Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/49

27 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE, 27 that is, one unintelligible to the Greeks, we must despair of being- able to comprehend these accounts of the ancient Thracian minstrels, and of assigning them a place in the history of Grecian civilisation; since it is manifest that at this early period, when there was scarcely any inter- course between different nations, or knowledge of foreign tongues, poets who sang in an unintelligible language could not have had more influence on the mental development of the people than the twittering of birds. Nothing but the dumb language of mimicry and dancing, and musical strains independent of articulate speech, can at such a period pass from nation to nation, as, for example, the Phrygian music passed over to Greece; whereas the Thracian minstrels are constantly represented as the fathers of poetry, which of course is necessarily combined with language. When we come to trace more precisely the country of these Thracian bards, we find that the traditions refer to Pieria, the district to the east of the Olympus range, to the north of Thessaly and the south of Emathia or Macedonia ; in Pieria likewise was Leibethra, where the Muses are said to have sung the lament over the tomb of Orpheus : the ancient poets, moreover, always make Pieria, not Thrace, the native place of the Muses, which last Homer clearly distinguishes from Pieria*. It was not until the Pierians were pressed in their own territory by the early Macedonian princes that some of them crossed the Strymon into Thrace Proper, where Herodotus mentions the castles of the Pierians at the expedition of Xerxes f- It is, however, quite conceivable, that in early times, either on account of their close vicinity, or because all the north was comprehended under one name, the Pierians might, in Southern Greece, have been called Thracians. These Pierians, from the intel- lectual relations which they maintained with the Greeks, appear to be a Grecian race ; which supposition is also confirmed by the Greek names of their places, rivers, fountains, &c, although it is probable that, situated on the limits of the Greek nation, they may have borrowed largely from neighbouring tribes. A branch of the Phrygian nation, so devoted to an enthusiastic worship, once dwelt close to Pieria, at the foot of Mount Bermius, where King Midas was said to have taken the drunken Silenus in his rose-gardens. In the whole of this region a wild and enthusiastic worship of Bacchus was diffused among both men and women. It may be easily conceived that the excitement which the mind thus received contributed to prepare it for poetical enthusiasm. These same Thracians or Pierians lived, up to the time of the Doric and ./Eolic migrations, in certain districts of Boeotia and Phocis. That they had dwelt about the Boeotian mountain of Helicon, in the district of Thespiae and Ascra, was evident to the ancient historians, as well from the traditions of the cities as from the agreement of many names of places in the country near Olympus (Leibethrian, Pimpleis, Helicon, &c). At the foot of Parnas- J See Miiller'a Douans, vol. i. p. 472, 483, 501.
 * Iliad, xiv. 226. f vii. 112.