With sacred hymns and songs that sweetly please,Now then, you that are of the grand musical chorus, tell your friends, who was the first that brought music into use; what time has added for the advantage of the science; who have been the most famous of its professors; and lastly, for what and how far it may be beneficial to mankind.
The Grecian youth all day the Gods appease;
Their lofty paeans bright Apollo hears,
And still the charming sounds delight his ears.
1
For this reason, upon the second day of the Saturnalian
festival, the famous Onesicrates invited certain persons, the
best skilled in music, to a banquet; by name Soterichus
[p. 104]
of Alexandria, and Lysias, one of those to whom he gave
a yearly pension. After all had done and the table was
cleared,—To dive, said he, most worthy friends, into the
nature and reason of the human voice is not an argument
proper for this merry meeting, as being a subject that
requires a more sober scrutiny. But because our chiefest
grammarians define the voice to be a percussion of the air
made sensible to the ear, and for that we were yesterday
discoursing of Grammar,—which is an art that can give
the voice form and shape by means of letters, and store it
up in the memory as a magazine,—let us consider what
is the next science to this which may be said to relate to
the voice. In my opinion, it must be music. For it is
one of the chiefest and most religious duties belonging to
man, to celebrate the praise of the Gods, who gave to him
alone the most excelling advantage of articulate discourse,
as Homer has observed in the following verses:—
1 Il. I. 472.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.