to be inspired by the Muses (whence the term [Greek: mousikê], with a far wider meaning than our word 'music'). Poetry was felt to require delivery in song for its complete expression, while music had little importance except to embody poetry. So the history of Greek poetry and music is a single subject. The poets were themselves singers, and their works were meant to be chanted by readers and interpreters so as to be received into appreciation through the ear. This does not mean that the poet composed fixed melodies for his verses, but that each species of poetry had a recognized style of cantillation, well enough known to be used freely by many persons. Common education was expected to give such familiarity with these musical styles as to preserve and disseminate them. Some sort of musical improvisation was probably not uncommon in cultivated circles generally.
The first style to become established was apparently the epic, cultivated
by wandering bards who intoned their verses, whether memorized
or improvised, to a slender accompaniment on the lyre or some similar
instrument. The historic masters here were Homer and Hesiod (9th
and 8th centuries B.C.).
Later several more condensed forms became popular, such as the Ionic iambics and elegiacs—hymns and odes of a celebrative or commemorative character—represented by Archilochos and Tertaios (early 7th century); the lyrics of Lesbos and other islands—brief songs of special delicacy and point in varied verse-forms—represented by Alkaios, Sappho and Anakreon (early 6th century); and the Dorian choral songs and the dithyrambs of the Dionysiac and other mystic rites—stronger and broader festal hymns intended to be chanted by companies of people in unison—represented by Terpander, Arion, Stesichoros, Simonides and Pindar (c. 650-450).
Side by side with these latter developed the Attic drama, both tragic and comic, with a complex union of solo and choral declamation, lyric and half-epic, on the part of carefully trained performers—represented, in tragedy, by Aischylos, Sophokles and Euripides, and, in comedy, by Aristophanes and Antiphanes (from about 500).
The drama was peculiarly important, since it was a culminating
and comprehensive form that utilized the best features in
preceding efforts and served to make them widely popular.
The social prominence of the drama is attested by the remains
of splendid theatres in every part of the old Greco-Roman world.
Another institution intimately connected with the growth of music-poetry was the series of festival-contests regularly held
