Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/93

COMMENCEMENT OF LYRIC POETRY. 75 type vras to a certain extent consecrated, like the primitive statues of the gods, from which men only ventured to deviate by gradual and almost unconscious innovations. Moreover, in the first half of the seventh century B.C., that genius which had ouce created an Iliad and an Odyssey was no longer to be found, anu the work of hexameter narrative had come to be prosecuted by less gifted persons, by those Cyclic poets of whom I have spoken in the preceding volumes. Such, as far as we can make it out amidst very uncertain evidence, was the state of the Greek mind immediately before elegiac and lyric poets appeared ; while at the same time its experience was enlarging by the formation of new colonies, and the communion among its various states tended to increase by the freer reciprocity of religious games and festivals. There arose a demand for turning the literature of the age I use this word as synonymous with the poetry to new feelings and purposes, and for applying the rich, plastic, and musical lan- guage of the old epic, to present passion and circumstance, social as well as individual. Such a tendency had become ob- vious in Hesiod, even within the range of hexameter verse ; but the same causes which led to an enlargement of the subjects of poetry inclined men also to vary the metre. In regard to this latter point, there is reason to believe that the expansion of Greek music was the immediate determining cause ; for it has been already stated that the musical scale and instruments of the Greeks, originally very narrow, were ma- terially enlarged by borrowing from Phrygia and Lydia, and these acquisitions seem to have been first realized about the beginning of the seventh century B.C., through the Lesbian harper Terpander, the Phrygian (or Greco-Phrygian) flute- player Olympus, and the Arkadian or Boeotian flute-player Klonas. Terpander made the important advance of exchanging the original four-stringed harp for one of seven strings, embrac- ing the compass of one octave or two Greek tetrachords, and Olympus as well as Klonas taught many new nomes, or tunes, on the flute, to which the Greeks had before been strangers, probably also the use of a flute of more varied musical compass. Terpander is said to have gained the prize at the first recorded celebration of the Lacedaemonian festival of the Krrneia, in 676