Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/451

Rh utterance of hexameters was dropped by a certain derived secular class, the Rhapsodists. These, who recited at courts "the books [of Homer] separately, some one, some the other, at the feasts or public solemnities of the Greek cities," and who themselves sometimes composed "dedicatory prologues or epilogues in honor of the deities with whose festivals such public performances were connected," and became in so far themselves poets, were distinguished from the early poets by their nonmusical speech.

"While the latter sang, solely or chiefly, bis own compositions to the accompaniment of his lyre, the rhapsodist, bearing a laurel branch or wand as his badge of office, rehearsed, without musical accompaniment, the poems of others:" [sometimes, as above said, joined with his own].

Thus there simultaneously arose a class of secular poets and a divergence of poetry from song.

A parallel genesis occurred among the Romans. Though its sequences were broken, its beginning was the same. Says Grimm—

. . . "Poetry borders so closely on divination, the Roman vates is alike songster and soothsayer, and soothsaying was certainly a priestly function." Congruous with this is the statement that

"Roman religion was a ceremonial for the priests, not for the people; and its poetry was merely formulae in verse, and soared no higher than the semi-barbarous ejaculations of the Salian priests or the Arvolian brotherhood."

The more elaborated forms of religious ceremony appear to have been imported from subjugated countries—the sacred games from Etruria, and other observances from Greece. Hence the Romans being the conquerors, it seems to have resulted that the arts, and among others the art of poetry, brought with them by the captives, were for a long period lightly thought of by their captors. Having no commission from the gods, the professors of it were treated with contempt and their function entirely secularized. So that, as Mommsen writes:—

"The poet or, as he was at this time called, the "writer," the actor and the composer, not only belonged still, as formerly, to the despised class of laborers for hire, but were still, as formerly, placed in the most marked way under the ban of public opinion, and subjected to police malreatment." With like implications in a later chapter he adds:—

"None of those who in this age appeared as poets before the public, as we have already said, can be shown to have been noble, and not only so, but none can be shown to have been natives of Latium proper."