The Ancient Phonograph is a resonant book. Resonant because the argument is full-throated and engulfs the reader in symphonic readings of Homer, Greek tragedy, Latin and Greek oratory, Tennyson's poetry, and Mozart's operas. Resonant also because its voice carries far, reaching and drawing from fields that are usually not in conversation with classical studies-media studies, sound studies, critical theory, and voice studies. Finally, resonant because its object is both as mesmerizing and as difficult to embrace as a bodiless echo. -Classical Philology

A search for traces of the voice before the phonograph, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Long before the invention of musical notation, and long before that of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler searches for traces of voices before Edison, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice-as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists and to voice theorists but to anyone with an interest in the verbal arts-literature, oratory, song-and the nature of aesthetic experience.