Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/187

 *

both in his actual conduct and also in his disposition, if ever it happened to him to get out of temper or indignant at anything, would take up his lyre, and play upon it. And when people asked him the reason of this conduct, he used to say, 'I am pacifying myself.' And so, too, the Achilles of Homer was mollified by the music of the harp, which is all that Homer allots to him out of the spoils of Eetion, as being able to check his fiery temper. And he is the only hero in the whole Iliad who indulges in this music."

Now, that music can heal diseases, Theophrastus asserts in his treatise on Enthusiasm, where he says that men with diseases in the loins become free from pain if any one plays a Phrygian air opposite to the part affected. And the Phrygians are the first people who invented and employed the harmony which goes by their name; owing to which circumstance it is that the flute-players among the Greeks have usually Phrygian and servile-sounding names, such as Sambas in Alcman, and Adon, and Telus. And in Hipponax we find Cion, and Codalus, and Babys, from whom the proverb arose about men who play worse and worse,—"He plays worse than Babys." But Aristoxenus ascribes the invention of this harmony to Hyagnis the Phrygian.

19. But Heraclides of Pontus, in the third book of his treatise on Music, says—"Now that harmony ought not to be called Phrygian, just as it has no right either to be called Lydian. For there are three harmonies; as there are also three different races of Greeks—Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians: and accordingly there is no little difference between their manners. The Lacedæmonians are of all the Dorians the most strict in maintaining their national customs; and the Thessalians (and these are they who were the origin of the

Which is translated by Pope:—

Amused at ease the godlike man they found, Pleased with the solemn harp's harmonious sound, (The well-wrought harp from conquer'd Thebæ came, Of polish'd silver was its costly frame.) With this he soothes his angry soul, and sings Th' immortal deeds of heroes and of kings.—Iliad, ix. 245. ]