The Grecians had a notion of Satyrs, whom I have
already described; and taking them and the Sileni--that is, the
young Satyrs and the old--for the tutors, attendants, and humble
companions of their Bacchus, habited themselves like those rural
deities, and imitated them in their rustic dances, to which they
joined songs with some sort of rude harmony, but without certain
numbers; and to these they added a kind of chorus.
The Romans also, as nature is the same in all places, though they
knew nothing of those Grecian demi-gods, nor had any communication
with Greece, yet had certain young men who at their festivals danced
and sang after their uncouth manner to a certain kind of verse which
they called Saturnian. What it was we have no certain light from
antiquity to discover; but we may conclude that, like the Grecian,
it was void of art, or, at least, with very feeble beginnings of it.
Those ancient Romans at these holy days, which were a mixture of
devotion and debauchery, had a custom of reproaching each other with
their faults in a sort of extempore poetry, or rather of tunable
hobbling verse, and they answered in the same kind of gross
raillery--their wit and their music being of a piece.
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