Excerpt from The Verse of Greek Comedy
Greek poetry in the fifth century before Christ was a highly developed and complex art. Greek poets had begun to sing in a remote past. Their successors in the age of Aristophanes had inherited from many singers in many lands - the coast of Asia, the islands of the Aegean and the Continent - a great treasure of rhythmical phrases that had gradually been developed and perfected during centuries of practice among a song-loving people, and that still admitted countless harmonious variations, just as the English heroic line, passing from Shakespeare to Milton and from Milton on to Tennyson, became under his magic touch a new instrument of melody modulated to every theme. The poets of the later age, guided by that intuitive apprehension and appreciation of beauty of form which characterized their race in all ranges of creative art, combined these phrases into harmonious periods and symmetrical strophes with extraordinary skill, but they were only vaguely conscious of historical relations. What is the rhythm of these phrases and their metrical constitution? What are the laws by which they are combined in period and strophe? Whence did particular phrases come? We despair of a complete answer to some of these questions. Many problems confront us that in consequence of the loss of the music to which these Greek odes were sung do not, we must frankly confess, now admit of sure solution; but such knowledge as we may be able to get, by patient investigation, of the origin, nature, relation and development of the materials with which the poets wrought will contribute to a juster understanding of their art and a truer appreciation of their skill.
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