Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/470

448 448 HISTORY OF THE as mere secondary persons and assistants, from the poets themselves, but ■were paid immediately by the managers of the festival.* Melanippides was followed by Philoxemus of Cythera, first his slave and afterwards his pupil, who is ridiculed by Aristophanes in his later plays, and especially in the Plutus.- He lived, at a later period, at the court of Dionysius the elder, and is said to have taken all sorts of liber- ties with the tyrant, who sometimes indulged in poetry as an amateur; but he had to pay for this distinction by confinement to the stone-quar- ries at Syracuse, when the tyrant was in a bad humour. He died 01. 100, 1. b.c. 380. His Dithyrambs enjoyed the greatest reputation all over Greece, and it is remarkable that while Aristophanes speaks of him as a bold innovator, Antiphanes, the poet of the middle comedy, praises his music as already the genuine style of music, and calls Phi- loxenus himself, " a god among men;" whereas he calls the music and lyric poetry of his own time a flowery style of composition, which adorns itself with foreign melodies. § In the series of the corrupters of music, Pherecrates, in the passage already quoted, mentions, next to Melanippides, Cinesias, whom Aris- tophanes also ridicules about the middle of the Peloponnesian war, || on account of his pompous, and at the same time empty diction, and also for his rhythmical innovations. " Our art," he there says, " has its origin in the clouds : for the splendid passages of the dithyrambs must be aereal, and obscure ; azure-radiant, and wing-wafted." Plato % de- signedly brings forward Cinesias as a poet who obviously attached no importance to making his hearers better, but only sought to please the greater number : just as his father Males, who sang to the harp, had wished only to please the common people, but, as Plato sarcastically adds, had done just the reverse, and had only shocked the ears of his audience. Next to Cinesias, Phrvnis is arraigned by the personification of Music, who comes forward as the accuser in the lines of Pherecrates, of being one of her worst tormentors, " who had quite annihilated her with his twisting and turnings, since he had twelve modes on five strings." This Phrynis was a later offshoot of the Lesbian school ; he was a singer to the harp, who was born at Mitylene, and won his first victory at the musical contests which Pericles had introduced at the Panathenoea ; ** he flourished before and during the Peloponnesian war. The alteration in the old nomes of Terpander, which originally formed the con- ventional basis of harp-music, is attributed to him. ft % Fifty-five years old. Marm. Par. ep. G9. 6 Athen. XIY. p. G43, D. when Pericles was agonothetes, and built the Odeium, (about 01. 84. Plutarch, Peru/. 13,) and it is probable that ive should substitute the archon Callimachu9 (01, 83, 3.) for Callias. ft Plutarch, de Mus. G.
 * Plutarch,  30. f Aristoph. P/ut. 290 ; and see Schol.
 * j Birds, 1372. Comp. Clouds, 332. Pence, S32." ^ Gorffias, p. 501, D.
 * 'Ecri KaXxUv ugxavro;. Scho/. Clouds, i'"iG. But no Callias answers to the tims