Our information concerning the general course of the development of music among this people is pretty accurate through a period of about 1300 years. The entire course of the Greek history of music may be divided into four great divisions, each of which was principally devoted to a certain part of the art. These divisions begin at a date which we might take approximately at about 1000 B.C., when the Homeric poems began to be chanted or sung by traveling minstrels called Rhapsodists. The schools of rhapsodies lasted for about 250 years, when choral and patriotic song began to be developed. In connection with this part of the history, there was in the later portion of it a more ornamental and fanciful development of the smaller and social uses of song, represented by Sappho, Anacreon and others. This period endured for about two centuries and a half, and by insensible degrees passed into the Attic drama, which came to its maturity at the hands of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides about 450 B.C. Here was the culmination of Greek musical art upon the purely artistic and aesthetic side. Then followed a period of philosophizing, theory and mathematical deduction, which extended to the end of the Alexandrian schools, about 300 A.D. The limits of the present work do not permit tracing this course of progress with the amplitude which its relation to liberal education would otherwise warrant, or even to the extent which its bearing upon the present ideals of the tonal art would justify, were not the range of subjects indispensable to even a summarized treatment of musical history so wide as it has now become. But the general features of the different steps in the Greek music are the following: As already noticed, the earliest traces of music are those in the Homeric poems, which are thought to have been composed about 1000 B.C. In these we find the minstrel everywhere a central figure, an honored guest, ready at call to entertain the company with some ballad of the ancient times, or to improvise a new one appropriate to the case in hand. The heroes themselves were not loth to take part in these exercises. Ulysses, the Odyssey tells us, occasionally took the lyre in his own hand and sang a rhapsody of his own adventures. Several centuries later, Solon, one of the famed seven wise men of Greece, composed the rhapsody of "Salamis, or the Lost Island," and sang it in a public assembly of the Athenians with so much effect that an expedition was organized, with Solon at its head, for its recovery, which presently followed triumphantly. Many passages in the Odyssey will occur to the classical reader in illustration of the position of the minstrel in Argos in the earlier times. For example (Odyssey I, 400, Bryant's translation):