Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/111

RELATION OF POETRY TO MUSIC. 93 hich have been enumerated, the ancient epic continued to be recited by the rhapsodes as before, and some new epical compo- sitions were added to the existing stock : Eugammon of Kyrene, about the 50th Olympiad, (580 B. c.) appears to be the last of the series. At Athens, especially, both Solon and Peisistratua manifested great solicitude as well for the recitation as for the correct preservation of the Iliad. Perhaps its popularity may have been diminished by the competition of so much lyric and choric poetry, more showy and striking in its accompaniments, as well as more changeful in its rhythmical character. Whatever secondary effect, however, this newer species of poetry may have derived from such helps, its primary effect was produced by real intellectual or poetical excellence, by the thoughts, sentiment, and expression, not by the accompaniment. For a long time the musical composer and the poet continued generally to be one and the same person ; and besides those who have acquired sufficient distinction to reach posterity, we cannot doubt that ther.e were many known only to their own contemporaries. But with all of them the instrument and the melody constituted only the inferior part of that which was known by the name of music, altogether subordinate to the "thoughts that breathe and words that burn." 1 Exactness and variety of rhythmical pronunciation gave to the latter their full effect upon a delicate ear ; but such pleasure of the ear was ancillary to the emotion of mind arising out of the sense conveyed. Complaints are made by the poets, even so early as 500 B.C., that the accompani- ment was becoming too prominent. But it was not until the age of the comic poet Aristophanes, towards the end of the fifth cen- tury B.C., that the primitive relation between the instrumental accompaniment and the words was really reversed, and loud were the complaints to which it gave rise ; 2 the performance of 1 Aristoplian. Nubes, 536. 'AW avry Kal roZf t-xeaiv Triarevova' 1 k 2 See Pratinas ap. Athenaeum, xiv, p. 617, also p. 636, and the striking fragment of the lost comic poet Pherckrates, in Plutarch, De Music&, p. 1141, containing the bitter remonstrance of Music (MovatK?/) against th wrong which she had suffered from the dithyrambist Melanippides : com pare also Aristophanes, Nubes, 951-972; Athenaeus, xiv, p. 617; Horat