Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/45

CUSTOMS AND RELIGION OF THE PHRYGIANS. 29 Each style of music had its partisans : Apollo led the choir of the lutists, and Pan and Marsyas were faithful to the native reed. Our duller northern sense is slow to grasp how impressions so wide apart, yet alike in their mastery, should have been aroused in the breasts of the ancient Greeks, albeit most of us can feel the difference of tone produced by wind or string instru- ments. Whether due to the complex and scientific character of modern music, certain it is that, except to southern nations who have retained much of the impressionable nature of primi- tive societies, it no longer is an all-engrossing force, a sub- jugation of the senses as irresistible and as much to be dreaded as inebriation. The supreme sway music is apt to exercise over the impres- sionable mind of youth was fully acknowledged and taken into account by ancient philosophers in their educational plans. Plato banishes the flute from his ideal Republic ; x and Aristotle 2 is of opinion that the young should not be exposed to music of necessity married to the captivating strains of elegiac verse which in his day still went by the name of Phrygian, as likely to lead to self- indulgence and debauchery of the worst kind. Nor were their apprehensions ill founded, for the melodies played on the flute bore strong and unmistakable signs of their origin ; of having sprung up in the frenzied transports of public rituals to which the Greek gave the name of " orgies," and which were associated with the cults of Thrace, Syria, and Asia Minor. The religious belief of Phrygia was but the worship of the powers of nature ; its festivals were a sacred drama, the subject of which was the eternal struggle between life and death, light and darkness, youth and decay. Upon this theme a rich fancy rang the changes according to time and place. The waxing and waning of the moon, the revolution of the glittering spheres, the rising of the sun, its daily sinking below the horizon and its disappearance in the gloom of night, are phenomena well calculated to strike terror in the imagination of primitive man. Experience enables us to view with equanimity, if not with indifference, the varying phases of the complexes that sum up the universe. But it was not so in those early days, and we can imagine the anxiety with which men watched the rapid succession of the seasons in a region of climatic extremes. But yesterday the tableland lay under a 1 PLATO, Republic, iii. p. 399. 2 ARISTOTLE, Politico, VIII. vii. 8, 9.