Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/101

POETRY ORIGINALLY SUNG 77 poetry originates in some form of song, in words com- bined with music ; and the different forms of poetry either gradually cast off their music as they required attention and clearness of thought, or fell more under the sway of music as they aimed at the expression of vague feeling. We can seldom say whether a given set of words were meant for speaking or for singing. Theognis's elegies seem to have been sung at banquets to a flute accompaniment ; Plato, in speaking of Solon, uses some- times the word ' sing,' sometimes ' recite.' The two chief marks of song as against speech are, what we call the strophe or stanza, and the protracted dwelling of the voice on one syllable. For instance, the pentameter, which is made out of the hexameter by letting one long syllable count for two at the end of each half of the line, is more 'lyric' than the plain hexameter ; and the elegy, with its couplets of hexameters and pentameters, more lyric than the uniformly hexametric epos. The syncop- ated iambic produces one of the grandest of ^schylean song-metres, while the plain iambic trimeter is the form of poetry nearest to prose. We hear of traditional tunes in Greece only by desultory and unscientific accounts. The ' Skolia ' or drinking- songs had a very charming traditional tune for which no author is mentioned. Various flute-tunes, such as 'the Many-headed,' 'the Chariot,' are attributed to a certain Olympus, a Phrygian, son of the satyr Marsyas, whose historical credit cannot be saved by calling him 'the younger Olympus.' The lyre-tunes go back mostly to Terpander of Antissa, in Lesbos. Two state- ments about him have a certain suggestiveness. When Orpheus was torn to pieces — as a Bacchic incarnation had to be — by the Thracian women, his head and lyre floated 7