The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the lyre of orpheus
blood pulsation because during one breath (inhaling and exhaling) the human
heart has four beats. Thus the ancient bards sang and recited these verses
in full accordance with the measures of their rhythmical system, their own
hearts and lungs. The first records of Greek history and poetry, the Homeric
poems, disclosed this very fact, that the Greek meters were neither artificial
expressions of style nor detached from the processes of nature. On the contrary,
the hexameter of Homer seemed to show from the very outset that man, as the
prototype of the rhythms of the world, “is the measure of all.”
It is obvious that the Hellenes did not arbitrarily fashion such measures,
numbers and proportions in any kind of sophistication, and it is unthinkable
that speculations on proportions ever influenced the mind of the author of
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Man at the Hellenic stage of development was a
living measure of the cosmos, a mirror of nature’s law; and the laws of cosmic
rhythms themselves played, as it were, on the lyre of man’s rhythmical organism
and created the world of Hellas’ meters. It was for this reason that Antipater of
Sidon called Homer the “imperishable mouth of the cosmos.”
The hexameter revealed the rhythmical system of man on which, at the
time of the Homeric poems, memory was still based. Therefore it seems
understandable that the bard and his disciples and finally everybody in Hellas
could memorize the cantos from beginning to end.
The iambic trimeter became the verse of the drama and therefore dominated
the poetry of the late evolution of the Greek language as the hexameter did
that of the earlier. It is a verse which consists of twice three measures, followed
by a caesura, thus built up like the hexameter on the breath and heartbeat
relationship.
Outoi syneichthein, alla symphilein ephyn.
(I am not here to hate, to love is all my task.)
– Sophocles, Antigone, 523
The elements of primitive lyric poetry were rhythm (rhythmos) and melody
(melos). The folk songs of anonymous authors point to the dance and the
movement of people at work as the source of the rhythms. Music and words
were inseparably connected, for instance in the anonymous Dancing Song: