Does this mean that wherever the heroic poems were introduced the rhapsodists tried to accommodate them, as far as possible, to the language of the district?
Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, according to Herodotus (V 67) prohibited rhapsodists from reciting the Homeric poems, because they were full of the praises of Argos and its people.
The former said in a speech "Our fathers thought Homer such a good poet that they made a law for him alone among poets that his poems should be recited by rhapsodists at every quinquennial holding of the Panathenaea.
The theme of the Dialogue may possibly have been suggested by the passage of Xenophon's Memorabilia in which the rhapsodists are described by Euthydemus as 'very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very idiotic themselves.
Odeum was a building intended for the recitations of rhapsodists and the performances of citharædists, before the theatre was in existence.
The ancient and original Odeum of Athens in the Agora was probably erected in the time of Hipparchus, who, according to Plato, first introduced at Athens the poems of Homer, and caused rhapsodists to recite them during the Panathenæa.
That scholar justly observes: “The eleventh chapter, Description of Evening, is certainly the work of the Rhapsodists and an interpolation of later date.
As they were the first rhapsodists the combined name Kuśílava signifies a reciter of poems, or an improvisatore, even to the present day.
As the whole poem could not be recited at once, the rhapsodists at the beginning of a fresh recitation would naturally remind their hearers of the events immediately preceding.
This work was then learnt by professional rhapsodists (kucilava) and recited by them in public as they wandered about the country.
They seem rather to owe their origin simply to the desire of professional rhapsodists to meet the demands of the popular taste.
What actually saved them in the first place was an institution resembling that of the Rhapsodists in Greece.
Four years ago, at the age of eighteen, Charmides had elected to enter the ranks of that band of rhapsodists known to us now only as the predecessors of fire-winged Pindar and his glorious brethren.
Rhapsodists were of a class apart, and were reverenced by an art-loving people as on an equality with their priests.
The practice of poets or rhapsodists contending for the prize at the great religious festivals is of considerable antiquity, though apparently post-Homeric.
On this a scholiast says that the name "Homeridae" denoted originally descendants of Homer, who sang his poems in succession, but afterwards was applied to rhapsodists who did not claim descent from him.
A modern critic, who thinks this possible, is bringing the practice of archaising poets of the late nineteenth century into the minds of rhapsodists of the eighth century before Christ.
Any one who believes that in an uncritical age rhapsodists archaised, with such success as the presumed late poets of the ILIAD must have done, may try his hand in our critical age, at a ballad in the style of the Border ballads.
From casual strollers like the rhapsodists and chanters at festivals, we look for nothing of the sort.
Late rhapsodists would not delve in the archaeology of the Mycenaean prime.
Mr. Jevons suggests that the many brief poems collected in the Homeric hymns are invocations which the rhapsodists preluded to their recitals.
The rhapsodists were men, as a rule, of one day recitations, though at a prolonged festival at Athens there was time for the whole Iliad to be recited.
The poets who did not introduce the new small bucklers with which they were familiar, did stuff the Iliad full of corslets unknown, by the theory, to the original poet, but familiar to rhapsodists living centuries later.
We have seen how natural it was for the rhapsodists of his race to pass from verse to prose and again from prose to verse.
They were probably Homeric rhapsodists by profession, to whom the constant recitation of the ancient Homeric poems would naturally suggest the idea of continuing them by essays of their own.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "rhapsodists" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
