A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

Éos first, whose hands are rosy rays,

      Ocean forsook, and Heaven's high pathway trod;

      At night across the sea that wondrous bed

      Shell-hollow, beaten by Hephaistos' hand,

      Of wingèd gold and gorgeous, bears his head

      Half-waking on the wave, from eve's red strand

      To the Ethiop shore, where steeds and chariot are,

      Keen-mettled, waiting for the morning star."

      The influence of Mimnermus increased with time, and the plan of his Nanno* remained a formative idea to the great elegiac movement of Alexandria and its Roman imitators. There is music and character in all that he writes, and spirit where it is wanted, as in the account of the taking of Smyrna.

      The shadowiness of these non-Attic poets strikes us as soon as we touch the full stream of Attic tradition in SOLON, son of Exekestides ( 639-559 B.C.). The tradition is still story rather than history, but it is there: his travels, his pretended madness, his dealings with the tyrant Pisistratus. The travels were probably, in reality, ordinary commercial voyages, but they made a fine background for the favourite Greek conception of the Wise Wanderer. We hear, in defiance of chronology, how he met the richest of kings, Crœsus, who showed all his glory and then asked who was the 'most fortunate' man in the world. Solon named him certain obscure persons who had done their duty and were loved by their neighbours and were now safely dead. The words seemed meaningless at the time, but had their due effect afterwards -- on Crœsus when Cyrus was in the act of burning him to death; and on Cyrus when he heard the story and desisted from his cruel pride.

      Solon was a soldier and statesman who had written love-poetry in his youth, and now turned his skill in verse to practical purposes, circulating political poems as his successors two centuries later circulated speeches and pamphlets. It is not clear how far this practice was borrowed from the great towns of Ionia, how far it was a growth of the specially Athenian instinct for politics. We possess many considerable fragments, elegiac, iambic, and trochaic, which are of immense interest as historical documents; while as poetry they have something of the hardness and dulness of the practical man. The most interesting bits are on the war against Megara for the possession of Salamis, and on the 'Seisachtheia' or 'Offshaking of Burdens,'as Solon's great legislative revolution was called. As a reforming statesman, Solon was beaten by the extraordinary difficulties of the time; he lived to see the downfall of the constitution he had framed, and the rise of Pisistratus; but something in his character kept him alive in the memory of Athens as the type of the great and good lawgiver, who might have been a'Tyrannos,' but would not for righteousness' sake. THEOGNIS of Megara, by far the best preserved of the elegists, owes his immortality to his maxims, the brief statements of practical philosophy which the Greeks called 'Gnômai' and the Romans 'Sentenliœ.' Some are merely moral --

       "Fairest is righteousness, and best is health,And sweetest is to win the heart's desire."

      Some are bitter --

       "Few men can cheat their haters, Kyrnos mine;Only true love is easy to betray!"

      Many show the exile waiting for his revenge --

       "Drink while they drink, and, though thine heart be galled,Let no man living count the wounds of it:There comes a day for patience, and a dayFor deeds and joy, to all men and to thee!"

      Theognis's doctrine is not food for babes. He is a Dorian noble, and a partisan of the bitterest type in a state renowned for its factions. He drinks freely; he speaks of the Demos as 'the vile'or as 'my enemies';once he prays Zeus to "give him their black blood to drink." That was when the Demos had killed all his friends, and driven him to beggary and exile, and the proud man had to write poems for those who entertained him. We hear, for instance, of an elegy on some Syracusans slain in battle. Our extant remains are entirely personal ebullitions of feeling or monitory addresses, chiefly to his squire Kyrnos. His relations with Kyrnos are typical of the Dorian soldier. He takes to battle with him a boy, his equal in station, to whom he is 'like a father'(l. 1049). He teaches him all the duties of Dorian chivalry -- to fight, to suffer in silence, to stick to a friend, to keep clear of falsehood, and to avoid associating with 'base men.' He is pledged to bring the boy back safe, or die on the field himself; and he is disgraced if the boy does not grow up to be a worthy and noble Dorian. In the rest of his relations with the squire, there is some sentiment which we cannot enter into: there were no women in the Dorian camps. It is the mixed gift of good and evil brought by the Dorian invaders to Greece, which the true Greek sometimes over-admired because it was so foreign to him -- self-mastery, courage, grossness, and pride, effective devotion to a narrow class and an uncivilised ideal. Our MSS. of Theognis come from a collection made for educational purposes in the third century B.C., and show that state of interpolation which is characteristic of the schoolbook. Whole passages of Solon, Mimnermus, Tyrtæus, and another elegist Euênus, originally jotted on the margin for purposes of comparison, have now crept into the text. The order of the 'Gnomes' is confused; and we sometimes have what appear to be two separate versions of the same gnome, an original and an abbreviation. There is a certain blindness of frank pride and chivalry, a depth of hatred and love, and a sense of mystery, which make Theognis worthy of the name of poet.

      The gnomic movement receives its special expression in the conception of the Seven Wise Men. They provide the necessary mythical authorship for the widespread proverbs and maxims -- the 'Know thyself,'which was written up on the temple at Delphi; the 'Nothing too much,' 'Surety; loss to follow,'and the like, which were current in people's mouths. The Wise Ones were not always very virtuous. The tyrant Periander occurs in some of the lists, and the quasi-tyrant Pittacus in all: their wisdom was chiefly of a prudential tendency. A pretended edition of their works was compiled by the fourth-century (?) orator, Lobon of Argos. Riddles, as well as gnomes, are a form of wisdom; and several ancient conundrums are attributed to the sage Kleobîlus, or else to 'Kleobulina,' the woman being explained as a daughter of the man: it seemed, perhaps, a feminine form of wisdom.

      The gnome is made witty by the contemporaries PHOKYLIDES of Miletus and DEMODOCUS of Leros (about 537 B.C.). Their only remains are in the nature of epigrams in elegiac metre. Demodocus claims to be the inventor of a very fruitful jest: "This, too, is of Demodocus: The Chians are bad; not this man good and that bad, but all bad, except Procles. And even Procles is a Chian!"There are many Greek and Latin adaptations of that epigram before we get to Porson's condemnation of German scholars: "All save only Hermann; and Hermann's a German!" The form of introduction, "This, too, is of Phokylides," or "of Demodocus,"seems to have served these two poets as the mention of Kyrnos served Theognis. It was a 'seal' which stamped the author's name on the work. We have under the name of Phokylides a poem in two hundred and thirty-nine hexameters, containing moral precepts, which Bernays has shown to be the work of an Alexandrian Jew. It begins, "First honour God, and next thy parents";it speaks of the resurrection of the body, and agrees with Deuteronomy (xxii. 6) on the taking of birds' nests.

      SEMONIDES of Amorgos (fl. 625 B.C.) owes the peculiar spelling of his name to grammarians who wished to distinguish him from his more illustrious namesake, Simônides of Keos. His elegies, a history of Samos among them, are lost; but Stobæus has preserved in his Anthology an iambic poem on women -- a counter-satire, apparently, on the waggon-songs in which the village women at certain festivals were licensed to mock their male acquaintances. The good woman in Semonides is like a bee, the attractive and extravagant like a mare, and so on. The pig-woman comes comparatively high in the scale, though she is lazy and fond of food.

      There were three iambic poets regarded as 'classical' by the Alexandrian canon-Semonides, Archilochus, and HippŐnax. But, except possibly the last-named, no poet wrote iambics exclusively; and the intimate literary connection between, for instance, Theognis, Archilochus, and Hesiod, shows that the metrical division is unimportant. Much of Solon's work might, as far as the subject or the spirit is concerned, have been in elegiacs or iambics indifferently. The iambic metres appear to have been connected with the popular and homely gods Dionysus and Demeter, as the stately dactylic hexameters were with Zeus and Apollo. The iambic is the metre nearest to common speech;