3. _Eastern Church Hymnody._--The hymn of our Lord, the precepts of the apostles, the angelic song at the nativity, and "Benedicite omnia opera" are referred to in a curious metrical prologue to the hymnary of the Mozarabic Breviary as precedents for the practice of the Western Church. In this respect, however, the Western Church followed the Eastern, in which hymnody prevailed from the earliest times. Therapeutae. Philo describes the Theraputae (q.v.) of the neighbourhood of Alexandria as composers of original hymns, which (as well as old) were sung at their great religious festivals--the people listening in silence till they came to the closing strains, or refrains, at the end of a hymn or stanza (the "acroteleutia" and "ephymnia"), in which all, women as well as men, heartily joined. These songs, he says, were in various metres (for which he uses a number of technical terms); some were choral, some not; and they were divided into variously constructed strophes or stanzas. Eusebius, who thought that the Theraputae were communities of Christians, says that the Christian practice of his own day was in exact accordance with this description. Antiphonal singing. The practice, not only of singing hymns, but of singing them antiphonally, appears, from the well-known letter of Pliny to Trajan, to have been established in the Bithynian churches at the beginning of the 2nd century. They were accustomed "stato die ante lucem convenire, carmenque Christo, quasi Deo, dicere _secum invicem_." This agrees well, in point of time, with the tradition recorded by the historian Socrates, that Ignatius (who suffered martyrdom about A.D. 107) was led by a vision or dream of angels singing hymns in that manner to the Holy Trinity to introduce antiphonal singing into the church of Antioch, from which it quickly spread to other churches. There seems to be an allusion to choral singing in the epistle of Ignatius himself to the Romans, where he exhorts them, "[Greek: choros genomenoi]" ("having formed themselves into a choir"), to "sing praise to the Father in Christ Jesus." A statement of Theodoret has sometimes been supposed to refer the origin of antiphonal singing to a much later date; but this seems to relate only to the singing of Old Testament Psalms ([Greek: tên Dauidikên melôdian]), the alternate chanting of which, by a choir divided into two parts, was (according to that statement) first introduced into the church of Antioch by two monks famous in the history of their time, Flavianus and Diodorus, under the emperor Constantius II. 2nd century. 3rd century.