Thesauros Literature miscellany Δειπνοσοφισταί

Δειπνοσοφισταί

Δειπνοσοφισταί Athenaeus of Naucratis

Book 14

18 Now, that music can heal diseases, Theophrastus asserts in his treatise on Enthusiasm, where he says that men with diseases in the loins become free from pain if any one plays a Phrygian air opposite to the part affected. And the Phrygians are the first people who invented and employed the harmony which goes by their name; owing to which circumstance it is that the flute-players among the Greeks have usually Phrygian and servile-sounding names, such as Sambas in Aleman, and Adon, and Telus. And in Hipponax we find Cion, and Codalus, and Babys, from whom the proverb arose about men who play worse and worse,—He plays worse than Babys. But Aristoxenus ascribes the invention of this harmony to Hyagnis the Phrygian.
19 But Heraclides of Pontus, in the third book of his treatise on Music, says—"Now that harmony ought not to be called Phrygian, just as it has no right either to be called Lydian. For there are three harmonies; as there are also three different races of Greeks-Dorians, Aeolians, and] Ionians: and accordingly there is no little difference between their manners. The Lacedæmonians are of all the Dorians the most strict in maintaining their national customs and the Thessalians (and these are they who were the origin of the Aeolian race) have preserved at all times very nearly the same customs and institutions; but the population of the Ionians has been a great deal changed, and has gone through many transitions, because they have at all times resembled whatever nations of barbarians have from time to time been their masters. Accordingly, that species of melody which the Dorians composed they called the Dorian harmony, and that which the Aeolians used to sing they named the Aeolian harmony, and the third they called the Ionian, because they heard the Ionians sing it.

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