,
the odes of Sappho and Pindar, those of the latter having a
novel periodicity of form which gives force to the suggestion
that these choric dances were the forerunners of our modern
instrumental forms.

Such matters, however, take us from our actual subject, and we
will therefore turn to Pythagoras, at Crotona, in Italy (about
500 B.C.), whom we find already laying down the rules forming
a mathematical and scientific basis for the Greek musical scale.

More than three centuries had passed since Homer had chanted
his "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and in the course of the succeeding
fifty years some of the master spirits of the world were to
appear. When we think of Pythagoras, Gautama, Buddha, Confucius,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Sappho, Pindar, Phidias, and Herodotus as
contemporaries--and this list might be vastly extended--it seems
as if some strange wave of ideality had poured over mankind.
In Greece, however, Pythagoras's theory of metempsychosis
(doctrine of the supposed transmigration of the soul from
one body to another) was not strong enough to make permanent
headway, and his scientific theories unhappily turned music
from its natural course into the workshop of science, from
which Aristoxenus in vain attempted to rescue it.

At that time Homer's hexameter had begun to experience many
changes, and from the art of rhythm developed that of rhyme and
form. The old lyre, from having four strings, was developed by
Terpander, victor in the first musical contest at the feast
of Apollo Carneius, into an instrument of seven strings, to
which Pythagoras[05] added an eighth, Theophrastus a ninth,
and so on until the number of eighteen was reached.

Flute and lyre playing had attained a high state of excellence,
for we hear that Lasus, the teacher of the poet Pindar
(himself the son of a Theban flute player), introduced into
lyre playing the runs and light passages which, until that time,
it had been thought possible to produce only on the flute.

The dance also had undergone a wonderful development
rhythmically; for even in Homer's time we read in "The Odyssey"
of the court of Alcinoues at Phocaea, how two princes danced
before Ulysses and played with a scarlet ball, one throwing
it high in the air, the other always catching it with his
feet off the ground; and then changing, they flung the ball
from one to the other with such rapidity that it made the
onlookers dizzy. During the play, Demidocus chanted a song,
and accomp