A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

Aphrodite, the third is to Insolence and Ruin -- "and so you had better go home to your wedded wife."Some of the lines haunt a reader's memory:

       "Demeter bare, and the great Craftsman bare,Silver Apollo and Poseidon bare,To serve a year, a mortal master's thrall."

      CHOIRILUS of Samos was also a friend of Herodotus, and followed him and Æschylus in taking the Persian invasion for his subject, and Athens for his heroine. We hear of him in the suite of the Spartan general Lysander -- apparently as a domestic bard -- and afterwards at the court of Archelaus of Macedon. His poem is the first 'historical' epic in our sense of the word: an extant fragment complains that all legendary subjects are exhausted. The younger Choirilus who celebrated Alexander and has passed into legend as having been paid a gold philippus a line for very bad verses -- the same anecdote is told of others -- may have been this man's grandson. If he was really the author of the epitaph on Sardanapallus he was not a bad writer, though the original prose was finer: " Sardanapallus, son of Anakyndaraxes, built Anchialê and Tarsus in one day. Eat, drink, make merry; all things else are not worth -that!"

      A rival of the earlier Choirilus was ANTIMACHUS of Colophon, author of the Thebais,* a learned poet affecting to despise popularity, and in several respects an Alexandrian born before his time. Naturally, Alexandria admired him, counted him with Empedocles as master of 'the austere style,' and ranked him in general next to Homery, though Quintilian, in quoting the criticism, remarks that 'next' does not always mean 'near.' A vague anecdotic tradition connects Antimachus and Plato. Plato sent his disciple Heraclides to collect Antimachus's works, or else stayed in a room which Antimachus's recitation had emptied of other listeners; and Antimachus said, " Plato to me is worth a thousand." There were literary wars over Antimachus in later times; and this anecdote is used by the friends of the learned epos, like Apollonius, to glorify Antimachus, while Callimachus and Duris took it as merely proving what they otherwise held, that Plato was no judge of poetry. The fragments are mostly too short to be of any literary interest; the longer pieces are either merely grammatical or are quoted by Athenæus for some trivial point about wine-cups. The style strikes a modern ear as poor and harsh, but the harshness is studied, as the strange words are. He owed his real fame more to his elegiac romance Lydé*than to his epic.

      Lastly, Pausanias tells us: "A person called Phalysios rebuilt the temple of Asclêpios in Naupaktos. He had a disease of the eyes and was almost blind, when the god sent to him Anytê, the epic poetess, with a sealed tablet." Phalysios recovered, but we know no more of Anytê except that she was a native of Tegea, in Arcadia, and is once called 'the feminine Homer' -- by Antipater of Thessalonica, who has handed down to us many of her epigrams, and who may or may not have read her epics.

The descendants of Hesiod are more varied and more obscure. The genealogical epos has two lines of development. The ordinary form went on living in divers parts of Greece. We hear of the Naupaktian Verses, the Samian, the Phocæan; but either they go without an author, or they are given to poets of local legend, the national equivalents of Hesiod -- 'Karkinos' of Naupaktos, 'Eumêlus' of Corinth, 'Asius'2 of Samos. On the other hand, the 'Eoiê' type produced the romantic or erotic elegy. This form of poetry in the hands of such masters as Mimnermus, Antimachus, and Hermêsianax, takes the form of lists of bygone lovers, whose children are sometimes given and sometimes not. It is the story of the 'Eoiê' seen from a different point of view. When we hear how the 'great blue wave heaven-high' curled over the head of Tyro and took her to her sea-god, we think not of the royal pedigree, but of the wild romance of the story, the feeling in the heart of Enîpeus or of Tyro.

      The didactic poetry of Hesiod developed on one side into the moralising or gnomic epics of Phocylidês, the proverbs of the Seven Wise Men, the elegies of Solon and Theognis; it even passed into the iambics of Sêmonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hippônax (see p. 88). On another side, it gave rise to the poetry of science and learning. The master himself was credited with an Astronomy*and a Tour of the Earth;* but such subjects for epos cannot generally be traced to any definite authors before the fourth century, and were not popular before the time of Arâtus of Soli (ca. 276 B.C.). The first astronomical poet on record, Kleostratos of Tenedos, who watched the stars from Mount Ida, is said to belong to the sixth century. The first medical poem is perhaps by one Periander, of the fourth. The epics on cookery, which we hear of in Athenæus, were parodies rather than dissertations. The arch-gourmand Archestratos of Gela was a contemporary of Aristotle; so was Matron. It was the time of the Middle Comedy, when food and the cooking of it were recognised as humorous subjects.

      But the main stream of didactic epos in early times became religious. ' Hesiod' fell under the influence of ' Orpheus.' Even the traditional poems were affected in this way. Kerkôps, the alleged 'real author' of certain Hesiodic poems, wrote a religious book, and is called a 'Pythagorean'; which must mean, in this early time, before Pythagoras was born, an Orphic. Eumêlus knew things about the under-world that he can only have learned from Onomacritus. Even the poem of Aristeas, which might be counted as a secular geographical epos, the forerunner of the various 'Periêgêsês,'evidently owed its interest to its miracles and theology.

      The Orphic movement worked mostly among the common people and dropped out of literary record; we only catch it where it influences philosophy. It is the explanation of Pythagoras, the man of learning and culture, who turns from the world to become high priest of an ascetic brotherhood based on mysticism and purification.

      The rise of a distinctly philosophical epos is immediately due to the curious spiritual rebellion of XENOPHANES of Colophon, a disciple of Anaximander, who was driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to earning his livelihood as a rhapsode. But he knew from Anaximander that what he recited was untrue. " Homer and Hesiod fastened on the gods all that is a shame and a rebuke to man, thieving, and adultery and the cheating one of another."He made his master's physical Infinite into God -- "there is one God most high over men and gods;" "all of him sees, thinks, and hears; he has noparts; he is not man-like either in body or mind." "Men have made God in their own image; if oxen and lions could paint, they would make gods like oxen and lions."He wrote new 'true' poetry of his own -- the great doctrinal poem On Nature,*an epic on the historical Founding of Colophon,*and 2000 elegiacs on the Settlement at Elea*of himself and his fellow-exiles. The seventy years which he speaks of as having "tossed his troubled thoughts up and down Hellas,"must have contained much hard fighting against organised opposition, of which we have an echo in his Satires.* He was not a great philosopher nor a great poet; but the fact that in the very stronghold of epic tradition he preached the gospel of free philosophy and said boldly the things that every one was secretly feeling, made him a great power in Greek life and literature. He is almost the only outspoken critic of religion preserved to us from Greek antiquity. The scepticism or indifference of later times was combined with a conventional dislike to free speech on religious matters -- partly as an attack on shadows, partly as mere 'bad taste.'

      The example of Xenophanes led his great philosophical disciple to put his abstract speculations into verse form. PARMENIDES' poem On Nature* was in two books, the first on the way of Truth, the second on the way of Falsehood. There is a mythological setting, and the poet's ride to the daughters of the Sun, who led him through the stone gates of Night and Day to the sanctuary of Wisdom, is quite impressive in its way. But it would all have been better in prose.

      EMPEDOCLES of Acragas, on the other hand, is a real poet, perhaps as great as his admirer Lucretius, and working on a finer material. He was an important citizen, a champion of liberty against the tyrants Thêron and Thrasydaios. His history, like that of the kindred spirits, Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana, has been overlaid by the miraculous. He stopped the Etesian winds; he drained an enormous marsh; he recalled a dead woman to life; he prophesied the hour that the gods would summon him, and passed away without dying. His enemies said that from sheer vanity he had thrown himself down Mount Etna that he might disappear without a trace and pass for immortal. 'How did any one know, then?' 'He had brass boots and the volcano threw one of them up!' Saner tradition said that he died an exile in the Peloponnese. His character profoundly influenced Greek and Arabian thought, and many works in both languages have passed under his name. His system we speak of later; but the thaumaturgy