Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/49

 THE TRAGIC CHORUS. — ARION. 31 a higher degree of perfection in another With regard to Athens in particular, it appears to us, that we have in some sort positive evidence that choruses were not instituted there until the Athenians had recognized the Dorian oracle at Delphi ; for some old Delphian oracles have come down to us^ particularly enjoining these Doric rites, a command which could hardly have been necessary, had they existed at Athens from the first. It must be obvious that so long as the choral music and dancing of the Dorians were a religious exercise in which the whole popula- tion took a part, the tunes and figures must have been very simple and unartificial. A few plain regulative notes on the tetrachord, and as much concinnity of movement as the public drill-masters could effect, sufficed for the recitation and performance of Paeans in Laced^mon, Crete, and Delos. But, as a natural consequence of the importance attached to music and dancing, in countries where they formed the basis of religious, political, and military organi- sation, it was not long before art and genius volunteered their ser- vices, and improvements in the theory and practice of instrumental music were eagerly adopted and imported, or cultivated by emulous harpers in the Dorian states. The jEolian colonists of Lesbos, from their proximity to the coast of Asia Minor, were among the first who sought to accommodate the more extensive and varied harmonies of the Phrygians and Lydians to the uses and require- ments of the Dorian chorus. Terpander, of Lesbos, who gained the prize at the Lacedaemonian Carneia in B.C. 676^, substituted the seven-stringed cithara for the old tetrachord; and his contempo- raries, the Grgeco-Phrygian Olympus, and the Boeotian Clonas, exercised an influence scarcely less important on the flute-music of the Greeks. A little later, Thaletas, the Cretan, imported into the choral worship of his own country and Sparta a more impassioned style of music and dancing, which was intimately connected with the rhythmical innovations of Terpander and Olympus'*; and the Lydian Alcman, who was a great poet as well as a great musician, composed songs for the popular chorus, which may be considered as the true beginning of lyric poetry. As these improvements ^ See Themistius, Oral, xxvil. p. 337 A, Harduin. : dX' oi^kv tcus KuXvei ra wap* eripoLi dpxw Xa^ovTa TrXetWos a-TrouS^s Trap' dWois TvyxoLytLV. 2 Apud Demosth. Mid. p. 531, § 15, Buttm. 3 Athenseus, xiv. p, 635 E.
 * MuUer, Hid. Lit. Gr. c. xii. § 10.