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although there is no guarantee that they go back to the Classical period, we can hardly suppose that nothing of the kind then existed. The ball-game that Nausicaa plays with her young friends in the Odyssey seems to have been combined with a song and dance. Aristophanes refers to a little verse that children chanted, while clapping their hands, if a cloud passed over the sun.74 In certain places there were longer songs that children sang on a particular day of the year, when they went round from house to house asking for gifts of food.75 |
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Music accompanying activity |
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The Greeks well understood the value of music as an adjunct to work and bodily movement, especially to that which is of a repetitive or rhythmical character. It stimulates the spirits and it assists in maintaining the rate of achievement and, where necessary, in synchronizing everyone's efforts. The songs of the wool-workers and the rope-makers have been mentioned, and the women's grinding and pounding songs. There is a terracotta model from Thebes, dating from the sixth century BC, which shows a group of women kneading dough, probably in a bakery, with a piper playing a suitable strain to them.76 |
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The comic poet Teleclides mentioned a song sung by hired labourers as they went to work in the fieldsperhaps at harvest time, when extra hands are particularly needed. There was a traditional reapers' song called the Lityerses, referred to by Menander and others. Theocritus gives what purports to be a version of it, and also speaks of a girl piper playing for the reapers as they work.77 Another such traditional song was the Linos, performed at the time of the vintage. Homer describes it as a processional sung by a boy to the lyre, as young people of both sexes, carrying the baskets of grapes, |
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74PMG 852, 861,875, 876; Od. 6. 101; Ar. fr. 404. |
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75 Hom. Epigr. 15 (Samos), PMG 848 (Rhodes), and other material collected in Ath. 359d-360d. The custom has survived in Greece and has many parallels in other lands; cf. A. Dieterich, Kleine Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin, 1911), 324-52; Jacoby on FGrH 526 F 1; S. Baud-Bovy, Byzantina-Metabyzantina 1 (1946), 23-32, and Revue de musicologie 54 (1968), 8-10; K. Meuli, Gesammelte Schriften, i (Basle and Stuttgart, 1975), 33-68. |
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76 See Pl. 8. |
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77 Teleclides fr. 8; Men. Carchedonius fr. 3 Sandbach; Theoc. Id. 10. 16, 41, with Gow's note. Pollux 4.55, however, says that the Lityerses was sung at threshing-floors. The singing bath-attendants of Crates (above, n. 72) are perhaps a scribal error for gleaners (balaneon: kalameon). |
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