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octaves. A modern reader, accustomed to the rich and delicate chords and dissonances of the music of our own day, or the magnificent contrapuntal achievements of Bach and Handel, will wonder at the seemingly extravagant language held by classical authors as to the effect on the emotions of men, and even on the character of nations, produced by mere unharmonised melodies, and those, according to modern ideas, of the most unimpressive kind. But if the Greeks were ignorant of harmony, their appreciation of pitch and rhythm seems to have been infinitely keener than our own. Some of their scales involving quarter-tones would baffle the most accurate of modern singers. And the rhythms of a Pindaric Ode would be incomprehensible to a modern audience, accustomed only to two-time, three-time, and their multiples.^[1] Let any

1. It is true that Mendelssohn, in his 'Antigone' and 'Œdipus' choruses, has employed modern musical notation to represent the sequences of long and short syllables in elaborate Greek choral rhythms. But, to complete his bars, he has been obliged to treat a long syllable as equivalent to any number of short ones, two, three, or even more: whereas it seems certain that the ancients always considered a long syllable as representing two short ones, neither more nor less. For example, a trochee (—◡) in the Strophe may be answered occasionally by a tribrach (◡◡◡) in the Antistrophe, but never by a proceleusmatic (◡◡◡◡), and so with other feet. The Sapphic metre has been several times set to music by modern composers. But the rhythm of its three long lines is necessarily somewhat distorted in the process—usually thus:

   

   instead of the original