Page:Pindar (Morice).djvu/18

4 preserved to us from the general wreck of Greek Lyric poetry. But we can see in these no very marked differences of theme, of style, or even of metre; and it is almost always impossible to decide to which class any fragment should be assigned, which we do not know, upon external evidence, to have belonged to one class and not to another.

A class of composition, originally widely distinct from both Pæan and Dithyramb, but which in time became, so far as we can judge, almost indistinguishable from either, was the so-called "Hyporchema" or Mimic-ballet. In this performance a narrative poem was sung (of course with musical accompaniment), while the dancers represented the action of the poem in a species of pantomime. The Hyporchema was thus, as it were, a link between Greek Choral poetry and the drama. It is impossible to determine how far exactly it differed from the later developments of the Pæan, since in this too the gestures of the dancers in some way illustrated the music and the poem. Perhaps we may get an idea of the difference by distinguishing sharply between the successive sentiments (hope, fear, triumph, &c.) expressed in a poem, and the actions described in it (as an attack, a repulse, a murder, a sudden discovery, and the like), and imagining the gestures of the Pæan-chorus as contrived to illustrate the former, and those of the Hyporchema to mimic the latter. There is no conspicuous dissimilarity of theme or treatment between the extant fragments of Hyporchemata and the other classes of Choral Odes. Narrative passages abound in the "Hymns" and