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Page 27
More than three centuries had passed since Homer had chanted
his "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and in the course of the succeeding
fifty years some of the master spirits of the world were to
appear. When we think of Pythagoras, Gautama, Buddha, Confucius,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Pindar, Phidias, and Herodotus as
contemporaries--and this list might be vastly extended--it seems
as if some strange wave of ideality had poured over mankind.
In Greece, however, Pythagoras's theory of metempsychosis
(doctrine of the supposed transmigration of the soul from
one body to another) was not strong enough to make permanent
headway, and his scientific theories unhappily turned music
from its natural course into the workshop of science, from
which Aristoxenus in vain attempted to rescue it.
At that time Homer's hexameter had begun to experience many
changes, and from the art of rhythm developed that of rhyme and
form. The old lyre, from having four strings, was developed by
Terpander, victor in the first musical contest at the feast
of Apollo Carneius, into an instrument of seven strings, to
which Pythagoras[05] added an eighth, Theophrastus a ninth,
and so on until the number of eighteen was reached.
Flute and lyre playing had attained a high state of excellence,
for we hear that Lasus, the teacher of the poet Pindar
(himself the son of a Theban flute player), introduced into
lyre playing the runs and light passages which, until that time,
it had been thought possible to produce only on the flute.
The dance also had undergone a wonderful development
rhythmically; for even in Homer's time we read in "The Odyssey"
of the court of Alcino�s at Phocaea, how two princes danced
before Ulysses and played with a scarlet ball, one throwing
it high in the air, the other always catching it with his
feet off the ground; and then changing, they flung the ball
from one to the other with such rapidity that it made the
onlookers dizzy. During the play, Demidocus chanted a song,
and accompanied the dance with his lyre, the players never
losing a step. As Aristides (died 468 B.C.), speaking of
Greek music many centuries later said: "Metre is not a thing
which concerns the ear alone, for in the dance it is to be
_seen_." Even a statue was said to have silent rhythm, and
pictures were spoken of as being musical or unmusical.
Already in Homer's time, the Cretans had six varieties of
[5/4] time to which they danced:
[4 8 4 | 4 8 8 8 | 8 4 8 8 | 8 8 4 8 | 8 8 8 4 | 8 8 8 8 8]
[- ' - | - ' ' ' | ' - ' ' | ' ' - ' | ' ' ' - | ' ' ' ' ']
The first was known as the Cretic foot, being in a way the model
or type from which the others were made; but the others were
called paeons. The "Hymn to Apollo" was called a paeon or paean,
for the singers danced in Cretic rhythms as they chanted it.
There were many other dances in Greece, each having its
characteristic rhythm. For instance, the Molossian dance
consisted of three long steps, [- - -] ([3/2]); that of the
Laconians was the dactyl, [- ' '] ([4/4]), which was sometimes
reversed [' ' -] ([4/4]). In the latter form it was also the
chief dance of the Locrians, the step being called anapaest.
From Ionia came the two long and two short steps, [- - ' '],
([3/4: 4 4 8 8]), or [' ' - -] ([3/4: 8 8 4 4]), which were
called Ionic feet. The Doric steps consisted primarily of a
trochee and a spondee, [- ' - -] or [7/8] time. These values,
however, were arranged in three other different orders, namely,
[' - - - | - - ' - | - - - '] and were called the first,
second, third, or fourth epitrite, according to the positions
of the short step. The second epitrite was considered the most
distinctly Doric.
The advent of the Dionysian[06] festivals in Greece threatened
to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances, which are to
be traced back to that frenzied worship of Bel and Astarte
in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to the impulse of the
moment, seemed to carry everything before them. Instead of that,
however, the hymns to Bacchus, who was called in Phoenicia
the flute god, from which the characteristics of his worship
are indicated, were the germs from which tragedy and comedy
developed, and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into
dithyrambs. For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess Cybele,
brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker form of this
worship; they mourned for the death of Bacchus, who was supposed
to die in winter and to come to life again in the spring. When
these mournful hymns were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the
altar; thus the origin of the word "tragedy" or "goat song"
(_tragos_, goat, and _odos_, singer). As the rite developed,
the leader of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus,
and sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make
response. In time it became the custom for the leader,
or coryphaeus, to be answered by one single member of the
chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting
of commentaries on the narrative. The answerer was called
"hypocrite," afterward the term for actor.
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