* Cf. in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit dam (as) (house), Greek domos. Latin domus, English tim-ber; dvaras, thyra, fores, door; venas, (f)oinos, vinum, wine; naus, naus, navis, nave; akshas, axon, axis, axle; iugam, zygon, iugum, yoke, etc.

* We do not know how ancient Greek was pronounced.² The accents that trouble us so much were seldom used by the classical Greeks, but were inserted into ancient texts by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century B.C. These accents should be ignored in reading Greek poetry.

† Cf. Greek alpha, Phoenician aleph (bull); beta, beth (tent); gamma, gimel (camel); delta, daleth (door); e-psilon, he (window); zeta, zain (lance); beta, kheth (paling); iota, yod (hand), etc.

* Graphein, which we translate to write, originally meant to engrave.

† The Latins called a roll volumen—wound up.

‡ Latin frontes, whence our frontispiece.

§ Though we have been eye-minded since the development of printing, and writing is seldom read aloud, style and punctuation are still formed with a view to easy breathing in the reader, and a rhythmic sound in the words. Probably our descendants will be ear-minded again.

* Rhyme was mostly confined to oracles and religious prophecies.

† From raptein, to stitch together, and oide, a song.

* So called because they were found chiefly near the Double Gate of the city at the Ceramicas.

* No. 682 in the National Museum at Athens.

† Now in the British Museum; there are copies in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The Branchidae were the hereditary priests of the temple.

* A scale employing quarter tones; e.g., E E’ F A B B’ C E-where the accent indicates a quarter tone above the preceding note.

* The music of Hellas was played in a variety of scales far more numerous and complex than ours. Our diatonic scale makes no smaller division than the half tone, and twelve half tones constitute our octave; the Greeks used quarter tones, and had forty-five scales of eighteen notes apiece.⁷³ These scales were in three groups: the diatonic scales, based upon the tetrachord E D C B; the chromatic, upon E C# C B; and the enharmonic, upon E C C_b B. From the Greek scales, by simplification, came those of medieval church music, and, through these, our own.

Within the diatonic tetrachord seven modes (harmoniai) were produced by tuning the strings to alter the position of the semitones in the octave. The most important modes were the Dorian (E F G A B C D E), martial and grave though in a minor key; the Lydian (C D E F G A B C), tender and plaintive though in a major key; and the Phrygian (D E F G A B C D), minor in key, and orgiastically passionate and wild.⁷⁴ It is amusing to read of the violent controversies concerning the musical, ethical, and medical effects, restorative or disastrous, which the Greeks—chiefly the philosophers—ascribed to these half-tone variations. Dorian music, we are told, made men brave and dignified, the Lydian made them sentimental and weak, the Phrygian made them excited and headstrong. Plato saw effeminate luxury and gross immorality as the offspring of most music, and wished to banish all instrumental performances from his ideal state. Aristotle would have had all youths trained in the Dorian mode.⁷⁵ Theophrastus had a good word to say even for the Phrygian mode; serious diseases, he tells us, can be made painless by playing a Phrygian air near the affected part.⁷⁶

Greek musical notation used not ovals and stems on a staff of lines, but the letters of the alphabet, varied by inversion or transversion, augmented by dots and dashes to make sixtyfour signs, and placed above the words of the song. A few scraps of such notation have come down to console us for the loss of the rest; they indicate melodies akin rather to Oriental than to European strains, and would be more bearable to the Hindus, the Chinese, or the Japanese than to our dull Occidental ears, untrained to quarter tones.

* The word foot, as meaning part of a verse, owes its origin to the dance that accompanied the song;⁷⁹ orchestra, to the Greek, meant a dancing platform, usually in front of the stage.