AT LOS ANGELES UNIVERSITY LOS ANGELES C O M PA yi() .V VO L UMKH. Fourth Edition. A HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE: FKOM THE EARLIEST PKRIOD TO THE TIMK.S OF THE ANTONINKS. BY CHARLES THOMAS CRUTTWELL, M.A., FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD J HEAD MA3TKR OK MAI.VKKN COLLEGE. Crown vo, cloth, 8s. 6d. "Mr. CRUTTWELL has done a r< nl service to all Students of the Latin Language and Literature. . . . Full of good scholarship and good criti- cism. " A tkenotuiii. " A most serviceable indeed indispensable guide for the Student. . . . The 'general reader' will be both charmed and instructed." Saturday Review. Second Edition. SPECIMENS OF ROMAN LITERATURE: FROM THK EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE TIMK.S OK THE ASTONINES. From the Works of Latin Authors, Prose Writers, and Potts. Parti. ROMAN THOUGHT: Religion, Philosophy and Science, Art aud Letters, 6s. Part II. ROMAN STYLE : Descriptive, Rhetorical, and Humorous Passages, 53. With Synopsis and Indices complete. Edited by CHAUI.ES THOMAS CKUTTWELL, M.A., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford ; aud PEAKE BANTOX, M.A., sometime Scholar of Jesus College, Cambridge. Oi', in One Volume, Crown Bvo, 665 pp., cloth, price io.t. 6d. " l-'rom any point of view the work is one which must be n<>t only use- ful, but necessary, lor many classes of readers. . . . Th- plan of tin: book gives it a standing-ground of its own ... A volume which, for tlie sound judgment exercised in plan and selection, calls fur hearty common' iation." Snturday Jtt.vuir. LONDON: CHAHLKS GKIFFIN ANO COMPANY. A HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE f Ije arlhst f moto FRANK BYRON JEVONS, M.A., TUTOR IX THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM. LONDON: CHARLES GRIFFIN ANT) COMPANY, EXETER STREET, STRAND. [All rights reserved.] HALLANTYNK. HANSON AND CO. JiUINbUKl.il AND LONDON TO VENERABLE H. W. W ATKINS, D.D. CANOX AND ARCHDEACON OF DURHAM, PKOFESSOR OF HEBREW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM, Ubis Mori? IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. ^ THIS, like the preceding volume in this series, " is designed mainly for Students at our Universities and Public Schools, and for such as are preparing for the Indian Civil Service or other advanced Examinations." But it is also intended to be intelligible, and, it is hoped, will be found interesting to those who know no Greek. V With this purpose, Greek and all points involving Greek scholarship have been relegated to the Notes and Appen- dices. A list of the works consulted and utilised in writing this book would occupy many pages. To note on each page, in the German fashion, every obligation and refer- ence would swell the work to twice its present size. I must therefore content myself with saying that I have endeavoured to draw on all the best treatises on the sub- ject in English, French, and German. Much, especially of the German work, deals with isolated points: the prin- ciples which determined the growth of Greek literature VI 11 PREFACE. have been comparatively neglected by previous writers. The present effort may, I hope, contribute towards remedy- ing this neglect. I am indebted for valuable guidance to my former tutor, H. Richards, Esq., M.A., Fellow of Wadham Col- lege, Oxford, and to J. T. Danson, Esq., F.S.A. F. B. J. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, DURHAM. July 1886. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY. PAOB Difference between classical period and later periods of Greek litera- ture Greek literature the proper introduction to literature generally Classical period divisible into poetry (epic, lyri'j, and dramatic) and prose (history, oratory, and philosophy) . I PART I. EPIC, LYRIC, AND THE DRAMA. BOOK I. EPIC POETRY. CHAPTER I. THE ILIAD. Its background Three ways of painting in a background Skill of Homer The plot Its unity and interconnpction Artistic dis- posal of side-issues ......... 7 CHAPTER II. THE ODYSSEY. Its modern popularity Unity Tclcmachia Mdrchen The ''kernel" The climax Transformation of Odysseus . . 17 CHAPTER III. THE HOMERIC QUESTION. The early Separatists Modern Chorizontes -Wolf Commission of Pisistratus Hermann Lachmann Diuskeuasts Grote Paley Conclusion ........ 25 CONTENTS. KAOK APPENDIX. Heading, Writing, and Publication in Classical Greek Times: Origin of writing Date of Greek alphabet Of a read- ing public in Greece Recitation, publication Homeridae . 41 CHAPTER IV. THE EPIC CYCLE. Proclus His summary of the Cypria, the ^Kthiopis, Little Iliad, the Sack of Troy, the Return, Telegonia Theban epics ... 54 APPENDIX. Relation of the Epic Cycle to Homer .-Homer and the cycle Proclus' summary and the original poems Cyclics avoid Homer Borrow inspiration Date what they imitate . 61 CHAPTER V. THE HOMERIC HYMNS. Their nature The proems of rhapsodists The longer hymns Other Homeric poems Margites Batrachomyomachia, &c. Homeric epigrams ........... 69 CHAPTER VI. HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. Difference between He.siod and Homer Hesiod didactic Nature of didactic poetry Life of Hesiod Merit of his work Works and Days Tkcogony and its origin Shield of Heracles and lost works Genealogical poems 77 CHAPTER VII. OTHER EPIC POETS AND OTHMR WRITERS OF HEXAMETERS. Peisander Panyasis Antimachus of Colophon Choerilus of Samos Arimaspeia of Aristeas Orphic poets Verse philosophers Slow development of prose Connection between philosophy and poetry Xenophanes Parmenides Empedocles HOOK II. LYRIC POETRY. CHAPTER I. TIIK El.ECJIAC AND IA.MIUC POKTS. Rise of lyric Its nature and difference from epic and from modern lyric Its germs Songs of the people Foreign elements Elegiac, iambic, and melic Elegy Callinus Archilochus Simonides Tyrtani> Minmermus Solon .... 100 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER II. PAGE LYRIC POETRY : MELIC. Nature of melic Four periods in its history Terpander, Clonas, and Thaletas Terpander's extension of the nome Alcman Parthenia Arion The dithyramb 121 CHAPTER III. MELIC POETRY : ALOEUS AND SAPPHO. Life of Alcseus Political verses Estimate of antiquity Drinking- songs His work as a whole Sappho Her life Her excellence and style Damophila Erinna Stesichorus . . . .130 CHAPTER IV. ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC WRITERS CONTINUED. The Theognidea Life of Theognis His political, moral, and social views Demodocus Phocylides Spurious Phocylidea Hip- ponax Other writers of elegiacs or iambics . . . .147 CHAPTER V. MELIC AT CO URT. Ibycus His odes choral Influence of tyranny and democracy on literature Anacreon Simonides Dithyramb Encomia Payment for poetry Threni Epigram Bacchylides and others . . . . . . . . . . 155 CHAPTER VI. PINDAR. Early life Tenth Pythian Pythian games Sixth Pythian Twelfth Pythian Pindar and Athens Eleventh Olympian Fifth Nemean Second Period Fourth Pythian Third Period Relation of choral lyric to previous and subsequent kinds of poetry Decay of choral lyric . . . . . . .170 BOOK III. THE DRAMA. CHAPTER I. EARLY TRAGEDY. Origin of Tragedy Thespis Pratiuas Satyric drama The Cyclops Aristias Phrynichus Phenician Women Chosrilus . .183 APPENDIX. Metre, Dialect, and Divisions of Tragedy . . .189 Xll CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. PACK AESCHYLUS. Influence of religion Visit to Sicily Its cause His politics The Eumenides The Persians Suppliants The Seven Prometheus Bound Characters Clytemestra Chorus in ^Eschylus Style Fragments "School "of ^Eschylus Euphorion Astydamas 192 CHAPTER III. SOPHOCLES. Life Herodotus Fatalism and "irony of Sophocles" Character- drawing The chorus Style Lost plays and fragments " School " of Sophocles Ion Neophron Carcinus and his " school "........... 206 CHAPTER IV. EURIPIDES. Life and plays Popularity Transitional character of his work Consequent defects Prologue and dcus ex machind Chorus Character-drawing Style Fragments " School " Achceus, Agathon " Reading tragedians '' Decay of tragedy . . 220 CHAPTER V. COMKDY : ORIGIN AND GROWTH. Worship of Dionysius and I'hallica Mimetic dances Megara Mseson and Susarion Sicilian comedy Kpicharmus Ifebi's Wedding Origin of Sicilian comedy Influence of Epirharrnus on Attic comedy Sophron and his mimes . . . 234 CHAPTER VI. THE OLD COMEDY. The old, the middle, and the new Magnes Crates Cratinus Pherecrates Eupolis, his relations with Aristophanes His plays and character Phrynichus, Plato, and others . . .24} CHAPTER VII. ARISTOPHANES. Two periods of Aristophanes' work The Babylonians Tin 1 Arlnr- nians The Kniyhts and Cleon The patriotism of Aristophanes The influence of comedy on politics The (Jl finds and Socrates Aristophanes on philosophy His discontent with the present CONTENTS. xiii PAGE Unsatisfactory text of the Clouds The real nature of the attack on Socrates The Wasps and its construction Change in Aris- tophanes' attitude The Peace The Birds and its beauty Lost plays Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusce Euripides and the Frogs Ecclesiazusce Plutus Lost plays 253 APPENDIX A. The Wasps .. . . . . . . -277 B. The Parabasis .... ... 278 CHAPTER VIII. MIDDLE COMEDY. Old and middle comedy Reason of their difference Disappearance of the chorus Reason thereof Plot in old, middle, and new Characters Sources of our information Alexis Antiphanes Auaxandrides Eubulus Other comedians .... 279 PART II. HISTORY, ORATORY, AND PHILOSOPHY. BOOK I. HISTORY. CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNINGS OF PROSE. Prose literature invented in Miletus Cadmus and Pherecydes The logographers Hecataeus Dionysius of Miletus Xanthus Hippocrates His life and works ...... 297 CHAPTER II. HERODOTUS. His date and life Object of his travels Outline of his History Intended for recitation Incomplete The Assyrian history Unity of his work Its national sentiment Nemesis his philo- sophy of history His credulity, capacity, honesty, means of information .......... 306 CHAPTER III. THUCYDIDES. Life Importance of the Peloponnesian war Its interest Its moral The object of Thucydides His ' positive " character His annalistic method His literary genius Literary defects and their causes Compared with Tacitus . . . . -3-7 xiv CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PAOB XENOPHON. Life Works, historical, philosophical, and miscellaneous A nabasis Its authorship Hellenics Its defects, and their various explana- tions Xenophon and Thucydides Cyropcedia Other historical and miscellaneous works Object of the philosophical works Xenophon and Plato ........ 348 CHAPTER V. OTHER HISTORIANS. Ctesias His relation to Herodotus Theopompus Ephorus Others . 362 BOOK II. ORATORY CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNINGS OF RHETORIC AND THE FIRST LOGOGRArilKR*. Eloquence and its development into oratory The Sophists Pro- tagoras Sicilian rhetoric : Corax and Tisias Gorgias The logographers and their services Antiphon His life Imma- turity The Tetralogies The " severe " style --His merits . 367 CHAPTER II. PRACTICAL ORATORY : AXUOCIDES AND TA.SIAS. Andocides His life Not a rhetorician His weaknesses and his strength The four surviving speeches Lysias His life Speeches, spurious, epideictic, deliberative, and forensic Ethos Plain style < 'race Thrasymachus, Theodoras, Kurnus, Critiaa ........... 579 CHAPTER III. KPIDKICTIC RHETORIC AND THE TRANSITION. Isocratcs A logographer then a Sophist Pan- Hellenism Style epideictic Hiatus avoided Smoothness Antisthenes Alei- damus Polycrates Zoilus the Homeromastix Anaximenes s His influence on Demosthenes ..... 392 CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER IV. PAOK DEMOSTHENES : FIRST PERIOD. Relation of Demosthenes to earlier oratory and to the culture of his time His character and early life His youthful exaggeration Want of self-control Imitation Lack of artistic sense and ethos 404 CHAPTER V. DEMOSTHENES: SECOND PERIOD. His excessive argumentation His lighter qualities The speech for Phormio Political speeches Constitutional speeches The Demegories Their ethos The speech against Midias On the Embassy 412 CHAPTER VI. DEMOSTHENES : THIRD PERIOD SPEECH OF THE CROWN. Points at issue between ^schines and Ctesiphon The speech as delivered and as we have it Demosthenes' power of language His rhythm His intellectual superiority His morality The Harpalus affair Death of Demosthenes ..... 425 CHAPTER VII. THE CONTEMPORARIES OF DEMOSTHENES: THE ANTI-MACEDONIAN PARTY. Divisions in the Anti-Macedonian party Hyperides His life and character His grace and charm Speech for Euxenippus For Lycophron Discovery in Egypt of fragments of Hyperides Speech against Demosthenes Funeral oration Lycurgus Hegesippus and the speech on the Halonnesus Polyeuctus . 436 CHAPTER VIII. .(ESCHINES AND THE ORATORS OF THE MACEDONIAN PARTY. .Eschines Life Speeches ^Eschines and Demosthenes compared and contrasted Demades Aristogiton Minor orators The decline of oratory Its causes A development of pre-existing tendencies .......... 450 XVI CONTENTS. BOOK III. PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER I. PAGE PLATO AND THE PHILOSOPHERS BEFORE HIM. Anaximander. Anaximenes, and Heraclitus Zeno Anaxagoras Other philosophers Plato Life Acquaintance with Socrates Travels Why he adopted the form of dialogue Its place in Greek literature His style, diction, structure of sentence, rhythm Its affinity with poetry and with comedy Aristotle on Plato's literary qualities Authenticity of the works ascribed to Plato 465 CONCLUSION. The limits of the range of thought Physical conditions liace quali- ties Oral communication of Greek literature Political and social conditions Influence of language . . . 484 A HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. INTRODUCTORY. CLASSICAL Greek Literature begins with Homer, and ends practically, if not precisely, with the death of Demosthenes. During this period Greece was free. "With the loss of liberty, literature underwent a change. Greece ceased to produce men of genius, and this constitutes one difference between the classi- cal and later periods. A second great difference is that whereas the literature of the classical period was written not only by Greeks, but for Greeks, later literature was cosmopolitan ; and to this change in the literature corresponds the change in the language, which from pure Greek became Hellenistic Greek. The earliest period of Greek literature is, then, classical because it is the work of genius, and is due solely to Greek genius. It reflects Greek life and expresses Greek thoughts alone, and, like the language in which it is clad, contains no foreign elements. Classical Greek literature is the proper introduction to litera- ture generally, because in it the laws which determined its development are simple, and can be easily traced. It was pure and original, and its development, unlike that of subsequent literatures, was not complicated by the influence of a foreign literature. Further, the various kinds of literature, poetry and prose, epic, lyric, and the drama, history, philosophy, and oratory, not only remained true, each to its own type, but on the whole they developed in orderly succession. This was because they were the work of different members of the Greek race, whose latent literary tendencies required different political and social conditions to draw them out. They were evoked one after the other by political and social changes ; and so the stages A HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. in the development of literature correspond with those of the nation's life. The growth of Epic poetry, the earliest form of the literature which has bequeathed remains to us, was favoured by a stage of civilisation in which patriarchal monarchy formed the political machinery, and family life furnished the society and the literary public. Lyric, the next branch of literature, found favouring conditions in the aristocracies which succeeded to monarchy, and in which the social communion of the pri- vileged class took the place of family life, and provided a new public for literature. The Drama was designed for the enter- tainment of large numbers of persons, and was a response to the demands of democracy. From this time on, literature no longer found its home in the halls of chieftains, or its audience in the social meetings of the few ; but when the state came to consist of the whole of the citizens, literature became united with the life of the state as a whole, and thenceforward was but one of the ways in which that life expressed itself. Literary men were not a class distinguished by their profession from the rest of the community, nor was literature a tiling apart from the practical matters of life. The Orator* were active politicians or men of law ; and their speeches were not literary displays, but had a practical object, to turn the vote of the Assembly, or to gain a verdict. History was the record of a contemporary wtir, or of a war which had occurred in the previous generation. Philosophy was but a picture in words of the conversations between culti- vated Greeks on the great problems of life. The drama was not a mere literary entertainment : it was an act of common worship, in which the genius of man was devoted to the glory of the gods. In this book we shall follow the divisions into which ('.reek literature naturally falls, and shall complete our survey of each branch of literature before proceeding to another. This method is not absolutely chronological, for the divisions overlap to a certain extcTit ; but it gives a simpler account, and in reality a truer view of the history, than we should obtain by following out chronological distinctions to the uttermost. Our division then will lie as follows: In the first place, as the rise ot poetry preceded that of prose, we shall divide the hi>fory of Greek literature into two parts, the first containing the history of poetry, the second of prose. Then the first part will fall into three divi.-ions (i.) Kpic ; (2.) Lyric; (3.) The Drama: and the second will also fall into three divisions (i.) History; (2.) Philosophy; (3.) Oratory. Our account of Epic poetry will begin with Homer. Other INTRODUCTORY. 3 poets must have lived before Homer, and must have carried the development of poetry to a considerable height before such works as the Iliad and Odyssey could have been composed. But as there is not a vestige of this pre-Homerie poetry left, we shall proceed at once to Homer ; and before considering the question whether there was such a person as Homer, we must try to gain some idea of what there is in the Iliad and Odyssey which places them among the world's greatest literary treasures, and which could make Keats, who only knew the poems through an inferior English version, say on first looking into Chapman's Homer ' Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise Bilent upon a peak in Darieu." part E. EPIC AND LYRIC POETRY, THE DRAMA, BOOK I. EPIC POETRY. CHAPTER I. THE ILIAD. WHATEVER may have been the authorship, origin, original form, and date of the Homeric poems, the fact remains that it is in their present form that they have commanded the admiration of men for more than two thousand years, have been the model for epic poetry, the inspiration of poets of all kinds, and have made the name of Homer greater than any name in literature. Therefore, before dissecting the poems of Homer, or rather vivi- secting them, for they yet live, let us admire the beauty of their form, the firmness of their outlines, the purity of their Greek features, and the soul which gives expression to them. And this we may do without pre-judging any of the questions to which these poems have given rise ; for those who advocate the hypothesis of several authors are as warm in the praise of our existing Homer, as are the supporters of Homer's undivided authorship. Indeed, the example of the frieze of the Parthenon and some of our own cathedrals shows that a work of art may possess unity of design and harmony in details, and yet be the work of not one artist, but several. Confining ourselves in this chapter to the Iliad, let us first admire the skill with which the background is painted in. The subject of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles and its conse- quences, is but an incident in the story of the Trojan war. Achilles and Agamemnon quarrelled before the walls of Troy, as we are informed at the beginning of the first book ; but the reader has to be informed how it came about that Achilles and Agamemnon were besieging Troy, and this is the story of the Trojan war, which is presupposed by and forms the background 8 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. of the Iliad. In the same way every plot, whether of an epic, or a drama, or a novel, presupposes a state of things existing before the action begins ; and the way in which the author contrives to acquaint the reader with this state of things, in other words to paint in the background, gives us a test of his skill. 1. The simplest and most inartistic way is that adopted by Euripides in many of his plays. Before the drama begins, one of the characters, or even a figure who does not appear in the play itself, comes on the stage, and, speaking to the audience, tells them what they have to imagine in order to understand what is going to be done, on the stage. This is the most in- artistic, because the pleasure one gets from seeing a play depends on the illusion depends, that is to say, on our believing for the time that what we see performed before us is real : and in the prologues of Euripides the author practically comes forward and disenchants us by warning us that what is going to come is only a play. In a novel, too, the author may begin at the beginning and tell us methodically from point to point all that his story presupposes ; and then, having got this preliminary matter out of the way, proceed with his real subject. But this method is usually repulsive to the reader, whose interest is not awakened, and he puts down the book. 2. The next and more usual way of painting in the background is to begin with the real subject, at the point the author thinks most attractive ; and then, after having gained the reader's attention, to go back to the beginning of tilings and explain the circumstances in which his characters iind themselves. This is more artistic than the first way, though how much more depends on the artist. It may be done clumsily, the author without any excuse simply saying in e fleet, " ^s'ow let us retrace our steps, and see how this came about ; " or it may be done more skilfully, as when the author arranges tilings so that one of the characters naturally relates the antecedent cir- cumstances for the benefit of another character. Thus, in the ./Eneid, Virgil begins with a storm at sea which throws ^Eneas on the coast of Carthage ; and the Queen of Carthage naturally wishes to know the history of the stranger, who then relates at great length all that is necessary for tin 1 reader to know in order to comprehend the story of the .Eneid. Kven here thc he would do so in real life, but because the information must be -riven to the reader somehow. EPIC POETRY : THE ILIAD. 9 To make the characters talk at the reader in this way is bad workmanship. 3. There is yet a third way of painting in the background. It consists in making the plot itself disclose what it presupposes, in not telling the reader, but allowing him to infer how what he sees has come about. This is the best way, not because it is most natural, but because it most resembles nature. It is not the method which most naturally suggests itself to the author ; but it is the way in which the spectator of a scene in real life, enacted by people unknown to him, gains the know- ledge necessary for a comprehension of the scene. This, as it is the best, is also the most difficult method. To construct scenes which shall be necessary to the plot, and yet at the same time shall serve the purpose of conveying information to the reader, demands great power in the artist. It is the third method, needless to say, which is acted on in the Iliad. At the beginning of the epic we are simply told that Achilles and Agamemnon, being Achaeans, quarrelled about a captive, Brise'is. That they were at the time beleaguering Troy, we incidentally learn from the words of Brise'is' father, who prays that the Achseans may succeed in capturing Troy, if only they will restore him his daughter. Why the Achaeans are besieging Troy we are not formally told, but some light is given us when, in the heat of the angry quarrel, Achilles says he is here for no advantage of his own, but of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to gain recompense for them. Evidently, then, the two sons of Atreus are besieging Troy to right some wrong they have suffered, and Achilles and others are there to help them. The hint thus afforded is confirmed, and the information developed, when in the first engagement we observe Menelaus single out one of the Trojan Avarriors and challenge him to the fight, with the remark, " Thou mayst see what sort of warrior is he whose lovely wife thou hast." Then during the preparations for the duel, the cause of the Trojan war, the carrying off of Helen by Paris, naturally comes out ; and the picture of the state of things presupposed is completed by the appearance of Helen herself. Meanwhile, in other respects the setting of the scene has been proceeded with. The forces on both sides are mustered before our eyes, and we discover that the siege has endured for full nine years. But this information is not conveyed directly to, nor by talking at, the reader : it comes out in the necessary course of the action. The general attack, which Agamemnon has been delusively encouraged by Zeus to deliver, affords a 10 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. natural opportunity for giving a list of the Achreans who took part in this great war, and of their opponents. The same inci- dent, too, is utilised as a means of allowing the reader to dis- cover the length of time which the siege has lasted, and the hardships it has entailed. Before venturing to make a move- ment of such importance, Agamemnon resolves to try a ruse and prove his army's mettle by proposing to abandon the siege, inasmuch as nine years have been fruitlessly spent on it. The readiness which the people show in accepting the offer demon- strates the sufferings they had undergone, and the omen of the sparrow and her eight young ones devoured by a serpent, an omen boding the capture of Troy after nine years' siege, further impresses the reader with the number of the years. There remains yet one more point to be noticed here before we dismiss the subject of the skill with which Homer paints in his background. It is a point of much importance, and has been sometimes overlooked. In the fighting which followed on the violation of the truce, and in which Diomede displayed his valour, when the Achasans are wavering, Here upbraids them thus : " Fie upon you ! . . . "While yet noble Achilles entered continually into battle, then issued not the Trojans even from the Dardanian gate ; for they had dread of his terrible spear." l This passage, which is corroborated by others (v. 788, ix. 352, xv. 721), shows that we are to suppose the Trojans as confined to their lines for the first nine years. Sow that Achilles is no longer against them, they venture forth : and this is important, not only because occurring, as the first passage does, in a book devoted to the prowess of Diomede, it keeps the attention of the reader to the absence of Achilles and the, consequences of his absence, but also because, if we overlook this aspect of the circumstances preceding the action of the Iliad, we fail to understand that the total result of the first day's fighting, though indecisive in itself, is yet, compared with the previous state of tilings, most encouraging to the Trojans. Having examined the background of the Iliad, let us turn now to the plot itself. "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, 1'eleus' son, the ruinous wrath that brought on the Achaians woes innumerable." ]n these, the opening words of the Iliad, we have the subject fully stated; the poem is the story of Achilles' wrath and its consequences. The plot is the way in which the wrath was aroused, displayed, and finally exhausted. 1 Hf're and throughout the translations :ire from the excellent versions <>f the Iliad by Messrs. Liuii,', Leaf, aud .Myers; of the Odyssry, by Messrs. Uutcher aud Lang. EPIC POETRY : THE ILIAD. I I If now we examine the Iliad we shall find there is little in. it that was not designed whether by a single original author, or by the authors of subsequently added books for the purpose of carrying forward the plot. Given the subject, different authors might work it out in different ways, might imagine different causes for the quarrel, different forms for Achilles' anger to take, and different modes of terminating it. But in the Iliad there are no traces of any differences on any of these points. The plot is one and the same throughout. The cause of the quarrel is always the unfair and dishonouring treatment of Achilles by Agamemnon in the matter of Briseis ; the form which Achilles' anger takes is always abstention from assisting the Achaeans ; and the resolution of the entanglement is always the death of Patroclus, and the consequent renunciation by Achilles of his punitive inaction. Let us now examine the plot a little more closely, and see how the details fit in with the main outline of the story, and are necessitated by it and by each other. Achilles complains to Thetis of the wrong put on him, and she obtains from Zeus a promise that the Achaeans shall suffer for their conduct. This promise dominates the whole story, there is no hint of any other reason for the general reverse in spite of temporary successes of the Acheeans ; and from this interference of Zeus, which is implied by the whole of the Iliad, flow the events of the first day's fighting. That these events might have been framed differently by the poet is true, but this does not show that they were originally conceived by him in some other way. The cause, the exhibition, and the termination of Achilles' anger, might have been worked out in a manner different from that in which they have actually been developed. But no one argues from this that they were originally developed differently ; and the reason is that the actual treatment of any one of these points is consistent with itself, and harmonises with the rest. So too the events of the first day's fighting. The deceitful dream sent by Zeus induces Agamemnon to make a general attack, which he prefaces by proving the spirit of his men ; and the Trojans are encouraged by the intervention of Zeus to accept the engagement. Thus Paris and Menelaus are brought face to face : the duel naturally and its consequences necessarily follow. If the duel had been fought out, and its terms acted on, the war would have ended, and Zeus' promise would have been broken. The treachery of Pandarus, there- fore, and a general engagement were necessitated by tho duel. 12 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. The other incidents which belong to this the first day of fighting, the second of the Iliad's action, follow from the pro- mise of Zeus, and are implied by what happens after them, as well as by the state of things which is represented as existing at the moment when the Iliad begins. That is to say, the fighting is necessitated by the treachery of Pandarus (which is referred to several times, v. 206, vii. 69 and 351); disaster to the Achaeans is involved by the promise of Zeus ; while the overwhelming numbers of the Achaeans (ii. 123 ft), and the nine years' terror of the Trojans, made it impossible for the poet to represent the Achaeans as suffering a crushing defeat the very first time they met their foes in the open field. In these considerations we find the explanation and justification of the books which relate the prowess of Diomedc. On the one hand, the promise of Zeus made it imperative that the Achaeans should suffer defeat ; on the other, the demands of probability and consistency required that the promise of Zeus should be, if not overridden, at least to some extent thwarted : and the solu- tion of this difficulty was found in the intervention of the deities that sided with the Achaeans an intervention which showed itself in supporting Diomede. Thus the appearance of Diomede rests on conceptions which are at the very foundation of the plot. On the appearance of Diomede depend the departure of Hector for Troy to institute prayers for his repulse, the meeting of Hector and Andromache, and the contrasted scene between Hector, Paris, and Helen. All these incidents derive their connection with the plot from the exploits of .Diomede, as the latter in their turn derive much of their aesthetic value from the fact that the former depend on them. The next event, the single combat between Hector and Ajax, does not ilo\v from the exploits of Diomede, but serves to impress the same conclusion on the reader, viz., that the Trojans, who had long been inferior to the Achaeans, were now proving a match for them. Hut for the Trojans m<-rely to prove a match for the Aelurans was no fulfilment of the promise made by Zeus in Thetis. Thanks 10 tint prowess of Dinmede and the intervention of some of the goooks xiii.-xxiv. The excitement of the plot is heightened by the fact that on the very day Odysseus enters his house in disguise, Penelope, having, in defiance of public opinion, refused for so long to wed, has, with infinite, grief, resolved to make an end of her resistance to the, suitors. Her husband had charged her to wait, if he did not return, no longer than till their son Avas a grown man : that time had come, and regard for her son's future prompted her to a decision. Thus she resolves on the trial of the bow ; 1 If the Telemachia did not form p:irt of the original Odyssey, and Tele- niachus was not represented therein as making a voyage, his retuiu to Ithaca is somewhat inexplicable. EPIC POETRY : THE ODYSSEY. 2 3 and on that day Odysseus arrives. The situation is dramatic ; but it is said by some critics that there are indications in the poem itself that this is not the tale as it was told in the original Odyssey. In the last book the ghost of Amphimedon ascribes the trial of the bow to the ingenuity of Odysseus, who suggested it to his wife in order to bring about the wooers' destruction. This, we are told, proves that, originally, Penelope was not about to succumb to the twenty years of weary waiting and hope deferred that she had suffered. The disguised Odysseus suggested, and she accepted it, as a means of further delay, since it was certain that none of the wooers could succeed in the trial. Thus there was originally no situation : things were going on much as usual, and there was no particular need for Odysseus to arrive at this time rather than any other. Consequently our admiration of the unity of the Odyssey is, at least as regards this point, misplaced, because here we have not unity, but dis- crepancy of design. It does not, however, seem necessary to accept this conclusion. That Amphimedon, knowing nothing of the facts, should ascribe the conjunction of events which brought about the slaughter to the cunning of Odysseus is natural, and is consistent with the repeated tributes to the hero's cleverness which occur throughout the poem. To press the words further is unsafe, and we are not much encouraged to draw from them conclu- sions about the original form of the Odyssey, when we find that the passage in which they occur the second Nekuia is regarded by the same critics as having been introduced long after the original form of the Odyssey had been lost. The unity of design in the later books of the Odyssey has also been attacked on other grounds. Athene, having transformed and re-transformed Odysseus, again gives him the appearance of a beggar, and in that disguise he goes to his home ; is ill-treated by, and kills, the suitors. Then, without being changed back into his proper shape, he is recognised by Penelope. This fact that Odysseus is not mentioned as being changed again into his real shape is taken to show that originally there was no trans- forming of Odysseus at all. In the original Odyssey, the hero, aged and altered by years and suffering, was naturally protected from immediate recognition. But a later and more " reflective " age found a supernatural transformation necessary to account for the non-recognition of Odysseus by his son, wife, and servants ; and so the original tale was patched with this view. But fortunately the original conception is still to be seen by seeing eyes. If Odysseus had originally and really been irans- 24 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. formed, then of course the scar on his leg would have been transformed too. But the scar on his leg was not transformed ; he shows it to his father, to Eumaeus, and to the neatherd, and Eurycleia discovered him hy it ; therefore Odysseus was not transformed in the original Odyssey. Consequently, instead of unity, we have again discrepancy of design ; for these scenes are a patchwork combination of the work of two very different ages. As these arguments have been put forward gravely, they must receive a grave answer ; and we may say, first, that before Odysseus is recognised by Penelope, he is, as a matter of fact, re-transformed (xxiii. 156-163) by Athene. She does not, indeed, use her wand as she does in first transforming him, but to the gods all things are possible. Secondly, in all countries and literature, the supernatural and marvellous precede the employment of purely natural causes. Fairy tales come early, not late, in a nation's growth ; so that if two versions of the story did exist, we should be justified in concluding that the version which contained a magic change was earlier than that which relied solely on the changes brought about by the natural operation of age and suffering. Thirdly, the subject of trans- formation is a difficult and obscure one. In one story the change seems to leave untouched at least the psychological identity of the person transformed ; whereas in another a very simple measure of transformation is enough to cause, the person concerned to ask, "Can this be 1 1" The limits within which are confined the changes wrought by transformation seem to be shifting, and to be so elastic that, if Homer says or implies that Odysseus was indeed transformed, but the transformation did not take effect upon his legs or the scars upon his legs, we. may fortify ourselves by the analogy of the prince in the Arabian Ni'jht* (who conversely had his legs changed into black marble, but not the rest of his body), and take Homer's word for it. "Without, here entering upon the question as to whether we have the "original" Odyssey or not. and, if not, how the changes that have been made in-re made, we may at least con- clude that the traces of such changes are not considerable enough to atfect the admiration which critics, from Aristotle onwards, have felt and expressed for the unity and dramatic interest of the Odyssey. It is better to profit by the beauty of the poem as we have it, than to bestow our admiration upon the Odyssey, " original " it may be, as constructed by some modern critics. EPIC POETKY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 2 5 CHAPTEE III. THE HOMERIC QUESTION. IN very early times there seems to have been a " Homeric question," though it has very little in common with the Homeric question of modern times. From an early period any epic which pleased the popular fancy appears to have been ascribed to Homer, as any law at Athens which had anything to recom- mend it was ascribed by the orators to Solon. But in the course of time, and on grounds which, like the epics themselves, are lost to us, one epic after another was abjudicated from Homer, and the Iliad and Odyssey were the only epics of which Homer was allowed to be the author. But the process of separation did not stop here. Photius, a Patriarch of Con- stantinople, who died A.D. 891, quotes from a late writer named Proclus a statement to the effect that Xenon and Hellanicus denied that the Odyssey was by Homer. Of Xenon we know nothing (he is mentioned in one of the Scholia Greek com- mentaries of various dates to the Iliad, and that is all) : Hellanicus was senior to the famous Alexandrian grammarian and Homeric critic, Aristarchus, whose date is about B.C. 222- 150. The upholders of the view that the Iliad and the Odyssey were by different authors were called the Chorizontes or Separatists, and were combated by Aristarchus. In antiquity the theory was considered a paradox; and in modern times the question whether the two poems are by the same author has yielded to the question whether either poem is by a single author. The arguments on which the ancient separatists proceeded were partly linguistic and partly mythological, so far as can be learnt from the scattered notices to be found in ancient Greek commentaries on the Iliad. As an example of their linguistic arguments, we may take that based on the use of the word proparoithen, "before." This word may be used, like the English "before," either of things in space or of things in time, and probably was first used of space, and subsequently extended to time. In the Iliad, the Chorizontes said, the word is used of space; in the Odyssey, of time. Obviously, therefore, lan- guage had undergone some development between the time when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written. But, as a matter of fact, the word is used of time in the Iliad as often as in the Odyssey once in each poem. An instance of the arguments 26 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. drawn from mythology is the fact that in the Iliad Charis is the wife of Hephaestus ; in the Odyssey, Aphrodite. This is undeniable; but in the " fluid " state in which mythology was in early times, the fact does not go for much. A stronger argu- ment is that in the Iliad there is one Charis, in the Odyssey there are several Charites, which may indicate that the legend had undergone development, and thus point to a later origin for the Odyssey. Another mythological argument used by the ancient Chorizontes is that in the Iliad Iris appears as the messenger of the gods ; in the Odyssey, Hermes. But the facts do not wholly bear out this argument ; for although in the Iliad Iris is frequently the messenger, Hermes also acts on one important occasion in this capacity ; while in the Odyssey, though Hermes appears once as messenger, the functions of Iris had certainly not died out of memory, as is shown by the jest of calling a beggar who ran messages Irus. 1 In modern times the arguments of the ancient Chorizontes have been taken up for the purpose of showing that whether each poem is by one, and only one, author or not at any rate the Odyssey belongs to a later period than the Iliad. No one professes to assign much weight to the arguments used, though the conclusion is pretty generally accepted. That there are differences between the two poems is undisputed. The question is whether the differences are greater than the difference in subject naturally involves. "Minstrels" are frequently men- tioned in the Odyssey, but are unknown in the Iliad. But minstrels were apparently the appanages of a court, not of a camp. In the Iliad the gods are much more violently opposed to each other than in the Odyssey, which shows a progress in religious sentiment. But the strife in Olympus gives majesty to the mortal conflicts of the Iliad, whereas in the Odyssey there is no such commotion on earth as to rouse war in heaven. Again, it is said that the Odyssey, dealing with the return from Troy, presupposes, and is therefore later than, the Iliad. The subject of the one certainly presupposes the other. But there, is no reference, in the Odyssey to the Iliad. The, current mythology doubtless embraced the tales of the Trojan war and of the return of the (Ireeks before either Odyssey or Iliad was composed ; and this is all that either presupposes. The, Odyssey, again, is supposed to show development of legend ; but the fluid state of myths and legends makes it quite possible that variants, or even different stages, of a legend's growth continued to exist side by side. Arguments have been drawn also from the difl'er- 1 See Gudcles, Problem f (lie Homeric Poems, 52 oo. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 2/ ence in the vocabulary of the two poems, but little weight is usually given to them. Finally, geographical knowledge in the Odyssey is said to be wider, and consequently later, than that in the Iliad. But the Odyssey gives greater scope for the display of such knowledge ; and the question is further complicated by the fact that passages which are quoted by the one side are rejected as interpolations by the other. But the ancient doubts whether both the Odyssey and Iliad were by Homer have sunk into insignificance by the side of the modern doubts whether either the Iliad or the Odyssey is by Homer whether there was ever such a person as Homer whether either poem is by one author whether the poems are not the fortuitous aggregate of unconnected ballads whether they are of any antiquity at all. These difficulties, which con- stitute the modern Homeric question, were first definitely raised at the end of last century, and to Wolf is justly due the honour of having raised them. 1 Friedrich August Wolf was a professor in Halle, and being engaged on an edition of the Iliad, in his endeavours to gain a safe standing-ground from which to criticise various readings and to emend faulty readings, he was led to inquire of himself by what means the text of Homer had come down to us, and particularly how it had been transmitted in the earliest times. He found that not only, on the current view of the great antiquity of Homer, was it ex- tremely difficult to account for the transmission of so extensive a text, but that the current view itself was based, as he supposed, on two impossibilities. First, it implies the existence of writing in Homer's time ; next, it implies the absence of any difference between the state of nature existing in Homer's time and the artificial condition of later Greek civilisation. In both these difficulties, which Wolf stated in his famous Prolegomena to Homer (1795), we see the influence of the general current of thought of the eighteenth century. " Nature" had been brought into very sharp contrast with the artificial complexity of modern civilisation by Rousseau, and the same contrast was sought for in the literature of early and " natural" times as compared with the productions of an advanced society. 1 Before Wolf learned men had had transient doubts, e.g. Casaubon and Perizonius, whether the poems were originally committed to writing ; Bentley, whether Homer intended the poems to be recited as wholes; an Italian scholar, Vieo, had denied the existence of Homer; "Wood (Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, 1769) had raised the ques- tion of the antiquity of writing ; Zoega (1788) had called attention to incon- sistencies in the poems; and Herder and Heyne contributed to the compara- tive study of ballads and epics. But all these taken together do not. impair the originality and magnitude of Wolf's achievement. 28 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. Works belonging to primitive times must, like the ballads of our own early literature, be short, simple, inartificial in fine, natural. With the advance of society literary compositions became longer and more complex, and as the resources of art accumulated, works of art became more artificial. In the Nibelungcnlied was found a parallel to Greek epics : the Nile- lunc/enlied was demonstrated to have been made out of ballads, and the analogy was applied to the Homeric poems. With these views on the history of literature, there could be no hesitation in concluding that the Iliad and the Odyssey, in their present form, belong to the later and more complex period of literary development. Parts of each poem may belong to the simpler and earlier period, but they have evidently been overlaid by the work of the more artificial period. The other difficulty which Wolf found in the way of the popular belief in the great antiquity of the poems as we have them, resulted from applying to the origin of the Homeric poems a question which was being put, with equally important results, in philosophy with regard to knowledge, viz., how is it possible? What are the conditions necessarily involved in the supposition that the poems existed in times of great antiquity? and did these conditions, as a matter of fact, exist? In the first place, the transmission of the poems for many centuries implies the existence of writing. But before, say, B.C. 700, writing did not exist in Greece. Either, then, the current view is wrong in attributing to the poems a greater antiquity than B.C. 700 ; or, if the poems did exist before that date, they must have been short and simple enough to be committed to memory and trans- mitted orally. And the latter hypothesis agrees with the view that the poems of early and natural times were simple and short. But inasmuch as the evidence as to the date of the introduc- tion of writing into Greece is scanty, Wolf brings forth another condition which is indispensable for the composition of such extensive works as the Iliad and the Odyssey, and could not have existed in the time of Homer. An artist must have, a public. A poet writes to be. published. Now, whatever the date at which writing was introduced into Greece, the habit of reading was not established until very late times. ll<>iner, that is to say, composed to lie recited and heard, not to lie rend. But no audience could sit through a reading of the Iliad or the Odyssey, each consisting of twenty-four books and over 9000 verses. Therefore, to the impossibility of carrying so long a work in the memory has to be added the impossibility of ever lindin" an audience for so lonu a poem. But if there was no EPIC POETRY: THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 29 audience to be had for such a work, it is pretty certain that no such work would be composed. The length of a poem in those times must have depended on the conditions under which it was to be recited, and those conditions admitted of the recita- tion of short poems only. Indeed, we know, as a matter of fact, that in historic times, when Homer was recited at festivals, it was not the whole Iliad or the whole Odyssey that was given, but only short portions of them called rhapsodies. "We may, then, sum up "Wolf's objections to the common view of the great antiquity of Homer thus : in their present condition the poems are not of the short and simple character which is the mark of early and natural literature, and they are too long to have been transmitted by memory or to have ever even found an audience. The conclusion he drew was that Homer whose existence and genius he did not dispute living in primitive times, before writing was in common use, and before the exist- ence of a reading public, could not have composed the whole, but only parts, of the Iliad and Odyssey as we have them. The rest consists of additions made by various subsequent poets and professional reciters or rhapsodists. "Which parts were by Homer and which by later hands, Wolf made no attempt to dis- cover, although he lived for many years after framing his theory and publishing his Prolegomena. There remains a third point to be noticed in Wolf's theory. If Homer did not commit his poems to writing, and if the pre- sent form of the Iliad and Odyssey is not due to Homer, by whom were the poems committed to writing, and to whom is their present form due ? Wolf foresaw this difficulty and pro- vided an answer. Pisistratus, the famous tyrant of Athens, first caused the poems to be committed to writing. He also united the poems, composed by different hands and recited indi- vidually, into the two great wholes now known as the Iliad and Odyssey. And this he did by means of a Commission of four " Diaskeuasts," whose names, according to Wolf, were Onoma- critus, Orpheus of Croton, Simonides, and Anacrcon. The evi- dence for these statements Wolf found in passages from Cicero, 1 Pausanias 2 (an antiquarian who flourished about A.I). 160), ^Elian :J (whose date is about A.D. 180), a Life of Homer 4 (author unknown, date late), and a grammarian, Diomedes 5 (very late). Although these writers disagree as to the reason why Pisistratus 1 De Or. iii. 137, "primus Homeri libros, confusos antea, sic disposuisse dicitur ut nuuc habenius." - vii. 26. 3 V. H. xiii. 14. 4 In AVesterrnann's Collection. 5 111 Villoison, Auecdota Grseca, ii. 182. 3O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. caused the poems to be edited into their present shape some say it was because previously they had never been committed to writing, and that Pisistratus gave an obol for every line any one could provide ; others, because the poems had suffered from tires, earthquakes, and floods, and were therefore much scattered 1 still they all maintain the present form to be due to Pisistra- tus ; and so closely does their language in this respect agree, that it seems probable they either copied from each other or from some common source. Since Wolf's time, on the strength of a passage in Tzetzes (a Byzantian grammarian, date about A.D. 1160), the names of the four Diaskeuasts have been given as Onomacritus, Orpheus, Zopyrus, and Epikonkylos (the last name is conjectural). But inasmuch as Tzetzes is separated by an interval of 1700 years from the time lie was writing about, and is an inaccurate writer, we may dismiss him. "We have now to consider the worth of Wolf's authorities for the Commission of Pisistratus. In the first place, they are none of them sufficiently near in point of time to the period of Pisis- tratus to carry any great weight. Cicero, the earliest of them, lived 500 years after Pisistratus. How comes it that during those 500 years no author makes mention of so important a fact in literary history 1 Aristotle, who made extensive inves- tigations into the history of literature, knows nothing of this Commission, or of any other form of Homer than that we pos- sess. The Alexandrine critics of this period, who worked so much on Homer, know nothing of it. Xo allusion to it is to be found in Plato, none in the orators, who had various occa- sions in their speeches when they would gladly have claimed for Athens the distinction of such an important literary achieve- ment had they known of it. It seems improbable that such a valuable piece of information should have escaped so many eager and competent students for half a millennium and then have been discovered by Cicero. A more reasonable explana- was that produced by Aristarchus, the next best that of Zenodot chus and Zenodotus lived about 400 years after Pisistratus). 1 tstiug as a specimen of the worth of Byzantine learning. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 3 I tion is that it was unknown to them, because it was only invented after their time. 1 The common source of all these stories seems to be an inscrip- tion quoted in an anonymous Life of Homer, and there said to have been taken from a statue of Pisistratus. The question then arises whether the inscription was taken from the statue of Pisistratus ? In the first place, the Athenians' hatred of the Pisistratidse makes it unlikely that any such statue was erected in memory of Pisistratus ; and, in the next place, the words of the inscription are remarkable. " Thrice tyrant, thrice the populace of Athens expelled me, thrice recalled me, the great Pisistratus, who collected Homer, erewhile sung scatteredly," &c. It is improbable that, in an inscription intended to do honour to Pisistratus, his military achievements and his services to religion should be entirely omitted, while his repeated ex- pulsions from Athens important facts in his life, but not those which his heirs, wishing to remain tyrants of Athens, would care to have remembered are dwelt upon. And what is the great achievement which, according to the inscription, outweighs all else that Pisistratus did. and is to constitute his political rehabilitation 1 A reform of the text of Homer. Assuming that this reform was the work of Pisistratus, we certainly never find it mentioned by any historian, orator, or other writer before Alexandrine times, either as an extenuating circumstance in Pisistratus' tyranny or in any other way. On the other hand, we know that the royal patronage extended in Alexandrine times by the Ptolemies to learning produced a reaction in favour of discerning tyrants, and that the composition of epi- grams was a favourite exercise amongst the literary men of Alexandria. A service then to literature was precisely the one fact which an Alexandrine writer would regard as worth record- ing in an epigram on Pisistratus. This is one suggestion as to the origin of the epigram and the stories based upon it. It seems, however, more plausible to trace the epigram to the rivalry which existed between the two great schools of learning, Alexandria and Pergamum. Cicero, in whom the story, as far as we can trace it, first appears, had but little acquaintance with Alexandrian learning. On the other hand, his education in Rhodes brought him under the 1 The same line of argument maybe applied to the statement that Onoma- critus was one of the members of the Commission. If he was, how is it that Herodotus (vii. 6), who knows that Onomacritus " revised" many oracles in the interest of Pisistratus, and was expelled from Athens by Hipparchus for a less acceptable revision of Musseus' oracles, has nothing to say of his ver- sion of Homer? 3 2 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. influence of the Pergamum school. In Rhodes, Cicero was a pupil of Posidonius, who was a pupil of Pana3tius, who again was one of the followers of Crates of Mallos, the founder of the Pergamum school. Thus Cicero's statement ahout Pisistratus seems to go back ultimately rather to Pergamum than. Alexan- dria, and the circumstances which there gave rise to the story seem to have consisted in the desire to depreciate Alexandria and its royal patrons, by showing that there was nothing so very remarkable in learning receiving royal patronage. Even so long ago as the time of Pisistratus tyrants interested themselves in literature. Be this as it may, the epigram, in whatever spirit composed, betrays its late date by the fact that, whereas Pisis- tratus was expelled twice, it says he was expelled three, times. Thus the authorities on which Wolf relied for proving that the present shape of the Homeric poems is due to Pisistratus seem to have their source in an epigram, which, whatever the motives for composing it, is certainly untrustworthy. Further, the epigram itself gives no countenance to the inference which Cicero and other later writers have drawn from it, viz., that Pisistratus caused a recension of Homer to be made. The epi- gram says that before Pisistratus Homer was " sung scatteredly." Now we know on good authority that of the orators Isocrates, B.C. 436-338, and Lycurgus, B.C. 395-329 that the singing of the rhapsodies at the great Athenian festival was regulated by law ; but who introduced the law does not seem to have been known. In Alexandrian times it certainly was a matter of conjecture who introduced the law ; and it is a reasonable in- ference that in the epigram of which we are speaking we have nothing more than the author's conjecture, stated positively, that the law was due to Pisistratus. For thirty years or more nothing was done to carry out the views which "\Volf had expressed in his Prol''i/u>/'iia ; and yet, as we have pointed out, although Wolf demonstrated the diffi- culties in the way of the traditional view of Homer, he con- tributed nothing himself towards pointing out what in the poems was Homer's work and what was not. When at last, after more than thirty years, Hermann took up the question, although he came forward with a criterion by which to distinguish the original parts of the. poems from subsequent accretions, he never fully carried out the process of applying his criterion. J''ir subject some incident relating to the few days of Achilles' absence from the war. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 3 5 to understand who diaskeuasts were. They were not a class of men united or distinguished by the possession of any special experience or innate powers of working up given material into epic shape. If a playwright touched up or re-wrote a play of his own, already performed, with a view to producing it a second time, he was said to diaslceuazein or revise his play. But, . more than this, any man who made a correction in a manuscript was a diaskeuast ; and if the "correction" was wrong, he was none the less a diaskeuast. So to say that the shaping of the Iliad was the work of diaskeuasts may be true, but it does not help us much, for any man could be a dias- keuast, but not every man could make an Iliad out of given material. On Lachmann's theory, indeed, it would require an artist of consummate skill to give to eighteen wholly inde- pendent lays the amount of consistency and unity which the Iliad possesses. Thus the mechanical device of a Commission is inadequate to the purpose. What is required is a poet of no mean rank, and Lachmann gives us, with no satisfactory proof. Onomacritu?, who spent his life on Orphic poetry, and would have worked up his material in accordance with his training in Orphic poetry, whereas no Orphic elements are to be traced in our Iliad. We may further ask what object could Pisistratus have had in amalgamating separate lays into one whole 1 It could not have been in the interests of literature, for, according to Lach- mann, the separate lays are more beautiful than our Iliad. And further, if this was the case, how did Pisistratus contrive to supplant the older, better known, and more beautiful lays by his novel amalgamation 1 His authority extended only to Athens, but all Greece accepted the Iliad as we have it. If we waive this difficulty, the question still remains what was the object of the amalgamation, since it was not to benefit literature 1 Pisistratu?, wo have seen, was apparently believed by some to have regulated the text for purposes of recitation ; but the short lays which Lachmann supposes to have existed would be much better adapted for recitation than our Iliad, and to amalgamate these lays into a lengthy whole would not render their recitation the easier. We next come to the views put forward by the great his- torian of Greece, Grote. The question which Wolf had sug- gested, but had not attempted to solve, viz., what is Homer's work, and what is not, in the, Iliad and Odyssey, Grote took up and answered. But in other respects he is not a follower of Wolf. The assumption, universally accepted last century, that 36 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. primitive poems or lays must be short, Grote did not accept. He quotes from Chodsko's Popular Poetry of Persia the fact that " one of the songs of the Calmuck national bards sometimes lasts a whole day ; " and refers to the fact, which had been pre- viously used by Lachmann, that the old German poem Parsifal contains 24,810 verses, and was the work of a man, Eschenbach, who could neither read nor write. Thus the composition of the Iliad or the Odyssey before writing was known in Greece has nothing impossible in it. Nor has the oral transmission of the poems ; the songs of the Icelandic Skalds were thus trans- mitted for more than two centuries ; and we may add that the Vedas were transmitted in this way for a much longer period. In modern Greece blind singers carry in their memory large quantities of verse which they recite at village feasts. Fur- ther, if Homer was, as the oldest traditions relate, blind, writ- ing, even if known in his time, would have been of no use to him. In anticipation of the objection that the power of memory might not be so great among the Greeks as among other nations, Grote refers to the fact that in Socrates' time, as we learn from Xenophon, there were many Athenians who were taught to learn both the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart, and the rhapsodists professionally repeated the poems from memory. Having thus cleared the ground, and shown that there is no impossibility in composing and transmitting poems of the length of our Iliad and Odyssey by means of memory alone, Groto proceeds to investigate the question of the original unity of these epics on critical grounds, and he begins with the Odyssey. The question at issue is, as he says, whether the gaps and in- consistencies which constitute the proofs " of mere unprepared coalescence " preponderate "over the other proofs of designed adaptation scattered throughout the whole poem 1 " The con- clusion he roaches is, "The, poem as it now stands exhibits unequivocally adaptation of parts and continuity of structure, whether by one or several consentient hands. It may, perhaps, be a secondary formation out of a pre-existing Odyssey of smaller dimensions ; but if so, the parts of the smaller whole must have been so far recast as to make them suitable members cf the larger, and are noway recognisable by us." Further, " Its authors cannot have been mere compilers of prc-oxi.-ting materials, such as I'isistratus and his friends; they must have been poets, competent to work such matter as they found into a new and eidarged design of their own." The Odyssey, then, is itself a proof of the falsity of the assump- EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 37 ticn that " long continuous epics with an artistical structure are inconsistent with the capacities of a rude and non-writing age," for in the Odyssey " the integration of the whole and the composition of the parts must have been simultaneous." Grote then applies the same critical method to the Iliad. Here he finds that the original scheme of the Iliad, viz., to relate the wrath of Achilles and its consequences does not com- prehend the whole poem. Those books which carry out the original scheme hang together by themselves. Those books (ii. to vii.) which do not relate to the original scheme hang on the whole fairly well together, but present dis- crepancies with the first set. The portion of the Iliad which has direct relation to the original scheme, as expounded in the opening lines of the First Book, Grote called an Achilleis. The other books "are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem from an Achilleis into an Iliad." They give us, not any information about the wrath of Achilles, but a picture of the war against Ilium, They have been worked into a certain conformity with the Achilleis, and " they belong to the same generation and state of society as the primitive Achilleis." Finally, Grote thinks that the Odyssey and Iliad belong to the same age, but are not by the same author ; that the Odyssey is probably by a single author, the Iliad probably not. We may now see how far Grote has laid the difficulties raised by Wolf. The assumption that primitive poems must be short seems to break down under the attack made upon it by Grote and others. As for analogies drawn from other literatures, even were the fact of a ballad origin for epics established, Homer's spiritual and intellectual superiority over the ballad ists makes comparison unsafe. But the other difficulty raised by Wolf, viz., as to the possibility of the composition of such poems as our Iliad and Odyssey in times when writing was unknown, is not answered by Grote. Everything Grote says about the possibility of composing and transmitting long poems by means of the memory alone may be admitted, and must always be taken into account in any solution of the Homeric question ; but Homer composed, as Grote admits, not for a reading public there was none but for recitation before an audience ; and although the Athenians in later times would sit for a whole day listening to the performance of tragedies, a day would not suffice for the recitation of the Iliad or the Odyssey. Thus, though the bare possibility of composing the poems without the aid of writing is fully established by Groto, his admission of 38 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. the non-existence of a reading public leaves the difficulty raised by Wolf unsolved. But this failure to shake "Wolf's main position, so far from weakening Grote's theory of the Iliad, rather strengthens it. If Wolf was right in denying the possibility of composing long poems in very early times, then Grote's Achilleis is a step in the right direction ; and as a solution of the problem how the Iliad as we have it arose, it is superior to Lachmann's lays. Grote's theory does what Lachmann's failed to do it explains the general consistency of the poem. But unless there is some external necessity compelling us to suppose that originally the Iliad must have been shorter than it now is, Grote's theory is open to the objection which may be alleged against all attempts to extract the original from the present Iliad it is subjec- tive. The weight assigned to discrepancies or to proofs of design will always depend on the critic : there is no external standard whereby to ascertain their real weight, and consequently no hope of settling the question. Since Grote, the most important "variety 1 ' of the Wolfian theory that has arisen is the view of Professor Paley. With Wolf, but more strongly than Wolf, he insists on the late date of writing, and on the still later date at which a reading public came into existence. But, unlike the Woltians, he insists on the unity of the Iliad. Thus he reaches the conclusion that the Iliad is posterior to the growth of a reading public, and the latter he correctly dates, on various grounds, as extending from about B.C. 430 on. He does not seem to believe in an original nucleus around which other stories kept collecting, or in a theory of interpolations. The Iliad is not the fortuitous work of time, nor the deliberate work of successive generations, but the design and execution of a single mind working on ancient O O O material. The Iliad, he says, may '' be aptly compared to a stained-glass window composed from a quantity of old materials, more or less detached and of different dates, but real ranged and iilled in with modern gla/.ier's work, so as to form a har- monious whnle, by some cunning artist who had an eye for unity of design, harmony of colour, and a general antique effect." The. proofs of this theory are to be found in the non- existence of a reading public before n.c,. 430 ; in the, absence, from the Tragedians and from early works of art. of any signs of the influence of Homer; in the general absence of references to Homer 1 in Greek literature before Plato, and in the sudden 1 References to " Homer " do indeed occur; l>ut limner was a name used t<> cover nearly anything written in liexann'icrs. 1'iofussor I'nley's poiut is that references to our Homer are not found. EPIC POETRY: THE HOMERIC QUESTION". 39 display of acquaintance with Homer in Plato and later authors ; and, finally, in the language of Homer, which shows, both in grammar and vocabulary, a thorough mixture of old and new, of genuine and spurious archaisms, which seem to imply that the dialect was not a living or spoken, but a conventional one: The argument based by Mr. Paley on the evidence of works of art is one for specialists to discuss, and it is enough here to say that it is a question on which specialists disagree. The same may be said of the argument based on the evidence of language. But we may add that the words, formations, gram- matical usages, and the omissions of the digamma which Mr. Paley cites to show the late character of our Homer, have been paralleled by Dr. Hayman (in his edition of the Odyssey) in the oldest Greek literature that we possess ; while Mr. Monro has pointed out (in his article on Homer in the Encyclopaedic, Britannica) the leading features which stamp the dialect of Homer as the oldest form of the Greek language that we possess. The fact that Pindar and the Tragedians seem to have preferred to draw on the Cyclic Poets instead of on Homer for subjects, does not compel us to infer that our Homer was unknown to them. There are two good reasons to explain the fact. The tirst is one pointed out by Aristotle : the plots of the Iliad and Odyssey are so simple that they only admit of being dramatised in one or two ways. The second reason is that Pindar and the Tragedians were too Aviso to challenge comparison with Homer on his own ground, and were too artistic to endeavour to "paint the lily or gild refined gold." Finally, if Homer is, as Mr. Paley seems to maintain, a compilation, is the work of a jobber of ancient literature, is, in fact, a sham literary antique, there is only one period to which it could be assigned, and that is the post-classical period. In B.C. 420 nothing of the kind could become as popular as Homer undoubtedly was, as is shown by the fact that Antimachus of Colophon did compose an imitation epic, and the Greek public refused to be put off with such patchwork. Ikit our Homer, as Mr. Paley admits, was composed before post-classical times, and we may be sure that in classical Greek literature the only period capable of pro- ducing a great epic was the epic period. Antimachus himself certainly did not compile our Homer, as Mr. Paley suggests, for we know from Porphyrius that he plagiarised our Homer. There remains a diliiculty raised by Wolf against the anti- quity of Homer which we have left untouched that of under- standing how poems as long as the Iliad and Odvssev could O 1 O J u have been recited. A single recitation, it is said, would not 4O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. suffice. This is true ; and the inference is that the poems were designed to last through several recitations. This simple ex- planation has long escaped recognition because we are apt to forget that all classical Greek literature was designed for re- citation, and that at different times the manner of recitation differed. In the times when an author's audience consisted of the whole body of citizens (in the time, e.g., of the drama or of choral lyric), ai i audience was only got together at long inter- vals, and therefore what was put before it had to be linished at a sitting. But in Homeric times the poet's audience con- sisted of the household of a chieftain such as Odysseus or of a king like Alcinous ; and this audience gathered together night after night. There is, therefore, nothing in the conditions under which epic poetry was produced to make the recitation of the Iliad and the Odyssey impossible. Attempts have frequently been made to show that one part of the Iliad or of the Odyssey is inconsistent with some other part, and therefore could not have been composed by the same author. But, in the first place, it is still more unlikely that an interpolator, whose first business would be to make his inter- polation harmonise with the original, would make these mis- takes ; and next, there are inconsistencies to be found in Milton, Shakspere, Dante, Virgil, and novelists of all kinds, quite as great as in Homer. A logical inconsistency goes for little in these questions ; and a poetical inconsistency yet remains to be discovered in Homer. We can only protest against the spirit in which some critics approach the greatest of poets. They examine the Homeric poems as they would a candidate's dissertation for a degree, and have no hesitation in rejecting the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey for not know- ing his 1 [diner. The question whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are both the work of a single hand admits of no positive proof. If it could bo demonstrated by internal evidence that they must belong to different ages, the question would lie settled. But there is nothing in the poems to show that thev do not belong to the same age. ; and although we cannot say that Greece was incapable of producing two poets pdssessing the marvellous genius required to produce such a poem as the Iliad or the Odyssey, it seems safer to adhere to the literary tradition, which is not on the whole likely to have been mistaken on such a point of capital importance, and which attributes both the Iliad and the Odyssey to Homer. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III. READING, WRITING, AND PUBLICATION IN CLASSICAL GREEK TIMES. ALL alphabets and syllabaries, ex- cept the Sanskrit alphabet, seem to have had their origin in picture- writing. The idea of communicat- ing information by rough sketches of objects occurs sooner or later to most peoples. The Red Indians by means of sketches on bark can or could send simple messages to each other, as, e.g., the number of an advancing enemy. In these messages a man is drawn in much the same way as schoolboys draw men on a slate a big circle sur- mounted by a smaller one and rest- ing on two more or less perpendi- cular strokes. If the figure is represented with a hat, it stands for a white man ; if not, for a red man. The signature and address are conveyed by sketches of the creatures which the chiefs have adopted as totems and taken their names from- The picture-writing of the Aztecs, though still sketch- ing, was capable of expressing more ideas and more abstract ideas than that of the Red Indians. This was the result of the continual use of picture-writing for the purposes of governing a large and heterogeneous empire and for recording its history. The next stage in the development is when the sketch comes to be re- garded not so much as a picture of the object depicted as the symbol of the name of the object ; and by the time the signification of the sketch has become conventionalised, the sketch has generally ceased to have any great resemblance to the natural object, and is itself a con- ventional symbol. This stage is represented by the 214 ''radicals" in Chinese. These characters, which by themselves, and in composition with other marks, form the written symbols of every word in the lan- guage, are not letters, nor syllables, but each is a word. The next stage is reached when the character, hav- ing long represented merely the sound of the object's name, comes to stand for the sound of the first syllable only. In this stage writing consists of a collection of symbols representing the sound of syllables, that is, a syllabary. This is repre- sented by the cuneiform or arrow- headed inscriptions, which, like the Chinese "radicals," are descendants from sketches. The uniform and generally rectangular appearance of cuneiform inscriptions is a marked instance of the influence exercised by the nature of the writing material on the form of the writing itself. Straight strokes thicker at one end than at the other are the natural result of rapid writing with a pointed instrument on clay. Using such writing materials, the Assyrians fol- lowed the line of least resistance and eliminated curves. Finally, the character which at first stood for the whole word and then for the first syllable came to stand for the first letter, and an alphabet was attained. "We have illustrated the development of the alphabet from the writing of various nations, but in Egyptian all these stages co-exist. Some characters stand for a word, some for a syllable, and some for a letter, thus clearly indicating the origin of alphabets. From the Egyptians the I'hfpni- cians obtained their alphabet, from the Phoenicians the Greeks, from the Greeks the Romans, from them modern European nations. The source from which the various Greek alphabets were derived is indicated partly by tradition, for the Greeks HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. attributed the alphabet to Cadmus, whose name is Semitic ("Kedem," Eastern), partly by the form of the letters themselves and partly by the names of the letters. When borrowed, the alphabet necessarily underwent s-oine changes, since the Phoenician alphabet contained sym- bols of sounds not used by the Greeks (e.g., several sibilants), and in Greek there were vowel sounds not known to the Phoenicians. We have, however, to do not with the historj' of the Greek alphabet, but its date. The names of the Greek letters which end in the "emphatic aleph " (contrast, c.g.,beta, the Greek name for B, with the Hebrew bct/t), show that the alphabet was bor- rowed from the northern Semites, those of Tyre and Sidon ; and it has been argued that the borrowing must belong to the period of the Phoenicians' naval and commercial supremacy over the Mediterranean. So, too, it has been argued that the borrowing by the Italians from the Greeks must be referred to Grocco- Italic times, i.e., the time when the Greeks and Italians yet formed one people. But in these remote ages we get out of our chronological depth, and we have no means of knowing, at any rate at present, what "must" have happened or when. It is better to .say that these data are uncertain in them- selves and give a general presump- tion of antiquity to the introduction of the alphabet, which must, how- ever, wait upon better established facts. For these facts we may look either to ancient Greek authors themselves or to inscriptions. For instance, if Homer mentioned writ- ing, and the date of Homer were fixed, we should get a date for writ- ing. As a matter of fact, there is a well-known passage in tli" Iliad (vi. 169) in which it is s:iid that Proitos sent Bellerophon to Lycia, "and gave him tokens of woe, graving in a golden tablet many deadly things, and bade him show liie.se to Aiiteia's father, that he might be slain." But, as we have seen, there are more ways of sending a message than by means of an alphabet ; so the passage is not conclusive. In the next place, the passage may have been tampered with ; and finally, as the date of Homer is vague, it does not help us much to date the alphabet. The difficulties in the way of utilising Homer to date the alpha- bet are applicable to all passages from ancient authors. When we go farther back than B.C. 500, the dates assigned to authors become hard to check ; and there is always the possibility which may or may not amount to a probability that the passage relied on may not be genuine. With inscriptions, how- ever, we are on safer grounds : they do not admit much of interpolation, and we may rely on their being now in the shape the action of time and weather excepted in which they came from the sculptor's hands. Forger)' is, indeed, possible even on stone, but much less likely than in the case of MSS. But in- scriptions get destroyed, and the earlier their age the fewer survive. In the valley of the Nile, indeed, which has the least destructive climate in the world, inscriptions of enormous antiquity do of course survive, but it is not on the banks of the Nile that we can expect to find Greek inscriptions. And yet it is there we find the oldest inscription in Greek that is yet known or can be dated. On the banks of the Nile in Nubia is the temple of Abu Simbel. In the temple of Abu Simbel are huge statues of stone, and on the leirs of the second colossus from tin; south are chipped the names, witti- cisms, and records of travellers oi all aires, in alphabet* known and un- known. The earliest of the Greek travellers who have, thus left their names are a body of mercenaries. They seem to have formed part of the expedition whieh was led as far as Elephantine by King I'sammatichoa EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 43 whether the first monarch of that name or his successor does not appear. 1 From Elephantine they seem to have set out on a voyage of discovery up the river, and to have gone past Kerkis the locality of which cannot be fixed as far as the stream allowed, perhaps to the second cataract. On their return they put in at Abu Simbel, and on the left leg of the colossus inscribed the record of their bold voyage. Besides the common record, we find the names of various members of the detachment inscribed separately by those who wished at once to display their ability to write and to perpetuate to all time their con- nection with the expedition. This interesting inscription can be dated by two methods, which check each other, and thus give tolerable certainty to the result. In the first place, the letters used, and their shape, show that the inscription is older than inscrip- tions, generically similar, which are known to belong to about B.C. 540. For instance, in our inscrip- tion there is no special symbol for the long 6 of the Greek alphabet, the omega. One and the same symbol has to do duty for the long and for the short o. Inscriptions of B.C. 540 have acquired a special symbol for the omega. As we have already said, the Greeks, possessing a more extensive vowel system than the Phoenicians, had to modify the alphabet they borrowed ; and the late origin of the sign for the omega is betrayed by that letter's position in the Greek alphabet. As for the shape of the letters in the Abu Simbel inscription, the sign for s, instead of being made with four strokes, as in the sigma of the B.C. 540 inscriptions and that of the ordinary Greek alphabet (1), is made by means of three strokes only, which is known on other grounds to be the older form. Thus the epigraphic evidence makes the inscription to be some time older than B.C. 540. The evidence from the contents of the inscription places the date between B.C. 620- 600, according as we take the Psammatichos mentioned to be the first or the second king of that name. 2 We have, then, got a date for the existence of writing in Greece. In B.C. 600 the art of writing was so 1 A Rhodiau pinax, discovered lately at Naukratis, which probably belongs to the time of Psammatichos II., shows epigraphic peculiarities resembling those of the Abu Simbel inscriptions. See Mr. E. A. Gardner in the Academy, No. 700. 2 This inscription, having a bearing on the Homeric question, lias been dis- credited. As for the epigraphic evidence, it is said that it is inconclusive because against the evidences given above that the inscription belongs to B.C. 600, we have to set the fact that the writing runs from left to right, whereas it was only later than this period that this direction was adopted. In the next place, we have a distinct sign for eta, which is again a later introduction. As for the contents, the fact that in the inscription there appears not only a King Psammatichos, but a mercenary the commander of the exploring detachment of the same name, points to the inscription's being a " hoax.'" But if we confine ourselves to the Ionic alphabet, the only evidence we luivo whether the sign for eta was current in B.C. 600 is our inscription. We cannot reject it because we have no other of B.C. 600. If we go hevond the Ionic alphabet, we find that in Thera this sign was used about B.C. 600. So too witli regard to the direction of the writing : the left to right direc- tion only became general in the fifth century B.C., but exceptions before that period occur. This is one. As for the "hoax" theory, it implies a knowledge of the early history of the Greek alphabet which probably not even a learned Greek possessed, and may be ou the whole safely denied to a practical joker. 44 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. well established in Greece that in a detachment of mercenaries a cer- tain number could write. There is, however, another point to notice : the names of these soldiers show that they came from different parts of Greece, some being lonians, others Dorians ; but all use the same Ionic alphabet. This means that not only was writing well enough established for Greeks from all parts of Greece to possess the art, but also that since the intro- duction of writing enough time had elapsed for the Ionic alphabet to spread and to become common amongst theDorian-speaking peoples in the south-west of Asia Minor. What amount of time we ought to allow for thesa tilings to come about, it is impossible to say. Low races at the present day pick up writing very quickly from our colonists ; and amongst the quick- witted Greeks it would spread very rapidly. Instead of losing our- selves in conjectures, let us look for evidence. Since writing had in B.n. 600 been known for some time in Greece, a passage in a Greek author older than B.C. 600 that refers to writing is not, from the mere fact of such reference, suspicious. Now in Ar- ehilochus, who is generally supposed roughly to have lived about B.C. 700, there is a reference to writing. Archilochus had a great faculty for saying unpleasant tilings, and he used fables of his own invention with great clfeet. "With regard to one of these fables he speaks meta- phorically of "a grievous ski/talS." A skyt>ile was a staff on which a strip of leather fur writing pur- poses was rolled slant-wise. A message was then written on the leather; the leather was then un- rolled and given to tin; messenger. Now if the messenger wen; inter- cepted, the message! could not be deciphered, for only when the leather was rolled on a stall' pre- cisely the same size as the proper one would the letters come right. Such a staff, of course, the recipient by arrangement possessed. This primitive method of cipher con- tinued to be used a long time by the Spartans for conveying state messages. To return to Archilo- chus : the leather from the fkytalS was without the staff an enigma ; the key to the enigma was the skytatt. The fable of Archilochus was to outward appearance innocent of any recondite meaning, but was a "grievous ski/tale" for the person attacked. It seems reasonable to accept this passage as indicating a knowledge of writing in Greece about B.C. 700. This date allows a century for the diffusion of the art and the spread of the Ionic alphabet which are implied by the Abu Simbel inscrip- tion ; and the passage does not prove too much. It does not im- ply even that Archilochus himself could write. The invention or in- troduction was sufficiently novel and admirable to furnish a poet with a metaphor ; and the ski/talS was probably then, as in later times, a governmental institution. Thus the mention of a tki/tale accords with the probable supposition that writing was used for governmental purposes before it became common among the people. lUit the knowledge that writing was known in Greece in B.C. 700 is not sullicient for our purpose. It may have been a government monopoly, or at any rate, so little known as to bo useless for literary purposes. What we want to know is first when a reading public, ex- isted. We must, however, realise that such a reading public as exists at the present time was never known in antiquity, for two reasons : first, the population, and consequently the possible number of readers, was much less in the city-states of the ancient world than in the nation- states of modern history ; secondly, ancient authors could not reach their public by any means of pu!>- lication to bu compared with ihe EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 45 printing-press. Further, the means of attaining publicity were more restricted in classical Greek times than in Rome. The large number of literary slaves in Rome made the multiplication of manuscripts easy, and cheapened and extended their sale. In Greece, multiplica- tion was less rapid and circulation more restricted. Recognising then the limited extent of the Greek reading public in classical times, we have to see what evidence there is for its existence at all ; and we may regard its existence as satis- factorily proved when we find trade in books going on. Now we find a book-market 1 mentioned in Eupolis, that is to say, existing between B.C. 430 and B.C. 405. The trade in books thus indicated may also be illustrated by a passage from Xeno- phon (who lived about B.C. 444- 355), in which he says, that from a ship wrecked at Salmydessus on the Pontus many books - were re- covered. We may therefore take it as reasonably proved that a trade in books existed at the end of the fifth century B.C. Other in- dications of a reading public may be found in Aristophanes, who in the Tagenistfe, 3 speaking of a young man gone wrong, ascribes his ruin to "a book, or Prodicus, or bad company." But we may go a little farther back. In fragments of the old comedy we find as terms of abuse such expressions as " an un- lettered man," "a man who does not know his A, B, C." 4 And the extent of education thus implied to exist about B.C. 450 cannot be regarded with su-picion when we find in Herodotus 5 that boys' schools existed in Chios in the time of Histiaeus, say about B.C. 500. Before, however, inferring the ex- istence of a reading public in B.C. 500, we must look rather more closely at our evidence. Reading and writing were taught B.C. 500, and to be unable to read and write was, half a century later, a thing to be ashamed of. Hut this does not of itself prove the existence of a reading public. Enough education to be able to keep accounts, to read public notices, to correspond with friends or business agents, may have been in the possession of every free Athenian in the period B.C. 500 to B.C. 450, and the want of such education may have caused a man to be sneered at ; but this does not prove the habit of reading literature. There is, however, a passage in the 1 o3 TO. /3i/3\i' &via, Meineke, F. C. ii. 550. 2 TroXXai /3i/3Xoi yeypa,u[j.evai, An. VII. v. 14. 3 Fr. 3, 7) J3tj3\iov 5itcf>6 i) HpooiKos rj r(av a.8o\fffx^ v tk ye TIuJv dfpwi>, ovs tKfivoi Kare\LTrov iv fji^iois ypd\f/a- vres, avfXiTTUV Koivrj ffvv rols <;////.> or r/raphcion, 3 by the Romans stilus. Two or more of these tablets of the Or a composition, /jid\0a. 0(\TOl. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 47 same size might be fastened together by means of a string run through holes in the tablets. Now, on a number of these deltoi an author might write his work, but to mul- tiply and circulate copies of his productions would be so cumbrous that it is difficult to believe that any one sought or gained publicity by such means. Still it must bo remembered that the Assyrians car- ried on business and formed large libraries out of even -more unpro- mising writing materials slabs of clay. When we tind that the per- sons wishing to consult a book in an Assyrian library are requested to write the name of the book and its author on a proper piece of clay and hand it in to the librarian, we must obviously get rid of some of our preconceived notions as to the material difficulties in the way of circulating waxed tablets. But although waxed tablets may have been at one time the best means the Greeks had of commit- ting their thoughts to writing, they were for literary purposes eventually superseded by papyrus, on which the scribe wrote with a reed-pen, ca'amus, 1 and ink, mdan, 2 out of an inkstand, mefanodochcion. 3 These were materials much more adapted for literary purposes ; and if we as- sume that authors did not begin to circulate copies of their works until papyrus was common in Greece, and if we can date the introduction of papyrus, then we shall have a date before which we may perhaps deny the multiplication and circulation of manuscripts. Now papyrus was known and used for writing pur- poses in Egypt from times of the greatest antiquity ; and it has been assumed that as soon as the Greeks had any commerce with Egypt they would at once adopt this conveni- ent writing material and import it largely. This may have been the case, but, in the absence of evidence to show that it was, we ought not to build on the supposition. We must look for something more trust- worthy, and this we find in Hero- dotus. In a chapter in which he traces the origin and history of the Greek alphabet in a manner shown by recent epi^raphical researches to be correct, Herodotus declares that from of old 4 the lonians had used papyrus for writing purposes. Even if we decline to trust Herodotus' information on this point, we must at any rate admit that papyrus was so much in use in his day that there seemed to him nothing improbable in its having been in use for a long time among the Greeks. That is to say, papyrus was well established in B.C. 450. But between Herodotus, B.C. 450, and Theognis, B.C. 550, is a century. In B.C. 450 the material conditions admitted of the multiplication and circulatioTi of works. In B.C. 550 they admitted at least, of an author's committing his works to writing, but whether at this time an author had to use waxed tablets or could use papyrus, we can hardly say. But this century is precisely the period of the rise of prose literature in Greece, and it may be said that this fact in itself implies that litera- 4 3 HISTORY OK GREEK LITERATURE. tare could be and was circulated. An orator found his publicity in the assembly, a playwright on the stage, a lyric poet in the convivial gatherings of his friends ; but for what public except a reading public could a philosopher or a historian compose ? Here again we must try to get rid of some of our pre-con- ceived notions, and endenvour to form our views of Greek literature not by our own habits, but by what we know of Greek lite. The great- est of Greek philosophers, Socrates, determined the current of Greek thought and the philosophy of all time, not by addressing himself to a reading public, but by the power of the living word ; and herein Soc- rates exemplifies the Greek mind. So long as the Greek, whether phi- losopher or orator, lyric or dramatic poet, was brought into living con- tact with his fellow Greeks, so long the literature of Greece was sponta- neous, creative, and classic. When the audience, whether of the assem- bly, the law court, the theatre, the symposium, or the temple, was re- placed by a reading public, then the Greek mind ceased to create, and began to draw its inspiration, not from Nature and the life around it, but from bonks. It became learned and imitative, pedantic and frigid. If Socrates gave much to the Athenians, he also derived much from his continual attrition with them. His example of per- sonal intercourse between the teacher and the taught was, it need hardly be said, followed by I'lato and Aristotle. They composed not primarily for a reading public, but for their own circle. And before their time, as I'lato read his Phccdo to his trifinls and pupils, so Prota- goras read his treatise on the go, Is in the house of Kuripides or in the Lyceum ; and Socrates hail listened to Zeno reading his works. Hero- dotus read portions ot his in Athens at the festival of the 1'anathenaja, while at Olympia .such readings were specially provided for, and not only Herodotus, but Gorgins, Hippias, and Empedocles there obtained publicity for their compo- sitions. It seems, then, that the rise of prose literature in the century B.C. 550 to B.C. 450 does not necessitate the assumption of the existence of a reading public, but only of an audi nee to listen to the author reading his manuscript. So we may sum up the results, so far, of our inquiry into the early history of reading, writing, and publication as follows : In B.u. 700 writing was known in Greece, as appears from the metaphor used by Archilo- chus of the " grievous skijtide. " In B.C. 600 the art was so widely spread, that out of a band of mercenaries from all parts of Greece, a certain portion could carve their names on the colossus at Abu Shubel. In B.C. 550 it was possible for Theognis and for prose writers to commit their works to writing. In B.C. 500 there were schools in Greece. In B.C. 450 it was a disgrace to bo unable to read and write. In B.C. 420 we have proof of the existence of a reading public in the fact that there was a book trade. And now, how docs this affect the Homeric question l . In this way : The epic age and we must remem- ber that although the Iliad and Odyssey are the only epics which have come down to us, there were many other epic poems which sur- vived until Alexandrine tunes at least,- the epic age ended before B.C. 700, and \ve have no evidence to show or reason to believe that writing was known in Greece much before that date. How long before B.C. 700 Homer lived we do not know. Herodotus con j.-ctnn -s that he lived about B.C. S^o, but this is only a conjecture, and as we du not know the grounds for it. w>- cannot place much faith in it. esi>e<-ially as the existence of such a person as Homer is disputed. At any rate. we have no reason to believe that poets of the epic age could commit EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 49 their works to writing, however short or long their poems were, or transmit them except by word of mouth. It seems doubtful indeed whether the means of writing which were in use among the Greeks be- tween B.C. 700 and B.C. 550 were enough to allow of the transmission by writing of any considerable body of literature. But since many epics were somehow transmitted during this period, and since before B.C. 700 they apparently must have been transmitted by word of mouth and memory, their transmission does not seem of itself to prove that writing was used B.C. 700 to B.C. 550 for literary purposes. But the effort of memory required for the composition and transmis- sion of poems without the aid of writing has not, as we have seen, in itself any thing incredible, though it implies a power not frequently manifested among us who live among printed books. If this were the only difficulty in the way of be- lieving that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed before B.C. 700, and transmitted substantially as we have them, the question would be settled. Memory was equal to the task. But the composition of a poem implies a public to whom the poem is to be given, and conditions under which it is brought before that public. We have now to in- quire to what public and how the epic poets addressed themselves ? To find an answer we must go to the Homeric poems themselves. Whatever the origin and growth of these poems, all inquirers admit that there is embodied in them much that is ancient and much that reflects the life and manners of the time before B.C. 700. We may therefore reasonably seek to find out from them the position of poets in the earliest times. Now we find bards mentioned several times in the Odyssey, and they are always conceived of as attached to a great house or a royal court ; and they are always represented as re- citing their poems over the con- clusion of a meal. Thus, attached to the court of King Alcinous was the minstrel Demodocus, " whom the Muse loved dearly, and she gave him both good and evil ; of his sight she reft him, but granted him sweet song." In the house of Odysseus there was Phemius the minstrel ; and King Agamemnon left his wife Clytemestra under the care of a minstrel, " whom the son of Atreus straitly charged, as he went to Troy, to have a care of his wife." The audience, therefore, to which the minstrel addressed himself was that to be found in a great house or a royal court. Odysseus says to King Alcinous, "Nay, as for me, I say that there is no more gracious or perfect delight than when a whole people make merry, and the men sit orderly at feast in the halls and listen to the singer, and tables by them are laden with bread and Mesh, and a wine-bearer drawing the wine serves it round and pours it into the cups." To his audience the minstrel might sing either lays he had learnt from others or his own poems. Phemius says, " None has taught me but myself, and the god has put into my heart all man- ner of lays, and methinks I sing to thee as a god. " Such being the audience for which an epic poet composed, and such the conditions under which he pro- duced his work, the question now arises whether granted a poet cap- able of composing the Iliad or the Odyssey, and of carrying the poem in his head there is anything in these conditions to make the de- livery of so long a poem impossible ? Obviously it would be impossible to finish the recitation in a single evening ; and Wolf argued that this proved that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been origi- nally of anything like their present length. But is it impossible to suppose that the poet took up the thread of his story one evening where he had dropped it the previ- HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. ous evening ? If it is possible for us to put down a book one day and take it up again the next, and not lose the thread of the story, there is no difficulty in imagining the epic poet's audience listening one night to a story commenced on some previous night. 1 The Arabians, at any rate, found nothing impossible in supposing a Caliph listening to tales in this way for a thousand and one nights. The ancient Greek seems to have experienced the same temptation as the modern novel- reader to sit up all night over an interesting work, for when Odysseus breaks oil' relating his adventures to the Phseacians on the ground that it was time for sleep, Alcinous, who compares him to a minstrel, says, " Behold the night is of great length, unspeakable, and the time for sleep in the hall is not yet ; tell me therefore of those wondrous deeds. I could abide even till the bright dawn, so long as thou couldst endure to rehearse me these woes of thine in the hall." And if Odysseus proceeds to finish his tale, it is not because the Phseacians would have refused to listen to its conclusion the following evening, but because he wished to return to Ithaca as soon as he might. So far then ns concerns the audi- ence and the manner of reciting his works, the epic poet might well have composed a poem too long to be finished in a single sitting. And we have sci'ii that poems of great length can be composed and trans- mitted without the aid of writing. It seems, therefore, that the difficul- ties raised by Wolf against the com- position of the Iliad and the Odys- sey in their present form are not sufficiently great to exclude the hy- pothesis that we have, the Homeric poems substantially as they were originally composed. This, how- ever, is only a negative conclusion ; when the poems were as a matter of fact composed, and whether since then they have remained substanti- ally unaltered, are questions which have yet to be answered. There remain a couple of subjects to be briefly noticed before this chapter can be completed. First, there is the method of recitation in post- epic times ; second, the question by whom were the poems transmitted ? So long as the royal and aristo- cratic form of society described in the Homeric poems existed, so long the mode of recitation also described in Homer would last. But with changes in the social and political systems of Greece, changes would also come about in the audience and the manner of addressing the audi- ence. The epic age was succeeded by the period of lyric poetry, and the lyric poets fall roughly into the two classes of poets who composed personal lyrics designed for recita- tion before the circle of their own aristocratic friends, and of poets who composed choral lyrics to be performed at the expense of a tyrant or a government before an audience consisting, not of a narrow circle, but of the whole population of the city. The political conditions that rendered possible the oligarchical society for which personal lyrics were composed differed from those described in Homer. Royalty had disappeared, and the aristocracy were engaged in a struggle with the people for their privileges ; but the audiences in an aristocracy were but little different from those in the regal times of Homer. They were more restricted ; the royal hospitality of old times had given way to the exclusive narrowness of good society ; and the class interests of the audience, being shared by the poet, who was himself a member of 1 Indeed the Scholiast to Od. iii. 267 says, fv re rats eoprcus tv re rais i'airavfftffiv lift TroXXas r)fj.(pa.s avX\ty6fifVOi TOVTUV JJKOVOV, ei' irov iririseis fell to the lot of Achilles, Chryseis to Agamemnon. There then follows the death of Palamedes, the resolve of Zeus to assist the Trojans by with- drawing Achilles from the fighting, and a catalogue of the Trojan allies. The Ci/prt'a was followed by the Iliad of Homer, and the next poem in the cycle was the s story where the Iliad left it. The of Miletus, the greatest of the epic poets after Homer. His date is made, by the chronologists to be about 776 j;.c. After the death and burial of Hector, the Amax.on J'eiithesilea, the daughter of Ares, came to assist the Trojans, and was killed by Achilles. The Trojans, by the, good oflices of Achilles, wen- allowed to bury the heroine, and this gave Thersites occasion to speak evil of Achilles and Penlhesilea. Kmag'-d at this. Achilles slew Thersiles with a blow from his \\<\. and hence arose dissension in the, Greek army. In the end, Achilles sailed to Lesbos, and there having sacrificed to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto, he was purified from the guilt of blood by Odysseus. EPIC POETRY : THE EPIC CYCLE. 5 7 After this, Memnon, son of Eos, the dawn, clad in armour made by Hephaestus, came to the assistance of the Trojans. Thetis foretold to Achilles the doom which awaited him if he killed Memnon ; but when Antilochus, the friend of Achilles, had been slain by Memnon, Achilles in vengeance killed Memnon, who was conveyed away by his mother, Eos, and made immortal by Zeus. Achilles routed the Trojans and chased them into the city, where he fell by the hands of Paris and Apollo. A fierce fight arose over the body of the Greek hero, which was at last carried back to the ships by Odysseus, whilst Ajax kept off the foe. Then Antilochus was buried, and lamentation was made over Achilles by Thetis and her nymphs. When the body was placed on the pyre, Thetis conveyed it away to the isle Leuce ; the Greeks erected a mound and held funeral games in honour of Achilles ; and at these games, in which the divine armour of Achilles was one of the prizes, Odysseus and Ajax contended for the armour, which was awarded to Odysseus. The next poem is the Little Iliad. It is generally asso- ciated with the name of Lesches, who was said to belong to Lesbos. But Aristotle prefers to speak of the author of the Little Iliad without pretending to know his name, and it is therefore probable that he thought there was no authority for assigning the poem to Lesches. This is confirmed by the fact that Hellanicus of Lesbos, who on patriotic grounds would pro- bably have credited his fellow-countryman with the author- ship if there had been any excuse for doing so, attributes the work to Cinaethon of Sparta. Further, it has been conjec- tured that Lesches is not a proper name, but is derived from the word lescM, a market, and meant merely the man Avho sang in the market to the assembled people. The Little Iliad says that the award of Achilles' divine armour to Odysseus was due to Athene. Ajax, in his anger at the slight put upon him by the preference shown to Odysseus, resolved to slaughter the Greek chieftains ; but Athene sent madness on him, so that he slew sheep for men, and when he awoke to a sense of this further disgrace, lie killed himself. After this Odysseus contrived to capture Helenus, by means of whose prophetic powers the Greeks learned how Troy might be captured. They sent Odysseus and Diomodes to Lemnos, to bring to them the wounded Philoctetcs. He Avas healed by Machaon, and then killed Paris in single combat. The body of Paris was treated with contumely by Mcnclaus, but was given to the Trojans for burial. Helen, Paris being dead, 5 8 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. became the wife of his brother, Deiphobus. At this point in the poem yet new characters are brought on the scene. Odys- seus fetched jSTeoptolemu?, the son of Achilles, from Seyms, and gave to him his father's divine armour. For the Trojans, a fresh hero appeared in Eurypylus, the son of Telephus. Neop- tolemus and Eurypylus fight as their fathers had (in the Cypria) fought before them, and Eurypylus is slain. Mean- while Epeus, inspired by Athene, contrives the famous wooden horse. Odysseus, having mutilated and disguised himself, steals into Troy to gather information, and though recognised by Helen, returns in safety. After this, in company with Diomede, he succeeded in entering Troy and carrying oft' the Palladium, or image of Pallas, which as long as it was in the possession of the Trojans secured Troy from overthrow. Then picked men of the Greeks were shut up in a wooden horse ; the rest of the army burnt their tents and sailed away, as though they had raised the siege. But they only went as far away as Tenedos. The Trojans in their joy at the end of the war pulled down part of their wall to admit the horse into the city, and feasted and rejoiced because they had defeated the Greeks. Proclus says that the Little Iliad was followed by the Sack of Troi/, the work of Arctinus of Miletus. According to Arctinus, the Trojans at first were doubtful about the horse. Some proposed to throw it over a precipice, others to burn it, others to place it as an offering to Athene in the temple of the goddess. The last view prevailed, and the Trojans made merry. Laocoon, who had urged the destruction of the horse, was killed by two serpents that came out of the sea ; and /Eneas, who had supported Laocoon in his opposition to the reception of the horse into the city, withdrew with his followers to Ida. Sinon, a Greek, who had gained entrance into Troy by a stratagem, then gave the signal to the Greek fleet by a torch. The Greeks returned, and Troy was simultaneously attacked from without by the main body, and from within by those who had gained admittance by means of the horse. Neoptolemus slew Priam at the altar of Zeus ; Menelaus killed Deiphobus and carried off Helen to the ships. Cassandra, daughter of Priam, fled to the temple of Athene, and, still clinging to the image of the goddess, was dragged away by Ajax Oilous. Dismayed at this reckless impiety, his fellow- soldiers would have stoned Ajax to death, but that he fled for protection to the altar of the very goddess he had offended ; and therefore, when the Greeks sailed away, Athene devised destruction for them on the sea. Astyanax, the little sou EPIC POETRY: THE EPIC CYCLE. 59 of Hector and Andromache, was killed by the advice, if not the hand, of Odysseus ; and Andromache became the prize of Neoptolemus. Then the city was burnt, and Polyxena slaughtered on the tomb of Achilles as an offering to the hero's ghost. The Sack of Troy was followed by the Nostoi, or "The Return," or, as it was sometimes called, "The Return of the Atridae." l Proclus calls the author Agias ; Pausanias, Hegias. Eustathius says he was a Colophonian. It seems probable that there were several poems called the Return. The one sum- marised by Proclus takes up the story where the Sack of Troy left it. The wrath of Athene, roused by the impiety of Ajax Oileus, and extending to all the Greeks because they failed to punish Ajax, now begins to manifest itself. First, she caused the two sons of Atreus to quarrel about setting sail : Agamemnon stayed to appease Athene, but Menelaus set sail, following the example of Diomede and Nestor, who reached their homes in safety. Menelaus, however, lost all his ships but five, and then was driven to Egypt. Calchas the seer, Leontes, and Poly- poetes, went on foot to Colophon, 2 and there buried Tciresias. When Agamemnon was about to sail, the ghost of Achilles appeared and warned him, but in vain, of his doom. There next follows the storm in which Ajax perished. Neoptolemus, by the advice of Thetis, returns by land, meeting Odysseus in Maroneia ; and eventually, after burying his father's old friend, the aged knight Phoenix, returns to his grandfather, Peleus. The poem concludes with the murder of Agamemnon by .rEgisthus and Clytemestra ; the vengeance taken by Orestes and Pylades, and the return of Mcnelaus home. Finally, the tale of Troy was wound up by the Telegonia, or story of Telegonus. This epic was by Eugamon of Gyrene, who lived about B.C. 570. The Telegonia attached itself to the Odyssey closely, taking up the story where the Odyssey ended, viz., with the death of the suitors. The suitors were buried by their relatives, and Odysseus went to Elis to see the herds there. He was entertained by Polyxenus, from whom he received a bowl on which was chased the story of Trophonius, Agamedes, and Augeas. He then returned to Ithaca ami accomplished the sacrifices ordained by Teiresias. After this he went to Thesprotis and married Callidice. queen of the land, and led the Thesprotians in a war against the Brygi. The god 1 i] ruiv 'ArpeiSuiv KtiOoSos. 2 This mention of Colophon confirms slightly Eustathius' statement that the author \v;is a Colophouian. 6O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. of war, however, routed Odysseus' army, but then was fought by Athene, until Apollo intervened. After the death of Calli- dice, Polypoetes, the son of Odysseus, inherited the kingdom, and Odysseus returned to Ithaca. Meanwhile Telegonus, the son of Odysseus by Circo, had sailed from ylvpa in quest of his father, and had come to Ithaca. He was ravaging the island when Odysseus came to the assistance of the Ithacans and was killed by Telegonus. Then Telegonus having discovered who it was he had slain, took the body of Odysseus, with Telemachus and Penelope, to his mother Circe. She made them immortal. Telegonus married Penelope, Telemachus Circe. It may be asked what grounds there are for ascribing a consider- able antiquity to the ^Ethiopia, Cypria, the Sad; the Return, &c. ? 1 11 the first place, there is the unanimous belief of antiquity that the earliest period of Greek literature was an age of epic poetry, and that these epics belonged to that period. In the next place, there are the perpetual allusions throughout lyric and dramatic poetry to the tales of Troy and Thebes which were told in these epics. Further, in the way of definite external evidence there is the mention by Herodotus of the Ci/pria as distinct from the work of Homer and as inconsistent in some of its details with the Iliad. The Epini also, one of the poems relating to Thebes which was incorporated in the cycle, is mentioned by Herodotus (iv. 32). In Theognis, who flour- ished about n.c. 540. there is a quotation from the Cypria. 1 Finally, Callinus, whose date is placed about B.C. 730, mentions the TliP.bais, another of the poems incorporated in the cycle which dealt with Thebes, though he ascribes it to Homer. As we have said, the Fpic Cycle included not only a series of epics relating the story of the Trojan war, but also another series relating the expedition again>t Thebes. Of the latter we have no summary and practically no knowledge. "We may gain some idea of the contents of the Theban epics from tragedies on the same subject, but we can form no idea of the way in which the tale of Thebes was treated by the authors of the epic poems, nor of their literary merit. The most famous of the Theban epics was the. 'J'//ff>af^. Its author is unknown. It treated of th' 1 history of (Kdipus and his sons, as did also, to judge from the nam<', the (Edipudeia, which is ascribed to Cinsethon. The Epiijuni was presumably a continuation of the; EPIC POETRY : THE EPIC CYCLE. 6l story of the Thebais, and may have been identical with the Alcmceonis, though this is uncertain. The Taking of (Echalia related the story of the capture of the town by Heracles, who thus won lole a story on which Sophocles' play the Trachinice was based. The name of the author is Creophylus. The Mini/as may have been identical with the Phocceis : it contained a descent to Hades, in which Charon appears ; and the name of the author is given sometimes as Prodicus, sometimes as Thestoride*. The two last-mentioned epics, the Taking of (Echalia and the Minyas, were not based on Theban myths, and consequently it may be doubted whether they were in- corporated into the Epic Cycle. The same may be said of the Titanomachia, which was ascribed to Arctinus and also to Eurnelus, and of the Atthis or Amazonia. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV. THE RELATIOX OF THE EPIC CYCLE TO HOMER. ALTHOUGH Procltis may have given us a correct version of the tale of Troy as it was to be found in the Epic Cycle, it does not follow that we get from his summary a complete or a correct notion of the poems in their original separate form. His object was to give a clear account of the various events which made up the story, and for this purpose he may have had to omit or to alter parts of some of the poems. If two poems narrated the same event, lie would, for clearness, have to omit one account ; and if one poem did not join on naturally to that which preceded or that which followed it, he would have to alter its begin- ning or end in order to make the sequence easy and intelligible. We must therefore endeavour to see if, and how much, this has been the case. Beginning with the Ci/pria, we find apparently a clear case of alteration. According to Proclus, Paris, when carrying Helen away to Troy, was driven by a storm. which Here sent, to Sidon and captured the place. But Herodo- tus * distinctly says that, according to the Cypria, Paris reached Troy in three days, having enjoyed a favourable wind and a smooth sea. It is unlikely that Herodotus should make a mistake on this point, be- cause he relies on his quotation to prove that the Cypria was not the work of Homer. He says, accord- ing to Homer, Paris went to Sidon, but according to the Cypria, he did not. We have, then, here a case in which the version of the Ci/pria with which we are acquainted through Proclus has been altered in order to make the general flow of the story harmonious, and parti- cularly to make the Cypria har- monise with Homer. It may also seem as though Proclus must have omitted a good deal at the end of the Cypria; for it is not quite clear how the poem was wound up satisfactorily, so as to make a complete whole in itself ; and 11. 117. 62 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. further, it seems that, according to a scholiast, 1 tho poem mentioned at least one incident, the death of Polyxena, in the sack of Troy. Hut this does not prove that the action of the poem included the taking of Troy. The Cypria is essentially the narrative of the beginning of the war, and a refer- ence to an incident at the end of the war no more proves that the taking of Troy was a part of the subject of the poem than the refer- ences in the Iliad to the death of Achilles prove that his death came within the action of the Iliad. 2 We may therefore reasonably con- clude that the Cypria ended where Proclus makes it end. 3 The Cyi>ria was followed in the cycle by the Iliad, and after the Iliad came the ^Ethiopia of Arc- tinus. As far as can be judged, the beginning of the ^Ethiopia seems to have originally litted on to the end of the Iliad so well that no alteration or omission was neces- sary. But when we look to the rest of the poem, the case is dilfe- rent. In the iirst place, according to Proclus, the ^Ethiopia ends with a quarrel between Ajax and Odys- seus about the armour of Achilles, the issue of which is contained in the Little Hind. But the *Ethi<>pis could not have ended in the middle of the quarrel ; it too, a.s well as the Little Iliad, must have related the issue. Kven there, however, it could not have stopped. The suicide of Ajax was not an event of sufficient importance, did nut exer- cise so great an influence on the course of the war that an epic could find a natural close, or the story of the war find a breathing place therein. If the ^Ethiopia did not, however, end with the suicide of Ajax, where did it end ? The answer seems to be given by the fact that Arctinus did actually carry on the tale of Troy as far as the taking of Troy. This he related in the poem which Proclus sum- marises and calls the Sack of Troy. Doubtless Proclus was right in call- ing what he summarised the Sack of Troy ; but it was not a separate poem : it was part of the jEthiupis, and this part got its name from its contents, in the same way as different parts of Homer have received their names from their contents. It seems, therefore, probable that the beginning of the ^Ethiopia was placed next after the Iliad because it immediately took up the story of the Iliad. Then the Little Iliad was appended to this portion of the Ethiopia because it contained a fuller account of the events which led up to the making of the wooden horse than the corresponding por- tion of the jEthinpis presented. Then the rest of the ^Ethiopia, re- lating the taking of Troy and called the ayia.ff- Orivat Ki'ptiriOTjy Kal 'IfivKos' 6 Of TO. KuTrpittKa Troi^cras (prjaiv I'wit '(JSvacr^ws /ecu AiOU7J5ous iv ry rrji TroXews aXiicra ~pa.\'p.OiTiaOti.ov rdtpov 'E/CTOpos 'nnroSd/jiOio. 6 4 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. is asked to sing the lay of the horse, we seem to have a reference to the Little Iliad or the ^Ethiopia. But there are not only references between the cyelies and Homer ; there are cross references. If, for instance, the Iliad presupposes the Sack of Trot/, the Sack also presup- poses the Iliad, which would prove that each poem was later than and borrowed from the other. It seems, therefore, that we must seek some other explanation. This may perhaps be found in supposing that the references, say in the Iliad to the fate of Astyanax, are not to the Sack, but to the floating popular legend. So, too, it would not be necessary to assume that the Re- turn expanded the brief allusion to Agamemnon's death contained in the Odyssey. Both authors may have drawn independently from the stories of the people. In fine, the cyclics need not have borrowed from Homer, nor Homer from the cyclics ; both may have borrowed from a common source. This indeed assumes that there was a common source for Homer and the cyclics to draw upon, and it has 1'ei-n denied that we have any proof of the existence of a popular legend telling the tale of Troy. But this denial seems to be made on insufficient grounds and to be opposed to facts. In the first place, all peoples have their folk- lore, floating mythology, and popu- lar legend-;. In the next place, the comparison of (ireck mythology and legends with tho.se of other Aryan peoples shows that the Greeks had folk-tales long before the epic period. Again, each city and place in Greece hud abundant local myths and legends. Further, wo have already seen that many of the tales incorporated in the Odyssey, so far from being the invention of Homer, are not even the special creation of Greece, but are found among peoples of totally distinct origin. Finally, we have in Homer distinct references to lays, c.y., of the horse and the sack of Troy, as existing before Homer's time ; while the introduc- tion to the Odyssey says, " Of these things, goddess, declare them even unto us," which implies if the line is genuine that the goddess in- spired other poets before Homer. But although we may be fairly certain that there existed in popu- lar story a common source from which Homer and the cyclics may have drawn without one borrowing from the other, it is very improbable that Homer and the authors of the cyclic poems composed their works simultaneously and independently. It is also very improbable that the authors of the later poems which- ever were the later poems were unacquainted with, and therefore uninfluenced by, the work of their predecessors. Further, if we assume that all the poets were ignorant of each other's work, we cannot under- stand how it came about, for in- stance, that the Cijfiria jusr ended where the Iliad began, and that the jEtluupis just began where the Iliad ended. A common source may ex- plain the points which the poets have in common, but it does not explain their avoiding each other's subjects. Of course, it may be said that our knowledge of the cyclics comes from Prod us' summary of the cycle ; that in the cycle the poems were cut down so as to fit on to each other ; and that there- fore we have no right to say that the Return, for instance, in its origi- nal form did end where the Odyssey begins, or the Tileyonia begin where the Odyssey ended. To this we reply, that we can only form our opinion on this point by ni'-ans of the evidence we possess. The .sum- mary of the Ci/i'i'in makes ii toler- ably evident that the poem in its original form did end where the, summary makes it end ; just as the summary of the *'I'Jtkio/iix makes it probable that the original poem be- gan wife re the summary begins (i.e., at the end of the Iliad), but did not end where the summary ends. So, EPIC POETEY: THE EPIC CYCLE. too, the Return and the Telegonia as summarised are evidently poems complete in themselves, and there is nothing in the summary of them which points to their having been mutilated in order to fit on to the Odyssey in the cycle. We have then these facts to ac- count for : whereas the action of one cyclic poem, e.g., the jEthiopis, occupies the same ground as is taken up by that of another, e.g., the Little Iliad, the action of the Iliad and Odyssey does not clash with or overlap that of any cyclic poem. We may say that this is accidental ; that the authors of the four poems which touch the Iliad and Odyssey knew nothing of Homer, nor he anything of them, and that they all happened to just avoid each other's ground. But this is too improbable to be readily accepted. It is much more likely that either Homer found the Cyclics or they found Homer in possession of certain ground and intentionally avoided poaching on the preserve. We have therefore to draw one of two conclusions ; either Homer found the Cyclics in existence, and forbore to go over their ground again, for fear of challenging a comparison with them unfavour- able to himself a modesty which has received its reward in the re- spect shown to Homer by every generation of civilised men since his time ; or the cyclics found Homer in possession of certain ground, and seeing that they could not improve on Homer, contented themselves with occupying the space that he had left a decision the wisdom of which is seen in the fact that it allowed their work to live by the side of Homer for many centuries, while its soundness is shown by the universal verdict in favour of the superiority of Homer. 1 Further, it is necessary to ob- serve that there is the same sharp line between the subjects of Homer and Pindar, of Homer and the Tra- gedians, as there is between Homer and the Cyclics. Now, either Pin- dar and the Tragedians knew Homer or they did not. Both views have been held ; let us see what each view implies. According to the view that Pindar and the tragedians had no acquaintance with Homer, this was because Homer was a late compilation from the floating pop- ular legend which recounted the tale of Troy. This compilation was made about B.C. 420, for the satis- faction of the reading public, which then was coming into existence for the first time. But according to this view, not only were the Iliad and the Odyssey compilations from the unwritten tale of Troy, but the Cijpria, ^Ethiopia, Little Iliad, the Sack, the Return, and the other cyclic poems also were compilations from the same source, and were made about the same time as the Iliad and Odyssey. The same ar- guments which show that the Iliad and Odyssey as we have them must have been later than B.C. 430, and could not have been the work of an author living before B.C. 700, also show that the Cypria, ^Ethiopia, &c., could not have taken separate and distinct form before B.C. 420, and could not have been the work of authors living in the earliest times. "All these, I am confident," says Mr. Paley, " were written epitomes of different parts of a story, which 1 Of course it might be said that Homer found the Cyclics in possession of the field and chose ground not occupied by them, because it was best fitted for his purpose, not because lie feared comparison. But against this wo have to set the improbability of the Cyclics having just left mom for the Iliad between the C'/firia and the Ethiopia, and for the Oilyssoy between the Return and the Teleyonia. We should also have to assume that Ilomur undertook the function of writing ail introduction, to the Teleyonia, of all poems ! R 66 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. in the time of oral recitation formed one general and undistinguished whole." Thus, according to Mr. Paley, Homer and the Cyclics are both later than Pindar and the Tragedians, and Homer is later than the Cyclics. Therefore, in order to explain why the part of the tale of Troy which is found in Homer is not touched on by Pindar, the Tragedians, or the Cyclics, we must either believe that Pindar and the Tragedians, having exactly the same unwritten tale of Troy to draw upon as Homer, by some extraor- dinary chance managed to avoid precisely the incidents afterwards selected by the compiler of our Homer ; or else we must believe that the unfortunate compiler came on to the field alter Pindar, the Tragedians, and the compilers of the cyclic poems had used up all the incidents in the legend of Troy which they thought lit for their purpose. Then we must further believe that the incidents which lyric poets, dramatists, and epic compilers indeed all the poets Greece possessed had one after another deliberately rejected as un- fit for any kind of poetic treatment whatever these incidents, as soon as they were strung together by some obscure compiler, whose very name is lost beyond conjecture, at once obtained a success and a repu- tation which wholly eclipsed every other epic compilation, at once took rank above the poetry of the great- est poets, was at once honoured with the name of Homer, and. fin- ally, in spite of its modern allusions, its late and bastard dialect, and its obvious patchwork character, was unanimously declared by Greek critics of all kinds to possess the very highest antiquity and to be a model of epic unit}'. 1 There have been instances of literary forgery in ancient and recent times, but surely none deserves to rank by the side of our Homer, which thus deceived the very elect of nations, a people whose taste was trained in the finest literature a country ever possessed, whose linguistic sensi- tiveness is unparalleled, whether viewed from the side of philology or of literature, whose collective powers of criticism were a pruning- knife, that allowed none but the pure works of genius to flourish. Fortunately we are not compelled to accept such an improbable theory as results from assuming that Homer was later than the Tragedians. We have the alternative of assuming that Homer preceded Pindar and the Tragedians, lint on this as- sumption we have to explain why Pindar and the Tragedians avoided the ground chosen by Homer, and the same explanation should also explain why the cyclicpocts avoided Homer's ground. In the first place, we have the reason given by Aris- totle ; the subjects of the Iliad and Odyssey are so simple that they do not aiford material for more than one or two plays. The subject of the Odyssey is the return of Odysseus ; of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles. Each .subject is indivi- sible ; it would be practically im- possible to construct a play which should have, say, the lirst half of the story in the Iliad for its plot, 1 Mr. Paley at, lenst will not allege that the fame of our Homer is due to the way in which his compiler strung together these incidents, which wore rejected by :ill ot her poets. Antimachus. or whoever it. was, was merely a com- piler, not an author. (" 1 never said or spoke of late authorship." J'oat Epic Words, p. 27, n. i.) The merit of the poems, according to Jlr. Paley, is that they contain pieces of heautiful ancient work set together, in which, ;\s be- longing to the " one ami undistinguished vdfc>le, !< foimed by the tale of Troy in the time of oral recitation, must have been known to the Tragedians (though not known iu their present connection), and yet were rejected by them. EPIC POETRY : THE EPIC CYCLE. and be complete. In the next place, to tell the story of Odysseus' re- turn or Achilles' wrath over again in the same way as Homer told it, would be to challenge Homer, the greatest of poets, on his own ground ; and it is a proof of the sound judg- ment of Greek authors that none we know imagined he could gild Homer's refined gold, 1 or tell Ho- mer's tale better than Homer told it. 2 But it may be said that even if the plot of the Iliad or the Odys- sey does not admit of much drama- tisation, there are many episodes which, can be detached from the plot, and would suffice to make a drama. This is true ; and it is just in dramatising these episodes that the Tragedians show they were ac- quainted with both what is told in our Homer, and with the way in which it is told by our Homer. The death of Agamemnon is no part of the plot of the Odyssej', though it is alluded to in the poem. The death of Agamemnon, therefore, was made the catastrophe of the Return and the subject of tragedies. Homer's allusions to the matter are slight enough to allow of other authors developing the hint, and filling up the sketch in their own fashion ; and we find that the author of the Return and /Eschylus have each developed Homer's out- line after their own fashion, and in a way which shows that ./Eschylus did not follow the non-Homeric version more closely than he fol- lows Homer. The author of the Return made the death of Agamem- non to be the consequence of the wrath of Athene. The Greeks, by not punishing Ajax for his oll'ence against the goddess, incurred her wrath ; and Agamemnon, as the leader and representative of the Greeks, paid in his own person for his followers' fault. ./Eschylus also gives a theological colouring, as it were, to the cause of Agamemnon's doom ; but instead of attributing it ultimately to the offence of Ajax, he uses it to confirm his theory that the mystery of undeserved suffer- ing is to be explained by guilt in the sufferer's ancestors. In the same way, every incident in the tale of Troy which does not come within the action of the Iliad and Odyssey, but belongs to the causes or consequences of the action, has been worked by other authors into epic or dramatic form. Further, although neither any epic or any tragic poet ventured to challenge comparison with Homer on his own ground, the like respect was paid neither by epic poets to each other, nor by the Tragedians to epic poets. But not only do the epic and tragic poets, both by the incidents iu the tale of Troy which they ac- cept and those they reject, show an evident acquaintance with our Homer, and distinguish between the plot and the episodes of each of the Homeric poems : there are parallelisms between the Cyclicsand Homer which seem to be cases of imitation. For instance, in the Telegonia, Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circe, sets forth on an expedition to obtain tidings of his father ; in the Odyssey, Tele- machns, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, does the same. Now it seems difficult to avoid the conclu- sion that one author borrowed the idea from the other ; and if this is a case of plagiarism, wo have to remember that, in order to prove Homer to be later than the Cyclics. we must say that he plagiarised, and plagiarised from an author who 1 Somebody did dramatise Homer's own subjects, for Aristotle says so. But the very names of both author and tragedy have perished the punish- ment of presumption. " " To attempt to tell the story [of Falstaff's life] in bettor words th:m Shakespeare, would occur to no one but Miss Bruddon, who has epitomised Sir Walter, &,c. " Obiter Dicta, p. 228. 68 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. brought his poem to a fitting close by making Telegonus marry Pene- lope, and Telemachus marry Circe. Again, in the Cypria, Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel. Achilles with- draws from the lighting, and the Trojans gain successes until Achil- les comes forth from his tent. In the Ci/pria this is but an episode, while in the Iliad a similar quarrel (which has a different origin) con- stitutes the subject of the whole poem. In the ^Ethiopia, again, Antilochus, the friend of Achilles, is slain by Memnon. Achilles, in spite of the prophetic warning of his mother Thetis, takes vengeance on Memnon, kills him, and then is killed himself. In the Iliad it is Patroclus who is slain by Hector, and it is the vengeance on Hector which Thetis warns Achilles will be followed by his own death. An- other parallelism from the sEtkio- pis is to be found in the funeral games with which the body of Achilles, as in the Iliad the body of Palroclus, is honoured. From the Little Iliad we may take the way in which Menelaus insults the body of Paris before it is returned for burial to the Trojans, as parallel to the treatment of Hector's body by Achilles in the Iliad. In the Return there was a descent to the nether world, which at once sug- gests that of Odysseus in the Iliad. Further, we may notice that the characteristics of certain actors in the tale arc repeated in a way not likely to have occurred indepen- dently to two authors. In the Cilpria, Nestor, when consulted by Menelaus about tlie recovery of Helen, at once makes a lung speech full of ancient instances, exactly parallel to his speech in the em- bassy to Achilles in the Iliad. Again, in the ^Etliiopis, Thersites is as obnoxious as in the Iliad, talk- ing ribaldry about Achilles and the Amaxon Penthesilea. In all these cases, if Homer is more ancient than the Cyclic.s, as sound judgment declares, and as is agreed upon by the immense majo- rity of writers on the subject, the Cyclics have imitated incidents in Homer, changing either the names of the actors or the occasion of the scene. Hut if, as most people will allow, this is so, we may derive from the cyclics valuable informa- tion as to the contents of Homer in their time. For instance, the ex- pedition of Telegonus in quest of news of his father shows that in the Odyssey, which the author of the Teleyonia possessed, the expedi- dition of Telemachus was an inte- gral portion. That is to say, since we have no reason to doubt the date assigned by the chronologists to Eugamon, the author of the Tele- gonia, viz., B.C. 560 or B.C. 570, then what is called the Telemachia of our Odyssey was part of the poem at the beginning ot the sixth cen- tury. So, too, the scene in the nether world in the Return shows that the Ackuia of the Odyssey be- longed to the poem when Agias if he was the author lived. His date we do not know : we can only say that the literary superiority of the Return to the Tclcyonia makes it probable that it belongs to an earlier period. Further, if the Re- turn is but an expansion of the sketch given in the early books of the Odyssey of the adventures of Menelaus, Agamemnon, and Nestor on their return from Troy, we cany back the Tcit-machia to before the time of the Return. The in formation we derive from the Cyclics as to the form and con- tents of the Iliad is even more valu- able. The last two books of the Iliad have been frequently con- demned as late additions ; hut at any rate, they were; probably an integral part of the Iliad before the 'time of the Little. Iliad or the jflthio/.is, for the funeral games of Aeljlles in the latter, ami the con- tumelious treatment ol Paris' body in the former, arc imitated from what is related in Iliad xxiii. and xxiv. Now Lesches, the author of EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC HYMNS. 6 9 the Liide Iliad, is dated B.C. 700 ; Arctinus, the author of the ^Ethio- pia, B.C. 770; and although we have no means of judging on what grounds Eusebius and Hieronymus 1 dated these early authors, we have no grounds for disputing their dates. Again, the behaviour of Thersites in the ^Ethiopia, and the garrulousness of Nestor in the Cyp- ria, are reproductions of scenes which occur in Iliad ii. and ix., i.e., in books which, according to Mr. Grote, were not part of the original Iliad. These books then appear to have been part of the Iliad at least before B.C. 77O. 2 CHAPTER V. THE HOMERIC HYMNS. THE Homeric hymns are a collection of upwards of thirty poems written in hexameter verse. They vary in length from three lines to six hundred, the majority being short. They belong to widely different ages, and consequently to very various authors. The motives with which they were composed were different, though the majority appear to have had the same object. The authorship is in all cases extremely doubtful, and their literary merit varies considerably. They are called Homeric because they were supposed to be the work of Homer or of Homeric poets ; and some are hymns in the original rather than in the later sense of the word. That is to say, they are songs, not necessarily addressed to or telling of the gods, and, when a god is their subject, they are not necessarily of a devo- tional character. The Greek word liymnos was used by Homer of the lays of minstrels, such as the lay of the wooden horse, or of the taking of Troy, or of the loves of Aphrodite and Ares. Any song which related the glorious deeds of men or gods was originally a " hymn." Later, the word in Greek came to have a special sense, and to mean a prayer in verse ; in w^iich sense the word rightly describes .some of the Homeric hymns. The majority of the hymns are short, and the short hymns are prayers and invocations. Let us, therefore, see what is 1 Eusebius wa* Bishop of Csesarea about A.n. 320. His chronology, which is of great value to the historians of ancient times, and has received many confirmations from modern discoveries, was contained in his l[avTooaTrr> 'Icrropia (from the beginning of the world to A. P. 325). We have only frag- ments of this work, translated into Latin, and continued by Hieronymus. 2 This, of course, does not affect Mr. Grote's theory, which regards the later books as added on to the Iliad immediately after the time of Homer, which, according to Herodotus, was about B.C. 850. 7O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. prayed for, or why the gods are invoked, and then we may bo able to see why these poems, though of different ages and origin, have been collected together. When the collection was made may be discussed subsequently. In some cases the prayer seems to be merely a general one for blessing and happiness. For instance, the hymn to Athene (xi.) contains four lines ad- dressed to the goddess describing her attributes, and concludes " Hail, goddess ! and grant us fortune and happiness." So, too, in the vmn to Heracles (xv.), the poet says, in effect, I will sing of ileracles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, who did and suf- fered many wondrous tilings, and now has a place in Olympus by the side of Hebe : " Hail, king ! son of Zeus ; grant us pro- sperity and to deserve it." J!ut in other prayers we find a much more definite petition. In the hymn to Hestia, the god- dess of the hearth (xxiv.), the poet prays to her, wherever she be, to visit this house and give grace to his song. What song she is to give grace to we see at once from the hymn to Selene (xxxii.), the moon, which ends, " Hail, goddess ! having begun with you, I will sing the praise of demi-gods, whose deeds minstrels make famous." The demi-gods are the heroes of the story of Troy or of Thebes, ami the praise which the bard, after his invocation of Selene, is about to sing is a lay of his own composition or a portion of some epic. This is the character of the collection of the Homeric hymns as a whole. They are prayers or invocations to some god, made by a minstrel or a rhapsodist about to recite an epic poem. Many of the hymns end like the hymn to the Dioscuri (xxxiii.) : " Hail, Tyndaridce ! riders of fleet horses, and I will make mention of you in another song." Why the poet should make mention of them, or whatever god he prays to, in another pong appears from the end of the hymn to the Earth (xxx.) : " Hail, mother of the gods ! spouse of the starry Sky ! graciously grant me a goodly livelihood in return for my song, while I. will make mention of you in another song." If the god hoars the prayer, the worshipper will continue his worship ; and he prays for a goodly livelihood because, whether a wandering bard or a rhapsodist, it is by the poetic art he makes his living. Other hymns, like one to Hermes (xviii.), end, u Hail, son of Zeus and Main ! having begun with you, I will go on to another song." These too are evidently preludes to the, recitation of epic poetry, the epic poem recited being the other song which the bard will go on to. We are therefore justified in conclud- ing that hymns such as the one to Zeus (xxiii.), ending, ' Me, gracious, son of Kronos, most glorious and greatest," although EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC HYMNS. 7 I they contain no reference to the recitation which the minstrel is about to make, and for the success of which he prays, were, like the rest, preludes to a recitation. But two exceptions must be made. The hymn to Poseidon (xxii.) expressly prays that the god will help those at sea, and the hymn to Ares (viii.) expressly prays for peace. l By what accident these two hymns came to be incorporated in a collection of preludes it is impos- sible now to say. Having established the nature of the hymns, let ur how see what is known about the practice of preluding a recitation of epic poetry by a short invocation. There is in Homer a passage which, describing the bard Demodocns as beginning the lay of the horse, is generally translated, "He being stirred by the god, began ; " but it is probable that it should be trans- lated, "He being stirred, began with the god," i.e., began with a brief invocation, such as we have in the hymns. 2 In this case the custom goes back to Homeric times, though it is doubtful whether any of the hymns go back to so early a date. There is no reason to doubt that bards, when about to recite poems of their own composition, made a brief invocation ; and a short hymn to Aphrodite (x.), which prays her to "grant a delightsome song," seems in those words to be rather the prayer of a poet about to recite a poem of his own than of a rhapso- dist. 3 In this case, Hymn x., which has much beauty in its brief compass, would belong to the epic age, i.e., to the time 1 Probably we ought to include among the exceptions a hymn to Dionysus (xxvi.), which ends 66s 5' 7]/j.as xcu'poiras es &pas aSris 'iKfffOai, K 5' aOtt' upawv ei's TOVS TTO\\OUS tviavrovs. 2 Od. viii. 499, 6 5' bpfJ-tjOels Deov ^p^ero. The translation given above is somewhat confirmed by a general resemblance between the formula of the hymns and the passage in the Odyssey. The latter runs /j.v6'rjffouLa.i dvOpuiroLffiv (is &pa rot Trpcxppwv Bebs finracre OeffTTiv O.OL^TJV. ws (pdO, 6 o' 6p[j.T]0eis 6eov fjpxero. A recollection of the passage seems to have coloured the diction of the hymn to Helios (xxxi.), which ends X. ii. 14) also says that rhapsodists preluded their recitations with an invocation ; but he says that they generally invoked Zeus. At iirst this seems to present a dilli- culty, for only one, of the Homeric hymns is addressed to /ens. But the plausible suggestion has been made that tin 1 choice of a god to be invoked depended frequently on the place the recitation -\\-as held. For instance, a minslivl recite his poem in a chieftain's hall might very natural the gcddes.s of the hearth, Hcstia; as indeed is done the hymns. A rhapsodist competing in the festivals at Delos would appropriately invoke the god of the fe.-tival and the island, Apollo. In the same way it is probable that the names of the guds to whom the various Homeric hymns are addressed EPIC POETRY I THE HOMERIC HYMNS. 7 3 indicate the locality or the festival at which the recitations they preluded took place. Thus the hymn to Demeter was probably used at Eleusinia, The hymn to Artemis (ix.), in which Apollo is mentioned, was probably in use at the festival held in honour of the two deities at Claros near Colophon. The hymn to Aphrodite (x.), in which Salamis, in Cyprus, is mentioned, would be connected with the festival of the goddess in Salamis. Invocations to Zeus being equally appropriate under all circumstances, would naturally be frequent. Thus the words of Pindar confirm the conclusion that mcst of the hymns were the work of or used by rhapsodists. As yet we have made no special reference to the first four Homeric hymns. Three of them are as long as the average book in Homer, and the other one is over 290 lines. A diffi- culty therefore has been felt in believing that these long hymns could have been meant as preludes to a recitation, since they are long enough for a recitation in themselves. Various ways out of the difficulty have been imagined. The expansion theory, which plays so large a part in the reconstruction of the " original " Homer, has been applied to the Homeric hymns. It is said that these long hymns were originally short, but were gradually interpolated and expanded to their present length. But why rhapsodists should defeat their own object and stultify themselves in this manner it is difficult to see. If in their present form they are too long to serve the purpose for which they were intended, it is vain to say they have reached it by expansion. If rhapsodists would not compose preludes (or epics) too long for their purpose, neither would they expand them to such a length. A more reasonable theory is that the interpolations are much later than the time of rhapsodists ; that they are the work of stupid scribes, or perhaps of editors. The text is indeed in a very bad state, and there are many obscurities, due in all probability to stupid interpolations. In- deed, the first hymn to Apollo is really two distinct hymns run together. But, on the other hand, many obscurities are due to equally stupid omissions. Incomplete as the text is, it would be much more incomplete had not Matthsei in 1772 discovered a manuscript in a stable at Moscow containing a fragment of a hymn to Dionysus and a long hymn to Uumeter, hitherto wanting in the MSS. of the Homeric hymns. It is not im- probable, therefore, that, with a complete text, we should iind the interpolations in our text balanced by the lacuna?. Another theory is, that as each rhapsodist preluded his own recitation by a short invocation, so the whole contest was opened 74 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. by a long hymn, which served as a prelude to the whole pro- ceedings. But this is a pure conjecture, supported by nothing in the hymns themselves, nor by any analogy outside of them. There remains yet another conjecture to be mentioned ; it is that the long hymns are not preludes at all, but lays with which the authors actually competed for the prize ; that, in fact, we have in them specimens of the lays of which, on the accretion theory of Homer, the Homeric poems are a fortui- tous aggregation. This conjecture seems refuted by the fact that the long hymns, like the short ones, end with the de- claration that the poet having begun with the god, will now go on to his recitation. But the general stupidity of the MSS. makes it possible that these verses have got tagged on to poems to which they do not belong. A more fatal objection is that the hymn to Apollo which Thucydides ascribes to Homer, and which seems to have been a prelude, not an independent poem, contains 178 lines. Having exhausted the various con- jectures made on the subject, and having found none of them satisfactory, we must expand our notions of what rhapsodists could recite and Greek audiences listen to. If 178 lines were not too much as a prelude to the real business of recitation, possibly neither were five hundred. Although the different hymns belong to different dates, that to the Delian Apollo being the oldest, they probably most of them belong, if not to the epic period, to a time not very long after it. The question how old this collection is is different. The very faulty condition of the text, with other considerations, makes it probable that the collection was made after Alexan- drine times. The oldest reference to be found to it is in Philo- demos, who was contemporary with Cicero. The difference between the lines from the hymn to Apollo, as quoted by Thucydides and as they stand in our text, is considerable, and shows that the hymn had been transmitted orally and with the consequent variations for some time before it was com- mitted to writing. At the same time, the spelling shows that probably it was committed to writing before the completion of the alphabet in the arehonship of Euclides ; whereas the other hymns were probably not written down until after that period. 1 1 E.g., when the hymn to Apollo was meta-characterised, "KTBON was in- correctly transliterated into fftfiwv instead of f{jf3ovv. The absence of such mistakes of transliteration in the other liymns makes it probable that they were not transliterated, but written down for the first time after the completion of the alphabet. In xii. 3 the rcadini; ffdw may mislead. It looks like a false transliteration of 2AO = craou. But the MSS. read adov. 2dw is a correction (!) by Barnes. Editors should restore aaov. EPIC POETRY : THE HOMERIC HYMNS. 7 5 Here we may appropriately mention some other poems which, as well as the hymns, were accounted Homeric in ancient times. The most famous is the Margites. This poem, which unfortu- nately has not survived to our time, took its name from the hero. Margites was the very personification of folly. As we learn from a fragment, he knew many things, and knew them all equally badly. Being unable to count more than five, he set to work to enumerate the waves of the sea. From this we can infer to a certain extent the nature of the poem. In the first place, it was not a parody ; in the next, it was not a per- sonal attack upon any one. It was general in its character, and depended for its success in provoking mirth on the humour with which the author described the situations into which Margites was naturally brought by his folly. Aristotle regarded it as standing in the same relation to comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey to tragedy ; and he regarded the Margites, as well as the Iliad and Odyssey, as the work of Homer. Its popu- larity was great in antiquity. The Stoic Zeno is said by Dion Chrysostom (53, 4) to have written a treatise on it. But it can be traced back safely farther than the time of Zeno, for Archilochus, whose date is about B.C. 700, was acquainted with it. Whether, however, the Margites was the work of Homer, it is difficult to say. The absence of any mention of it in the better scholia on Homer has been regarded as an indication that the Alexandrian critics did not rank it as Homeric. Further, Suidas l and Proclus attribute it to Pigres, the brother of Arte- misia, the queen of Halicarnassus, who distinguished herself in the Persian wars. But this seems to have been merely a con- jecture based on the inadequate ground that Pigres interpolated the Iliad with pentameters, and the Maryites contained iambics mixed with hexameters. Further, the poem can be traced farther back than Pigres, as fur as Archilochus. The mixture of iambics with hexameters does indeed seem to show that the Marrjitp.s belongs to a time when iambic poetry was struggling into being, and the epic age passing away. This would make the poem to be post-Homeric : but against it we have to set UK; fact that Aristotle regarded Homer as the author. Other humorous poems attributed to Homer, and now lost, were the Cercopes, the J^jricichlides, and the Caminoa. Thn 1 Suidas probably lived about A.n. 1000. He wrote a lexicon, compiled from a variety of sources, previous dictionaries, scholi;i, and the writings of grammarians. He did not possess much power of discriminating between Kood arid bad authority for a statement ; and it is unsafe to rely on what be says, unless it is probable, for some reason or other, that hu is quoting from a good authority. ?6 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. Cercopes, like the Margitcs, seems to have been the literary version of a popular tale ; and the tale, at least, was of some antiquity, since it afforded a subject for one of the metopes of Selinus. Besides these poems which have not survived, there is another humorous poem which has survived, the Batracho- myomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice. This is not based on any popular tale ; it is a parody of warlike epics, and pre- supposes some literary cultivation for its appreciation. It possesses, however, no literary merit, and only occasional flashes of humour, e.g., the reappearance of a combatant after having been severely wounded or even killed a just parody on the disregard of Homeric heroes for wounds winch should have put them liors de combat. The Batraclwmyomachia cannot be the work of Homer, and the only ground for allowing it any antiquity is the statement of Suidas that it was written by Pigres. But as he also attributes the Margifes to the same author, it is probable he has confused the two poems. It may, indeed, be reasonably doubted whether the Batracho- myomachia belongs to the classical period at all. Be this as it may. the parody was successful enough to lead to imitations, such as the Psaromachia, Arachnomachta, and Geranomachia. Parodies were in much favour in Athens during the Pelopon- nesian war, and were regularly recited at festivals, probably at the Panathenaea. The most distinguished author of this kind was Hegemon of Thasos, a friend of Alcibiades, who composed a Gigantomachia, which may have contained, at least, refer- ences to the Sicilian expedition. In the next century Euboeus of Paros, and after him Boeotus of Syracuse ami Matron, seem to have cultivated parody with success. Finally, a few Homeric epigrams have survived to our day. They are of various worth, and probably of different dates. Whether any go back to Homer's time, there is nothing to show. They include epitaphs and gnomes in hexameters, and, most in- teresting of all, the Eircsionc. This poem gets its name from the olive or laurel twig wound round with threads of wool, which was not only carried by supplicants, but was also carried by boys in the country who went round begging from house to house, and singing the Eirpsinne, much in the same way as boys iu our own country at Christmas-time. EPIC POETRY: HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. 7 '/ CHAPTER VI. HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. FROM Homer to Hesiod the step is a great one. To say that their only resemblance is that they are both in Greek and both in hexameters, would be an exaggeration, though not a great exaggeration. In subject, object, method, style, in the circum- stances under which they were produced, and the place and race to which they belong, they differ widely. When Alex- ander the Great said that Homer was reading for kings, Hesiod for peasants, he gave utterance to a criticism which has con- siderable truth in it. The contempt for Hesiod implie'd in the judgment is perhaps too strong, though in reading him we can- not but frequently feel that we are in the tracts of hexameters rather than in the realms of poetry. This is sometimes as- cribed to the nature of the subject. But the Georgics of Virgil suffice to show that it is possible for a poet to impart at least as much interest to farming as to fighting ; and the fact re- mains, that excellent though Hesiod may have been as a man in all matters of life, he was not a great poet, hardly a poet at all. If Alexander's criticism does but little injustice to Hesiod's claims to be counted a poet, it is a yet more just expression of the difference in the circumstances under which and the audience for which the two authors composed. Homer was, as a matter of fact, a composer for kings, and Hesiod for peas- ants. Homer took for a subject the quarrel between the divine Achilles and Agamemnon, king of men. Hesiod takes for his text the lawsuit between his brother and himself, poor farmers both, though not both honest. In Homer, kings are heroes, whose prowess it is the poet's privilege to sing of. In Hesiod, kings are the unjust judges who gave a verdict against the author, and are to be shown the error of their ways. From this difference in the subject and its treatment we may fairly infer a difference in the audience to which the two authors addressed themselves. Amongst farmers, who had themselves suffered from the injustice of kings, Hesiod's verses would be as welcome as was Homer's poetry in a palace ; and Alexander's verdict shows the reception which would have been accorded to Hesiod's Workfi and Days by royal readers. Here, as elsewhere through- out the history of classical Greek literature, we see the reaction of audience on author, and the way in which the demands of the public determined the character of the literature. 78 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. If Homer and Hesiod differ in their subjects, they differ quite as much in what is more important, their objects; and this again is doubtless partly due to their difference in race and place. Homer's object is simply to tell his story in the best way. "Tell me, Muse, of that man so ready at need," is the prayer he puts up ; or, " Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, Pelciis' son." But Hesiod's object is not to tell a story, but to tell the truth. He informs us at the beginning of the Theogony that the Muses appeared to him by night, when he was with his flocks on the mountain Helicon, ami said to him, '' A\ r e can tell many lies like unto the truth, but we can, when we wish, say what is true.'' From this it is clear that Hesiod regarded the fictions of Homer with the same moral condemnation as Solon felt for acting, which, being the telling of lies, was not to be allowed in the state. The Spartans im- plied the same view by the synonym which they invented for lying " llomerising ; " while even with us, to "romance" is to "tell a story," in the uncomplimentarysep.se. The object of Hesiod, then, was to tell not a story, but the truth. Now a poet may choose for bis poem anything he likes to take, from a field-mouse to the fall of man ; and, provided that he pro- duces work beautiful in itself and in accordance with the laws of poetry, criticism which carps at his choice of subject has no value. He may choose to tell the truth, and that will not mar his poetry. Nor will it make mere verses poetry, any more than it will make a bad verse scan. A statement may be true, yet not beautifully or poetically expressed: witness the axioms of Euclid. And the inference is equally false whether we say this is true and therefore poetical, or this is not true ami there- fore is not poetical. In line, whatever the poet may wish to relate, his object is to produce poetry, while the object of Hesiod was not to produce poetry but to give instruction. The play of the imagination, which is essential to the poetical treatment of any theme, Hesiod evidently looked upon with suspicion: it resulted in "lies like the truth" indeed, but not the truth. AViiereas be, wished to give exact information about the best mode oi' conducting a farm, about the evil consequences of idleness and injustice, or about the pedigree of ihe gods. Ilesiod is the representative of didactic poetry, of the poetry which is designed to instruct. The popularity he enjoyed in antiquity was due to the fact that he fulfilled his object. lie did instruct, and he was used largely for purposes of instruc- tion. But it is precisely because the aim of instruction wholly iilled his field of vision to the exclusion of the poet's proper EPIC POETRY : BESIOD AND HESIODIC POETUY. 79 object the production of poetry that he fails of being a poet. We have said that Hesiod's didactic object was due to the place and race to which he belonged. He was an ^Eolian and a Bosotian. Boeotia did indeed produce isolated geniuses a poet, Pindar ; a general, Epaminondas. But the dulness of the atmosphere was matched by, if it was not the cause of, the dul- ness of the population. The Athenians called their neighbours " Boeotian pigs ; " arid country and people alike were better fitted for cultivation than culture. The Homeric poems, on the other hand, belonged in their origin to Asia Minor arid the Ionian race, a place and people much better adapted for the development of the sense of beauty and for the groAvth of works of the imagination. Here it should be noticed, that although didactic poetry was developed in Boeotia and epic in Ionia, the two kinds of literature were not the exclusive posses- sion, the one of the one people, the other of the ether. As epic poetry has a history before Homer, so didactic poetry had a development before Hesiod. Poems as long as those of Hesiod, and consisting of a string of precepts but loosely bound to- gether, could only have been built on the foundations laid by a long line of predecessors. As the Homeric poems are the literary and artistic version of various popular legends and myths and folk-lore woven together by the genius of the poet, so too the wise saws of which Hesiod's Worlcs and Days is made up were drawn from the experience and also from the superstitions of the people. Further, as popular legends had received poetic treatment before Homer's time, so before Hesiod "the wisdom of many" had been shaped into form by "the wit of the few." Precepts for the conduct of life were put into pointed form both before and after Hesiod's time. Such were the sayings of the Seven "\Vise Men ; and in later times at Athens, Hipparchus, the son of Pisistratus, had verses of this kind inscribed on the milestones and the images of Hermes. 1 Didactic poetry, however, did not limit itself to teaching mora- lity. Hesiod gives advice concerning the condition of cattle as well as the conduct of life, on marriage as well as morality. And so, too. we find didactic passages in the Iliad, e./x, which, like other didactic poetry, is essentially prosaic, was thrown into the. form of verse? To this it has been replied that Hesiod had very strong feelings about the injustice of judges and the evil of idleness ; and the strength of his feelings was so great, that his soul could not rest until lie had given the most beautiful and imposing expression to his feelings that lie could. And this it is said is the explanation of didactic poetry in general. Poetry in itself is not the proper vehicle for in- struction and information : prose is the proper means. But EPIC POETRY : HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. 8 I the attractive and enthralling beauty of what the author had to say appeared to him so great, that poetry was the only worthy expression for it ; and into poetry he put it. Now we will not insist upon the fact that food for cattle and matters of manure cannot have this overpowering beauty. The fallacy of the ex- planation is, that it assumes that Hesiod and other didactic poets had before them the choice whether to compose in verse or prose. But in the seventh century B.C. no Greek author had any such choice. The very idea that it was possible to com- pose prose was unknown until the latter part of the sixth century, and then it was in Ionia that the discovery an important one was made. If a man had that within him which he felt he must give words to if his thoughts on the order of things, or his knowledge of the practical matters of life, seemed to him too precious to die within his own breast, he had only one way of giving them extensive publicity, only one way of ensuring that they should live after him, and that was to put them into verse. A precept is useless if it can- not be remembered, and cannot be readily learnt by one person from another. Accordingly, amongst most peoples, rhyme, metre, or alliteration is used as an aid to memory. Rhyme and metre have indeed a beauty of their own, which doubt- less is the secret of their original cultivation. But they have also the practical recommendation of enabling the memory to carry a larger amount of facts than it otherwise could retain and so long as writing is unknown to or little used by a people, verse is not only a means of gratifying man's sense of beauty, but also bears the burdens which paper or parchment are sub- sequently made to carry. Even when prose literature has come into existence, and when the function of verse has been specialised down to the sole purpose of adding to the beauty of expression, we still find that there survives, especially amongst the uneducated, a large amount of folk-lore in. verse. Amongst this folk-lore there may generally be found rhymes about the weather, about the proper days for the discharge of certain domestic duties, and rough and ready maxims of conduct. Now this is pre- cisely the sort of teaching found in Hesiod's Works and Dat/s. The "works" are farming operations, the "days" are the days of the month on which it is lucky to do or avoid certain things. It seems, therefore, reasonable to suppose that Ilesiod was but following a custom, which already existed among the people, of couching useful information in verse, because it was easier to remember than it would have been if put into pro.se. It is true F 82 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. that a short maxim may have a long life, even in prose, if it is put in a pithy form, which by its point or its ring strikes the imagination and impresses itself on the memory. Such maxims are the proverbs of all peoples. They play an important part in the education of a nation, and constitute the principal edu- cation of many illiterate people. But although brief maxims may, even when expressed in prose, have a wide and long popu- lar existence, it is because they are brief. A dozen words in prose may be remembered if they are striking enough, but a dozen pages of prose not. Hesiod, therefore, who wrote a long work, had a very obvious reason for giving it the form of verse. His object was to give useful information ; and however valu- able his precepts were in themselves, his object would have been defeated if they were not extensively circulated. Xow, if his sayings were to spread amongst the agricultural popula- tion of Boeotia, and be handed down from father to son, it was necessary that they should be in verse, for they were too long to be remembered or repeated otherwise ; for whatever the date at which writing came into use in Greece, we may reason- ably suppose that the tillers of the soil did no more reading in Greece than they did in England before the invention of the printing-press. It is from the Works and Days and the introduction to the Tlu'or/ony that we learn all we know about Hesiod's life. His father ] came from Cyme in /Eolis and settled in Ascra, at the foot of Mount Helicon, in Bosotia. There, as far as we know, Hesiod spent his lii'e. After his father's death he lost his share of his father's property in a lawsuit brought against him by his brother IVrses, who obtained a verdict by bribing the judges. This, however, seems not to have prevented Hesiod from obtaining, by careful farming, a livelihood sufficient to enable him to give assistance to his brother subsequently, when Persis was in need of aid. Nor did the work which he had to do as a fanner prevent him from composing didactic poetry. The Muses of Helicon inspired him to sing in the Theogutti/ of the origin of the world and the history of the gods. His literary fame and triumphs were not limited to tho audience that he found among his farmer neighbours, but on one occasion he competed with a poem at the funeral of King 1 The name of his father is traditionally given as Dios. This probably is due to a misunderstanding of Works and Uays, 299 IpydStv He par) olov yivos. Unless we correct the residing into Ai'ou ^cos. EPIC POETRY : HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. 8 3 Amphidamas in Chalcis, and carried off the prize. The law- suit with his brother was the occasion of Hesiod's composing the poem which now forms the first part of the Worlcs and Days ; the appeals of Perses for assistance afforded him the opportunity for giving the advice contained in the real Works and Days. Other poems, of which we will speak shortly, he composed besides these, but they have not survived. Tradition says that he left Ascra and died, and was buried in Xaupactus. There seem to have been two tombs, one in Naupactus, the other in Ascra, claiming to contain his bones ; and this circum- etance apparently gave rise to the myth commemorated by Pindar, that he lived two lives. Hesiod's verses are not in themselves beautiful, nor does his subject, even when it of itself suggests poetical treatment, exalt his style above his ordinary prosaic level. He lacks imagina- tion. But it is unfair to convert this into a reproach. His object was to give sound practical advice, and this he does in a practical, if prosaic, manner. He succeeds in what he aims at ; and it argues ignorance of the conditions under which he composed to imagine, that because he necessarily composed in verse, he therefore necessarily aimed at an imaginative render- ing of ideas. He says himself his aim was truth, not invention ; and verse was the proper vehicle for his ideas, not because they required poetical rendering, but because it was an aid to the memory. To judge him fairly, and to understand wherein the merit consisted which made his name great in Greece, we must consider what he said, not how he said it. He spoke bravely and earnestly for the worth of Avork in itself, whether it brought wealth or not. He preached the faith that justice was better than injustice, both for men and cities. He took the side of right against wrong. Besides, he was eminently shrewd and practical. Trust no man, he says, without a witness advice which the Greeks certainly would take care to have taught to their children. His morality was not so much above their level as to prevent their being influenced by it. What reward a man could find in giving to those who did not give to him, neither Hesiod nor his countrymen could divine. He for- mulated and they accepted the precept, Give to those only who give to you. This side of his morality lowers him in our eyes, but helps to explain his reputation in Greece. The merit of Hesiod lies in his matter, not in the form with which he invested it ; and it is illogical to disintegrate his poems because of their deficiency in organisation and artistic unity. Further, to plan and execute a work in which thu 84 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. parts are duly subordinated one to another, implies not only imagination and a sense of beauty, but considerable mental grasp ; and in this, too, llesiod was lacking. In the Works and Days, the myth of Pandora is related in an unintelligent and unintelligible manner. In the Tlteoijomj, which is pro- fessedly a systematic version of the various beliefs about the gods and the origin of things current in Greece, it is obvious that the difficulty there is in understanding many parts is due to the fact that Hesiod himself did not understand what he was retailing. Some critics, while accepting the Works and Days as it stands, have declared that though it is the work of Hesiod, the Theoyony is not, us the Chorizontcs or Separatists maintained that the Iliad was, but the Odyssey was not, the work of Homer. This view, in the case of llesiod as of Homer, descends from antiquity. Pausanias, who flourished about A. o. 160, says l that, according to a local tradition current among the Boeotians near Mount Helicon, the only work of Hesiod's was the Works and Days, and to this view Pausanias gives his own linn adherence. But all earlier authorities unanimously ascribe the Tlii'O'jony to llesiod. The Alexandrian critics never suspected that it was spurious. Herodotus expressly says that Hesiod made a theogony. 2 Heraclitus refers to it. :i Acusilaus, who flourished about B.C. 500, probably borrowed from it. Xenophanes (u.c. 570) expressly refers to it as Hesiod's work. 4 We have therefore to set against a mere tradition, existing in the time of Pausanias, about something that happened a thou- sand years before, the explicit statements of authors who lived six or seven hundred years nearer to Hesiod's time. There can be little doubt that, as far as external evidence goes, it is in favour of the, Thi'iitjnuy being the work of Hesiod. And this must decide tin- question of its authorship. The Tlti-oyony not only relates, as its name implies, the birth of the gods, but is also a cosmogony describing the origin of tin; universe. The poem is not the invention of Hesiod himself; it is his connected version of the floating beliefs and myths of his time, iu which he has incorporated, probably, verses, and 1 xi. 31, 4, Hfucjruic o( TTtfil T(II> ' V.\iK(i}va. cuYoCcres ira.fifiXrjfj.fj.tfr] oo^rj \tyovtnVj (is Huiooos ciXXo Tror/Jcrcu ovotv, i) rd tpya. ii. 53- 3 \\.\v. e, not that lie knew the Tin " iutes a verse, and says, Xe'^co 5e Kayw TO. ^TTT;' Sia TOVTO yap oT,ucu ijfJ.5.s TrcuSas H>VTO.S ras TUV iroLyTuv yi'd>/J.as eKfjLaf- ddvfiv, iV avSpes ovres ai/rcus ^pcS/zetfa. Cf. Libanius, i. 502, 9, iv. 874. - Tro\vfj.a6itj vbov at'.' 5i5dffK(L. 'liffiooov yap dp eo/6a|e /ecu LlvOayopyv, K.r.X. xvi. ed. By water. 86 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. children and mutilates his father Uranus, are descended from times when the Aryans were no more advanced in civilisation than the South Sea Islanders. Such stories are found all over the world, as flint arrow-heads and stone implements are found, and show that the mind of primitive man was everywhere in- fluenced by the same analogies in the endeavour to solve the problem of the origin of things. We have now to mention the other works ascribed to Ilesiod. Of these, the Shield of Hercules alone survives. It is obviously inspired by the description of the shield of Achilles in Homer, and the diction contains reminiscences of Homeric phraseology. As literature, it possesses no great merit. The narrative is life- less, the description of the shield inartistic. The introduction now prefixed to the poem does not belong to it, but to the Eove of Hesiod. It is said that Stesichorus, the lyric poet who lived about B.C. 600, expressly ascribed the Shield to Hesiod, but the critic Aristophanes of Byzantium (circa B.C. 200) declared it spurious, and his opinion has been unanimously accepted, on internal grounds, by modern writers. Other works, now lost, such as the Catalogue, of Women, the Eoa 1 , jEgimios, the Teaching of Chiron, the Wedding of Knj.r, the Mdampodia, were also ascribed to Hesiod, some perhaps justly, others because they were Hesiodic, i.e.. didactic or genea- logical, or like him in style. The most important of these works is the Catalogue. It probably formed a continuation of the Themjniiy, as it contained the genealogy of heroes, related in much the same way as the genealogy of the gods is related in the Tlieoyony. It seems to have consisted of three books ; and as the Eoa>, consisting of two books and treating of the same subject, was usually united with it in a work of live books altogether, it has sometimes been maintained that the Catalogue and the Eoi.e l are but different names for the same work. ]>ut the fragments of them seem to show that the same myths wore treated in a different way in the two works, and as the Cata- Inijiii' was universally recognised in antiquity as the work of Hesiod, \vhili- there were doubts about the genuineness of the 1 The title Enir. 'Hcucu. is a plural of the phrase 7) O 'lrj, ami the poem got its name from the fact that the history of each heroine be^an with the words r) O'LTJ. l'"or instance, the fragment of the Eoa; which has been prefixed to the ?) O'I'T; Trpo\iirovffa Oou.ovs KO.I irar/iioa yala The E'KC, therefore, must have begun with some such stntfment ns : Never wtrie there women so fair as those oS antiquity- or such as Alcmene ; and every heroine was introduced with the words "or such as." EPIC POETRY : HESIOD AND HESIODIC POETRY. 8? Loce, it is possible that not only were they different works, but by different authors. The references to Gyrene in the Eoce make it probable that the poem was composed after that place came into the hands of the Greeks, i.e. about B.C. 620, and therefore some time after Hesiod's date. Another genealogical poem, the Naupadian Epic, was also ascribed by some to Hesiod ; others l ascribed it to a poet of whom we know nothing, Carcinos of Xaupactus ; others to a Milesian. We have no means of deciding whether Carcinos was the author, but the grounds on which it was assigned to Hesiod only suffice to show that, like the Eoce, it was Hesiodic in character. That is to say, it was a genealogical poem ; it resembled the Catalogue in that it celebrated the heroines of antiquity, 2 and it resembled the Eoce in the fact that the history of each heroine was introduced with the inartistic formula "or such as," which implies that the poem began with some such phrase as " Xever was woman so fair, or such as," Alcmene, or whoever the heroine was. Genealogical poems took especial root in Greece, as epic proper owes its cultivation to the colonies in Asia Minor. These poems being of a semi-historical character, are valuable for the history of Greek literature, as showing that prose, which is the proper vehicle for history, and which was, as a matter of fact, first used for history, was only brought into use after verse had been many times tried for the purpose of recording history. At the same time they show by what slow degrees history began to disengage itself from myth. Amongst the authors of these semi-historical genealogical poems, the name of Chersias of Orchomenus has come down to us. He is said to have been a contemporary of Periander and Chilon. To Eumelus of Corinth, who was said to have composed the Return, were also ascribed the Corinthian Epic, the Bougonia. and Europia, which we may regard as semi-historical poems. Argos also, as well as Corinth, produced poetry of this kind, the Phoronis and Danais, whose authors are unknown. In Sparta, Cinrcthon, a contem- porary of Eumelus, who lived probably about B.C. 776, produced a genealogical poem. Athens had her representative in liege- sinus, who wrote the Atthis ; and in later times in the colonies Asios of Samos wrote a genealogical poem amongst others. The ^Egimios and the Wedding of Keyx, which were ascribed to Hesiod, were narrative in character and were short epics. They originated among the 15ceotians and Dorian Locrians, and 1 Pausanias says Charon of Lfimpsacus. - I'm 1 this Puus;mius, who had seeu the poem, is our authority. 88 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. betray their origin by the fact that they, like the Shield of Heracles, took their subjects from the myths in which Heracles figured. Finally, the Teaching of Chiron was a development of the didactic side of Hesiod's poetry, as were also the Great Work* and the Astronomy, and, in later times, the Astrolorjia of Cleostrutus of Tenedos. CHAPTER VII. OTHER EPIC POETS AND OTHER WRITERS OF HEXAMETERS. "BESIDES Homer and the poets whose works were incorporated in after-times into the Epic Cycle, we find that there were other epic poets, whose, works have perished entirely, or are repre- sented by insignificant fragments only. With the doubtful exception of Peisander, all these poets belong to post-epic times; that is to say, they devoted themselves to epic composi- tion at a time when genius had abandoned epic poetry for the cultivation of other kinds of literature. The epic age is the period in which genius carried epic poetry to its greatest height, and in Avhich epic constituted the main if not the- sole literary food of the nation. Although epic poems continued to be pro- duced throughout the period of lyric poetry and of the drama, even until the rise of oratory, we may regard the epic age as ended and the lyric period inaugurated when, in B.C. 700, genius appeared for the iirst time in the iield of lyric poetry in the person of Archilochus. The elements of lyric had existed long before- this among the people, but the age of lyric only began Avith Archilochus, and when it began the epic age may be said to end. We have therefore now to deal with authors who composed epics at a time when popular attention, and consequently 1 he- encouragement which national fame can give, was bestowed on other kinds of literature. Some epics composed under these unfavourable conditions were, incorporated in the Epic Cycle, and have, already been mentioned. Among the epic poets who remain to be mentioned, the most, distinguished was the earliest, Peisander of Kamiros in Uhodes. Some authoiities regarded him as belonging to the epic au'c; others, withm<>rc probability, assign D.C. 6;o as his date, and lie may be even mure modern than that. He, like the other epic authors of po.-,L-epic times, EPIC POETRY: OTHER EPIC POETS. 89 finding the cycle of Trojan myths already worked out, turned elsewhere for a subject, which he found in the adventures of Heracles. The subject had indeed been treated of before in short Hesiodic poems, such as the Shield of Heracles and the Marriage of Keyx. But these works, though epic in style, had only dealt with incidents in the life of the hero. It yet re- mained for some one to give in the epic style a systematic account of all the adventures of Heracles. This Peisander did in his Ileradeia. The epic consisted of two books, and, as far as we can judge, seems to have been a well-planned work, pos- sessing some claims to artistic unity and symmetry of detail. wherein it differed from the loose and unpoetical character of the genealogical poems attributed to Hesiod. Beyond this it is impossible for us to form for ourselves any independent judg- ment as to the literary merit of Peisander. It is to be noticed that, as we should expect, we do not find in classical authors any mention of Peisander. Peisander devoted himself to epic poetry at a time when no wide reputation was to be gained from it, and the audience to which he addressed himself was probably the narrow one of his own circle of friends. On what grounds the Alexandrian critics, who classed him along with Homer and Hesiod in their canon of epic poets, did so class him, we do not know ; but a class which included Hesiod could not have been constituted simply on grounds of literary merit. An interesting figure among these later epic poets is that of Panyasis, the uncle of Herodotus. Panyasis, the son of Poly- archus of Halicarnassus, lived about B.C. 500, in the time of the Persian wars. He was not merely a learned archaeologist, a patient investigator, and a man of letters, but he was a poli- tician and a patriot, and died in the cause of freedom. His native city was under the rule, not of a government of the. citizens' own choice, but of a dynasty of tyrants maintained in their power by the arms and wealth of Persia. The move- ment of the Persian war afforded the party of freedom an oppor- tunity to strike for liberty. Temporary success was followed by the return of the tyrants, and in the struggle Panyasis lost his life. Like Peisander, Panyasis took Heracles for the subject of his epic, and wrote a lleradnia. Peisander had treated the subject at greater length than had his predecessors, and Panyasis far outstripped Peisander. The llrra<-l<'ia of Peisander consisted of two books, that of Panyasis of fourteen, and they numbered nine thousand verses. The fragments do not allow us to form an opinion on the literary worth of Pan- yasis' epic ; and the statement made by Suidas that he was 9O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. ranked next to Homer is a testimonial of no great value, since \ve do not know by whom he was ranked next to Homer. An- other statement made by Suidas, that Panyasis gave a fresh impulse to epic, which was nearly extinct, confirms what we have said with regard to Peisander, that the epic age was over. The Heradda of Panyasis seems to have owed its length mainly to the learning with which it was crammed. The author was indefatigable in collecting local legends ; and everything that diligent investigation could amass of this kind, Panyasis seems to have incorporated into his poem on Heracles. His antiquarian instincts, however, found better room for exercise in his lonica. This was a semi-historical poem, seven thousand verses long, in which was embodied all the tradition, myth, and legend which Panyasis could collect about the early history of the Ionic race. Finally, we should notice that Panyasis' services to literature must not be measured by these poems alone ; for Herodotus doubtless owed to his uncle much of his education and of his impulse to literature. Antimachus of Colophon belonged to the generation before Plato. He seems to have been but little in Athens, to have spent most of his life in Colophon, and to have died at an advanced age. Besides an elegiac poem, Lyde, he wrote a very long epic, a Thelais. His contemporaries paid no more atten- tion to him than to other epic poets of the post-epic age. It was only when criticism had declined that his epic was dragged by Hadrian from its merited obscurity, and ordered by the Emperor's decree thenceforth to take the place of Homer. A greater service rendered by Antimachus to literature was his edition of Homer. Other epic poets, of whom we know scarcely anything but their names, but who lived probably in post-epic times, were Zopyrus, Diphilus, Antimachus of Teos, Phsedimus of Bisanthe, who wrote a llcradda and also elegiac poems, and IMotimus. Chocrilus of Sarnos, a contemporary of Herodotus, deserves sepa- rate mention, though lie lias shared the obscurity of Antimachus. Departing from the established custom of epic poets, which was to take the subjects of their poems from mythology, Cha-rilus wrote a historical epic. The period he chose was the Persian war, ami the title of his epic was Per sic a or Pcri''i. The, idea was doubtless suggested to him by the fact that Phryniehus and yEschylus had found a subject for tragedy in the same period. But Choerilus seems not to have had the power to handle the theme properly, lie, was somewhat of a hack, and devoted himself to writing complimentary verses to distinguished EPIC POETKY : OTHER EPIC POETS. 9 I men, such as Lysander, the conqi:eror of Athens, and Archelaus, king of Macedonia. His -Persica was impartially enough de- voted to the praise of Athens. Equally noteworthy as a departure from the ordinary round of epic subjects is the Arimaspeia of Aristeas. The poem takes its name from the fabulous people of the one-eyed Arimaspes. Whereas other epic poets, and the Tragedians as well, confined themselves to mythology, Aristeas of Proconnesus in the Pro- pontis seems to have drawn on his imagination for his subject, and to have had a great taste for the marvellous. As to the date of this poet, some conjectured him to be older even than Homer, but all that we know is that he was older than Hero- dotus, from whom (iv. 13-15) what we know of Aristeas is drawn. Inasmuch as Aristeas laid the scene of his epic among the Hyperboreans, he may be conjectured to have had some points in common with the mystic school of poets ; for the Hyperboreans were a people regarded as specially beloved by Apollo. To the mystic school also belonged Abaris, who pro- fessed, or was said in later times, to have come from the Hyper- boreans on a mission from Apollo. He brought with him an arrow as a sign that he was sent by Apollo, according to Hero- dotus (iv. 36) ; but the visionaries of the Nee-Platonic school in later times related that Abaris rode through the air on this arrow, and thus traversed the world. Oracles, hymns of puri- fication, and an epic were ascribed to him, but we have no means of judging Avhether the works ascribed to him were really his. About the works of the Cretan Epimenides we are equally ill-informed, though it admits of no doubt that he was a historical personage. He was summoned by the Athenians to purify their city from the pollution brought upon it by Cylon, about B.C. 6 10 ; and according to Plato, who, however, lived two centuries later, he possessed a profound, insight into spiritual things. Tales of a wonderful character were told about him too. He. was brought up by the Nymphse and possessed the power of projecting his soul into space. Special mention must be made of the Orphic poets. "Whether there ever was such a person as Orpheus, " who with his lute made trees Bow themselves as he did please," is a point on which, in the total absence of evidence, we are reduced to con- jecture. On the one hand, the stories which are told of his mar- vellous powers of music and of his descent to the nether world to bring back his wife, Eurydice, seem to class him among legendary personages. On the other hand, there seem to have existed religious hymns of great antiquity, universally regarded as tho 92 niSTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. work of Orpheus, which may have been the production of some poet older even than Homer. At any rate, it is certain that in historic times associations of men calling themselves " fol- lowers of Orpheus " were devoted to the worship of Dionysos- Zagreus. Dionysos in this aspect was a different god from the god of wine, and the bacchanalia of the followers of Orpheus very different from other bacchanalian rites. Dionysos-Zagreus was a god of the nether world, and the followers of Orpheus led an ascetic life in search of purity and in hope of future blessed- ness. When they had partaken of the flesh offered as a sac- rifice at their initiation, they thenceforward renounced meat. Like Egyptian priests, they wore white raiment. Religious hymns bearing the name of Orpheus seem to have been current among the people from early times ; but an Orphic literature first arose about the time of the Persian wars. Even before then, Orphic views had made themselves felt in religious literature, as, for instance, in the TJieogony of Pherecydes of Syros, fragments of which still survive. But at the beginning of the fifth century we find many Orphic poets, Persinus of Miletus, Timocles of Syracuse, Diognetus, Brontinus, and Cer- cops ; and a theogony entirely Orphic. The most celebrated of the Orphic poets of this period is Onomacritus, who was employed by the Pisistratida?. to collect and arrange oracles affecting Athens, and was convicted by the poet Lasos of inter- polating forgeries. There seems little reason to doubt that in this age, though more extensively in Neo- Platonic times, hymns and poems were composed which were not perhaps deliberate forgeries, but speedily came to be uncritically received as the works of Orpheus, or as possessing a much greater antiquity than was really theirs. The oracles which Onomacritus was employed by the Pisi- stratidie to collect were those of MUSHBUS. Although regarded as the pupil of Orpheus, MUSJEUS seems to have written poetry which was connected with the Eleusinian mysteries, and his prophecies related exclusively to Attica. Closely connected with MUS.TUS was Eumolpus. lie was, according to the popular tradition, descended from Musneus. It does not seem that he, composed poetry himself, or, if he did, it perished early ; but lie preserved and transmitted the verses of Mu<;rus. Another name which occurs in connection with that of Mus;eus is JJacis. Some of his prophecies are quoted by Herodotus (viii. 20, 77, 96, ix. 43), and arc regarded by the historian as a complete refutation of the sceptical views existing in his time with regard to prophecies. Another prophet quoted by Herodotus EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. 9 3 is an Athenian named Lysistratus. All these prophecies, as also those of the Delphian and other oracles, are in hexameter verse ; and in their diction they show the influence of Homer, and to a less extent of Hesiod. To complete our enumeration of the less important writers of hexameters, M~e ought to mention the anonymous authors of epitaphs. When the pentameter was invented, elegiac couplets, consisting of a hexameter and a pentameter, became the uni- versal metre for epitaphs. But before the invention of the pentameter, hexameter was used. An example is preserved in the so-called Homeric Epigrams (iii.), which professes to have been inscribed on the tomb of Midas. There are also found hexameter epitaphs amongst the oldest stone records which we possess. 1 Finally, this is the proper place for us to speak of the philo- sophers who wrote in hexameters, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. If it fell within the scope of this work to trace the filiation of philosophic systems, we should properly treat of these philosophers in connection with those who wrote in prose, since the form in which they expressed themselves would not justify us in separating them. But we are concerned with them only in their literary aspect, and have not to do with their philosophy. For the history of literature, the importance of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles is that they show how difficult a thing it was for a nation, Avhich for centuries had composed in verse alone, to learn to write in prose. About the same time that Xenophanes in Elea was formulating his philosophy in hexameters, that is, about B.C. 570, Pherecydes, a native of Scyros. one 'of the Cyclades, and a pupil of the famous Thales, was making the earliest attempt to write in prose. Some few specimens of his work have come down to us. In everything but metre they are poetry, not prose ; and whereas in poetry an author could compose artistic sentences of some complexity, in prose at this time he could only ejaculate short and simple expressions, in their baldness rather resembling a child's attempt at writing than a philosopher's. A little later than this, about ];.c. 547, another philosopher, Anaxi- mander of Miletus, again made an effort to write prose, with more clearness but scarcely less awkwardness than his pre- decessor. Half a century later, although the philosophers Anaximenes and Lleraclitus had carried on the work of estab- lishing prose, and the logographers Cadmus, Hecatonis, and Acusilaus, the predecessors of the historians, had written 1 llolil, /. Ant., 37, 62, 78, 340, 342, 343, 407, 531. 94 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. geographical, genealogical, and semi-historical works in prose, we find that Parnienides preferred poetry. Prose in the hands of Heraclitus was even less fitted for an intelligible exposition of philosophy than was poetry. Even as late as B.C. 444, the year in which Thurii was founded, a time when Herodotus had already composed and recited much of his history, the first great work in prose, Empedocles still wrote in verse. This last fact is instructive, because it directs our attention to the circumstance that, besides the difficulty of writing prose, there were difficulties in the way of reading prose. It is sometimes, if not generally, said that prose, or at least a prose literature, cannot be developed unless there exists a reading public, and the existence of a reading public depends upon the development of the means of multiplying and diffusing copies of a manuscript. But in the works of the Orators we have a prose literature which was not designed for a reading public. Nay, more ; the development of prose as an artistic expres- sion of thought, possessing a beauty and a rhythm of its own, distinct from but as marked as those of poetry, is the work of the Orators, whose object was to produce, not a written litera- ture, but periods addressed to the ear of their audience. For this purpose, all that is necessary is that the writing should be easy enough for the author to put down his thoughts, without excessive and distracting labour. Now, in B.C. 444 the art of writing was far enough developed for this, as the existence of the history of Herodotus shows ; and even in the time of Xenophanes, B.C. 570, this may have been the case ; for writing had then been known in Greece for a hundred and thirty years. If, then, Empedocles, as late as B.C. 444, preferred to use poetry, we may reasonably conjecture that one reason at least for his preference was that the Greek public listened more readily to poetry, to which it was accustomed, than to inartistic prose. It was only about this time that Greek audiences were learning to listen to prose, whether the unaffected prose of Herodotus, or the artificial and florid rhetoric of Gorgias. When we go back more than a century to the time of Xeno- phanes, the case is still clearer. The author who wrote in prose might indeed find a public in the private audience of pupils or friends whom lie collected together to listen to his writings; but the author who aimed at a wider publicity, and wished to gain the ear of the assembled population of the city, could only succeed in his purpose if he wrote in verse, and declaimed his verses at some public festival, the object of which was to afford an opportunity for the production of EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. 9 5 poetical compositions. The former method was that adopted by the philosophers who wrote in prose ; the latter that in which Xenophanes published his works. 1 But it must not be inferred that the connection between philosophy and poetry was accidental, or merely a matter of form, due solely and wholly to the difficulty of writing and diffusing prose. There is also an internal bond, and a reason in the nature of the two things for their connection. A subject of philosophy may be treated of by poetry, and philosophy may deal with its own subjects poetically ; but it is only in early times that the connection between them is maintained. With the development of knowledge philosophy breaks away from poetry, and each is specialised to its proper work and methods. This process of specialisation is not peculiar to poetry and philosophy, but is the law of the development of knowledge in all its branches. In the earliest stages of a nation's intel- lectual history, not only philosophy, but all the nation's knowledge is comprised in poetry. The works of Hesiod, for instance, are an encyclopaedia of the knowledge of the Greeks of his time. His Theogony contains not only the nation's theology, but its earliest speculations on physical philosophy and the origin of the universe. The Catalof/ue of Women and his genealogical works were the only history recorded, and led the way to the genealogies of the logo- graphers, who paved the way for history. In the Works and Days we have not only a manual of practical knowledge, but a treatise on moral philosophy in embryo. But by degrees the various branches of knowledge comprised in the poetry of Hesiod began to break away from poetry and poetical treat- ment, and to gain a separate existence, an appropriate mode of expression and methods of their own. The genealogical poems were followed by the prose genealogies of the logographers, which in their turn were displaced by the history of Herodotus. History, again, when it had finally split off from poetry, was found to contain within it another department of knowledge, geography, which eventually, with the increase of knowledge, was developed out of history, as history had been evolved out of poetry ; and in the present day, physical geography and political geography are each receiving a special evolution. A similar process of specialisation took place in philosophy. For long, theology and philosophy were inseparable : from philosophy proper, physical philosophy had to be detached ; and then moral philosophy had to win an existence of its own, 1 Diog. Laert. ix. 18, auros fppa^/yofi ra eavrov. 96 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. independent of the philosophy which speculates on first prin- ciples and the nature of things. But it was only gradually that philosophy escaped from poetry, and we have here only to do with its first unsuccessful attempts. Although, as we have seen, the origin of things is a subject which may lie dealt with by poetry, and was dealt with in the various theogonies, the me- thods by which a solution of the problem may be attempted are different, and are not all equally capable of poetic expression or consistent with a poet's manner of thought. The method may be scientific, that is, may consist in the observation of facts experiment is a later discovery, unknown to the Greeks in recording them, drawing inductions from them, and so even- tual!}' reaching the end in view. But this is an essentially prosaic process ; and the Ionic philosophers who employed it were naturally, we may almost say necessarily, driven to attempt to write in prose. On the other hand, there were philosophers who declared that the senses, our only means of observing facts, are wholly untrustworthy. They are all subject to illusions, and it is only by exercising our reason that we can detect the illusion and ascertain the truth. Instead, therefore, of trusting to the senses, which deceive us, we must rely solely upon reason, and excogitate the truth out of the mind. Now this method of reaching conclusions is not inconsistent with the poet's way of viewing things. He too draws upon his own internal stores, and creates out of his own genius what did not exist before. And it was Xenophanes, by nature a poet and the author of lyric poetry of considerable merit, and his follower Parrnenides, also a poet, who invented this method and founded the Eleatic school of philosophy. It was therefore the method employed in philosophy which largely determined whether it should detach itself from poetry, as in the case of Ionic philo- sophy, or remain in the pleasing fetters of verse, as in the case of Xenophanes, Farmenides, and Empedocles. Xenophanes was horn in Colophon, which was situated on the coa.-t of Asia Elinor, not far from Kphesus. He lived certainly to the age of ninety-one, for Diogenes Laertius (ix. 19) quotes some verses in which Xenophanes says that since the time when he was twenty-live years of age he had spent sixty- seven years in mental activity. At some point in this long life he left his native city and settled down in Klca. This town, the modern Castellamare, situated on the west coast of .South Italy, a little north of .Point Palinurum in Lucania, was a colony founded by the Phocians in u.c 536. Xenophanos composed an epic poem on the foundation of the city, and it EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. 97 has been suggested that he himself took part in the first colo- nisation of the city. In any case, it seems probable that he was fairly advanced in years at the time of the foundation of Elea, for he lived before the time of Heraclitus, whose date is about B.C. 500. In addition to the epic poem in two thousand verses already mentioned, which he is said to have composed on the subject of the foundation of Elea, but from which no quotations are made in Greek literature, we have quotations from lyric poems not exclusively didactic or moralising in tone, but festive and a doubtful iambic. The Parodies from which Athenaeus (ii. 54E) professes to quote half-a-dozen lines, did not belong to the branch of literature invented, according to Aristotle, by Hegemon, a contemporary of Epicharmus, for Hegemon lived after Xenophanes. But, as the verses themselves show, they were sarcastic in tone, and probably Athenaeus had no other reason for calling them "Parodies." The same explanation would suffice to account for the fact that Silli. a species of satiric poetry, were ascribed to Xenophanes. He could not have written Silli, for this kind of literature was only invented centuries after his date by Timon the Phliasian, surnamed the Sillographer. Eustathius, the commentator of Homer, who lived about A.D. 1160, not only, following Strabo, ascribes Silli to Xenophanes, but even traces their origin back to the Iliad (ii. 212), thus showing that the only real ground for ascribing them to Xenophanes was the existence of satiric passages in his poetry. The error seems to have had additional life given to it by the fact that Timon the Sillographer in one of his Silli introduced Xenophanes making jest of Homer and other poets. Finally, the philosophy of Xenophanes was couched in hexa- meters. A few verses are quoted by Greek authors of various dates, which, however, would not have sufficed to give us much idea of his philosophy, did we not possess a partial resume in prose drawn from Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, by Sim- plicius ; and another, said, though it is doubtful, to be the work of Aristotle. If Xenophanes ever committed his works to writing, they must have perished early ; for not only does Simplicius, the commentator of Aristotle, say that lie could not obtain his works, but other authors who cite verses by Xeno- phanes were evidently quoting at second-hand. Earlier autho- rities, such as Theophrastus, Empedocles, and Heraclitus, from whom later writers, like Athenaeus, Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and others, derived their knowledge of Xenophanes, G 98 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. give the sense more frequently than the actual words of their author, although his works were probably known, if not in writing, by oral tradition, to at least Heraclitus, who lived but little later. The title which late authorities give to Xeno- phanes' philosophical work is On Nature ; 1 but this is probably unwarranted. It is a title which iits and belongs to works of the Ionic philosophers who wrote on physics and science, but is unsuitable to the metaphysics of Xenophanes, and is based on no good authority. Xenophanes is a most interesting figure among the philo- sophers and authors of his time, and we cannot but regret that we possess so little of his work. He was a man of great origi- nality, and the power of his mind is proved by the fact that the method which he applied to philosophy continued to be exer- cised and developed through many generations of modern as well as of ancient philosophers. Although he founded a school of philosophy, the Eleatic, he was a man of many interests, and his literary activity, as we have seen, was by no means limited to a single branch. lie possessed powers of penetration which were not confined to the service of philosophy, but were exercised on matters of more obvious interest. Although he himself composed drinking-songs, and was not insensible to the pleasures which, in moderation, enhance the charm of life, he noted and protested against the growing luxury that proved the intellectual ruin of the Ionic cities, which had done so much for the literature and science of Greece. Kor did the evils of excessive athleticism escape his observation and reproof. If a man, he says, wins a foot-race or a boxing-match, or even a horse-race, in the national games, he is the object of his fellow- citizens' admiration ; he has an oilicial front-seat awarded to him at all entertainments, is maintained at the public expense, and is presented with a gift to be an heirloom for ever. Yet how much less worthy is the athlete than the philosopher ! AYherein does the winning of a race conduce to the good government of a. city or to the interests of the people 1 Men's minds are much astray when they set philosophy below fleetness of foot. The. justice of Xenophanes' protest is confirmed by its repetition a century or more later by tragedians and orators, it' Xenophanes thus sets himself against the current of public opinion on matters athletic, he displayed equal courage in his criticisms on llesiod and Homer. Everything, he said, which men con- sider it disgraceful to do. these poets represent the gods as doing. Here again Xenophanes was led by no mere striving i L/C A'alura, Trfpi rpvaews. EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. 99 after cheap originality of criticism and self-supposed superiority to the common view. Philosophy for generations, and through its most distinguished exponents, echoed the protests which he first made in the name of morality. Against the anthropo- morphism of his age and nation Xenophanes brought to bear all the varied resources of his many-sided ability. His philo- sophy was designed not for a chosen few, but for the general ear, as is shown by the fact that lie delivered it in poetry ; and if, in the summaries of it which Theophrastus and others have handed down to us, the reasoning seems close and subtle, the quotations which they make in the words of Xenophanes him- self show that he expressed pointed arguments in a manner that any of his audience could understand. Men think, he says with profound contempt, that the gods have birth, speak, have bodies, and wear clothes like themselves ! Why, if horses or cows could draw like men, they would represent the gods as cows or horses ! The theory of the transmigration of souls, which Pythagoras and his followers believed in, met with as little mercy from Xenophanes as did the anthropomorphism of the people and the poets. According to the somewhat malicious invention of Xenophanes, Pythagoras checked a man who was beating a dog with the words, " Stay your hand ! in the dog is the soul of one dear to me ; I recognise his voice." If Xenophanes was the founder and the first of the Eleatic school, Parmenides was the greatest of its philosophers. Par- menides, born at Elea, belonged to a wealthy and distinguished family. He was a pupil of Xenophanes, and he also studied under Aminias and Diochaetes, Pythagorean philosophers. But from the latter, in accordance with the system of Pythagorean- ism, he seems to have gained rather stimulation to the pursuit of philosophy than any body of definite doctrine. Later in life, he in his turn handed on the philosophy he had elaborated to his pupils Zeno and Melissus. Although a native of Elea, IK; seems to have been in communication with, or rather to have- met most of the philosophers of his time, whether they belonged, like Empedocles, to Sicily, or, like Heraclitus, to so distant a place as Ephesus. The wealth of Parmenides doubtless afforded him the means to travel where he would; and we fortunately have in Plato the record of the fact that he visited Athens and there met Socrates, then a young man. Parmenides came, according to Plato, for the celebration of the great Athenian festival, the Panathenosa, at a time when he was of mature years and had already achieved a reputation. This visit is of interest for two reasons : it gives us the date of TOO HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. and it shows how philosophy was diffused in Greece. As for the date, Socrates was born B.C. 468, and if we suppose that at the time of the meeting Socrates was sixteen years of age and we can hardly suppose that he was younger Parmenides visited Athens in B.C. 452 ; and he was between sixty and seventy years of age at the time. During the visit he met many Athe- nians, with whom he discussed points of philosophy. This method of diffusing his views was specially suited to Parme- nides, because the development of an argument by means of questioning the pupil or auditor the dialectic method was a characteristic of the school to which he belonged. By him, probably, for the first time the young Socrates heard the method employed, which he was subsequently to develop to its full per- fection. But although Parmenides travelled far, and learned, discussed, taught, and wrote on philosophy, he neither neglected his duties as a citizen nor performed them perfunctorily. He proposed laws which were adopted and perpetuated ; and his public life redounded as much to his reputation as his philo- sophy. In his writings he declares that the study of philosophy and the successful pursuit of truth demand purity and piety in the student ; and his life confirmed what his theory taught. AVe possess fragments of Parmenides' poetry of considerable length. His sole work seems to have been a poem, the title of which, On Nature, as it goes back to Theophrastus, may be genuine, though, if it is, the word " nature " must be used in an extended sense, for Parmenides was rather a metaphysician than a man of science. The contrast between reason and sense, and the superiority of the former, are the points implied in the philosophy of Xenophanes, which Parmenides developed and made into the foundation of his philosophy. The senses are subject to illusion, and are inferior to the reason. The latter alone can apprehend truth, the former can only lead to con- jecture. In the pursuit of knowledge we have to learn to distinguish between reality and appearances ; and whereas all that we know by means of the senses is the appearances of tilings, it is by reason that we have to discover what they really are. Keality is truth, and truth is reason ; therefore reason is the only reality. The evidence of the senses does not go beyond mere appearances and conjecture. Thought and existence are the same. On this distinction between truth, reason, and reality, on the one, hand, and conjecture, sense, and appearance, on the other, is based the division of Parmenides' poem into the two parts On Trutli. and On Conjecture. They have been regarded, but on insuilicient grounds, as two distinct works'. EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. I O I It is probable that Parmenides did not formally distinguish them. The mystic or allegorical character of Parmenides' writing in the part of his poem which dealt Avith Conjecture may be illus- trated by the interesting introduction to the poem, which is conceived in the same strain. He represents himself as con- veyed by steeds, as far as thought can reach, along the famous road by which is reached the goddess who initiates the learned into all secrets. The way to light was shown him by the Nymphs of the Sun, who led him to the gates where are the ways of darkness and light. There they besought admittance for him from the guardian of the gate of light, Justice, who bade him welcome, if it was that piety had brought him on this road so remote from those the vulgar frequent. She then Avarns him of the arduous task there is before him, to acquire the sum of knowledge and to distinguish truth from the conjecture of the vulgar : and the poem begins. The steeds which conveyed Parmenides aloft are the lofty impulses of the philosophic mind. The goddess to whom they conveyed him is Heavenly Truth, and the road which leads to her is philosophy. The two ways of light and darkness are the two kinds of knowledge, truth and conjecture. The nymphs are Nymphs "of the Sun because truth is light ; and the guardian of the gate is Justice because only the just and pious can pursue philosophy and attain truth. The allegory is poetical, and testifies to the exalted conception Parmenides possessed of the position of philosophy and the attributes necessary in the philosopher. It helps us further to understand why Parmenides wrote in poetry, in two ways : first, it shows his poetic tenden- cies ; next, it was quite beyond the capacities of prose, as it existed in his time, to bear the burden of bodying forth so deep an allegory. The prose of Plato could and did do greater work than this, but Plato was not born for a generation after Par- menides had made his reputation. We are fortunate in possess- ing so long a fragment of the Eleatic philosopher's work, and we probably have to thank Plato for it indirectly. Parmenides' visit to Athens created great interest there in his philosophy. It made a great impression on Socrates, and through him on Plato, who has added lustre, by his dialogue entitled Parmen- ides, to the name. Plato himself studied Parmenides' writings, as did Plato's pupil Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus ; and even as late as the fifth century after Christ a copy of his works seems to have existed in the possession of Proclus, the Neo- Platonic philosopher. 102 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. Empedocles is a remarkable figure in the history of Greek literature, and a number of remarkable stories have collected round his name. Perhaps the most widely known is the fable alluded to by Horace, according to which Empedocles terminated an extraordinary career by leaping into the crater of yEtna, in order that he might seem to have vanished like a god, as he pretended to be, and was only betrayed by the fact that an eruption shortly afterwards ejected one of his sandals. The story has as little truth in it as has the orthodox explanation, which is to the effect that Empedocles accidentally fell into the crater while studying volcanic phenomena. In the time, and for centuries after the time, of Empedocles, the very existence of a crater seems to have been unknown, from the simple fact that no one ventured to explore the volcano. The fable is a caricature, and independent of the testimony which it bears to the wit of the Sicilians who invented it, it is valuable because, being a good caricature, it departs but little from the real features of the character which it derides. Empedocles did study natural science, and he did give himself out to be of divine origin, but he was no impostor in science, and in his divine origin he at least firmly believed. His is a character full of apparent con- tradictions : he was an abstract thinker, but a practical poli- tician ; he was steeped in mysticism, but studied the material welfare of his fellow-citizens ; though he achieved wonders in natural science, he preferred to claim supernatural powers ; in him artistic prose, according to Aristotle, has its ultimate founder, yet he wrote in verse ; he is the most poetical of philosophers, and yet his works differ from prose only in that they are in metrical form. A little younger than the philosopher Anaxagoras, who was born B.C. 500. and a little older than the rhetorician Gorgias, the date of whose birth was B.C. 480, Empedocles may be inferred to have been born about B.C. 490. The place of his birth was Agrigentum in Sicily, a city which in splendour rivalled Syra- cuse. He belonged to a wealthy family, for his grandfather, after whom he was named, won the chariot race at the Olympian games, and only kings and persons of great wealth could afford to breed or purchase horses capable of carrying off this prize. We have no explicit information about his youth, but the educational influences which existed in Sicily and in Agri- gentum, and to which doubtless he was subjected, explain his subsequent career. The mysticism of his philosophy was im- bibed by him from the Pythagoreans, who were scattered through Sicily and South Italy. His natural science was pro- EPIC POETRY: OTHER EPIC POETS. 103 bably derived from the celebrated physicians Acron and Pau- sanias, who flourished in Sicily in his time. Finally, the elo- quence which served him in his political life was not his pecu- liar attribute, but distinguished the Sicilian race, to whom the germs of oratory developed later in Athens were due. The wealth and position which Empedocles by his birth enjoyed brought political duties with them ; and when Thero the tyrant, whose rule had raised Agrigentnm to the highest ele- vation it attained, had died, Empedocles, following the tradi- tions of his family, assisted in establishing the liberty which he subsequently did so much to preserve. He purged oligarchy from the city, and declined to accept the sole rule of the state, which the citizens offered him. But throughout he was some- what theatrical : he aimed at effect. When he appeared in public, it was with a dress and surroundings deliberately designed to create the impression that Empedocles must not be con- founded with other people. Yet this was not affectation ; it was the nature of the man. If he posed, he had an unaffected admiration for the attitudes he struck. If he arrayed himself in theatrical costume, he also wrote an appreciative description of it in his philosophical works. "When we find him in the latrica professing not only to heal all known diseases, but ready to undertake the cure of old age and to provide a remedy for death, we should be doing him an injustice to dismiss him as a quack. He, like a medicine-man among the negroes, also pro- fessed to bring or avert rain, and undoubtedly believed in his ability to do what he professed as much as any medicine-man, and with greater reason, since his acquirements in natural science were considerable, and his mysticism obscured the limits which Nature has placed on Science. His unequivocal statement in the Katharmoi that he is no mortal, but an immortal god, is itself a testimony to his good faith, being but a piece of his faith in himself. At the same time, as we shall shortly see, the assertion loses something of its crudeness when viewed through the haze of his mystic philosophy. It is necessary to have some knowledge of the character of Empedocles in order to appreciate his literary worth at its proper value. In his case, if ever, the style is the man. In the first place, he clothed his scientific writings in verse instead of prose, in the same way as he wore purple, for the sake of effect. 1 In the next place, however, we have to recognise that, notwith- standing his pretence, he did possess solid literary merit. His 1 Aristotle, Poetics, i, ovoev 5 KOLV&V IffTtv'Ofj.rjpy Kal 'Vjfj,Tre5oK\i TrXriv rf> fj-erpov cu6 TOV fj.f TroirjrrjV SiKaiov KdXeiv, rbv o > ?} iroir]Ti]v. IO4 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. mysticism was adapted for poetry ; it lent itself to metaphorical expression and lofty diction ; and Aristotle, who denies that the medical works of Empedocles are poetry, although they are in verse, also calls attention to his poetical qualities elsewhere. 1 Empedocles speaks of himself as giving oracles to the multi- tude who thronged round him clamouring for his supernatural assistance, and his style is frequently oracular in character. He was grandiose in his writing as in his bearing. Artificiality is breathed in his verses, and was the breath of his life : the poetical devices and tricks of expression which marked the early rhetoricians are to be traced even in the fragments we possess ; they are alluded to by Aristotle, who seems to have regarded him, in spite of his writing in verse, as the first of the rhetoricians, 2 and were probably transmitted by Empedocles to his pupil Gorgias, who transplanted them to Athens. According to Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle ascribed to Empe- docles tragedies and other works, the Invasion of Xerxes, a hymn to Apollo, and a Politics. But as no author quotes a single line from any of these works, and as a later poet named Empedocles seems to have certainly composed tragedies, it is not improbable that Diogenes, who was a somewhat careless compiler, has confounded the two authors named Empedocles. The works by the philosopher Empedocles of which we possess fragments are the Katharmoi, latrica, Physics, and some epi- grams. In the Katharmoi, or Songs of Purification, he pro- fesses, as the name indicates, to purify from sin or crime all who come to him, as in the latrica, or Songs of Healing, he professed to cure all diseases, old age, and death. His medical knowledge was indeed extensive for his age, and he is said to have effected some remarkable cures, restoring the apparently dead, and so on. But he professed also to have supernatural powers, and this profession is connected with the mysticism which found its exposition in the PJn/sics, or poem on Nature. Into the mixture of mysticism and scientific speculation which made up the philosophy of Empedocles it is beyond our pro- vince to go. We will only say that he reached the conception of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, or, as he preferred mystically to call them, Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Ncstis (the last name seems to have been his own 'invention). These ele- 1 In the lost Dialogue on the Poets, Aristotle s:iid,'0/j.ijpiK6s 6 'Efj.ireSoK\7Js Kal Sav&s irfpi rrjv (ppdffiv ytyove, /Hfra0opix6s Tt &v Kal TO?S fiXXois ro?s irtpl iroiriTtKTjv (TriTfiJy/J.affi xpw.uffoj, ax we learn from Diogenes Laertius, viii. 57. - Sext. Einp. vii. 6 says, 'E/ATTfOOK\fO. p.tv ~)ap 6 'ApiCTOTf\ys (frycri -npOnov K(KlV1JK(Vai. EPIC POETRY : OTHER EPIC POETS. I O 5 merits are indestructible. They may be combined, and the compounds into which they combine may be reduced by disso- lution to the four elements again. But for these processes two principles are required : the principle of combination, which he calls mystically Friendship, and which is the Love of Parmenides and the Pythagoreans; and the principle of dissolution, which he calls Discord. The tendency of Friendship operating on the four elements is to produce a Sphere, that is, to give to the universe a perfect shape ; but there exists the opposite tendency of Discord, and the history of the universe is the resultant of their conflict. The principle of Discord, however, is not limited to the material world in its action. It operates also in the moral world. It prompts a daemon to some crime, and then for thrice ten thousand years the daemon, in exile from heaven, has to inhabit the bodies of men and living creatures. The poem On Nature begins with a statement of this law, and the declaration that Empedocles is himself a daemon undergoing the punishment of a mortal body. After this exordium, the first book seems to have dealt with the four elements, the second with the nature and condition of man, the third with the gods and things divine. Somewhat late in life Empedocles is said to have commenced his travels. He journeyed to the Peloponnesus, attended the Olympian games, and there recited his Songs of Purification. How long a period elapsed before he returned to Sicily is un- known, but it is reported that he found it impossible to gain ad- mission into his native town when he did return, and he resumed his travels. He is said to have visited Athens, and it is not improbable that, like most celebrated men of the age, he visited the intellectual centre of Greece. He died between sixty and seventy years of age. Many strange stories are told of his death, the mode of which remains unknown. BOOK II. LYRIC POETRY. CHAPTER I. THE ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS. EPIC poetry was succeeded in Greece by lyric poetry. The germs of lyric poetry already existed in the epic period, but for their development it was necessary that a change should occur iu the conditions of social and political life. Tl>" poli- tical ajjiL social- -changes which (levcloped th^ ^errrrsof ~ tyric poetry \vere_tliejjverthrow of regal governments^ the foundation of colonies^ and the "extension "of commerce. The overthrow of royal government tended to the liberty of the citizens. The people ceased to live for the sake of supporting a king, and began to live for themselves and their country. This shift of material interests was followed by a corresponding shift in literary interest. So long as the king was the state, Priam's fortunes were necessarily the poet's materials ; but when the citizens became the state, their interests, their hopes, and their fears became the theme which interested them and inspired the poet. The tendency of colonisation worked to the same end. Settlers are compelled to rely on their own exertions ; birth and position go for little in the new country ; it is the man of most capacity and energy who comes to the top. In a colony, the individual citi/.en gained an importance which was beyond his reach in the old country. It is hardly necessary to say that the extension of commerce had a similar result. As commerce, grew, there opened before the individual citizen the possibility of attaining to wealth and importance. TJie-tiuilt-oI tlmse changes was lync-po_eJtry. Men's thoughts were fixed on the present, not on Jthe__pjiit. Politically and socially a break had been made. The ideal past,, depicted in epic pjjeUy, was no longer felt to have any relation to the- LYRIC POETRY : ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS. I O/ present, and was, therefore, no longer fitted to supply inspira- tion to the poet or to engage the attention of his hearers. The hour called not for a narrative of the fight round Troy, but for lays such as those of Callinus or Tyrtaeus, which could rouse a man to fight "for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods." The first_difference between epic and lyric is that the former , is narrative and the latter is the expression of emotion. But this difference implies another. In epic the poet never himself appears. He narrates everything, but never gives his own view -as his own view of anything. The essence of lyric, on the other hand, is that in it the poet expresses his own personal (^ emotions. Lyric is personal, epic impersonal ; or, as the same idea is sometimes expressed, the former is subjective, the latter objective. The conditions under which lyric poetry was developed in Greece gave it some characteristics which distinguish it from, and are brought into relief by, the lyric poetry of other nations. Modern lyric comprises everything within its range ; anything which touches the poet and moves him to song may provide a subject Chapman's Homer or the west wind, a nation or a skylark, the future or the past. But Greek lyric poetry, born of a reaction _from coir^jnplatioji^oTTIur ^a^^to^qp-tion^TrrTEfi prfisentjUEadLnnt this universal ._range. It___draws its thenies__jrimu_JUld_js_jdjvaj^_ related tq^_ the present! Solonaddresses his fellow-citizens not on the past, but on the present condition of Attica. Theognis deals with the politics, Tyrtaeus with the Avars, of his own time. And although, in choral poetry, the theme is frequently mythical, such poetry always was composed for, and related to, a de- finite religious festival. In fact, it was " occajaiojial_oetry,'' us is clearly seen in those odelToT Pindar which were written to celebrate the occasion of some victory in the various national- games of Greece. Greek lyric poetry is, then, distinguished from other lyric poetry by always having reference to the present, and this is due to the conditions under which it was developed. It is also distinguished by the occasional presence of mythical element. This, as we have said, occurs in choral lyrics written for -some festival, and in honour of the gods. In this, too, we have a trace of the conditions under which Greek lyric was developed, for the mythical element is an inheritance from the epic period. Another inheritance, and also another distinctive feature nf Gr^pQyHg^lg~^h^';n H '' in ^ e -- Q1 ' didactic Element. This was apparent in Hesiod, and reappears IOS HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. most markedly in Theognis, although it is not confined to him, TnitTs pre~sent in all varieties of Greek lyric. We have considered the social and political conditions under which the germs of lyric poetry were developed, and we have seen how the characteristics peculiar to Greek lyric were due to the conditions of its development. We may now proceed to consider the germs themselves. They were of two kinds x religious chants and%>opular songs. No_spcimen of the former has come down to us, but we may reasonably ccmjecffiTfe that they had the same origin and were much the same in kind as the Saliaric hymns of the Romans. They were probably metrical invocations of the gods, of a simple and inartistic kind, addressing the god in all his various attributes and with his various names, containing much repetition and tautology, and doing the duty of liturgies. They were preserved by hereditary priesthoods, being transmitted from generation to generation, and receiving occa- sional additions. In Attica Ihe Eumolpidse were a hereditary priesthood of this kind, connected with the worship of Demeter at Eleusis, whose hymns were traditionally referred to Pamphus as their author. But as Apollo was the god of song, it was with his cult that the most important of these religious chants were associated. The Paean which was the name of the form of hymn used in the worship of Apollo, seems to have been of two kinds, corresponding to two attributes of the god. lie _vvas the god of victory, and to him the Greeks in Homer sing praises and thanksgiving for victory. The hymn itself was probably sung by a single voice, and the worshippers sang as a chorus the refrain, " lo Psean ! lo Paean !" 15ut Apollo was also the god who sent pestilence, and the people, when threatened or stricken with plague, prayed in chorus to him for deliverance. The Nome was another form of hymn with which Apollo was worshipped, and seems to be distinguished from the Paean by the fact that it was sung by a priest, and was not a special prayer for deliverance from pestilence or a special thanksgiving for victory, but praise of a more general character. Naturally the songs in honour of Apollo nourished most at the two most important centres of his worship, Delos and Delphi. The origin of the Nome was traditionally ascribed to Delphi, and Chryso- themis and Philammon, mythical personages, were credited with its authorship. The. hymns which for generations had been sung at Delos were, connected with the name of ( Men. The fact that Olen was said to have been a Lycian, taken in con- nection with the existence in Delos of a Phenician worship (imported from Lycia) before the Ionic worship, may nidi- LYRIO POETRY : ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS. T O9 cate that the hymns ascribed to him had a foreign element in them. A few inconsiderable fragments of songs of the people, quoted l)y Athenseus, Plutarch, Pollux, scholiasts and grammarians, have come down to us, and from the same sources we hear of other songs of which we have no specimens. Some of these fragments are certainly of comparatively late date, but as songs of the people change very little in the course of time, we may learn something even from the later fragments. The reason that so few of these songs have been preserved is that the literary lyric killed the popular song, and it is only in those parts of Greece which remained comparatively uncultured that the people's songs survived. Thus it was in Sparta that cradle- songs flourished most, and from Sparta come a couple of frag- ments of songs which accompanied dancing. In one of these fragments the dancers encourage each other to keep on dancing ; the other consists of three lines, one of which was uttered by the young men, the next by the old men, and the third by the boys. From Bottirea we have a fragment "Away to Athens, hie ! " of the song which the women of Bottiaea sang while dancing. Elsewhere also the custom of singing while dancing prevailed ; and about another fragment which runs, " Where are my roses ? where are my violets 1 where are my beautiful flowers 1 Here are your roses ; here are your violets ; here are your beautiful flowers," Athenaeus says that the accompany- ing dance was mimetic. It may be noticed incidentally that men and women do not seem to have danced together. Games, as well as dancing, were accompanied by songs. Greek boys played a game, in which one boy, being blindfolded, sang a verse, "I will hunt a fly of brass:" to which the other boys replied, " You may hunt, but you will not catcli us ; " and in- flicted blows on him with straps, till he caught one of them. Greek girls also had a game of a less violent description, with questions and answers to be sung. Greek children invoked the appearance of the sun in much the same way as in the English " Rain, rain, go away," &c. The most interesting of these children's songs is the Rhodian Swallow-song, which has been fortunately preserved, apparently complete, by Athenseus. In the spring the boys of Rhodes went round from house to house singing this song, in which they announced the return of the swallow with the returning year, and demanded to be supplied with cheese and wine. The Crow-song seems to have been of the same kind : the boys went about with crows in their hands, and making much the same request as in the Swallow-song. I IO HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. In these songs 'the boys played at beggars, but real beggars also had their songs, although we have no specimen of them. Working men, bakers, and rowers all had songs to accompany and lighten their labours. The women had their weaving- songs ; at Elis, their vintage-songs ; and they sang while wash- ing clothes and while working in the mill. The song of the reapers was called Lityerses, and as this was the name of the son of Midias, king of Phrygia, the song may have come from that country. The shepherds' songs, at any rate in some instances, seem to have been of a sentimental kind, and we have a fragment of one which told a story of unrequited love. Love-songs naturally formed an important part of the popular songs, and in Locris such songs were much cultivated ; but we have a fragment of one only. Drinking-songs can hardly be reckoned among the pre-lyric popular songs. They were intro- duced during the lyrical period by Terpander from Asia Minor, and eventually some, such as those celebrating the glorious deed of Harmodius and Aristogiton, attained great popularity, and were genuine songs of the people. More important, as the roots of lyrical poetry, than any of the songs of the people yet mentioned, were the wedding-songs and dirges. The dirge was known to Homer, and as all peoples seem to possess some- thing of the kind, it may well have been original with the Greeks, although indications are not wanting that some foreign Carian elements were introduced. This form of song was afterwards developed by Pindar, and came to be of much im- portance in the lyrical part of Greek tragedy. The wedding- song was also known to Homer, who calls it the Hymenoeus. It became literary and lyrical in the hands of Pindar and Sappho, and, as the Epithalamion, it has passed into the lyric poetry of all European nations. Finally, amongst the songs of the people we have to notice an important class borrowed from the Kast. Their common feature is that they are laments for the untimely and undeserved death of some beauteous youth. In all eases they seem to have been of Oriental origin, to have originally lamented the departure or death of summer, and to have been amalgamated with .some local Greek myth. Thus the Linos, of which we have a fragment (perhaps not in its original form), came from Phenicia (where, as also in Cyprus and Bithynia, Herodotus recognised it), and was connected with the story of the beauteous Linos, who was killed by Apollo for challenging him to a contest in song. The fragment that we have ascribes the invention of song to Linos, and relates the death of Linos and the lament of the Muses for him. The LYRIC POETRY : ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS. I I I Linos was sung by a single voice, and the refrain " Ai Linon ! Ai Linon ! " by a chorus. The derivation of Ai Linou may be the Semitic ai le nu, woe is us. In Tegea of Arcadia the Greeks explained the lamentation as being for the death of Skephros, who was killed by his brother. Sterility fell on the land in consequence, and an oracle ordered a yearly festival, at which Skephros was to be mourned for ; and hence the song was called the Skephros. The Hyacinth song has the same origin ; it was localised in Sparta, and came there through the island of Cythera, a Phenician settlement of old. Most famous of all these lamentations was that for Adonis. The Phenician origin of this song, and of the festival at which it was sung, is indi- cated by the mythological device of making Adonis the son of Phoenix ; by the obviously Semitic derivation of the word (adonai, lord), and by the fact that the song and festival can be traced back to Samos, and thence to Cyprus, whither they first spread from Phenicia. Having seen what were the germs of lyric poetry, and what were the conditions under which they were developed, we may now proceed to consider the various kinds of lyric poetry. They are three, the Elegiac, the Iambic, and the Lyric, in the narrower or specific sense, or, as it is sometimes called, Melic. They are alike in that they are all subjective, expressing the poet's own emotions as such, and that they were all designed for a musical accompaniment. They differ in metre ; and in that Elegy and Iambic poetry are more subjective than Melic ; and that choral odes belong to Melic. In dialect, Elegv and .1 Qt- Iambic poetry, as they originated in Ionia, Avere "Ionic, : Melic poetry drew on the other dialects. Choruses, having originated both amongst the Dorians and the /Eolians, contain both xEolic and Doric, though the latter came in course of time to pre- dominate. Melic songs, as opposed to choruses, had no fixed dialect, but each poet used his native dialect. The origin_ of elegy is closely connected with flip improve- ments made in tho L fin to in PlirygliiT Elegy spread with the flute from Ionia to Greece, and the word depayis ; of Terpander s seven divisions : dp-^d, fj-crapxa, KaraTpotrd, fj-eraKaraTpOTrd, 6fJ.a\6s, ff$payis, eiriXoyos. The main body of tin; hymn was, as the word implies, the o/x0aX6s. The fftfipayis was the '"seal" which stamped the conclusion. To the "seal " Terpander added the epilogue; to the dpxd the /xerapxd, and to the KaTarpoird the fj.fra.Ka.TaTpoTrd, ^cs Pollux, iv. 66. 126 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. to doubt. From Delphi Terpamler is said to have been sent by the oracle to Sparta. There he instituted the celebrated festival of the Carnea in honour of Apollo, and in the musical contests which were held regularly ever afterwards at the festi- val, the prize was for long carried off by the school of Terpander, the most famous member of which was Kapion. 1 The innovation which Clonas of Thebes made in melic was to compose nomes designed, not for a cithara, but a flute accom- paniment. In this ho was followed by Polymnestus of Colo- phon, and Sakadas of Argos, and Echembrotus of Arcadia. As we possess not even a fragment by any one of these composers of uomes (except a dedication on an offering by Echembrotus), we need not say more of them. The development of the paean is ascribed to Thaletas of Crete. Of his works we possess no fragment, and know nothing ; but he seems to have exercised a decisive influence on the course of melic, for, after his time nomes gave way to the paean, solo to chorus, and the cithara to the flute. It is interesting to note, too, that his connection with Sparta was set down to the action of the oracle of Delphi, as was also that of Terpander and of Tyrtaeus. Whatever may be the historical value of the incidents with which this connection is clothed in the case of those three important early lyric poets, the fact that they were said to have been sent by the oracle to Sparta shows the closeness of the relations between Delphi and Sparta, and that lyric poetry was associated with Delphi. The new path marked out for mi-lie by Thaletas was followed by Xenodamos, who brought from Crete the hyporcheme, a species of melic in which the mimetic dancing was the most important clement, and by Xenocritus, who took as the subject of his poems the adventures, not of the gods, but of heroes, thus paving the way for the dithyramb. In Airman we at last come to a poet of whom, from his frag- ments, few and mutilated as they arc, we can form at least some idea for ourselves. His date is uncertain, and of his life we only know t\vo thing? that his poetry was performed and composed by him in Sparta and that he came from Sardis. Dionysius of Haliearnassus said, indeed, that Airman was a Spartan by birth ; but Stephanus of Byzantium quotes some 1 One of the ei^rlit mimes which Terpander was said to have composed was called Kapion, after this favourite pupil. Tiie others are said to have been called AtoXtos and Botwrtos, after the musical scales or keys of those names ; Op0ios and Tpoxaios, after the metres, and 'Oi>s, Terpaoioios, Tfpirdv5pei.os t for reasons which cannot he discovered. LYRIC POETRY: MELIC. 127 verses from Alcman which explicitly state that he came from lofty Sardis. Whether he was a slave, as Suidas, following Crates, affirms, and Dionysius denies, or a freeman ; whether he was a Lydian or a Greek, and how he came from Sardis to Sparta, whether as a slave, or as an artist attracted by the chance of fame in Sparta ; and at what age, whether as a child or as a man these are all questions which cannot be satisfactorily settled. It seems improbable that, if he were a slave, he would ever have been permitted to obtain the rights of citizenship in Sparta, and take such an important part in the direction of public worship. About his nationality his name proves little, for though it is Greek, it may not have been his original name ; nor do the two alternative names which Suidas gives his father, though both are Greek, prove more ; for neither may be genuine. Finally, whether he left Sardis before he was old enough to have been materially influenced by Lydian art, or im- ported Lydian tendencies into Sparta, is a question to which the fragments we possess are insufficient to give an answer. Turning from these questions, let us try to see what were his contributions to melic, and why the Alexandrine critics regarded him as a classic, and placed him in their canon of the nine great lyric poets. The direction in which Alcman made his advance, and the nature of his work, were determined by the previous history of melic and the existing conditions in Sparta, That is to say, Alcman found melic exclusively de- voted to religious worship in Sparta, and accordingly it was to the lyric of Avorship that he directed his genius. He found that Thaletas had diverted the current of lyric from nomes in solo to worship in chorus, and he followed out the channel thus opened, composing pa?ans, hymns, wedding-songs, and prosodia or processional hymns. But his genius was too powerful to be confined to merely working out tendencies which he found already existing. Although he started from and developed the religious and choral elements of lyric, he confined himself to neither. It is the function of lyric to give poetic form to all the emotions, not to that of worship only, and it is the essence of lyric to give more prominence to the subjectivity and the personality of the poet than choral poetry, at any rate in its earlier stages, permitted. As a true lyric poet, then, Alcman felt the need to teach in song other feelings than the religious, and to set forth his own experiences with more directness than the impersonal nature of choral poetry, as it then existed, was compatible with. At the same time these tendencies were con- ditioned by the character of his public, which, being Spartan, 128 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. demanded religious and choral poetry. Alcman had, therefore, to seek for some variety of Dorian melic, which should satisfy Spartan taste and yet admit of being developed into an instru- ment for conveying his feelings and his own views on life as his own. This he found in the Parthenia, or girls' choruses, which had long existed in Sparta. Such choruses, sung and danced by girls, imply that women were allowed to freely appear in public, and that they received some education in music and dancing. It is, therefore, interesting to note that the history of the condition of Greek women receives some light from the history of these Parthenia. In the oldest times they were pro- bably common to all the Greeks, for dances of this kind are mentioned in Homer and the Homeric hymns. 1 For some time they continued to be usual, not only among the Dorians and ^Eolians, but also among the lonians. Eventually, how- ever, the Athenian practice of secluding women, of allowing them to leave the house only for religious worship, and of teaching them nothing but the most elementary household duties, caused the Parthenia to decay among the Athenians. In Sparta, however, where the state took the education of girls into its own hands with as much care as that of boys, and where women occupied a place of some independence by the side of man, the Parthenia long continued to flourish. Arion is not represented by a single fragment, for the hy 71111 of thanksgiving commemorating his miraculous escape on the back of a dolphin from death at the hands of a treacherous crew, which Julian (II. A. xii. 45) quotes as the work of Avion, is generally regarded now as the work of a later hand. It is the. more to be regretted that we should possess nothing of his, because he not only wrote hexameters (to the number of 2000) and nomes, but first gave a place in literature to the dithyramb, which was the seed out of which the drama was to grow ; and the early history of the dithyramb is a matter of some obscurity. The worship of Dionysus was probably of groat antiquity in Greece, and may reasonably be supposed to date from before the composition of the Homeric hymn to Dionysus. The power of wine had excited by its mystery the wonder of man in Aryan times, for it is celebrated in the Yedus, when; the virtues of soma are the marvel of the poet. But as the worship of Dionysus was a different thing from the praise- of *r>/a, so the dithyramb was not the same thing as the early hymns to 1 Ili;ul, xvi. 182 ; Hymns, xxx. 14. The dance of Artpmi* and her train, Hymns, xxvii. 15. was probably suggested by the practice of ordinary life, us was also Hymns, v. 5. LYRIC POETRY : MELIC. I 2 9 Dionysus. The proper, and presumably the original, subject of the dithyramb was the birth of Dionysus, as we learn from Plato (Laws, iii. 700), though eventually any portion of his history came to be matter for dithyrambic poets. But it was less in the matter than in the manner of delivery that the dithyramb differed from the hymns. The dithyramb was orgiastic, and this, together with the name (for which no Greek etymology can be found), seems to point to a foreign origin. This view of the nature and origin of the dithyramb is strengthened by the fact that it was in Corinth, which en- couraged orgiastic rites and was specially connected with the wor- ship of Cotyto, that the dithyramb first found a home in Greece ; and that it was from Methymna in Lesbos, where phallic wor- ship nourished, that Arion brought the dithyramb to Corinth. The first mention of the dithyramb is in a time before Arion, in a fragment (773) of Archilochus, who says that he knows how, when he is smitten by wine as by a thunderbolt, to lead off the dithyramb. From this fragment, as well as from the general course of melic poetry, it probably follows that the dithyramb was, until the time of Arion (who was a contem- porary of Periander, B.C. 628-585), sung not in chorus, but in monody, as was the case with other melic poetry until Tha- letas, and still more effectively Alcman, brought choral poetry into the position of importance which nomes originally occu- pied. At any rate, the singing of the dithyramb by an organised and trained chorus (as opposed to the extempore singing of a refrain, as in the case of the earliest pecans and wedding-songs), was due to Arion. The position of the chorus in the dithy- ramb, too, was new, and was due to Arion. Instead of being drawn up in a rectangular body, as Avas the case with all Dorian choruses, and moving from right to left, and left to right, round the altar, the chorus was arranged in a circle round the altar, and hence was called a Cyclic chorus. Another innovation made by Arion was to dress the chorus as satyrs ; the choreutse, or members of the chorus, thus came to be called in Greek tratjoi, goats or satyrs, and their song was the goat- or satyr-song, trag-cedia. This, and not the offering of a goat as a prize, it is which is the origin of the word " tragedy." The number of choreula 2 in Arioivs time is not known. The first mention of the number fifty is later, and occurs in a frag- ment of Simonides (147) ; whether this was the number of Arion's chorus there is nothing to show. A further innova- tion ascribed to Arion is, that he gave a " tragic turn '" l to the 1 ToayiKbs rpoTTos. Hesycliius. I I3O HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. dithyramb, and what this means is uncertain. It has been sup- posed to mean that Arion did not confine himself to the birth or the adventures of Dionysus for the subject of his dithjgrambs, but substituted heroic myths. 1 But probably it refers to the nature of the dancing with which the dithyramb was accom- panied. This was more lively and more extravagant than in the case of other choral poetry ; it was probably highly mimetic, and, as danced by the satyr-clad choreutse, dramatic. CHAPTER III. MELIC POETRY : ALC.EUS AXD SAPPHO. WHILST the lonians had been developing elegiac and iambic poetry, and whilst in Sparta melic poets, attracted from all parts of the Greek world, had carried nomes as far as the simple nature of such poetry permitted, and then had begun to lay the foundations of choral poetry, in Lesbos the other division of melic poetry, which consisted of odes, individual and subjective in character, and which corresponded rather to what we under- stand at the present day by lyric poetry, was being quietly but steadily developed. Of the stages between the songs of the people in Lesbos and the poetry of Alcseus absolutely no trace has come down to us ; we have neither a word nor the name of a single poet. It is indeed only inference, but it is a necessary inference from the developed character of Alcacus' rhythm, that such stages occurred. At the beginning of the sixth century B.C., in the time of Alcseus, who was a contemporary of Solon, Lesbos was in a state of political convulsion, the shocks of which threw down one form of government after another, oligarchical, tyrannic, and democratic, until the wisdom and power of Pittacus, the Solon of Lesbos, secured peace for his country. Jn these revolutions and counter-revolutions Alcieus took an eager part. Born of a inble family, and reared in the political faith of his fathers, Alcseus was by nature and by education an ardent partisan of the oligarchy, which in his earlier years ruled without fear or check in Lesbos. But the good time of oligarchy was drawing to aii end, and thai in Lesbos was exploded in the u-ual way from within. .Finding the position which he shared in common 1 A cL;iug"j of tliis kind \vu* siijijn esscd at Sicyon by Cleistheues. ILlt. v. 67. LYRIC POETRY : ALGOUS AND SAPPHO. I 3 I with his fellow-oligarchs not of sufficient freedom, Melanchrus contrived to constitute himself tyrant ; and this proceeding led to a complication of revolutions, tyrannicides, exiles, imprison- ments, usurpations, conspiracies, and insurrections, which at this distance of time it is almost impossible to disentangle. Melan- chrus was eventually assassinated, but the oligarchy was not to be restored. In the division, however, between the oligarchs and the people, who had united to overthrow the tyranny, but split on the question of oligarchy or democracy, another oligarch, Myrsilus, throwing over his own party, forced his way to the tyranny. Probably at this time Alcaeus and his brothers were driven into exile ; and we may perhaps measure the force of this political eruption by the distance to which, and the divers directions in which, these exiles were ejected ; for Alcaeus landed in Egypt, and took service under the Pharaoh Hofra, while his brother Antimenidas was projected east, and entered the army of Nebuchadnezzar. Myrsilus shared the fate of Melanchrus, and was assassinated, and after this a popular government was established by Pittacus. But Alcaeus was impartially opposed both to the usurpations of tyrants and the people's encroach- ments on the rights of the oligarchs, and he made war both with his sword and his verse on Pittacus and the popular govern- ment. The insurrection failed, however, and Alcaeus was thrown into prison. There he implored for release from Pittacus, whom he had despised and abused. Pittacus released him with the comment, " To forgive is better than to take vengeance." After this Ave know nothing more of Alcaeus' history. Alcaeus' compositions made at least ten books, and included hymns to the gods, as well as the odes for which he was more famous. The latter are sometimes divided into political (stasio- tika), drinking (skolia), and love (erotika) songs ; but it is hard to observe this division of classes, for the wine seems to have got into all of them, and they were probably all delivered in the same way, to the same audience, and on the same sort of occa- sion. That is to say, they were probably sung by Alcasus, to his own accompaniment, over the wine to his political and personal friends. Hence his songs, when they are something more than drinking-songs, would still naturally contain allusions to wine, and even those which began as drinking-songs might, without any inconsequence, turn to love or politics. The fragments of his works are disappointing reading, and this is not because time has, so far as we can judge, treated Alcaeus more hardly than other lyric poets of the same or greater antiquity. Kela- tively, indeed, to the elegiac poets, Alcaeus is not fortunate in 132 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. the size of the fragments from which we have to form our opinion of him, and we can assign a natural reason for this : the lines of cleavage are not the same in elegiac poetry as in odes of a more complex metrical formation. A large proportion of the fragments of Alcseus have reached us embedded in the works of grammarians, who quote Alcaeus only to illustrate a metrical point or a peculiarity of dialect ; and such quotations, usually short, never necessarily contain a complete thought. Quotations from the elegiac poets, on the other hand, are made not for such purposes, but usually for the sake of the thought contained in them. Hence we have complete elegies by Solon, Tyrtojus, or Mimnermus, but only fragments of Alcaeus. Still, compared with Archilochus or Alcman, Alcaeus is well represented ; but whereas in the little that survives of Alcman there are to be found two fragments which at once put him at least on a level with his reputation, in the more extensive fragments of Alcseus there is nothing which is worthy of the great name that Alcaeus enjoys. The fragments of his hymns to the gods contain nothing which is above poetical commonplace ; and probably the hymns in their entirety were of no great merit, for Alcseus was not by inclination likely to excel in, nor was he in after-time famous for, religious and choral lyric. It is his political ami martial verse which antiquity is unanimous in extolling as constituting his greatness as a lyric poet. Dionysius of Ilalicarnassus (2. 8), Athenseus (xiv. 62 ~A), Quintilian (10. i. 63), and the epigram- matists in the Greek Anthology, all select his stasiotika as his distinctive excellence. AVe turn, therefore, with interest to the fragments of these odes, and find that fortunately among them are some of the most considerable and famous of his fragments. For instance, we have the original of Horace's ' () navis ! refe- rent in mare te :> (C. i. 14), in which, under the metaphor of a ship, the distress of the state is pictured (18). "We have, again, the original of Horace's ' Xunc est bibendum." with the re- joicing over the murder of Mvrsilus (20). And, as the expres- sion of Alcicus' martial spirit, we have a description (15) of his room decorated with helmets and greaves and bucklers, and all the appurtenances of war; and also (33) his welcome to his brother, who had returned from his service, under Neburhad- ncz/ar with a beautiful ivory-hilted sword, which lie had taken from a giant whom he had slain in fair and open light. All these fiainiients are good, and they confirm what Diony- sius and (Quintilian say. that he is not dill'use. and that his style possesses grandeur; but they do not reach the level of LYRIC POETRY : ALCLEUS AND SAPPHO. I 3 3 the highest poetry. The finest is the metaphor of the ship, with the waves rising against it on all sides, and its sails in rags. Compared with the diligent but lifeless work of Horace's imitation, the Greek has the merit of being sketched after nature ; but if we wish to see the difference between this and the best poetry, "to know the change and feel it," we have only to compare the lines in which Homer 1 describes, not a storm Alcseus' stanzas are not very stormy ; he has to tell us that the weather is bad but the motion of a ship. Setting aside other differences, in the one case we feel that we are on the ship, and in the other we do not. In the description of his room, too, we are sensible of a somewhat similar deficiency ; but in this case the deficiency is in the spirit, not in the reality of the description. As a picture of an artistic interior, it would rank in literary merit with similar work in Theopliile Gautier or Balzac, and have the advantage of brevity. When, how- ever, Athenseus (/. c.) asks us to admire in this the martial spirit of a man who was more than warlike enough, our atten- tion is at once drawn to the difference in spirit between these verses, in which weapons play the part of sesthetic mural decora- tions, and those in which Tyrtseus describes the Spartan warrior, with teeth set, feet firmly planted on the ground, covered by his shield, holding his burly lance in his hand, learning in battle how to fight. Thus, then, not only do the fragments which we happen to possess fail to bear out the high opinion which the ancients held of the stasiotika, but one of them is actually a passage which Athenseus quotes to prove his opinion. If Athenseus has thus misjudged the merit of Alcseus, it becomes worth while to examine the criticisms of Dionysius and Quintilian more closely, and with some independence of judgment. What Dionysius singles out as above all excellent in Alca-us is the ethos of the political odes ; and Quintilian explains this for us when he praises Alcseus for attacking tyrants. This, then, was the ethos of the political odes hatred to tyrants. And this was Alcseus' distinctive excellence. Liberty is a subject which may inspire the highest poetry, as it does in the lines ' Two voices are there : one is of the sea. One of the mountains ; each a mighty voice : But it must be liberty which fills the poet; and when we set 1 Odyss. ii. ad fin. 134 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. Alcaeus, with his "Now must we soak ! now must a man per- force be made to drink, since Myrsilus is dead," by the side of Wordsworth's " There came a tyrant, and . . . thou fought'st against him," we not only see that the stasiotika failed of the highest excellence as poetry, but we also feel that hatred of tyrants is not, as Dionysius and Quintilian seemed to think, the same thing as love of liberty. Alcouis fought against the tyranny of one, but for the tyranny of the few. Leaving the fragments of the political odes, we find among the drinking-songs, or skolia, two pieces of much greater beauty, which seem to show that Dionysius and Quintilian ranked the stasiotika above all the rest of Alcanis, not because of their poetical, but their political merit, in the same way as Alcseus' popularity at Athens, which is testified to by Aristophanes, seems to have attached itself to the political odes (for it is a stasiotikon which he quotes in the Jl'asps, 1234), and to have been due to the tyranno-phobia from which the democracy, according to Aristophanes, suffered. 1 The two fragments which give us a higher opinion of Alcseus than anything in the poli- tical odes are a winter-piece (34) and a summer-piece (39). The former is the original of Horace's " Vides ut alta stet nive candidum " (C. i. 9), and is a picture of the time " when icicles hang by the wall," and " all around the wind doth blow." The latter was written " While that the sun, with his licams hot, ^torched the fruits in vale ami mountain." ]'ut when we have felt the beauty of these two fragments, and recognise the brevity and the grandeur of the style, we are conscious of the same deficiency as in the other fragments. Although he has a sympathy with and a love for nature, the poet is not absorbed in his subject; as, for instance, Airman in his description of a sleeping landscape : he is thinking of something else wine and women. In Shakespeare. "When icicles hang by ihe wail." and ''When all around the wind doth blow," "Then nightly sings the staring owl." ISut in Alea-us. when the storm blows and the rivers fivexo, or when the fruits, are scorched and the grasshopper sings, then Alca-us says, "Let us drink." It is perhaps, however, unfair to contrast AlcaMis with Shakespeare or any modern lyric poet, for this reason, that tho 1 It i-i significant that, as soon as tyranno-phobia, both in the Athenians and in critics, dies out, a proper appreciation of Alca'us' merit as a port begins to emerge. It is Ilimerius who reveals to tis the existence of an appreciation of Alcn-ns' sympathy with nature, when he snys of some oilo thut the birds sing in it as you would expect birds to sing in Alca.'us. LYRIC POETRY : ALCMUS AND SAPPHO. I 3 5 Greeks did not make the sharp severance between man and nature that we do in modern times. The Greeks were from two to three thousand years nearer than we to the time of those primitive stories in which the hero is addressed by and talks to a snake or a bird or a stream or a rock as familiarly as to any other of his acquaintances. In Greek literature, too, the relations of man and nature are the same : nature is always conceived of as sympathising with the sufferings of rnan or ministering to his joys. Nature was still the mother of the Greek, and he was old enough to sympathise with her, and to go to her to be comforted and consoled, but not old enough or self-conscious enough to know as well as feel that he loved her. A Greek might perhaps have felt, but could not have said, with Shelley " I love snow and all the forms Of the radiant frost ; I love waves, and winds, and storms, Everything almost Which is Nature's, and may be Untainted by man's misery." Still further was the Greek from discovering that nature is indifferent to man, with an indifference which Burns has given expression to " Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh an' fair ! How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae weary, fu' o' care ! " It was, then, characteristic of Greek lyric, and not a peculiar de- ficiency in Alcseus, that he could only treat nature as a back- ground to man, could not work with his eye solely on nature to the exclusion of man, as Shelley did in his two verses beginning, " A widow bird sate mourning for her love." But within the limits between which Greek thought moved, Alcseus does not in his pictures of nature attain the excellence of Alcman, or of /Eschylus in the Prometheus Bound, or Sophocles in the Ajax. Of the love-songs of Alcseus nothing remains but fragments, which give us no idea of their worth; and the names of the objects of his affection, e.;/., Lycus, show that these odes would not have been acceptable to modern ears. Having considered the hymns, the stasiotika, the skolia, and the erotika of Alcseus, we have now to estimate his work as a whole. To begin with his rhythms, not only was the logacedic verse which bears his name his invention, and still, by the name Alcaic, testifies to his excellence in this form of strophe, but sapphics also were 136 HISTORY OF GREEK LITERATURE. the product of his genius. The fragment which describes his room is in a metre peculiar to Alcaeus, and lie tried many other experiments in the combination of metres. In the next place, the qualities of his style are, as Dionysius said, and as even we at the present day can to some extent see, brevity and magnificence. His matter except in the hymns, which are not characteristic is personal, and, like his metre and his style, genuinely lyric. Occurring in the period of growth and creation in the history of Greek literature, he is original in his matter as in his metres ; and this gives to his work the note of reality which we miss in Horace. When Alcams shows us the ship of state in distress, he, at least, pictures himself as on board ; but to the Roman ship of state Horace in his ode stands in the attitude of an apostro- phising spectator on shore. The difference between an original and an adaptation comes out even more strongly in the ode, which in Alcreus celebrates the assassination of Myrsilus, and in Horace is adapted to the suicide of Cleopatra. Alcaeus had indeed suffered at the hands of Myrsilus, had been perhaps exiled by him, certainly deprived of his oligarchical privileges. He, therefore, when Myrsilus was killed, could sing, " Xow must we drink," and mean it. But Cleopatra's existence had not been, as Horace would imply, a crushing weight which scarcely permitted him or any other Roman to breathe while it lasted. When, therefore, Horace whose digestion was a source of anxiety to him says, " Xow must we drink/' it is, because the word of command has been uttered by Augustus. In the choice of his subjects Alctrus is limited. lie found his main inspiration in good wine and inferior politics. P.ut if his range is narrow, within its limits he, shows considerable variety of treatment. A then sens remarked that there was no circumstance or occasion which Alcjruis could not convert into an excuse for drinking ; and summer and winter, joy and sorrow, love and politics, do all lead to the bowl with him. lint this fact should not be interpreted to mean ihat he, was solely de- voted to tin; worship of wine. Unfortunately this was net the case, or his drinking-songs would have been better. He never wrote anything so thorough as the lines in the Cyclops of Euripides " I would give All tlint the C'vflops feed upon their mountains And pitch into tlic brine oil' some white dill', Having <: