CHAPTER XXVI.
How the Music Grew.
IN THE DAYS OF A THOUSAND YEARS.
“Most things in Greece are subjects of dispute,” so wrote Pausanias, and his word for it may be accepted freely. As it was in his day (writing in 174 A.D.) so it is in ours; learned authorities so differ on simplest points that the wayfarer asking questions has no little difficulty in deciding whom he shall heed, whose directions he should follow.
The evolution of the musical scale should be of interest even to musicians who would not make the subject a study. How step by step our diatonic scale developed, how it has become what it is gradually by slow degrees—does anybody know? Certainly. Wise men in their libraries find much; the erudition is deep and they can expound it in their own way, but it is the way for the plodding student, not intended to attract the general reader. Moreover the wise men do not agree, and the wayfarer in literature after reading many books fails to obtain the clear account which he has been seeking. Having had occasion to go into the matter of the Greek system on the historical side, I saw how confused it was, and how necessary to examine author against author, to try to arrive at some orderly assignment of steps and changes made in those distant times, and to endeavour to bring home to the mind the conception of a chain of historic facts.
Traditions embody general beliefs in stated facts, or supposed facts, and history makes record of these, giving to them more or less credence. The statements concerning the earliest developments of the Greek scale are based upon traditions, since it was not until after the lapse of many centuries that anything was written.
The recorded periods of civilization that held good in ancient chronology have many of them been displaced by the newest explorers, whose work within the last few years has been prolific in discoveries affecting calculations of the relations of time in the past. The dates I adopt will therefore have to be considered authentic only so far as the learned choose to agree concerning them.
Old historians stated that Athens was founded in 1556 B.C. by Cecrops, who led a colony from Sais, in Egypt, and established the kingdom of Athens. Neith, or Nit, was the deity of Sais, her name also was Minerva, the patron goddess of Athens. In less than fifty years after, Danaus, who was accounted a brother of Amenhotep III. (by some Egyptologists called Amunoph) left Egypt 1400 B.C. and founded Argos, of which he became king, and died 1425 B.C.
These are highly important dates in the perspective of history. Egypt, through the wars of Thotmes III. and the later expeditions of the Amenhotep Pharaohs, had been raised to the height of empire; Mesopotamia and Syria had been brought under her rule and her armies were constantly traversing and retraversing that extensive region tributary to her (known now by us as Asia Minor), reaching along that coast of the Mediterranean and even to Cyprus, Crete and other isles.
By a few touches of history and a chain of dates, it may be possible to bring before you life as it was, to excite your imagination to realise in a broad view the state of the then known world, when in all that vast territory, the high civilization to which Egypt had attained could not have failed to influence the daily lives of those myriads of peoples, busy with their tradings, and little ambitions, and religions, and domestic wants, and pleasures. It was a very composite population, tribes, clans and races, or by whatever names we class them, full of jealousies and antagonisms, only held in abeyance from fighting by the prospect of greater gain by trading with one another.
The musical instincts of the whole of these peoples probably followed one channel common to all, their music differing but little from what we call “folk-song”; and even varieties of language need not have raised barriers in musical feeling, as the instance of the Song of Linus referred to by Herodotus (see pages [63]-4 ante) clearly shews.