B.C., when the Homeric
poems began to be chanted or sung by traveling minstrels called
Rhapsodists. The schools of rhapsodies lasted for about 250 years,
when choral and patriotic song began to be developed. In connection
with this part of the history, there was in the later portion of it a
more ornamental and fanciful development of the smaller and social
uses of song, represented by Sappho, Anacreon and others. This period
endured for about two centuries and a half, and by insensible degrees
passed into the Attic drama, which came to its maturity at the hands
of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides about 450 B.C.

Here was the culmination of Greek musical art upon the purely artistic
and aesthetic side. Then followed a period of philosophizing, theory
and mathematical deduction, which extended to the end of the
Alexandrian schools, about 300 A.D. The limits of the present work do
not permit tracing this course of progress with the amplitude which
its relation to liberal education would otherwise warrant, or even to
the extent which its bearing upon the present ideals of the tonal art
would justify, were not the range of subjects indispensable to even a
summarized treatment of musical history so wide as it has now become.
But the general features of the different steps in the Greek music are
the following:

As already noticed, the earliest traces of music are those in the
Homeric poems, which are thought to have been composed about 1000 B.C.
In these we find the minstrel everywhere a central figure, an honored
guest, ready at call to entertain the company with some ballad of the
ancient times, or to improvise a new one appropriate to the case in
hand. The heroes themselves were not loth to take part in these
exercises. Ulysses, the Odyssey tells us, occasionally took the lyre
in his own hand and sang a rhapsody of his own adventures. Several
centuries later, Solon, one of the famed seven wise men of Greece,
composed the rhapsody of "Salamis, or the Lost Island," and sang it in
a public assembly of the Athenians with so much effect that an
expedition was organized, with Solon at its head, for its recovery,
which presently followed triumphantly.

Many passages in the Odyssey will occur to the classical reader in
illustration of the position of the minstrel in Argos in the earlier
times. For example (Odyssey I, 400, Bryant's translation):

"Silent all
They sat and listened to t