Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/42

20 20 HISTORY OF THE thanksgiving for victory and safety. The custom, at the termination of the winter, when the year again assumes a mild and serene aspect, and every heart is filled with hope and confidence, of singing venial paeans (elapivol 7raia»'£c), recommended by the Delphic oracle to the cities of Lower Italy, is probably of very high antiquity. Among the Pythago- reans likewise the solemn purification (KaQapaig), which they performed in spring, consisted in singing paeans and other hymns sacred to Apollo. In Homer*, the Achaeans, who have restored Chryseis to the priest her father, are represented as singing, at the end of the sacrificial feast, over their cups, a paean in honour of the far-darting god, whose wrath they thus endeavour completely to appease. And in the same poet, Achilles, after the slaughter of Hector, calls on his companions to return to the ships, singing a paean, the spirit and tone of which he expresses in the following words : " We have gained great glory ; we have slain the divine Hector, to whom the Trojans in the city prayed as to a god f.'' From these passages it is evident that the paean was sung by several persons, one of whom probably led the others (JLZ,apywv), and that the singers of the paean either sat together at table (which was still custo- mary at Athens in Plato's time), or moved onwards in a body. Of the latter mode of singing a paean the hymn to the Pythian Apollo fur- nishes an example, where the Cretans, who have been called by the god as priests of his sanctuary at Pytho, and have happily performed a miraculous voyage from their own island after the sacrificial feast which they celebrate on the shores of Crissa, afterwards ascend to Pytho, in the narrow valley of Parnassus. " Apollo leads them, holding his harp ((p6pjj,iy£) in his hand, playing beautifully, with a noble and lofty step. The Cretans follow him in a measured pace, and sing, after the Cretin fashion, an Iepaean, which sweet song the muse had placed in their breasts J." From this paean, which was sung by a moving body of persons, arose the use of the paean (Trauovl^etv) in war, before the attack on the enemy, which seems to have prevailed chiefly among the Doric nations, and does not occur in Homer. If it was our purpose to seek merely probable conclusions, or if the nature of the present work admitted a detailed investigation, in which we might collect and combine a variety of minute particles of evidence, we could perhaps show that many of the later descriptions of hymns belonging to the separate worships of Artemis, Demeter, Dionysus, and other gods, originated in the earliest period of Greek literature. As, however, it seems advisable in this work to avoid merely conjectural inquiries, we will proceed to follow up the traces which occur in the Homeric poems, and to postpone the other matters until we come to the history of lyric poetry. § 5. Not only the common and public worship of the Gods, but also
 * Iliad, i. 473. f Iliad-, xxii. 391. * Horn. Hymn. Apoll. 514.