Melanippides

Melanippides of Melos (Greek: Μελανιππίδης), one of the most celebrated lyric poets in the use of dithyramb, and an exponent of the "new music."

The life of Melanippides can only be fixed within rather uncertain limits. He is thought to have flourished around the middle of the 5th-century BC. He was younger than Lasus of Hermione (Plut. Mus. p. 1141, c.), and younger than Diagoras of Melos. He was a contemporary of the comic poet Pherecrates. He lived for some time at the court of Archelaus of Macedon, and died there in around 412 BC.

His high reputation as a poet is intimated by Xenophon, who makes Aristodemus give him first place among dithyrambic poets, alongside Homer, Sophocles, Polykleitos and Zeuxis, as the chief masters in their respective arts (Xenoph. Mem. i. 4. §. 3), and by Plutarch, who mentions him, with Simonides and Euripides, as among the most distinguished masters of music (Non posse suav. vivi sec. Epic. 1095d).

Melanippides did not, however, escape the censures which the old comic poets so often heap upon their lyric contemporaries for their corruption of the severe beauties of the ancient music. Pherecrates places him at the head of such offenders and charges him with relaxing and softening the ancient music by increasing the chords of the lyre to twelve (or perhaps ten) and thus paving the way for the further licences introduced by Cinesias, Phrynis, and Timotheus of Miletus (Plut. de Mus. p. 1141, as explained and corrected by Meineke, Frag. Com. Grace, pp. 326–335). According to Aristotle, he altogether abandoned the antistrophic arrangement, and introduced long preludes (anabolai) in which the union, which was considered essential in ancient times, between music and the words of poetry, seems to have been severed (Aristot. Rhet. iii. 9).

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