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 flutes, somebody said that Melanippides, in his Marsyas, disparaging the art of playing the flute, had said very cleverly about Minerva:—

Minerva cast away those instruments Down from her sacred hand; and said, in scorn, "Away, you shameful things—you stains of the body! Shall I now yield myself to such malpractices?"

And some one, replying to him, said,—But Telestes of Selinus, in opposition to Melanippides, says in his Argo (and it is of Minerva that he too is speaking):—

It seems to me a scarcely credible thing That the wise Pallas, holiest of goddesses, Should in the mountain groves have taken up That clever instrument, and then again Thrown it away, fearing to draw her mouth Into an unseemly shape, to be a glory To the nymph-born, noisy monster Marsyas. For how should chaste Minerva be so anxious About her beauty, when the Fates had given her A childless, husbandless virginity?

intimating his belief that she, as she was and always was to continue a maid, could not be alarmed at the idea of disfiguring her beauty. And in a subsequent passage he says—

But this report, spread by vain-speaking men, Hostile to every chorus, flew most causelessly Through Greece, to raise an envy and reproach Against the wise and sacred art of music.

And after this, in an express panegyric on the art of flute-playing, he says—

And so the happy breath of the holy goddess Bestow'd this art divine on Bromius, With the quick motion of the nimble fingers.

And very neatly, in his Æsculapius, has Telestes vindicated the use of the flute, where he says—

And that wise Phrygian king who first poured forth The notes from sweetly-sounding sacred flutes, Rivalling the music of the Doric Muse, Embracing with his well-join'd reeds the breath Which fills the flute with tuneful modulation.

8. And Pratinas the Phliasian says, that when some hired flute-players and chorus-dancers were occupying the orchestra, some people were indignant because the flute-players did not play in tune to the choruses, as was the national custom, but the choruses instead sang, keeping time to the flutes. And