Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/230

 214 HISTORY OF GREECE. wherein the Thracian bard Thamyris, rashly contending in song with tho Muses, is conquered, blinded, and stripped of his art, seems to be the prototype of the very similar story respecting the contention of Apollo with the Phrygian Marsyas, 1 the cithara against the flute ; while the Phrygian Midas is farther charac- terized as the religious disciple of Thracian Orpheus. In my previous chapter relating to the legend of Troy, 2 men- tion has been already made of the early fusion of the JEolic Greeks with the indigenous population of the Troad; and it is from hence probably that the Phrygian music with the flute as its instru- ment, employed in the orgiastic rites and worship of the Great Mother in Mount Ida, in the Mysian Olympus, and other moun- tain regions of the country, and even in the Greek city of Lam- psakus, 3 passed to the Greek composers. Its introduction is coeval with the earliest facts respecting Grecian music, and must have taken place during the first century of the recorded Olympiads. In the Homeric poems we find no allusion to it, but it may probably have contributed to stimulate that development of lyric and elegiac composition which grew up among the post- Homeric .ZEolfans and lonians, to the gradual displacement of the old epic. Another instance of the fusion of Phrygians witl Greeks is to be found in the religious ceremonies of Kyzikus, Kius, and Prusa, on the southern and south-eastern coasts of the Propontis ; at the first of the three places, the worship of the Great Mother of the gods was celebrated with much solemnity on the hill of Dindymon, bearing the same name as that mountain in the interior, near Pessinus, from whence Cybele derived hen 1 Xenoph. Anab. i, 2, 8; Homer, Iliad, ii, 595; Strabo, xii, p. 578: tho latter connects Olympus with Kelsenae as well as Marsyas. Justin, xi, 7 : "Mida, qui ab Orpheo sacrorum solemnibus initiatus, Phrygiam religionibus "mplevit." The coins of Midaeion, Kadi, and PrymnGssus, in the more northerly portion of Phrygia, bear the impress of the Phrygian hero Midas (Eckhel, Doctrina Nnmmorum Vet. iii, pp. 143-168). 2 Part i, ch. xv, p. 453. 3 The fragment of Hipponax mentioning an eunuch of Lampsnkns, rich and well-fed, reveals to us the Asiatic worship in that place (Fragm. 26, ed, Bergk):- Qvvvav re not [IVTTUTOV Tjfiepat; vruacf c, uairep Kaplxinrivbf evvovx^, etc.