_LYRIC POETRY._
=Rise of Lyric Poetry.=—For more than two hundred years after Homer
and Hesiod, no one worthy of the name of poet appeared in Greece.
Greek genius seemed to have exhausted itself. A few feeble imitators
of the great master, and epic poetry was no more. The spirit of the
Iliad and the Odyssey died with the monarchies whose chieftains they
immortalized. When popular governments arose, the bard no longer
celebrated the gods and demigods of the past, or traced the genealogies
of kings, but sung the glories of his country, or poured forth without
restraint the emotions of his soul. Thus lyric poetry was the child of
liberty.
=Varieties.=—At the beginning of the seventh century B.C., there
was a new birth of poesy; Grecian song burst forth once more, from
hearts throbbing with enthusiasm at the triumph of free institutions.
Solemn dirges and stately hymns chanted by olive-crowned youth bearing
offerings to the gods, were no longer paramount; ballads full of human
feeling, lyrics appealing directly to the people—to the patriot, the
artisan, the shepherd, the lover, the pleasure-seeker—struck chords
that vibrated in many hearts. Feasts afforded frequent occasions for
outbursts of national feeling, it being the custom of the guests to
pass a branch of myrtle from hand to hand, each as he received it
repeating an appropriate verse.
A favorite banquet-song of the fifth century B.C. was the following
eulogy of Harmo’dius and Aristogi’ton, the Athenian heroes who slew the
tyrant Hipparchus:—
“In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogi’ton 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 Tydi’des Diomede.
In a wreath of myrtle I’ll wear my glaive,
Like Harmodius and Aristogiton 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 Aristogiton bold,
Who, striking the tyrant down,
Made Athens a freeman’s town.”
PROF. CONINGTON.
The flower-songs of the Greeks were especially beautiful; children
enjoyed their nursery rhymes; while in the Lay of the Swallow, the
penniless bard, chanting at the gate, sought an avenue to the charity
of his rich neighbor.
FROM THE LAY OF THE SWALLOW.
“The swallow is here, the swallow is here,
She comes to proclaim the reviving year;
With her jet-black hood, and her milk-white breast,
She is come, she is come, at our behest,
The harbinger of the beautiful spring,
To claim your generous offering.
Let your bountiful door its wealth outpour,
What is little to you is to us great store;
A bunch of dry figs, and a savory cruse
Of pottage the swallow will not refuse;
With a basket of cheese and a barley cake,
And a cup of red wine our thirst to slake.”—MURE.
The creations of the lyric muse are graceful, touching, and true to
nature. We regret not to exchange the sublime heights of epic poetry
for an humbler field in which we may commune with the joys and sorrows,
the hopes and fears, of humanity. Here, as Tegner says, Greek poetry
arises “slender, smooth, erect like the palm-tree with its rich yet
symmetrical crown; and a nightingale sits among the leaves and sings.”
THE ELEGY.
The Ionians, first to free themselves from kingly rule, gave to the
Hellenic world the earliest forms of lyric poetry,—the elegiac couplet
and the lighter iambic verse appropriate to satire. These twin-born
metres, of Ionian parentage, grew up side by side in Greece. In the
elegiac couplet, a dactylic line of five feet or their equivalent
followed the sonorous hexameter,[26] constituting a livelier measure
than the old heroic verse, which consisted of hexameters alone.
The Greek elegy was not necessarily plaintive; on the contrary, it did
good service in rousing to action in time of war, and gave fitting
expression to the spirit of the banquet-hall.
=Callinus.=—The inventor of this metre was Calli’nus of Eph’esus, in
Ionia, who flourished between 730 and 678 B.C. He attempted by it to
excite his countrymen against a horde of barbarian invaders; but the
people were too much enervated by intercourse with the effeminate
nations of Asia to respond to his thrilling strains.
The following is a fragment of Callinus, perhaps the oldest war-elegy
in existence:—
“How long will ye slumber? When will ye take heart,
And fear the reproach of your neighbors at hand?
Fy! comrades, to think ye have peace for your part,
Whilst the sword and the arrow are wasting our land!
Shame! grasp the shield close! cover well the bold breast!
Aloft raise the spear as ye march on the foe!
With no thought of retreat, with no terror confessed,
Hurl your last dart in dying, or strike your last blow!
Oh! ’tis noble and glorious to fight for our all—
For our country, our children, the wife of our love!
Death comes not the sooner! no soldier shall fall
Ere his thread is spun out by the sisters above.
Once to die is man’s doom; rush, rush to the fight!
He cannot escape, though his blood were Jove’s own;
For a while let him cheat the shrill arrow by flight:
Fate will catch him at last in his chamber alone.
Unlamented he dies—unregretted? not so,
When, the tower of his country, in death falls the brave;
Thrice hallowed his name amongst all, high or low,
As with blessings alive, so with tears in the grave.”
H. N. COLERIDGE.
=Tyrtæus.=—Another proficient in this variety of elegy was Tyrtæus,
supposed to have been born in the Attic town of Aphidnæ. He led the
Spartans in the Second Messenian War (685-668 B.C.), they having,
by the direction of an oracle, sent to Athens for a general, to
secure the success which had before been denied them. The story is
that the jealous Athenians despatched to their neighbors a deformed
schoolmaster, the cripple Tyrtæus, in the belief that his services
would be of little value; but they mistook. The greatest military
genius could not have accomplished more; for Tyrtæus, by his wise
counsels and inspiriting war-songs, made his soldiers invincible.
Messenia fell, and her citizens became slaves to the Spartans. Nor,
afterward, was the poetry of Tyrtæus less efficacious in quelling civil
dissensions and establishing domestic peace. In every respect, “the
Muse of Sparta,” as he was called, proved to be to his adopted country
the blessing promised by the oracle.
Tyrtæus is said to have invented the trumpet, and introduced it as a
companion to the flute, then the chief instrument in use. Some have
interpreted the lameness of the bard as signifying his limping measure,
the second line of the elegiac couplet being, as we have seen, a foot
shorter than the first.
Of the many productions of Tyrtæus, consisting of marching-songs, as
well as warlike and political elegies, only a few fragments survive.
His poems, characterized by terseness and impassioned power, were long
popular among the Spartans, who, on a campaign, were wont to recite
them after each evening meal to kindle afresh their martial fire.
BATTLE-HYMN OF TYRTÆUS.
“Our country’s voice invites the brave
The glorious toils of war to try;
Cursed be the coward, or the slave,
Who shuns the fight, who fears to die.
Obedient to the high command,
Full fraught with patriotic fire,
Descends a small but trusty band,
And scarce restrains the impatient ire.
Behold! the hostile crowds advance;
Unyielding, we their might oppose;
With helm to helm, and lance to lance,
In awful pomp we meet our foes.
Unawed by fear, untaught to yield,
We boldly tread the ensanguined plain;
And scorn to quit the martial field,
Though drenched in blood, though heaped with slain.
For, though stern Death assail the brave,
His virtues endless life shall claim;
His fame shall mock the invidious grave,
To times unborn a sacred name.”—LOWTH.
THE SATIRE.
=Archilochus= of Pa’ros (728-660 B.C.) was the first great satirist,
the inventor of that rapid, loosely-constructed iambic measure so
admirably adapted to his withering lampoons. The son of a slave-woman,
Archil’ochus was treated with indignity in his native island; so
bidding adieu to “the figs and fishy life” of Paros in early youth,
he sailed with a colony to Tha’sos in the northern Ægean. His new
home, however, disappointed his expectations; its gold-mines yielded
not the fortune he had dreamed of, and he denounced it as “the sink
of all Hellenic ills.” The colonists becoming engaged in war with a
neighboring people, a pitched battle proved too severe an ordeal for
the poet’s courage, and dropping his shield he fled.
Perhaps it was for this cowardly action, perhaps on account of his
empty purse, that when he returned to Paros, one of its fair daughters,
who had been his boyhood’s love, refused him her hand. Her father,
also, denied his suit; whereupon the furious poet poured forth in
stinging verses such a torrent of violent invective upon the girl and
her whole family, that she, her father, and her sisters, are said to
have taken refuge from his scurrilous attacks in suicide.
The public odium thus excited drove Archilochus from Paros. But the
brand of cowardice was upon him. The Spartans, whose mothers, pointing
to the battle-field, were wont to say “Return with your shields or upon
them,” disdained the man who could write,
“That shield some Saian decks, which, ’gainst my grain,
I left—fair, flawless shield—beside the wood.
Well, let it go! I and my purse remain:
To-morrow’s bull-skin may be just as good.”
Insult met him at every step, till a poetical victory at the Olympic
Games restored him to popular favor. He went back to Paros, an old
man, to redeem his reputation as a soldier by dying in battle with the
Naxians. Then all Greece awoke to the greatness of his genius; and the
prediction of an oracle before his birth, that he would be “immortal
among men in the glory of his song,” was fulfilled.
Fertility of invention, and an intimate acquaintance with human nature,
were conspicuous in the poetry of Archilochus. Elegies and love-songs
flowed from his pen, and his philosophical poetry gained for him from
Plato the epithet of “Wisest;” but it was in satire that classical
writers conceded to him the highest rank. Archilochus likens himself
to a hedgehog bristling with quills, whose “one great resource is
worth all the devices of more powerful animals.” From his birthplace,
ill-natured satire has been called _Parian verse_.
So little remains of the writings of this author that we can hardly
decide whether his countrymen judged aright in reckoning him second
only to Homer. The two represented distinct departments of poetry; each
in his own, it was claimed, fell little short of perfection. Where
Homer praised, Archilochus reviled. Their birthdays were celebrated in
one grand festival, and a single double-faced statue perpetuated the
memory of the Epic Poet and the Parian Satirist.
ARCHILOCHUS TO HIS SOUL.
“My soul, my soul, by cares past all relief
Distracted sore, bear up! with manly breast
And dauntless mien, each fresh assault of grief
Encountering. By hostile weapons pressed,
Stand firm. Let no unlooked-for triumph move
To empty exultation, no defeat
Cast down. But still let moderation prove
Of life’s uncertain cup the bitter and the sweet.”
MURE.
Greek satire had other representatives, whose names will be found at
the end of this chapter; but their genius was of a lower grade.
ÆOLIC AND DORIC SCHOOLS.
Lyric poetry was the peculiar province of the Æolian and Dorian Greeks,
who carried it to perfection. The Æolic writers were replete with
intense passion, and employed lively metres of simple structure. The
Dorian lyric, intended to be sung by choruses or to choral dances on
great occasions, funerals, marriages, or public festivals, was a much
more majestic, but at the same time a more intricate and artificial
composition. The most distinguished composers of the Æolic School were
Alcæus and Sappho; of the Doric, Simonides and Pindar.
=Alcæus= flourished in the latter part of the seventh century B.C.
He was a noble of Lesbos, and lived in the stirring times when
the constitutional and the aristocratic party contended for the
sovereignty. In this struggle Alcæus appears as the deadly foe of
democratic rule; when his friend Pittacus was clothed with supreme
authority by the people, Alcæus directed against him the keenest shafts
of his satire. Pittacus defeated him in an attempt to overthrow the
government, but generously spared his life, saying, “Forgiveness is
better than revenge.” Of the poet’s subsequent career we are ignorant.
The ancients were loud in their praises of Alcæus. His poems were
polished, full of vehemence and passion, sublime in their denunciations
of tyranny and encomiums of freedom. Love and wine were two of his
favorite topics; yet even his jovial pieces were pervaded by a
loftiness of sentiment foreign to mere sensual songs. Among his most
beautiful compositions were the odes to Sappho, whose love he once
sought, but whose genius soared to greater heights than his. We take
from Alcæus
THE CONSTITUTION OF A STATE.
“What constitutes a state?
Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities fair, with spires and turrets crowned:
No:—Men, high-minded men,
With powers as far above dull brutes endued,
In forest, brake, or den,
As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude—
Men who their duties know,
Know too their rights, and knowing, dare maintain;
Prevent the long-aimed blow,
And crush the tyrant, while they rend the chain.”
SIR WILLIAM JONES.
=The Lesbian Poetesses.=—Lesbos was the centre of lyric song. To
its shores, the waves of ocean are fabled to have borne the lyre of
Orpheus, which the people hung in Apollo’s temple: thus traditionally
distinguished by fate, it became renowned as the home of Grecian
poetesses.
The Lesbian women were not confined to domestic duties, but were
allowed to take part in public affairs. They founded societies for the
cultivation of their literary tastes, and before all Greece vindicated
the genius of their sex. And Lesbos was the very clime for poetry to
ripen in. The love of the beautiful was fed on every side. The island
was a paradise of groves and rivulets, of blossoms and perfumes. Among
its olive-clad hills, at its fountains set in violets and fringed with
fern, under its stately pines, and in its temples shining with ivory
and gold, its poetesses received their inspiration.
=Sappho.=—Greatest of these, and queen of her sex in intellectual
endowments, was Sappho, “the Lesbian Nightingale,” “spotless,
sweetly-smiling, violet-wreathed,” as Alcæus fondly described her, whom
all Greece knew as _The Poetess_.
In her history it is difficult to separate the true from the fabulous.
Born at Mytile’ne, the capital of the island, in the latter part of
the seventh century B.C., she was deprived of a mother’s care at the
age of six. In early womanhood, a new calamity befell her in the loss
of her husband, and thenceforth she devoted her genius to letters,
making the elevation of her countrywomen the great object of her life.
Her reputation soon spread throughout Greece. Mytilene became the seat
of a brilliant sisterhood eager in the study of the polished arts;
sparkling conversation enlivened its meetings; music and poetry were
the branches its members specially cultivated; love was the common
subject of their verse; their lives were above reproach. In the centre
of this constellation of gifted women blazed Sappho, “Star of Lesbian
Song.” Greece, captivated by her sweet numbers, accorded her a place
by Homer’s side—then raised her to the level of its goddesses as “the
Tenth Muse.”
[Illustration: THE LOVER’S LEAP.]
Ancient story made Sappho the victim of disappointed love. Overcome
with passion for Pha’on, a beautiful Mytilenean youth notorious for
his heart-breaking propensities, and finding Phaon indifferent to
her advances, she is said to have thrown herself from the Leuca’dian
promontory[27] and drowned her passion in the Ionian Sea. There is,
however, no evidence to support the story; on the contrary, the
poetess seems to have been implicated with Alcæus in a conspiracy
against Pittacus, who then ruled in Lesbos, and to have been banished
in consequence. (On the Æolic school of Sappho, _consult Donaldson’s
“History of the Literature of Ancient Greece,” p. 218_.)
SAPPHO’S STYLE.—Simplicity, tenderness, concentrated passion, and
brilliancy of description, are characteristic of Sappho’s verse. Her
poetry is the very language of harmony; no more musical measures than
hers were known to the Greeks. Her favorite stanza, an invention of her
own, consisted of four lines with a cadence like the following:—
Tenderest mistress | of the heart’s emotion,
Over whom love sweeps | as the mighty ocean,
Unto thee pour we | all our soul’s devotion,
Glorious Sappho!
In depicting love, Sappho is unmatched. Her utterances, indeed, were
so intense as to be misconstrued by the sensual Greeks of a later
day, and give rise to reports injurious to her good name; or possibly
she may have been confounded with another Sappho, of a different
character; but we have no doubt that her life was as pure as her poetry
is charming. Her imagery, when imagery she used, Sappho gathered from
the bright-tinted flowers, the starry skies, and fragrant zephyrs of
Lesbos, where, as she sung,
“Through orchard plots, with fragrance crowned,
The clear cold fountain murmuring flows;
And forest leaves, with rustling sound,
Invite to soft repose.”
Judging from her fragments, we must admit that in her peculiar
department Sappho stands without a peer. Indeed, her own graceful lines
may well be applied to herself:—
“The stars that round the beauteous moon
Attendant wait, cast into shade
Their ineffectual lustres, soon
As she, in full-orbed majesty arrayed,
Her silver radiance showers
Upon this world of ours,”—
for the lesser lights of lyric poesy pale in the lustre of her genius.
Addison, in his Spectator, makes the following remarks on Sappho,
which are fully justified by the praises of ancient critics:—“Among
the mutilated poets of antiquity, there are none whose fragments are
so beautiful as those of Sappho. One may see, by what is left, that
she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those
little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our
modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been
made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth and
described it in all its symptoms. I do not know, by the character that
is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind
that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness
and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a
reading.”
It is told that a physician, by studying the symptoms of love as
described by Sappho, detected in the mysterious sickness of the
young Anti’ochus, son of the king of Syria, a hidden passion for his
step-mother. The treatment was in accordance with the diagnosis, the
disease disappearing when the anxious father relinquished to the youth
the beautiful object of his affections.
Sappho’s description of the raptures of love, commended by all critics
from Longinus down, is certainly a nonpareil. It has been thus
translated by Ambrose Philips, a friend of Addison’s:—
A LOVE SONG.
“Blest as th’ immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears, and sees thee all the while
Softly speak and sweetly smile.
’Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
And raised such tumults in my breast;
For while I gazed in transport tost,
My breath was gone, my voice was lost.
My bosom glowed: the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame;
O’er my dim eyes a darkness hung;
My ears with hollow murmurs rung.
In dewy damps my limbs were chill’d;
My blood with gentle horrors thrill’d;
My feeble pulse forgot to play;
I fainted, sunk, and died away.”
The grave Solon paid our authoress a delicate compliment. Having heard
his nephew recite one of her poems, he is said to have exclaimed that
he would not willingly die till he had learned it by heart.
The works of Sappho, comprised in nine books, embraced love-lays,
elegies, bridal songs sometimes extended into miniature dramas, and
amorous hymns to Venus and Cupid. The remnants are principally erotic
pieces. We present below the Hymn to Venus, preserved entire, in which
the writer delicately makes the goddess her confidante, and modestly
discloses the secret of her misplaced affections.
HYMN TO VENUS.
“O Venus, beauty of the skies,
To whom a thousand temples rise,
Gayly false in gentle smiles,
Full of love-perplexing wiles;
O goddess! from my heart remove
The wasting cares and pains of love,
If ever thou hast kindly heard
A song in soft distress preferred,
Propitious to my tuneful vow,
O gentle goddess! hear me now.
Descend, thou bright immortal guest,
In all thy radiant charms confessed.
Thou once didst leave almighty Jove,
And all the golden roofs above:
The car thy wanton sparrows drew,
Hovering in air they lightly flew;
As to my bower they winged their way,
I saw their quivering pinions play.
The birds dismissed (while you remain),
Bore back their empty car again.
Then you, with looks divinely mild,
In every heavenly feature smiled,
And asked what new complaints I made,
And why I called yon to my aid:
What frenzy in my bosom raged,
And by what cure to be assuaged:
What gentle youth I would allure;
Whom in my artful toils secure:
Who does thy tender heart subdue,
Tell me, my Sappho, tell me, who?
Though now he shuns thy longing arms,
He soon shall court thy slighted charms:
Though now thy offerings he despise,
He soon to thee shall sacrifice;
Though now he freeze, he soon shall burn,
And be thy victim in his turn.
Celestial visitant, once more
Thy needful presence I implore!
In pity come and ease my grief,
Bring my distempered soul relief;
Favor thy suppliant’s hidden fires,
And give me all my heart desires.”
AMBROSE PHILIPS.
THE ROSE.
“Did Jove a queen of flowers decree,
The rose the queen of flowers should be;
Of flowers the eye; of plants the gem;
The meadow’s blush; earth’s diadem;
Glory of colors on the gaze
Lightening in its beauty’s blaze.
It breathes of Love; it blooms the guest
Of Venus’ ever-fragrant breast.
In gaudy pomp its petals spread;
Light foliage trembles round its head;
With vermeil blossoms fresh and fair
It laughs to the voluptuous air.”—ELTON.
=Sappho’s Pupils.=—Doubtless many went forth from Sappho’s school
to reflect, in their own accomplishments, the brilliancy of
their mistress. History has preserved the names of two of her
pupils—Damoph’yla of Asia Minor, noted for a Hymn to Diana; and
ERINNA, a Rhodian maid who shone among the brightest lights of
Sappho’s circle, and, if we may believe the story, died of a broken
heart when compelled by her parents to exchange the delights of
literature for the drudgery of the spinning-wheel. This cruel treatment
Erinna made the subject of an affecting lament, “the Spindle,” a poem
of three hundred hexameters, on which her reputation rests. Her death
at the age of nineteen cheated the world of a writer who promised to
rival Homer himself.
“The Spindle” is lost; but the following epigram on a virgin of Lesbos,
who died on the day appointed for her marriage, speaks for Erinna:—
“The virgin Myrtis’ sepulchre am I;
Creep softly to the pillar’d mount of woe;
And whisper to the grave, in earth below,
‘Grave! thou art envious in thy cruelty!’
To thee, now gazing here, her barbarous fate
These bride’s adornments tell; that, with the fire
Of Hymen’s torch, which led her to the gate,
Her husband burned the maid upon her pyre:
Yes, Hymen! thou didst change the marriage-song
To the shrill wailing of the mourners’ throng.”
A pointed epitaph in the Greek Anthology shows the estimation in which
the poetess was held by her countrymen:—
“These are Erinna’s songs: how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years;
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers?”
=Anacreon.=—In the sixth century, Te’os, a seaport of Ionia, gave birth
to the society poet, Anacreon; who, though an Ionian, wrote rather in
the style of the Æolian lyrics. His verses, however, while soft and
graceful, were marked by levity, and lacked the dignity and depth of
the Æolic school. “The Muse, good humor, love, and wine,” Anacreon
tells us, were his themes; accordingly his songs, brimming with
sensuality, grew in popular estimation as Greece degenerated in public
morality.
When his native city fell a prey to Cyrus the Persian, Anacreon with
the other inhabitants set sail for Thrace (540 B.C.). From Thrace,
while yet in his youth, he withdrew to the island of Sa’mos whose
tyrant, Polyc’rates, was a munificent patron of literature and art.
Amid the gayety of the Samian court, the witty and pleasure-loving poet
found a congenial home, Polycrates making him an intimate companion
and confiding to him important state secrets. But the ruler of Samos
was treacherously put to death by a Persian satrap; about which time,
Anacreon was invited to Athens by the tyrant Hipparchus, who sent his
royal trireme to bring his poet-laureate across the Ægean.
At Athens, Anacreon for a time gave free rein to his passions, joining
a set of boon companions who basked in the sunshine of royal favor.
His voluptuous career was cut short by the assassination of Hipparchus,
and he returned to Teos (repeopled during his absence), to be choked by
a grape-seed at the advanced age of eighty-five—or, if we are to take
the story figuratively, to fall a victim to his irrepressible love of
the bottle.
A statue of a drunken old man on the Athenian acropolis kept alive
in the minds of the people as well the graceful odes of Anacreon as
his prevailing weakness. His friend Simonides wrote an epitaph to his
memory, in which we catch a glimpse of the exciting whirl of pleasures
that made up his existence:—
“Bland mother of the grape! all-gladdening vine!
Teeming inebriate joy! whose tendrils bloom
Crisp-woven in winding trail, now green entwine
This pillar’s top, this mount, Anacreon’s tomb.
As lover of the feast, the untempered bowl,
While the full draught was reeling in his soul,
He smote upon the harp, whose melodies
Were tuned to girlish loves, till midnight fled;
Now, fallen to earth, embower him as he lies,
Thy purpling clusters blushing o’er his head:
Still be fresh dew upon the branches hung,
Like that which breathed from his enchanting tongue.”
The name of Anacreon is attached to about sixty odes, but they are all
probably from five hundred to a thousand years later than he. Yet, if
they are not by his hand, they breathe his spirit. As a sample of these
Anacreontics, we give a paraphrase of
CUPID AND THE BEE.
Young Cupid once a rose caressed,
And sportively its leaflets pressed.
The witching thing, so fair to view
One could not but believe it true,
Warmed, on its bosom false, a bee,
Which stung the boy-god in his glee.
Sobbing, he raised his pinions bright,
And flew unto the isle of light,
Where, in her beauty, myrtle-crowned,
The Paphian goddess sat enthroned.
Her Cupid sought, and to her breast
His wounded finger, weeping, pressed.
“O mother! kiss me,” was his cry—
“O mother! save me, or I die;
A winged little snake or bee
With cruel sting has wounded me!”
The blooming goddess in her arms
Folded and kissed his budding charms;
To her soft bosom pressed her pride,
And then with truthful words replied:
“If thus a little insect thing
Can pain thee with its tiny sting,
How languish, think you, those who smart
Beneath my Cupid’s cruel dart?
How fatal must that poison prove
That rankles on the shafts of Love!”
=Simonides= (556-467 B.C.), who brought into high repute the Doric or
Choral School while he also composed in the Ionic dialect, was born
in Ceos, an island of the Cyclades. He was one of a brilliant coterie
of poets attracted to Athens by the munificence of Hipparchus; and
after the assassination of the latter he withdrew to Thessaly, to find
rich and powerful patrons there on whom to lavish his eulogies; for
Simonides was the first poet that set a price upon his talents and
turned his panegyrics into gold. He who, when small pay was offered,
disdained to celebrate a mule victorious in the race on the plea that
it was an ass’s daughter, when the price was raised found in the “child
of thunder-footed steeds” no unfit subject for his facile Muse.
In connection with this rather unpoetical eye to business, we are told
that once Simonides, having extolled in verse one of his Thessalian
patrons, was refused more than half the promised price and referred for
the balance to the gods Castor and Pollux, whose praises filled most
of the poem. The Thessalian noble was still laughing at his ruse for
evading payment, when Simonides was summoned from the room to speak
with two strangers. Hastening out, he found that they had vanished; but
no sooner had he withdrawn from the apartment than the roof fell and
killed all whom he had left there. Thus the twin deities discharged
their indebtedness to the poet.
The evening of his days Simonides passed in Syracuse, the ornament of
Hi’ero’s court, the recipient of royal favors during his life, and at
his death of the highest funeral honors. It was here that the poet, who
was somewhat of a philosopher, confessed his inability to answer the
question of the Syracusan monarch, “What is God?”
Simonides was remarkably successful in adapting the elegy to funeral
songs and epitaphs, and thus embalming Grecian heroism for the
contemplation of future ages. He lived in the time of the Persian
War, and commemorated its worthies. The tomb of the three hundred
who fell at Thermopylæ for the liberties of Greece bore this grand
inscription from his pen: “Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedæmonians
that we lie here in obedience to their laws.” In his workshop the
epigram was wrought to perfection. “The Simonidean tears” seemed to
well up from the very depths of the heart. Among all the epigrammatists
known to literature, none have excelled him whom Plato styled “the
divine Simonides;” who was “the voice of Hellas—the genius of Fame,
sculpturing with a pen of adamant, in letters of indelible gold, the
achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization.” Fifty-six
times, the last time at the age of eighty, he bore away from all
competitors the prize of poetry.
Besides dirges and epigrams, hymns, prayers, pæans, and processional
odes, flowed from the prolific pen of Simonides. Long a chorus-teacher
in the land of his birth, he was peculiarly fitted for the composition
of solemn choral poetry. “The Lament of Danaë,” his finest surviving
work, is a noble specimen of the Greek lyric. It describes the Argive
princess set adrift with her child in an ark upon the stormy billows
by her inhuman parent. Tenderly she folds the sleeping boy in her arms,
and prays Father Zeus that like him the sea may sleep.
DANAË’S LAMENT.
“Closed in the fine-wrought chest,
She felt, the rising wind the waters move.
Then, by new fear possessed,
With action wild
And cheeks bedewed, she stretched her arms of love
Toward Perseus:‘O my child,
What sorrow wrings my breast!
While thou art sunk so deep
In infancy’s calm sleep;
Launched in this joyless ark,
Bronze-fastened, glimmering-dark,
Yet, pillowed on thy tangled hair,
Thou slumberest, nor dost care
For billows past thee bounding
Nor breezes shrilly sounding.
Laid in thy mantle red, sweet face, how fair!
Ah! but if Fear
Had aught of fear for thee,
Thou even to me
Wouldst turn thy tender ear.
But now I bid thee rest, my babe; sleep still!
Rest, O thou sea! Rest, rest, unbounded ill!
Zeus, Father, some relief, some change from thee!
Am I too bold? For _his_ sake, pardon me!’”
EPITAPH ON THE NIECE OF HIPPARCHUS.
“Archedicè, the daughter of King Hippias,
Who in his time
Of all the potentates of Greece was prime,
This dust doth hide;
Daughter, wife, sister, mother, unto kings she was,
Yet free from pride.”—HOBBES.
Pindar, the friend and pupil of Simonides, the greatest master of the
Doric School, adorned the golden age of Grecian literature, and will
there be considered as the representative of lyric poetry.
MINOR ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS.
MIMNERMUS of Colophon (634-590 B.C.), the first to adapt the elegiac
couplet to plaintive and erotic themes: he bewails the enslavement
of his degenerate country by Lydia. Old age the terror of the poet;
life without “the gold-haired goddess” of love not worth living; a
characteristic saying of his, “When the flower of youth is past, it is
best to die at once; may death strike me at my sixtieth year.”
SOLON, the Athenian lawgiver (638-559 B.C.), the first _gnomic_ poet:
embodied his moral maxims (_gnomes_) in elegiac verse: also a master
of the martial elegy, as his famous “Salaminian Ode” shows. Plato
declared that if Solon had devoted his genius to the Muses, Homer
might not have stood alone in his glory.
THEOGNIS (583-495 B.C.), a noble of Meg’ara, who opposed the
democratic faction, and was in consequence expelled from the state
and deprived of his hereditary lands by the Commons. He sang his
songs in elegiac verse. Distinguished also as a gnomic poet. The
following thoughts are culled from among his sayings:—“Wealth is
almighty.”—“Easy among men is the practice of wickedness, but hard
the method of goodness.”—“No one descends to Hades with his riches,
nor can he by paying ransom escape death.”—“Prefer to live piously on
small means to being rich on what is gotten unjustly.”
PHOCYL’IDES of Miletus (550-490 B.C.), an Ionian gnomic poet whose
didactic couplets, generally marked by sound sense, sometimes
breathing a worldly spirit, began with the introductory phrase, “And
this too is Phocylides’.” The following are maxims of his:—“First get
your living, and then think of getting virtue.”—“A small city set upon
a rock and well-governed is better than all foolish Nineveh.”
XENOPH’ANES of Colophon (about 540 B.C.), founder of the Eleatic sect
of philosophers: also an elegiac poet: condemns the effeminacy of his
countrymen, and derides a prevailing preference for physical over
intellectual culture.
THE SATIRISTS.
SIMONIDES THE ELDER, of Amorgus (660 B.C.), “the Iambographer: “style
flowing and polished: masterpiece, a satire on women—“Even though they
seem to be good, when one has got one she becomes a plague.”
HIP’PONAX of Ephesus (540 B.C.), the father of parody, and inventor
of the choliambic measure, or limping iambic, in which the last foot
was a spondee. He attacked the luxury and vice of his day, sparing
neither friend nor relative; it is told that by his crushing satire a
sculptor who had caricatured his ugly person was driven to suicide. It
was Hipponax who said: “Woman gives two days of happiness to man, the
day of her bridal and the day of her funeral.” The stranger who passed
his tomb was warned:
“Wake not the sleeping wasp, for though he’s dead,
Still straight and sure his crooked lines are sped.”
MINOR POETS OF THE CHORAL SCHOOL.
ALCMAN (671-631 B.C.), Sparta’s jovial lyric poet, an emancipated
Lydian slave.
STESICH’ORUS of Sicily (632-560 B.C.), inventor of the choric system;
named from his occupation _Stesichorus_, leader of the chorus. His
greatness foreshadowed by a nightingale that alighted on his infant
lips and burst into song: hymns, fables, pastorals: the earliest Greek
novelist; his love tales and romances narrated in verse.
TERPANDER the Lesbian (about 650 B.C.), the founder of Greek musical
science, and inventor of the heptachord, or seven-stringed lyre.
IB’YCUS, of Rhegium in southern Italy (540 B.C.), lived in Samos as
the friend of Polycrates, His odes principally erotic: from the warmth
of his passion, Ibycus was styled “the love-maddened.”
BACCHYL’IDES (470 B.C.), the nephew of Simonides of Ceos: hymns,
epigrams, etc., in Doric: style highly polished: a specimen epigram is,
“The touchstone tries the purity of gold,
And by all-conquering truth man’s worth and wit are told.”
TIMOC’REON OF RHODES (471 B.C.), lyric poet and satirist.