to have been almost as closely connected in Hebrew, Indian, and Chinese literatures as in the early lyrics of Greece, and the development of music and religious ritual seem, at least up to a certain point, to have been closely united in all these literatures. Without entering on any technical discussions of Greek or Hebrew, much less Indian or Chinese, music, we can discover abundant evidences showing that clans or guilds of bard-musicians, for the most part sacred, were the chief makers of early poetry; and without some such organisation it is difficult to imagine how the old song-dances could have been developed.
Among the early composers of Greek hymns stand out prominently the Eumolpids of Eleusis in Attica. To this clan the chief sacerdotal functions in connection with the worship of Demeter are known to have descended as an hereditary privilege. The very name of the clan—"Beautiful Singers"[1]—points to their original office of sacred choristers; and, if the social development of the Greeks had resembled that of the Indian Aryans or the Hebrews, these hereditary musician-priests might have grown into Bráhmanic or Levitic castes. In the Lycomids of Attica we have another clan of sacred singers; and at Athens the playing of the Kithara at processions belonged to another clan, the Eunids. But these clans of musicians were by no means confined to Attica. Like the Hebrew clans of musician-poets, to which we shall presently refer, the flute-players of Sparta continued their art and their rights in families. To a family of musicians Terpander, the Lesbian, the reputed founder of Greek music, belonged. Simonides of Keos, who exercised the functions of chorus-
- ↑ Cf. Swinburne's Erechtheus, ll. 52, 53—
"Eumolpus; nothing sweet in ears of thine
The music of his making," etc.
