Page:Polynesian Mythology by George Grey (polynesianmythol00greyuoft).djvu/358

perceptions of a Greek audience were fully awake to, and their judgment could appreciate, a want of exactness in execution; for Dionysius of Halicarnassus says, he himself has been in the most crowded theatre, where, if a singer or citharoedist mistook the smallest interval (presumed to be the enharmonic diesis), he was hissed off the stage.

Isaac Vossius,^[1] from a multitude of authorities, has established, that transitions were made by ancient singers and performers, from the diatonic to the chromatic and enharmonic, with the greatest facility; and he adds, "which, because the moderns cannot do, they even positively and seriously assert that the ancients could not sing the enharmonic." Whereas, continues he, "not only did they sing it, but accompanied it with instruments."

So Plutarch (Πεϱὶ Μουσικῆς), who adds a remark, the purport of which is, such persons (who affirm that the ancients could not accompany the enharmonic) forget that if they can accompany greater intervals which were composed of less, there can be no reason why the scale of an instrument might not be so adjusted as to accompany the less intervals which compose those greater.

The doubt of the possibility of using the enharmonic as a scale is not confined to our own day, for Plutarch, as we have seen (and in other places also), speaks of the decline of it; and Athenaeus speaks of certain Greeks who, from time to time, retired by themselves to keep up the recollection of the good old music, since the art had become so corrupted.

In Plutarch's time (de Musica) he bitterly complains that certain people "affirmed the enharmonic diesis to be absolutely undistinguishable, and that, therefore, it had no