Since poetry, music, singing, and dancing were the chief components of a Hellenic boy’s education, the æsthetic canons by which these were regulated came to be of great importance in the moral history of Hellas, and were the objects of much thought and inquiry on the part of the educational theorists. It is hard for a modern reader to understand the attitude which Plato and Aristotle adopt towards poetry, art, and music, partly owing to the way in which these subjects are neglected in many modern schools, and still more owing to the immense changes which have taken place both in the subjects themselves and in their relations to the State as a whole.
In ancient Hellas art, literature, and music were addressed to the whole citizen-body, not to a cultured upper class. The epics were recited to crowds that might number thousands. The choral lyrics were danced and sung by large choruses in the presence of a whole city. Tragedy and Comedy were acted before the whole Athenian populace, swollen by crowds from every part of Hellas. The great orations were spoken either to the national assembly, where every grown man might be present, or to a jury of several hundred citizens. So with Hellenic art. The statues and pictures were not created for private drawing-rooms, but for public temples, colonnades, or gymnasia.
Thus it was national, not individual taste which was the standard of Hellenic art and literature: they had to follow the taste of the city, not of a clique. But every city in Hellas, as in the Italy of the Renaissance, had an intense individuality of its own, which dominated its poets, artists, and musicians. The art-schools of the islands, of Argos, of Athens were as distinct from one another as those of Venice, Florence, Perugia. The greater centres had types of music so far distinct that they required different instruments. Language, character, and politics in like manner presented a different aspect in each community. But underneath this ubiquitous local individuality lay the fundamental distinction between the Dorian, on the one hand, and the Ionian, with whom for æsthetic purposes may be classed the Aeolian, on the other. For Hellenism began to run its course in two distinct channels, the Doric and the Ionic.[680]
The Doric characteristics were the sacrifice of the detail and the individual to the whole and the community, a love of terseness and simplicity, a strong sense of harmony, order, and proportion, a hatred of complexity, mystery, vagueness, and luxury, and a preference for the perfect body over the developed intellect. The Dorians were essentially one-sided, and lacking in imagination, intellect, and invention; they were strong conservatives, and any innovation was repugnant to them.
The Ionians were a very different people. Individualism was strong in them from the first. They had a tendency to floridity, to exaggeration of detail, and to luxury. A quick-witted and imaginative race, they were fond of perpetual innovation. Versatility was characteristic of them. They preferred intellectual to physical success. Their imagination outran their powers of execution. They had none of the solidity of the less brilliant Dorian, none of his discipline, self-restraint, directness, or perseverance. They were his inferiors in most physical and ethical qualities, his superiors in all intellectual pursuits.
Till the fifth century the two conflicting types exercise little influence upon one another. The Ionians produce a sensuous, dreamy, refined, and imaginative sculpture; the Dorians a series of physically excellent but wholly unintellectual athlete-statues. The Aeolians produce the personal lyrics of love and wine; the Dorians the choral poetry of athletic triumphs and gymnastic dances. The Dorians can claim the ethical and collectivist philosophy of Pythagoras; the Ionians the intellectual and individualist philosophy of the so-called Ionian schools.
Athens during this period was purely Ionic, as her statues, the remains of which are now being recovered from the rubbish heaps where Xerxes threw them, abundantly testify. Further evidence comes from the style of dress shown in these statues and in other works of art of the period: it is almost oriental.[681] The statues reveal an excess of detail and over-refinement: the most common type was a draped woman. The Dorians, on the other hand, were most successful in the nude male type; and the great Aeginetan school quite failed to represent the goddess Athena.
The same principle of differentiation applied to music as well as to art, in Hellas: the Dorian, the Ionian, the Aeolian, as well as the neighbouring Phrygian and Lydian, each produced a type of their own, or “harmony,” as it was called. Each “harmony” bore the mark of the “ethos,” or moral character, of the tribe or race which produced it, plainly and unmistakably. Music in early Hellas must have been of a primitive type, and an acute musical ear had not yet been developed by long training. Consequently, the average Hellenic audience was in the position of the utterly unmusical man of modern times: the complicated music of modern masters would have been wholly unintelligible to them, and the only meanings which they could extract from music were certain broad ethical impressions. The unmusical man is stirred by a good marching tune, moved to a certain depression by a dirge or dead march, enlivened and excited by a rollicking bacchanalian song, and reduced to a solemn and half-religious frame of mind by the tones of a great organ. So with the average Hellene: he extracted this amount of impressions from his music, and no more. Any idea of music as the voice of the unutterable was quite foreign to his mind; in fact, he disliked any music that was unaccompanied by singing: tunes without words were unknown in earlier Hellas.
How these different harmonies were produced, by what combination of notes and scales each was regulated, may be left to the specialists: it is one of those questions which will probably never be settled conclusively. The fact remains that they existed, each with an unmistakable moral characteristic of its own. But what exactly the moral characteristic of each was, is rendered doubtful by the conflicting evidence of different writers; probably, as musical taste changed and developed, the same “harmony” came to cause a different impression. Plato’s ear, accustomed to the prevalent Dorian, found the Lydian doleful and depressing; Aristotle and his contemporaries, more used to softer music, praised it as valuable for educational purposes.[682] Herakleides of Pontos,[683] who made a special study of music, gives, in a fragment, a sketch of the old Hellenic “harmonies.” The Dorian, according to him, was manly, dignified, stern, and robust, not effeminate nor merry nor variegated nor versatile.[684] The Aeolic, afterwards called “Hypo-Dorian,” was haughty and pretentious, rather conceited, not, however, base in any way, but inflated and confident. It was the right music for “woman, wine, and song.” The Ionic, representing the old Ionic character before the race degenerated, was passionate, headstrong, contentious, showing no signs of benevolence or merriment, but revealing a certain hardness of heart and temperament. It was not florid nor cheerful, but austere and harsh, with a not ignoble dignity which fitted it to accompany Tragedy. Later, the race and the “harmony” seem to have degenerated, and are charged with being luxurious and effeminate. There used also to be a Locrian “harmony,” which was used by Pindar and Simonides, but afterwards it fell into contempt and died out.
Besides these purely Hellenic types, there were two which came from barbarian races, the Lydian and the Phrygian. Of the Lydian there were several varieties. The Mixed-Lydian was doleful and suitable to dirges: it made the audience feel mournful and grave. The Syntono-Lydian was very similar. The pure Lydian is rejected as effeminate by Plato;[685] but Aristotle, resting on the musical experts, declares that it involves order and arrangement (κόσμος) and is well adapted for education. About the Phrygian opinion is still more divided. Plato commends it. According to him it suitably represents the notes and accents of a self-controlled man “in peaceful and unconstrained circumstances, trying to persuade some one or making a request, praying to a god or advising a man, or giving his attention to the request or advice or arguments of some one else; and if he attains his object, not puffed up, but in all things acting, and accepting the consequences of his actions, with moderation and self-control.” The philosopher then goes on to reject the flute, as suitable only to hysterical enthusiasm. But this, as Aristotle pointed out, was inconsistent. For the Phrygian harmony and the flute went hand in hand: the wild orgies of Dionusos and other worships of an enthusiastic nature were usually accompanied by the flute and could only be set to the Phrygian harmony. The dithyramb, for instance, could only be set in this way; when Philoxenos definitely tried to write one to the Dorian, he slid back without being able to prevent it into the Phrygian. Aristotle therefore, accounting it an enthusiastic harmony, reserves it as a “purge” (κάθαρσις), which, by providing under well-regulated conditions an occasional outlet for hysteria, will work such affections out of the system for a long period: at the end of which another dose will be required.[686]