Story of the Flute
moral instrument, but adapted to enthusiastic and passionate music, such as is improper for the sober purposes of education.[1] Plato banished it from his republic, saying no modest woman could hear the Lydian flute with impunity. Aristonætus attributes to it great power to excite the passions. Perhaps this is why it was such a favourite with Cleopatra, a fact which did not escape the notice of Shakespeare (see p. 231, ante). An ancient Greek hymn to Mercury speaks of "the amorous sighing of the flute." It is to be noticed that the Hebrews employed the pipe or flute very little; that used in Nebuchadnezzar's band (Dan. iii.) was called "Mashrokitha."
Owing to its bad reputation, and also to its connection with Pagan religious ceremonies, the flute (though said to have been used by the early Alexandrian Christians in A.D. 150 to accompany the chant of the Last Supper)TheFathers
and the
Puritans was tabooed by the early Christian Church. By the Canons of St. Paul (viii. 32), flute-players were refused the rite of baptism, St. Chrysostom calls pipes "the very pomps and hotchpotch of the devil." St. Clement asserted the flute was fit for beasts rather than men, and St. Cyprian goes so far as to say that to strive
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- ↑ As Roger Asham says quaintly in his Toxophilus (1545), "Pallas, when she invented a pipe, cast it away, not so much sayeth Aristotle, because it deformed her face, but muche rather because such an Instrumente belongeth nothing to learnynge. Howe such Instrumentes agree with learnyng, the goodlye argument betwixt Apollo, god of learnyng, and Marsyas the Satyr, defender of pipinge, doth well declare, where Marsyas had his skine quite pulled over his head for his labour."
