Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/449

 B1AR1AN MUblCAL SUSCEPTIBILITY. 433 lessons of fatigue, endurance, and aggressior, the citi- rens collectively were kept in the constant habit of simultaneous and regulated movement in the warlike march, in the religious dance, and in the social procession. Music and song, being con- stantly employed to direct the measure and keep alive the spirit ' of these multitudinous movements, became associated with the most powerful feelings which the habitual self-suppression of a Spartan permitted to arise, and especially with those sympathies which are communicated at once to an assembled crowd ; indeed, /he musician and the minstrel were the only persons who ever Addressed themselves to the feelings of a Lacedaemonian assembly. Moreover, the simple music of that early day, though destitute of artistical merit, and superseded afterwards by more compli^ cated combinations, had, nevertheless, a pronounced ethical char- acter ; it wrought much more powerfully on the impulses and resolutions of the hearers, though it tickled the ear less grate- fully, than the scientific compositions of after-days. Farther, each particular style of music had its own appropriate mental effect, the Phrygian mode imparted a wild and maddening stimulus ; the Dorian mode created a settled and deliberate resolution, exempt alike from the desponding and from the im- petuous sentiments. 2 What is called the Dorian mode, seems to be in reality the old native Greek mode, as contradistinguished from the Phrygian and Lydian, these being the three primi- tive modes, subdivided and combined only in later times, with which the first Grecian musicians became conversant. It prob- ably acquired its title of Dorian from the musical celebrity of Sparta and Argos, during the seventh and sixth centuries before the Christian era ; but it belonged as much to the Arcadians and Achaeans as to the Spartans and Argeians. And the marked ethical effects, produced both by the Dorian and the Phrygian modes in ancient times, are facts perfectly well-attested, however difficult they may be to explain upon any general theory of mu iic. 1 Thucyd. v. 69 ; Xenoph. Eep. Laced, c. 13. 2 See the treatise of Plutarch, De MusicA, passim, especially c. 17, p. 1136, etc; 33, p. 1143. Plato, Republ. iii. p. 399 ; Aristot. Polit. viii. 6, 5-8. The excellent treatise De Metris Pindari, prefixed by M. Boeckh to his edition of Pindar, is full of instruction upon this as well as upon all othei points connected with the Grecian music (see lib. iii. c. 8. p. 238). VOL. ii. 19 28oc.