Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/133

 teacher at the town of Karthæa, belonged to another such family. Other members of this family were Bacchylides and Simonides the younger, the writer on genealogies. Finally, Pindar himself seems to have belonged to a family in which music was a kind of hereditary art. Early epic poetry, also, was apparently arranged and perfected for recital, perhaps in some cases actually composed, by similar clans or castes of bards. Such, for example, were the Homêridæ of Chios, who, even if they were not a clan of really common descent, were organised on the clan model like the Hebrew "sons of the prophets." Even the dramatic poets, as we shall see hereafter, did not altogether lose the hereditary culture of the poetic art.

Turning to the united cultivation of music and song among the Hebrews, we find the clearest evidences of its communal nature. Before the organisation of Yahveh's central worship we find local bodies, apparently organised on the clan model, engaged in this culture under the guidance of a leader, much as each town in early Greece appears to have had its chorodidaskalos, or teacher of the chorus. In one place we have a picture of "a band of Nâbîs"—a word by no means satisfactorily translated by the Greek word "prophet"—"descending from the high place, and before them lyre, and timbrel, and flute, and harp, while they dance and sing together as Nâbîs" (mithnabbëîm). There is another bard-clan at Naioth—"an assembly of Nâbîs singing and dancing, with Samuel standing as leader over them." Such also are the "sons of" (an ordinary Hebrew and Arab expression for clan) "the Nâbîs" at Jericho, and the "sons of the Nâbîs"