a disagreeable sound, such as
that of the blacksmith, carpenter, or mason, to be carried on
in their city limits. They dressed in garments of deep purple,
tied their hair in gold threads, and the city was famed for
its incessant banqueting and merrymaking. It was such luxury
as this that Pindar found at the court of Hiero, at Syracuse,
whither Aeschylus had retired after his defeat by Sophocles
at the Dionysian Festival at Athens.

The worship of Bacchus being at its height at that time, it may
be imagined that wine formed the principal element of their
feasts. And even as the dithyramb had been pressed into the
service of poetry, so was drinking made rhythmic by music. For
even the wine was mixed with water according to musical ratios;
for instance, the paeonic or 3 to 2, [' ' ' -] = [8 8 8 4];
the iambic or 2 to 1, [- '] = [4 8]; dactylic or 2 to 2,
[- ' '] = [4. 8 8]. The master of the feast decided the ratio,
and a flute girl played a prescribed melody while the toast
to good fortune, which commenced every banquet, was being
drunk. By the time the last note had sounded, the great cup
should have gone round the table and been returned to the
master. And then they had the game of the cottabos, which
consisted of throwing the contents of a wine cup high in the
air in such a manner that the wine would fall in a solid mass
into a metal basin. The winner was the one who produced the
clearest musical sound from the basin.

We see from all this that music was considered rather
a beautiful plaything or a mere colour. By itself it was
considered effeminate; therefore the early Greeks always had the
flute player accompanied by a singer, and the voice was always
used with the lyre to prevent the latter appealing directly
to the senses. The dance was corrected in the same manner;
for when we speak of Greek dances, we always mean _choric_
dances. Perhaps the nearest approach to the effect of what
we call music was made by Aeschylus, in the last scene of his
"Persians," when Xerxes and the chorus end the play with one
continued wail of sorrow. In this instance the words take
second place, and the actual sound is depended upon for the
dramatic effect.

The rise and fall of actual instrumental music in Greece may
be placed between 500 and 400 B.C. After the close of the
Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.), when Sparta supplanted Athens as
the leader of Greece, art declined rapidly, and at the time
of Philip of Macedon (328 B.C.) ma