So that the music was not strictly syllabic. “The length of irregular syllabic quantities has to subserve, and to be fitted into the _arsis_ and _thesis_, or up and down beats, of a foot of verse in the measure that has been adopted.” This old custom is familiar to us in our Te Deum and other chants, and in oratorio recitative, and is in fact the most ancient as it has been the most universal feature in the evolution of song. Mr. Chappell quotes a Greek passage “On the Phrasing of a composition,” by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. “But rhythm and music diminish and augment the quantities of syllables, so as often to change them to their opposites. Time is _not to be regulated by syllables_, but syllables by time.” We know how our modern rhymesters, who write for the drawing-room or the streets, are given to ricketty irregularities of metre; but this is from slipshod guiltiness, and is quite of a different order from the poetic disposition of syllabic utterance. Read Coleridge’s “Christabel” for the most splendid example of such word music; or, in later days, Swinburne’s lines, which so often give marvellous evidence of the mastery of this rhythmic art. With these remarks in precaution, we may look at the music to the first of those three relics, the “Hymn to Calliope” as modernly set forth:— [Illustration] Many readers will be glad to have this example of Greek music, just to see what it is like. The words must be left to experts who can sing them, for it would be of little use to add them here; and whosoever is disposed for further enquiry will find the adapted harmony by G. A. Macfarren in Mr. W. Chappell’s book. The above is transposed a fourth lower than according to the mode assigned to it, and an octave higher than the pitch as for a man’s voice. The transposition is in accordance with the system of Claudius Ptolemy, who showed how much too high for use the Greek hymns were if taken at the pitch that had been assigned to them. The second of the three hymns is a “Hymn to Apollo,” and is less tunable in style; the third is a “Hymn to Nemesis,” sung to the sound of the lyre. No one of the manuscripts is older than fourteen centuries. The authorship of the first two hymns is attributed to Dionysius; in any case the inferences lead to the placing of the date not earlier than from the second to the fourth century of our era. Considering all these indications of the state of our knowledge of Greek music, we cannot wonder at the great and exciting interest aroused by the veritable music on marble so fortunately recovered.