to the highest pitch, by making the furious mad, and the revengeful intoxicated with vengeance all the orgiastic cults seek to discharge the _ferocia_ of a deity all at once, and thus make an orgy, so that the deity may feel freer and quieter afterwards, and leave man in peace. _Melos,_ according to its root, signifies a soothing agency, not because the song is gentle itself, but because its after-effect is gentle.--And not only in the religious song, but also in the secular song of the most ancient times, the prerequisite is that the rhythm should exercise a magical influence; for example, in drawing water, or in rowing: the song is for the enchanting of the spirits supposed to be active thereby; it makes them obliging, involuntary and the instruments of man. And as often as a person acts he has occasion to sing, _every_ action is dependent on the assistance of spirits: magic song and incantation appear to be the original form of poetry. When verse also came to be used in oracles--the Greeks said that the hexameter was invented at Delphi,--the rhythm was here also intended to exercise a compulsory influence. To make a prophecy--that means originally (according to what seems to me the probable derivation of the Greek word) to determine something; people thought they could determine the future by winning Apollo over to their side: he who, according to the most ancient idea, is far more than a foreseeing deity. According as the formula is pronounced with literal and rhythmical correctness, it determines the future: the formula, however, is the invention of Apollo, who as the God of rhythm, can also determine the goddesses of fate--Looked at and investigated as a whole, was there ever anything _more serviceable_ to the ancient superstitious species of human being than rhythm? People could do everything with it: they could make labour go on magically; they could compel a God to appear, to be near at hand, and listen to them; they could arrange the future for themselves according to their will; they could unburden their own souls of any kind of excess (of anxiety, of mania, of sympathy, of revenge), and not only their own souls, but the souls of the most evil spirits,--without verse a person was nothing, by means of verse a person became almost a God. Such a fundamental feeling no longer allows itself to be fully eradicated,--and even now, after millenniums of long labour in combating such superstition, the very wisest of us occasionally becomes the fool of rhythm, be it only that one _perceives_ a thought to be _truer_ when it has a metrical form and approaches with a divine hopping. Is it not a very funny thing that the most serious philosophers, however anxious they are in other respects for strict certainty, still appeal to _poetical sayings_ in order to give their thoughts force and credibility? and yet it is more dangerous to a truth when the poet assents to it than when he contradicts it! For, as Homer says, "Minstrels speak much falsehood!"--