Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/50

28 2S HISTORY OF THE sus, however, in Phocis, was said to have been situated the city of Daulis, the seat of the Thracian king Tereus, who is known by his connexion with the Athenian king Pandion, and by the fable of the metamor- phosis of his wife Procne into a nightingale. This story (which occurs under other forms in several parts of Greece) is one of those simple fables which, among the early inhabitants of Greece easily grew from a contemplation of the phenomena of Nature and the still life of animals : the nightingale, with her sad nocturnal song, seemed to them to lament a lost child, whose name Itys, or Itylus, they imagined that they could hear in her notes ; the reason why the nightingale, when a human being, was supposed to have dwelt in this district was, that it had the fame of being the native country of the art of singing, where the Muses would be most likely to impart their gifts to animals ; as in other parts of Greece it was said that the nightingales sang sweetly over the grave of the ancient minstrel, Orpheus. From what has been said, it appears suffi- ciently clear that these Pierians or Thracians, dwelling about Helicon and Parnassus in the vicinity of Attica, are chiefly signified when a Thracian origin is ascribed to the mythical bards of Attica. § 9. It is an obvious remark, that with these movements of the Pierians was also connected the extension of the temples of the Muses in Greece, who alone among the gods are represented by the ancient poets as presiding over poetry, since Apollo, in strictness, is only con- cerned with the music of the cithara. Homer calls the Muses the Olym- pian ; in Hesiod, at the beginning of the Theogony, they are called the Heliconian, although, according to the notion of the Bceotian poet, they were born on Olympus, and dwelt at a short distance from the highest pinnacle of this mountain, where Zeus was enthroned ; whence they only go at times to Helicon, bathe in Hippocrene, and celebrate their choral dances around the altar of Zeus on the top of the mountain. Now, when it is borne in mind that the same mountain on which the worship of the Muses originally flourished was also represented in the earliest Greek poetry as the common abode of the Gods ; in which, whatever country they might singly prefer, they jointly assembled about the throne of the chief god, it seems highly probable that it was the poets of this region, the ancient Pierian minstrels, whose imagination had created this council of the gods and had distributed and arranged its parts. Those things which the epic poetry of Homer must have derived from earlier compositions (such as the first notions concerning the structure of the world, the dominions of the Olympian gods and the Titans, the established epithets which are applied to the gods, without reference to the peculiar circumstances under which they appear, and which often disagree with the rest of the epic mythology) probably must, in great measure, be referred to these Pierian bards. Moreover, their poetry was doubtless not concerned merely with the gods, but contained the first germs of the
 * Apollodorus, i. 3. 3.