Rise of Lyric Poetry.—For more than two hundred years after Homer and Hesiod, no one worthy of the name of poet appeared in Greece. Greek genius seemed to have exhausted itself. A few feeble imitators of the great master, and epic poetry was no more. The spirit of the Iliad and the Odyssey died with the monarchies whose chieftains they immortalized. When popular governments arose, the bard no longer celebrated the gods and demigods of the past, or traced the genealogies of kings, but sung the glories of his country, or poured forth without restraint the emotions of his soul. Thus lyric poetry was the child of liberty.
Varieties.—At the beginning of the seventh century B.C., there was a new birth of poesy; Grecian song burst forth once more, from hearts throbbing with enthusiasm at the triumph of free institutions. Solemn dirges and stately hymns chanted by olive-crowned youth bearing offerings to the gods, were no longer paramount; ballads full of human feeling, lyrics appealing directly to the people—to the patriot, the artisan, the shepherd, the lover, the pleasure-seeker—struck chords that vibrated in many hearts. Feasts afforded frequent occasions for outbursts of national feeling, it being the custom of the guests to pass a branch of myrtle from hand to hand, each as he received it repeating an appropriate verse.
A favorite banquet-song of the fifth century B.C. was the following eulogy of Harmo’dius and Aristogi’ton, the Athenian heroes who slew the tyrant Hipparchus:—
The flower-songs of the Greeks were especially beautiful; children enjoyed their nursery rhymes; while in the Lay of the Swallow, the penniless bard, chanting at the gate, sought an avenue to the charity of his rich neighbor.
FROM THE LAY OF THE SWALLOW.
The creations of the lyric muse are graceful, touching, and true to nature. We regret not to exchange the sublime heights of epic poetry for an humbler field in which we may commune with the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, of humanity. Here, as Tegner says, Greek poetry arises “slender, smooth, erect like the palm-tree with its rich yet symmetrical crown; and a nightingale sits among the leaves and sings.”
The Ionians, first to free themselves from kingly rule, gave to the Hellenic world the earliest forms of lyric poetry,—the elegiac couplet and the lighter iambic verse appropriate to satire. These twin-born metres, of Ionian parentage, grew up side by side in Greece. In the elegiac couplet, a dactylic line of five feet or their equivalent followed the sonorous hexameter,[26] constituting a livelier measure than the old heroic verse, which consisted of hexameters alone.
The Greek elegy was not necessarily plaintive; on the contrary, it did good service in rousing to action in time of war, and gave fitting expression to the spirit of the banquet-hall.
Callinus.—The inventor of this metre was Calli’nus of Eph’esus, in Ionia, who flourished between 730 and 678 B.C. He attempted by it to excite his countrymen against a horde of barbarian invaders; but the people were too much enervated by intercourse with the effeminate nations of Asia to respond to his thrilling strains.
The following is a fragment of Callinus, perhaps the oldest war-elegy in existence:—
Tyrtæus.—Another proficient in this variety of elegy was Tyrtæus, supposed to have been born in the Attic town of Aphidnæ. He led the Spartans in the Second Messenian War (685-668 B.C.), they having, by the direction of an oracle, sent to Athens for a general, to secure the success which had before been denied them. The story is that the jealous Athenians despatched to their neighbors a deformed schoolmaster, the cripple Tyrtæus, in the belief that his services would be of little value; but they mistook. The greatest military genius could not have accomplished more; for Tyrtæus, by his wise counsels and inspiriting war-songs, made his soldiers invincible. Messenia fell, and her citizens became slaves to the Spartans. Nor, afterward, was the poetry of Tyrtæus less efficacious in quelling civil dissensions and establishing domestic peace. In every respect, “the Muse of Sparta,” as he was called, proved to be to his adopted country the blessing promised by the oracle.
Tyrtæus is said to have invented the trumpet, and introduced it as a companion to the flute, then the chief instrument in use. Some have interpreted the lameness of the bard as signifying his limping measure, the second line of the elegiac couplet being, as we have seen, a foot shorter than the first.
Of the many productions of Tyrtæus, consisting of marching-songs, as well as warlike and political elegies, only a few fragments survive. His poems, characterized by terseness and impassioned power, were long popular among the Spartans, who, on a campaign, were wont to recite them after each evening meal to kindle afresh their martial fire.
BATTLE-HYMN OF TYRTÆUS.
Archilochus of Pa’ros (728-660 B.C.) was the first great satirist, the inventor of that rapid, loosely-constructed iambic measure so admirably adapted to his withering lampoons. The son of a slave-woman, Archil’ochus was treated with indignity in his native island; so bidding adieu to “the figs and fishy life” of Paros in early youth, he sailed with a colony to Tha’sos in the northern Ægean. His new home, however, disappointed his expectations; its gold-mines yielded not the fortune he had dreamed of, and he denounced it as “the sink of all Hellenic ills.” The colonists becoming engaged in war with a neighboring people, a pitched battle proved too severe an ordeal for the poet’s courage, and dropping his shield he fled.
Perhaps it was for this cowardly action, perhaps on account of his empty purse, that when he returned to Paros, one of its fair daughters, who had been his boyhood’s love, refused him her hand. Her father, also, denied his suit; whereupon the furious poet poured forth in stinging verses such a torrent of violent invective upon the girl and her whole family, that she, her father, and her sisters, are said to have taken refuge from his scurrilous attacks in suicide.
The public odium thus excited drove Archilochus from Paros. But the brand of cowardice was upon him. The Spartans, whose mothers, pointing to the battle-field, were wont to say “Return with your shields or upon them,” disdained the man who could write,
Insult met him at every step, till a poetical victory at the Olympic Games restored him to popular favor. He went back to Paros, an old man, to redeem his reputation as a soldier by dying in battle with the Naxians. Then all Greece awoke to the greatness of his genius; and the prediction of an oracle before his birth, that he would be “immortal among men in the glory of his song,” was fulfilled.
Fertility of invention, and an intimate acquaintance with human nature, were conspicuous in the poetry of Archilochus. Elegies and love-songs flowed from his pen, and his philosophical poetry gained for him from Plato the epithet of “Wisest;” but it was in satire that classical writers conceded to him the highest rank. Archilochus likens himself to a hedgehog bristling with quills, whose “one great resource is worth all the devices of more powerful animals.” From his birthplace, ill-natured satire has been called Parian verse.
So little remains of the writings of this author that we can hardly decide whether his countrymen judged aright in reckoning him second only to Homer. The two represented distinct departments of poetry; each in his own, it was claimed, fell little short of perfection. Where Homer praised, Archilochus reviled. Their birthdays were celebrated in one grand festival, and a single double-faced statue perpetuated the memory of the Epic Poet and the Parian Satirist.
ARCHILOCHUS TO HIS SOUL.
Greek satire had other representatives, whose names will be found at the end of this chapter; but their genius was of a lower grade.
Lyric poetry was the peculiar province of the Æolian and Dorian Greeks, who carried it to perfection. The Æolic writers were replete with intense passion, and employed lively metres of simple structure. The Dorian lyric, intended to be sung by choruses or to choral dances on great occasions, funerals, marriages, or public festivals, was a much more majestic, but at the same time a more intricate and artificial composition. The most distinguished composers of the Æolic School were Alcæus and Sappho; of the Doric, Simonides and Pindar.
Alcæus flourished in the latter part of the seventh century B.C. He was a noble of Lesbos, and lived in the stirring times when the constitutional and the aristocratic party contended for the sovereignty. In this struggle Alcæus appears as the deadly foe of democratic rule; when his friend Pittacus was clothed with supreme authority by the people, Alcæus directed against him the keenest shafts of his satire. Pittacus defeated him in an attempt to overthrow the government, but generously spared his life, saying, “Forgiveness is better than revenge.” Of the poet’s subsequent career we are ignorant.
The ancients were loud in their praises of Alcæus. His poems were polished, full of vehemence and passion, sublime in their denunciations of tyranny and encomiums of freedom. Love and wine were two of his favorite topics; yet even his jovial pieces were pervaded by a loftiness of sentiment foreign to mere sensual songs. Among his most beautiful compositions were the odes to Sappho, whose love he once sought, but whose genius soared to greater heights than his. We take from Alcæus
THE CONSTITUTION OF A STATE.
The Lesbian Poetesses.—Lesbos was the centre of lyric song. To its shores, the waves of ocean are fabled to have borne the lyre of Orpheus, which the people hung in Apollo’s temple: thus traditionally distinguished by fate, it became renowned as the home of Grecian poetesses.
The Lesbian women were not confined to domestic duties, but were allowed to take part in public affairs. They founded societies for the cultivation of their literary tastes, and before all Greece vindicated the genius of their sex. And Lesbos was the very clime for poetry to ripen in. The love of the beautiful was fed on every side. The island was a paradise of groves and rivulets, of blossoms and perfumes. Among its olive-clad hills, at its fountains set in violets and fringed with fern, under its stately pines, and in its temples shining with ivory and gold, its poetesses received their inspiration.
Sappho.—Greatest of these, and queen of her sex in intellectual endowments, was Sappho, “the Lesbian Nightingale,” “spotless, sweetly-smiling, violet-wreathed,” as Alcæus fondly described her, whom all Greece knew as The Poetess.
In her history it is difficult to separate the true from the fabulous. Born at Mytile’ne, the capital of the island, in the latter part of the seventh century B.C., she was deprived of a mother’s care at the age of six. In early womanhood, a new calamity befell her in the loss of her husband, and thenceforth she devoted her genius to letters, making the elevation of her countrywomen the great object of her life. Her reputation soon spread throughout Greece. Mytilene became the seat of a brilliant sisterhood eager in the study of the polished arts; sparkling conversation enlivened its meetings; music and poetry were the branches its members specially cultivated; love was the common subject of their verse; their lives were above reproach. In the centre of this constellation of gifted women blazed Sappho, “Star of Lesbian Song.” Greece, captivated by her sweet numbers, accorded her a place by Homer’s side—then raised her to the level of its goddesses as “the Tenth Muse.”
Ancient story made Sappho the victim of disappointed love. Overcome with passion for Pha’on, a beautiful Mytilenean youth notorious for his heart-breaking propensities, and finding Phaon indifferent to her advances, she is said to have thrown herself from the Leuca’dian promontory[27] and drowned her passion in the Ionian Sea. There is, however, no evidence to support the story; on the contrary, the poetess seems to have been implicated with Alcæus in a conspiracy against Pittacus, who then ruled in Lesbos, and to have been banished in consequence. (On the Æolic school of Sappho, consult Donaldson’s “History of the Literature of Ancient Greece,” p. 218.)
Sappho’s Style.—Simplicity, tenderness, concentrated passion, and brilliancy of description, are characteristic of Sappho’s verse. Her poetry is the very language of harmony; no more musical measures than hers were known to the Greeks. Her favorite stanza, an invention of her own, consisted of four lines with a cadence like the following:—
In depicting love, Sappho is unmatched. Her utterances, indeed, were so intense as to be misconstrued by the sensual Greeks of a later day, and give rise to reports injurious to her good name; or possibly she may have been confounded with another Sappho, of a different character; but we have no doubt that her life was as pure as her poetry is charming. Her imagery, when imagery she used, Sappho gathered from the bright-tinted flowers, the starry skies, and fragrant zephyrs of Lesbos, where, as she sung,
Judging from her fragments, we must admit that in her peculiar department Sappho stands without a peer. Indeed, her own graceful lines may well be applied to herself:—
for the lesser lights of lyric poesy pale in the lustre of her genius.
Addison, in his Spectator, makes the following remarks on Sappho, which are fully justified by the praises of ancient critics:—“Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there are none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. One may see, by what is left, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth and described it in all its symptoms. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.”
It is told that a physician, by studying the symptoms of love as described by Sappho, detected in the mysterious sickness of the young Anti’ochus, son of the king of Syria, a hidden passion for his step-mother. The treatment was in accordance with the diagnosis, the disease disappearing when the anxious father relinquished to the youth the beautiful object of his affections.
Sappho’s description of the raptures of love, commended by all critics from Longinus down, is certainly a nonpareil. It has been thus translated by Ambrose Philips, a friend of Addison’s:—
A LOVE SONG.
The grave Solon paid our authoress a delicate compliment. Having heard his nephew recite one of her poems, he is said to have exclaimed that he would not willingly die till he had learned it by heart.
The works of Sappho, comprised in nine books, embraced love-lays, elegies, bridal songs sometimes extended into miniature dramas, and amorous hymns to Venus and Cupid. The remnants are principally erotic pieces. We present below the Hymn to Venus, preserved entire, in which the writer delicately makes the goddess her confidante, and modestly discloses the secret of her misplaced affections.
HYMN TO VENUS.
THE ROSE.
Sappho’s Pupils.—Doubtless many went forth from Sappho’s school to reflect, in their own accomplishments, the brilliancy of their mistress. History has preserved the names of two of her pupils—Damoph’yla of Asia Minor, noted for a Hymn to Diana; and Erinna, a Rhodian maid who shone among the brightest lights of Sappho’s circle, and, if we may believe the story, died of a broken heart when compelled by her parents to exchange the delights of literature for the drudgery of the spinning-wheel. This cruel treatment Erinna made the subject of an affecting lament, “the Spindle,” a poem of three hundred hexameters, on which her reputation rests. Her death at the age of nineteen cheated the world of a writer who promised to rival Homer himself.
“The Spindle” is lost; but the following epigram on a virgin of Lesbos, who died on the day appointed for her marriage, speaks for Erinna:—
A pointed epitaph in the Greek Anthology shows the estimation in which the poetess was held by her countrymen:—
Anacreon.—In the sixth century, Te’os, a seaport of Ionia, gave birth to the society poet, Anacreon; who, though an Ionian, wrote rather in the style of the Æolian lyrics. His verses, however, while soft and graceful, were marked by levity, and lacked the dignity and depth of the Æolic school. “The Muse, good humor, love, and wine,” Anacreon tells us, were his themes; accordingly his songs, brimming with sensuality, grew in popular estimation as Greece degenerated in public morality.
When his native city fell a prey to Cyrus the Persian, Anacreon with the other inhabitants set sail for Thrace (540 B.C.). From Thrace, while yet in his youth, he withdrew to the island of Sa’mos whose tyrant, Polyc’rates, was a munificent patron of literature and art. Amid the gayety of the Samian court, the witty and pleasure-loving poet found a congenial home, Polycrates making him an intimate companion and confiding to him important state secrets. But the ruler of Samos was treacherously put to death by a Persian satrap; about which time, Anacreon was invited to Athens by the tyrant Hipparchus, who sent his royal trireme to bring his poet-laureate across the Ægean.
At Athens, Anacreon for a time gave free rein to his passions, joining a set of boon companions who basked in the sunshine of royal favor. His voluptuous career was cut short by the assassination of Hipparchus, and he returned to Teos (repeopled during his absence), to be choked by a grape-seed at the advanced age of eighty-five—or, if we are to take the story figuratively, to fall a victim to his irrepressible love of the bottle.
A statue of a drunken old man on the Athenian acropolis kept alive in the minds of the people as well the graceful odes of Anacreon as his prevailing weakness. His friend Simonides wrote an epitaph to his memory, in which we catch a glimpse of the exciting whirl of pleasures that made up his existence:—
The name of Anacreon is attached to about sixty odes, but they are all probably from five hundred to a thousand years later than he. Yet, if they are not by his hand, they breathe his spirit. As a sample of these Anacreontics, we give a paraphrase of
CUPID AND THE BEE.
Simonides (556-467 B.C.), who brought into high repute the Doric or Choral School while he also composed in the Ionic dialect, was born in Ceos, an island of the Cyclades. He was one of a brilliant coterie of poets attracted to Athens by the munificence of Hipparchus; and after the assassination of the latter he withdrew to Thessaly, to find rich and powerful patrons there on whom to lavish his eulogies; for Simonides was the first poet that set a price upon his talents and turned his panegyrics into gold. He who, when small pay was offered, disdained to celebrate a mule victorious in the race on the plea that it was an ass’s daughter, when the price was raised found in the “child of thunder-footed steeds” no unfit subject for his facile Muse.
In connection with this rather unpoetical eye to business, we are told that once Simonides, having extolled in verse one of his Thessalian patrons, was refused more than half the promised price and referred for the balance to the gods Castor and Pollux, whose praises filled most of the poem. The Thessalian noble was still laughing at his ruse for evading payment, when Simonides was summoned from the room to speak with two strangers. Hastening out, he found that they had vanished; but no sooner had he withdrawn from the apartment than the roof fell and killed all whom he had left there. Thus the twin deities discharged their indebtedness to the poet.
The evening of his days Simonides passed in Syracuse, the ornament of Hi’ero’s court, the recipient of royal favors during his life, and at his death of the highest funeral honors. It was here that the poet, who was somewhat of a philosopher, confessed his inability to answer the question of the Syracusan monarch, “What is God?”
Simonides was remarkably successful in adapting the elegy to funeral songs and epitaphs, and thus embalming Grecian heroism for the contemplation of future ages. He lived in the time of the Persian War, and commemorated its worthies. The tomb of the three hundred who fell at Thermopylæ for the liberties of Greece bore this grand inscription from his pen: “Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedæmonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws.” In his workshop the epigram was wrought to perfection. “The Simonidean tears" seemed to well up from the very depths of the heart. Among all the epigrammatists known to literature, none have excelled him whom Plato styled “the divine Simonides;” who was “the voice of Hellas—the genius of Fame, sculpturing with a pen of adamant, in letters of indelible gold, the achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization.” Fifty-six times, the last time at the age of eighty, he bore away from all competitors the prize of poetry.
Besides dirges and epigrams, hymns, prayers, pæans, and processional odes, flowed from the prolific pen of Simonides. Long a chorus-teacher in the land of his birth, he was peculiarly fitted for the composition of solemn choral poetry. “The Lament of Danaë,” his finest surviving work, is a noble specimen of the Greek lyric. It describes the Argive princess set adrift with her child in an ark upon the stormy billows by her inhuman parent. Tenderly she folds the sleeping boy in her arms, and prays Father Zeus that like him the sea may sleep.
DANAË’S LAMENT.
EPITAPH ON THE NIECE OF HIPPARCHUS.
Pindar, the friend and pupil of Simonides, the greatest master of the Doric School, adorned the golden age of Grecian literature, and will there be considered as the representative of lyric poetry.