Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/107

 ARION.- STESICHORUS. 9 of spontaneous nature into the garden of art, 1 constitutes the first stuge in tho refinement of Dionysiac worship ; which will here- after be found still farther exalted in the form of the Attic drama. The date of Arion seems about GOO B.C., shortly after Alk- man : that of Stesichorus is a few years later. To the latter tho Greek chorus owed a high degree of improvement, and in par ticular the last finished distribution of its performance into the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epodus : the turn, the return, and the rest, the rhythm and metre of the song during each strophe corresponded with that during the antistrophe, but was varied during the epodus, and again varied during the following strophes. Until this time the song had been monostrophic, con- sisting of nothing more than one uniform stanza, repeated from the beginning to the end of the composition ; 2 so that we may easily see how vast was the new complication and difficulty intro- duced by Stesichorus, not less for the performers than for the composer, himself at that time the teacher and trainer of per- formers. Both this poet and his contemporary the flute-player Sakadas of Argos, who gained the prize at the first three Pythian games founded after the Sacred War, seem to have surpassed their predecessors in the breadth of subject which they embraced, borrowing from the inexhaustible province of ancient legend, and expanding the choric song into a well-sustained epical narrative. 3 Indeed, these Pythian games opened a new 1 Aristot. Poetic, c. 6, tyevvijaav TIJV troiTjaiv EK TUV avToff%fdiaafj.u.Tuv: again, to the same effect, ibid. c. 9. 2 Alkman slightly departed from this rule : in one of his compositions of fourteen strophes, the last seven -were in a different metre from the first seven (Hephaestion. c. xv, p. 134, Gaisf. ; Hermann, Elementa Doctrin. Metricse, c. xvii, sect. 595). 'A/iKuavmrj Kai.voTOfj.ia nal Sr^cr^opftof (Plu- tarch, De Musica, p. 1135). 8 Pausanias, vi, 14. 4; x, 7, 3. Sakadas, as well as Stesichorus, composed an 'IA:ou irepaif (Athenseus, xiii, p. 609). "Stesichorum (observes Quintilian, x, 1) quam sit mgenio validus, raa- torise quoque ostendunt, maxima bella ct clarissimos canentem duces, et epici carminis onera lyra sustinentem. Reddit enim personis in agendo simal loquendoque debitam dignitatem : ac si tenuisset modum, videtur eemulari proximus Homerum potnisse: sed redundat, a*'}ue fffunditur 1 }rod, ut est reprehendcndum. ita copiae vitium est."