"Prosodia," no less than in the "Hyporchemata," and, for anything that we can see to the contrary, the pantomimic method might have been applied to the one as well as to the other. But it is clear that in all these matters the Greeks had a very nice sense of artistic propriety, and in the lack of more complete information, we must suppose that the gestures which were suitable to the lively and cheerful Hyporchema would have been considered unduly realistic, and therefore indecorous, in the solemn and magnificent "Pæan" or "Encomium."
To Stesichorus, a Sicilian poet of the sixth century B.C., Choral poetry owed the final arrangement of its metrical system. Thenceforward a perfect Choral Ode consisted of a succession of stanzas arranged in "ternaries" or groups of three, the first stanza in each group being called the Strophe, the second the Antistrophe, and the third the Epode. Any one of these stanzas, viewed in itself, seems quite irregular in its construction: it may consist of any number of lines up to a dozen or thereabouts, and these lines may vary indefinitely in rhythm and length. But on examination it will always be found, that an Antistrophe corresponds in rhythm—line for line, and foot for foot—to the preceding Strophe; and further, that all the strophes of any one Ode are identical in rhythm (so that, in fact, all the Strophes and Antistrophes are but repetitions of a single form of stanza), while the Epodes similarly correspond to one another, though they differ from the Strophes and Antistrophes. Every Ode accordingly, of whatever length, employs two forms
