Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/337

315 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 315 our purpose to remark, that all the earlier lyrical measures might be used for the songs of a single person of the chorus or the stage, as well as for the stasima ; but that, generally, grave and solemn forms were applicable only to the songs of the whole chorus; and that lighter and more sprightly measures, more suited to the expression of emotion and affection, prevailed in the monodies. Hence the rhythms of the Doric mode, known from Pindar, are found only in the stasima ; not in commi and songs airo (TKrjvfjc, which afford no place, where this mode could sustain its peculiar character.* On the other hand, dochmiaf are admirably fitted, by their rapid movement and the apparent antipathy of their elements, to depict the most violent excitement of the human mind ; while the great variety of form which may be developed from them, lends itself equally to the expression of stormy passion and of deep melancholy. Tragedy has no form more peculiarly her own, nor more characteristic of her entire being and essence. A fixed difference in the metrical forms of the commos and the d-7ro owjvjjfc is not perceptible ; we only know from Aristotle, that certain modes were peculiar to certain persons of the drama, in conse- quence of the peculiar energy or pathos of the character, which ap- peared suited to the acting or suffering heroes or heroines of the drama, but not to the merely sympathizing chorus. J § 14. All the odes we have hitherto described are properly of a musical nature, called mele by the ancients ; they were sung to an accom- paniment of instruments, among which sometimes the cithara and lyre, sometimes the flute predominated. Other pieces belong to that middle kind, between song and speech, of which we have spoken in treating of the rhapsodic recitation of the epos, the elegy, and the iambus. § The anapaestic systems, which were chanted sometimes by the chorus, some- times by the actors, but properly as an accompaniment to a marching movement, either of entrance or exit, escort or salutation, recall the Spartan marching songs. || We can hardly imagine them as set to regular melodies, nor yet as delivered in common speech. In the early tragedy they are allotted, in long systems, as a portion of the parodos, to the chorus when entering in rank and file. Hexameters were some- times recited by the actors in announcing important tidings, or uttering serious reflections; where the peculiar dignity and gravity of this originally set in tl>e Doric mode ; but this must refer to the tragedians before vKschylus. + The main form is o_^_/o_^ ; an antispastic composition, in which the arsis of the iambic and that of the trochaic part coincided. { Aristot. Probl. xix. -1 . § Ch. 4. § 3. ch. 10. § 2.
 * Plutarch de ivmsica 17. indeed, says that even r^uytxa) o'ixtoi, i. e. commoi, were
 * Ch. 14. § 2.