to the form which the earlier writers of Iambics had invented. It found its true sphere in the Dorian Comedy of Epicharmus and the Athenian Comedy of Aristophanes, who combined the personalities of Archilochus and the generalities of Simonides in his own consummate work of dramatic art. Among the lost treasures of Greek literature we have to regret few things more than the plays of the Syracusan Epicharmus, from whom we might have learned directly what now we can only infer that the Dorians, when uncontrolled by the severe taste of Sparta, indulged a humour for drollery and sarcasm, which, though rougher than that of the Ionians, must have had its own flavour of raciness and fun. Roman Satire maintained a strictly moral intention; facit indignatio versus is the motto of Juvenal, while Horace holds the mirror of worldly philosophy to the follies and the vices of his age, and Persius applies the canons of Stoical Ethics to the phenomena of society as he observed them. This is the lead which our modern satirists-the Regnier of France, the Dryden or the Pope of England, have followed. Greek literature furnishes no specimen of this species of composition. Wherever in the Comedies of Aristophanes, or the Dialogues of Lucian, or the Epigrams of the Anthology, we meet with satire, we find the simple motives of Archilochus and Simonides at work. Personal animosity gives a barb and a venom to the shaft: or the poet delineates with more or less of comic wit the social anomalies which have struck his fancy. Of serious invective and of moral preaching, the Greeks, in their satiric art at least, knew nothing. Plato himself is only accidentally a satirist in the sense of the term which we moderns have adopted from the Romans. CHAPTER V. THE LYRIC POETS. The Esthetic Instinct of the Greeks in their Choice of Metres.Different Species of Lyrical Poetry.-The Fragments in Bergk's Collection. Proemia.- Prosodia. - Parthenia. Paan. 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. - 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 backwards into the remote shadows of antiquity, we find that lyrical poetry, like all art in Greece, took its origin in connection with primitive Natureworship. The song of Linus, 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 * τοῖσιν δ' ἐν μέσσοισι πάϊς φόρμιγγι λιγείη ἱμερόεν κιθάριζε· λίνον δ ̓ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδεν λεπταλέῃ φωνῇ.—liad, xviii. 569. Bergk (Pocta Lyrici Græci, 3 vols., Leipsic, 1866) gives an old Greek Linus-song on p. 1297. of summer's prime. In the funeral chant for Adonis, women bewailed the fleeting splendour of the spring; and Hyacinthus, loved and slain by Phoebus, whom the Laconian youths and maidens honoured, was again a type of vernal loveliness deflowered. 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 aesthetic 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 proprieties. How could a poet have bewailed his loves or losses in the stately structure of the Pindaric ode? Conversely, a hymn to Phœbus 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 vigour 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. Then, and not till then, the Greeks descended to that degradation of art which prevailed, Many poems of the Syracusan Idyllists are valuable historically as adaptations of the Hexameter to subjects essentially lyrical. In the Adoniazusa, the Epithalamium Helena, the Lament for Bion, &c., we trace a lyrical inspiration overlaid by the Idyllic form. Theocritus must have worked on the lines of old choral poetry. 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. 66 To describe 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 connexion 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 threnodia 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 sub I |