel in the myth of white exceptionalism. This view of Classics has contributed to it becoming a discipline dominated by white scholarship.
Life in antiquity, however, was certainly not as white as many would have us believe, but instead was a vibrant, multi-ethnic world. To take Northern Britannia as an example, the Regina Tombstone from South Shields was dedicated by a man from Palmyra to his wife from Essex, and Ivory Bangle Lady was a high-status woman from North Africa who died and was buried in fourth-century York. In the discipline itself, there are many scholars who don’t fit the “white and wealthy” paradigm the public image of Classics suggests, and many scholars make it their life’s work to reinvigorate information and ideas the discipline has pushed to one side for too long — and to teach these ideas, too.
Hozier features most consistently in the playlists I looked at, and it’s not hard to see why. Not only is he wildly popular amongst the young adult demographic and a particular cult figure amongst young lesbians, but his entire aesthetic reception revolves around his connection with nature and the woods — indeed, he is affectionately known as “Bogman”/“fae” by his fans. His song “In a Week” is a particularly good example of his aesthetic:
I have never known peace
like the damp grass that yields to me.
I have never known hunger
like these insects that feast on me
Hozier describes two forgotten lovers decomposing together (it’s more romantic than it sounds). This sense of nature, freedom, and the outdoors is at the heart of Hozier’s core aesthetic. His breathy, delicate vocals and complex-but-light fingerpicking (“Shrike” is a good example of this), as well as the background effects of birdsong (particularly clear in “Cherry Wine”), create a sense of a wide-open space, placing us in the outdoors while we yearn alongside Hozier. He does not dominate his sonic space with his voice, instead leaving room for the listener to hear their own thoughts through the rural silence.
A similar use of instrumentation to create a sense of breezy freedom can be found in “The Mystery of Love” by Sufjan Stevens, written for the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name. This song features consistently in almost every “Ancient Greek” playlist. The Mediterranean countryside, two young yearning lovers, running water, and the open sky: this film is the distilled essence of this aesthetic. Stevens’ breathy vocals play softly in the background, and everything is peaceful. Stevens explicitly references classical antiquity in the lines “like Hephaistion who died/Alexander’s lover/now my riverbed has dried/shall I find no other?” The tetrafecta of a) Greek, b) homoerotic, c) outdoors and d) doomed could come straight from Theocritus, couldn’t it? Listen to other songs on these playlists, and you’ll find these elements reappearing over and over again. When considered all together, they construct a definitive sense of nature and the pastoral.
These tropes weren’t invented by Sufjan Stevens, but were formed in antiquity and reshaped by 18th-century reception. The traditions and themes of bucolic poetry, which idealizes the lifestyle of a herder, were established by Theocritus, an Alexandrian poet who wrote in the 3rd century BCE.
Theocritus’s poetry makes heavy use of the archetypal yearning lover in Idyll 1, where Daphnis leaves his usual forest haunt to drown himself in the river — and just like Stevens in “Mystery of Love,” he is “drowned in living waters/cursed by the love that I received.” In Idyll 3, even the fearsome Polyphemus himself receives the bucolic treatment, changing from a cheese-making mass murderer into a Hozier-like, wreath-wearing lover. Polyphemus, too, imagines his own decay, as he sings “I’ll stop my singing. I’ll lie here, a fallen man, and like this the wolves shall devour me,” (this and all translations my own) drawing on a very similar aesthetic to Hozier. Perhaps the most famous exponent of bucolic poetry is Vergil, who, in his Eclogues, creates an unapologetically Theocritean aesthetic. In Eclogue 2, for example, the lover Corydon yearns amongst the copses and thickets, in danger of death and dreaming of a rustic life “in these muddy fields, in a humble cottage” (did someone say cottagecore?). I see the Ovid or Taylor Swift? buzzfeed quiz, and I raise you “Hozier or pastoral poet?”
The pastoral aesthetic is flexible and not confined to poetry: the author Longus distilled the tropes of the pastoral into his novel Daphnis and Chloe. Again, we find yearning, inexperienced lovers, goats, and picturesque landscapes. The rural landscape provides a locus amoenus, or a pleasing place, wherein the agonies of love are the only disruptive elements. Typically, the locus amoenus consists of shady trees, running water, and fragrant plants. In the third sentence of the novel, Longus paints the picture that will provide the inspiration of the story: a “grove … thickly wooded and thick with flowers, with little streams running everywhere.” The locus amoenus reappears in many of the lyrics in these playlists. For example, in “Strawberry Blond,” Mitski sings of painful desire happening where “bumblebees swarm” and “fields roll on,” reflecting the pastoralism that, for these Spotify curators at least, evokes an enchantment with imagery from the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Spotify enthusiasts are not the first generation to be enchanted by the vision of the Greco-Roman countryside and the escape it promises, however. Even before Spotify existed, people searched for a return to this aesthetic. Today, rich people pay hundreds of dollars to eat dishes similar to the fare of Horace’s Country Mouse, and the “faux frugality” of Horace has found a new home in the “Millennial Rustic Twee” aesthetic, where temple ruins were transported to the English garden via follies. While modern pastoralists make playlists, 18th-century fans literally made gardens.
The classical aesthetic for landscape architect Capability Brown can be seen in his creation of the “Grecian Valley” at Stowe House, using a “Temple to Concord and Victory,” “The Fane of Pastoral Poetry,” and “The Circle of the Dancing Faun.” in his landscape design. These scenes are not just found in the real outside world, but in the outside world of paintings too. Look at the background of “Daphnis and Apollo” by Pollaiuolo, or Van Dyck’s “Jupiter and Antiope”: in both the Edenic, grassy landscape conveys a sense of Arcadia. Even if these backgrounds are, well, just in the background, they help build and sustain a particular vision of the wild and rural ancient world. Lely’s “Amorous couple in a Landscape” does the same thing: by clothing the pastoral aesthetic in ancient dress, he romanticizes the rustic by associating it with the ancient. Lely and the creators of these playlists have a lot of common ground.
This fascination with the Greco-Roman outdoors extended to literary reception: it’s not by chance that Keats, when delivering his ekphrasis of a Greek pot, chooses to focus on the “fair youth, beneath the trees” who “canst not leave/[his] song,” echoing the trope of the piping pastoral herdsman rather than the bustling Athenian agora. Indeed, in his “Ode to Psyche,” Keats relocates Cupid and Psyche from the opulent palace of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses to a rural setting. Suffice it to say this aesthetic has a long history of reception in which our Spotify playlists are the digital heirs.
The playlists I have mentioned combine the kind of classical pastoralism I’ve been describing with songs that evoke Dark Academia. What this means practically is that, in addition to yearning lovers beside shady groves, these playlists incorporate concepts of threat, hedonism, and exhilaration. Such feelings are on display in songs such as Lorde’s “Sober II,” “The Cult of Dionysus” by the Orion Experience, “Pomegranate Seeds” by Julian Moon, and Hozier’s “Dinner and Diatribes.” The themes of these songs, like Dark Academia, reek of luxury and expense, while explicitly referencing classical literature and mythology. That two of these songs directly reference classical mythology is not a coincidence: the “Dark Academic” sound and the music that reflects the classical world are evidently often one and the same.
What’s my point? Why should we bother looking critically at playlists, a non-academic and private method of expression? Who cares if classical antiquity has been romanticized, aestheticized, and reduced to a Dark Academic locus amoenus?
If we do not view these modern receptions critically, we run the risk of failing to see the reductive effect this kind of flattening has — how, in short, this one-note representation steeps many people’s first contact with classics as a discipline in Eurocentricity, classism, and whiteness. Not to mention, the playlists could be better, more inventive, and evocative if they removed the constraints of these “-isms”!
Although the Dark Academia subculture has become more aware of its valorization of wealth and whiteness, especially in the past few months, it is still, by definition, an exclusionary space. The Instagram feeds of Dark Academic accounts showcase white bodies and wealth, perpetuating the idea that Classics is the reserve of the elite. Even before many people think about applying to programs that work on decolonizing curricula or increasing institutional access, this aesthetic develops an exclusionary idea of who classics is “for.”
Indeed, the majority of the artists on these playlists are white, and so even in the musical landscape, let alone the pastoral landscape, whiteness dominates. To be clear, I’m not calling for the delisting of these playlists — at this point, I lay my cards on the table and confess to not only being a Hozier fan, but to adding many of these songs to my own playlists. Instead, what we should have is a critical awareness and an acknowledgement that, even in what seem to be the most trivial avenues of classical reception, there is consistent exclusion.
Laying aside this criticism, I hope that this article will inspire more and broader-ranging classically-themed playlists. I’ll start. Here’s a playlist I created for the Aeneid, basing my choices not on aesthetic, but on text:
· No Cities to Love—Sleater Kinney
· Ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn’t) — The Buzzcocks
· Dear Theodosia — Leslie Odom Jr & Lin Manuel Miranda
· Immigrant Song — Led Zeppelin
· No Children — The Mountain Goats
· Leaving, On a Jet Plane — John Denver
· When I Reach the Place I’m Going — Jessie Buckley
· Stupid Cupid — Connie Francis
· Truth Hurts — Lizzo
· Bad Day — Darwin Deez
· Is this the Way to Amarillo? — Tony Christie
· How Far We’ve Come — Matchbox 20
· We Built this City — Starship
· I Just Can’t Wait to be King — The Lion King Cast
· Should I stay or should I go? — The Clash
· Ain’t no Mountain High Enough — Diana Ross and the Supremes
· Will you Love me Tomorrow? — The Shirelles
· Praying — Kesha
You don’t have to take it too seriously: there’s something very funny about imagining Aeneas skipping, Peter Kay-style, through the Mediterranean singing “Is this the Way to [the future site of Rome].” By detaching ourselves from aesthetic, we can have fun with the joyful combination of music and classics, a combination which allows us to think about texts from a new angle. If you’ve never tried to make a playlist for your favorite classical works or concepts, I earnestly recommend it — not only as an antidote for the over-aestheticization of classics, or as a way to think about your subject in new ways, but just for the fun of it all. Have a go at making a playlist: if you do, I guarantee I’ll listen.
Angharad Derbyshire is a second year undergraduate studying Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. She enjoys the pastoral, Roman archaeology & ale, and has a cat called Minerva who helped her write this article by jumping on the keyboard. Twitter: @harryestinhorto.
With thanks to Caroline Ball.
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