A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

the Danais,* and many more we pass over.

      HYMNS OR PRELUDES

It was a custom in epic poetry for the minstrel to 'begin from a god,' generally from Zeus or the Muses.4 This gave rise to the cultivation of the 'Pro-oimion' or Prelude as a separate form of art, specimens of which survive in the so-called Homeric 'Hymns,' the word ὓμνος having in early Greek no religious connotation. The shortest of these preludes merely call on the god by his titles, refer briefly to some of his achievements, and finish by a line like, "Hail to thee, Lord; and now begin my lay," or, "Beginning from thee, I will pass to another song."5 The five longer hymns are, like Pindar's victory songs, illustrations of the degree to which a form of art can grow beyond itself before it is felt to be artistically impossible. The prelude was developed as a thing apart until it ceased to be a prelude.

      The collection which we possess contains poems of diverse dates and localities, and the tradition of the text is singularly confused. The first 546 lines, for instance, are given as one hymn 'to Apollo.' But they comprise certainly two hymns: the first (1-178) by an Ionic poet, on the birth of the Ionian God in the floating island of Delos; the second by a poet of Central Greece, on the slaying of the great Earth-serpent, and the establishment of the Dorian God at Delphi. Further, these two divisions are not single poems, but fall into separate incomplete parts. Athenæus actually calls the whole 'the hymns to Apollo.' The Ionic portion of this hymn is probably the earliest work in the extant collection. It is quoted as Homer's by Thucydides (iii. 104), and Aristophanes (Birds, 575), and attributed by Didymus the grammarian to the rhapsode Kynæthus of Chios; which puts it, in point of antiquity, on a level with the rejected epics. The hymn to Hermes partly dates itself by giving seven strings to the original lyre as invented by that god. It must have been written when the old four-stringed lyre had passed, not only out of use, but out of memory. The beautiful fragment (vii.) on the capture of Dionysus by brigands looks like Attic work of the fifth or fourth century B.C. The Prelude to Pan (xix.) may be Alexandrian; that to Ares (viii.) suggests the fourth century A.D.

      In spite of their bad preservation, our Hymns are delightful reading. That to Aphrodite, relating nothing but the visit of Aphrodite to Anchises shepherding his kine on Mount Ida, expresses perhaps more exquisitely than anything else in Greek literature that frank joy in physical life and beauty which is often supposed to be characteristic of Greece. The long hymn to Demeter, extant in only one MS., which was discovered last century at Moscow 'among pigs and chickens,' is perhaps the most beautiful of all. It is interesting as an early Attic or Eleusinian composition. Parts are perhaps rather fluent and weak, but most of the poem is worthy of the magnificent myth on which it is founded. Take one piece at the opening, where Persephone "was playing with Okeanos' deep-breasted daughters, and plucking flowers, roses and crocus and pretty pansies, in a soft meadow, and flags and hyacinth, and that great narcissus that Earth sent up for a snare to the rose-face maiden, doing service by God's will to Him of the Many Guests. The bloom of it was wondeiful, a marvel for gods undying and mortal men; from the root of it there grew out a hundred heads, and the incensed smell of it made all the wide sky laugh above, and all the earth laugh and the salt swell of the sea. And the girl in wonder reached out both her hands to take the beautiful thing to play with; then yawned the broad-trod ground by the Flat of Nysa, and the deathless steeds brake forth, and the Cronos-born king, He of the Many Names, of the Many Guests; and He swept her away on his golden chariot." The dark splendour of Aidôneus, "Him of the Many Thralls, of the Many Guests," is in the highest spirit of the saga.

      COMIC POEMS

      Of the Comic Poems which passed in antiquity as Homer's, the only extant example is the Battle of the Frogs and Mice,rather a good parody of the fighting epic. The opening is Bœotian; the general colour of the poem Attic. An obvious fable -- followed strangely enough by A. Ludwich in his large edition -- gives it to one Pigres, a Carian chief, who fought in the Persian War. The battle began because a mouse named Psicharpax, flying from a weasel, came to a pond to quench his thirst. He was accosted by a frog of royal race, Physignathos, son of Peleus -- (the hero of Mount Pelion has become 'Mudman,' and his son 'Puff-cheek'!) -- who persuaded him to have a ride on his back and see his kingdom. Unhappily a 'Hydros' -- usually a watersnake, here perhaps some otter-like animal -- lifted its head above the water, and the frog instinctively dived. The mouse perished, but not unavenged. A kinsman saw him from the bank, and from the blood-feud arose a great war, in which the mice had the best of it. At last Athena besought Zeus to prevent the annihilation of the frogs. He tried first thunderbolts and then crabs, which latter were more than the mice could stand; they turned, and the war ended.

      There were many comic battle-pieces; we hear of a Spider-fight,* a Crane-fight,* a Fieldfare-poem.* Some were in iambics, and consequently foreign to the Homeric style. The most celebrated comic poem was the Margîtes,* so called after its hero, a roaring blade (μαργος), high-spirited and incompetent, whose characteristic is given in the immortal line --

      πóλλ' ήπíστατο ἐργù, κακως δ ἠπíστατο πáντα.

      "Many arts he knew, and he knew them all badly;and again: "He was not meant by the gods for a digger or a ploughman, nor generally for anything sensible; he was deficient in all manner of wisdom." Late writers on metre say the poem was in a mixture of heroic and iambic verse, a statement which suggests a late metrical refurbishment of a traditional subject. It can scarcely be true of the poem which Aristotle regarded as Homer's. Margîtes must have been more amusing than Hierocle's 'Scholasticus,' the hero of the joke-book from which so many of our 'Joe Millers' are taken. Scholasticus was a pure fool, with nothing but a certain modesty to recommend him.

      What is meant by calling these poems Homeric? Only that they date from a time when it was not thought worth while to record the author's name; and, perhaps, that if you mean to recite a mock epic battle, it slightly improves your joke to introduce it as the work of the immortal Homer.

      HESIOD

      As the epos of romance and war was personified in 'Homêros,' the bard of princes, so the epos of plain teaching was personified in the peasant poet 'Hêsiodos.' The Hesiodic poems, indeed, contain certain pretended reminiscences, and one of them, the Erga,is largely made up of addresses to 'Persês,' assumed to be the poet's erring friend -- in one part, his brother. We have seen that the reminiscences are fictions, and presumably Persês is a fiction too. If a real man had treacherously robbed Hesiod of his patrimony by means of bribes to 'mandevouring princes,' Hesiod would scarcely have remained on intimate terms with him. 'Persês' is a lay figure for the didactic epos to preach at, and as such he does his duty. Hesiod wants to praise industry, to condemn the ways of men, and especially of judges: the figure must be an idle dog, ignorant of the world and fond of law. Hesiod wants to praise righteousness: the figure must show a certain light-handedness in its dealings with money. We have then no information of what Hesiod was -- only a tradition of what Hesiod was supposed to be. He was born at Kymê, in Æolis; his father migrated to Bœotia, and settled in Ascra, a charming and fertile village on the slopes of Mount Helicon, which the poet describes as "bad in winter, insufferable in summer." Here he herded flocks on Helicon, till one day the Muses greeted him with the words: "Boors of the wild fields, by-words of shame, nothing but belly! We know how to tell many false things true-seeming, but we know how to speak the real truth when we will." This made Hesiod a poet. We hear nothing more of him till his death, except that he once went across the channel from Aulis to Chalkis to take part in a competition at the funeral games of Amphidamas, king of Eubœa, and, although much of his advice is about nautical matters, that he did not enjoy the sea. He avoided Southern Greece because of an oracle which foretold that he should die at Nemea; and so he did, at a little sanctuary near Oineon in Locris, which happened to bear that name. He was murdered and thrown into the sea by the brothers of one Clymenê or Ctimenê, who was supposed to have borne a son to the octogenarian poet; but the dolphins brought the body to land, and a stately tomb was built for it