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Updated: May 19, 2025
Any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the ILIAD must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the Border ballads.
How, if the true ancient tone, taste, manners, and religion were lost, as the Cyclic poets show that they were, did the contemporary Ionian poets or rhapsodists know and preserve the old manner?
Fragrant odors from the censers were flung upon the air; a shower of roses fell from the windows upon the maidens; arms glistened in the sunlight, and in moments when the people were silent the sounds of lyres and flutes floated on the breeze, accompanying with soft melodies the voices of the Homeric rhapsodists.
Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect Drawcansir as to prose writers. He complains of the dry reasoners and matter-of-fact people for their want of passion; and he is jealous of the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province of poetry. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of Walton's Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty of pretension.
It mounts the Greek stage without losing aught, so to speak, of its immeasurable, gigantic proportions. Its characters are still heroes, demigods, gods; its themes are visions, oracles, fatality; its scenes are battles, funeral rites, catalogues. That which the rhapsodists formerly sang, the actors declaim that is the whole difference. There is something more.
The movement was obliged to be in triple time; the rest was ad libitum. As to the origin of this song whether it came in its actual state from the brain of a single rhapsodist, or was gradually perfected by a school or succession of rhapsodists, I am ignorant.
Late rhapsodists would not delve in the archaeology of the Mycenaean prime. Indeed, one does not see how they could discover, in Asia, that corslets were not worn, five centuries earlier, on the other side of the sea. We are told that Aias and some other heroes are never spoken of as wearing corslets.
He began with the idea of the godhead, and showed the necessity of considering it as an eternal and unchanging existence, and represented the anthropomorphic conceptions of the Greeks concerning their gods as mere prejudices. In his works he retained the poetic form of composition, some fragments of which he himself recited at public festivals, after the manner of the rhapsodists.
And of the truth of what they say I cannot speak; but I think he is Bacchus the Redeemer, who, as you, Balbus, know, was no wanton reveller in lasciviousness, but a very god of great benevolence and of wisdom truly dark and awful. And to those he touched tongues were given and soothsaying, and to many the transports of inspiration and divine madness, as of poets and rhapsodists.
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