[38] The distinction of an older and younger Olympus which was made by Pratinas, the Greek poet and historian, is no longer credited. At any rate, the older (whom Pratinas places before the Trojan War) is the one to whom the chief merits accrue, and therefore the only one to be considered here.
[39] During the first auletic contest in connection with these festivals, which took place in 586 B. C., a certain Sakadas was awarded the victor’s wreath for the performance of another Nomos Pythicos, composed by himself, which, from all accounts, may be looked upon as a sort of program music, describing the event in realistic manner.
[40] The word Pæan (Gr. [Greek: paian]) originally signified physician. It was the name given to a choral address, usually of thanksgiving, to Apollo or Diana.
[41] Dithyrambic composition continued, of course, to flourish beside the drama, as did also the writing of nomes, but both were corrupted by the introduction of solo interpolations (in the case of the former) and choral numbers (in the latter), so that they finally approached each other in a sort of cantata form.
[42] Hence the expression ‘magadizing’ for singing in octaves.
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF PLAIN-SONG
Music in the Roman empire—Sources of early Christian music; the hymns of St. Ambrose—Hebrew traditions—Psalmody, responses, antiphons; the liturgy; the Gregorian tradition; the antiphonary and the gradual; sequences and tropes—Ecclesiastical modes; early notation.
I
From the point of view of the musical historian the dominant note of civilization at the opening of the Christian era was the all-pervading influence of Hellenistic culture. It is well to remember, however, that this influence was more in form than in content. Greek art was no longer the pure, bright flame that lighted the world so gloriously in the age of Pericles. Its blaze had become dull and lifeless; elements foreign to the fuel that had fed it in the classic age had been brought to it by the softly sensuous fingers of the Orient and the rough, unsympathetic hands of Rome. Hellenic art at the opening of the Christian era resembled that of Periclean Athens as little as the pseudo-classic architecture of the Italian Renaissance resembled the crowning glories of the Acropolis. The serene, clear, intellectual æstheticism of Greece had degenerated into the coarse sensuality of the pagan Latins and the sterile dilettantism of the theistic peoples of the Orient. Neither Latins nor Orientals were at all capable of understanding or assimilating it. Its joyous, essentially Aryan paganism was as foreign to the Semitic temperament as its lucid intellectuality was impossible to the turgid Roman mind.