The role of music in ancient rhetoric Kamila Wysłucha The bond between music and oratory has served as a topic of scholarly re- flection innumerable times and still stirs the minds of researchers devoted to interdisciplinary studies of antiquity 1 . Yet, it seems that its complexity has to be uncovered, since its perception as simply an affinity of two arts is rather insuf- ficient. Favoured with a closer look, it becomes apparent that the bond involves, apart from its main constituents, music and oratory, an abundance of ideas intro- duced on many levels from such fields as first of all philosophy, rhetoric and the science of harmony, to name only the most crucial ones. Concepts from these fields pervade both arts binding them together in such a way that any interpretation of their theoretical background which disregards one of them portends a precarious generalisation. Amid all this, the instrumental role of music in the service of ora- tory has yet to be redefined and specified. In this paper I will venture to present the concepts pertaining to music that were planted on the oratorical ground. If we carefully analyze the aesthetic views that the ancients held on oratory and music, we will notice that the two disciplines of art were much closer together than it is often expected. Their interconnection is especially eagerly explored by the researchers of musical rhetoric from later epochs, in which the rules of composing an oration were eagerly applied to composing a musical piece 2 . However, we have no evidence that ancient compositions were written in accordance with the same rules. In fact we barely have any information about the way these pieces came into being. But what is significant is that if there had been a parallel between music and oratory on this level, it would have no doubt been mentioned in the sources. Instead, various ancient writers on oratory refer to music primarily only in the case 1 From among various studies devoted to the topic I cherish in the deepest regard Wille’s book (1997: 207-217) for asserting issues I would like to elaborate on in the present study. 2 The baroque period was especially abundant in treatises on musical rhetoric that were drawing on the ancient ones, to take as an example Francisco de Salinas. On the role of rhetoric in music of modern periods see Malhomme 2002.