that it made the onlookers dizzy.  During the play, Demidocus chanted a song, and accompanied the dance with his lyre, the players never losing a step.  As Aristides (died 468 B.C.), speaking of Greek music many centuries later said:  “Metre is not a thing which concerns the ear alone, for in the dance it is to be seen.”  Even a statue was said to have silent rhythm, and pictures were spoken of as being musical or unmusical.

Already in Homer’s time, the Cretans had six varieties of [5/4] time to which they danced: 

  [4 8 4 | 4 8 8 8 | 8 4 8 8 | 8 8 4 8 | 8 8 8 4 | 8 8 8 8 8]
  [- ’ — | — ’ ’ ’ | ’ — ’ ’ | ’ ’ — ’ | ’ ’ ’ — | ’ ’ ’ ’ ’]

The first was known as the Cretic foot, being in a way the model or type from which the others were made; but the others were called paeons.  The “Hymn to Apollo” was called a paeon or paean, for the singers danced in Cretic rhythms as they chanted it.

There were many other dances in Greece, each having its characteristic rhythm.  For instance, the Molossian dance consisted of three long steps, [- — -] ([3/2]); that of the Laconians was the dactyl, [- ’ ’] ([4/4]), which was sometimes reversed [’ ’ -] ([4/4]).  In the latter form it was also the chief dance of the Locrians, the step being called anapaest.  From Ionia came the two long and two short steps, [- — ’ ’], ([3/4:  4 4 8 8]), or [’ ’ — -] ([3/4:  8 8 4 4]), which were called Ionic feet.  The Doric steps consisted primarily of a trochee and a spondee, [- ’ — -] or [7/8] time.  These values, however, were arranged in three other different orders, namely, [’ — — — | — — ’ — | — — — ’] and were called the first, second, third, or fourth epitrite, according to the positions of the short step.  The second epitrite was considered the most distinctly Doric.

The advent of the Dionysian[06] festivals in Greece threatened to destroy art, for those wild Bacchic dances, which are to be traced back to that frenzied worship of Bel and Astarte in Babylon, wild dances amenable only to the impulse of the moment, seemed to carry everything before them.  Instead of that, however, the hymns to Bacchus, who was called in Phoenicia the flute god, from which the characteristics of his worship are indicated, were the germs from which tragedy and comedy developed, and the mad bacchanalian dances were tamed into dithyrambs.  For the Corybantes, priests of the goddess Cybele, brought from Phrygia, in Asia Minor, the darker form of this worship; they mourned for the death of Bacchus, who was supposed to die in winter and to come to life again in the spring.  When these mournful hymns were sung, a goat was sacrificed on the altar; thus the origin of the word “tragedy” or “goat song” (tragos, goat, and odos, singer).  As the rite developed, the leader of the chorus would chant the praises of Dionysus, and sing of his adventures, to which the chorus would make response.  In time it became the custom for the leader, or coryphaeus, to be answered by one single member of the chorus, the latter being thus used merely for the chanting of commentaries on the narrative.  The answerer was called “hypocrite,” afterward the term for actor.