Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/276

 258 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. suited for translation in any classic metre. The churches were accustomed to give utterance to their faith and feeling in scriptural phrases. There always had been singing. The simplest singing is melodious, and tends to bring into a rhythmic order whatever words are sung. It was natural and easy to bring Greek words to an accentually rhythmic order, that is, an order having a regular recurrence of accented sylla- bles. Since the men who dir^ted this choral worship had little conception of poetry based on accentual rhythm, they were not conscious that they were bring- ing into existence a new form of poetry. But such was the fact. There existed, moreover, rhythmic precedents which influenced the progress of liturgical chant. From the time of the Sophist Gorgias, all Greek prose that had style, and embodied rhetorical principles as understood by antiquity, was rhythmical ; that is to say, within its periods the succession of strong sounds was or- dered so as to yield a rhythm pleasing to the ear, and suited to the elevated and semi-musical manner in which dignified compositions were read or recited.^ Such prose was not regarded as poetry, and did not in classical times develop definite parallelisms of accent- ual and strophic forms. So long as quantity survived in speech, the rhythm of prose would in part depend on it; but as quantity ceased to exist, the prose rhythm became more exclusively dependent upon ac- cent, which had always made part of it. Rhythmic prose continued in vogue among rhetoricians and orar tors into the Christian period. It is marked in the 1 See Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, p. 41 et seq.