_THE LYRIC POETS._
The Æsthetic Instinct of the Greeks in their
Choice of Metres.--Different Species of
Lyrical Poetry.--The Fragments in Bergk's
Collection.--Proemia.--Prosodia.--Parthenia.--Pæan.--
Hyporchem.--Dithyramb.--Phallic
Hymn.--Epinikia.--Threnoi.--Scolia.--Æolian
and Dorian Lyrists.--The Flourishing Period of
Lesbos.--Sappho.--Alcæus.--Anacreon.--Nationality
of the Dorian Lyrists.--Spartan
Education.--Alcman.--Arion.--Stesichorus.--Ibycus.--Simonides.--
Greek Troubadours.--Style of Simonides.--Pindar.--Later
Literary Odes.
To compress into a single essay all that should be said about the Greek
lyrical poets is impossible. Yet by eliminating the writers of elegies
and iambics, who have been considered separately as gnomic poets and
satirists, the field is somewhat narrowed. Simonides of Amorgos,
Archilochus, Theognis, Solon, not to mention lesser names, are by this
process legitimately excluded. The Æolian lyrists, with Sappho at
their head, and the so-called Dorian lyrists, who culminate in Pindar,
remain. Casting a glance backward into the remote shadows of antiquity,
we find that lyrical poetry, like all art in Greece, took its origin
in connection with primitive Nature-worship. The song of Linus,[76]
referred to by Homer in his description of the shield of Achilles, was
a lament sung by reapers for the beautiful dead youth who symbolized
the decay of summer's prime.[77] In the funeral chant for Adonis,
women bewailed the fleeting splendor of the spring; and Hyacinthus,
loved and slain by Phoebus, whom the Laconian youths and maidens
honored, was again a type of vernal loveliness defloured. The Bacchic
songs of alternating mirth and sadness, which gave birth, through
the dithyramb, to tragedy, and through the Comus-hymn to comedy,
marked the waxing and the waning of successive years, the pulses
of the heart of Nature, to which men listened as the months passed
over them. In their dim beginnings these elements of Greek poetry
are hardly to be distinguished from the dirges and the raptures of
Asiatic ceremonial, in which the dance and chant and song were mingled
in a vague monotony--generation after generation expressing the same
emotions according to traditions handed down from their forefathers.
But the Greek genius was endowed with the faculty of distinguishing,
differentiating, vitalizing, what the Oriental nations left hazy and
confused and inert. Therefore with the very earliest stirrings of
conscious art in Greece we remark a powerful specializing tendency.
Articulation succeeds to mere interjectional utterance. Separate
forms of music and of metre are devoted, with the unerring instinct
of a truly æsthetic race, to the expression of the several moods and
passions of the soul. An unconscious psychology leads by intuitive
analysis to the creation of distinct branches of composition, each
accurately adapted to its special purpose.
From the very first commencement of their literature, the Greeks
thus determined separate styles and established critical canons,
which, though empirically and spontaneously formed, were based
on real relations between the moral and æsthetical sides of art,
between feeling and expression, substance and form. The hexameter was
consecrated to epical narrative; the elegy was confined to songs of
lament or meditation; the iambic assumed a satiric character. To have
written a narrative in iambics or a satire in hexameters would have
been odious to Greek taste; the stately march of the dactylic metre
seemed unfit for snarling and invective; the quick flight of the iambic
did not carry weight enough or volume to sustain a lengthy narrative.
In the same way the infinite divisions of lyrical poetry had all their
own peculiar properties. How could a poet have bewailed his loves
or losses in the stately structure of the Pindaric ode? Conversely,
a hymn to Phoebus required more sonorousness and elaboration than
the recurring stanzas of the Sapphic or Alcaic offered. It was the
business, therefore, of the Greek poet, after duly considering his
subject, to select the special form of poetry consecrated by long usage
for his particular purpose; to conform his language to some species
of music inseparable from that style, and then, within the prescribed
limits, both of metre and of melody, to exercise his imagination as
freely as he could, and to produce novelty. This amount of fixity in
the forms of poetry and music arose from the exquisite tact and innate
taste of the Greek race. It was far from being a piece of scholastic
pedantry or of Chinese conservatism. No; the diction, metre, and music
of an elegy or an ode tended to assume a certain form as naturally as
the ingredients of a ruby or a sapphire crystallize into a crimson
or an azure stone. The discrimination shown by the Greeks in all the
technicalities of art remained in full vigor till the decline of their
literature. It was not until the Alexandrian age that they began to
confound these delicate distinctions, and to use the idyllic hexameter
for all subjects, whether narrative, descriptive, elegiac, encomiastic,
hymeneal.[78] Then, and not till then, the Greeks descended to that
degradation of art which prevailed, for instance, in England during
what we call the classic period of our literature. Under the influence
of Dryden and of Pope, an English poet used no metre but the heroic
couplet, whether he were writing a play, an epigram, a satire, an epic,
an eclogue, an elegy, or a didactic epistle; thus losing all elasticity
of style, all the force which appropriate form communicates to thought.
To catalogue the minute subdivisions of the art of lyric poetry in
Greece, to show how wisely their several limits were prescribed, how
firmly adhered to, and to trace the connection of choral song with
all the affairs of public and private life, would be a task of some
magnitude. Colonel Mure, in a well-known passage, writes: "From Olympus
down to the workshop or the sheep-fold, from Jove and Apollo to the
wandering mendicant, every rank and degree of the Greek community,
divine or human, had its own proper allotment of poetical celebration.
The gods had their hymns, nomes, pæans, dithyrambs; great men had
their encomia and epinikia; the votaries of pleasure their erotica
and symposiaca; the mourner his threnoi and elegies; the vine-dresser
had his epilenia; the herdsmen their bucolica; even the beggar his
eiresione and chelidonisma." Lyrical poetry in Greece was not produced,
like poetry in modern times, for the student, by men who find they have
a taste for versifying. It was intimately intertwined with actual life,
and was so indispensable that every town had its professional poets
and choruses, just as every church in Europe now has its organist,
of greater or less pretension. The mass of lyrical poetry which must
have existed in Greece was probably enormous. We can only compare it
to the quantity of church music that exists in Germany and Italy, in
MS. and print, good, bad, and indifferent, unknown and unexplored, so
voluminous that no one ventures to sift it or reduce it to order. Of
this large mass we possess the fragments. Just as the rocky islands of
the Ægean Archipelago testify to the existence of a submerged tract
of mountain heights and valleys, whose summits alone appear above
the waves, so the odes of Pindar, the waifs and strays of Sappho,
Simonides, and others, are evidences of the loss we have sustained.
They prove that beneath the ocean of time and oblivion remain forever
buried stores of poetry which might have been sufficient to form the
glory of a literature less rich in masterpieces than the Greek. To
collect the fragments, to piece them together, to ponder over them
until their scattered indications offer some suggestion of the whole
which has been lost, is all that remains for the modern student.
Like the mutilated marbles of Praxiteles, chips broken off from
bass-reliefs and statues, which are disinterred from the ruins of Rome
or Herculaneum, the minutest portions of the Greek lyrists have their
value. We must be thankful for any two words of Sappho that survive in
authentic juxtaposition, for any hemistich that may be veritably styled
a relic of "some tender-hearted scroll of pure Simonides."
Chance has wrought fantastically with these relics. The lyrists,
even in classical days, fell comparatively early into neglect. They
were too condensed in language, too difficult in style, too sublime
in imagination for the pedants of the later empire. Long before its
close, Greek literature was oppressed with its own wealth; in the
words of Livy, _magnitudine laboravit sua_. Taste, too, began to
change; sophistic treatises, idyllic verses, novelettes in prose,
neat epigrams, usurped upon the grander forms of composition. The
stagnation, again, of civic life under imperial sway proved unfavorable
to the composition of national odes and to choric celebrations in
which whole peoples took a part. So disdainful in her alms-giving
has Fortune been, that she has only flung to us the epinikian odes
of Pindar; while his hymns to the gods, his processional chants, and
his funeral dirges, are lost. Young Athens, Alexandria, and Byzantium
cared, we may conceive, for poems which shed lustre on athletic sports
and horse-racing. Trainers, boxers, riders, chariot-drivers--all the
muscular section of the public--had some interest in by-gone Pythian
or Olympian victories. But who sought to preserve the antiquated
hymns to Phoebus and to Zeus, when the rites of Isis and Serapis and
the Phrygian mother were in vogue? The outspoken boldness of the
erotic and satiric lyrists stood them in bad stead. When Theodora
was exhibiting her naked charms in the arena, who could commend the
study of Anacreon in the school-room? Degeneracy of public morals and
prudery of literary taste go not unfrequently together. Therefore, the
Emperor Julian proscribed Archilochus; and what Julian proscribed,
the Christians sought to extirpate. To destroy an ode of Sappho was
a good work. Consequently, we possess no complete edition of even a
section of the works of any lyrist except Pindar: what remains of the
others has been preserved in the works of critics, anecdote-mongers,
and grammarians; who cite tantalizing passages to prove a rule in
syntax, to illustrate a legend or a custom, to exemplify a canon of
taste. Imbedded in ponderous prose, these splintered jewels escaped
the iconoclastic zeal of the monks. Thanks be to Athenæus above all
men (the author of an imaginary dialogue in fifteen bulky books on
every topic of Greek antiquity), to Longinus, to Philostratus, to
Maximus Tyrius, to Plutarch the moralist, to Stobæus, to Hephæstion,
to Herodian, and to the host of other Dryasdusts from whose heaps of
shot rubbish Bergk and his predecessors have sorted out the fragments
of extinguished stars! As a masterpiece of patient, self-denying,
scientific, exhaustive investigation, the three volumes of Bergk are
unrivalled. Every author of antiquity has been laid under contribution,
subjected to critical analysis, compared and confronted with his
fellow-witnesses. The result, reduced to the smallest possible compass,
yields a small glittering heap of pure gold-dust, a little handful of
auriferous deposit sifted from numberless river-beds, crushed from
huge masses of unfertile quartz. In our admiration of the scholar's
ingenuity, we almost forget our sorrow for so much irreparable waste.
Before proceeding to consider the justice of the time-honored division
of Greek lyrics into Æolian and Dorian, it will be well to pass in
review a few of the principal classes into which Greek choral poetry
may be divided. Only thus can any idea of its richness and variety
be formed. The old Homeric #hymnoi#, or hymns dedicated to special
deities, were intended to be sung at festivals and rhapsodical
contests. Their technical name was proemia, or preludes--preludes, that
is, to a longer recitation; and on this account, as they were chanted
by the poet himself, they were written in hexameters. With them,
therefore, we have nothing here to do. Processional hymns, or prosodia,
on the contrary, were strictly lyrical, and constituted a large portion
of the poetry of Pindar, Alcman, and Stesichorus. They were sung at
solemn festivals by troops of men and maidens walking, crowned with
olive, myrtle, bay, or oleander, to the shrines. Their style varied
with the occasion and the character of the deity to whom they were
addressed. When Hecuba led her maidens in dire necessity to the shrine
of Pallas, the prosodion was solemn and earnest. When Sophocles, with
lyre in hand, headed the chorus round the trophy of Salamis, it was
victorious and martial. If we wish to present to our mind a picture of
these processional ceremonies, we may study the frieze of the Parthenon
preserved among the Elgin Marbles. Those long lines of maidens and
young men, with baskets in their hands, with flowers and palm-branches,
with censers and sacred emblems, are marching to the sound of flutes
and lyres, and to the stately rhythms of antiphonal chanting. When they
reach the altar of the god, a halt is made; the libations are poured;
and now the music changes to a solemn and spondaic measure--for the
term spondaic seems to be derived from the fact that the libation-hymn
was composed in a grave and heavy metre of full feet. Hephæstion has
preserved a spondaic verse of Terpander which illustrates this rhythm:
#spendômen tais Mnamas
paisin Môsais
kai tôi Môsarchôi
Latous huiei.#[79]
In the age of Greek decadence the honors of the prosodion were
sometimes paid to men. Athenæus gives this lively description of
the procession which greeted Demetrius Poliorketes: "When Demetrius
returned from Leucadia and Corcyra to Athens, the Athenians received
him not only with incense and garlands and libations, but they even
sent out processional choruses, and greeted him with ithyphallic hymns
and dances: stationed by his chariot-wheels, they sang and danced and
chanted that he alone was a real god; the rest were sleeping, or were
on a journey, or did not exist; they called him son of Poseidon and
Aphrodite, eminent for beauty, universal in his goodness to mankind;
then they prayed and besought and supplicated him like a god." The hymn
which they sang may be read in Bergk, vol. iii. p. 1314. It is one of
the most interesting relics of antiquity.[80]
For the sake of its rare and curious metre alternating the iambic and
trochaic rhythms, I have faced the difficulties of translation, and
have ventured on the following version:
See how the mightiest gods, and best-beloved
Towards our town are winging!
For lo, Demeter and Demetrius
This glad day is bringing!
She to perform her daughter's solemn rites;
Mystic pomps attend her:
He, joyous as a god should be, and blithe,
Comes with laughing splendor.
Show forth your triumph! Friends all, troop around!
Let him shine above you!
Be you the stars to circle him with love;
He's the sun to love you.
Hail, offspring of Poseidon, powerful god,
Child of Aphrodite!
The other gods keep far away from earth;
Have no ears, though mighty;
They are not, or they will not hear us wail:
Thee our eye beholdeth;
Not wood, not stone, but living, breathing, real,
Thee our prayer enfoldeth.
First give us peace! Give, dearest, for thou canst:
Thou art Lord and Master!
The Sphinx, who not on Thebes, but on all Greece
Swoops to gloat and pasture;
The Ætolian, he who sits upon his rock,
Like that old disaster;
He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and we
Can no longer labor;
For it was ever thus the Ætolian thief
Preyed upon his neighbor;
Him punish thou, or if not thou, then send
Oedipus to harm him,
Who'll cast this Sphinx down from his cliff of pride,
Or to stone will charm him.
A special kind of prosodia were the Parthenia, or processional hymns
of maidens; such, for example, as the Athenian girls sang to Pallas
while they climbed the staircase of the Parthenon. Aristophanes has
presented us with a beautiful example of antiphonal Parthenia at
the end of his _Lysistrata_, where choruses of Athenian and Spartan
girls sing turn and turn about in rivalry. Alcman won his laurels at
Sparta by the composition of this kind of hymn. A fragment (Bergk,
p. 842) only remains to show what they were like: "No more, ye
honey-voiced, sweet-singing maidens, can my limbs support me: oh,
oh, that I were a cerylus, who skims the flower of the sea with
halcyons, of a dauntless heart, the sea-blue bird of spring!" Such
Parthenia, when addressed to Phoebus, were called Daphnephorica; for
the maidens carried laurel-branches to his shrine. A more charming
picture cannot be conceived than that which is presented to our fancy
by these white-robed virgins, each with her rod of bay and crown of
laurel-leaves, ascending the marble steps of the temple of the Dorian
god. John Lyly, who had imbibed the spirit of Greek life, has written a
hymn, "Sing to Apollo, god of day!" which might well have been used at
such a festival.
The prosodia of which we have been speaking were addressed to all
the gods. But there were other choric hymns with special names,
consecrated to the service of particular deities. Of this sort was the
pæan, sung to Phoebus in his double character of a victorious and
a healing god. The pæan was both a song of war and of peace; it was
the proper accompaniment of the battle and the feast. In like manner
the hyporchem, which, as its name implies, was always accompanied
by a dance, originally formed a portion of the cult of Phoebus. The
chorus described in the _Iliad_, xviii. 590, and the glorious pageant
of Olympus celebrated in the _Hymn to Apollo_, 186, were, technically
speaking, hyporchems. As the pæan and the hyporchem were originally
consecrated to Apollo, so the dithyramb and the phallic hymn belonged
to Dionysus. The dithyramb never lost the tempestuous and enthusiastic
character of Bacchic revelry; but in time it grew from being a wild
celebration of the mystic sufferings of Bacchus into the sublime art
of tragedy. Arion forms the point of this transition. He seems to
have thrown a greater reality of passion and dramatic action into
his choruses, which led to the introduction of dialogue, and so by
degrees to tragedy proper. Meanwhile the dithyramb, as a tumultuous
choric song, retained its individual existence. As Arion had devoted
his genius to the cultivation of the tragic or cyclic chorus, Lasos,
the master of Pindar, stamped his own style upon the dithyrambic ode
as it continued to be used at festive meetings. Every town in Greece
had its chorodidascalus, a functionary whom Aristophanes ridicules in
the person of Kinesias in the _Birds_.[81] He is introduced warbling
the wildest, windiest nonsense, and entreating to have a pair of
wings given him that he may chase his airy ideas through the sky.
The phallic hymn, from which in like manner comedy took its origin,
was a mad outpouring of purely animal exultation. Here the wine-god
was celebrated as the pleasure-loving, drunken, lascivious deity.
Aristophanes, again, our truest source of information respecting all
the details of Greek life, supplies us with an instance of one of these
songs, and of the simple rites which accompanied its performance.[82]
In the _Frogs_, also, the Master of Comedy has presented us with an
elaborate series of Bacchic hymns.[83] Here the phallic and satyric
element is combined with something of the grandeur of the dithyrambic
ode; the curious mixture of sarcasm, obscenity, and splendid
poetry offers a striking instance of Greek religious feeling, so
incomprehensible to modern minds. It is greatly to be regretted that
our information respecting the dithyramb and the phallic chorus has to
be obtained from a dramatic poet rather than from any perfect specimens
of these compositions. Bergk's Collection, full as it is, yields
nothing but hints and fragments.[84]
Passing to the lyrics, which were connected with circumstances of human
life, the first to be mentioned are epinikia, or odes sung in honor of
victors at the games. Of these, in the splendid series of Pindar and in
the fragments of Simonides, we have abundant examples. We are also able
to trace their development from the simple exclamation of #tênella ô
kallinike#,[85] the composition of which was ascribed to Archilochus,
and which Pindar looked back upon with scornful triumph. Indeed, in his
hands, to use the phrase of Wordsworth, "the thing became a trumpet,
whence he blew soul-animating strains." The epinikian ode was the most
costly and splendid flower in the victor's wreath. Pindar compares
the praise which he pours forth for Diagoras the Rhodian to noblest
wine foaming in the golden goblet, which a father gives to honor his
son-in-law, the prime and jewel of his treasure-house.
The occasions on which such odes were sung were various--either when
the victor was being crowned, or when he was returning to his native
city, or by torchlight during the evening of the victorious day, or at
a banquet after his reception in his home. On one of these occasions
the poet would appear with his trained band of singers and musicians,
and, taking his stand by the altar of the god to whom the victor
offered a thanksgiving sacrifice, would guide the choric stream of
song through strophe and antistrophe and epode, in sonorous labyrinths
of eulogy and mythological allusion--prayer, praise, and admonition
mingling with the fumes of intoxicating poetry. Of all these occasions
the most striking must have been the commemoration of a victory in
the temple of Zeus at Altis, near Olympia, by moonlight. The contest
has taken place during the day; and the olive-wreath has been placed
upon the head, say, of Myronides, from Thebes. Having rested from his
labors, after the bath and the banquet, crowned with his victorious
garland and with fillets bound about his hair, he stands surrounded
by his friends. Zeus, in ivory and gold, looks down from his marble
pedestal. Through the open roof shines a moon of the south, glancing
aslant on statue and column and carved bass-relief; while below, the
red glare of torches, paling its silver, flickers with fitful crimson
on the glowing faces of young men. Then swells the choral hymn, with
praise of Myronides and praise of Thebes, and stormy flights of
fancy shooting beyond sun and stars. At its close follow libation,
dedication, hands upraised in prayer to Zeus. Then the trampling of
sandalled feet upon the marble floor, the procession with songs still
sounding to the temple-gate, and on a sudden, lo! the full moon, the
hills and plain and solemn night of stars. The band disperses, and the
Comus succeeds to the thanksgiving.
As a contrast to the epinikia we may take the different kinds of
threnoi, or funeral songs. The most primitive was called epikedeion,
a dirge or coronach, improvised by women over the bodies of the
dead.[86] The lamentations of Helen and Andromache for Hector, and
of the slave-girls for Patroclus, are Homeric instances of this
species. Euripides imitates them in his tragedies--in the dirge sung
by Antigone, for instance, in the _Phoenissæ_, and in the wailings
of Hecuba for Astyanax in the _Troades_. A different kind of threnos
were the songs of Linus, Hyacinth, Adonis, and others, to which I
have already alluded in the beginning of this chapter. The finest
extant specimen of this sort is Bion's _Lament for Adonis_, which,
however, was composed in the idyllic age, when the hexameter had been
substituted for the richer and more splendid lyric metres. A third
class of threnos consisted of complex choral hymns composed by poets
like Simonides or Pindar, to be sung at funeral solemnities. Many of
our most precious lyric fragments, those which embody philosophical
reflections on life and dim previsions of another world, belong to
dirges of this elaborate kind.
Marriage festivals offered another occasion for lyric poetry. The
hymeneal, sung during the wedding ceremony, the epithalamium, chanted
at the house of the bridegroom, and many other species, have been
defined by the grammarians. Unfortunately we possess nothing but the
merest _débris_ of any true Greek ode of this kind. Sappho's are
the best. We have to study the imitations of her style in Catullus,
the marriage chorus at the end of the _Birds_ of Aristophanes, and
the epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus, in order to form a remote
conception of what a Sapphic marriage chorus might have been. In
banquet songs we are more fortunate. Abundant are the paroenia of
Alcæus, Anacreon, Theognis, and others. Scolia, or catches, so called
from their irregular metrical structure, were also in vogue at
banquets; and of these popular songs a sufficient number are preserved.
A drunken passage in the works of Aristophanes brings before us
after a lively fashion the ceremonies with which the scolion and the
wine-cup circled the symposium together.[87] Of all these catches the
most celebrated in ancient days was the panegyric of Harmodius and
Aristogeiton, attributed to Callistratus. As I have the opportunity
of printing from MS. a translation of this song by the late Professor
Conington, I will introduce it here:
In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman's town.
Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead!
Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said,
With Achilles first in speed,
And Tydides Diomede.
In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,
When the twain on Athena's day
Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.
For aye shall your fame in the land be told,
Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman's town.
The whole collection of scolia in Bergk (pp. 1287-1296) is full of
interest, since these simple and popular songs carry us back more
freshly than elaborate poems to the life of the Greeks. One of these,
attributed to Simonides, sums up the qualities which a Greek most
desired:
#hygiainein men ariston andri thnatôi,
deuteron de phyan kalon genesthai,
to triton de ploutein adolôs,
kai to tetarton hêban meta tôn philôn.#[88]
Unlike Solomon, when asked what he would take from the Lord as a gift,
the Greek poet does not answer Wisdom, but first Health, secondly
Beauty, thirdly Wealth untainted by fraud, and fourthly Youth in the
society of friends. The last thought of this little poem is expanded
very beautifully in another scolion:
#syn moi pine, synêba, synera, systephanêphorei,
syn moi mainomenôi maineo, syn sôphroni sôphronei#:
"Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear crowns with me,
when I am mad be mad with me, be wise with me when I am wise." The verb
#synêban# is almost untranslatable. Of another kind is the scolion
of Hybrias the Cretan, translated thus into English verse by Thomas
Campbell:
My wealth's a burly spear and brand,
And a right good shield of hides untanned,
Which on my arm I buckle:
With these I plough, I reap, I sow,
With these I make the sweet vintage flow,
And all around me truckle.
But your wights that take no pride to wield
A massy spear and well-made shield,
Nor joy to draw the sword:
Oh, I bring those heartless, hapless drones,
Down in a trice on their marrow-bones,
To call me king and lord.
This catch brings before our eyes in a very lively picture the lawless
Freiherr of early Dorian barbarism. Another species of the scolion is
more sentimental: "Would that I were a fair lyre of ivory, and that
fair boys bore me to the Bacchic Choir; would that I were a fair,
new, and mighty golden jar, and that a fair woman bore me with a
pure heart." Again, we find moral precepts in these catches. "Whoso
betrayeth not a friend hath great honor among men and gods, according
to my mind."
While on the subject of scolia, it will not do to pass over the most
splendid specimen we have in this order of composition. It is a
fragment from Pindar (Bergk, p. 327), to translate which, I feel, is
profanation:
O soul, 'tis thine in season meet,
To pluck of love the blossom sweet,
When hearts are young:
But he who sees the blazing beams,
The light that from _that_ forehead streams,
And is not stung;--
Who is not storm-tost with desire,--
Lo! he, I ween, with frozen fire,
Of adamant or stubborn steel,
Is forged in his cold heart that cannot feel.
Disowned, dishonored, and denied
By Aphrodite glittering-eyed,
He either toils
All day for gold, a sordid gain,
Or bent beneath a woman's reign,
In petty broils,
Endures her insolence, a drudge,
Compelled the common path to trudge;
But I, apart from this disease,
Wasting away like wax of holy bees,
Which the sun's splendor wounds, do pine,
Whene'er I see the young-limbed bloom divine
Of boys. Lo! look you well; for here in Tenedos,
Grace and Persuasion dwell in young Theoxenos.
Of the many different kinds of lyric poetry consecrated to love and
intended for recitation by single musicians, it is not possible to give
a strict account. That the Greeks cultivated the serenade is clear
from a passage in the _Ecclesiazusæ_ of Aristophanes, which contains
a graceful though gross specimen of this kind of song. The children's
songs (Bergk, 1303-1307) about flowers, tortoises, and hobgoblins are
too curiously illustrative of Greek manners not to merit a passing
notice, nor can I here omit a translation of the only Swallow-song
preserved to us. Athenæus, to whom we owe this curious relic, localizes
the Chelidonisma in Rhodes, referring it particularly to the district
of Lindus.[89] In spring time the children went round the town,
collecting doles and presents from house to house, and singing as they
went:
She is here, she is here, the swallow!
Fair seasons bringing, fair years to follow!
Her belly is white,
Her back black as night!
From your rich house
Roll forth to us
Tarts, wine, and cheese:
Or if not these,
Oatmeal and barley-cake
The swallow deigns to take.
What shall we have? or must we hence away?
Thanks, if you give; if not, we'll make you pay!
The house-door hence we'll carry;
Nor shall the lintel tarry;
From hearth and home your wife we'll rob;
She is so small,
To take her off will be an easy job!
Whate'er you give, give largess free!
Up! open, open to the swallow's call!
No grave old men, but merry children we!
After this lengthy, but far from exhaustive, enumeration of the kinds
and occasions of lyrical poetry in Greece, we may turn to consider
the different parts played in their cultivation by the several chief
families of Hellas. It is remarkable that all the great writers of
elegies and iambics were Ionians; Theognis of Megara is the only Dorian
whose genuine poems are celebrated; and against his we have to set
the bulk of Solon, Mimnermus, Phocylides, Callinus, and Tyrtæus, all
Ionians.[90] Not a single Dorian poet seems to have composed iambics,
the rigid discipline and strong sense of decorum in a Dorian state
probably rendering the cultivation of satire impossible. We are told
that the Spartans would not even suffer Archilochus to lodge as a
stranger among them. But when we turn to lyric poetry--to the poetry of
stanzas and strophes--the two other families of the Greeks, the Æolians
and the Dorians, take the lead. As a Dorian was exceptional among
the elegists, so now an Ionian will be comparatively rare among the
lyrists. So great was the æsthetical conservatism of the Greeks that
throughout their history their primitive distinctions of dialect are
never lost sight of. When the Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote
their iambics in pure Attic, but they preserved a Dorian tone in their
choruses. The epic hexameter and the elegy, on the other hand, retained
an Ionian character to the last.
The paths struck out by the Æolians and Dorians in the domain of lyric
poetry were so different as to justify us in speaking of two distinct
species. When Milton in the _Paradise Regained_ catalogued the poetical
achievements of the Greeks, he assigned their true place to these two
species in the line--
Æolian charms and Dorian lyric odes.
The poets and poetesses of the Ægean Islands cultivated a rapid and
effusive style, polishing their passionate stanzas so exquisitely that
they well deserve the name of charms. The Dorian poets, inspired by a
graver and more sustained imagination, composed long and complex odes
for the celebration of gods and heroes. The Æolian singer dwelt on his
own joys and sorrows; the Dorian bard addressed some deity, or told the
tales of demigods and warriors. The Æolian chanted his stanzas to the
lyre or flute; the Dorian trained a chorus, who gave utterance to his
verse in dance and song.
Though the Æolians were the eldest family of the Hellenic stock, their
language retaining more than any other dialect the primitive character
of the Greek tongue, yet they never rose to such historical importance
as the Dorians and Ionians. Geographically they were scattered in
such a way as to have no definite centre. We find Æolians in Elis, in
Boeotia, in Lesbos, and on the Asian sea-coast south of the Troad.
But in course of time the Æolians of Elis and Boeotia were almost
identified with the Dorians as allies of Sparta, while the Æolians of
Lesbos and Asia merged themselves in the Athenian empire. Politically,
mentally, and morally, they showed less activity than their cousins of
the blood of Dorus and Ion. They produced no law-givers like Lycurgus
and Solon; they had no metropolis like Sparta and Athens; they played
no prominent part in the struggle with Persia, or in the Peloponnesian
war. In the later days of Greece, Thebes, when Dorized by contact with
the Spartans, for a short time headed Greece, and flourished with
brief splendor. But it would not be accurate to give to the Æolian
character the credit of the fame of Thebes at that advanced period.
Yet, for a certain space of time, the Æolians occupied the very
foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of
lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed. There seems to have
been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made
the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos,
the centre of Æolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions:
the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and
steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians
divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and
the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and state-craft and
social economy, were restrained by the Æolians within the sphere of
individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in
any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of
physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the
consuming fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and
receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first
this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the
world has known: this was the flower-time of the Æolians, their brief
and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten.
Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment
had flamed into the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of
words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which
no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this
the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made
a literature of love, or the Venetian painters, who based their art
upon the beauty of color, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each
case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling
result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing
left for art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued.
Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of lyric
poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Æolians permitted more social
and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Æolian women were
not confined to the harem like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous
discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they
were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an
extent unknown elsewhere in history--until, indeed, the present time.
The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They
formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the
arts of beauty, and sought to refine metrical forms and diction. Nor
did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art. Unrestrained
by public opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated
their senses and emotions, and indulged their wildest passions. All
the luxuries and elegances of life which that climate and the rich
valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal; exquisite
gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river-beds ablaze
with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive-groves and fountains,
where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maiden-hair;
pine-tree-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a
tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sun and sea-wind can
mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring,
aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through
all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky
gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescos of heroic forms. In
such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived, and thought of love. When
we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and
lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but
biting winter wanting to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast
with the summer, to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated
senses. The voluptuousness of Æolian poetry is not like that of Persian
or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact.
We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically
and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends
solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.
The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of
Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved in
Bergk's _Collection_--the line, for example (p. 890), #êros angelos
imerophônos aêdôn#,[91] which Ben Jonson fancifully translated, "the
dear glad angel of the spring, the nightingale"--that we muse in a
sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must
have been. Among the ancients Sappho enjoyed a unique renown. She
was called "The Poetess," as Homer was called "The Poet." Aristotle
quoted without question a judgment that placed her in the same rank
as Homer and Archilochus. Plato in the _Phædrus_ mentioned her as the
tenth muse. Solon, hearing one of her poems, prayed that he might not
see death till he had learned it. Strabo speaks of her genius with
religious awe. Longinus cites her love-ode as a specimen of poetical
sublimity. The epigrammatists call her Child of Aphrodite and Eros,
nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride of Hellas, peer of Muses,
companion of Apollo. Nowhere is a hint whispered that her poetry was
aught but perfect. As far as we can judge, these praises were strictly
just. Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists
of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar
and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable
grace. In her art she was unerring. Even Archilochus seems commonplace
when compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase.
About her life--her brother Charaxus, her daughter Cleis, her rejection
of Alcæus and her suit to Phaon, her love for Atthis and Anactoria,
her leap from the Leucadian cliff--we know so very little, and that
little is so confused with mythology and turbid with the scandal of
the comic poets, that it is not worth while to rake up once again
the old materials for hypothetical conclusions. There is enough of
heart-devouring passion in Sappho's own verse without the legends of
Phaon and the cliff of Leucas. The reality casts all fiction into the
shade; for nowhere, except, perhaps, in some Persian or Provençal
love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions of overmastering
emotion. Whether addressing the maidens, whom even in Elysium, as
Horace says, Sappho could not forget; or embodying the profounder
yearnings of an intense soul after beauty, which has never on earth
existed, but which inflames the hearts of noblest poets, robbing their
eyes of sleep and giving them the bitterness of tears to drink--these
dazzling fragments,
Which still, like sparkles of Greek fire,
Burn on through time and ne'er expire,
are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate utterance, diamonds,
topazes, and blazing rubies, in which the fire of the soul is
crystallized forever. Adequately to translate Sappho was beyond the
power of even Catullus: that love-ode which Longinus called "not one
passion, but a congress of passions," and which a Greek physician
copied into his book of diagnoses as a compendium of all the symptoms
of corroding emotion, appears but languid in its Latin dress of "Ille
mi par." Far less has any modern poet succeeded in the task: Rossetti,
who deals so skilfully with Dante and Villon, is comparatively tame
when he approaches Sappho. Instead of attempting, therefore, to
interpret for English readers the charm of Sappho's style,[92] it is
best to refer to pp. 874-924 of Bergk, where every vestige that is left
of her is shrined.
Beside Sappho, Alcæus pales. His drinking-songs and war-songs have,
indeed, great beauty; but they are not to be named in the same breath,
for perfection of style, with the stanzas of Sappho. Of his life we
know a few not wholly uninteresting incidents. He was a noble of
Mitylene, the capital of Lesbos, where he flourished as early as 611
B.C. Alcæus belonged to a family of distinguished men. His brothers
Cicis and Antimenidas upheld the party of the oligarchy against the
tyrant Melanchrus; and during the troubles which agitated Mitylene
after the fall of this despot, while other petty tyrants--Myrsilus,
Megalagyrus, and the Cleanactids--were attempting to subdue the island,
the three brothers ranged themselves uniformly on the side of the
aristocracy. At first they seem to have been friendly with Pittacus.
It was while fighting at his side against the Athenians at Sigeum that
Alcæus threw his shield away--- an exploit which, like Archilochus,
he celebrated in a poem without apparently damaging his reputation
for valor. Being a stout soldier, a violent partisan, the bard of
revolutions, and the brother of a pair of heroes, he could trifle with
this little accident, which less doughty warriors must have concealed.
When Pittacus was chosen Æsymnetes, or dictator with despotic power for
the preservation of public order, in 589 B.C., Alcæus and his brothers
went into opposition and were exiled. All three of them were what
in modern politics we should call High Tories. They could not endure
the least approach to popular government, the slightest infringement
of the rights of the nobility. During his exile Alcæus employed his
poetic faculty in vituperating Pittacus. His satires were esteemed
almost as pungent as those of Archilochus. But the liberal-minded ruler
did not resent them. When Alcæus was on one occasion taken prisoner,
he set him free, remarking that "forgiveness is better than revenge."
Alcæus lived to be reconciled with him and to recognize his merits.
As a trait in the domestic life and fortunes of the Greeks of this
time, it is worth mentioning that Alcæus took refuge in Egypt during
his banishment from Lesbos, and that his brother Antimenidas entered
the service of the king of Babylon. In the same way two Englishmen in
the times of the Edwards might have travelled in Germany or become
soldiers of the Republic of Florence. Of the Greek oligarch who lent
his sword to Nebuchadnezzar--in his wars, perhaps, against Jehoiakim
or Pharaoh-Necho--we get a curious glimpse. Alcæus greeted him on his
return in a poem of which we possess a fragment, and which may be
paraphrased thus:
From the ends of the earth thou art come
Back to thy home;
The ivory hilt of thy blade
With gold is embossed and inlaid;
Since for Babylon's host a great deed
Thou didst work in their need,
Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might,
Royal, whose height
Lacked of five cubits one span--
A terrible man.
We can fancy with what delight and curiosity Alcæus, who, as may
be gathered from his poems, was an amateur of armor, examined this
sword-handle, wrought perhaps from Ethiopian tusks by Egyptian artists,
with lotos-flowers or patterns of crocodiles, monkeys, and lions. This
story of the polished Greek citizen's adventure among the Jews and
Egyptians, known to us through Holy Writ, touches our imagination with
the same strange sense of novelty as when we read of the Persian poet
Sâdy, a slave in the camp of Richard Coeur de Lion's Crusaders.
Considering the life Alcæus led, it is not strange that he should
have sung of arms and civic struggles. Many fragments, preserved in
all probability from the _Stasiotica_, or Songs of Sedition, which
were very popular among the ancients, throw light upon the stormier
passages of his history. One of these pieces[93] describes the poet's
armory--his polished helmets and white horse-hair plumes, the burnished
brazen greaves that hang upon the wall, the linen breastplates and
bucklers thrown in heaps about the floor, with Chalkidian blades and
girdles and tunics. The most striking point about this fragment is its
foppery. Alcæus spares no pains to make us know how bright his armor
is, how carefully his greaves are fixed against the wall by pegs you
cannot see (#passalois kryptoisi perikeimenai#), how carelessly the
girdles and small gear are tossed about in sumptuous disarray. The poem
seems to reveal a luxurious nature delighting in military millinery. No
Dorian would have described his weapons from this point of view, but
would have rather told us how often they had been used with effect in
the field. The Æolian character is here tempered with Orientalism.
Of the erotic poems of Alcæus, only a very few and inconsiderable
fragments have survived. Horace says of them, addressing his lyre:
Lesbio primum modulate civi,
Qui ferox bello, tamen inter arma,
Sive jactatam religârat udo
Littore navim,
Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi
Semper hærentem puerum canebat;
Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque
Crine decorum.[94]
Of Lycus we only know, on the authority of Cicero,[95] that he had
a wart upon the finger, which Alcæus praised in one of his poems.
It has also been conjectured that the line #oinos, ô phile pai,
kai alathea#--"wine, dear boy, and truth"--which Theocritus quotes
as a proverb at the beginning of his Æolic Idyl, was addressed to
Lycus. A fragment of far greater interest is the couplet preserved
by Hephæstion,[96] in which Alcæus calls on Sappho by her name:
"Violet-crowned, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho! I want to say something,
but shame prevents me." To this declaration Sappho replied: "If thy
wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what
is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy
just desires." This is all we know about the love-passages between the
greatest lyrists of the Æolian school. In this way do the ancient
critics tantalize us. Aristotle,[97] in order to illustrate a moral
proposition, Hephæstion, with a view to proving a metrical rule, fling
these scraps of their wealth forth, little dreaming that after twenty
centuries the men of new nations and other thoughts will eagerly
collect the scraps, and long for more of that which might have been so
freely lavished. Whether Sappho wrote her reply in maidenly modesty
because the advances of Alcæus were really dishonorable, or whether she
affected indignation to conceal a personal dislike for the poet, we
cannot say. Aristotle or Hephæstion might, probably, have been able to
tell us. But the one was only thinking of the signs of shame, while the
attention of the other was riveted upon the "so-called _dodecasyllable
Alcaic_."
The most considerable remains of the lyrics of Alcæus are
drinking-songs--praises of wine, combined with reflections upon life
and appropriate descriptions of the different seasons. No time was
amiss for drinking, to his mind: the heat of summer, the cold of
winter, the blazing dog-star and the driving tempest, twilight with
its cheerful gleam of lamps, mid-day with its sunshine--all suggest
reasons for indulging in the cup. Not that we are justified in fancying
Alcæus to have been a vulgar toper: he retained Æolian sumptuousness in
his pleasures, and raised the art of drinking to an æsthetic altitude.
One well-known piece from the _Paroenia_ of Alcæus is capable of
translation into Elizabethan rhymed verse as follows:
The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heaven
A storm is driven:
And on the running water-brooks the cold
Lays icy hold:
Then up! beat down the winter; make the fire
Blaze high and higher;
Mix wine as sweet as honey of the bee
Abundantly;
Then drink with comfortable wool around
Your temples bound.
We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wear
With wasting care;
For grief will profit us no whit, my friend,
Nor nothing mend:
But this is our best medicine, with wine fraught
To cast out thought.
The debt of Horace to Alcæus must have been immense. The fragment
just translated is the original of the ninth ode of the first book.
The fragment on the death of Myrsilus, #nyn chrê methysthên#, shows
where Horace found the model for the last ode of the first book.
Again, "O navis referent" (Hor., _Carm._, i. 14) is based on an ode
of the Lesbian poet of which we possess a fragment.[98] Between the
temperaments of Horace and of Alcæus, as between those of Catullus and
of Sappho, there were marked similarities and correspondences. The
poetry of both Horace and Alcæus was polished rather than profound,
admirably sketched rather than richly colored, more graceful than
intense, less passionate than reflective. In Sappho and Catullus, on
the other hand, we meet with richer and more ardent natures: they are
endowed with keener sensibilities, with a sensuality more noble because
of its intensity, with emotions more profound, with a deeper faculty of
thought, that never loses itself in the shallows of "Stoic-Epicurean
acceptance," but simply and exquisitely apprehends the facts of human
life. Where Horace talks of Orcus and the Urn, Catullus sings:
Soles occidere et redire possunt,
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
This contrast between the polished sententiousness of Horace and the
pathetic outcry of Catullus marks the difference between two classes
of poets to whom Horace and Alcæus, Sappho and Catullus, respectively
belong.
Of the other Lesbian poets, Erinna and Damophila, we know but little:
the one survives in a single epigram--if we reject the epitaphs on
Baucis; the other is a mere name. It is noticeable that of the four
Lesbian poets three are women. We may remember that in Thebes, which
was also an Æolian city, Myrtis and Corinna rivalled Pindar.
To the list of Æolian poets, Anacreon, though an Ionian by birth and
an Ionian in temperament, is generally added, because he cultivated
the lyrical stanza of personal emotion. Into the Æolian style Anacreon
introduced a new and uncongenial element. His passion had none of
Sappho's fiery splendor, none of the haughtiness and restlessness which
distinguished Alcæus. There was a vein of levity, almost of vulgarity,
in the Ionians, which removed them from the altitudes of Dorian heroism
and Æolian enthusiasm. This tincture of flippancy is discernible in
Anacreon. Life and love come easily to him. The roses keep no secrets
for his ears, such as they told to Sappho: they serve very well for
garlands when he drinks, and have a pleasant smell, especially in
myrrh. The wine-cup does not suggest to him variety of seasons--the
frozen streams of winter, the parched breath of the dog-star--as with
Alcæus: he tipples and gets drunk. His loves, too, are facile--neither
permanent nor tempestuous. The girls and boys of whom he sings were
flute-players and cupbearers, servants of a tyrant, _instrumenta
libidinis_, chosen for their looks, as the poet had been selected for
the sweetness of his lyre with twenty chords. He never felt the furnace
of Sappho, whose love, however criminal in the estimation of modern
moralists, was serious and of the soul. The difference between the
lives of these three lyrists is very striking. Alcæus was a politician
and party leader. Sappho was the centre of a free society of female
poets. Anacreon was the courtier and laureate of tyrants. He won his
first fame with Polycrates, at whose death Hipparchus fetched him to
Athens in a trireme of fifty oars. Between Bacchus and Venus he spent
his days in palaces; and died at the ripe age of eighty-five at Teos,
choked, it is reported, by a grape-stone--a hoary-headed _roué_, for
whom the rhyme of the mediæval Arcipoeta might have been written:
Meum est propositum,
In taberna mori, etc.
It need not be remarked that of the genuine poems of Anacreon we
possess but few (pp. 1011-1045 of Bergk). His great popularity in
Greece led to innumerable imitations of his lighter style.[99] These
are fully preserved in Bergk's _Collection_ (pp. 1046-1108).
The Dorian style offers a marked contrast to the Æolian. In the case of
the Ionian satirists and elegists, and in that of the Æolian lyrists,
the national peculiarities of the art resulted from national qualities
in the artists. This is not the case with the so-called Dorian poets.
The great lyrists of this school are, with one exception, of extraction
foreign to the Dorian tribe. Alcman was a Lydian; Stesichorus
acknowledged an Ionian colony for his fatherland; Arion was a Lesbian;
Simonides and Bacchylides were Ionian; Pindar was Boeotian; Ibycus of
Rhegium alone was a Dorian. Why, then, is the style called Dorian?
Because the poets, though not Dorian by birth, wrote for Dorian patrons
in the land of Dorians, to add splendor to ceremonies and solemnities
in vogue among the Dorians. The distinctive features of this, the most
sublime branch of Greek lyrical poetry, have been already hinted at:
these elaborate choral hymns, in which strophe answers to antistrophe,
and epode to epode, chanted by bands of singers and accompanied at
times by dancing, were designed to give expression, no longer to
personal emotions, but to the feelings of great congregations of men
engaged in the celebration of gods and heroes and illustrious mortals.
Why this species of choral poetry received the patronage and name of
the Dorian tribe may be seen by glancing at the institutions peculiar
to this section of the Hellenic family. The Dorians, more than any
other Greeks, lived in common and in public. Their children were
educated, not at home, but in companies, beneath the supervision of
state-officers. Girls as well as boys submitted to gymnastic training,
and were taught to sacrifice domestic and personal to political
and social interests. Tutored to merge the individual in the mass,
habituated to associate together in large bodies, the Dorians felt no
need of venting private feeling. Their personal emotions were stunted:
they had no separate wants and wishes, aspirations and regrets,
to utter. Yet the sense of melody and harmony which was rooted so
profoundly in the Greek temperament needed some outlet even here;
while the gymnastic and athletic exercises practised by the Dorians
rendered them peculiarly sensitive, not only to the beauties of the
human body, but also to the refinements of rhythmical movement. The
spiritual enthusiasm for great and glorious actions, which formed the
soul of the Greek race, flamed with all the greater brilliancy among
Dorians, because it was not narrowed, as among the Æolians, to the
selfish passions of the individual, or diverted, as among Ionians,
to meditation or satire; but was concentrated on public interests, on
religious and heroic traditions, on all the thoughts and feelings which
stimulate a large political activity. The Dorians required a poetry
which should be public, which should admit of the participation of many
individuals, which should give utterance to national enthusiasms, which
should combine the movements of men and women in choric evolutions with
the melodies of music and the sublime words of inspired prophecy. In
brief, the Dorians needed poets able--
"to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue
and public civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind,
and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious
and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's Almightiness,
and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high
Providence.... Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and
sublime, in virtue amiable or grave; whatsoever hath passion
or admiration in all the changes of that which is called
fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and reflexes of
man's thoughts from within; all these things, with a solid and
treatable smoothness, to paint out and describe."
But here arose a difficulty. With all their need of the highest and
most elaborate poetry, with all their sensibility to beauty, the
Dorians thought it beneath the dignity of a citizen to practise the
arts. Their education, almost exclusively military and gymnastic,
unfitted them, at all events in Sparta, for studies indispensable
towards gaining proficiency in any science so elaborate as that of
choral poetry. Drilled to abstinence, obedience, and silence, dwelling
in a camp, without privacy or leisure, how could a Spartan, that
automaton of the State, be expected to produce poetry, or excel in
any fine art? A Spartan king, on being shown the most distinguished
musician of his age, pointed to his cook as the best maker of black
broth. Music, if music they must have; poetry, if poetry were required
by some divinely implanted instinct; dancing, if dancing were a
necessary compliment to the Deity, must be imported by these warriors
from foreign lands. Thus the Spartans became the patrons of stranger
artists, on whom they imposed their laws of taste. They pressed the
flexible Ionian, the passionate Lesbian, the languid Lydian, the acute
Athenian, into their service, and made them use the crabbed Dorian
speech. They said: We want such and such odes for our choruses; we
wish to amuse our youths and maidens, and to honor the gods with
pompous harmonies; you, men of art, write for us, sing for us; but be
careful to comprehend our character; and remember that, though you are
Ionians or Lesbians, your inspiration must be Dorian. They got what
they required. The so-called Dorian lyric is a genuine product of the
Dorian race, although its greatest masters were foreigners and aliens.
Much after the same fashion did England patronize Handel in the last
century; in the same way may Handel's oratorios be called English
music; for though the English are not musicians, and are diffident
in general of the artist class, yet neither Germans nor Italians nor
French have seen produced upon their soil such colossal works of art in
the service of a highly intellectual religion.
It is interesting to reflect upon the influence of the Dorian race
in the evolution of Greek art. That, as a nation, they possessed
the germs of artistic invention, and that their character expressed
itself very clearly in æsthetic forms, is evident from the existence
of the Dorian style in architecture, and the Dorian mood in music,
both of which reflect their broad simplicity and strength disdaining
ornament. The same stamp they impressed upon Greek poetry, through the
instruments they selected from other tribes. Had it not been for the
strict legislation of Lycurgus, which, by forcing Sparta into a purely
political development, and establishing a complete community of life
among the citizens, checked the emergence of that individuality which
is so all-important to the artist, Sparta might have counted her great
sculptors, poets, musicians, orators, and painters, in rivalry with
Pheidias, Sophocles, Damon, Pericles, Polygnotus. As it was, though
without hands to paint and carve, without lips to sing and plead, the
stubborn Dorian race set its seal on a wide field of Greek art.[100]
The elaborate works of the choral lyrists may be regarded as the highly
wrought expansions of rudiments already existing among the Dorians.
Alcman, Arion, and Stesichorus, the three masters who formed choral
poetry from the materials indicated to us in the poems of Homer, and
who had to blend in one harmonious whole the sister arts of dancing,
music, and poetry, so as to present a pompous appeal to the intellect
through speech, and through the ear and eye, found ready to their hands
such simple songs as may be read in Bergk, pp. 1297-1303. The dithyramb
of the women of Elis: "Come, hero, Dionysus, to the holy sea-temple,
attended by the Graces, and rushing on with oxen-hoof! Holy ox! Holy
ox!" The chorus of the old men, men, and boys at Sparta: "We once were
stalwart youths: we are; if thou likest, try our strength: we shall be;
and far better too!" The march-song of the Spartans in their rhythmic
revels: "Advance, boys, set your feet forward, and dance in the reel
better still." From these had to be trained the complex and magnificent
work of art, which culminated in a Pythian ode of Pindar! Alcman was a
native of Sardis, and a slave of Agesilaus the Spartan. He flourished
at Sparta between 671 and 631 B.C., composing Parthenia for the maidens
of Taygetus. Who does not know his lines upon the valley of Eurotas?
"Sleep holds the mountain summits and ravines, the promontories and
the watercourses; leaves, and creeping things, and whatsoever black
earth breeds; and wild beasts of the hills, and bees, and monsters
in the hollows of the dark blue deep; and all the wide-winged birds
are sleeping." Junior to Alcman was Arion, who spent most of his time
with Periander at Corinth. His contribution to choral poetry was the
elaboration of the dithyramb. But of his work we have unfortunately not
a single fragment left. The piece that bears his name (Bergk, p. 872)
has to be ascribed to some tolerable poet of the Euripidean period.
His life is involved in mythology; most beautiful is the oft-told tale
of his salvation from the sea waves by an enamoured dolphin--a fish,
by the way, which Athenæus dignified by the title of #philôidos te
kai philaulos# (song-loving and flute-loving), and which Aristotle
calls #philanthrôpos# (affectionate to men). Rather more is known
about Stesichorus. He was a native of Himera in Sicily, but possibly a
Locrian by descent. His parents called him Tisias, but he took his more
famous name from his profession. Stesichorus is a title that might have
been given to any chorus-master in a Greek city; but Tisias of Himera
won it by being emphatically the author of the choric system. Antiquity
recognized in him the inventor of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, with
the corresponding movements of the dance, which were designated the
Triad of Stesichorus. A remark made by Quintilian about this poet--that
he sustained the burden of the epos with his lyre--forms a valuable
criticism on his style. In the days of Stesichorus, the epic proper
had lost its vitality; but people still felt the liveliest interest
in heroic legends, and loved to connect the celebration of the past
with their ceremonies. A lyrical poet had therefore so to treat the
myths of Hellas that choruses should represent them in their odes and
semi-dramatic dances. It is probable that Stesichorus made far more
use of mythical material than Pindar, dealing with it less allusively
and adhering more closely to the epic form of narrative. When we hear
of his ode, the Orestea, being divided into three books (whatever
that may mean), and read the titles of the rest--Cerberus, Cycnus,
Scylla, Europa, the Sack of Troy, the Nostoi, and Geryonis--we are led
to suspect that his choral compositions were something of the nature
of mediæval mystery-plays--semi-lyrical, semi-dramatic poems, founded
on the religious legends of the past. Stesichorus did not confine
himself to this species of composition, but wrote hymns, encomia, and
pæans, like other professional lyrists who succeeded him, and invented
a curious kind of love-tale from real life. One of these romantic
poems, called Calycé, was about a girl who loved purely but unhappily,
and died. Another, called Rhadina, told the forlorn tale of a Samian
brother and sister put to death by a cruel tyrant. It is a pity that
these early Greek novels in verse are lost. We might have found in them
the fresh originals of Daphnis and Chloe, or of the romances of Tatius
and Heliodorus. Finally, Stesichorus composed fables, such as the Horse
and the Stag, and pastorals upon the death of Daphnis, in which he
proved himself true to his Sicilian origin, and anticipated Theocritus.
Enough has been said about Stesichorus to show that he was a richly
inventive genius--one of those facile and abundant natures who excel in
many branches of art, and who give hints by which posterity may profit.
Yet with all his genius he was not thoroughly successful. His pastorals
and romances were abandoned by his successors; his epical lyrics were
lost in the tragic drama. Like many other poets, he failed by coming
at a wrong moment, or else by adhering to forms of art which could not
long remain in vogue. In his attempt to reconcile the epical treatment
of mythology with the choric system of his own invention, he proved
that he had not fully grasped the capabilities of lyrical poetry. In
his endeavor to create an idyllic and romantic species, he was far
before his age.
The remaining choral poets of the Dorian style, of whom the eldest,
Ibycus, dates half a century later than Arion, received from their
predecessors an instrument of poetical expression already nearly
complete. It was their part to use it as skilfully as possible, and to
introduce such changes as might render it more polished. Excellence
of workmanship is particularly noticeable in what remains of Ibycus,
Simonides, Bacchylides. These latter lyrists are no longer local poets:
under the altered circumstances of Hellas at the time of the Persian
war, art has become Panhellenic, the artists cease to be the servants
of one state or of one deity; they range from city to city, giving
their services to all who seek for them, and embracing the various
tribes and religious rites of the collected Greeks in their æsthetic
sympathy. Now, for the first time, poets began to sell their songs
of praise for money. Simonides introduced the practice, which had
something shocking in it to Greek taste, and which Plato especially
censures as sophistic and illiberal in his _Protagoras_. Now, too,
poets became the friends and counsellors of princes, mixing freely
in the politics of Samos, Syracuse, Agrigentum, Thessaly; aiding the
tyrants Polycrates, Hiero, Theron, the Scopads, with their advice.
Simonides is said to have suspended hostilities between Theron and
Hiero by his diplomatic intercession after their armies had been drawn
up in battle-array. Petrarch did not occupy a more important place
among the princes and republics of mediæval Italy. Under these new
conditions, and with this expansion of the poet's calling, the old
character of the Dorian lyric changed. The title Dorian is now merely
nominal, and the dialect is a conventional language consecrated to this
style.
Ibycus was a native of Rhegium, a colony of mixed Ionians and Dorians.
To which of these families he belonged is not certain. If we judged
by the internal evidence of his poems, we should call him an Ionian;
for they are distinguished by voluptuous sweetness, with a dash of
almost Æolian intensity. Ibycus was a poet-errant, carrying his songs
from state to state. The beautiful story of the cranes who led to the
discovery of his murder at Corinth, though probably mythical, like
that of Arion's dolphin, illustrates the rude lives of these Greek
troubadours, and shows in what respect the _sacer vates_, servant of
the Muses and beloved of Phoebus, was held by the people. Ibycus was
regarded by antiquity as a kind of male Sappho. His odes, composed
for birthday festivals and banquets, were dedicated chiefly to the
praise of beautiful youths; and the legends which adorned them, like
those of Ganymede or Tithonus, were appropriate to the erotic style.
Aristophanes, in the _Thesmophoriazusæ_, makes Agathon connect him
with Anacreon and Alcæus, as the three refiners of language. It is
clear, therefore, that in his art Ibycus adapted the manner of Dorian
poetry to the matter of Æolian or Ionian love-chants. Of his poetry
we have but few fragments. The following seems to strike the keynote
of his style: "Love once again looking upon me from his cloud-black
brows, with languishing glances, drives me by enchantments of all kinds
to the endless nets of Cypris: verily I tremble at his onset, as a
chariot-horse, who hath won prizes, in old age goes grudgingly to try
his speed in the swift race of cars." In another piece he compares
the onset of Love to a downrush of the Thracian north wind armed with
lightning. This fragment, numbered first in Bergk's _Collection_, is
taken from Athenæus, who quotes it to prove the vehement emotion of the
poet:
In spring Cydonian apple-trees,
Watered by fountains ever flowing
Through crofts unmown of maiden goddesses,
And young vines, 'neath the shade
Of shooting tendrils, tranquilly are growing.
Meanwhile for me Love never laid
In slumber, like a north-wind glowing
With Thracian lightnings, still doth dart
Blood-parching madness on my heart,
From Kupris hurtling, stormful, wild,
Lording the man as erst the child.
It is interesting to compare the different metaphors whereby the early
lyrists imaged the assaults of the Love-god. Sappho describes him in
one place as a youth arrayed with a flame-colored chlamys descending
from heaven; in another she calls him "a limb-dissolving, bitter-sweet,
impracticable wild beast;" again, she compares the state of her soul
under the influence of love to oak-trees torn and shaken by a mountain
whirlwind. Anacreon paints a fine picture of Love like a blacksmith,
forging his soul and tempering it in icy torrents. The dubious winged
figure armed with a heavy sword, which is carved upon the recently
discovered column from the Temple of Ephesus, if he be the Love-god,
and not, as some conjecture, Death, seems to have been conceived in
the spirit of these energetic metaphors. The Greeks, at the period of
Anacreon and Ibycus, were far from having as yet imagined the baby
Cupid of Moschus, the Epigrammatists, and the Alexandrian Anacreontics.
He was still a terrible and passion-stirring power--no mere malicious
urchin coming by night with drenched wings and unstrung bow to reward
the poet's hospitality by wounding him; no naughty boy who runs away
from his mother and steals honeycombs, no bee-like elf asleep in
rosebuds.
Simonides is a far more brilliant representative than Ibycus, both of
Greek choral poetry in its prime, and also of the whole literary life
of Hellas during the period which immediately preceded and followed
the Persian war. He was born in the island of Ceos, of pure Ionian
blood and breeding; but the Ionians of Ceos were celebrated for their
#sôphrosynê# (reserve, or self-restraint), a quality strongly marked
in the poems of Simonides. In his odes we do not trace that mixture of
Æolian passion and that concentration upon personal emotions which
are noticeable in those of Ibycus, but rather a Dorian solemnity of
thought and feeling, qualifying Simonides for the arduous functions to
which he was called, of commemorating in elegy and epigram and funeral
ode the achievements of Hellas against Persia. Simonides belonged to
a family of professional poets; for the arts among the early Greeks
were hereditary; a father taught the trade of flute-playing and
chorus-leading and verse-making to his son, who, if he had original
genius, became a great poet, as was the fate of Pindar; or, if he
were endowed with commonplace abilities, remained a journeyman in
art without discredit to himself, performing useful functions in his
native place.[101] Simonides exercised his calling of chorus-teacher
at Carthæa in Ceos, and lived at the #chorêgeion#, or resort of the
chorus, near the temple of Apollo. But the greater portion of his
life, after he had attained celebrity, was passed with patrons--with
Hipparchus, who invited him to Athens, where he dwelt at amity with
Anacreon, and at enmity with Pindar's master, Lasos; with the Scopads
and Aleuads of Thessaly, for whom he composed the most touching threnoi
and the most brilliant panegyrics, of which fragments have descended
to us; finally, with Hiero of Syracuse, who honored him exceedingly,
and when he died consigned him to the earth with princely funeral
pomp. The relations of Simonides to these patrons may be gathered from
numerous slight indications, none of which are very honorable to his
character. For instance, after receiving the hospitality of Hipparchus,
he composed an epigram for the statue of Harmodius, in which he calls
the murder of the tyrant "a great light rising upon Athens." Again, he
praised the brutal Scopas, son of Creon, in an ode which is celebrated,
both as being connected with the most dramatic incident in the poet's
life, and also as having furnished Plato with a theme for argument, and
Aristotle with an ethical quotation--"To be a good man in very truth,
a square without blame, is hard." This proposition Plato discusses
in the _Protagoras_, while Aristotle cites the phrase, #tetragônos
aneu psogou# (four-square without fault). From the general tenor of
the fragments of this ode, from Plato's criticism, and from what is
known about the coarse nature of Scopas, who is being praised, we must
conjecture that Simonides attempted to whitewash his patron's character
by depreciating the standard of morality. With Ionian facility and
courtly compliment, he made excuses for a bad man by pleading that
perfect goodness was unattainable. Scopas refused to pay the price
required by Simonides for the poem in question, telling him to get half
of it from the Dioscuri, who had also been eulogized. This was at a
banquet. While the king was laughing at his own rude jest, a servant
whispered to the poet that two goodly youths waited without, desiring
earnestly to speak with him. Simonides left the palace, but found no
one. Even as he stood looking for his visitors, he heard the crash of
beams and the groans of dying men. Scopas with his guests had been
destroyed by the falling of the roof, and Simonides had received a
godlike guerdon from the two sons of Tyndareus. This story belongs,
perhaps, to the same class as the cranes of Ibycus and the dolphin
of Arion. Yet there seems to be no doubt that the Scopad dynasty was
suddenly extinguished; for we hear nothing of them at the time of the
Persian war, and we know that Simonides composed a threnos for the
family.
The most splendid period of the life of Simonides was that which he
passed at Athens during the great wars with Persia. Here he was the
friend of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Here he composed his
epigrams on Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, Platæa--poems not destined
to be merely sung or consigned to parchment, but to be carved in
marble or engraved in letters of imperishable bronze upon the works
of the noblest architects and statuaries. The genius of Simonides
is unique in this branch of monumental poetry. His couplets--calm,
simple, terse, strong as the deeds they celebrate, enduring as the
brass or stone which they adorned--animated succeeding generations
of Greek patriots; they were transferred to the brains of statesmen
like Pericles and Demosthenes, inscribed upon the fleshy tablets of
the hearts of warriors like Cleomenes, Pelopidas, Epaminondas. We are
thrice fortunate in possessing the entire collection of these epigrams,
unrivalled for the magnitude of the events they celebrate, and for the
circumstances under which they were composed. When we reflect what
would have become of the civilization of the world but for these Greek
victories--when we remember that the events which these few couplets
record transcend in importance those of any other single period of
history--we are almost appalled by the contrast between the brevity of
the epigrams and the world-wide vastness of their matter. In reviewing
the life of Simonides, after admitting that he was greedy of gain and
not adverse to flattery, we are bound to confess that, as a poet, he
proved himself adequate to the age of Marathon and Salamis. He was
the voice of Hellas--the genius of Fame, sculpturing upon her brazen
shield with a pen of adamant, in austere letters of indelible gold,
the achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization. Happy
poet! Had ever any other man so splendid a heritage of song allotted to
him?
In style Simonides is always pure and exquisitely polished. The
ancients called him the sweet poet--Melicertes--_par excellence_. His
#sôphrosynê#, or tempered self-restraint, gives a mellow tone not
merely to his philosophy and moral precepts, but also to his art.
He has none of Pindar's rugged majesty, volcanic force, gorgeous
exuberance: he does not, like Pindar, pour forth an inexhaustible
torrent of poetical ideas, chafing against each other in the eddies of
breathless inspiration. On the contrary, he works up a few thoughts,
a few carefully selected images, with patient skill, producing a
perfectly harmonious result, but one which is always bordering on
the commonplace. Like all correct poets, he is somewhat tame, though
tender, delicate, and exquisitely beautiful. Pindar electrifies his
hearer, seizing him like the eagle in Dante's vision, and bearing him
breathless through the ether of celestial flame. Simonides leads us by
the hand along the banks of pleasant rivers, through laurel groves, and
by the porticos of sunny temples. What he possesses of quite peculiar
to his own genius is pathos--the pathos of romance. This appears most
remarkably in the fragment of a threnos which describes Danaë afloat
upon the waves at night. It is with the greatest diffidence that I
offer a translation of what remains one of the most perfect pieces of
pathetic poetry in any literature:
When, in the carven chest,
The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest
Smote her with fear, she, not with cheeks unwet,
Her arms of love round Perseus set,
And said: O child, what grief is mine!
But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast
Is sunk in rest,
Here in the cheerless brass-bound bark,
Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark.
Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine
Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep,
Nor the shrill winds that sweep,--
Lapped in thy purple robe's embrace,
Fair little face!
But if this dread were dreadful too to thee,
Then wouldst thou lend thy listening ear to me;
Therefore I cry,--Sleep, babe, and sea be still,
And slumber our unmeasured ill!
Oh, may some change of fate, sire Zeus, from thee
Descend, our woes to end!
But if this prayer, too overbold, offend
Thy justice, yet be merciful to me!
The careful development of simple thoughts in Simonides may best be
illustrated by the fragment on the three hundred Spartans who died at
Thermopylæ:
"Of those who died at Thermopylæ glorious is the fate and fair
the doom; their grave is an altar; instead of lamentation,
they have endless fame; their dirge is a chant of praise.
Such winding-sheet as theirs no rust, no, nor all-conquering
time, shall bring to naught. But this sepulchre of brave men
hath taken for its habitant the glory of Hellas. Leonidas is
witness, Sparta's king, who hath left a mighty crown of valor
and undying fame."
The antitheses are wrought with consummate skill; the fate of the
heroes is glorious, their doom honorable. So far the eulogy is
commonplace; then the same thought receives a bolder turn: their grave
is an altar. We do not lament for them so much as hold them in eternal
memory; our very songs of sorrow become pæans of praise. What follows
is a still further expansion of the leading theme: rust and time cannot
affect their fame; Hellas confides her glory to their tomb. Then
generalities are quitted; and Leonidas, the protagonist of Thermopylæ,
appears.
In his threnoi Simonides has generally recourse to the common grounds
of consolation, which the Ionian elegists repeat _ad nauseam_, dwelling
upon the shortness and uncertainty and ills of life, and tending rather
to depress the survivors on their own account than to comfort them for
the dead.[102] In one he says, "Short is the strength of men, and vain
are all their cares, and in their brief life trouble follows upon
trouble; and death, that no man shuns, is hung above our heads--for
him both good and bad share equally." It is impossible, while reading
this lachrymose lament, to forget the fragment of that mighty threnos
of Pindar's which sounds like a trumpet-blast for immortality, and,
trampling under feet the glories of this world, reveals the gladness of
the souls who have attained Elysium:
For them the night all through,
In that broad realm below,
The splendor of the sun spreads endless light;
'Mid rosy meadows bright,
Their city of the tombs with incense-trees,
And golden chalices
Of flowers, and fruitage fair,
Scenting the breezy air,
Is laden. There with horses and with play,
With games and lyres, they while the hours away.
On every side around
Pure happiness is found,
With all the blooming beauty of the world;
There fragrant smoke, upcurled
From altars where the blazing fire is dense
With perfumed frankincense,
Burned unto gods in heaven,
Through all the land is driven,
Making its pleasant place odorous
With scented gales and sweet airs amorous.
The same note of melancholy reflection upon transient human life
may be traced in the following fragment ascribed to Simonides. He is
apparently rebuking Cleobulus of Lindus in Rhodes for an arrogant
epigraph inscribed upon some stelé.
Those who are wise in heart and mind,
O Lindian Cleobulus, find
Naught in thy shallow vaunt aright;
Who with the streams that flow for aye,
The vernal flowers that bloom and die,
The fiery sun, the moon's mild rays,
The strong sea's eddying water-ways,
Matchest a marble pillar's might--
Lo, all things that have being are
To the high gods inferior far;
But carven stone may not withstand
Even a mortal's ruthless hand.
Therefore thy words no wisdom teach
More than an idiot's idle speech.
What has been said about Simonides applies in a great measure also to
Bacchylides, who was his nephew, pupil, and faithful follower. The
personality of Bacchylides, as a man and a poet, is absorbed in that
of his uncle--the greater bard, the more distinguished actor on the
theatre of the world. While Simonides played his part in public life,
Bacchylides gave himself up to the elegant pleasures of society; while
Simonides celebrated in epigrams the military glories of the Greeks,
Bacchylides wrote wine-songs and congratulatory odes. His descriptions
of Bacchic intoxication and of the charms of peace display the same
careful word-painting as the description by Simonides of Orpheus, with
more luxuriance of sensual suggestion. His threnoi exhibit the same
Ionian despondency and resignation--a dead settled calm, an elegant
stolidity of epicureanism. That this excellent, if somewhat languid,
lyrist may receive his due meed of attention, I have selected his most
important fragment, the _Praise of Peace_, for translation (Bergk, vol.
iii. p. 1230):
To mortal men Peace giveth these good things:
Wealth, and the flowers of honey-throated song;
The flame that springs
On carven altars from fat sheep and kine,
Slain to the gods in heaven; and, all day long,
Games for glad youths, and flutes, and wreaths, and circling wine.
Then in the steely shield swart spiders weave
Their web and dusky woof:
Rust to the pointed spear and sword doth cleave;
The brazen trump sounds no alarms;
Nor is sleep harried from our eyes aloof,
But with sweet rest my bosom warms:
The streets are thronged with lovely men and young,
And hymns in praise of boys like flames to heaven are flung.
The tone common to Simonides and Bacchylides in funeral poems will be
illustrated by the four following fragments:[103]
Being a man, say not what comes to-morrow,
Nor, seeing one in bliss, how long 'twill last;
For wide-winged fly was ne'er of flight so fast
As change to sorrow.
Nay, not those elder men, who lived of yore,
Of sceptred gods the half-immortal seed,
Not even they to prosperous old age wore
A life from pain and death and danger freed.
Short is the strength of men, and vain their trouble,
Through their brief age sorrows on sorrows double;
O'er each and all hangs death escaped by none;
Of him both good and bad an equal lot have won.
For mortal men not to be born is best,
Nor e'er to see the bright beams of the day;
Since, as life rolls away,
No man that breathes was ever alway blest.
Here we must stop short in the front of Pindar--the Hamlet among these
lesser actors, the Shakespeare among a crowd of inferior poets. To
treat of Greek lyrical poetry and to omit Pindar is a paradox in
action. Yet Pindar is so colossal, so much apart, that he deserves a
separate study, and cannot be dragged in at the end of a bird's-eye
view of a period of literature. At the time of Pindar, poetry was
sinking into mannerism. He by the force of his native originality gave
it a wholly fresh direction, and created a style as novel as it was
inimitable. Like some high mountain-peak, upon the border-land of plain
and lesser hills, he stands alone, sky-piercing and tremendous in his
solitary strength.
Before, however, entering upon the criticism of Pindar's poetry, it
will be of service to complete this review of the Greek lyric by some
specimens of those later artificial literary odes, a few of which
have been preserved for us by the anthologists and grammarians. The
following Hymn to Virtue has a special interest, since it is ascribed
to Aristotle, the philosopher, and makes allusion to his friend, the
tyrant of Atarneus. The comparative dryness of the style is no less
characteristic of the age in which the poem is supposed to have been
written, than its animating motive, the beauty of Virtue, is true to
the Greek conception of morality and heroism.
Virtue, to men thou bringest care and toil;
Yet art thou life's best, fairest spoil!
O virgin goddess, for thy beauty's sake
To die is delicate in this our Greece,
Or to endure of pain the stern strong ache.
Such fruit for our soul's ease
Of joys undying, dearer far than gold
Or home or soft-eyed sleep, dost thou unfold!
It was for thee the seed of Zeus,
Stout Herakles, and Leda's twins, did choose
Strength-draining deeds, to spread abroad thy name:
Smit with the love of thee,
Aias and Achileus went smilingly
Down to Death's portal, crowned with deathless fame.
Now, since thou art so fair,
Leaving the lightsome air,
Atarneus' hero hath died gloriously.
Wherefore immortal praise shall be his guerdon:
His goodness and his deeds are made the burden
Of songs divine
Sung by Memory's daughters nine,
Hymning of hospitable Zeus the might
And friendship firm as fate in fate's despite.
The next is a Hymn to Health, hardly less true to Greek feeling than
the Hymn to Virtue. Simonides, it will be remembered, had said that the
first and best possession to be desired by man is health. The ode is
but a rhetorical expansion of this sentence, showing that none of the
good things of human life can be enjoyed without physical well-being.
Health! Eldest, most august of all
The blessed gods, on thee I call!
Oh, let me spend with thee the rest
Of mortal life, securely blest!
Oh, mayst thou be my house-mate still,
To shield and shelter me from ill!
If wealth have any grace,
If fair our children's face;
If kinghood, lifting men to be
Peers with the high gods' empery;
If young Love's flying feet
Through secret snares be sweet;
If aught of all heaven's gifts to mortals sent,
If rest from care be dear, or calm content--
These goodly things, each, all of them, with thee
Bloom everlastingly,
Blest Health! Yea, Beauty's year
Breaks into spring for thee, for only thee!
Without thee no man's life is aught but cold and drear.
As an example of the pæan or the prosodial hymn, when it assumed a
literary form, I may select an ode to Phoebus, which bears the name of
Dionysius. Apollo is here addressed in his character of Light-giver,
and leader of the lesser powers of heaven. The stars and the moon are
his attendants, rejoicing in his music, and deriving from his might
their glory.
Let all wide heaven be still!
Be silent vale and hill,
Earth and whispering wind and sea,
Voice of birds and echo shrill!
For soon amid our choir will be
Phoebus with floating locks, the Lord of Minstrelsy!
O father of the snow-browed morn;
Thou who dost drive the rosy car
Of day's wing-footed coursers, borne
With gleaming curls of gold unshorn
Over heaven's boundless vault afar;
Weaving the woof of myriad rays,
Wealth-scattering beams that burn and blaze,
Enwinding them round earth in endless maze!
The rivers of thy fire undying
Beget bright day, our heart's desire:
The throng of stars to greet thee flying
Through cloudless heaven, join choric dances,
Hailing thee king with ceaseless crying
For joy of thy Phoebean lyre.
In front the gray-eyed Moon advances
Drawn by her snow-white heifers o'er
Night's silent silvery dancing-floor:
With gladness her mild bosom burns
As round the dædal world she turns.
From these specimens we may infer the character of that semi-ethical,
semi-religious lyric poetry which was produced so copiously in Greece,
and of which we have lost all but accidental remnants. Though not to
be compared for grandeur of style and abundance of grace with the
odes of Pindar and the fragments of Simonides, they display a careful
workmanship, a clear and harmonious development of ideas, that make us
long, alas too vainly, for the treasures of a literature now buried in
irrevocable oblivion.
FOOTNOTES:
[76]
#toisin d' en messoisi païs phormingi ligeiêi
himeroen kitharize; linon d' hypo kalon aeiden
leptaleêi phônêi.#--_Iliad_, xviii. 569.
A boy, amid them, from a clear-toned harp
Drew lovely music; well his liquid voice
The strings accompanied.--_Lord Derby's Trans._
[77] Bergk (_Poetæ Lyrici Græci_, 3 vols., Leipsic, 1866) gives an old
Greek Linus-song on p. 1297:
O Linus, thee the gods did grace;
For unto thee they gave, most dear,
First among men the song to raise
With shrill voice sounding high and clear;
And Phoebus thee in anger slays,
And Muses mourn around thy bier.
[78] Many poems of the Syracusan idyllists are valuable historically
as adaptations of the hexameter to subjects essentially lyrical. In
the Adoniazusæ, the Epithalamium Helenæ, the Lament for Bion, etc., we
trace a lyrical inspiration overlaid by the idyllic form. Theocritus
must have worked on the lines of old choral poetry.
[79] "Pour we libations to Memory's daughters, the Muses, and to the
Muse-leading son of Leto."
[80] Plutarch records with just indignation the honors of this sort
paid by Aratus to Antigonus: "He offered sacrifices, called Antigonea,
in honor of Antigonus, and sang pæans himself, with a garland on his
head, to the praise of _a wasted, consumptive Macedonian_" (_Life of
Cleomenes_). The words in italics strongly express a true Greek sense
of disgust for the barbarian and the weakling.
[81] See Frere, vol. ii. pp. 200, 201.
[82] See Trans. of _Acharnians_, Frere, vol. ii. p. 17.
[83] Frere's _Translation_, vol. ii. pp. 241-245.
[84] See, however, the interesting archaic hymns to Dionysus, pp. 1299,
1300.
[85] Bergk, p. 716; Pindar, _Olymp._, ix. 1.
[86] It is interesting to observe that this custom of the funeral
dirge, improvised with wild inspiration by women, has been preserved
almost to the present day in Corsica. A collection of these coronachs,
called _Voceri_ in the language of the island, was published in 1855 at
Bastia, by Cesare Fabiani.
[87] Translated by Mitchell, vol. ii. p. 282, in his _Dicast turned
Gentleman_.
[88] "To be in health is the best thing for mortal man; the next best
to be of form and nature beautiful; the third, to enjoy wealth gotten
without fraud; and the fourth, to be in youth's bloom among friends."
The Greek suspicion of wealth, abundantly illustrated in the Gnomic
elegies, might be further exemplified by this fragment ascribed to
Timocreon:
Would, blind Wealth, that thou hadst been
Ne'er on land or ocean seen,
Nowhere on this upper earth!
Hell's black stream that gave thee birth
Is the proper haunt for thee,
Cause of all man's misery!
[89] Athen., _Lib._, viii. 360.
[90] This begs the question of the nationality of Tyrtæus, who,
according to antique tradition, was of Attic origin, but who writes
like a Spartan.
[91] Compare Simonides (Bergk, vol. iii. p. 1143):
#angele klyta earos hadyodmou,
kyanea chelidoi.#
Blithe angel of the perfume-breathing spring,
Dark-vested swallow.
[92] Those who are curious in the matter of metres will find the
Sapphic stanza reproduced in English, with perfect truth of cadence, in
Swinburne's "Sapphics" (_Poems and Ballads_). The imitations by Horace
are far less close to the original.
[93] Bergk, p. 935.
[94] _Carm._, i. 32, thus translated by Conington:
Thou, strung by Lesbos' minstrel hand,
The bard who 'mid the clash of steel,
Or haply mooring to the strand,
His battered keel,
Of Bacchus and the Muses sung,
And Cupid, still at Venus' side,
And Lycus, beautiful and young,
Dark-haired, dark-eyed.
[95] _De Nat. Deorum_, i. 28.
[96] See Bergk, p. 948.
[97] _Rhet._, i. 9.
[98] Bergk, p. 936.
[99] The people of Athens gave him a statue on their Acropolis. The
Teians struck his portrait on coins. Critias said that his poems
would last as long as the Cottabos in Hellas. He did in fact exactly
represent one side, and that the least heroic side, of the character
of the Greeks--their simple love of sensual pleasure. As mere Hedonism
grew, so did the songs and the style of Anacreon gain in popularity,
whereas the stormier passion of Sappho became unfashionable.
[100] It is unhistorical to confound the Dorians with the Spartans, who
were a specially trained section of the Dorian stock. Yet it will be
seen that, in relation at least to lyric poetry, Sparta fairly may be
taken as _the_ Dorian state.
[101] The dramatic art was hereditary among the Athenians. Æschylus
left a son, Euphorion, and two nephews, Philocles and Astydamas, who
produced tragedies. The last is reported to have written no fewer
than two hundred and forty plays. Iophon, the son, and Sophocles, the
grandson, of the great Sophocles, were dramatists of some repute at
Athens. Euripides had a nephew of his own name, and Aristophanes two
sons who followed the same calling. It is only from families like the
Bachs that we can draw any modern parallel to this transmission of an
art from father to son in the same race.
[102] The reputation gained by Simonides among the ancients for the
sorrow of his song is proved by the phrase of Catullus,--"Moestius
lachrymis Simonideis" (more sad than tears shed by Simonides).
[103] See Bergk, vol. iii. pp. 1128, 1129, 1132, 1227.