rate, conceived and directed by a single artist, who thus combined the functions of librettist, composer, and ballet-master. And though in practice no doubt the poet, as time went on, more and more delegated the two latter sets of duties to subordinates, yet we find him to the last retaining a certain amount of responsibility and claiming a certain amount of credit, not for the verses only, but for the accompanying music and spectacle. It is to be noticed further that in this threefold combination the element of Poetry always maintained its supremacy, the Music and the Dance remained always in due subordination to it. Such a phenomenon as the modern Italian Opera has made familiar to us—a libretto overshadowed and made insignificant by the music of which it is the vehicle rather than the theme—would have shocked a Greek's sense of artistic propriety. "Songs," says Pindar,[1] are "lords of the lyre:" and as the lyre obeys the song, so the dance obeys the lyre,—"Golden lyre, the dancers' step lists thy bidding!"[2] The Greek Choral Ode required, then, not merely a combination of these three elements, but a combination of them in due subordination to one another, the Ballet adapting itself to the Music, and that again to the Poem, which was the groundwork of the whole structure.
Ancient authors classify, with great precision, but perhaps with an excess of subtlety, the various subdivisions of Greek Choral poetry. Originally, no doubt, the distinctions which they draw corresponded
