Note 145 — Chapter XXIX · LYRIC POETRY. — THE SEVEN WISE MEN.

These early innovators in Grecian music, rhythm, metre, and poetry, belonging to the seventh century B. C., were very imperfectly known, even to those contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle who tried to get together facts for a consecutive history of music. The treatise of Plutarch, De Musicâ, shows what very contradictory statements he found. He quotes from four different authors,—Herakleidês, Glaukus, Alexander, and Aristoxenus, who by no means agreed in their series of names and facts. The first three of them blend together mythe and history; while even the Anagraphê or inscription at Sikyon, which professed to give a continuous list of such poets and musicians as had contended at the Sikyonian games, began with a large stock of mythical names,—Amphion, Linus, Pierius, etc. (Plutarch, Music. p. 1132.) Some authors, according to Plutarch (p. 1133), made the great chronological mistake of placing Terpander as contemporary with Hippônax; a proof how little of chronological evidence was then accessible.

That Terpander was victor at the Spartan festival of the Karneia, in 676 B. C., may well have been derived by Hellanikus from the Spartan registers: the name of the Lesbian harper Perikleitas, as having gained the same prize at some subsequent period (Plutarch, De Mus. p. 1133), probably rests on the same authority. That Archilochus was rather later than Terpander, and Thalêtas rather later than Archilochus, was the statement of Glaukus (Plutarch, De Mus. p. 1134). Klonas and Polymnêstus are placed later than Terpander; Archilochus later than Klonas: Alkman is said to have mentioned Polymnêstus in one of his songs (pp. 1133-1135). It can hardly be true that Terpander gained four Pythian prizes, if the festival was octennial prior to its reconstitution by the Amphiktyons (p. 1132). Sakadas gained three Pythian prizes after that period, when the festival was quadrennial (p. 1134).

Compare the confused indications in Pollux, iv, 65-66, 78-79. The abstract given by Photius of certain parts of the Chrestomathia of Proclus (published in Gaisford’s edition of Hephæstion, pp. 375-389), is also extremely valuable, in spite of its brevity and obscurity, about the lyric and choric poetry of Greece.