Vīvāmus – Ancient Roman Song

Music and vocals by Farya Faraji, lyrics by Gaius Valerius Catullus. This another one of my attempts at conveying a historically accurate sound of what Ancient Roman music would have sounded like based on the known facts. In my opinion, the best place to start for reconstructing their music is the poetry: Ancient Roman poetry used the interplay of long vs short vowel lengths and stress accent to create rythmic effects to the poetry, not unlike modern rap does. This gives us a direct insight into some rythmic structures preserved by the phonemic quality of the language.

Therefore, I based the structure of this song entirely on the recitation of the poem, and simply added musical notes to the pre-existing rythmic skeleton, using what they called the Phrygian Diatonic mode (which is the equivalent to today’s Dorian mode), and building the instrumentation around my reconstructed Greco-Roman lyre, frame drums, ancient cymbals, and a pan flute, all of which were in use back then. Knowing that poetry was often recited musically, I believe this example to be one of the most plausible possibilities of what their songs may have sounded like. The pronunciation used is Restored Classical pronunciation, which is the same pronunciation Catullus himself would have used.

Catullus is one of the great Roman poets of the late Republic, who wrote in the Neoteric style, a style that was somewhat rebellious for its day in contrast to the established norm, since the Neoterics purposefully moved away from the epic scale of gods and heroes rooted in Homeric poetry, and instead embraced more personal issues like personal love, or an artist’s identity. This poem, which we call Catullus 5, like 24 others, is devoted to a certain Lesbia, widely believed to be Clodia Metelli, a Roman aristocrat.

Latin lyrics:
Uīuāmūs mĕă Lēsbĭa. ātque ămēmŭs.
rūmōrēsquĕ sĕnūm sĕuērĭōrŭm
ōmnēs ūnĭŭs aēstĭmēmŭs āssĭs.
dā mī bāsĭă mīllĕ. deīndĕ cēntŭm.
deīn mīlle āltĕră. deīn sĕcūndă cēntŭm.
deīnde ūsque āltĕră mīllĕ. deīndĕ cēntŭm.
deīn cūm mīlĭă mūltă fēcĕrīmŭs
cōntūrbābĭmŭs īllă nē scĭāmŭs
aūt nē quīs mălŭs īnuĭdērĕ pōssĭt
cūm tāntūm scĭăt ēssĕ bāsĭōrŭm

English translation:
Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don’t know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out
how many kisses we have shared.