VOCI Antropologia Sonora del Mondo Antico | I ED. 2008 | M. BETTINI

In Voci. Antropologia sonora del mondo antico, Maurizio Bettini examines the soundscape of the ancient Greco-Roman world, with particular attention to the voices of animals and humans as heard (and imagined) in antiquity. Combining anthropology, philology and linguistics, he reconstructs how ancient societies perceived, interpreted and used “voices” — from the bray of a donkey and the song of birds to prophetic glossolalia and poetic metamorphosis — as meaningful signals within their cultural universe. This work offers a unique contribution to the study of ancient sensory experience, of how sound and meaning were intertwined, and invites the reader to consider what has been lost and what remains only in text-traces of a vanished auditory world.