IN A LYRE-SCHOOL
From a Hudria in the British Museum (E 172).
As soon as his pupils knew how to play, the master taught them the works of the great lyric poets,[292] which were not taught in the school of letters. These were set to music, and the boys sang them and played the accompaniment. Every gentleman at Athens was expected to be able to sing and play in this manner when he went out to a dinner-party. The custom,
however, began to become unfashionable during the Peloponnesian War. When old Strepsiades, in the Clouds,[293] asked Pheidippides to take the lyre and sing a song of Simonides, his new-fashioned son replies that playing the lyre was quite out of date, and singing over the wine was only fit for a slave-woman at the grindstone. Whether this state of feeling continued and whether it had a prejudicial effect on the music-schools cannot be decided. Sometimes the guests brought their boys to sing to the company: in the Peace the son of the hero Lamachos is going to sing Homer, while the coward Kleonumos’ boy has a song of Archilochos ready. Alkaios and Anakreon were also favourites;[294] the lyric portions of Kratinos’ comedies, too, are mentioned as sung at banquets:[295] no doubt, the same was true of the other great comedians. As the iambic parts of Aeschylus and Euripides were recited at the dinner-table, it is natural to suppose that their songs were also sung. The aged Dikasts in the Wasps sing the choruses from Phrunichos’ Sidonians. Old songs like Lamprokles’ “Pallas, dread sacker of cities” and Kudides’ “A cry that echoes afar” were popular in earlier times. No doubt there was plenty of variety in accordance with the master’s taste. At the music school, too, may have been taught the metrical version, set to music, of the Athenian laws, which was ascribed to Solon,[296] and that of the legislation of Charondas, which Athenian gentlemen sang over their wine.[297] Athenian boys were expected to know the laws by the time that they were epheboi, and may well have been taught them in this convenient and attractive way at the lyre-master’s. To know how to play the lyre became the mark of a liberal education, since every one learned letters, but the poorest did not enter the music-school. “He doesn’t know the way to play the lyre,” became a proverb for an uneducated person, who had not had so many opportunities in life as his wealthier fellow-citizens. So, as a plea for a defendant we find—
He may have stolen. But acquit him, for
He doesn’t know the way to play the lyre.[298]
To this the Dikast retorts that he has not learnt the lyre either, so he must be forgiven if he is so stupid as to condemn the accused.[299]
At the beginning of the fifth century the Hellenes were stimulated, according to Aristotle,[300] by their growing wealth and importance to make many educational experiments, especially in music. All manner of musical instruments were tried in the music-schools, but were rejected on trial, when the moral effects could be better appreciated. Among the instruments thus found wanting was the flute. At one time the flute became so popular at Athens that the majority of the free citizens could play it. But its moral effect proved to be unsatisfactory; it was the instrument which belonged to wild religious orgies, and it aroused that hysterical and almost lunatic excitement[301] which the Hellenes regarded as a useful medicine, when taken at long intervals of time, for giving an outlet to such feelings and working them off the system, in order that a long period of calm might follow. But such a medicine was most unsuitable to be the daily food of boys. The flute had two other disadvantages. It distorted the face sufficiently to horrify a sensitive Hellene.[302] It also prevented the use of the voice: the boys could not sing to it, as they sang to the lyre. So Athena, in the old legend, had been quite right in throwing the instrument away in disgust: it was only suitable for a Phrygian Satyr, for it made no appeal to the intellect, but only to the passions.[303]
This is Aristotle’s account. It may be objected that the vases which represent scenes in the music-schools show the flute and the lyre being taught side by side, and apparently equally popular. But these vases can mostly be traced more or less certainly to the first half of the fifth century, and so they bear out Aristotle’s statement. Moreover, the flute did not, of course, die out in Hellas by any means; it only became an extra, instead of the regular instrument in schools. The most notable Athenians, Kallias and Kritias and Alkibiades, are said to have played it.[304] It always remained popular at Thebes. But at Athens, in the banquets, while the guests usually played the lyre themselves, the flute was as a rule only played by professional flute-girls,[305] although on the vases the guests are sometimes found performing on this instrument also.[306] Probably the Athenian attitude may be summed up in the “ancient proverb”:[307]
A flutist’s brains can never stay: