( 516 ) (October, 
NOTICES: OF > BOO Rez 
The History of Music. Vol. 1. From the Earliest Records to 
the Fall of the Roman Empire. By W. CuHappe ti, F.S.A. 
London: Simpkin and Marshall. 1874. 
Or the arts of the Ancients—of sculpture, painting, music— 
sculpture is best known to us; the others are almost unknown. 
A few late frescoes, a few late hymns to gods and goddesses,— 
these are all that we can place side by side with the grand 
sculptures of Pheidias and Myron, with those wonderful archi- 
tectural works the Propylea and the Parthenon, the very ruins 
of which impress us with wonder, and show how perfectly the 
harmonies of the eye were understood twenty-two centuries ago. 
But the poetical and dramatic art of the most cultivated of 
ancient nations has also been presented to us; in that marvel- 
lous trio, AZschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, we behold a combi- 
nation or concentration of the purest and most perfect art. We 
know how the gods were addressed, how their mysteries were 
celebrated, how Antigone lamented, and how Edipus passed 
suddenly and silently from the eyes of men when the dread voice 
at Colonos cried ‘‘ Come hither, come.”’ But we know not how 
the players played, and the choruses sang at divine celebrations, 
or when the crocus-coloured peplos was carried to the summit 
of the Acropolis amidst the rejoicing of the people, and the 
rhythmic dances of maidens with golden grasshoppers in their 
hair. 
We may, however, congratulate ourselves that we have in the 
work before us all that is known of Greek music, and much that 
has not been known before,—a Greek hymn to Nemesis harmo- 
nised by Macfarren, an explanation of Greek notation, Greek 
scales, and Greek singing; of Harmonici and Kanonici. 
Histories of ancient music are not common, although, so long 
ago as 1581, Vincenzo Galilei published his ‘ Dialogo della 
Musica Antica.” The works best known to us in this country 
are those of Sir John Hawkins (1776) and Dr. Burney 
(1776—1789). The work of the former was cumbrous and un- 
readable, and met with but little favour, while Dr. Burney 
unfortunately relied to a great extent on Boethius for his know- 
ledge of ancient music. But the treatise of Boethius was a 
broken reed, for its author utterly misunderstood Greek music, 
and concluded that the words nete and hypate (signifying 
respectively the shortest and the longest string of the seven- 
stringed lyre) referred to the top and bottom of the scale; thus 
he turned the Greek scale upside down. Yet the work of 
Boethius, ‘De Institutione Musica,” was the text-book during 
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