CHAPTER X.

The Isles of Greece.

MIDAS THE GLORIOUS.

“The Glorious!” So Pindar names the flute player Midas the Sicilian, who had twice obtained the laurel wreath by his performance on the flutes at the Pythic games. It is in his twelfth ode that Pindar celebrates the victory of Midas over all Greece upon that instrument which Athene herself had invented, and he inscribes the ode thus:—

TO MIDAS OF AGRAGAS, WINNER OF THE PRIZE FOR FLUTE PLAYING.

How strangely this sounds to us, and how little able are we to estimate at its true significance the esteem in which flute players were held by all the people of Greece.

Many records there are, telling unmistakably of the passion the Greeks had for this music; of the wealth lavished on the famous players; of the temples in which their names were cut in marble with every token of pride and exultation; and of statues raised to their honour. But greater tribute than any that was given, or than remains, is this,—that Pindar thought the flute player worthy of one of his odes, and immortalized him. His voice was the voice of national feeling, and, as I have said, it sounds strangely to us. We are so civilized, have gone so utterly beyond

“Earth’s early days, When simple pleasures pleased,”

that we should not recognize the voice of Saturn; and if

“The dim echoes of old Triton’s horn”

reached our brass belaboured ears, how many think you would listen with reverence?

Yet surely for a little while we should find some good in letting our imagination dwell upon the scenes and surroundings that were real in Greek life; some good also in cherishing the belief that the dead beliefs of old humanity were once living beliefs.

Pindar, second only because Homer was first, was revered by the whole Greek race, and considered their greatest lyric poet. From the pillars of Hercules to the verge of India, wherever there were Greeks, there Pindar was amongst them. How high an honour, therefore, it was that fell to Midas the flute player.

STROPHE.

I pray thee, Queen of Splendour, city of peerless grace, Persephone’s home; O thou that on thy tower-clad hill Dwellest, fair Queen, beside the streams of pastoral Agragas! Propitious greet, with favour of Heaven, and man’s good-will, The crown, at Pytho’s festival, that glorious Midas won; And welcome him victorious in that fair Art,—of old, That Pallas found, ...

Then come antistrophe, and again strophe and antistrophe, but without the intervening epode, by which it is known that this was a processional ode. The poet weaves into his strain numerous allusions to myths which were in common acceptance, and fully understood by his hearers, and acclaimed forthwith. Needless, however, to be given here, although scholars still find interest in them. Pindar goes on to state how Maiden Athene fashioned the flute with its varied strain, and bestowed it on man, and concludes with this

ANTISTROPHE.

Through slender brass it flows, through many a reedy quill, That grew by the Graces town, for choral dance renowned, In nymph Cephisis’ hallowed haunts; true witness of the dancers’ skill. Ne’er, save by toiling, mortal aught of bliss hath found; But all that lacks in our brief day can destiny’s power supply, What fate ordains none may avoid; needs must a day befall Of chances unforeseen that spite of all Man’s scheming, part will grant, and part deny!

So ends he, with the poet’s right to moralize, by which we may infer that our glorious Midas had to toil at the pipes, and practice some hours daily as the price of attaining his great renown.

Pindar’s lines have been variously translated; one reading is thus given:—

Through vocal vent its music flows, Of brass with slender reed combined, That near the festive city grows, Where with light steps the graces move, Marking the measured dance they wind In cool Cephisis’ flowery grove.

That reads pleasantly; but what of this more stately flow in prose?

When it passes through the slender brass and through the reeds, which grew near the city Charites, the city with beautiful places for the dance.

How charmingly that lingers on the tongue, “the city with beautiful places for the dance.” When will it be so said of our great city? Is it a picture past praying for;—past hoping for?

Pindar, as we know, came of a family of flute players. He was born at Thebes, or at an adjacent village, about 522 B.C. His family, we are told, excelled in flute playing, the national art of Bœotia; and he himself, in one of his odes, boasts of a descent from Spartan ancestors, and on his mother’s side from an Arcadian nymph, Metope, mother of Thebe, the mythical foundress of the Theban nation. Through the country of Bœotia, the river Cephisus ran into the Copaic Lake, and both river and lake were celebrated for the reed beds, from which the Theban flute makers obtained their materials. So that our poet was an authority upon flutes, and a critic in the art of playing the instruments. A legend records that when a boy, a swarm of bees settled on his lips whilst he was asleep and filled his mouth with honey. He was also believed to be a familiar guest with the priests of Delphi, where an iron chair, on which he sat to conduct his hymns, was shown as one of the curiosities of the temple; whilst at Athens a statue was erected to him, and the Rhodians engraved one of his odes in golden letters on their temple to Minerva, and the site of his house beside the fountain of Dirce was respected for centuries afterwards.

Flute playing was believed to be of Phrygian origin, and that it was brought from Asia Minor into Greece may perhaps be indicated by the fact that Pindar had in his house at Thebes (Grecian Thebes) a small temple to the Mother of the Gods and Pan, the Phrygian deities to whom the first hymns to the flute were supposed to have been sung. Dion notices that at Thebes all but the Cadmea was in ruins, and that a small votive statue of Hermes, set up for some victory in flute playing, still stood up out of the weeds among the ruins in the ancient Agora. The Pythic contests were held in the plains of Crissa, hard by which stood the temple and oracle of Apollo, the especial god of the Dorian race, and the patron of music and the arts. It was in the years 494 and 490 B.C. that Midas won his laurel crowns, and he had also won once at the Panathenea. Curiously, we find that the first notable flute player at the Pythian games, Sacadas, was victor on the first (586 B.C.) and two subsequent occasions after the performance on that instrument had been introduced as a regular part of the solemnity.

Pindar’s ode to Midas was sung at Agrigentum when the victor entered the city in triumphal procession, and the whole town poured out to meet him. The victor and his friends visited in proud succession the altars of his religion, and the titular deities of the city were thanked for their favour, and again his exploits were chanted in notes of solemn joy.

We have one or two flute players who possibly have some idea of their surpassing merits; but they would be aghast if they found themselves recipients of such public honours as these in a modern city,—we are so civilized. Yet stay, did we not receive intelligence how that Sarasate received some such jubilee welcome on returning to his native place in Spain, not very long ago! What an old-fashioned corner of the earth that must be, where the old atmosphere remains unsmoked, and where the peasants remain and get richly browned in the sun, and dance with goatskins over their shoulders, and to them there are days of out-door life still going on, such as are by our race clean forgotten.

To parallel Pindar and Midas, we should have to imagine Tennyson writing an ode to Sarasate the passionate, the great artist, the dark browed fiddler on the platform of St. James’s Hall, London! Ah! no, it will not do; the parallel would be too shaky. We can run excursion trains, and cram Albert Halls, and our people can shout themselves hoarse in Fleet Street over the three o’clock winner, and the names of Patti and Sims Reeves, and Melba, and Jean de Reszke may exhaust our refined fervour, and the grandeur of heads fitted with unseen crowns may raise a flickering illusion of glory, and the dazzling crush of ladies plated with diamonds, may exalt the senses with the pride of wealth,—but all this, the utmost of the get-up of modern effects, will pale beside that uprising of citizens, that grand acclaim in open air over the plain of Crissa to “glorious Midas!”

One day I do remember,—one day fit to be named with the days of old. Stay a moment, and think what _was_ in those days. Imagine the concourse of people from all ends of the world; a small world it was then, and yet how great in men, aye, and in coming men. There, under the shadow of the great towering crag of Delphi—the centre or “navel” of the earth, as the Greek poets termed it—with the world-renowned temple glowing in lily whiteness in the blue air, there the great games were held,—duty, religion, race, patriotism, drew all men of Greek birth or parentage to witness or to share in them. Week after week, from every state and colony, from isle and creek and dented bay, the flower of Hellas gathered in national pride to swell the host of spectators at these Panegyreis, called by them “universal gatherings.” Hither came statesmen and philosophers, merchants and traders, poets and priests, and people of every degree; streaming up through gorge and defile, up through groves of pine and laurel and cypress, up to the broad, bright plain,

Around the spot where trod Apollo’s foot.

In that great day when Midas stood forth to meet the gaze of the vast assembly, there were, as visitors, some of those who have written their names indelibly on the pages of Time, some of those who have made history. Who were they? Pindar, we know, was there,—what other? At that day, Pythagoras walked upon the earth, and Æschylus was then in the prime of manhood; Sophocles, a babe but one year old, nestled in a mother’s arms; and Phidias, a child of seven summers, not yet dreaming of his great fame, tripped over the grass, gathering garlands of hyacinth, saffron, and asphodel; and fancy may picture him there listening to the flutes of Midas, hearing the shout of victory, and seeing the bestowal of the laurel crown. Imagine him—_one of the young immortals_—lifted up in the exciting moment, his little heart throbbing in sympathy with the pulse of the grand enthusiasm that ran through that sunsmitten multitude!

Aye, those were glorious days! One such day I do remember, one worthy to rank with those days of Grecian festivals; the day when our vast city for a whole day welled out from every street and alley its thousands, tens of thousands, mile upon mile, from morn to sunset, to welcome Garibaldi. Then we knew what it was to feel the thrill of genuine fervour. Then, for one day at least, we rejoiced in being of human race, and believed in the wide kinship of patriotism. Men and women counted themselves happy if they could touch but the folds of his grey cloak. They who had looked into the depths of his calm grey eyes felt themselves dwellers under a loftier sky and went away, comforted; and to gaze upon his serene face was to receive into the heart a new sense of the service of life. He was one of those

Men whom we Build our love round, like an arch of triumph, As they pass us on their way to glory And to immortality.

Since glorious Midas won, 2397 years have come and gone, and Pindar’s verse each year has kept the laurels green. Perhaps in after years he personified the ideal or master flute player to the popular imagination, for the statue here represented dates from the time of Hadrian—that is six hundred years later—and is believed by the archæologists to be a copy or adaptation of an earlier work, when a pseudo-archaic style was in fashion. The original they say may, like other earlier representations of deities, have been clad in actual drapery. According to Pliny, Midas was the original inventor of the _plagiaulos_ or side blown flute; but it was so customary to assign to their heroes the origin of things considered benefits to the people, that we may class this as a mythical reminiscence.

The figure is draped in a _chiton_, with sleeves which are fastened down with studs; a circlet rests upon the head, and the hair falls in long tresses over the shoulders; the beard is long, and of the peculiar shape commented upon by ancient writers. The marble is beautifully worked, the details very graceful, and the expression given to the face remarkable. The statue was found in the villa of Antoninus Pius, near Civita Lavinia. The right arm, left hand, the mouthpiece, and part of the middle of the pipe are restorations; but the artist, being in the dark as to the actual kind of flute originally represented, made up a shape of mouthpiece from the fragments, for which his inner consciousness alone is responsible.

The flutes represented are from a photograph of the instruments in the British Museum, and there can be little doubt that this kind of pipe was the one given to the player by the sculptor. The reed when placed in the little tube would stand at half a right angle to the pipe, as the bore indicates that degree of slant.

In taking leave of Greece and her flutes, I am pleased to be able to quote from recent intelligence one incident which shows the permanence of national character.

“Milo, the Island of the Cyclades, in which the famous ‘Venus of Milo’ was discovered, has again been the scene of the unearthing of a splendid example of ancient Hellenic art. The new ‘find’ is the marble statue of a boxer, somewhat above life size, which is almost as perfect after its burial under the dust of centuries as it was when it came fresh from the hands of its sculptor.

“The shipping of the statue to Athens was made the occasion for a characteristic Greek popular festival. The whole population, headed by the civil magistrates and a band of musicians, and followed by a regiment of soldiers, accompanied the newly found treasure in jubilant procession to the ship, which had been sent from Athens for its transport to the capital.”

The old ways remain! The Greeks are a young people yet; they show the same spontaneity of enthusiasm, the same joy in the face of nature, the same impulses under the influence of art. Theirs is still a small world girdled by the sea, and they are not so far as we from the days when

Conquerors thanked the gods With laurel chaplets crowned.