PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 437 



musical utterance of hexameters was dropped by a certain derived 

 secular class, the Rhapsodists. These, who recited at courts " the 

 books [of Homer] separately, some one, some the other, at the 

 feasts or public solemnities of the Greek cities," and who them- 

 selves sometimes composed "dedicatory prologues or epilogues 

 in honor of the deities with whose festivals such public per- 

 formances were connected," and became in so far themselves 

 poets, were distinguished from the early poets by their non- 

 musical speech. 



"While the latter sang, solely or chiefly, bis own compositions to the 

 accompaniment of his lyre, the rhapsodist, bearing a laurel branch or wand 

 as his badge of office, rehearsed, without musical accompaniment, the poems 

 of others: " [sometimes, as above said, joined with his own]. 

 Thus there simultaneously arose a class of secular poets and a 

 divergence of poetry from song. 



A parallel genesis occurred among the Romans. Though 

 its sequences were broken, its beginning was the same. Says 

 Grimm 



. . . "Poetry borders so closely on divination, the Roman vates is alike 

 songster and soothsayer, and soothsaying was certainly a priestly function." 

 Congruous with this is the statement that 



"Roman religion was a ceremonial for the priests, not for the people; 

 and its poetry was merely formulae in verse, and soared no higher than the 

 semi-barbarous ejaculations of the Salian priests or the Arvolian brother- 

 hood." 



The more elaborated forms of religious ceremony appear to have 

 been imported from subjugated countries the sacred games from 

 Etruria, and other observances from Greece. Hence the Romans 

 being the conquerors, it seems to have resulted that the arts, and 

 among others the art of poetry, brought with them by the cap- 

 tives, were for a long period lightly thought of by their captors. 

 Having no commission from the gods, the professors of it were 

 treated with contempt and their function entirely secularized. So 

 that, as Mommsen writes : 



" The poet or, as he was at this time called, the " writer," the actor and the 

 composer, not only belonged still, as formerly, to the despised class of la- 

 borers for hire, but were still, as formerly, placed in the most marked way 

 under the ban of public opinion, and subjected to police mahreatment." 

 With like implications in a later chapter he adds : 

 " None of those who in this age appeared as poets before the public, as we 

 have already said, can be shown to have been noble, and not only so, but 

 none can be shown to have been natives of Latium proper." 



more closely akin than they ever are in our experience, we may expect to find that music 

 was influenced in some measure by this state of things." (p. 119). 



Thus it is clear that the primitive priest-poet of the Greeks was simply an emotionally- 

 excited orator, whose speech diverged from the common speech by becoming more measured 

 and more intoned. 



