Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/95

 EARLY GRECIAN MUSIC. -TERPAXDER. 77 defined limits. 1 Terpander employed his enlarged instrumental power as a new accompaniment to the Homeric poems, as well as to certain epic prooemia or hymns to the gods of his own composition. But he does not seem to have departed from the hexameter verse and the daktylic rhythm, to which the new accompaniment was probably not quite suitable ; and the idea may thus have been suggested of combining the words also according to new rhythmical and metrical laws. ]t is certain, at least, that the age (G70-GOO) immediately succeeding Terpander, comprising Archilochus, Kallinus, Tyr- txus, and Alkman, whose relations of time one to another ve have no certain means of determining, 3 though Alkman seems to have been the latest, presents a remarkable variety both of new metres and of new rhythms, superinduced upon the previ- 1 The difference between No/./of and Me/.of appears in Plutarch, Do Musica, p. 1132 Kai TUV Tspxavdpov, KifiapudiKuv TTOI.T]T>IV ovra vdftuv, Kara vofiov IKCLGTOV rolg eTteai rolf eavrov KOI role 'Ofirjpov /J.I/.T] ~ep fitieiv iv roif dyuor airoqvat 6e TOVTOV Aeyei ovopara Trpurov dlKOlS VOflOlf. The nomes -were not many in number: they went by special names ; and there was a disagreement of opinion as to the persons who had composed them (Plutarch, Music, p. 1133). They were monodic, not choric, in- tended to be sung by one person (Aristot. Problem, xix, 15). Herodot. i, 23, about Arion and the Nomus Orthius. 2 Mr. Clinton (Fasti Hellen. ad ann. 671, 665, 644) appears to me noway satisfactory in his chronological arrangements of the poets of this century. I agree with O. Miillcr (Hist, of Literat. of Ancient Greece, ch. xii, 9) iu thinking that he makes Terpander too recent, and Thaletas too ancient ; I also believe both Kallinus and Alkman to have been more recent than the place which Mr. Clinton assigns to them ; the epoch of Tyrtzeus will depend upon the date which we assign to the second Mcssenian war. How very imperfectly the chronology of the poetical names even of the sixth centuiy B.C. Sappho, Anakreon, Hipponax was known even to writers of the beginning of the Ptolemaic age (or shortly after 300 B.C.), we may see by the mistakes noted in Athenaeus, xiii, p. 599. Hermesianax of Kolophon, the elegiac poet, represented Anakreon as the lover of Sap pho ; this might perhaps be not absolutely impossible, if we supposed in Sappho an old age like that of Ninon de 1'Enclos ; but others (even eariie* than Hermesianax, since they are quoted by Chameleon) represented Anakreon, when in old age, as addressing verses to Sappho, still young Again, the comic writer Diphilus introduced both A?chilochas and Hip ponax as the lovers of Sappho.